Mary’s Monster

(This story about Mary Anning was first published in Phoenix magazine)

The thing about your father dying is that it’s like having the roof ripped off your house and the windows smashed in. It lets in the freezing gale and the bad thoughts. If you are poor, your father’s death will leave you hungry. It leaves you feeling like an empty ship being tossed about and wrecked slowly. There’s no rescue; your mother won’t be any help. She’s sinking too.

Mary’s father had been dead for eight weeks and three days and her mother was in the middle of having another baby. The groaning and pacing had ended and now she was upstairs with the midwife, screaming and pushing in the bed Mary’s father had died in.

Mary stood up and put her hand on the rough front door. She had been awake all night, breathing the close damp air of the two room cottage and listening to her mother’s agony compete with the noise of the storm outside. The door creaked on its hinges as she pushed it. Outside the wind fluttered her skirts about her ankles and made salty strands of hair dance about her face. The sky was a bruise uplit by a chink of golden sun.

The storm had paused.

She ran down towards the sea. Her legs and lungs going faster and faster until her clogs met the muddy sands and began to stick and squelch. By the time she had reached the breakers she had slowed to a stop. Tray had followed her and was barking excitedly and leaping around in the foam. She picked up a stone and lobbed it at a flock of gulls.

“FUCK YOU!”

Tray lolloped after the stone half wagging his tail, half cringing and Mary’s mood lurched from angry to sorry. She walked over and scratched him behind his ears and nuzzled his smelly face, until his tail wagged. Nothing was Tray’s fault.

“Good boy, Tray.”

They walked along the foreshore companionably for a while, Mary with her customary stoop. The beach was full of fossils and Mary, like her father before her, had a keen eye and a skill in shining up stones for the tourists. The wind pulled a tear from her eye. Memories of her father came as feelings now, not as pictures. She had to close her eyes tight and concentrate to remember his face clearly, but the feel of his rough hands around her waist hoisting her up the cliff was there instantly. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him walking in the mist that clung to the cliffs, dogged, determined and with the same stoop she had. Always looking for treasure. They were always looking.

It was cold for March and she shivered. He had never been indoors much, but she remembered the feel of sitting on his knee beside the fire and listening to the rain outside. The excitement of wondering what treasures might be revealed in the cliffs or washed up on the shore. And the anticipation of her story. Her father was always ready to tell it. Always with the same words. And she would listen and stare into the flames feeling warm and sleepy and safe.

“When you were just a babe in arms, Mary girl, we didn’t think you would stay. You were as dull and colicky a baby as ever there was. And sickly, too, like some of your sisters who were taken to God early. And your mother was tired, she was with child again, so Mrs. Haskings took you out for some fresh air. There was a blue sky and the circus had come to town. A grand event.” He always sucked on his pipe at this bit and then said, “Well, the day didn’t stay bright for long. I remember looking up at the clouds from my work bench and seeing a rare old gathering of those tall black thunder clouds, and they moved over swiftly, turning everything dark. Anyone with any sense would have gone indoors, but not old Mrs. Haskings. She wanted to see if she’d won anything in the meat raffle, so she held onto you and she moved under a tree when the rain came smattering down.”

At this point little Mary would always say ‘and what then, what then?’

And her father would say “And then a bolt of lightning cracked down. Boom! Onto the tree! And it bounced! And it struck poor Mrs. Haskings down dead! And you were in her arms! We ran out in terror. You were all limp and we thought you were dead.”

This bit always brought a tear to Mary’s mother’s eye and she’d say, “I had to prise you out of her arms. My poor baby.”

“We ran home with you and it was your mother’s idea to put you in a warm bath. It was only by your mother’s quick thinking and Gods will that you survived.” He would smile at Mary’s mother and then his brown face would go solemn. Sometimes he didn’t say the end of the story until she asked him. “And what else?” He’d jig her on his knee and he’d say “And from then on you thrived. It changed you that lightning, made you quick and clever. Cleverest child I ever came across.” And even though her Mother clucked and grumbled at that bit and told him not to put ideas in her head, he would just smile.

His eyes crinkled and the lines on his face rearranged themselves when he smiled.

Before he died, Mary’s Mother had told her she was like her father in all the worst ways. Mary supposed that meant she was a feckless dreamer. Sometimes she thought God had simply not wanted her when he struck down that lightning, but at other times she thought He might have saved her for a purpose. Her father was not wrong either, she was clever. She could read and draw and she had her very own booklet which she used to learn about the rocks and fossils in the cliffs.

