BONELINES
Phil Smith & Tony Whitehead
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In Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, authors Phil Smith, Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott lead us on a ‘virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. They create a pilgrimage we can all follow, even if confined to our homes.
In researching the Guidebook the authors went on an actual journey. Bonelines is the secret story of that journey. Given the present circumstances it now appears prophetic, prescient and helpful, so we have decided to bring it into the light. It is written in novel form and will be published online in weekly instalments. Here is the first instalment. (You can find details - and order a copy of - Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage here.) |
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Bonelines
Instalment 3 (Chapters 7-8)
Tony Whitehead & Phil Smith
7
The sun rose from behind the sea. The gold disc rested on the flat roof of the ocean. All along the blood and orange cliffs stood yawning families. The exhausted elders had gathered on the red arches above the receding waters; word had reached them in the East through the heavy Yew and they had come, picking their way urgently for days along the faint traces of the ridge and portal ways, until they were ready to drop down through the valleys to the shore; strangers made welcome with acorn liqueur and oily fish in water. Weather cracked lips worked in the cold air as the elders chewed; spitting the bones onto the muddy rocks below. All their eyes, like those of the families, some still arriving, others almost broken by their vigils, were upon the giant and shadowy shape the last lappings of the outgoing tide were stranding on the red sand.
It had first been sighted nine sunrises ago, a dark nick on the skin of the deep.
Since then, drawing ever more witnesses from the woods of the Moor, from the safety of the enclosed tombs on the Great Hill, from the stone villages and rounded homesteads, the shape had grown like a stain; an uninterpretable language gibbering and shouting from the horizon, growing ever louder. At times it was as black as old beasts’ blood in a bowl, at others like the shine of beetles, a blinding ruddiness, turning over and over, like a giant river hunter turning in the air to flash its golden chest; a flashing beacon alternately shielded and fired.
The elders had been called in unfamiliar desperation. The people had long ago given up on unreliable signs and rituals; the cyclopean architecture of the old ways fallen in the grass. Each blade of which told more truth than the old ceremonial archways and slabs of divination. Truth, the elders knew, stood in the trunks of trees, in the juice of fruit, in the way that water came up from a spring clear and full, the way that light fell delightfully through a gathering of young oaks; the truth was as transparent to a staggering child as any wobbling elder. The truth knew no dispensation for foolishness or ancestry, ancientness or decoration; when the time came all lay down upon the same bed of stones and rotted back to the loamy, red or brown certainty.
But now the thing out in the sea was driving them all inland, against the cold north wind at their backs. The whole people were walking in reverse. The green woodpeckers laughed, their insistent yaffles mocking the retreating tribe. The sheep complained of the unreasonableness of their desertion and imprisonment in hill forts. Even the Old Man had been called from his disgraced walking of the avenues in the high oak woods. But he was truly Old and no use to anyone but himself, and he was coming in his own unpunctual time.
No one yet had ventured upon the sands; except for The Thing.
Abandoned by the waters, it was now revealing itself fully. The thick body of a monstrous fish, its face full of gums, its nether parts a sheaf of fins and legs and crawling things. The elders, summoned to make some comparison, stood helpless and speechless above the unfolding darkness on the strandline. They knew of no pattern like this, nothing from the old ways, nothing from the things they knew now – the veins of leaves, the twists of roots, the segments of flowers; none matched the dynamism and slitheriness of this pile of odorous seething life, boiling and writhing in the gilded sand.
As the north wind pressed against the backs of the retreating tribe, three women remained, standing alone under the cliffs. They had arrived together. Later, their families would jostle for priority and pre-eminence. Nothing would ever persuade the three to distinguish between the moments of their arrival or the importance of their connection; two on the heights, one in the deep. The deeps are the heights and the heights are the deeps and the tunnels, caves and springs connect them.
The young women were from the middling sort of families; not known for preservation of the old places, nor for warrior deeds when occasional plunderers met their fates. They did their part when strangers were to be welcomed, they shared and traded and built and maintained their small round houses like their neighbours. They neither wore nor claimed any distinction from them. Nothing had set them apart, until this moment when the Dark Stranger called its daughters, none yet bonded with any other family, and they stepped forward, fearless. Had they recognised the invitation from their dreams? Had they fallen in a faint and fore-seen its dreadful beak and crowd of fingers wrestling up their shore? All would answer the questions, later, and when their descriptions were completed no one would wish, let alone dare, to ask again.
For the moment, their three names rang from the cliffs. These people had no alphabet, no libraries or registries, but their names were no less precious to them than to those peoples that did. First the mothers spoke their names, then the sisters and brothers. The fathers were already moving silently and furiously back down the cliffs, crestfallen.
The great Thing rolled and its million fins flopped queasily up the incline of the beach, spilling strands that fought and re-engaged in contests for firmer holds. Along their surfaces suckers opened up by the nestful, like the beaks of hungry chicks, and each sucker writhed inside with spiders’ traps, mucus webs and barbed saliva, strings of sticky tongue-like beads dangling and beckoning. The local people had welcomed many strange visitors, drinking up the smooth cloths and scarves, the hopeless invocatory symbols on shiny broaches; always hospitable, but never seduced. This stranger, however, was far more foreign, bile-raising and heart-exciting than anything that had come to trade before. Across the cliffs, the blood beat inside the people like the waves on the shore.
The three young ambassadors took three steps towards the Thing, only the woman in the centre took a fourth, into the mesh of dancing arms. The Thing threw out two long and padded ambassadors of its own, seizing on the child-woman and lifting her up and back. She hovered above the Thing, the wind began to whistle gently, her hair spread around her like a fantail, the low sun burnishing her blank face, her eyes turned inwards to her untranslatable feelings. The two remaining women stood their ground; the thick forearms of the Thing abased themselves around their toes and then rose up to their faces; falling backwards with a twist into the shallow waters, beginning the roll of the whole Thing, its globular torso raised itself up on hidden stilts, taller than the sandstone archways, a single eye staring deep into the soulwells of the elders, fixing their faces in masks of fear.
The eye sank down inside itself and the body shuddered like a burning homestead, suddenly losing its supports and sinking, trembling and swelling; the young woman of the people still brandished above its quivering mass. Then it exploded without warning and birthed heaps of wriggling things in a rush of broken water; tiny fishes flapped, crab-like skeletons struggled to roll over on their hard burdens, and tiny versions of the Thing Itself unfolded around each other, hooking onto the ankles and toes of the two young women standing at the base of the Beast from the Deep. The pads at the ends of the two long proboscises lifted the arms of the chosen woman-child in gestures of beckoning and acceptance. Her two fellow initiates responded; peeling the tiny octopi from their toes they laid them gently in the shallows, lifting crustaceans from their flesh they shepherded them down the sands with guiding pushes, the fish they cupped in their palms and lowered them onto the outgoing waves.
Once in the waters, the Thing collected her babies to her sides and into her folds and pockets, sweeping the waters with long fins. Sensing that their Great Mother was about to depart, that whatever commerce had taken place was over, the remaining hundreds of slimy squids, desperate fish and soft lobster-things wormed and crawled and dragged themselves waterwards. The men had sensed it too, and balanced the long spears with flint heads on their palms, running across the beach. Some aimed for the Thing itself, others threatened the tiny creeping things on the strandline. But the two young women still on the sand turned from the crowd of hurrying homunculi longing for their baptism and faced their own fathers, placing their bodies between the flint edges and the slimy Thing and its kind. The father of its captive and elevated princess wept with fury, the daughter of another father, one of the two ambassadors, pushed herself onto his flint head until her blood began to spurt from the flesh at her neck. The father of the Squid-Princess withdrew his spear and the other men did likewise; their flint blades dropped to the sand.
In triumph the Thing thrust its captive even higher into the blue of the morning; around her head bright stars sparkled for a moment, then the Thing rolled again and was suddenly beyond the gentle shelf of sand and into deeper waters, dragging her under. A curtain of spray rose and a cold mist marched over the two young women and down upon the faces of the fathers. A gasp was wrung from the families lined along the red cliff. Softened by the recent storms, parts of the cliff began to tumble down its steep incline; a spill of sand first, and then boulders.
