A/N: Here it is: the next chapter. It's very long, and I'm not totally happy with it, but as I've now been accused of abandoning the story ...
I've yet to start chapter 6, so there may be another longish wait for that one. Sorry in advance. I am very motivated by reviews, however ... ;)
Oh, and a warning: chapter contains (if you squint a little) OC slash. Just 'cos I can.
Disclaimer: Daine, Numair, Alanna, etc.: not mine. Other people: mine. Plot: mostly mine.
Chapter 5: Calgary, Drumheller, 9–16 July
"What are you up to, vetkin?" Numair asked Daine, who was seated at the dressing-table, scribbling furiously.
"Postcards," she replied without looking up.
"Postcards?"
"Mm. It's what people do when they go abroad on holiday, you know. And I've never been abroad on holiday before, so …"
Numair crossed the small room to stand behind her chair; he kneaded her shoulders gently, and she purred and stretched like a cat. "That's lovely," she said after a moment, "only it's hard to write …"
He stopped.
"How many have you got?" he inquired, regarding the large stack of cards with some amazement.
"Have a look," Daine invited. She waved a hand at the pile. Numair picked it up and flipped through cards addressed to Evin and Miri, the Contés, George and Alanna and Alan (and a separate one for Aly, at their own address), Thom, Kally, Roald, Onua, a long series of Zoo and Dick School colleagues …
"What are you finding to write about?"
"Mostly," Daine admitted, "I'm just going on and on about the beautiful scenery and how friendly everyone is. Go on and read them if you like," she added.
Glancing up, she saw his frown reflected in the mirror. "They're postcards, 'Mair. They're hardly private. And besides—"
He grinned at her. "Besides, if you wanted to abuse me to all my friends, you'd have used e-mail—it's faster, and offers far more scope for unpleasant detail."
He dodged as she lobbed a roll of stamps at him, but not quickly enough; it struck him on the shoulder, and he fell backwards onto the bed, groaning in mock agony.
"Very funny," Daine's reflection told him, trying with only moderate success to cover her laughter with a disapproving glare.
Tuesday's programme revolved around a trip to the Calgary Zoo, which most of the committee (and Numair) reached by C-Train. Laura's precise instructions—"meet at eight forty-five at the mammoth in the train tunnel"—made more sense in the execution than they had in the abstract, to Numair's relief, there being, in fact, a life-sized fibreglass model of a mammoth in the pedestrian tunnel that led from Zoo Station to the Zoo itself.
Whenever he and Daine visited a new zoo together, Numair couldn't help remembering their first trip to the Edinburgh Zoo—the rather daunting greetings of the sea lions, which had frightened him half out of his wits; the Penguin Parade waddling to an unexpected halt as it passed them, to the keepers' consternation; the meerkats flattening themselves against the glass of their enclosure in an attempt to "talk" to Daine. He was more used to it, now; he knew more or less what was coming, and he no longer feared for Daine's safety: if the past decade had taught him nothing else, he had at least learnt that no human being on earth was safer around animals than she. He felt, in fact, ever so slightly amused and smug, thinking, They've no idea what they're in for.
He hadn't expected—though he ought to have done, he realized—the real peril: dozens of babies and toddlers in pushchairs, prams, carry-packs and slings, so thick around the entrance to the zoo grounds, waiting with their mothers and older siblings for the nine-o'clock opening, that there seemed to be no end to them. Was the Edinburgh Zoo like this? If so, how could Daine spend every day there and be able to function?
He watched her anxiously as their group passed through the gate and turned left toward their first destination, the vast Canadian Wilds area on the north bank of the river—so intensely focused, so alert for signs of impending upset, that it took him some time to register what was upsetting everyone else.
Noticing at last the unnatural silence, he realized that Daine was the object of a rather unnerving level of scrutiny on the part of the local animal population. Those in the group who had not previously witnessed such an encounter wore expressions ranging from perplexed through alarmed to (in Amy's case) frankly terrified. "It's only caribou," he heard himself say. "Be thankful you've never had to watch her face down an angry Amur tiger."
