A Room Full Of Bones

‘Ah, here it is.’

In front of them is a plasterboard wall with two doors. Danforth is unlocking the left-hand door and reaching for a light switch. Rather reluctantly, Ruth follows him.

A flickering fluorescent light illuminates a narrow room with brick walls and cement floor. The walls are curved, a half-circle bisected by the plasterboard wall. The straight side of the room is lined with metal shelves and the shelves are stacked with cardboard boxes. Each box is scrawled with a single word. Bones.

The room is full of bones.

Ruth is an expert on bones; her students even once presented her with a life-size cardboard cutout of Bones from Star Trek. She has excavated mass graves, dug up prehistoric bodies, but she has never seen anything like this. Boxes of bones just piled up together in a cellar. No names, no dates, just ‘bones’. Are they all human? she wonders. There must be fifty, maybe sixty, boxes here.

She suddenly realises that Danforth is speaking to her and, incredibly, there is pride in his voice.

‘My great-grandfather was a real character. Travelled to Australia in the 1800s, the pioneer days. He was after gold. Did you know that gold was discovered in Australia in the 1850s? My great-grandpa started a gold mine in New South Wales. Had a few clashes with the old Abos over the land, but he must have been a fierce old codger because he stuck to it and made a mint. Came back to England in about 1870 but he was never the same again, apparently. My pa remembered him as quite dotty. Anyhow, he brought his collection back with him, God knows how. There’s some wonderful stuff. We’ve got some of it in the museum downstairs: snakeskins, dingo traps, branding irons, convict-made bricks.’

Great-grandpa must be Lord Percival Smith, adventurer and taxidermist, thinks Ruth. Clearly his collecting extended beyond slaughtering and stuffing local wildlife. She was right when she thought he looked an ugly customer.

‘Where do the bones come from?’ asks Ruth. She is starting to feel seriously uncomfortable. There isn’t much room to stand in the space between the boxes and Danforth Smith seems to be looming over her. He has to duck his head under the curved ceiling. She can see the sweat on his forehead. It’s very hot and there’s a faint smell of gas in the air.

‘They’re Aboriginal bones. And the skulls too. I think the old man had the idea that the Abos were put together differently from us, that they were linked to cave men or some such. So he started collecting bones. There must be hundreds here.’

Ruth shakes her head. As an expert in prehistory she detests the term ‘cave men’, but that almost fades into the background compared with the mind-boggling idea of a man who collected human bones for fun and a great- grandson who seems almost proud of the fact.

‘Where did he get the bones?’ she asks faintly.

‘From all over. Some of them come from one of the islands. Those are the ones that these Elginist nutters are on about. My great-granddad had a share in a salt mine on one of the islands.’

The word ‘island’ rings a faint bell. Does salt come from mines, wonders Ruth irrelevantly. It sounds like something from Alice in Wonderland, one of Cathbad’s favourite books. She remembers how, the first time she visited the museum, she had felt like Alice, plunged into an underground world, faced with arbitrary but somehow sinister choices. The little door or the big one. Eat me. Drink me. Aloud, she asks, ‘But where did they come from? I mean, did he just dig them up or…’ Or what, she thinks.

‘Oh I think so,’ says Danforth airily. ‘The Aboriginals just dumped their dead bodies in the ground, no coffin or anything.’ He sounds disapproving.

‘So he dug up the bodies?’ Ruth can’t believe her ears.

Danforth registers her tone and becomes more defensive. ‘He paid good money for them, I’m told. The Abos probably spent it on drink from what I’ve heard.’

‘And now the Elginists want the bones back?’

Danforth’s face darkens further. ‘They don’t know what they want. Burial of their ancestors and all that tosh. I mean, these…’ He gestures towards the cardboard boxes stacked on the shelves. ‘These aren’t their ancestors. They’re just bones.’

Ruth doesn’t know where to start. ‘But they’re human bones, human remains. They deserve a decent burial.’ She tries to think of an example that will mean something to Smith. ‘Look at Bishop Augustine. He’s your ancestor. You wouldn’t want his bones kept in a cardboard box. You’d want them treated with dignity and respect.’

