Brontosaurus: A Short Story

Recovered this when clearing out the hard drive of my old, busted computer. Its a very short story I wrote within a year of moving here. London to me then was little more than the sum of its museums, but I was smitten nonetheless. Apologies to both my regular readers who've seen this one before...

Simon was a boy who matched things up. Anna thought it was because he came from a broken home. He would look at your life and offer you a book to shore it up or break it down. He was associative about his pleasures too; he let them scroll out before him, each one conjuring up the next, like hip-hop tags unspooling in his mouth. So, for instance, they were descending to the platform at Angel and suddenly he had to find that dinosaur.
"It's the sweep of the escalator that reminded you," Anna said. "Long and stately. Like a Brontosaurus neck."
"It's not particularly long," Simon said.
"It's the longest escalator in the world," Anna said.
"There's longer in Russia," Simon said.
"That's what brought back the Brontosaurus," Anna said. "The romance of dead empires. Their melancholy fall."
"The world's longest escalator is in Turkmenistan," he said. "It's only got ten steps, but they're each five stories high. Whole families fall into the gaps on either side."
"Angel is as long as these things get," she said. "They disappoint you. Just like dinosaurs."
"I was twenty-five years old when I saw the Brontosaurus and it was even better than I'd imagined," Simon said. "That's the thing about dinosaurs. They never let you down."
"Did you ever have a guardian angel?" Anna said.

When Anna was eleven, the head nun gave the class markers and told them to draw a picture of their guardian angels. Anna drew Pádraig Pearse, the Irish patriot- there was a photograph of him above the blackboard, and he looked like someone she could boss around. Most children drew extreme versions of nuns- nuns with harps, nuns with wings, nuns with halos and talons. One boy drew a battleship, and he was now a senior partner in a Newcastle law firm. Nobody, as far as she recalled, drew dinosaurs.

What she meant to say was this: everything in Simon's life balanced out, apart from herself.

So she was conducting an investigation, was she? Well, to be clear: Simon didn't come from a broken home. Simon came from a warm and caring household. Though there were rules; and the rules were there to be obeyed. Simon came from a home where the lights went out at nine, and the whole family lay there trembling, silent in the dark like dinosaurs.

To get to the dinosaurs, they had to make their way backwards through the birds. There was something spiteful about these old exhibits, something obscene and kinked, mocking both bird and man. The peacock's plume was a dusty, pubic tangle. A hummingbird display was a caseful of heart attacks. When Anna saw the starling flayed and pinned to a board, she realised who the curator was: busy Jack from Whitechapel, the humourless fussbudget with his leather apron and his belt of knives…

So this was it. Simon was escorting her to a crime scene. She would have to sit, hands in lap, beneath the huge catastrophe of bones. Simon would smile proudly, as if the carnage were his handiwork. "Anna," he'd say. "May I introduce my mother? I think you'll like her. She has brains in her head and in her tail."

Anna searched the museum for something redeemable. She saw the skeleton of a giant sloth, with a pelvis you could lounge in. She saw prehistoric dolphins, and a fifty foot long sea crocodile. She saw the petrified head of an Ichthyosaur, found in 1811 on Charmouth Beach by a fossil hunter called Joseph Anning and his eleven year old sister Mary.
"Is that alive?" said a girl.
"No," said her mother. "It was alive. But now its covered in what's the word." The girl raced her brother to the sandwich bar. To herself the mother said: "Cement."
Anna thought the mother had it wrong. The ichthyosaur was the most vital creature she had ever seen. The jaws gleamed, as if narrowly released from the muzzle of the earth, and the iris seemed to be contracting in adjustment to the newer, harsher light. In 1812, Mary Anning returned to the rockface alone and hacked out the creature's neck. Her brother didn't accompany her; he was a young man with a career ahead of him, he had no time for bringing monsters back to life. Mary was working blind, without models, relying on the earth's fragile memory and her own guilelessness. Of course, the earth exaggerated. Who wouldn't, with all that attention, so late in the day? The neck it surrendered was the most beautiful and pointless object in the world. Anna wanted desperately to see the body that bore this rococo caber. But it didn't exist. After the neck, there was nothing else. Mary's excavations let her down. Which meant that innocence could only get you so far along the way. Or else it meant: even the earth forgets.

When she was eleven, Anna made her own monster. She stared at Pearse's face until a thorny part of her went into those soft features. Hers was a contrary angel. His punches never left a mark, but his disregard could crush her utterly. Real boys seemed flimsy in comparison; she sifted them in vain for her angel's weightiness, his fearsome gravity.

"Brontosaurus," Simon said.
In the centre of the lobby stood the storybook figure: backbone spilling gracefully across the squat torso, an elegant bell-curve of bones.
"And that's just a baby," Simon said loudly. "My one took up the whole room."
"It says on the label this is a diplodocus," Anna said.
Simon walked away, fists by his sides. She found him in the Late Cretaceous, striding briskly past the Stegosaurs and Iguanadons as if they were a crew of fairground shrills.
"In Dublin Zoo they had a crocodile that grew too big for his enclosure," Anna said. "There was a narrow groove in the floor of the reptile house, and the crocodile lay wedged in it. The children threw their pennies at his back."
"Children are brutes," Simon said, and she wondered if he was turning into his father. But no, he was just pining for his Brontosaurus.
"Maybe they've put it in storage," she said.
"Maybe it never existed in the first place," Simon said.
Technically, Anna knew that he was right. The first Brontosaurus was created in the 19th century by a man called Othniel Charles Marsh, who fitted up the body of an Apatosaurus with a Camosaurus skull. It was probably an honest mistake. At least, Marsh had no motive for the deception, apart from jealousy. He was desperate to find and name as many species as possible, to spite his deadly rival, Edward Cope. Marsh was not a man who matched things up. He would call the front leg of a specimen one name, the back leg another, the ribcage something else again. Anna imagined sex with Othniel Charles Marsh. She thought of him thrashing around beneath the covers, snorting with greed, breaking her body up into a daft menagerie, a nest of monsters with extraordinary names. Which was the exact opposite of sex with Simon. Simon had sex as if he were putting together a great creature that had lived once, in slower times, shadowing out its heft and shape, articulating the ribs in the dry air, frowning all the while as though engaged in a task of scrupulous creation (though at the end there was always the moment of hilarious failure, when the ladder toppled over and all the great bones clattered to the floor.)

That was when Anna realised. Simon was in love with her. He loved her and he couldn't cope with it. That was what put his calculations out and made him yearn for things that weren't there. He was looking for a counterweight and a brontosaurus wasn't big enough. She felt a rush of something that might have been compassion and might have been pity or alarm. She slid her hand into his, and he squeezed back, so hard it actually hurt, so hard that she could feel the tiny bones in her fingers all compacted together, as if under the weight of centuries, as if they were encased in what's the word? Cement.