Daine turned her head to glare at him—not playfully this time. "I do wish you'd stop telling people that," she said. "I've told you—"
"I know, I know." He raised his hands in surrender. "She wasn't angry, just—" he found he couldn't say it. I'm getting to be worse than Daine.
Who was no longer listening in any case.
Numair was cross with himself; he ought to have remembered how much his retelling of that particular incident irritated her. It was one thing to forget a dinner engagement with a colleague, or to forget to return your library books for a few months, but forgetting something you knew annoyed your wife, that was like … it was like forgetting the Periodic Table. Inexplicable, unpardonable, and a sure sign of impending senility.
Dan Reynolds, the University of California pathologist, sidled up to Numair. "Is this normal?" he queried. "They can probably get their teeth through that fence, you know. Has she had all her shots?"
Numair grinned; he couldn't help it. "Are you familiar with Daine's nickname?" he inquired. Dan shook his head. "She's called 'Beast Whisperer' at home," he explained. "Just watch. It's all right—she's perfectly safe."
Their progress around the zoo was much slower than Laura and Pritha must have expected, as the group had to halt at each animal enclosure for assorted rituals of greeting. On the other hand, Numair reflected, they certainly saw more animals, and closer to, than they would ever have done without Daine in their party. And, of course, they were nearly all vets or wildlife biologists; even those who had initially been frightened were soon hovering at her elbow, asking, "How do you do that?"
Numair had a feeling that Wednesday's meeting was going to be very interesting indeed.
"No, I really can't," Daine said, for at least the hundredth time since Tuesday morning. She was feeling quite exasperated. "It isn't something anyone can teach—no one taught it me, either, I was born this way."
"But you teach, don't you?" Laurel inquired. "What do you teach your students?"
Finally, a sensible question! "Animal behaviour," Daine began, ticking off points on her fingers. "How animals behave, and why they behave that way, and what different behaviours mean. How animals relate to people, and vice versa. How they can help a sick or hurt beast feel safe enough to allow an examination. All that sort of thing."
"Well, then."
"Numair, hurry up!" Daine stood outside the door of their room, looking at her watch. "They're coming to collect us in five minutes!" Greg and Bruce had invited them to dinner at a highly recommended Indian restaurant downtown, and she was ravenous.
"And it'll take no more than two for us to get downstairs," was the imperturbable reply.
"You're not brushing your hair again, are you?"
"Certainly not!" This time Numair sounded indignant. There was a pause, then, "I'm changing my tie."
Daine laughed. Then something occurred to her, and she stepped back into the room, letting the heavy door swing shut behind her. "'Mair, d'you think Bruce and Greg might be …" her voice trailed off.
Numair, tie at last adjusted to his satisfaction, turned away from the mirror. "Together, you mean?" he asked. Daine nodded. "Well, yes, of course they are. Hadn't you noticed?"
"But they …" he looked at her, and she could see that he was beginning to misinterpret her surprise. "They live on opposite sides of a continent," she explained. "A huge continent. How do they bear it? We couldn't. I couldn't."
Numair shrugged. "We're lucky," he pointed out. Then he glanced at his own watch. "Now, come along," he admonished. "We don't want to keep our hosts waiting."
"What are you two up to this weekend?" Greg asked over the malai kofta, dhal, saag paneer and tandoori fish with rice and naan. "Still avoiding the Stampede?"
Numair had his mouth full, so Daine replied, between bites, "We're going to hire a car and drive out to Drumheller. Numair's dying to see this palaeontology museum they've got there."
"But you're not?" Bruce guessed, winking at her.
Daine gave her husband's arm a playful squeeze. "I'm sure I'll have a lovely time. It's just that I prefer beasties with more flesh on their bones. This food is heavenly, by the way."
Numair, still chewing, nodded in agreement.
"We did the Tyrrell Museum last weekend," Greg said. "It's fantastic. Especially the Devonian Reef and the Burgess Shale."
"You mean the extinct marine wildlife," Bruce teased him. "Don't mind him," he added, looking at Numair and Daine. "He can't help it—he's obsessed with things that swim."
