When she was a young girl, maybe two or three years old, her family used to vacation at Lyme Regis, in Dorset. There were a few photographs in the family album that helped Cynthia remember this time. The crisp, cold feeling of the water as she ran in and out of the waves, the radiant '70's windbreakers where her mother sheltered on the chilly beach, the scary feeling of excitement atop the gigantic green slide on the way back home to their rented cottage, and the smell of coalfires in the evening air. In London there was no more coal burning after the clean air act, but her mother said the smell reminded her of her own childhood. Sometimes Cynthia wondered how many of these memories were true, and how many had been fabricated and embellished by speculation each time she looked again at the old photographs. But the photographs were black and white, so the radiance of the psychedelic windbreakers, and the greenness of the vast slide, were things she must have remembered. And, of course, the smell of coal, and the touch of the water.
And the ammonites. They never took pictures of the ammonites, but she remembered them clearly. Inset in the neighbours' whitewashed garden wall, all around the museum and on the pavement outside. She asked her father about them, calling them snails. Those are ammonites, he said, relics of ancient underwater sea-snails. He explained how a fossil is formed, by the dead creature being pressed into stone, and eventually rotting away, the cavity itself slowly filling with rock. Cynthia thought of the spiral inside the Brighton rock that her grandmother once gave her, and wondered if that too was a fossil. She searched underwater, among the seashells, for ammonites, wanting to prove they were not extinct, staying in the icy English Channel so long that her parents first worried about her feet turning blue and then since she seemed happy enough jokingly said to the concerned onlookers that she must have seal blood in her. On the way home, she drew ammonites in the sand, spreading the sand on the foot of the green slide and digging spirals in it until the last of the late evening sun vanished over the playground wall.
Eventually, her search turned from the sea itself to the rocks and cliffs of the sea wall. She dug at the rocks with her fingernails, trying to unearth fossils. It was tiresome work, and she was just about to turn to collecting seashells instead when she saw a large rock in the shape of a woman bending down and washing her hair. Cynthia felt the form of the rock, looking closely, and found to her surprise a tiny bit of the ridge of an ammonite's shell, with which she had become so familiar by rubbing her fingers on the neibhbours' wall every evening until they had become calloused. In her imagination, she pictured the ammonite sitting inside the rock, coiled in the woman's belly, like the fat ripples her mother called her 'spare tire'. She wanted it. It was her ammonite. But she had no idea how to get it out, and soon their vacation was over and they returned to London with only the black and white pictures in the family album, none of them showing the ammonites.
They never returned to Lyme Regis, for shortly after Cynthia's younger brother was born. Her mother placed Cynthia's hand on her belly, and instead of an ammonite she felt inside her brother kicking. He was born with a murmer in his heart, and a mitral valve prolapse which meant that he could die at any moment. Her father explained that the heart pumps blood through two loops, one to the lungs and one to the rest of the body. The hear squeezes the old blood into a new chamber, and the mitral valve stops it from coming back and mixing with the new blood. Like the valve on the big orange bouncy toy that he let her inflate. In her baby brother's heart, the valve was broken, so some of the blood flowed right back when the heart squeezed, making a murmering sound. She tried to listen to his chest on one of the brief visits he had at home, like listening to her grandmother's conch, hoping to hear the sound of the sea. But she didn't hear anything.
Instead of vacations, Cynthia went to kindergarten and her father picked her up while her mother was in and out of the hospital with the new baby. Her father took her to the Museum of Natural History, where she saw the giant ammonites in the entrance hall, just like her ammonite on the beach. She wanted to buy some little ammonites in the museum shop, but they were too expensive so they bought gemstones for her mother, for when she came home. Her mother put on a polite smile, when they hid the stones around the room for her, like fossils, but Cynthia saw her father's face fall. They both fussed over the baby, and Cynthia bounced around wildly on her orange toy, abusing it to see if the little valve would give way like the one in her brother's heart.
When she was an art student, Cynthia went back to Dorset, on a field trip to learn about stonecarving. She and her fellow students stayed at a caravan park on the cliffs, overlooking a small, dingy beach where they had bonfires every night and smoked. During the day, they drove to the quarry, all eight of them in one student's old Volkswagen Golf, with the windows rolled down, blaring Ziggy Stardust out loud to the rolling hills and craggy old people of this large village or small town. There they were lectured by a sculptor who taught art at the nearby community college, then let loose on the rocks, vaguely supported by a local stone mason. The rocks were not only from the quarry itself. The place was a graveyard for old gravestones. The town had decomissioned two cemeteries to make way for a shopping centre, and dumped the stones in the quarry. A few graves remained, ornamentally sandwiched between the Vodafone shop and a council estate, and it seemed nobody mourned the loss of the largest part. Then other towns began dumping their gravestones here from all over Dorset, adding to the natural resource of rock, undoing centuries of human labour and rebuilding mountains in the derelict quarry, piling up high on the cliffs what had long ago fallen into the sea.
Cynthia wandered among the discarded gravestones and boulders, liking the idea of finding something here to use rather than carving more stone out of the quarry's rockface. She started collecting interesting letters and inscriptions, copying them into her sketchbook. Then she sketched a boulder that looked to her as though there was a tortoise hiding inside. She wanted to find a form already hidden in the rock, so there would be less to carve out. She had no idea what she wanted to make, and so imposing her own will on the quarry was meaningless.