The Thing was surrounded by a churning crowd of little things, boiling the water around her and driving her farther and farther from the shore, until, her thick spindles of flesh having trapped all her children in fasts and holds, she rolled for what seemed a final move and pulled the whole tribe beneath the waves. The cliffs let out a collective howl, a piece of land as big as the Thing itself dislodged, hurling a family into a meaningless heap of limbs onto the hard sand ten heights of one of the people below. From where it had fallen, a miserable trickle of tears dribbled down the frozen iron desert, exposed to the sun for the first time in 300 million years.
The sea spat and the Thing lifted its seal-like shoulders from the brine; then, its two giant fingers were raised, as if to thread twine through the eye of a bone needle, the proboscises of the Thing raised up the Squid Princess, her eyes as blue as the ocean, waters streaming, spring-like, from her ears, nose and mouth. Three times the Thing rolled over dragging her Princess down and three times lifted her up again to hang upon the sky; then with a finality and a deep woomph of sound it crashed back and turned over and was lost to the deep. Only the stain of its shadow was seen again; as it first spread beneath the surface and then shrank again as it sought the sharp cut of the horizon.
The bereaved father raced into the surf, a second time lifting his arm to hurl his spear harpoon-like through the water. But his arm was caught as he brought it back into alignment with his shoulder by the strong thin fingers of another’s daughter, the second unwounded ambassador. Instinctively, he turned the spear and caught her across the face with the centre of the shaft. Her expression did not change; still the look of supreme bliss, that had covered it for a while now, prevailed. The father stood back and the daughter of another opened her lips; a spring of blood fell from her lower lip, flecked with fragments of teeth. When she smiled, she smiled the smile of a conger eel. He had made her of the Deep. He turned and fled, dropping his spear, in horror at what he did and flung himself at the feet of the girl’s mother, begging her to end his life there and then.
The elders halted such nonsense. They had stepped down from their useless exaltation on the archways and stumbled across the sand to where the two young women defended the deep and its shrinking shadow. But the elders had nothing to say; nothing at the heavy Yew had prepared them for this, nothing they had witnessed at their wells, not even the speaking heads had spoken of this, nothing in their meetings with the trees in their groves, joining the gatherings, had pre-empted a monstrous mother from the wet. They had arrived at the shore with a floundering dignity; but there was no liturgy to continue the ritual. They stood useless and gilded, the salt stinging in their wrinkled visages. The girls faced them, almost black against the thin blue of the sea, flashing red with splashes of their own blood. Then he came.
The Old Man, called for, many days before, had finally made it from the woods up on the heights, dragged from his trawling up and down the stone rows dragging up memories of things he had been told as a child about rituals that even his grandparents had never seen. Hoping that one day some magical emissary might appear from a distant god who had simply forgotten for so long to call and yet had suddenly been reminded of His people. He tottered across the sand, between the crowds of people stepping back to let him pass. He searched their eyes and faces for clues as to how he should begin his interpretation. They were as enigmatic and unhelpful as the dumb stone rows!
At a glance he took in the two bleeding women standing between him and the sea; this was not right, all gateways should have two different pillars, one flat and one pointed, one male and one female. He saw from their exalted faces that all righteousness and fear of the Great People had fled from them and they were running with their own madness like worms in a new cadaver. He would get no old truths from them!
Striding between the two pubescent guardians, the Old Man attempted to push his way past them, but they were stood too far apart and holding his palms to the faces of each of them, he made contact with neither, but instead tripped upon a piece of afterbirth and toppled into a heap of placenta.
The bereaved assembly roared until they wept; the outrageousness of it all emerging as a chorus of wolf howls, that fine line between fearful snarl and laughter. The Old Man lay as if dead, pretending dead, until he could stand their laughing no longer and grasping at a large rounded stone pushed himself to his feet with the last portions of his faith, swinging the giant pebble at the nearest young female head. The guardian ducked, her wildcat headpiece rolling down the sand’s incline, the assembly expecting to see some part of her skull still in it. But her head seemed to regenerate and popped up from her long smock and back onto her shoulders. The Old Man formed an egg shape of surprise with his lips, which is how he died; the same expression frozen as the girl-guardian grabbed his ankle and tipped him helplessly back into a rockpool, his body writhing and struggling against the inevitable airless death amongst the indifferent shrimp and blennies that now played between the final bubbles of his precious air. And so the last of the old priesthood died by a symbolism that even he had forgotten.
The trickle from the red cliff had become a spout, silver and glutinous in the rising light.
A kind of half-hearted nostalgic anger rippled through the men and one or two stepped forwards to discipline the girls. A flock of oystercatchers resting on the sand behind the chosen girls took fright at the movement of the men, and took precautionary wing, flapping and hovering, flashing their blankets of black and white; only for moments were the birds airborne, but for those moments it seemed as if something like huge feathered chequerboard wings had begun to grow from the shoulders of the two girls.
One by one the families approached the girls and made some display of honour and respect; but when the family of the sea-princess approached them, it was the girls that knelt and bowed and made many improvised signs and gestures. Beckoning them to lead, the girls guided the bereaved family from the beach, and the families processed inland, carrying the limbs of the broken family, back to the more familiar spaces of their everyday; leaving the elders to bury the old man's body in the sand for the crabs and lugworms to feast upon; denying him the final bed of stones, an anonymous grave out of sight of the sky was the mark of his shame.
8
The cluster of birds curled, unfolded, splayed and puckered. Nothing unusual in that. The ‘desert island’ at the ends of the dunes always attracted heaving flocks of birds; mostly brief tourists on their way to or from an African wintering or a northern mating. The whole cluster abruptly sagged, squared off at its corners and then, unnaturally, shifted wholesale to the right.
“Didn’t know birds c...”, Mandi mumbled to herself.
They were not her quarry. That was making its way on a parallel path through the marram grass, about thirty yards ahead of her and clearly stalking its own prey. Dressed in green and grey camouflage trousers and hooded jacket, it stood out from any of the casual strollers who might have ventured out onto the dunes of The Sett that morning; partly by its dress, but partly by the pace it kept up through the thin and slippery sand. Like some persistence hunter, it rushed along, low to the ground and almost silent. Any racket or rustle was lost in the blustery gale blowing up from the sea.
Mandi’s intention was to find the caretaker. He was nowhere to be found on the site; but one of the residents had assured her that he was known for taking a mid-morning or mid-afternoon walk to the end of the dunes, dependent on the tides, before resuming his duties. Just as Mandi was contemplating – as best she could at pace, though easier on the more solid lower path she had chosen – that if the camouflaged figure was stalking Crabbe then her attentions might be convenient, even fortuitous, when it threw itself to the ground, almost out of sight beneath the yellowing grass. Mandi clambered up the side of the dune, aware that this was not recommended by the wardens’ notices that she would one day like to collect together in one place and burn. Or maybe plant them all in the same place; collect all the warning signs and nannie state noticeboards and assemble them in one huge forest of No and Don’t and Beware.
BE AWARE! JELLYFISH ARE BEING WASHED UP ON THIS BEACH. KEEP CHILDREN & DOGS AWAY.
Whoever the tracker was, they knew nothing about covering their back. In the soft sand, Mandi was able to creep within a few inches of their splayed boot-shod feet. She could see their gloved hands manipulating a phone; they appeared to be videoing something up ahead on the ‘desert island’. A rolled up magazine poked from the back pocket of their liverish fatigues. Mandi knelt on one knee and looked beyond the stalker. High above the churning waters, where the estuary met the turning tide, a second manuscript of birds was unfurling, exploding into single characters and joining up in spiralling columns. The stalker’s focus was lower; Mandi eased her body onto the sand, almost side by side with the recumbent stalker.
Through a gap between two dunes she could see that something odd was going on around the ‘desert island’. Figures in white hazard suits were moving about, four or five of them, almost in a dance, swinging past each other, but making ground from the seaward to the landward side of the dunes. She could see the screen of the stalker’s phone. On there the figures in white, only their upper bodies and hooded faces in view, were blurred and sinister, looking not unlike nuclear plant workers from someone’s reactionary 1950s imagination. Reflected in the screen, Mandi saw the moon-like face of the stalker; a man about her own age, soft features, fair eyebrows, milky blue eyes wide with terror and a slit for a mouth tense against the world. But if she could see him, he...
The moony stalker abruptly but silently rolled onto his back away from Mandi. She leapt to her feet and for one moment considered placing a foot square upon his chest.
