The Dinosaur Feather

You’ll always have to go shopping.’ She laughed and winked at Clive. Clive glared at her.
    ‘I’ve lived here for more than twenty-five years,’ he snarled.
    The woman looked at him and giggled.
    ‘Is that right? I don’t remember ever seeing you before,’ she replied.
    Clive turned on his heel and left.
    When he got back, he sat down in his armchair with a small selection of cakes. He looked at his lawn. When he sat very still, the house felt so quiet, it was almost as if he didn’t exist.
    Franz and Tom were both married and Clive didn’t really know them any more. They had become rather remote since having children of their own. Young children were such hard work. When his own boys had been small, Clive would often sleep at his office to avoid the broken nights. Now Franz managed a gym and Tom had an executive position with Canada Post. How hard could that be? His sons would come round for dinner every now and then, and they saw each other at birthdays and holidays – obviously – but it had been years since he and the boys had done something together. What a pair of sissies! They were always hugging Kay and chatting to her in the kitchen, when they should be manning the barbecue with their father. Somehow Clive had always felt a closer bond to Jack.
    Michael Kramer called to ask why Clive hadn’t been to work. He tried to coax him by telling him they had plenty of promising research results to analyse; the project would finish intwo weeks and then they could write their report. With a bit of luck, they could turn up at the 27 th International Bird Symposium in Copenhagen in October with a poster. They had roughly ten weeks to get it done.
    ‘Sounds great,’ Clive said. ‘You get stuck in. I’m taking some sick leave. I’ve got glue ear.’
    ‘At your age?’ Michael sounded surprised.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Are you okay?’ his protégé asked.
    ‘Never felt better,’ Clive said and ended the call.
    He sat holding the telephone for a while, then he called Kay. ‘“New evidence is pouring out of the ground, Clive”,’ he mimicked, while the telephone rang in his son and daughter-in-law’s house. Never heard such rubbish. There was nothing ‘new’ about these bones, his idiot opponents had merely invented more fanciful interpretations. Franz’s wife answered. She sounded polite, but a little curt. Finally, Kay came to the telephone.
    ‘Yes?’ she said.
    ‘How long are you planning on staying away? Come home, Kay. The place is a total mess.’
    ‘Is that your way of apologising?’
    ‘Yes,’ Clive said, laughing. ‘You know what I’m like. I’m a scientist. Come on home, honey.’
    ‘Clive,’ Kay said, ‘you don’t hit someone you love. And you don’t call three days later and pretend it’s no big deal, like you just did.’ She hung up.
    He called back immediately, but no one picked up the telephone.

     
    During three more days and nights when Clive barely slept, he wrote a paper. His manifesto. When he had finished, he printed it out, placed the document on his desk and took a nap. He dreamt about Jack, but the dream turned into a nightmare. Jack and Michael had both . . . they were . . . no, he couldn’t stand the thought of it. Jack and Michael couldn’t be compared, they weren’t even in the same league, and the mere thought that they . . . Clive woke and touched his head. The sun had moved above the house and had been shining directly at his face while he snoozed. His stomach rumbled, but he had no appetite. He had tried every ready meal sold at the supermarket, every frozen pizza and casserole, every tin and carton, and he felt sick. Their freezer was filled with food, but all of it required cooking. The previous day Clive had defrosted a leg of lamb and put it in the oven. How hard could it be? He promptly forgot all about it and when he finally detected the smell of roasting meat and raced to the kitchen, the surface of the meat was hard and dry. He picked at it, but it didn’t taste anything like it did when Kay cooked it. It tasted of burned fabric.
    He rose and fetched his manifesto. He wanted to have it published, not in a journal, but as a small book. On its cover would be a 3D depiction of
Archaeopteryx
– without this ‘new’ femur that Helland and Tybjerg had conjured out of thin air, and which was now reproduced in every recent print of the bird. In Clive’s edition,
Archaeopteryx
would look exactly as it did when it was found in Solnhofen in 1877.