Tatty and the Snapping Dragons

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Grandma tied Tatty’s hair on top of her head in a dancer’s bun.

“Ow, not so tight.”

“Please stop wriggling. You need dancer’s hair,” Grandma told her.

Tatty pulled on new pale pink ballet tights.

“Mind how you go Tatty, you’ll make a hole,” tutted Grandma.

Tatty stepped into her pale pink leotard.

Tatty’s ballet shoes had once belonged to her Mum. Dad helped her criss-cross the satin ribbons around her ankles.

“There you go, little Ballerina,” he said.

“Oh just look at you,” Grandma cooed.

Tatty looked in the mirror.

She went to her dress-up box, and added a sparkling beady necklace, and some feathers.

“That’s better,” said Tatty

“Ballerina’s don’t look like that,” tutted Grandma, as she shoo-ed Tatty out the door.

The ballet school smelt like the inside of Tatty's ward-robe. Grandma introduced Tatty to her teacher, Ms Margo.

Ms Margo was very loud. Tatty wanted to cover her ears when Ms Margo yelled Hello Florence to Grandma, and hollered Well, well, well! at Tatty, and then shrieked So, you are our little ballerina! Instead of covering her ears, Tatty wished she could go home.

But Tatty could not go home. Ms Margo showed her a small white cross on the floor.

“THIS IS WHERE YOU STAND!” she hollered. Tatty stood exactly on her cross, her feet carefully together. Other children, all wearing pale pink leotards and tights like Tatty’s stood on their crosses too.

Ms Margo clapped her hands, and everyone stopped talking. Tinkling piano music filled the air.

Very elegantly indeed, and in perfect time to the music, Ms Margo pointed a toe to the front, slid it to the side, and then to the back. Everyone copied her.

Everyone except Tatty.

Tatty touched the feathers at her neck for courage. She screwed her toes into a point, and slid her foot to the front.

But somehow she did not know what to do next.

Ms Margo’s arms swayed above her head like a graceful tree. Everyone moved their arms like breezy branches.

But not Tatty.

“Like THIS Tatty,” yelled Ms Margo, and she placed her hands around Tatty’s wrists.

But when Ms Margo let go, her breezy branches fell straight back to her sides.

Tatty wanted to go home even more than before. She did not want to be a ballerina after all.

Her eyes prickled with tears.

Then Ms Margo clapped her hands, and the music stopped.

“IT’S TAPPING TIME! Ballet shoes off, tapping shoes on!” she bellowed.

Grandma helped Tatty to take off her ballet shoes. “Don’t feel sad Tatty, it will be better next time.”

“No, I don’t think so,” whispered Tatty. “I don’t want to do ballet anymore.”

Tatty did not have any tap shoes because she was learning to be a ballerina.

Ms Margo whispered loudly in Grandma’s ear.

“I suppose so,” said Grandma.

Ms Margo went to an old wooden cupboard, painted with silver stars and moons. She opened the door with a creak, and took a black velvet bag tied with a silver ribbon from a shelf. “This is for you!” she told Tatty.

Tatty looked inside the velvet bag. A delicious smell, like raindrops on a warm road, floated out to her. Tatty breathed it in and reached in to something gleaming.

It was a pair of Tap Shoes.

The toes were scuffed, with flakes of silver paint missing. They were creased and bent. But on the worn soles Tatty felt the gleaming slivers of silver metal shiver with the memory of many thrilling, noisy dances.

“Oh!” whispered Tatty. “They are beautiful!”

“They need a good coat of paint,” tutted Grandma.

But Tatty thought they were just right. She slipped her feet into the shoes, and tied the ribbons. They moulded perfectly around her feet. Their silvery taps went clicky-clack on the polished wooden floor as Tatty joined the class.

Then she remembered, “But I can’t dance.”

“The shoes will know what to do Tatty. They are full of dancing,” said Ms Margo.

Tatty thought she felt something trembling in the shoes. Maybe Ms Margo was right.

Ms Margo clapped her hands. Wild, fiery music filled the room.

Ms Margo pointed her toe: Click.

Her foot slid to the side: Sw-i-i-ish.

She stamped her feet together: Clunk. Clunk.

Everyone copied her. Even Tatty.

Click. Sw-i-i-ish. Clunk. Clunk.

Click. Sw-i-i-ish. Clunk. Clunk.

Ms Margo waved her arms like a whole forest of trees in the wind, she clunketty-clunked and clicketty-clicked her feet in time to the rolling, rollicking music. And so did Tatty.

Click. Sw-i-i-ish. Clunk. Clunk.

Click. Sw-i-i-ish. Clunk. Clunk.

Clicketty, swishedy, clunketty, clunk!