“What the fuck do you think you’re up to?”
“Aliens...” mumbled the stalker, straining to catch his balance as he careened to his feet, holding up his phone. He pointed in the general direction of the white figures, who Mandi could see quite clearly now were manipulating long nozzled sprays, carrying cream knapsacks of weedkiller or similar strapped to their backs.
“Aliens...”
And off he took, as fast as his camouflaged legs could carry him, back towards the entertainments and holiday camps of The Sett, kicking up fans of sand as he went.
“Nutter,” Mandi decided.
The black figure of the caretaker had appeared among the white-suited wardens and a heated discussion was in progress. Above the argument a smaller flock of Oystercatchers, recognisable to Mandi by their orange beaks and angular black and white plumage, banked gently and then swerved, almost tumbling upwards. Whatever the Caretaker had said to the white weedkiller operatives, it was either controversial or exciting, because they all began to wave their arms, as if in time with the swinging chequerboard above them. Mandi had no wish to interrupt them; she only wanted to speak with the caretaker, so she took a seat in the grass.
The moon-faced man had dropped his magazine in the sand. Mandi rescued it and shook it free of crystal grains. It was some sort of conspiracy ‘zine; not one she recognised, though she had read a whole load once for an article on the Huffington Post site. Mostly these nerds and nutters communicated digitally, but there were still a few traditionalists who refused to leave any electronic trace. The ‘zine was titled Conspiracy Now!
Mandi flicked through a few pages; none of the usual round ups of anomalous news, but a collection of longish essays. Something on numerology and the Futures markets, the involvement of the Illuminati in the production of microbeads (hardly a necessary participation?), a historical feature about something called Operation Northwoods, nothing on aliens or ufos, but there was an entertaining article about birdwatchers that Mandi read as she waited for the caretaker and the sprayers to be finished with each other, glancing over occasionally to check how the argument was progressing.
"Who runs the country?" Sir John Betjeman, gentleman poet and judicious conservationist, once asked rhetorically. "The RSPB. Their members are behind every hedge."
Mandi almost roared. She loved bitchy Tories.
In a recent publication of his research, well-respected author Jason Jenkinson, PhD, suggests it is not the RSPB birdwatchers but the birds themselves that we should be wary of. Conspiracy Now! reporter Patty Jones tells the story...”
Mandi licked her lips and tasted the salt.
“In 1998 a small group of physicists and avian biologists gathered at the Swiss Institute of Ornithology, Lausanne, to review the current literature on possible methods by which birds might make use of the earth's magnetic field to orientate themselves and to undertake their long migratory journeys. What the group suspected was that photons entering a bird's eye were causing chemical reactions in the bird's retina giving the bird a visual readout of their direction. Flying in one relation to the Earth’s magnetic poles coloured their vision one way, flying in another relation coloured it differently; in short, through the complexities of a process known as "quantum entanglement" it was proposed that birds could quite literally "see" the poles. As there was no human equivalent to this sense, it was impossible to provide an analogy in human terms – the notion of their vision being coloured, for example, might be perceived quite differently by the bird – so the phenomenon is described in the literature as "quantum vision". The group agreed to pursue its theoretical work, and called itself Erithacus, after the scientific name for the European robin, on which the early work into this sensory phenomenon had been carried out.”
This was vaguely interesting. Mandi had heard of something similar. Wasn’t that Iraqi-British guy who was always on the BBC involved?
“Parallel to the heavyweight theoretical work on quantum vision, the Oxford Laboratory of Ornithology was working hard on the neural basis for song learning in birds. This research had taken an interesting direction around the Millennium when for the first time ultra-sensitive neural probes were developed that were able to map the higher vocal centres of a range of avian subjects. Initially this was done in the hope of learning something by inference about language development in humans, but took an unexpected turn when Dr Amelia Harp, a brilliant young avian biologist, developed a tiny subcutaneous implant that could be inserted in the bird's skull that could send information about neural activity remotely to a field researcher. For the first time, it was possible to study the brain activity of a large population of a particular species in the field.
Harp’s device quickly became the standard tool of ornithological research. At the thirteenth International Ornithological Congress at Dartington Hall in Devon in May 2013...”
Hold on. Dartington was up the road. Ten miles away, a little more?
“...a chance meeting between Harp and members of the Erithacus group in the bar of the White Heart....”
Yes, she had had a drink there, long time back, the only time she had met up with Anne and Bryan close to the camp, but it was the ‘White Hart’ not ‘Heart’. How were you supposed to take these things seriously if they couldn’t even get the simple facts right? Like most journalism. Sloppy. A crow landed nearby, staring at her askance.
“... led to discussions about the theoretical possibilities of testing quantum vision in the field. Professor Bert Marley suggested an experiment with robins in the grounds of the estate. Might it be possible, he speculated, to use the implant to gain an understanding of the lived experience of robin's vision. "To see through a robin's eyes" as he crudely put it.”
Mandi wondered what it would be like to see herself through the crow’s eyes, but when she looked up, it had gone.
“What happened that spring day, when the first implant was injected into a robin's skull, became known as the now infamous “Dartington Experiment”. Its actual results are unclear as subsequent documentation was almost instantly classified and those involved have refused to discuss its findings (some even deny that any such experiment ever took place), but fragments are known from a handful of courageous freelance and non-tenured researchers disturbed by what they believe may be the consequences of this work and who have subsequently and energetically, but with little success, sought to gain the attention of both the orthodox scientific world and then the online conspiracy communities. It seems that the story is unusually toxic; those researchers who have continued to pursue its mysteries now haunt the conspiracy message boards and occasional fringe conferences, lonely figures who, perhaps uniquely, have lost all credibility with heretic and orthodox alike. Those, that is, that have not lost their minds entirely.”
A bit harsh, even for conspiracy gossip.
“What is known is that the original work produced considerably more information than was expected; the acres of redacted text on those few documents extracted by Freedom of Information requests have proved that beyond doubt. Jason Jenkinson, one of the leading conspiracy theorists of the “Dartington Experiment”, even claims that an analysis of the initial and now redacted data, and its subsequent visualisation in the informal research group’s computer models, clearly demonstrated that the 23X156 (the ring number of the robin provided with the implant) was observing her observers. The irony of this was not lost on the theoretical physicists (at least those of the Copenhagen persuasion) in the group. What's more, the information visualised was not about surface matters such as shape and form, but rather 23X156 appeared to be sensitive to her observers' feelings and even thoughts. According to one unattributed source: “we felt that very quickly we became caught up in a loop of the subject’s own devising, of the bird’s own devising”. According to Jenkinson, the small bird could sense potential aggression in a predator (human in this case); and while the data was less than unequivocal, before the experiments were halted the investigators believed that they could distinguish in the bird’s responses descriptions of human nervousness, sexual desire, attention, covetousness, elation and jealousy. More than this, the tiny robin could transmit this information to others of their flock, and, when a second receiver/broadcaster was implanted, this information was understood… a useful adaptive advantage, no doubt, and not wholly unsurprising. Once this had occurred, the research subjects, according to gossip around colleagues of members of the Erithacus group, were almost uncontainable and prone to strategies that resisted data gathering. Jenkinson quotes one anonymous source: “what all the fuss tells you is that the experiment failed, the data was useless and whatever the birds experienced... is for the birds”. However, what remains a mystery and seems to have turned upside down the worlds of those involved, was the key (apparent) finding that 23X156 could "see" and transmit her observers’ innermost desires.
Jenkinson claims, the project then "went dark" and has remained on ice ever since.”
Mandi’s concentration – though the article was nonsensical, there was metaphorical material there, she could see the potential pitch – was broken by the shadows of a group of herring gulls that had seemingly stationed themselves above her; riding the thermals so that they remained stationary in relation to the ground while barely moving their wings. Mandi wondered how they did that; but one avian mystery was enough...
“The official accounts state that the Erithacus group disbanded in September 2013 having, according to the press release, "reached the conclusion of its theoretical work". Professor Marley, subsequent to a minor stroke, retired to a quiet life to follow his love of birdwatching, moving to Kingsbridge and becoming an active bird ringer and council member of the Devon Bird Preservation Society. Amelia Harp, tragically, died in 2015 in a cycling accident while in the Pyrenees, a promising career brutally cut short, according to police reports, by the driver of a vintage Citroen DS temporarily blinded by the sun on a sharp mountain bend.”
