Bone Lines

by Stephanie Bretherton

  But what about jealousy? To her great surprise, Eloise realised that she was no longer quite so concerned about the sacred cow of fidelity. Encounters like the one she had just resisted could happen so easily – and were not always beyond forgiveness. In a momentary lapse of control she could have been in a different hotel room right now. The loyalty that really counted meant someone being there for you when you needed them most.

  And she understood all too well that passion ebbed and flowed through a relationship. Although a sound deposit of erotic chemistry in the bank should be a given, something sweet and satiating to draw upon whenever need or opportunity presented itself. Good Lord, she asked herself, otherwise what would be the point? For as self-sufficient as she was, she missed a physical relationship. She found herself in middle age no less – perhaps more – in tune with her own sensuality than in her youth.

  For now, however, she would keep on dancing and forget about everything else. Forget KC. There were other, better routes to happiness. It was all about choice. This oh-so-tempting transgression in the guilt-free ‘Vegas’ of a forgettable hotel, however flattering, however natural, however easy – she could not, would not do.

  9

  Her scanning of the wide skyline stops at the white bedrock. This is what she has been hoping for. Where there is the soft white stone there is a good chance of finding flint, as essential to her as any other resource.

  Yes, there, in a line below the layer of white, there it is, loose and easy to gather. She doesn’t even need to hack it out. She picks a few choice pieces and examines them for faults, for fitness. One tiny shard is almost perfect as it is, fitting neatly between thumb and forefinger, its edges will soon be sharp enough to straighten and refine the shaft of an arrow. Another will make a good bone scraper.

  She readies a hammerstone to refine the blades but then is drawn to look closer at the small piece that she is about to work, for she has never seen anything like this. There is something curling and complete within the rock.

  Surely it cannot be alive and yet it looks like something once living, perhaps crawling in a tidal pool, but now forever entombed. She strokes the smooth surface as if somehow her touch might coax a reaction. It is enchanting. How did this thing so like a sea creature come to be so far inland? They are still many days from the coast, she senses it, but cannot smell it yet. There is no answer to this puzzle, but its mystery makes it even more special. She will keep this prize deep within her pouch and not risk it on any task. Though, if she must, she would consider using it in trade. If she gets the chance, if she meets either the opportunity or the need.

  Will there ever again be such times of coming together? Families meeting, friends finding each other, old enemies or rivals in love watching each other at a distance. Learning who has been born, who is no longer alive, who is now throwing the furthest spear. Excitement and squabbles over the swapping of skins, ochre, amber, and so many jostling to choose one of her father’s bows. Sometimes, they had joined for the honouring of a lost but much loved elder. Many had heard the horn and the howling and had come for her grandmother. She who had eased others through their passage to the end of life, who had been carried for days as she faded, who had been mourned for many more.

  The wise one. The one who could smell trouble on the wind, see the wasting sickness before it took hold. Humble, quiet, kind. Never insisting, never diminishing the pride of the long beards or mocking the antics of the strutting stags, but these same men would do little of importance without consulting her. When would be the best time to leave one camp, one valley, one shore for another? When would the rain come, the herds return, the heat abate? Would this one live, could that one be trusted? How should a quarrel be solved between siblings, how to ease the pain of toothache, failure, loss? This remarkable old woman also had knowledge of how to set a bone, if there had been a clean enough break. This was among the greatest miracles yet seen and a method she had discovered only through the will to try. A skill that had saved many from certain death.

  Her grandmother had not always had the answers but somehow a touch from her, a smile, a nod of reassurance, a pat or a stroke of forgiveness, a smudge of burnt herb or taste of bitter leaf was enough to move a matter forward to its rightful, natural conclusion.

  One such gathering had been tense with the taste of bloodlust, the itch of revenge. The more skilled that some became at killing, or in the making of tools that could more quickly kill, the more dangerous the dispute. A great beast had been brought down with two spears, one belonging to a man who had taken something from the thrower of the other. It was claimed he had taken the other’s daughter, without the consent of either. But that daughter could neither confirm nor deny this claim for she was now dead, having bled too much during childbirth – a birth she was at least a year or so too young to have risked. One man insisted that all had been willing, but the other could not be persuaded, or placated for his loss. And now they both claimed the kill.

  The men at the gathering took too easily to one side or the other. The heat of the fire that had been readied to roast the beast was at risk of spreading and so it had fallen to her grandmother to settle the score. She had examined the carcass, the position and the depth of each spear, one to each lung.

  She concluded both blows to be equal but decided that the one who had lost his daughter should have the animal’s hide, a dowry of great value and a thing of comfort. He who had lost his mate (whether she had been willing or unwilling) should take the horns, one for himself, one for the orphaned child that had survived his mother’s demise. One horn should be carved with the mark of the child’s father, one with that of his grandfather and both should be blown when the latter ended his life’s walk and then be cast into the fire that would mark his end. That night, the old woman had declared, the entire gathering would feast on the meat, but the heart of the beast would burn in tribute to all those children who had died before their fathers, and to all those children who lived without a mother.

