Human (19 page)

“Look … um, Orrin? I really can't help you. I don't know an Ivy Carter.” Jayne frowned. “Professor Ellery is my supervisor and I'm working on these Flores tools alone. He organised it all for me.” She gestured to the scattering of sample bags on the desk in front of her.

“But Ivy's been waiting months for these tools,” Orrin said. “She told me all about it.”

“Months? She can't have.” Her blue eyes registered Orrin’s annoyance and grew wide. “These artefacts were airmailed with a week's notice. No one else wanted them. They were pulled from a salvage dig before the mining began.”

Salvage dig? Mining?
Orrin dismissed their obvious miscommunication. It was Ivy he wanted.
Needed.
“Are you serious? I saw you in the courtyard a week ago, Jayne. You were with Ivy - she had the chimp up a tree - I mean
bonobo
or whatever - right in the courtyard. You waved at me! I saw you again that afternoon– and a few days after that as well!”

“A chimp?” Jayne repeated. She looked embarrassed for him and took a step back.

“Yeah - Kyah. Black hair, up a tree…”

“Wow,” said Jayne. “Okay, I really think you've got the wrong person, I haven't been in all week, I’ve had the flu. Honestly, I can't help you.” She glanced surreptitiously to the security phone on the far wall.

Orrin's breathing came faster.
She thinks I’m nuts. This is mental.
This woman had spoken to him. Numerous times. She knew Ivy. Ivy knew her.
Would Ivy have asked Jayne to pretend she wasn't here? Was she avoiding me altogether?
He didn't see how that would work when they were both on the same campus.
Did I honestly upset her that much by scaring Kyah?
Orrin shook his head and rubbed his eye sockets with his thumbs.
No, Ivy doesn’t seem like the type to lie.
At a loss, he took one last stab.

“Look Jayne, if Ivy turns up here later, can you just tell her I'm sorry? I didn't mean to let the chimp get hurt, or upset. I should have realised - can you ask her to call me at least? Or leave a message at my lab?” He took a step closer to the bench and then scribbled his contact details on a coffee receipt from his pocket.

He held it out to Jayne but she had withdrawn further and made no move to reconcile the space between them.

“Look Orrin, I'm telling you the truth,” Jayne said. “I really don't know this Ivy woman and I haven't met you or any chimp. Just take the number to the admin ladies upstairs or to someone else. Please.”

“I've tried upstairs and they said she doesn't bloody exist!” Orrin shouted.

He leaned forward, both hands on the counter. This was either a desperate ploy to get out of a date, or he was going insane. Orrin’s eyes burned. Caught under his finger was one of the small plastic sample bags. He stared at it, his eyes toying with the black stone artefact inside as he tried to calm himself. A stone tool, he supposed. It looked oddly familiar but nothing that stirred his memory so he directed his attention back to Jayne. She had backed up a few steps more and was looking at him with accusing and panicked eyes.

Orrin lowered his voice and raised his hands in surrender. “Look, I apologise Jayne; there's obviously been some sort of mistake here.”
I'm losing it.
He took a deep breath. “Here's my number anyway… just in case.” Orrin slid the scrap of paper across the bench and let himself out of the room.

He heard the lock click behind him as he strode away.

An insistent telephone ring greeted him as he hit home that evening, tired and angry.

“Orrin here.”

“Big brother, I was beginning to think you'd disappeared,” a woman’s voice replied.

Orrin’s shoulders slouched. For a split second, he'd hoped.

“Sorry Bernie, work’s been brutal this month.”

“Nothing too bad I hope,” his sister said.

“Nothing I can't handle.”

“Mmm. That sounds ominous. Listen, I just wanted to check you were still coming next Saturday, the kids are dying to see you.”

Damn. Jess’s birthday party, entirely forgotten.
“Sure, I wouldn't miss it.”

“You'd better not. Hey… you can bring someone if you want,” she ventured.

I'd have to find her first.
“Thanks, but at this stage I’m on my own.”

“Okay sure, well in any case, I've invited Renee from work, with the short red hair remember? She's great, and she's really looking forward to meeting you.”

Red hair.
“Bernie, any more set ups and I will
disown
you.”

“Ha ha, you wish it was that easy. Okay O, but seriously less work, more craic, hey. Hang on, Jess wants to say hi.”

“Uncle Orrin?”

“Hey Jess, how's my favourite niece?” he said, tiredly.

“I'm your
only
niece Uncle O!

“No you aren't! What about Chrissy?”

“That's silly; she's a guinea-pig!”

Orrin chuckled. Jessica had an endless supply of coddled pets, and insisted he hold them all at least once during each visit.

“Guess what, today at school we went to the zoo!”

“Zoo, hey? Bet that was fun, dote.”

“Yeah, and guess what! We saw koalas and monkeys and kangaroos, and Leah and I got to touch a snake! And we saw the cougars and the elephants and the hobbits and the …”

“The what?”

“The hobbits. They were in a pretend cave and they had a babby and everything. The zoo lady fed them for us!”

“Is that right?”
Must be some new cute and cuddly for kids to fixate on.
He chuckled.
Payback to Bernie for setting me up again.
Orrin was used to humouring Jess, spoilt as she was, the first and only girl in his extended family. The handful of little boys occupied each other while eight-year-old Jess clucked over them and her animal 'babbies'.

“Yeah, the lady gave them apples and roast chicken. But I didn't like them. They looked scary. I guess the babby one was cute though. It talked to me and I patted it and Mum said if I’m good I might get one for my birthday!”