Tatty danced faster and faster, her arms moving like the wind, and her feet glittering and roaring like two snapping dragons.

At the end of the dance the wild music stopped. Tatty was puffing and hot, but she had a big smile on her face. Ms Margo winked at her, as she curtsied gracefully to the class.

“Excellent work class. See you next week!” she bellowed, but she was looking right at Tatty. Tatty looked back at Ms Margo.

“SEE YOU NEXT WEEK MS MARGO!” everyone shouted. Even Tatty, and she felt her silvery tap shoes give a little snapping shiver of excitement on her feet.

Salinity

Watery sunbeams raked the water, but I could not see the seabed, or the surface, and I could not tell which way was up. The ocean, under its grey wrinkled surface, was as green as a peacock’s neck. I hung which-ever-way-up in the sea’s strange emerald light, and strands of pearls bubbled from my nose and mouth. ‘Is this drowning?’ I wondered, as it began to hurt in my chest. Just before I’d been teaching Salina to swim in the shallows where doll-sized waves rippled. Now the blue sky had been replaced by sea-grapes and swirling ribbons of seaweed.

I gave up trying to reach the surface, and then a few moments later I could not remember why I had wanted to. The sharp saltiness in the back of my nose stopped hurting and the beautiful shimmering green began to disappear from the water. As though the sun went down in a rush everything turned grey and then greyer, until there was only a soft, cosy blackness.

I was seven years old, the day I drowned, and it took my Uncle Brian seven puffs of air to bring me back to life. I sucked in lung-fulls of sea-damp air with a gasp, and vomited salty water down my neck and into my ears. I could feel the prickles and wetness where Uncle Brian’s mouth had been on mine. Gritty sand scratched my back, and the stinging tickle of stinking black seaweed scraped the bare skin of my legs, but I lay a little longer wondering what would happen next. The next sound I heard, as I lay there getting over drowning, was that of my mother crying.

‘My baby, my little baby!’ she was sobbing, and then, ‘Hopeless. You’re just plain hopeless!’ My Dad had been minding me while she sat in out of the cold. Other voices were talking and someone put a towel around me and I lay there until I felt warmer and had left it long enough so I wouldn't have to say sorry for causing all the fuss.

Then I smelt my favourite smell in the whole world drifting on the breeze: hot chips with salt and vinegar. I surprised them all by sitting straight up and opening my eyes. ‘Hello there!’ I said in a watery voice. The world looked bluer than I remembered. My mother didn't say anything, she had to go and sit in the car. But my Dad hugged me with a teary grin and promised to find my doll if it took him all night.

Uncle Brian carried me up the beach. I was embarrassed to be pressed so close to his tanned chest smelling of coconut and sweat, so I closed my eyes again. His tightly coiled chest hairs prickled my skin. He bundled me into the back of the car, and he sat in the front with Mum and held her hand.

From the car I watched Dad wade up and down in the shallows, searching forSalina, his trousers rolled over his knees and his feet white in the half-light. He peered deep into the waves; their folding tops glowing silver and purple in the fading day. Only the backs of Mum and Uncle Brians’ heads kept me company and they talked in low voices only to each other, their heads close together.

My eyes stung, and my head swirled like I was back in the peacock-green ocean. I ate my chips one by one, and hoped Salina would float into Dad’s outstretched fingers. I imagined Dad’s hands with soft webs stretching between his fingers like a Mer-man’s.

Mum and my uncle were talking, and from the tone of their voices I could tell I wasn’t meant to be listening. After a few moments Mum moved away from him and her fingers drummed in sharp rhythms on the shiny, black steering wheel. ‘You are dangerous for me, Brian,’ she said at last. ‘I shouldn’t be left alone with you.’

By the time my chips are gone, Dad will find Salina, I thought. I ate slowly, and when the cup was nearly empty I licked the salt from my fingers. Salty tears oozed from my eyes, and dripped into the cup, plop, plop, plop.

I thought, I am full of the sea. I am salt.

The first stars were appearing when Dad finally came up the foot-track. Empty handed. Uncle Brian leapt out of the car, ‘Any luck?’ he asked in a booming, cheery voice. Dad did not answer him. He knelt at the rear door, and put his hand on mine. ‘I'm sorry, little mite,’ he said. His skin was strangely grey and moist looking, and his trousers dripped into the dust of the car park. ‘Salina has gone. She’s gone to live with the mermaids.’ I looked at his big white hand. It was wrinkled and cold like something dead, something bloated with water, not webbed like a Mer-man’s should be. I looked away, pulling my hand from under his at the same time. An aching in my throat would not let me talk.