  Now her granddaughter ached for such times again and all that they meant. She wished for the many, she wished for even one other. For at those gatherings (perhaps, she realises now, the real reason for this coming together) there had been the young men – and their needs. Present in the air, the smell of effort, the quest to find one who was willing, ready, one who might also want what he wanted.

  At the last meeting that she could remember, before the great death, she had been of age but had seen no one who might give her what she needed, what she deserved. No soul who looked like the one in her visions. None like the one that she had met much later, along this broken, lonely path.

  Now she understands that there is no longer any place for pride. No chance for choice. There is no longer any sense of rightful, natural conclusion. And she may have to exchange whatever she must for whatever she can. If she ever finds any other left alive.

  *

  Eloise was still not sleeping. Back home after a long and sometimes awkward (though more often stimulating) drive with KC, her top-of-the-range bed was suddenly too soft to resist her restlessness. Insomnia was a nemesis that she had vanquished with various strategies over the years but guilt and confusion always outflanked her.

  Am I falling in love with this man? Or rather, she asked (hoping it was so), is this nothing more than a troublesome series of synaptic sparks? Does love live only in the frontal lobe, where it can be so easily excised by injury? (Or influenced by hormones.) Is it merely an adaptation, a mechanism of attachment, a learned behaviour that ups the ante for mating and survival? Why, then, why, does it so often lead to self-destruction? Or the ultimate in self-sacrifice? Could ‘love’ be an emergent property, somehow greater than the sum of its parts?

  Eloise struggled to stop her thought train from grinding steel-on-steel, but it would not slow down, it merely sparked and took another track. She began to re-live various conversations with Darius, those repetitive arguments about the biological imperative to polygamy, their angry words
to each other returning in audio fragments and merging into a single recollection from a miserable holiday at Yellowstone. It had been their last together and almost as explosive as the massive thermal cauldron that was bubbling beneath them.

  As she sank into the quicksand of her memory-foam mattress, she could hear the proud, booming bass notes of his voice but she couldn’t visualise him clearly. Somehow her midnight memory had sucked the steam from the geysers all around them into the cramped Winnebago in which they had cruised the big sky highways. (And in which, in every way, she had miscarried her last hopes for happiness with him.)

  ‘Eloise, you are dreaming!’ Darius was shouting at her now. ‘Monogamy is not natural! The nuclear family was a necessary restriction of the age of agriculture but it’s a social construct, nothing more. Look at the promiscuity of your beloved bonobo apes, for fuck’s sake!’

  Darius liked to swear only when he thought it was witty to do so.

  ‘Oh, bollocks, Darius,’ she had replied, ‘that’s so boring. This helpless compulsion to spread a dynastic legacy – it’s nothing more than a convenient excuse for masculine self-indulgence. And if anything, agriculture was the worst thing ever to happen to sexual and social equality! It may well have been the worst thing to happen to our ecology at all!’

  ‘Now come on, LoLo,’ he’d countered with his most dismissive tone, ‘at best monogamy is a quasi-religious imposition to control the spread of disease and keep people in line, keep them parenting. But ‘free love’ is genetic, my darling, it’s nature’s best weapon for multiplication.’

  ‘There’s no bloody proof yet that promiscuity is either genetic or inevitable, Darius, or even beneficial except perhaps in highly reduced populations! It’s a specious argument… and you know it is, because if that were the case, everyone would be shagging anything they can get their hands on!’

  ‘They are!’

  Eloise remembered looking away from Darius in disgust, making a mental note to add some new behavioural comparisons to the twins study that was due to start right after Yellowstone.

  ‘Look, my love,’ Darius continued, ‘I know you’d prefer to think that humanity has always yearned towards a lifetime of singular love…’

  Yes, she knew that was true. Like the wolf, like the swan. Like her parents.

  ‘… but that’s because you’re a well-brought-up and well-meaning woman…’

  Patronising git. How had he always managed to turn a strength into a weakness?

  ‘… and it was the female of the species that learned to demand commitment to enhance the survival of their offspring. Hah! Even though a good half of you girls would happily source these from a healthy bloody prick ’n mix – or, at the very least, the most impressive presenting candidate! And as for the male of the species, we are more than happy to oblige. Hell, we’ll kill each other to oblige! You know very well your own mother observed such violent reproductive competition among the supposedly blissful natives of the Amazon – and what an anthropological wrecking ball that was! We came out of the trees that way, my love, and we may have tried to smother it in a self-hating Victorian veneer, but we will always be driven to both violence and sexual variety.’

  At the time she had been too exhausted about everything, about the whole played-out drama of ‘Darius & Eloise’ to fight back with any gusto.

  ‘But that doesn’t have to be the case, Darius. There really is such a thing as self-control. And anyway, humans have far less sexual dimorphism between the genders than in truly polygamous species. And once we invented weapons that equalised male-on-male combat, making it much more dangerous, the harem was out and pair bonding crept in. You know very well that humans have nothing like the canine teeth you see in any species dominated by the alpha male – or even the matriarchal society of the bonobos. And despite the huge variations in culture around the world, we have observed in several ancient hunter–gatherer tribes today – those with relative equality among the sexes that is – that monogamy is the norm and polygamy is a rare exception. An urge to promiscuity simply isn’t a compulsion for everyone, Darius, and not everyone who seeks the constancy of monogamy is weak. On the contrary, it takes some serious strength!’

