ago. The whole planet was just a wilderness of mares’ tails and dinosaurs and stagnant pools, back then. And the wind wasn’t so much wind, as a load of blue steam whirling about. I used to dream about earthquakes splitting the crust of the earth, like a failed soufflé of my mum’s, or eczema. I’d read those science-fiction comics. They’d show artists’ impressions of lower life-forms squabbling for supremacy. They were always bulbous, with little eyes on stalks, and they’d be submerged in a kind of churning primordial gloop. I had a vision of time speeded up, and dwarfy creatures with fins – not animals, but not plants either, a kind of horrible in-between thing – wriggling and twisting. Eating one another and being eaten.
‘I once watched a praying mantis eating a beetle,’ I told Norman. ‘Its jaws crunched from the side. They’re like mechanised clamps, an insect’s jaws.’ I demonstrated with my thumb and index finger, making pinching motions at Norman’s nose, and he shrank back in mock-fear, laughing. ‘The beetle put up quite a fight,’ I said. ‘It was still trying to defend itself when it only had one leg left, hanging by a thread.’ It had really impressed me. Things like that do, when you’re six. Then you forget about them, until suddenly they snap into your head one evening, years later, in a pub, after a few lagers. ‘Kicking and struggling to the very last. In the end, all that was left was a back foot, waving.’
Norman was looking at me sideways.
‘Well, that’s us, isn’t it?’ I continued, remembering why I’d thought about the mantis. ‘We’re that foot, waving. We’re being eaten alive. Swallowed up by time.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Point there, Buck. Bit of a philosopher, then, are you?’
To counteract this flattering but way-off-the-mark impression, I did him one of my brooding Elvis looks, and he guffawed.
It was my dad who told me about evolution, or rather his idea of it. I don’t suppose that either of us realised, then, how important it would become.
Even before the gizzard stone and, later, my Saturday job at Harper’s, I’d had a passion for skeletal biology, fuelled by the discoveries I made in the back garden, a long, narrow sliver of land subsiding towards the canal, black as Coke, which flowed sluggishly in a diagonal across the south of the borough. Both garden and canal were flanked by thin privet hedges and dust-filled urban weeds – bastard forms of dandelion, burdock, teasels, and rosebay willowherb which had mutated to outwit the weedkiller my father used to attack them. Every September, around the time the school term started, the cotton-wool tufts of willowherb drifted aimlessly on gusts of wind and settled on the lawn like lint, stirring up that strange feeling of melancholy that accompanies the changes of season in a city. At weekends, while my brothers helped our father fight weeds or prune hydrangeas or tackle rhubarb, I’d pick my way over the upturned earth, avoiding the lumps of half-buried cat-shit, to exhume the more ancient detritus of nature: snail-shells, cow’s teeth, old sparrow-skulls, a dog’s femur as drilled and pocked as a hard sponge. By the canal I found dried beetles, dead dragonflies, stiffened birds, and once, three-quarters of a fox. I became obsessed with this jetsam of calcium, and the audacity of its design.
‘Daddy, how did they make this?’ I ask, thrusting part of a shrew up at him.
My father’s spade is an extension of his foot, a submerged stilt. He’s digging a trench for beets. ‘Make what?’
‘This bone. Look, it’s teeny-weeny. Look, Dad.’
‘It made itself, Bobby. The shrew grew in its mummy’s tummy.’
‘But who made the mummy shrew?’
‘The mummy shrew’s mum and dad.’
‘So, Dad, who made the first ever shrew, then?’
‘Evolution. It developed from another type of creature.’ Dad heaves his weight down on the spade, makes an ‘
Eurkah
’ noise, wipes sweat from
‘I once watched a praying mantis eating a beetle,’ I told Norman. ‘Its jaws crunched from the side. They’re like mechanised clamps, an insect’s jaws.’ I demonstrated with my thumb and index finger, making pinching motions at Norman’s nose, and he shrank back in mock-fear, laughing. ‘The beetle put up quite a fight,’ I said. ‘It was still trying to defend itself when it only had one leg left, hanging by a thread.’ It had really impressed me. Things like that do, when you’re six. Then you forget about them, until suddenly they snap into your head one evening, years later, in a pub, after a few lagers. ‘Kicking and struggling to the very last. In the end, all that was left was a back foot, waving.’
Norman was looking at me sideways.
‘Well, that’s us, isn’t it?’ I continued, remembering why I’d thought about the mantis. ‘We’re that foot, waving. We’re being eaten alive. Swallowed up by time.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Point there, Buck. Bit of a philosopher, then, are you?’
To counteract this flattering but way-off-the-mark impression, I did him one of my brooding Elvis looks, and he guffawed.
It was my dad who told me about evolution, or rather his idea of it. I don’t suppose that either of us realised, then, how important it would become.
Even before the gizzard stone and, later, my Saturday job at Harper’s, I’d had a passion for skeletal biology, fuelled by the discoveries I made in the back garden, a long, narrow sliver of land subsiding towards the canal, black as Coke, which flowed sluggishly in a diagonal across the south of the borough. Both garden and canal were flanked by thin privet hedges and dust-filled urban weeds – bastard forms of dandelion, burdock, teasels, and rosebay willowherb which had mutated to outwit the weedkiller my father used to attack them. Every September, around the time the school term started, the cotton-wool tufts of willowherb drifted aimlessly on gusts of wind and settled on the lawn like lint, stirring up that strange feeling of melancholy that accompanies the changes of season in a city. At weekends, while my brothers helped our father fight weeds or prune hydrangeas or tackle rhubarb, I’d pick my way over the upturned earth, avoiding the lumps of half-buried cat-shit, to exhume the more ancient detritus of nature: snail-shells, cow’s teeth, old sparrow-skulls, a dog’s femur as drilled and pocked as a hard sponge. By the canal I found dried beetles, dead dragonflies, stiffened birds, and once, three-quarters of a fox. I became obsessed with this jetsam of calcium, and the audacity of its design.
‘Daddy, how did they make this?’ I ask, thrusting part of a shrew up at him.
My father’s spade is an extension of his foot, a submerged stilt. He’s digging a trench for beets. ‘Make what?’
‘This bone. Look, it’s teeny-weeny. Look, Dad.’
‘It made itself, Bobby. The shrew grew in its mummy’s tummy.’
‘But who made the mummy shrew?’
‘The mummy shrew’s mum and dad.’
‘So, Dad, who made the first ever shrew, then?’
‘Evolution. It developed from another type of creature.’ Dad heaves his weight down on the spade, makes an ‘
Eurkah
’ noise, wipes sweat from
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