Mum started the car, and revved the engine impatiently. ‘Sorry love,’ she said. She looked over her shoulder into the back seat for the first time. ‘You were too old for a dolly, any how,’ she added, lighting another cigarette with a glowing coil of wire. My uncle Brian got in the back with me while Dad started the car. ‘Chip tax,’ he said with a chuckle, stealing the longest chip I’d been saving and that was now soggy on one end from my tears. ‘Well, Frank, that was quite a trip to the beach, hey!’

The very next Sunday, when he came to take my Mum out to lunch, Uncle Brian gave me a new doll. She came in crinkly, purple paper with a wardrobe of little clothes. She had such long, smooth hair that I hated her a bit for being so beautiful. My own hair was not long and it was never smooth, it frizzled up in the rain. I spent hours in my room with the door shut on the silence of Dad left alone in the house, arranging her tiny clothes on pale yellow plastic hangers. I could not think of a name so didn’t call her anything. I told her that in life there were many things that were very dangerous, and especially warned her about the dangers of the sea, and she promised not to go anywhere near it. I cut her hair as short as mine to make it easier to look after.

One night at the end of summer Mum set the table in the dining room with Grandma’s tablecloth, the one embroidered with red strawberries normally used for Christmas or really fancy dinners. She spread it carefully over the polished wood and laid it with the best plates, arranging them on the table like a magazine ad. I put out the cutlery while Mum spent a long time making a roast dinner, sort of humming every now and then as she peeled and poked. Dad and I grinned at each other as everything came out to the table all piled onto our biggest platter. It looked and tasted like Christmas and I wondered if there would be pudding and ice-cream for dessert.

Dad and I were the happiest we’d been for a long time and I thought that Mum must be too. But after she finished picking at a chicken leg and baked potato she placed her knife and fork side by side in the exact centre of her plate, pushing some peas to one side. In the same voice she had used to ask Dad for the gravy, she said,

‘I'm leaving you Frank. Brian loves the girl like she was his own and he’ll give us both a good home.’ The fork on its way to Dad’s mouth stopped in its tracks. A spot of gravy landed on the table-cloth, making one of the strawberries look like it had a rotten patch in it. Then Mum just picked up her plate and left the table. In the darkened kitchen I heard her fumbling in her cigarette packet, and then theclick, click, click of her lighter.

At first nothing happened, then Dad slid his plate right across the table, ploughing the strawberries into thick rumples and folds. He kept pushing it right to the very edge and I watched it wobble, then fall. Globs of gravy, a slick brown carrot, and half a potato pattered onto the carpet. The lid came off the salt shaker and a drift of salt spewed out.

‘Is that how you tell me?’ he asked in a thin voice, but Mum just puffed away in the kitchen.

Maybe there was pudding, maybe not. I didn’t get any and that, plus the fact that Mum had ruined the lovely dinner, meant I hated her for a while then.

Mum and Dad stopped talking to each other apart from Dad’s thin sentences that started with ‘why…?’ and Mum’s angry, smoky nothings. When he was putting me to bed Dad told me he was trying to find the words to stop us leaving him. But Mum went from one room to another so she didn’t have to listen to him. The only happy person seemed to be Uncle Brian, who appeared in the house when Dad was not there and pretended I was playing a game where I was holding out on him and he had to guess the name of my new doll.

I had to pack my clothes and my toys into green garbage bags all by myself as Mum was too busy to help me. Dad cried when he saw them in my room. I couldn’t imagine Uncle Brian crying about that sort of thing. I told Dad not to worry, because I’d come back to see him all the time. That cheered him up a lot, he said.

Two days later it was me who found her. She was lying face down in a shallow sea of pinkly tinged bathwater, an empty container of strawberry bath-salts bobbing in the crook of her neck. Dad came and the lid of the toilet creaked as he sat on it, next to the bath. My Mum lay so still in the water, like she was sleeping. Then Dad began to cry, but differently, like something was jammed up inside. His noises reminded me of some sort of small animal. I pressed to his side and patted him as lovingly as I could. He pointed out my new doll lying with wet hair and a squashed arm in the bottom of the bath. ‘A bloody doll!’ he cried. ‘She slipped on a bloody doll!’

Water dripped from the tap into the pink water, …plunk, …plunk, …plunk. The water around her head was redder than raspberries but pinker than tomato sauce. Darker outlines of crimson outlined sea-weedy shapes where her hair fanned in tendrils around her head. ‘Should we give her the Kiss of Life?’ I asked eventually, not liking to suggest out-right that we ask Uncle Brian to come and puff seven hot breaths into her wet mouth. ‘Too late Pumpkin,’ said Dad sadly. ‘It’s all too late for that.’

’Oh.’

