Despite himself, the professor couldn’t help a little smile. He was unsure about being wheeled out. About being the face of the city’s environmental push. Afraid it would mean he had to compromise his opinion. But it had worked well. The rooftops. The diversity. The insect hatcheries in the park.
‘I’ve got a gutter garden on my building,’ the courier said, excitedly. ‘We group-funded.’
‘That’s good to know.’
‘And we’re going to get an alittlement on the roof!’
The professor looked at the package on the desk. An itch in his fingers.
‘They’ll make a difference.’
‘A lot’s got from alittlement,’ the courier smiled, reeling off the jingle. People called it to him on the street! ‘I love your accent,’ she said.
That offsided him somewhat.
‘Where are you from?’ the wasp girl asked.
‘North East,’ said the professor. ‘Near Redcar.’
The package, small as it was, gave the impression it was waiting for him to succumb to its attention with the patient way some cats have.
‘There’s an ice dock up there, isn’t there?’
‘One of the small ones,’ the professor answered.
Incidental report. Student 512. Posting area non-applicable. Independent study. Dock development area, grid ref TQ 381837. Solo. Verification location-tagged visual evidence, embedded.
Ellie’s voice. Always such a bounce to it.
Attendant material, specimen. One. Cast skin, larval exoskeleton . . .
Exuvia, he can’t help correcting her. It’s an exuvia . . .
The extraordinary husk, barely an inch long and caught as if alive in the tube,
. . . Odonata. Species unconfirmed. Dated as report.
The professor back-swipes.
Species unconfirmed. Dated as report.
Ellie sent the specimen from a development area near the Dock site. Part of the ground that will become the tow-track along which the iceberg will travel, up from the re-flooded river. The area cleared some two years now. A ‘guerrilla’ expedition, Ellie jokes, under her own steam.
. . . There’s mallow. White dead-nettle. Clematis (vitalba) establishing. ‘Old Man’s Beard’. I love that name. Wild clary. Hoverflies, good sign! Can’t see it, but there’s a dove somewhere.
Ellie holds the recorder up to catch the coo, but it’s faint, barely perceptible.
Cultivated roses. Hey! A comma. That’s beautiful. On a white buddleia. Some of your bees are here. I can spot their little wires.
The professor back-swipes again, to where she says, ‘a comma’.
Taps his finger further down the line of the recording.
. . . Ice Dock’s huge. Sort of in the distance but sort of not. It looks like pictures of the Colosseum!
Taps again.
. . . pile of dust and earth with bits of broken brick in it. But. So many grasses. Sainfoin. Oh! Campanula. ‘Bellflowers’. They’re so pretty, look. You can eat these, you know. Of course you know.
There are small rustles as she bends to pick a leaf.
Eeek . . . Stealing from a witch’s garden . . . Mmm . . . I can see why Rapunzel’s mum went mad for it . . . Turnipy.
The professor pauses the report, picks up the tube.
The package on the desk, split open down its middle just like the specimen. This thing of wonder he holds in his hand emerged from it; and he is startled. As if he has actually watched it climb from the wrapping and come to him.
Dehiscent, he thinks. Can I use that word for this?
No, that’s only plants. The splitting along a built-in line of weakness in a structure.
An unscientific nervousness starts in the professor’s middle as he looks at the exuvia.
Even with his naked eye he can see. A dragonfly larva in the last instar. The abdominal barb, he’s sure, on the ninth segment. But the segments are tricky to count with the eye. And just one skin.
If it’s what he thinks it is, they emerge to hatch en masse. So.
There must have been more . . .
He forwards to the time stamp Ellie’s given in her handwritten note. Odd to find the fact she’s scribbled to him with an old-fashioned pen more personal somehow than listening to her voice.
. . . old pipe maybe? Don’t know. It’s got kind of bust concretey edges. Definitely some sort of pipe.
Swimming beetles. Insects on the water. Pond skaters, Gerridae. And whirligigs. That’s another name I love. ‘Whirligigs.’ Quite a few. Don’t like my shadow, shy little things. Imagine breathing through your bum! Different types of waterweed. Gnats!
Gnats. What sort of gnats? Sylvicola? Macrocera?
There’s a pile of chunks stacked up. Look more soily than concretey, really. Does that make sense?
It’s clay. It’s a clay sewer pipe.
It is sort of dug down to. As if the ground has collapsed a bit.
The professor feels a kind of flutter in his centre. An expectation, that Ellie’s next few details will confirm the leap of imagination he’s not been able to prevent. That this ‘pipe’ is one of the many waterways they culverted, or co-opted as sewers, and built the growing city over, in the 1800s.
There’s big old flag iris to one side. The stalks all dried out. It’s in the sun. Nearly midday now.
Ellie, Ellie, tell me. Was the water running?
Oh! Hang on.
Even barely?
That’s. Wow! Yes! It’s a skin . . .
Exuvia . . .
It has the look of a shrunk dragon. A frail ferocity to its proportions. The heavy intent of its head. Its front two pairs of legs extended forward, as if it reaches out to claim something.
He places the cast skin on the plate of the field microscope. Focuses.
The mud of the pool bottom has dried upon the skeleton, an arid silt. He cannot help but think of ash. A rebirth. The body split, the soul escaped on wings.
There is something about the mud that gives the look of interruption. He recognises he is thinking of Pompeii. Perhaps because of Ellie’s mention of the Colosseum. Of people stopped mid-process.
Again, the scientist, he thinks of souls. Of a great heat vaporising the essence from a body.
The dorsal barbs, down to the penultimate section of the abdomen. The fact of the dried silt. He has pushed back the prospect. An intuition of its species he felt instantly.
But as he sees the skin, magnified, it speaks to him as an artefact. Seems utterly sure of itself. It is.
The barb on the ninth segment.
Libellula fulva. ‘Scarce Chaser’. Dragonfly. Unmistakable.
He looks to the date on the record he’s called up. The last recorded sighting. UK-wide. More than twenty years ago . . . On the drains of the Ouse Washes.
It’s on the Red List of protected species. As he thought it might be.
He gazes through the binocular field microscope.