Here we go.
“Jenkinson, in his book "The Dartington Experiment Revealed", which draws together arguments published on various websites with much greater biographical detail, accepts none of this. He claims that Marley, far from being retired, is through his work as a ringer, till actively progressing the fieldwork for the Erithacus group; recruiting many unsuspecting bird enthusiasts to gather data for the project. And he claims that Harp was deliberately killed at the point when she was about to blow the whistle on the whole project at a conference in Nice.”
Well, if Professor Marley is still active, he is active not far away in Kingsbridge, halfway between the Bay and Plymouth...
“Readers get to the nub of "The Dartington Experiment Revealed" in chapter seven of the book. Entitled "Open Your Eyes", the account claims to reveal the true nature of the Erithacus group's work. Simply put, states Jenkinson, “the Group discovered it was possible to use birds to spy on people's desires. And the information that could be collected had vast commercial value”. Birds, by chance, are the perfect vehicle for such mass observation; sophisticated communicators, expert navigators and mental cartographers, musical artists and having the imagination and empathy of poets. They are one of the most widespread taxonomical groups in the world, common on every continent. And they are humans’ constant companion. "Look out of your window" writes Jenkinson, ominously "the chances are you will see a bird. And that bird, we now know, is seeing you and your desires, and relaying what it sees to The Company".”
O for...
“Jenkinson is cautious in what he says about "The Company". Sometimes the term is capitalised sometimes not; sometimes he seems to be describing a crypto-organisation, sometimes a general movement of opinion in public society. Critics on the various conspiracy theory discussion groups are cynical, with many suggesting that Jenkinson has no idea what the “Company" or “company” is, except that it might be good for his book sales; some suspect that the Erithacus group is "The Company" and that Jenkinson has created ambiguity around its existence in order to sensationalise his story. Whatever, the questions of what remains of the experiment, who it was for and what it was for are left hanging.
The final, most wayward and – for the casual reader – most entertaining chapter of Jenkinson's book, "Resistance is fertile", suggests a fight back against the bird watchers in our parks and gardens; a popular witch hunt against ornithological enthusiasts, obsessive twitchers and even those unsuspecting citizens who have a bird table in their garden or leave a few nuts on their windowsill in the winter. Just before Harp died, Jenkinson claims, she discovered that one group of birds, the seagulls, are both immune to the implants and act as "jamming devices" for the transmission of data. In fact, these seagulls (predominantly Herring Gulls, but other gulls may be involved) actively fight with other birds to prevent such data being transmitted, generating a confusion that may, in evolutionary terms, give the gulls an advantage that allows them to thrive. Initially, comforted by this observation, Harp’s complacency was rattled when she discovered that the robins’ initial resistance to sharing their data was not some instinctive or ‘natural’ protective reaction, but a ‘bargaining’ delay during which they were communicating with much larger data gathering groups and technologies and were now effectively operating as the eyes, ears and wings of the giant information tech companies. In desperation, Harp theorised that by encouraging the further spread of seagulls it might be possible for an effective resistance against this avian mass data gathering to emerge. She was intelligent enough to offer this to her employers much in the way that hackers offer their knowledge to security companies, but, a friendly robin on Harp’s bird table gave the game away and secured her fate!
In his conclusion to "The Dartington Experiment Revealed" Jenkinson pleads that we should all support the herring gulls in their war in the skies above us against all the other birds (although he gives no evidence to support his belief that this has spread beyond the robins). He points out that this is no easy task given the "bad rap" that seagulls get generally, both in the media and among the public...”
The gulls were gone. So lost in the storytelling had she become – and this was perhaps the point of this kind of pseudo-journalism (there was something to be made from this, the way it triggered some innate desire to join things up) – that she had failed to notice the departure of the very birds that it was, supposedly, all about. It was not just the gulls; lying back and taking in the giant blue dome of the morning she could see no birds at all. Up on her knees, no cormorants were evident diving among the waves, and the oystercatchers that had moved off towards the tip of the ‘desert island’ were now out of view. Not even a stray crow or a post-Christmas robin.
“"Why" he asks tantalizingly "are there constant calls by local councils to cull seagulls? Why all those "don't feed the gulls" signs? Why are the tabloids full of anti-gull rhetoric?" His answer: “the company”...”
No caretaker and no sprayers either. How long had she been reading this rubbish? Long enough for the whole ecology of the dunes to change. Mandi tossed the magazine back onto the sands and sprinted off towards the end of the spit. The sprayers must have passed her on the beach or down on the other side close to the golf links. She found the caretaker circling what looked like a pile of flotsam and jetsam on the strandline, picked out against the holiday resort just the other side of the waters of the estuary. The wind was unburdened here and blew straight and cold; its thin squeal was the only sound. The grass, if there ever had been much, was gone from the ‘desert island’, an oyster shape of lightish, almost white, sand. The whole space was bleached by the unlimited sun. Mandi had to pick her way around the dried carcass of an Angler Fish, tins with faint Cyrillic text, and serpentine lengths of synthetic rope.
“What was the argument with the weedkiller people?”
He did not seem to understand. Mandi opened her mouth to ask him something else, but forgot what it was. She looked around. The wind dropped. The cars moved about on the front across the water behind a concrete wall, like machines in a silent movie. No birds. Nothing. The world stood still. Waiting. She dare not open her mouth for fear that a great dark emptiness would be released. It was the most peculiar feeling she had ever felt.
“What are you trying to say?” she finally managed to force out. Staring at the pattern of chewed rubber ball, breezeblock, furniture legs, blue and orange ropes, tree stump, plastic tops and tampon applicator; she felt it would be an insult to poke at it with the toe of her trainer. But he had no more idea what she was talking about than before.
As if they could communicate better with silences, they both paused, jittery, and then they simultaneously turned and walked side by side up the dune path; silently they made their way over the bleached tree roots, the fenced paths, the exposed gabions, and then up through the unsettled dunes, until they found the route towards the entertainments and rides, the industrial estate-like shops and pub; passing the remnants of a long gone border of vegetables and flowers, surviving beneath the thin arms of an anomalous hawthorn bush. All without a word passing between the two of them; Mandi felt that although they did not speak, there was some element of understanding between the two of them, at least in the way that they harmoniously negotiated the slipping sands. Without referring to it or breaking stride, the caretaker shooed away a crow that had settled by the side of the discarded issue of Conspiracy Now! and elegantly scooped up its pages into his long-fingered fork-like hands, hurling it into the first waste bin on the concrete sea defences. Jammed in on top of a full complement of chip papers and Styrofoam punnets, the pages fell open at the avian conspiracy piece.
“That birds may be being used as information gathering devices in the service of a shadowy company, or maybe for the marketing departments of multinational companies, or as some data magnet for society in general, is, even in the work of conspiracy theories, ingenious and far-fetched. It is the outrageousness of the claim (and the general excitement and hilarity with which ‘The Dartington Experiment Revealed’ has been greeted on all sides) that, Jenkinson states is all that has saved him from the same fate as Harp. "Like Cassandra" he writes in the closing paragraph to ‘The Dartington Experiment Revealed’, "I am no doubt doomed to tell the truth that no-one will believe. And this is why I am allowed to live. A harmless nut, a crank, worse than Icke and his like. But all I ask is that you are wary of those apparently friendly feathered creatures that crowd your bird tables and twitter above your streets for they are traders in the currency of your innermost desires".”
Far back, at the end of the dunes, the choppy waters were making their way up towards the strandline, nibbling at the oddly arranged pattern of plastic detritus and driftwood that Mandi was sure the caretaker had been arranging into some meaningful shape when she surprised him. Although he had not responded to her question, and she had fallen into one of her blanknesses for want of a follow up, she had thought she could make some sense of the combination of natural and synthetic objects, the arrangement of organic curls with metallic joints. Now, the encroaching tide was eradicating any hint of meaning that might have been there. At the other end of the long spit, Mandi and the caretaker walked side by side, unspeaking, passing the occasional dog walker, and a young couple hanging on each other’s arms. High above them, a little back and to their right, a monstrous flock of something was murmurating, swinging, somersaulting, flapping like a great sheet of frost-bitten skin, then bunching and exploding, pausing, rounding off at the corners, and the whole thing, impossibly, shifting instantly sideways a quarter of a mile.