Rather than look at Mum any longer I sat on Dad’s knee and looked over his shoulder at all the things lying around the sink. Mum’s toothbrush was pale blue, with stiff shiny bristles. Dad’s had soft, curved lashes for bristles. Mine was smaller with yellow flowers. We stayed like that a long time, too sad to move, until the first thin stars appeared out the window.

Much later, when everyone had left, Dad tucked me in and kissed my hair. He left the door open just the right amount and I snuggled in to Angel, my new dolly, and smelled her plasticky smell. I smiled to myself when I realised that Brian had been wrong to try and take us away, but a bit right about Angel – I had known her name all along. Angel, come to save me. She did not like to snuggle, this one, but I was beginning to like her plastic smell. I held her and licked the warm skin of my arm where Dad had cried onto it and it tasted like the sea. ‘Is your poor arm alright?’ I asked Angel. ‘Did clumsy Mummy tread on you and hurt your little arm?’ It was still a little flattened and had a line like a scar on its plastic surface. I kissed it tenderly. ‘I'm glad we won’t have to leave Dad now,’ I whispered to Angel. ‘From now on it will be just him, you and me… thank you for saving me Angel.’

River Beach

Out on the Bass Straight a strong southerly was blowing. It whipped the tops off the waves and vaporised them, tossing them out like bridal veils for an ocean of salty brides. Solitary ocean gulls surfed on the wind, continually on the look out for the next flash of briny-silver.

Closer to shore, the wind blew more softly. The sea breeze found its way through the heads of a river, and wound along banks that increasingly became edged with reeds. With the breeze came the scent of the sea. It twined around points and headlands, and arrived softly and pleasantly at a little pebbly beach, lined with paper bark trees and gravel clearings for cars.

A beach on a river is a particular place. When the tide is out it is more river than beach, home to pale creatures who nestle invisibly in the soft river mud or dart through the warm shallows. Reeds efficient at filtering salt are a haven for black swans, who bob amongst them and think themselves hidden when they draw their head under a tender wing. At high tide the swans reveal themselves and gather at the up-river end of the beach. Their presence there reminds you that the river-beach is closer in spirit to life further up-river where creatures have no notion of salty water.

But with each ebb and flow of the tide the push up-river of salt and the ocean means the river beach is always in a flux of mostly being river and yet not quite. Gulls soar and circle joyously over you as you sit on a striped beach towel enjoying the sun, and their cries create a link with the ocean. Invisible to your eyes are the tiny sea creatures who come in with the tide, stay a while and then depart with the outgoing tide. Do they, like us, enjoy the holiday-like interlude of a trip to the beach?

*

Daisy ran down the beach. Her Mum and her Mum's friends June and Deb carried the towels, baskets and their books.

“Aah, you can smell the sea today,” said Daisy’s Mum.

“I want to build a sand-castle to the sky,” said Daisy. “Then, I’m going to sit next to the water, and let the waves come and get me!”

“That sounds lovely Daisy,” said her Mum. “But first, come and get some sun-screen on.”

The water was far down the pebbly beach, exposing wilting sea lettuce and many holes made by crabs. The sand that far down the beach was not white, or even golden. It was mixed with river mud. “It’s as soft as pudding to walk on,” said Daisy’s Mum later when they walked along the beach.

June and Daisy ran down to the water to swim. June dived straight in. Daisy wanted to dive in too, but all she could manage was to wade in until the cold water reached her middle.

“Wha-hoo! Look at the frog Daisy!” called June, gall-umping through the water. Daisy laughed and forgot to be cold. She began gallumping with her. They played giant frogs. They played skimming dolphins and splashing whales. They played beautiful mermaids.

Daisy’s Mum, Kristi, watched them play while she looked at the river and breathed in the faint scent of the sea. Deb lay back on her towel with her book. “The tide is coming in I think,” Kristi remarked. The rising tide soon covered the green, weedy sand. Next, it covered up the wide brown river flats. “Oh, look the tide’s really coming in now,” she said to Deb, who laid down her book for a moment to look.

Soon, the tide had come in far enough for the black swans to bob in amongst the reeds, close to the end of the beach. “Don’t they look beautiful,” she sighed.

June flopped breathless and laughing on her beach mat. Daisy lay down right next to her. June told Daisy quiet stories about pelicans, frogs and whales. They watched seagulls diving for fish on the river.

Kristi sighed with happiness. “Oh, lovely day,” she said to no-one in particular.

Deb turned the pages of her book.

A march fly tried to bite Kristi’s legs. “Ow!” she said crossly. “I keep missing it,” and she slapped at her legs.

“I reckon,” said June, “that we ought to put our shoes on and go for a walk.”

“It’s trying me now,” said Deb. Slap!