  ‘My point precisely! If it’s such a struggle, how can it be natural?’

  His questioning smile had made her feel quite sick at the time and she had visualised him as some kind of movie-screen silverback, roaring and beating his chest. But now she saw that this comparison was unfair to the beauty of that beast. The cult of misogyny did nothing but warp true masculinity. Those sad and angry men, so very afraid that if they were not more powerful than a woman then they were not much of anything, had greatly misunderstood the dynamic. The role of the alpha male in the higher primates was not to bully, oppress, or abuse – it was to protect, encourage and support. Unless directly threatened, unless in a situation of real and present danger, one rarely saw anything but gentleness from the most successful of silverbacks.

  ‘You’re missing my point,’ she had tried to explain to Darius that night, ‘humanity has probably been inclined to mate for life for many millennia and there are very tenable theories that the Old Stone Age was a time of egalitarianism for both gender and social groups.’

  Yes, a peaceful era of plenty. This had always made sense to Eloise. After all, how could endemically selfish societies cohere and thrive for so long? Even if it was, as some argued, a selfishness that was directed towards the survival of familial DNA at all costs. Or with the understanding that human violence was often born out of some misplaced sense of morality or justice. But Darius had always accused her of sentimentality, never failed to seek the Achilles heel or undermine her sense of objectivity.

  ‘Fantasy, LoLo!’ he had pronounced victoriously. ‘Life has always been the “perpetual struggle”, not some elevated utopia of Quaker brethren. The vulnerability of pregnancy and the dependency of nursing young has always required the protection of the most vigorous mate available, who meanwhile would be looking elsewhere for comfort while one consort was otherwise engaged. No, I’m sorry, but we are all hard-wired to put our own needs, our own DNA first. And mankind is the most ruthlessly efficient machine this planet has ever produced.’

  Yes, she’d thought, and no better representative than the man in front of me right now. But she had known better than to say so.

  ‘Well, actually,’ she had replied instead, ‘I would argue that we have some serious competition in that department from the virus. But, come on, Darius, “survival of the fittest” doesn’t necessarily mean the most aggressive – it means the best adapted, maybe even the most intelligent, or the most capable of living in balanced harmony within its system. And it certainly isn’t an expedient excuse for “slaughter of the feeblest” or “reproduction of the most rampant”!’

  ‘Careful, Eloise, my darling, you are starting to sound like some airy-fairy hippy.’

  At that point she had sighed and made a strategic retreat, if not quite giving up the battle or her opinions. Now, however, as she juggled her feelings about KC and pondered their attraction – and the recent temptation so nearly taken – Eloise was less sure. Perhaps Darius was right, after all? Perhaps we are all programmed for ego-centricity, for instant gratification at minimum effort. To seek power. To take whatever we want, whatever we need, whatever the cost. Perhaps patriarchy, oppression and war have always run amok and always reared their brutal, grinning heads. Especially if, or when, Darius’s type had ever been dominant. And how that monstrous tribe was rising again now.

  Did Darius deserve such comparisons? No, she conceded. Her ex may be challenging – a complex blend of the liberal and the conservative – but he was hardly on a par with the populist exploiters, or about to jack-boot up to join the resurgent right. His opinions could be harsh and uncompromising and he might lack empathy from time to time, but it was too easy to demonise the man she had once loved, once admired, and this did nothing to heal the damage wrought by the misplaced expectations of
her youthful passion for him.

  At last, Eloise let the mists of Yellowstone reclaim Darius and draw him back into her distant past. She tried to forgive him (once again). She tried to forgive herself. And then, with greater success, she tried to forgive the stubbornness of sleep.

  10

  The small mounds ahead seem unnatural to these surroundings, to this flat, featureless land. As she comes closer invisible fingers rake the back of her neck and she hesitates to approach, but there is no living movement and she is compelled to explore.

  The first curled cadaver, by now almost fully drawn back to the earth, stops her still. This one died how… of hurt or hunger? There is another nearby, face down, reaching out, as though collapsed in crawling. She sees no more corpses, only this handful of mounds, decorated with pebbles, horns, twists of twig and what once had been some kind of plant.

  Further investigation finds tracks leading from this place. Walking (not running) two-footed. A pair of men (not so much bigger than her). Survivors of this group? Or the ones who had given out the dying? Then she sees that they had been dragging something. Something small and struggling, but also two-legged. Her heart sounds an angry alarm and her eyes graze the horizon all around.

  When she is sure they are not still near she looks again at those left above the ground. One, and perhaps his mate? And now she understands that these were not her own kind. These were the Others. Different. So strong, and yet, as weak as any in these times. They hunted well, by crowding, thrusting and stabbing but they threw no spears, nor slingshots. They had no bows (although she had heard of no others outside of her own tribe that did) but they were powerful and never to be underestimated. She had never seen the Others before, only heard tales of them, but now there is a mysterious bond that she is unable to rip away.