That night, embedded among images of black triangular and disc-like craft, a short video of fuzzy white aliens was uploaded to the website of Tony ‘The Summoner’ Sumner-Crabbe.
Go to Bonelines Instalment 4
Go to the Bonelines homepage
The sun rose from behind the sea. The gold disc rested on the flat roof of the ocean. All along the blood and orange cliffs stood yawning families. The exhausted elders had gathered on the red arches above the receding waters; word had reached them in the East through the heavy Yew and they had come, picking their way urgently for days along the faint traces of the ridge and portal ways, until they were ready to drop down through the valleys to the shore; strangers made welcome with acorn liqueur and oily fish in water. Weather cracked lips worked in the cold air as the elders chewed; spitting the bones onto the muddy rocks below. All their eyes, like those of the families, some still arriving, others almost broken by their vigils, were upon the giant and shadowy shape the last lappings of the outgoing tide were stranding on the red sand.
It had first been sighted nine sunrises ago, a dark nick on the skin of the deep.
Since then, drawing ever more witnesses from the woods of the Moor, from the safety of the enclosed tombs on the Great Hill, from the stone villages and rounded homesteads, the shape had grown like a stain; an uninterpretable language gibbering and shouting from the horizon, growing ever louder. At times it was as black as old beasts’ blood in a bowl, at others like the shine of beetles, a blinding ruddiness, turning over and over, like a giant river hunter turning in the air to flash its golden chest; a flashing beacon alternately shielded and fired.
The elders had been called in unfamiliar desperation. The people had long ago given up on unreliable signs and rituals; the cyclopean architecture of the old ways fallen in the grass. Each blade of which told more truth than the old ceremonial archways and slabs of divination. Truth, the elders knew, stood in the trunks of trees, in the juice of fruit, in the way that water came up from a spring clear and full, the way that light fell delightfully through a gathering of young oaks; the truth was as transparent to a staggering child as any wobbling elder. The truth knew no dispensation for foolishness or ancestry, ancientness or decoration; when the time came all lay down upon the same bed of stones and rotted back to the loamy, red or brown certainty.
But now the thing out in the sea was driving them all inland, against the cold north wind at their backs. The whole people were walking in reverse. The green woodpeckers laughed, their insistent yaffles mocking the retreating tribe. The sheep complained of the unreasonableness of their desertion and imprisonment in hill forts. Even the Old Man had been called from his disgraced walking of the avenues in the high oak woods. But he was truly Old and no use to anyone but himself, and he was coming in his own unpunctual time.
No one yet had ventured upon the sands; except for The Thing.
Abandoned by the waters, it was now revealing itself fully. The thick body of a monstrous fish, its face full of gums, its nether parts a sheaf of fins and legs and crawling things. The elders, summoned to make some comparison, stood helpless and speechless above the unfolding darkness on the strandline. They knew of no pattern like this, nothing from the old ways, nothing from the things they knew now – the veins of leaves, the twists of roots, the segments of flowers; none matched the dynamism and slitheriness of this pile of odorous seething life, boiling and writhing in the gilded sand.
As the north wind pressed against the backs of the retreating tribe, three women remained, standing alone under the cliffs. They had arrived together. Later, their families would jostle for priority and pre-eminence. Nothing would ever persuade the three to distinguish between the moments of their arrival or the importance of their connection; two on the heights, one in the deep. The deeps are the heights and the heights are the deeps and the tunnels, caves and springs connect them.
The young women were from the middling sort of families; not known for preservation of the old places, nor for warrior deeds when occasional plunderers met their fates. They did their part when strangers were to be welcomed, they shared and traded and built and maintained their small round houses like their neighbours. They neither wore nor claimed any distinction from them. Nothing had set them apart, until this moment when the Dark Stranger called its daughters, none yet bonded with any other family, and they stepped forward, fearless. Had they recognised the invitation from their dreams? Had they fallen in a faint and fore-seen its dreadful beak and crowd of fingers wrestling up their shore? All would answer the questions, later, and when their descriptions were completed no one would wish, let alone dare, to ask again.
For the moment, their three names rang from the cliffs. These people had no alphabet, no libraries or registries, but their names were no less precious to them than to those peoples that did. First the mothers spoke their names, then the sisters and brothers. The fathers were already moving silently and furiously back down the cliffs, crestfallen.
The great Thing rolled and its million fins flopped queasily up the incline of the beach, spilling strands that fought and re-engaged in contests for firmer holds. Along their surfaces suckers opened up by the nestful, like the beaks of hungry chicks, and each sucker writhed inside with spiders’ traps, mucus webs and barbed saliva, strings of sticky tongue-like beads dangling and beckoning. The local people had welcomed many strange visitors, drinking up the smooth cloths and scarves, the hopeless invocatory symbols on shiny broaches; always hospitable, but never seduced. This stranger, however, was far more foreign, bile-raising and heart-exciting than anything that had come to trade before. Across the cliffs, the blood beat inside the people like the waves on the shore.
The three young ambassadors took three steps towards the Thing, only the woman in the centre took a fourth, into the mesh of dancing arms. The Thing threw out two long and padded ambassadors of its own, seizing on the child-woman and lifting her up and back. She hovered above the Thing, the wind began to whistle gently, her hair spread around her like a fantail, the low sun burnishing her blank face, her eyes turned inwards to her untranslatable feelings. The two remaining women stood their ground; the thick forearms of the Thing abased themselves around their toes and then rose up to their faces; falling backwards with a twist into the shallow waters, beginning the roll of the whole Thing, its globular torso raised itself up on hidden stilts, taller than the sandstone archways, a single eye staring deep into the soulwells of the elders, fixing their faces in masks of fear.
The eye sank down inside itself and the body shuddered like a burning homestead, suddenly losing its supports and sinking, trembling and swelling; the young woman of the people still brandished above its quivering mass. Then it exploded without warning and birthed heaps of wriggling things in a rush of broken water; tiny fishes flapped, crab-like skeletons struggled to roll over on their hard burdens, and tiny versions of the Thing Itself unfolded around each other, hooking onto the ankles and toes of the two young women standing at the base of the Beast from the Deep. The pads at the ends of the two long proboscises lifted the arms of the chosen woman-child in gestures of beckoning and acceptance. Her two fellow initiates responded; peeling the tiny octopi from their toes they laid them gently in the shallows, lifting crustaceans from their flesh they shepherded them down the sands with guiding pushes, the fish they cupped in their palms and lowered them onto the outgoing waves.
Once in the waters, the Thing collected her babies to her sides and into her folds and pockets, sweeping the waters with long fins. Sensing that their Great Mother was about to depart, that whatever commerce had taken place was over, the remaining hundreds of slimy squids, desperate fish and soft lobster-things wormed and crawled and dragged themselves waterwards. The men had sensed it too, and balanced the long spears with flint heads on their palms, running across the beach. Some aimed for the Thing itself, others threatened the tiny creeping things on the strandline. But the two young women still on the sand turned from the crowd of hurrying homunculi longing for their baptism and faced their own fathers, placing their bodies between the flint edges and the slimy Thing and its kind. The father of its captive and elevated princess wept with fury, the daughter of another father, one of the two ambassadors, pushed herself onto his flint head until her blood began to spurt from the flesh at her neck. The father of the Squid-Princess withdrew his spear and the other men did likewise; their flint blades dropped to the sand.
In triumph the Thing thrust its captive even higher into the blue of the morning; around her head bright stars sparkled for a moment, then the Thing rolled again and was suddenly beyond the gentle shelf of sand and into deeper waters, dragging her under. A curtain of spray rose and a cold mist marched over the two young women and down upon the faces of the fathers. A gasp was wrung from the families lined along the red cliff. Softened by the recent storms, parts of the cliff began to tumble down its steep incline; a spill of sand first, and then boulders.
The Thing was surrounded by a churning crowd of little things, boiling the water around her and driving her farther and farther from the shore, until, her thick spindles of flesh having trapped all her children in fasts and holds, she rolled for what seemed a final move and pulled the whole tribe beneath the waves. The cliffs let out a collective howl, a piece of land as big as the Thing itself dislodged, hurling a family into a meaningless heap of limbs onto the hard sand ten heights of one of the people below. From where it had fallen, a miserable trickle of tears dribbled down the frozen iron desert, exposed to the sun for the first time in 300 million years.