“No,” said Daisy. “I’ve got a sore toe, and I want to go home.”

“I’ll piggy-back you then,” said June.

“No, I need to go home,” said Daisy. “- Oh, look at this beautiful stone. I know, let’s go pick up some beautiful, treasure-stones.”

“Okay, let’s go!” said June.

“Let’s all go,” said Kristi. And they walked along the beach, splashing through small, warm waves until the shadows lengthened, and the breeze coming from the ocean grew cool.

*

That night, when Daisy and her Mum and her Mum's friends had gone home, a silvery moon rose over the deserted river beach. A warm land breeze flowed back down the river, twisting and turning until it met the ocean. The black swan family bobbed amongst the reeds. They tucked their heads under their wings and settled for the night. The moon tucked itself in behind a bank of high dappled clouds, and the beach was bathed in shadow. It waited for the day.

But down where the sand was pudding-soft the gentle folding and unfolding of river waves was stirring up a party: ribbons and splashes of luminous effervescence prickled in the darkness as millions of tiny plankton danced along the waves and set off their tiny blue green lights. They had been born out at sea and pushed down the wide river with the incoming tide until they found themselves at the warm edges of the river beach. They celebrated all through night until, with the coming of the dawn, their tiny lights faded.

And all the next day, while other children played frogs, dolphins and mermaids amongst them, the tiny invisible plankton tumbled and sang in the rolling waves, enjoying their short beach holiday, and waiting for the turning of the tide that would take them home.

Poor Hank Fish

Image taken from www.columbia.edu/.../austro.html

Nearly four million years before the present day a group of three bipedal hominids, possibly humankind’s earliest ancestors, walked together across an open plain, in what one day would be known as Africa. On this day the scent of recent volcanic eruptions would have been hanging in the air, the horizen studded with smoking cones. Their passing left a tantalising record, a trail of footprints imprinted in newly settled volcanic ash. By examining the nature of the prints, their size, shape and the distance between them, we know they walked upright. By comparing this data with skeletons dated from the same era we assign them to a group of bipedal hominids that were not tall, about half the height of us. We take (very) educated guesses that they belonged to two adults and a juvenile of the species australopithecine afarensis, and with our fingers crossed we claim these as our earliest ancestors.

Getting along on two legs as opposed to scrambling about on all fours had come about relatively recently in the scheme of things. The innovation had allowed the use hands for tasks other than mobility, and provided the advantage of a longer line of sight to catch a glimpse of game or scout for danger. It was the means for these early hominids to range further and further from the safety of the tree-ed places, and to take up the regular eating of meat to power their lengthier trips and to sustain a growing brain. Walking upright really did set them off on the path to becoming us.

In this manner, wonderfully free from the weight of their predestination over the next 3.7 million years, this little group walked on by, leaving nothing but footprints. It's a wonder they didn't stop and look back on them with amazement, maybe they did. The footprints remained in the ash long after it had become solid rock. The imprinted rock was covered by layer upon layer of soils over the millennia. Then the turnings of the earth and the relentless sweep of time removed the covering layers, grain by grain, sweeping them away until our groups’ signature footprints lay within reach of dainty pick and brush work by those inclined to such things.

A hefty 3.7 million years after first being laid down they were uncovered by someone very inclined to such things. Dust soaked anthropologist Hank Fish discovered a trail of fossilised footprints in the dry Tanzanian plains of Africa in the early nineteen seventies. They were the find of his life.

*

Aus – tral – o – pith – a - cine, Af – ar – en – sis, is how Celia first learnt to say their name when she was two. Celia Fish was only a babe in arms when the news of her father’s discovery entered the public domain. By the time she was six her father was a well-known Professor of Anthropology at Hobart University, inclined to give his views vociferously on local talk-back radio on matters not in the least connected with anthropology, and still touring on the strength of his one, great find. Celia’s mother had been an outspoken student. They fell in together, and managed to form an alliance held together by love and common understanding, ‘with no need what-so-ever for any medieval marriage ceremony’. Together they held sway over little Celia’s life, which she remembered in later years as a succession of ‘healthy differences of opinion’, or, as Celia remembers it, violent arguments.

Casts of the Hank Fish’s famous footprints were displayed in the Hobart Museum, set in a tasteful diorama featuring a dried, landscape representation. The interested public came for a look, bringing their children. A cursory glance in the anthropological room usually sufficed, before they wheeled their bonneted offspring off to the room containing the stuffed animals.

Celia went to see the impressive, twenty foot long panorama with her father on a regular basis. They took a cut lunch every Friday. When he was in an agreeable frame of mind Hank Fish explained the display in such interesting detail that young Celia could see the group, a family just like her own, like ghosts walking before her, the male in front and the female holding the young one’s hand.