"Déformation professionnelle," Numair nodded.
"Occupational hazard," Daine translated. "More or less. Do speak English, 'Mair."
"So how long have you two been married?" Greg asked, with a grin.
"Five years and two months," Numair said after a moment.
"But we lived together for, em, two and a half years before he talked me round," Daine added cheerfully. "So really it's nearer eight."
"No kids?" Bruce asked.
The casual question caught Daine off guard, and she was astounded to discover that she had not thought about babies, or pregnancy, or where she was in her cycle, for … she could not, in fact, remember how long it had been.
Now she thought, and the thought was crushing. "Excuse me a minute," she said thickly, pushing back her chair and trying not to fall with it. I won't throw a wobbler in front of colleagues. I won't, I won't, I won't. She didn't dare look back at Numair, knowing he would be gazing after her with brows knit in concern, or trying to reassure their hosts, or both together; she couldn't work out whether it would be worse if he came after her or if he didn't.
Out on the pavement, she stood for a moment gulping the warm, fragrant evening air before sitting down, hard, against a tree. The tears came, then, in a hot despairing tide, though she squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her fists and held her breath in an effort to suppress them.
"Do they think I'm mad?"
"No, love, of course not. They think they upset you, and they're terribly remorseful."
"I'm not sure that's any better."
"Possibly not."
"Do you think I'm mad?"
"Sweetheart, you know I—"
"Never mind. I don't suppose you'd tell me if you did."
"That's a bit unfair."
Daine turned in her husband's arms and looked at him searchingly—or so it seemed to him in the moonlit dark. He shifted in order to kiss her forehead. Swallowed hard to quell the rising panic in his throat. "Daine," he began, "love, we've got to—"
"Talk about this," she finished for him.
"Yes."
"It's my fault we haven't done. You've tried, I know, and I only go all weepy and catatonic. No—" she stilled his protests with a small hand over his mouth. "Let me finish, please. I've been thinking, tonight … maybe … maybe we ought to stop. Accept it. Enjoy …" he heard her voice catch. "Enjoy our freedom."
"Is that what you want?" he asked gently.
"You know it isn't," she whispered against his chest. "Only I'm so tired of feeling so desperate about it. I'm fed up with hating my body for not doing what it's meant to do, and I'm fed up with people sympathizing, and I'm fed up with wanting to snatch people's babies because they aren't looking after them the way I would, and I'm especially fed up with bursting into tears half a dozen times a day. That isn't me, and I hate it, 'Mair, I can't bear myself sometimes."
There must be something he could say to this—something helpful, something reassuring, something right—but whatever it was, he couldn't think of it. Instead he held her close, trying to stroke away the tension along her spine.
"What I keep thinking," she said after a moment, "is how ironic this is. I mean, it's funny really."
"How so?"
"My mum, I mean. She made a stupid mistake when she was sixteen and finished up with a fatherless baby she didn't want, and here's me …"
"I think you're wrong, you know."
"About what?"
"About your mother. She may have made a mistake—though I'm not convinced—but certainly she wanted you. She loved you, Daine, and your grandfather, too. You know that."
Daine whispered something he couldn't make out.
"What was that, love?" he asked her gently, and she raised her head a little. "I miss my mum," she repeated.
Numair tightened his arms around her. "I know," he whispered into her hair.
The attendant at Thrifty Car Rental looked Numair up and down, frankly dubious, as she handed him the keys to a Hyundai Accent at seven-thirty on Saturday morning.
"Don't worry about him," Daine said brightly. "He's tall, but he folds up nicely. When I met him, he was driving a Mini."
The attendant giggled; Numair glared at his wife in mock annoyance, but she could feel his relief at her improved mood.
They shared the early-morning drive out into the Badlands, a bizarre landscape of low, scrubby vegetation, steep cliffs and odd formations of reddish-striped sedimentary rock, bisected by two-lane highways so little used that, in places, it was dangerously easy to forget which side of the road was which.