The sea spat and the Thing lifted its seal-like shoulders from the brine; then, its two giant fingers were raised, as if to thread twine through the eye of a bone needle, the proboscises of the Thing raised up the Squid Princess, her eyes as blue as the ocean, waters streaming, spring-like, from her ears, nose and mouth. Three times the Thing rolled over dragging her Princess down and three times lifted her up again to hang upon the sky; then with a finality and a deep woomph of sound it crashed back and turned over and was lost to the deep. Only the stain of its shadow was seen again; as it first spread beneath the surface and then shrank again as it sought the sharp cut of the horizon.
The bereaved father raced into the surf, a second time lifting his arm to hurl his spear harpoon-like through the water. But his arm was caught as he brought it back into alignment with his shoulder by the strong thin fingers of another’s daughter, the second unwounded ambassador. Instinctively, he turned the spear and caught her across the face with the centre of the shaft. Her expression did not change; still the look of supreme bliss, that had covered it for a while now, prevailed. The father stood back and the daughter of another opened her lips; a spring of blood fell from her lower lip, flecked with fragments of teeth. When she smiled, she smiled the smile of a conger eel. He had made her of the Deep. He turned and fled, dropping his spear, in horror at what he did and flung himself at the feet of the girl’s mother, begging her to end his life there and then.
The elders halted such nonsense. They had stepped down from their useless exaltation on the archways and stumbled across the sand to where the two young women defended the deep and its shrinking shadow. But the elders had nothing to say; nothing at the heavy Yew had prepared them for this, nothing they had witnessed at their wells, not even the speaking heads had spoken of this, nothing in their meetings with the trees in their groves, joining the gatherings, had pre-empted a monstrous mother from the wet. They had arrived at the shore with a floundering dignity; but there was no liturgy to continue the ritual. They stood useless and gilded, the salt stinging in their wrinkled visages. The girls faced them, almost black against the thin blue of the sea, flashing red with splashes of their own blood. Then he came.
The Old Man, called for, many days before, had finally made it from the woods up on the heights, dragged from his trawling up and down the stone rows dragging up memories of things he had been told as a child about rituals that even his grandparents had never seen. Hoping that one day some magical emissary might appear from a distant god who had simply forgotten for so long to call and yet had suddenly been reminded of His people. He tottered across the sand, between the crowds of people stepping back to let him pass. He searched their eyes and faces for clues as to how he should begin his interpretation. They were as enigmatic and unhelpful as the dumb stone rows!
At a glance he took in the two bleeding women standing between him and the sea; this was not right, all gateways should have two different pillars, one flat and one pointed, one male and one female. He saw from their exalted faces that all righteousness and fear of the Great People had fled from them and they were running with their own madness like worms in a new cadaver. He would get no old truths from them!
Striding between the two pubescent guardians, the Old Man attempted to push his way past them, but they were stood too far apart and holding his palms to the faces of each of them, he made contact with neither, but instead tripped upon a piece of afterbirth and toppled into a heap of placenta.
The bereaved assembly roared until they wept; the outrageousness of it all emerging as a chorus of wolf howls, that fine line between fearful snarl and laughter. The Old Man lay as if dead, pretending dead, until he could stand their laughing no longer and grasping at a large rounded stone pushed himself to his feet with the last portions of his faith, swinging the giant pebble at the nearest young female head. The guardian ducked, her wildcat headpiece rolling down the sand’s incline, the assembly expecting to see some part of her skull still in it. But her head seemed to regenerate and popped up from her long smock and back onto her shoulders. The Old Man formed an egg shape of surprise with his lips, which is how he died; the same expression frozen as the girl-guardian grabbed his ankle and tipped him helplessly back into a rockpool, his body writhing and struggling against the inevitable airless death amongst the indifferent shrimp and blennies that now played between the final bubbles of his precious air. And so the last of the old priesthood died by a symbolism that even he had forgotten.
The trickle from the red cliff had become a spout, silver and glutinous in the rising light.
A kind of half-hearted nostalgic anger rippled through the men and one or two stepped forwards to discipline the girls. A flock of oystercatchers resting on the sand behind the chosen girls took fright at the movement of the men, and took precautionary wing, flapping and hovering, flashing their blankets of black and white; only for moments were the birds airborne, but for those moments it seemed as if something like huge feathered chequerboard wings had begun to grow from the shoulders of the two girls.
One by one the families approached the girls and made some display of honour and respect; but when the family of the sea-princess approached them, it was the girls that knelt and bowed and made many improvised signs and gestures. Beckoning them to lead, the girls guided the bereaved family from the beach, and the families processed inland, carrying the limbs of the broken family, back to the more familiar spaces of their everyday; leaving the elders to bury the old man's body in the sand for the crabs and lugworms to feast upon; denying him the final bed of stones, an anonymous grave out of sight of the sky was the mark of his shame.
8
The cluster of birds curled, unfolded, splayed and puckered. Nothing unusual in that. The ‘desert island’ at the ends of the dunes always attracted heaving flocks of birds; mostly brief tourists on their way to or from an African wintering or a northern mating. The whole cluster abruptly sagged, squared off at its corners and then, unnaturally, shifted wholesale to the right.
“Didn’t know birds c...”, Mandi mumbled to herself.
They were not her quarry. That was making its way on a parallel path through the marram grass, about thirty yards ahead of her and clearly stalking its own prey. Dressed in green and grey camouflage trousers and hooded jacket, it stood out from any of the casual strollers who might have ventured out onto the dunes of The Sett that morning; partly by its dress, but partly by the pace it kept up through the thin and slippery sand. Like some persistence hunter, it rushed along, low to the ground and almost silent. Any racket or rustle was lost in the blustery gale blowing up from the sea.
Mandi’s intention was to find the caretaker. He was nowhere to be found on the site; but one of the residents had assured her that he was known for taking a mid-morning or mid-afternoon walk to the end of the dunes, dependent on the tides, before resuming his duties. Just as Mandi was contemplating – as best she could at pace, though easier on the more solid lower path she had chosen – that if the camouflaged figure was stalking Crabbe then her attentions might be convenient, even fortuitous, when it threw itself to the ground, almost out of sight beneath the yellowing grass. Mandi clambered up the side of the dune, aware that this was not recommended by the wardens’ notices that she would one day like to collect together in one place and burn. Or maybe plant them all in the same place; collect all the warning signs and nannie state noticeboards and assemble them in one huge forest of No and Don’t and Beware.
BE AWARE! JELLYFISH ARE BEING WASHED UP ON THIS BEACH. KEEP CHILDREN & DOGS AWAY.
Whoever the tracker was, they knew nothing about covering their back. In the soft sand, Mandi was able to creep within a few inches of their splayed boot-shod feet. She could see their gloved hands manipulating a phone; they appeared to be videoing something up ahead on the ‘desert island’. A rolled up magazine poked from the back pocket of their liverish fatigues. Mandi knelt on one knee and looked beyond the stalker. High above the churning waters, where the estuary met the turning tide, a second manuscript of birds was unfurling, exploding into single characters and joining up in spiralling columns. The stalker’s focus was lower; Mandi eased her body onto the sand, almost side by side with the recumbent stalker.
Through a gap between two dunes she could see that something odd was going on around the ‘desert island’. Figures in white hazard suits were moving about, four or five of them, almost in a dance, swinging past each other, but making ground from the seaward to the landward side of the dunes. She could see the screen of the stalker’s phone. On there the figures in white, only their upper bodies and hooded faces in view, were blurred and sinister, looking not unlike nuclear plant workers from someone’s reactionary 1950s imagination. Reflected in the screen, Mandi saw the moon-like face of the stalker; a man about her own age, soft features, fair eyebrows, milky blue eyes wide with terror and a slit for a mouth tense against the world. But if she could see him, he...
The moony stalker abruptly but silently rolled onto his back away from Mandi. She leapt to her feet and for one moment considered placing a foot square upon his chest.
“What the fuck do you think you’re up to?”
“Aliens...” mumbled the stalker, straining to catch his balance as he careened to his feet, holding up his phone. He pointed in the general direction of the white figures, who Mandi could see quite clearly now were manipulating long nozzled sprays, carrying cream knapsacks of weedkiller or similar strapped to their backs.