On other occasions Hank paced moodily up and down, sucking on his filthy pipe, stopping periodically to peer over the red, silken rope at one section or another of the display. On one occasion, while Celia peered in the sodden brown paper bag, dissatisfied with tomato sandwiches and hoping for a biscuit, he climbed right over the rope. When Celia looked up, he was walking the diorama with carefully measured paces, at right angles to the line of footprints. When he reached the back of the display he knelt and scratched at the plaster there, and could be heard muttering to himself. Quite a little crowd gathered, and Celia was extremely ill at ease until he was ushered out by a kind but firm curator.

On walks to the park or along the street, where other children might carefully avoid treading on the cracks, dreams of the diorama and the ‘hom-in-ids’ who had left them, floated in Celia’s mind. She walked hand in hand with her mother, after ordering her grey haired father walk on ahead, ‘just like in Daddy’s footprints people.’

Hank Fish died when Celia was twelve. He had been ‘getting on’ for as long as Celia could remember, and had drunk much more than he should in the end. But still, she missed their Friday outings.

*

It was some time after this, roughly twenty-five years or so, that the whole mad project, as Celia called it, of Ben’s was born. It had begun not long after they had first met at university in 1990. Celia was a third year anthropological archeology student, following in the ‘footprints’ of her father. Ben was doing something complex with nano-particles for his PhD in physics.

Celia laughed when Ben, over first-date beers at their local, told her about his invention. ‘As you would,’ she defended herself, ‘if someone told you they had invented a time machine!’ Later that evening, Ben showed her how it worked, and how various objects could disappear and reappear at the turn of a dial. In an Einstein-theory-of-relativity-like demonstration, a clock reappeared three hours slower than it should have, and she was convinced. Not long after this night they declared themselves in love, and made plans to get married as soon as Ben finished his PhD.
As more time went by the prospect of the completion of the PhD, and consequently the wedding, seemed to be increasingly distant as funding for the former was continually refused, people actually laughing when Ben put forward his proposal.

Ben broached the idea with Celia during a crackling purple, window rattling storm one Sunday afternoon. They had filled the bedroom with candles, and were lying on the bed drinking vodka from small glasses. Celia tried her best not to let it worry her that Ben’s PhD had stalled at the starting posts, about all his work and incredible talent going to waste, but although she prided herself on her feminist position, a watered down version of her mother’s, she was secretly itching to start planning the wedding. Why, only that day she had given in to the urge, and her first bridal magazine was tucked out of sight in her bedside drawer, like some girls conceal a vibrator.

‘Everything will be all right, won’t it Ben?’ she asked. She wanted him to say something reassuring. Ben had quite a lot to say, as it turned out. Much of it was startling, and not much was reassuring, to Celia’s way of thinking. He laid out, piece by piece, a plan to send … someone … he paused meaningfully … back in time. He wanted to send … this someone … for increasingly longer periods, to times increasingly in the past, and when he was certain there were no ill effects … ‘

Celia moved away, to curl defensively at the foot of the bed, her arms tucked between her knees.

‘Yes, it’s you that gave me the idea, Cel. And your father.’

‘What idea? What do you mean?’

So he told her. He told her he was going to track down the exact moment when the famous footprints her father had discovered were left and film the whole event. Celia made no attempt at all to hide her disbelief.

Ben was not put off by her snorts of disgust. ‘Narrowing the time to a reasonable closeness, prior to actually sending you into the past is the critical part of the idea,’ he explained. Using a highly calibrated cycle of darting particle transportations, he had been able to do just this, he went on.

Celia gazed at him glumly, I'm going to marry this guy?

‘In order to actually pinpoint the right day I plan to send you back and forth, back and forth, you know?’

Celia managed a depressed nod. Yes, she knew.

‘… To have a look if the footprints are there, or not, and so on... ‘Eventually, after a … number … of trips the exact, right day will become clear,’ he explained, then fell silent.

Celia noted a look of … yes, expectant pride on his face. She curled into a tight ball. ‘Oh.’

Apparently encouraged, Ben went on. He told how he planned to make money selling the footage shot by Celia; money for his PhD, money for their wedding, and their … life … together. He faltered, waiting for a response. When Celia did not respond he reached down the bed and pulled her up beside him. Wrapping his arms around her he held her close to him. ‘Cel, Cel, only if you want to, okay? Only if you say yes.’ He kissed her cool cheek, and nibbled her ear-lobe. This never failed to make her giggle, despite her best efforts she could not stop herself. Ben explored other parts of Celia’s body, delighting her with his tender touch. Where words failed, caresses did not. She opened herself to him like a flower unfolding.

