I would eventually establish a pattern: stroll in past the bony architecture of the diplodocus skeleton, climb the stairs and then call upon the prehistoric humans and their skulls.
They made me wonder. My flat-browed, jut-chinned, hairy ancestors — how did they smell? We progressed to walk erect, but do we still bring with us an animal reek? When did that stop? Or did we already, grunting in huddles, smell like people — like unwashed people who were also beasts? That sweetsharp tang of sweat — yours or another’s — that taint, that seal, that gift which stays on your skin, when did we first travel with that? Or have we always? Do we carry the scent of the beasts we still are? Would that be our clue, when we look at those onward-marching illustrations of humanity straightening up from its stoop and being bettered by natural forces, swelling its brain, busying its fingers, perfecting its tongue — would that tell us how little has changed?
Jon’s balance, his vision billowed and twisted momentarily, slid like a loosened building. He chose to believe this was an effect of exposure to exhaust fumes and central London’s generally pertaining pollution. Probably if Parliament did exile the civil service to the wastes and moorlands of South-east London, it would add years to everyone’s lifespan.
His phone rang and — having checked that it was no one he wanted to hear — he slipped it back down into his coat. It protested as it went.
Too modern for my current frame of mind. While all of the other species keep evolving, we simply invent fresh ways to bill each other for being downcast or enraged — rage and despair being all for which we’re meant to hope …
The museum used to please me.
After comparing myself unfavourably with Australopithecus, I’d slope off to the modern bit, the wing where they keep their material archive: leaves, bodies, wings, drawings, samples. I like it there, because it contains no dinosaur remains and is therefore fairly child-free and peaceful — even, at times, apparently deserted. You ride a lift up to its top floor, as if you are boarding a spacecraft full of whatever’s left of our good, of the earth’s generosity — as if you’ll be able to leave and start again with seeds from climate-controlled vaults. It looks smart, futuristic — in the sense of suggesting that we have a future.
And there are interactive exhibits, film displays — quickly spurned by the scatter of more French teenagers as they pass along. And cabinets have been made with real drawers which can be pulled back to reveal displays. The drawers also provide ledges, edges, gaps. One can, as it were, fill the gaps.
Jon unbuttoned his jacket, although it wasn’t terribly warm, and let the poisoned air attempt to cool him, ease him. He was sweating. Sweating as he walked was not as bad as sweating while he was examined by a malicious superior.
I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction — not one of them.
And I also wouldn’t tell them about the Natural History Museum and my visits. I couldn’t appear to be a man who might make such visits and then sweat about them. Sweat would constitute evidence.
Because …
Because …
Natural history is about evidence. It is supposed to be about evidence, about science, real science. If you want to know the real world and function in it rationally and effectively, if you want to progress, you collect evidence and test it and love it and want more — you have an appetite for it and its intrinsic beauty. Once you have all the information you can currently gather, you collate it and you analyse it and you come to fact-based conclusions. You have used the real world to give you solutions to itself. This is a beautiful thing.
And humans do not thrive without it.
I believe that.
Once upon a time, we won a real war, a world war, with maths: with models and plans and statistics and knowledge underpinning what we did. We weren’t always right, but we were the less-deluded side and therefore the less savage. And we won. So that people would not be crushed, or shut up in hells, so that our peace could be filled with human beings living lives to their fullest extent.
That’s all I wanted.
That isn’t really much to ask.
And it’s why I believe that facts are beautiful things.
And …
Because …
The thing is, I must not sweat when Chalice looks at me, because that will make me seem to be a man who slips away to the Natural History Museum and who has a small roll of fine paper in his pocket and who rests that prepared paper — small and white and simple, typed on one side, the interior side — who rests that in the cradle of his modestly evolved hand, opens a prearranged display drawer and then slips that paper into one of the little gaps inside, as agreed in advance.
I can’t look like a man who walks on while someone behind him opens that drawer and takes that paper and — later, probably later, I bloody well hope later and discreetly — unrolls it and finds it is covered in evidence, figures, raw data, in what have become the most damaging of the leaks which have left the department …
I have transgressed the Civil Service Code: I have disclosed official information without authority.
But I am meant to behave with integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. I am called upon to set out the facts and relevant issues truthfully and correct any errors as soon as possible. I must uphold the administration of justice.
And they won’t fucking let me.
Jon felt that thrill beneath his skin — that sense of being rolled and unrolled himself, reworked, evolved, by each of his attempts at crime, each memory of gathering what his fellow human beings, what the voters ought to know.
It’s what the voters are unsurprised and indeed massively bored by, as it turns out. They are not a powder keg and I am not a match. And it’s what our current media environment finds indigestible, irrelevant, being more concerned with aspirational spending, aspirational violence, aspirational hate, aspirational fucking.
Please, not that.
So it would seem that deeper digging, further research, more transgression, is required to breach the wall of grubby white noise, to provoke public outrage, wakefulness … And so one develops strategy. One has that in one’s nature, one is trained for it … It does no good, but one deploys it, nonetheless.
And, of course, strategy shows — it suggests a mind at work, intentions. It could make people start to hunt for a Moriarty. One worries about that. There is an element of stress.
There are days when one is relieved that anything one releases into the public domain simply fizzes slightly and then disappears, leaves not a wrack behind.
Jon swung into Victoria Street and bolstered himself against simply running and not coming back, or forcing a little bit more of a nervous collapse and therefore bolting over the hills and far away, deep and deeper within the privacy of his own mind.
Off to the cloud-topped towers and gorgeous palaces of my own making.
It’s not as if I’m fully operational; I could give minor insanity as my excuse for perceived wrongdoing … But I don’t want to live in a world where concern for others and for the consequences of actions and for safety and reality and … Well, why not …? I don’t want to live in a world where having a concern for true beauty on a wider and wider scale would be regarded as a manifestation of mental illness.