“Aliens...”
And off he took, as fast as his camouflaged legs could carry him, back towards the entertainments and holiday camps of The Sett, kicking up fans of sand as he went.
“Nutter,” Mandi decided.
The black figure of the caretaker had appeared among the white-suited wardens and a heated discussion was in progress. Above the argument a smaller flock of Oystercatchers, recognisable to Mandi by their orange beaks and angular black and white plumage, banked gently and then swerved, almost tumbling upwards. Whatever the Caretaker had said to the white weedkiller operatives, it was either controversial or exciting, because they all began to wave their arms, as if in time with the swinging chequerboard above them. Mandi had no wish to interrupt them; she only wanted to speak with the caretaker, so she took a seat in the grass.
The moon-faced man had dropped his magazine in the sand. Mandi rescued it and shook it free of crystal grains. It was some sort of conspiracy ‘zine; not one she recognised, though she had read a whole load once for an article on the Huffington Post site. Mostly these nerds and nutters communicated digitally, but there were still a few traditionalists who refused to leave any electronic trace. The ‘zine was titled Conspiracy Now!
Mandi flicked through a few pages; none of the usual round ups of anomalous news, but a collection of longish essays. Something on numerology and the Futures markets, the involvement of the Illuminati in the production of microbeads (hardly a necessary participation?), a historical feature about something called Operation Northwoods, nothing on aliens or ufos, but there was an entertaining article about birdwatchers that Mandi read as she waited for the caretaker and the sprayers to be finished with each other, glancing over occasionally to check how the argument was progressing.
"Who runs the country?" Sir John Betjeman, gentleman poet and judicious conservationist, once asked rhetorically. "The RSPB. Their members are behind every hedge."
Mandi almost roared. She loved bitchy Tories.
In a recent publication of his research, well-respected author Jason Jenkinson, PhD, suggests it is not the RSPB birdwatchers but the birds themselves that we should be wary of. Conspiracy Now! reporter Patty Jones tells the story...”
Mandi licked her lips and tasted the salt.
“In 1998 a small group of physicists and avian biologists gathered at the Swiss Institute of Ornithology, Lausanne, to review the current literature on possible methods by which birds might make use of the earth's magnetic field to orientate themselves and to undertake their long migratory journeys. What the group suspected was that photons entering a bird's eye were causing chemical reactions in the bird's retina giving the bird a visual readout of their direction. Flying in one relation to the Earth’s magnetic poles coloured their vision one way, flying in another relation coloured it differently; in short, through the complexities of a process known as "quantum entanglement" it was proposed that birds could quite literally "see" the poles. As there was no human equivalent to this sense, it was impossible to provide an analogy in human terms – the notion of their vision being coloured, for example, might be perceived quite differently by the bird – so the phenomenon is described in the literature as "quantum vision". The group agreed to pursue its theoretical work, and called itself Erithacus, after the scientific name for the European robin, on which the early work into this sensory phenomenon had been carried out.”
This was vaguely interesting. Mandi had heard of something similar. Wasn’t that Iraqi-British guy who was always on the BBC involved?
“Parallel to the heavyweight theoretical work on quantum vision, the Oxford Laboratory of Ornithology was working hard on the neural basis for song learning in birds. This research had taken an interesting direction around the Millennium when for the first time ultra-sensitive neural probes were developed that were able to map the higher vocal centres of a range of avian subjects. Initially this was done in the hope of learning something by inference about language development in humans, but took an unexpected turn when Dr Amelia Harp, a brilliant young avian biologist, developed a tiny subcutaneous implant that could be inserted in the bird's skull that could send information about neural activity remotely to a field researcher. For the first time, it was possible to study the brain activity of a large population of a particular species in the field.
Harp’s device quickly became the standard tool of ornithological research. At the thirteenth International Ornithological Congress at Dartington Hall in Devon in May 2013...”
Hold on. Dartington was up the road. Ten miles away, a little more?
“...a chance meeting between Harp and members of the Erithacus group in the bar of the White Heart....”
Yes, she had had a drink there, long time back, the only time she had met up with Anne and Bryan close to the camp, but it was the ‘White Hart’ not ‘Heart’. How were you supposed to take these things seriously if they couldn’t even get the simple facts right? Like most journalism. Sloppy. A crow landed nearby, staring at her askance.
“... led to discussions about the theoretical possibilities of testing quantum vision in the field. Professor Bert Marley suggested an experiment with robins in the grounds of the estate. Might it be possible, he speculated, to use the implant to gain an understanding of the lived experience of robin's vision. "To see through a robin's eyes" as he crudely put it.”
Mandi wondered what it would be like to see herself through the crow’s eyes, but when she looked up, it had gone.
“What happened that spring day, when the first implant was injected into a robin's skull, became known as the now infamous “Dartington Experiment”. Its actual results are unclear as subsequent documentation was almost instantly classified and those involved have refused to discuss its findings (some even deny that any such experiment ever took place), but fragments are known from a handful of courageous freelance and non-tenured researchers disturbed by what they believe may be the consequences of this work and who have subsequently and energetically, but with little success, sought to gain the attention of both the orthodox scientific world and then the online conspiracy communities. It seems that the story is unusually toxic; those researchers who have continued to pursue its mysteries now haunt the conspiracy message boards and occasional fringe conferences, lonely figures who, perhaps uniquely, have lost all credibility with heretic and orthodox alike. Those, that is, that have not lost their minds entirely.”
A bit harsh, even for conspiracy gossip.
“What is known is that the original work produced considerably more information than was expected; the acres of redacted text on those few documents extracted by Freedom of Information requests have proved that beyond doubt. Jason Jenkinson, one of the leading conspiracy theorists of the “Dartington Experiment”, even claims that an analysis of the initial and now redacted data, and its subsequent visualisation in the informal research group’s computer models, clearly demonstrated that the 23X156 (the ring number of the robin provided with the implant) was observing her observers. The irony of this was not lost on the theoretical physicists (at least those of the Copenhagen persuasion) in the group. What's more, the information visualised was not about surface matters such as shape and form, but rather 23X156 appeared to be sensitive to her observers' feelings and even thoughts. According to one unattributed source: “we felt that very quickly we became caught up in a loop of the subject’s own devising, of the bird’s own devising”. According to Jenkinson, the small bird could sense potential aggression in a predator (human in this case); and while the data was less than unequivocal, before the experiments were halted the investigators believed that they could distinguish in the bird’s responses descriptions of human nervousness, sexual desire, attention, covetousness, elation and jealousy. More than this, the tiny robin could transmit this information to others of their flock, and, when a second receiver/broadcaster was implanted, this information was understood… a useful adaptive advantage, no doubt, and not wholly unsurprising. Once this had occurred, the research subjects, according to gossip around colleagues of members of the Erithacus group, were almost uncontainable and prone to strategies that resisted data gathering. Jenkinson quotes one anonymous source: “what all the fuss tells you is that the experiment failed, the data was useless and whatever the birds experienced... is for the birds”. However, what remains a mystery and seems to have turned upside down the worlds of those involved, was the key (apparent) finding that 23X156 could "see" and transmit her observers’ innermost desires.
Jenkinson claims, the project then "went dark" and has remained on ice ever since.”
Mandi’s concentration – though the article was nonsensical, there was metaphorical material there, she could see the potential pitch – was broken by the shadows of a group of herring gulls that had seemingly stationed themselves above her; riding the thermals so that they remained stationary in relation to the ground while barely moving their wings. Mandi wondered how they did that; but one avian mystery was enough...
“The official accounts state that the Erithacus group disbanded in September 2013 having, according to the press release, "reached the conclusion of its theoretical work". Professor Marley, subsequent to a minor stroke, retired to a quiet life to follow his love of birdwatching, moving to Kingsbridge and becoming an active bird ringer and council member of the Devon Bird Preservation Society. Amelia Harp, tragically, died in 2015 in a cycling accident while in the Pyrenees, a promising career brutally cut short, according to police reports, by the driver of a vintage Citroen DS temporarily blinded by the sun on a sharp mountain bend.”
Here we go.