"Your turn," Daine said in exasperation after drifting to the left for the third time in half an hour. She pulled the car onto the shoulder, clambered into the passenger seat as Numair got out to walk round to the driving side, shifted the seat forward some eight inches and put her head out the open window. "Don't forget to belt up," he reminded her.
What Daine persisted in calling "the dinosaur museum" was as spectacular as promised, and, once inside, she was rather glad they had booked a bed-and-breakfast room in Drumheller for the night. There was certainly more to see than they could easily have managed in one day; she didn't fancy staying the full twelve hours until nine-o'clock closing, but nor, she could see, would there have been any possibility of dragging Numair away any earlier, had they not been returning in the morning.
The existing overnight booking was also helpful in persuading him to forgo the overnight fossil-hunting trek in favour of a more reasonable (in her view) ninety-minute walking tour of dig sites in the Badlands. She was not at all surprised when the battery on Numair's digital camera packed up halfway back.
They ate their supper at an uninspiring and inauthentic Chinese restaurant and wandered back to their bed-and-breakfast through the still-bright evening, hand in hand, talking of nothing in particular.
"About last night," Daine said suddenly, then stopped.
Numair squeezed her hand.
"It was a shock. I hadn't thought about it, any of it, since … I don't know, really. At least since we've been here."
"I wondered," he said. "You've been …"
"More myself. I know."
"Happier, I was going to say."
"Easier to bear."
Numair stopped in his tracks. "Daine, really." His tone was severe. "No, don't apologize. But you ought to know better. I married you, after all, not you in your better moods."
But he had been more himself here, too, he knew—had been, in other words, more than a bundle of jangled nerves dreading the next crisis. It was this—not work at all—from which they had both needed a holiday.
Daine leaned against him with a sigh of absolute exhaustion. "I love you, 'Mair," she said. "I'm sorry I've been such a misery. It must be PMT, I think. I'm so tired I can hardly see straight."
"Come along, then." One arm around her shoulders, he bent to slide the other around her knees, then lifted her off her feet, grinning at her breathless whoop of protest.
It took only five minutes to walk the rest of the way back, but by the time they reached their destination she had gone fast asleep.
The curriculum committee wrapped up formally on Monday afternoon, with a ceremony of thanks from the Faculty and the University, and informally on Monday evening with an elaborate, delicious and uproarious dinner at a local restaurant (arranged by Amy, whose family, she said, had been eating there since she was a child).
"I can't believe we've been here two weeks already," Daine marvelled, between mouthfuls of Chinese broccoli in garlic sauce. Somehow the weekend's emotional crisis seemed to have cleared her head, and she felt well disposed toward the world and everyone in it.
"And tomorrow you're off to the mountains, right?" asked Amy from across the table. "How're you getting up there?"
"I'm going to drive them," said Sandy. "I'm going back up to Banff anyway, and that way they don't have to rent a car."
"You guys are really going to do this ten-day backpacking thing?" said Amy doubtfully. "It sounds like a lot of work." Amy, Daine had guessed early on, was not enthusiastic about holidays that did not include hot showers and indoor toilets.
"Ten days is nothing," she said cheerfully. From the other of the two large round tables occupied by their party, she heard Numair laugh heartily at something someone else had said. "At home we used to stay in the field for weeks in the summer. Before I went to work for the Zoo, I mean. And let me tell you, you've not seen wilderness till you've spent three weeks in the Outer Hebrides …"
From: Trebond-Cooper, Alanna
To: Sarrasri, Daine
Subject: RE: Incommunicado
Hello, Daine,
No, nothing to report here. I must say, Aly does seem to be coping very well—I'm rather proud of her. (Her hair, however, is still blue.) I shall keep an eye out while you're out of touch, though.
So you're really going to spend your holiday dragging heavy equipment about at high altitudes, are you? Rather you than me. But, of course, one forgets that you and Numair actually enjoy that sort of thing.
Have a lovely time, and don't get into any trouble, either of you. You know what I mean.
Cheers,
Alanna
A/N: "PMT", for those who don't know, is the UK equivalent of "PMS".