‘Yes, I'll do it,’ she had murmured sometime later, that stormy Sunday afternoon, when they were lying sated, wrapped in rumpled sheets.

*

That is how she came to be huddled now, shivering, in the long, dry grass of an ancient landscape that in about three point seven million years time would be called Tanzania. About to come face to face with her ancient ancestors, ‘…That’s the idea anyway,’ she muttered to herself.

The journey, if that was the right word, for Celia was never sure what to call it, had gone smoothly, with minimal disorientation this time. She had woken dazed in the transportation pod, with no idea of who she was, or where she was, which was disconcerting, but normal. The glowing red images passing before her eyes had still taken a few minutes to register in her fuzzed brain, but gradually the carefully designed symbols and letter combinations had done their work in her cerebral cortex, and other susceptible parts of her frontal lobes.

She checked her equipment again. Weird how all that shiny metal suddenly looked so completely out of place. Rising to her knees, she held the video camera to her eye and panned along the sunlit plain, and the small rise nearby; focusing on the open stretch of ash and mud running along the nearly dry riverbed. The stale, earthy smell of the dark mud wafted to her, carried by a gentle breeze. Turning the video camera towards herself she began to speak in a quiet, serious tone;

‘Celia Fish, speaking to you from three point seven million years ago in a place that will one day be … Tanzania, Africa.’ She paused. ‘When you hear these words, you will know that, however hard it is to believe what I am saying, I am speaking the truth. I will bring back soil samples, insect specimens …,’ she waved away a group of flies intent on exploring the corners of her eyes, ‘… we’ve been putting up with flies for a long time it seems.’ She paused again for the imagined polite laughter.

‘And I will bring back video footage of one of the earliest human, or humanoid, activities known to … man and woman kind today. A family, out for a walk together. A famous family, you could call them our First Family. I bring you the Australopithecine Afarensis Family Outing!’ Turning the camera off, she smiled to herself as she sank back into her grassy covering. ‘Corny, melodramatic, just perfect.’

Setting the camera on its tripod, she busied herself for some hours gathering test-tubes of different soils, and then grasses and the odd leafy twig, and made detailed notes. She tucked the test tubes of specimens one by one into the pockets of her field bag, and settled down to wait.

She waited a long time, and fleeting doubts as to time and place began flitting through her mind, although her previous brief trips had, without a doubt, narrowed both down to this day, and this place. Then she became aware of the rustling and cracking of grasses. Her pricked ears caught sounds of life approaching; soft murmurs, rising and falling in tone. ‘Surely, it’s them?’ As the sounds grew louder Celia was amazed to find her-self listening for a recognisable word. The noises they made were definitely not human, but they were not like any chimp or ape she had ever heard. Celia held her breath; her eyes and the camera trained on the slight rise about ten metres away, over which she guessed they were about to appear.

It was them. When they appeared; the male first, the female following and holding the child’s hand and chattering while she walked, Celia was taken by surprise again, this time by their size. Even the male was only the size of Celia’s ten-year-old niece. The child, who she knew was thought to be six or seven, looked no larger than a three year old. Celia gazed at their sloping foreheads, receding chins and close-set eyes with wonder. ‘Can they really turn into us?' she asked herself, enthralled.

While she was busy with these thoughts her hands were working on their own operating the video camera. Zooming in, she chose the best shots she could, wishing she could film from different angles. Still, it was fantastic how the sunlight was glinting through their reddish fuzzy hair, and a group of umbrella like trees and a smoking volcano in the distance provided a perfect backdrop.

That it should all flow so smoothly seemed incredible to Celia. The three Australopithecine Afarensis walked past, at a steady pace, across the muddy flat. She could even hear the male replying to the female’s chatter in an un-human, yet oddly familiar voice, and hoped the camera was capturing the sounds. Celia was so close she could actually hear the small sounds their bare feet made as they passed, leaving behind the oh so famous footprints.

They disappeared into the distance of place and time, leaving Celia in a state of total exhilaration. ‘We did it! It worked!’ she crowed. Barring some catastrophe she could not bring herself to consider, she had the proof they needed to prove that Ben’s idea was not crazy. ‘It won’t do me any harm either,’ she thought with a wry smile.

Celia had no more time to spend on these thoughts. The portal back to her own time would be closing soon. Ben had stressed the impossibility of being able to come back and get her if she missed it. Only he could operate the complicated machinery. As Celia had no desire to spend any long length of time four million years in her own past; she must get a move on.

She hastily gathered all her paraphernalia, zipped and clicked the various pockets and compartments, as she sped off towards the portal site. She checked her stopwatch, ‘Damn!’ There was less time than she thought. She set off at a jog, cutting across the nearly dry riverbed, her feet also making small sucky sounds in the mud and ash that released a stale, earthy aroma as she crossed.

