The Dinosaur Feather

live together. Obviously, they would be now they were having a baby.
    It had started with a chance meeting in a bar in Vesterbro. He was way out of her league, she thought, when she spotted him by the window to the courtyard where he stood with his arms folded, feet at ten to two, with a very straight back and a cigarette in a clenched fist. His T-shirt was rather tight, but it was probably hard to resist the temptation to dress like that when you had a great body, and he did.
    Smug git, Anna had thought. Thomas was a doctor at Hvidovre Hospital, he was currently training in his specialism, and he was in his mid-thirties. His hair was short, almost white, his skin was fine and freckled, and his eyes were very intense. He left at ten to two; just like his feet, Anna thought, as she watched him exit the bar.
    He called her two days later. She had told him her name and he had found her on the Internet; dinner? Okay. From then on, they were an item.
    It had gone wrong almost immediately. Anna still couldn’t understand exactly how it had happened, but the fact was that she had never been so miserable in all her life, and how this was linked directly to her being madly in love got lost in the drama. Or it did at the time. Thomas loved her, he told her so. But she didn’t believe it. You’re a bit paranoid, he laughed. Anna, however, loved him to distraction. The more he kept her at arm’s length, the more she loved him. She didn’t have a clue what was going on. She didn’t know if they were a couple, if he loved her (he said he did),or if he didn’t (he behaved that way). He would arrive several hours late, or fail to turn up altogether and he never rang her. She didn’t know if they had a future together, she didn’t know where he was, why he said the things he said, why sometimes she was allowed to go out with him and his friends and other times not: ‘Why would you want to do that, sweetheart?’ She could offer no reply. She just wanted to go.
    Thomas told her to calm down. ‘Don’t ruin it, it’s fine as it is,’ he would say. She tried, but it didn’t work. Thomas had only met Anna’s parents a few times and none of the occasions had been a success. Anna had never met Thomas’s parents. In the spring Thomas wanted time out, two weeks; ‘I love you Anna, never doubt that, I just can’t be doing with this pressure all the time,’ he had said and looked irritably at her. In fact, he had been so exhausted after an all-night row, which Anna had started, that he nearly gave a patient the wrong medication. During their two weeks apart, Anna did a pregnancy test.
    ‘Looks like we’re having a baby,’ he said and smiled when they met up again. Anna stared at him.
    ‘Are you pleased?’
    ‘I would have chosen a different time,’ he said.
    They moved in together shortly before Lily was born. That was nearly three years ago.
    The Natural History Museum was an upward extension of the Institute of Biology and it towered like a decorated ferry over the surrounding buildings. The top two floors of the museum were open to the public. The rest of the buildingconsisted of laboratories and offices symmetrically arranged around a fireproof core where collections of insects, molluscs and vertebrates had been gathered, identified and preserved by Danish scientists for hundreds of years. The Vertebrate Collection on the third floor housed a vast amount of vertebrates; downstairs were two invertebrate departments with molluscs, and furthest down was the whale basement, which included the mounted skeleton of an adult baleen whale.
    Anna’s external supervisor was Dr Tybjerg. He was a vertebrate morphologist who specialised in the evolution of cynodont birds. He was Professor Helland’s polar opposite. He had brown, thinning hair, dark eyes, a small nimble body and he wore pebble glasses at work which made Anna smile because he looked like a parody of himself. Dr Tybjerg was shy and very earnest. He never cancelled their meetings and he always arrived well-prepared, bringing with him any books he had mentioned at their previous meeting or a photocopy of an article he had promised her. His speech was staccato. He took impressive amounts of sugar in his strong black tea. To begin with he had found it hard to look her in the eye, and had clammed up like an oyster on the few occasions Anna had asked him personal questions.
    Dr Tybjerg was the first person to take Anna to the Vertebrate Collection.
    ‘You can’t