She squinted up at the cliffs. She hadn’t been up there since her father had died. There had been a landslide during the rains. Something might have been uncovered. She strode over, her eyes fixed on a newly exposed bit of black marl half way up. On the rocks each step has to be deliberate. You need to test the solidness of your footing and keep an eye on the weather and the tide. They can both turn on you quickly if you don’t pay attention. As you go, you can find many fine things. Sometimes a stone can be polished until it shines and you can sell it. Sometimes there’s a small rock. It might look like nothing, but when you crack it open there could be a fossil inside. And you can sell snakestones and vertiberries and crocodile teeth to the tourists.

Mary made her way up and along the cliff, breathing the fresh salty air and pocketing anything that looked promising. After about half a mile she saw an unusual shape. Black and smooth. A fossil perhaps? As she got closer she could see it more clearly. Not one of the usual rocks. Not one of the usual fossils either. Even the bit she could see was bigger than her two hands end on end. She scraped away at the clay, tearing what was left of her dirty fingernails as she went. The upper edge was smooth. A long beak? But there was no bird that big — it could have eaten a baby. Mary calmed herself and fished her pickaxe and hammer from her skirt pockets. She must do the job properly, use the right tools, the right amount of pressure. It is a fine balance, extracting a fossil from a rock. They do want to come out, but you can’t rush them. They’ve been there a long time and once you’ve broken one it won’t sell for even a fraction of the price.

This was different to anything she had seen before. The beak descended into spiky teeth. A giant crocodile? Mary had never seen anything so big. She had uncovered a bit of toothy beak longer than her own arm before she came to an elongated nostril. Then… The eye, more than a hand span in breadth. She stood back. The skull alone was the length of a child’s body and she counted nearly 200 teeth. Reaching out one dirty finger she pressed it into a tooth. Blood. A bauble shiny and gleaming.

It was the skull of a monster.

Mary looked at the grey swell with renewed respect. Not just shells and bodies and plunder. Not just France across the water but enormous monsters lurking within it. It took in ships, careless bathers and chunks of the cliffs and it threw back shells, fish and bodies; bloated and greening. Once it even threw back a woman. Dead, but perfect, waxy pale with seaweed in her hair like a mermaid, but Mary had never suspected it held anything like this.

Her skirts were caked in mud now, her fingers numb to the cold and she realized that the sun had travelled past its highest point and was going down in the west. More significantly, the tide was closing in. There was no dry way back across the beach. Tray capered nervously at her heels. She looked back at the skull. Just a little more, she decided. Just to see if there was a body attached. They would have to climb the cliffs to get home now anyway.

Her vision closed to just the base of the skull. After a bit of scraping, she could see a vertebrae poking from the rock and then another, each one 3 inches wide. Her thoughts skittered from money to bread, maybe butter too and then to her father. He would have been so pleased with this! Her mother, with a new baby to nurse and debts to pay… She didn’t usually hold with fossil hunting but this was different. They might all be saved by this monster. Mary’s numb hands worked quickly. Bones led to more bones. The body was definitely there, at least partially. The first warning drops of rain had begun to fall some time ago, but now they found their icy way to her scalp. Under her hand was what seemed to be the beginning of the first colossal rib. She would be able get the shale off it if she used the pick axe very gently just as her father had taught her…

Tray barked and snapped at her ankle.

The trance was broken. And the sea was now lapping dangerously at the muddy hems of her skirts. The sea would take her if she stayed any longer. The monster would have to wait until the next low tide. It was still half submerged in the rocks and there was no way she would be able to move it.

Tray whined. Focusing on her feet, Mary picked her way up the cliffs as quickly as she dared. The mud made the soles of her clogs thick and slimy and she needed her hands to scramble where the thin path had disappeared. One last thing to collect, shiny poking up under a bit of scrub. It was a half crown, hard and twinkly like a blessing. She pressed it into her palm and ran all the rest of the way to the cottage.

She arrived panting, to see her mother dozing in the rocking chair with the new infant in her arms. The midwife had aired the house, placed a pot of cockles and mussels on the fire and then seemingly vanished. Mary’s stomach growled.

She ladled out the hot broth, enjoying the clattering sounds of the shells against the wooden bowls and sliced two slices of bread and buttered them. Best butter from the farm, salty and creamy and so thick that she would be able to see tooth marks when she bit in. She woke her mother and sat finally in front of the fire to eat and to tell the story of the monster and the coin, and all the coins that were surely soon to come.

Notes

Lies: This narrative is based on the true story of Mary Anning, the fossil hunter who found the first Ichthyosaur fossil, but it does deviate from fact in some important ways. Mary did not find the head of the fossil — her elder brother did, however she did find the body some weeks later, which was what made waves in the scientific community due to its unusual anatomy.

Swearing: Fuck you! Yeah, it sounds weird for an 11 year old girl in the early 1800s to be saying fuck you, but it was a commonly used swear at the time and she did live next door to a Sailor’s Pub, so… yeah. Have a complain or do some constructive criticism in the comments if you like.