Still some distance from the portal site Celia suddenly stopped as though she had run into something solid. She looked back the way she had just come, and followed the trail of her own footprints across the ash covered plain. ‘Oh bloody hell. No!’

For crossing the tracks so recently left in the mud by humankind’s earliest ancestors were others of a much later species. The imprints of Celia’s running shoes were also clearly defined in the soft ash, cutting straight across those of the First Family, making a complete mockery of the First Family Outing.

Celia sank weakly to the ground. She felt faint, and a bit sick. She tried to cry, but could not. Somehow she made it back to the portal in time to be shunted through the same configurations that had gotten her here, but in reverse.

1971 Tanzania

Image taken from www.britannica.com

About three point seven million years later it was another lovely day on the Tanzanian plain, although perhaps a little warmer than the one Celia had experienced. Hank Fish did not normally notice the heat, the flies seeking moisture from his orifices, or the thin trickles of sweat that ran continuously down his body; he was used to all that. But today Hank was less likely than ever to notice these things. It was the last week, of his last field trip, before beginning a life of relative ease back in Hobart, teaching at the university - and he was onto something! For the last few hours he had been working steadily, firstly with chisel, pick and gentle taps with his hammer, and now with fine brushes.

Hank leant back on his heels and surveyed what he’d just uncovered with a strange mixture of emotions; relief, pride and exultation were the three he could identify off the top of his head. It was three sets of footprints, two larger and a smaller, that Hank had revealed in the ancient stone layer before him. He felt certain they were very ancient indeed, and bipedal, for he could tell by the heel imprint, and no matter how hard he searched he could find no handprints. He suspected they were most likely Australopithecine. Possibly Afarensis or maybe his old mate Africanus. ‘What ever they are, they are just the ticket,’ muttered Hank happily. ‘Just the bloody ticket.’ He set back to it with a fine haired brush.

He allowed himself a little whoop of excitement as he worked. He would get Roy to help him analyse and catalogue them, he decided. He would call him on the two-way soon, but not just yet. The way Hank figured it, the rock bed seemed to continue quite a bit further, with only a light covering of sandy soil. He worked with mixed feelings as he remembered the time years ago when he had unearthed what turned out to be the find of the decade, the first africanus jawbone and skull fragments, only to have the leader of the expedition, and quite rightly so he knew, categorise it, publish and have accolades heaped on his insipid blonde head for ever after. ‘Just keep calm, old fellow,’ he told himself, and set to on a fresh patch of ground with his chisel, whistling cheerfully through his teeth.

A couple of hot, damp hours later, Hank stopped again. He sat heavily on a rock and wiped his brow with a damp pocket-handkerchief. Shaking his head slowly, he rested it in his hands, eyes closed. ‘No.’ Soon the solitary word filtered through his clenched fingers. ‘No! NO! It can’t be!’ His agony carried over the plain, but remained unheard. Similarly the clenched fist pounding the air beside him remained unseen.

Suddenly he leapt up and ran to the Land Rover. He wrenched and pulled until the side mirror broke off in his hands. He ran back to the site and knelt down with the mirror and tried a couple of different angles. There was no mistaking it, (a tear of frustration trickled slowly down his cheek); neat, even whirls, a few millimetres apart, spreading about eight inches by three inches. At one end, clearly reflected in the mirror, a single word; ‘Nike’ and underneath it the digits ‘8 ½’.

This footprint was not ancient; it clearly belonged to a member of his own species. And if this footprint is not ancient, then all these other footprints, reasoned Hank, were obviously monkey or ape, and were obviously baked hard quite recently by the fierce African sun. How could he have been so wrong? Nothing made any sense anymore. He repeated the word ‘obviously’ to himself a few times to try it out, but it just wasn’t obvious to Hank at all. Not at all. He sat with his head in his hands again, and re-evaluated his future. He sat for some time.

*

Hank was very handy with a pick. He was equally handy with a chisel. It did not take him long at all to do what he decided had to be done. He spent longer ensuring that his work could not be detected, that the sandy gap in the length of footprints appeared as a fault line where natural erosion had taken place. He assured himself the interruption to the footsteps would scarcely rate a mention. He would ensure it did not.

When he was finally, quite satisfied that his handy work was beyond detection, it was late. The sky was stained a bloody orange on the horizon and Hank Fish flung his tools into the back of the truck. They struck the tail-gate with a sour, metallic clanging. As he drove slowly away from the site Hank noticed a nasty taste in his mouth, one no amount of water from his canteen seemed to be able to wash away.