“Jenkinson, in his book "The Dartington Experiment Revealed", which draws together arguments published on various websites with much greater biographical detail, accepts none of this. He claims that Marley, far from being retired, is through his work as a ringer, till actively progressing the fieldwork for the Erithacus group; recruiting many unsuspecting bird enthusiasts to gather data for the project. And he claims that Harp was deliberately killed at the point when she was about to blow the whistle on the whole project at a conference in Nice.”
Well, if Professor Marley is still active, he is active not far away in Kingsbridge, halfway between the Bay and Plymouth...
“Readers get to the nub of "The Dartington Experiment Revealed" in chapter seven of the book. Entitled "Open Your Eyes", the account claims to reveal the true nature of the Erithacus group's work. Simply put, states Jenkinson, “the Group discovered it was possible to use birds to spy on people's desires. And the information that could be collected had vast commercial value”. Birds, by chance, are the perfect vehicle for such mass observation; sophisticated communicators, expert navigators and mental cartographers, musical artists and having the imagination and empathy of poets. They are one of the most widespread taxonomical groups in the world, common on every continent. And they are humans’ constant companion. "Look out of your window" writes Jenkinson, ominously "the chances are you will see a bird. And that bird, we now know, is seeing you and your desires, and relaying what it sees to The Company".”
O for...
“Jenkinson is cautious in what he says about "The Company". Sometimes the term is capitalised sometimes not; sometimes he seems to be describing a crypto-organisation, sometimes a general movement of opinion in public society. Critics on the various conspiracy theory discussion groups are cynical, with many suggesting that Jenkinson has no idea what the “Company" or “company” is, except that it might be good for his book sales; some suspect that the Erithacus group is "The Company" and that Jenkinson has created ambiguity around its existence in order to sensationalise his story. Whatever, the questions of what remains of the experiment, who it was for and what it was for are left hanging.
The final, most wayward and – for the casual reader – most entertaining chapter of Jenkinson's book, "Resistance is fertile", suggests a fight back against the bird watchers in our parks and gardens; a popular witch hunt against ornithological enthusiasts, obsessive twitchers and even those unsuspecting citizens who have a bird table in their garden or leave a few nuts on their windowsill in the winter. Just before Harp died, Jenkinson claims, she discovered that one group of birds, the seagulls, are both immune to the implants and act as "jamming devices" for the transmission of data. In fact, these seagulls (predominantly Herring Gulls, but other gulls may be involved) actively fight with other birds to prevent such data being transmitted, generating a confusion that may, in evolutionary terms, give the gulls an advantage that allows them to thrive. Initially, comforted by this observation, Harp’s complacency was rattled when she discovered that the robins’ initial resistance to sharing their data was not some instinctive or ‘natural’ protective reaction, but a ‘bargaining’ delay during which they were communicating with much larger data gathering groups and technologies and were now effectively operating as the eyes, ears and wings of the giant information tech companies. In desperation, Harp theorised that by encouraging the further spread of seagulls it might be possible for an effective resistance against this avian mass data gathering to emerge. She was intelligent enough to offer this to her employers much in the way that hackers offer their knowledge to security companies, but, a friendly robin on Harp’s bird table gave the game away and secured her fate!
In his conclusion to "The Dartington Experiment Revealed" Jenkinson pleads that we should all support the herring gulls in their war in the skies above us against all the other birds (although he gives no evidence to support his belief that this has spread beyond the robins). He points out that this is no easy task given the "bad rap" that seagulls get generally, both in the media and among the public...”
The gulls were gone. So lost in the storytelling had she become – and this was perhaps the point of this kind of pseudo-journalism (there was something to be made from this, the way it triggered some innate desire to join things up) – that she had failed to notice the departure of the very birds that it was, supposedly, all about. It was not just the gulls; lying back and taking in the giant blue dome of the morning she could see no birds at all. Up on her knees, no cormorants were evident diving among the waves, and the oystercatchers that had moved off towards the tip of the ‘desert island’ were now out of view. Not even a stray crow or a post-Christmas robin.
“"Why" he asks tantalizingly "are there constant calls by local councils to cull seagulls? Why all those "don't feed the gulls" signs? Why are the tabloids full of anti-gull rhetoric?" His answer: “the company”...”
No caretaker and no sprayers either. How long had she been reading this rubbish? Long enough for the whole ecology of the dunes to change. Mandi tossed the magazine back onto the sands and sprinted off towards the end of the spit. The sprayers must have passed her on the beach or down on the other side close to the golf links. She found the caretaker circling what looked like a pile of flotsam and jetsam on the strandline, picked out against the holiday resort just the other side of the waters of the estuary. The wind was unburdened here and blew straight and cold; its thin squeal was the only sound. The grass, if there ever had been much, was gone from the ‘desert island’, an oyster shape of lightish, almost white, sand. The whole space was bleached by the unlimited sun. Mandi had to pick her way around the dried carcass of an Angler Fish, tins with faint Cyrillic text, and serpentine lengths of synthetic rope.
“What was the argument with the weedkiller people?”
He did not seem to understand. Mandi opened her mouth to ask him something else, but forgot what it was. She looked around. The wind dropped. The cars moved about on the front across the water behind a concrete wall, like machines in a silent movie. No birds. Nothing. The world stood still. Waiting. She dare not open her mouth for fear that a great dark emptiness would be released. It was the most peculiar feeling she had ever felt.
“What are you trying to say?” she finally managed to force out. Staring at the pattern of chewed rubber ball, breezeblock, furniture legs, blue and orange ropes, tree stump, plastic tops and tampon applicator; she felt it would be an insult to poke at it with the toe of her trainer. But he had no more idea what she was talking about than before.
As if they could communicate better with silences, they both paused, jittery, and then they simultaneously turned and walked side by side up the dune path; silently they made their way over the bleached tree roots, the fenced paths, the exposed gabions, and then up through the unsettled dunes, until they found the route towards the entertainments and rides, the industrial estate-like shops and pub; passing the remnants of a long gone border of vegetables and flowers, surviving beneath the thin arms of an anomalous hawthorn bush. All without a word passing between the two of them; Mandi felt that although they did not speak, there was some element of understanding between the two of them, at least in the way that they harmoniously negotiated the slipping sands. Without referring to it or breaking stride, the caretaker shooed away a crow that had settled by the side of the discarded issue of Conspiracy Now! and elegantly scooped up its pages into his long-fingered fork-like hands, hurling it into the first waste bin on the concrete sea defences. Jammed in on top of a full complement of chip papers and Styrofoam punnets, the pages fell open at the avian conspiracy piece.
“That birds may be being used as information gathering devices in the service of a shadowy company, or maybe for the marketing departments of multinational companies, or as some data magnet for society in general, is, even in the work of conspiracy theories, ingenious and far-fetched. It is the outrageousness of the claim (and the general excitement and hilarity with which ‘The Dartington Experiment Revealed’ has been greeted on all sides) that, Jenkinson states is all that has saved him from the same fate as Harp. "Like Cassandra" he writes in the closing paragraph to ‘The Dartington Experiment Revealed’, "I am no doubt doomed to tell the truth that no-one will believe. And this is why I am allowed to live. A harmless nut, a crank, worse than Icke and his like. But all I ask is that you are wary of those apparently friendly feathered creatures that crowd your bird tables and twitter above your streets for they are traders in the currency of your innermost desires".”
Far back, at the end of the dunes, the choppy waters were making their way up towards the strandline, nibbling at the oddly arranged pattern of plastic detritus and driftwood that Mandi was sure the caretaker had been arranging into some meaningful shape when she surprised him. Although he had not responded to her question, and she had fallen into one of her blanknesses for want of a follow up, she had thought she could make some sense of the combination of natural and synthetic objects, the arrangement of organic curls with metallic joints. Now, the encroaching tide was eradicating any hint of meaning that might have been there. At the other end of the long spit, Mandi and the caretaker walked side by side, unspeaking, passing the occasional dog walker, and a young couple hanging on each other’s arms. High above them, a little back and to their right, a monstrous flock of something was murmurating, swinging, somersaulting, flapping like a great sheet of frost-bitten skin, then bunching and exploding, pausing, rounding off at the corners, and the whole thing, impossibly, shifting instantly sideways a quarter of a mile.
That night, embedded among images of black triangular and disc-like craft, a short video of fuzzy white aliens was uploaded to the website of Tony ‘The Summoner’ Sumner-Crabbe.
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