Talked…
“What do you mean? Animals don’t-”

“Ma says I have to go, Bye Uncle O!”
Click.

Ivy gave up carrying Kyah after the first half hour. She was surprised to find the hunters paid the bonobo little attention. The part of her mind that ached to analyse and categorise and
understand
the minutiae of life forced itself above her fear. As Ivy walked, she studied the hunters.
Homo floresiensis.
The very sight of them thrilled her, despite the fact they could be the last things she ever saw.

One female trailed her side, closer than the others. Ivy chanced a look down at the woman’s face. Her eyes were filled with curiosity, not aggression, although a spear was still tight in her hand. Ivy swallowed nervously. The womans wide cheekbones were shadowed by pronounced eyebrows, each side defined and arched separately like Ivy's own. Her face was far from the mono-browed brute she'd so often seen depicted in pop culture.

The woman’s strong but petite jaw line shaped a relatively flat face with wide, thin lips and markedly human teeth. She looked enticingly familiar but for the distinct lack of a chin beneath.

Ivy couldn’t help but recall the debate sparked in her tutorial the week prior. She’d been dragging her students through the complexities of migration routes and trying to stifle a yawn and her own rumbling stomach simultaneously.

“Let’s get an early mark, guys,” she’d said. “And this time
please
catch up on your readings to avoid that arse-kicking….”

Ivy had begun to pack up, considering her caffeine options.

“Actually, I have a question…” Claire called over the shuffling and sudden scraping of chairs.

“Sure.” Ivy had pointedly ignored the muttered expletives and groans around the room as the others were denied an early escape.

“Well, I've been reading about this
Homo flor-es-i-en-sis?
” Claire stumbled over the name as the others took their seats again, interest vaguely sparked. “The hobbit? Well, if
you're
saying modern humans got to Indonesia around fifty-five thousand years ago, and
they’re
saying these tiny ape-men were still there until up to at least fifty thousand years ago… then, how does that work? They lived on the same island?” Claire looked doubtful. “How could it get across that big tidal rift you were talking about if modern humans didn’t do it until so much later? I mean there must be a mistake in the dating - this little thing was like a chimp, it had a tiny brain…so, not that smart, right?”

Ivy inwardly groaned and took a deep breath. Like a perfectly targeted missile, Claire had managed to denigrate Ivy's two favourite subjects in a single sentence.

“Okay well,” Ivy said, “firstly I have it on very good authority that chimpanzees are actually very intelligent, more so than quite a few humans I know,” laughs peppered the room, “and secondly, from what we’re discovering now, yes, it seems this new species of hominid,
Homo floresiensis
or ‘the hobbit’ as it’s affectionately being called by the media,
must
have co-existed with modern humans on the island of Flores for thousands of years.” Ivy jumped up. “Okay, who’s familiar with the Flores case? Anyone?”

A scattering of hands waved half-heartedly.

“Come on guys, this one is actually really exciting!” Ivy’s eyes sparkled with passion. “Smouldering volcanos, an exotic rainforest island, carnivorous dragons, tiny warrior tribes…this is real archaeology! Eat-your-heart-out Indiana Jones!” Ivy's enthusiasm washed over the group like a wave, dragging them back to her. “Okay, picture this. Six hundred kilometres east of Java on a remote jungle island - a place only accessible by water - a skeleton is found in a cave. She's only
one metre tall
. No chin, tiny brain case, narrow V-shaped jaws with paired roots on her pre-molars - all these features are prehistoric, reminiscent of our erectus and australopithecine
ancestors. Ancestors who died out at least two hundred
thousand
years ago, some of them, two million years ago!”

Ivy was almost lost in her own imagination as she painted the scene, pacing up and down.

“
But…
we have new,
modern
features thrown in too. Evidence for group hunting of stegodon, an extinct dwarfed elephant - still much bigger than these tiny hominids - requiring communication and strategy and planning. We've also got fire use, impressive stone tools
and
the ability to get enough people across the ocean to make the founding population genetically viable.”

“This is a total contradiction of old versus new in a single population. What we need is a date; some way to place this new species, if that's what it is, into our family tree. So we test.” She paused for effect, scanning faces. “And we get
totally
floored. Radiocarbon, thermoluminescence - all bringing in dates of only fifty thousand years, maybe younger.
Recent
time,
sapien
time.”

“And what do we have?” Ivy looked around the class and was met by confused faces, all struggling to make sense of the onslaught of contradictory information.

“We have a spectacular, brilliant mess in our hands, that's what!” she exclaimed, landing back onto the desk at the front. “Now seriously, just imagine the massive environmental changes up to the last ice age. They fought for survival and they won for a really, really long time. This is a very tough little bunch of cookies!” A few of the students looked impressed. “So Claire is right to ask - where do they fit in?
What are they?”

Ivy paused to look around the room. Nobody showed any sign of wanting to escape the adventure she offered now.

“Maybe it was a kid?” offered Claire. “A child's bones left in the cave by modern humans? That's why it's so small?”

“It was small, about the size of a three-year-old human,” Ivy agreed. “But the cranial sutures are closed and its wisdom teeth are erupted and already worn down. So we are definitely looking at an adult. Anyone else?”

“I thought someone said these hobbits were dwarfed modern humans?” called Ryan from the back row. “That the bones were pathologically diseased?
Micro
- whatever?”