Elephant

Supraoccipital bone

What in god’s name is that, you cried, opening the front door.

You had heard the doorbell ringing from the playroom upstairs where you had crouched over your little boy and kissed his head and pressed rounded wooden building blocks gently into his hands and told him he could be an architect or an engineer when he was older and he had held them loosely and looked at you as though he were a fish or a full-grown man sleeping with his eyes open.

I was in the doorway holding an elephant skull by its tusks.

It’s an elephant skull, I’ve found an elephant skull, I breathed, backing in through the house.

Parietal bone

That’s the spot, I said, taking a sip of my cup of tea.

I had moved the coffee table into the kitchen and unrolled a beach towel and placed the elephant skull in the centre of the living room. There were teeth missing in its yellow mouth and patches of soil and pinches of grass and dandelion leaves clinging to its sides and it looked as though it had spent its life lying upside down and gaping at the sky.

You were sitting opposite me, staring at the elephant skull.

Where did you find it, you said.

Frontal Bone

Must be worth something, I said. Must be worth a bit.

Earlier, I had sat with the telephone directory open on my lap and the house phone in my hand and had dialled a series of auctioneers and taxidermists and rag and bone men, enquiring on the probable price of an elephant skull. You had hovered nearby, watching me and cutting a carrot into finger length slices and feeding them to your little boy.

I don’t like it, you said. What if it is illegitimate, you said, whispering the word.

It’s not, I said and I knocked on the elephant skull with my fists as if to prove it.

You frowned.

Lacrimal bone

You held your hot water bottle against your belly. I lay beside you.

Promise me you will look for work tomorrow, you said.

I reached over and turned off the lamp.

I promise, I said.

Nasal bone

You crept around the living room, folding laundry into a hamper. Watching the elephant skull as if it might move.

It was bigger than a dog and it smelled like an abattoir and it was the colour of frozen vanilla yoghurt and cotton buds and recycled paper. It had two tiny eye sockets and two long tusks and a great, gaping hole in its head where its trunk should be.

You threw a pair of socks at the elephant skull and screamed a little in desperation.

Give me strength, you said.

Later, covering your eyes, you reached inside the elephant skull and fetched the socks out.

Maxilla

I crouched in the hallway undoing my shoelaces. You were walking down the stairs. Once you had slipped all the way to the bottom. Landing on your back. Lying in your stockings. Breathing forcefully as though giving birth.

What’s that, you asked.

It’s a bone, I said. It’s an elephant’s thigh bone.

You could see the notches and scratches in the bone where it had been cut with a knife.

You touched my face.

What do you think, I said.

Premaxilla

You lifted the mirror in front of your little boy.

You had spent the morning in his bedroom, shining the spring light across the walls and watching yourselves in the mirror as though you were on television.

Who is that, you said and your little boy moved his mouth and made the sounds a human mouth makes before it is confident making words, the same sounds his wordless ancestors made pounding baobab rot into gruel and lighting wild fires on the plains.

Who is that, you said.

Mandible

You held onto the elephant’s tusks and tried to edge the skull across the room. It was as heavy as a wardrobe.

When the elephant had been alive it had carried its skull unknowingly. It had been something hidden, something lifelong and secret and it had taken starvation or heart disease or ivory poachers or famished French soldiers or veterinary malpractice or African lions or poisoned oat feed or foul diseases to uncover it.

I had carried the elephant skull into the house easily. Juggling it along the street and into our home on the Peckham Park Road. How I had carried you into the house after our honeymoon. How you had held your breath and turned white and rigid from the humiliation of it.

Volma

You stayed up late waiting for me to come home. You and your little boy and the elephant skull.

Earlier, you had turned off the lights and sunk into the bath, your long hair floating on the hot water, your legs piercing the bath foam like tusks. You had laid there half sleeping, feeling sacred.

You stayed up past midnight worrying and waiting and praying and writing a list of reasons why you shouldn’t stay up late hoping for me to come home.

In the morning, there was an elephant’s ribcage occupying the majority of the living room.

There was a note on the fridge saying sorry.

Aveolar process

You slept all day on your little boy’s bedroom floor.

You dreamt that you lived with a group of grizzly bears in a hole in the ground and that the bears brought back Southwark Council recycling bins and attack victims and open bags of clinical waste and that you spent every moment of every day pretending to be a bear and being terrified that the bears would discover you were a human.

Squamosal jugal

I’m not killing them, I said. I’m not.

I stood in the doorway, holding an armful of elephant bones. My shoes were black with mud.

The baby monitor crackled and you walked through the bones in the living room to lift it up.

Sometimes it picked up radio stations or air traffic controllers or pirate broadcasts or Peckham taxi-cab dispatch conversations and it would sound as though there were crowds of people in your little boy’s bedroom.

I’m just finding them, I said, calling after you as you tied your dressing gown shut and climbed the stairs.

I left the bones with the others.

I slept beside them on the sofa bed.

Zygomatic arch

I awoke in the night to you standing over me.

I don’t want my little boy growing up in bones, you said.

That’s not something I want, you said.

Ethmoid bone

You looped your scarf and jangled your keys and buttoned your coat. I searched for my boots.

Can’t we bring him, you said.

It’s only an hour, I said.

The two of us had stayed awake talking, we had pleaded and debated and negotiated until winter birds were singing in the garden. Until dawn light was creeping through the windows.

I let you leave first and then I locked the door behind me.

Coronal suture

Upstairs, in the empty house, your little boy marched around his toys.

Downstairs, the elephant bones made a sort of monument in the centre of the room.

Sphenoid bone

I burst through the door and rolled over on the hallway carpet in laughter. You followed, clutching your fists, smiling maniacally. You leapt on me.

Let me see, you said. Let me see.

Later, I would open my cupped hands cautiously as though I were hiding diamonds or dynamite or butterflies and you would reach into my hands and touch the three delicate bones I was holding and ask me in wonder what they were.

They’re ear bones, I would say.