‘But that’s different. He was a bishop.’

‘Well some of these people might be bishops or the equivalent. Holy men and women.’ Ruth pauses, aware that she’s hazy about Indigenous Australian religion. She thinks of Bob Woonunga. My people believe that the world was created in the Dreamtime when the spirit ancestors roamed the Earth. She doesn’t think that there is any point telling this to Danforth Smith.

‘So,’ she says briskly. ‘What do you want from me?’

Danforth, too, seems relieved to have left the spirit world behind. ‘I want you to tell me if these bones really are human. I mean, they could be bloody dingo for all I know. The skulls are staying here, they’re important objects – especially the water carrier. But if the bones are human, I suppose these Elginist people can have them. They’re not doing much good here, after all.’

‘All right,’ says Ruth. ‘I’ll take a look at the bones.’

‘Righty ho.’ Danforth rubs his head, which he has just knocked against the doorpost. ‘Oh I almost forgot.’ In the corner of the room is a kind of wire cage. Danforth Smith takes out another key to unlock this. Inside is a metal box, rather like a large camera case. ‘Here are the skulls,’ he says. ‘Beautiful aren’t they?’

Ruth, left alone with the bones, takes off her jacket, wipes her hands on her legs and takes a water bottle from her bag. ‘Why do young people carry these bottles everywhere?’ her mother always asks. ‘I don’t feel the need to gulp down water all the time.’ Maybe not Mum, thinks Ruth, but even you might feel like a drink in these circumstances. She drinks slowly, trying to concentrate. The heat is making her sleepy. Last night hadn’t been a good one. Kate, worn out after the excitement of the didgeridoo, went to sleep at half-past seven. But as Ruth was tiptoeing downstairs at eight she woke up again. And again at ten, at midnight, at half-past three. Today Ruth feels as if she is sleepwalking or seeing everything through thick glass. She puts the bottle back in her rucksack. She’d better get on with it. She has a lecture at twelve. Come to think of it, the heat can’t be doing the bones much good either. Like Bishop Augustine’s coffin, they should really be kept at an ambient temperature. She takes down a box from the nearest shelf. She peers into the nearest box. Bones are piled high inside, yellow-white, some of them with numbers and dates printed on them. At first glance, they are almost definitely human.

She had planned to lay the bones out anatomically but soon gives up. Danforth Smith’s great-grandfather (such a character) must simply have scooped up everything buried in the soil of the island salt mine. There are adult bones, children’s bones, animal bones, all mixed together in a ghastly colonial stew. There are also a few interesting stone tools, which Ruth puts aside to study later.

What would Cathbad make of this? she wonders. Cathbad and his Elginist friends who want the bones reunited with Mother Earth. She decides to call him. She wants to hear his voice, to reassure herself that Cathbad, her friend, who has been so kind to her, could never have anything to do with letters that threatened to take a man’s life. A man who subsequently died. Besides, she tells herself, she wants to ask him about the ‘repatriation’ conference. It’s work, she tells herself, nothing to do with Max. So much has happened since she last saw Max, not least the birth of Kate, that she no longer knows how she feels about him anyway. She conjures him up: tall, curly- haired, slightly watchful. She met Max when he was excavating the Roman Villa near Swaffham but their relationship soon became overshadowed by other events, including murder. Cathbad was involved in that case too. He really does seem to have discovered the art of omnipresence.

Except today. Cathbad isn’t answering his phone. This is unusual because, although he claims that using mobile phones causes brain cancer, he’s usually pretty quick to answer a text or voicemail. Where can he be?

Ruth puts aside the bones and opens the box containing the skulls. There are three of them, more or less intact. Beautiful, Danforth had said, and, in a way, Ruth can see what he means. A human skull is a gift to an archaeologist, telling so much, free from the trappings of flesh. But it’s also a person, as Ruth always tells her students, and three people, three real people who were born and died thousands of miles away, have ended up with their heads locked in the basement of a Norfolk museum. Why? How?

The fourth object in the box makes Ruth catch her breath. It’s the top half of a skull, the iliac crest, scooped out to resemble a bowl. This must be the famous water carrier. What sort of person would want to drink out of