There was a rock that looked to her like a dancer, and another that looked like a woman, washing her hair. Cynthia began sketching this rock from all sides, drawing the form of the woman inside in the style of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth. Henry Moore sculpted woman as a landscape, and Barbara Hepworth made women coming out of the hills. They both drew with contour lines and frames, and so Cynthia proceeded to form her washerwoman from all angles inside of the rock. Then, something made her decide to feel the rock. This rock looked familiar. She did not normally imagine women washing inside of rocks. She knew exactly what she was looking for, and she found it - more by touch than by sight, because the whole thing was now faded and a little grimy. The ammonite ridge. Cynthia was convinced this was the rock from her childhood beach in Lyme Regis. She had found her ammonite again.
All plans to minimize carving by seeking a form close to the surface of the rock vanished from her mind, and she began chipping away with her hammer and chisel, mining for ammonite. The stone mason saw her and started to help, saying she had found a nice, big one. He could understand wanting to take it home. As they worked, he told her about how he became a mason, the years of training and the initiation consisting of carving two linked rings using only hand tools. The rock was hard, and after working all day they had only exposed a few centimetres of the outside curve of the ammonite's shell. It seemed to be intact. He suggested renting a power tool and generator to finish the job the next day, as Cynthia and her group were going back to London at the end of the week.
That night, they went to the local pub and drank apple scrumpy. Then they went back to the beach, and since they were out of dope somebody suggested smoking the wild fennel that grew all along the steep path back to the caravan. The next morning, Cynthia woke up in the bed, which was strange because she normally slept on the couch. The teacher from their art school came early, which was also strange, and told them that they had to go home. Apparently, the neighours complained that someone had been seen dancing around on the top of the caravan, threatening people with a mallet, and they were all making a lot of noise. Cynthia was taken aside and gently blamed for being the cause of this collective punishment. At first she remembered nothing. Then, she dimly recalled climbing up the front of the van. She was sure that she handed her mallet to someone down below, so that she could get a better grip, but perhaps they had passed it up to her later. Why was she holding a mallet?
A few weeks later, she and her brother drove back to Dorset to retrieve the ammonite. As children, they had never been close, since her parents took care to protect Jacob from the trials and tribulations of childhood, worrying about his heart. Cynthia felt left out and not a little jealous. Now Jacob was himself out of the house and going to college, and Cynthia hoped they could get to know one another as adults, beyond the constraints of their close-knit family. Once in the Dorset village, they found the friendly mason and with his help, hired a power tool and a generator. They had until sundown to carve out the ammonite, plenty of time since it was June 21st, the summer solstice and longest day of the year. Jacob was good at finding fossils. As a child, he had asked for an archaeologist's pick-axe for his birthday, and promptly came home with a large rock containing a dinosaur's footprint. His finding was confirmed by several bemused experts among their parents' friends. After extracting the ammonite, Cynthia planned to show Jacob the beach. Maybe they could light a bonfire together, to celebrate Midsummer's Night.
When they got to the quarry things started going awry. First of all, it was hard even for all three of them to carry the generator all the way from the car to the rock. Then, the thing wouldn't start up and they had to carry it all the way back and drive into town for a replacement. With two people chipping away by hand, they had revealed about a quarter way around the ammonite. It was nearly sunset when they finally got the second generator going, and Cynthia realized they would have to risk paying for another day's rental. As the sun was setting over the hills, tinging the white walls of the quarry with its red light, Jacob, who had been chipping away at the rock, suddenly collapsed.
Cynthia went through in her mind the steps of cardiac ressuscitation that she had learned years ago at a first aid class. She wondered if this was even the right thing to do for someone with Jacob's condition, the mitral valve prolapse. In that moment, she remembered a recurrent dream or nightmare she used to have about her brother, when they were younger. She had been left to take care of him while her parents went to get something out from the car. They were at a stately home, in the garden, a place way out in the countryside and larger than life. Jacob was just learning to walk, and he stumbled into a maze. Cynthia saw him enter, and ran after him, surprised he was not right there in the entrance. The passageway bent around in a spiral between the tall, dark green boxtrees. Cynthia kept going, expecting to find Jacob at each next bend, running faster and faster. Finally, she arrived at the centre of the spiral, exhausted, and there was no Jacob. She felt terrible. She felt so ashamed, what would she say to her parents when they came back and discovered she had lost her brother? They must be back by now, she should go out and ask them for help. To her surprise, she noticed there were not one but two exits from the place where she found herself, in her mind the centre of the maze. She looked from one to the other with increasing trepidation, trying to remember which passageway she had come from. Which was the way back out? This was the point when she always woke up.
While Cynthia hesitated, the stone mason, who knew nothing of Jacob's condition, had already applied CPR. Jacob spluttered awake, and asked where he was. Cynthia took him to hospital, while the stone mason returned the power tools. Ah well, she thought, he will get the ammonite himself another day. Small payment for rescuing my brother, while I was shamefully trapped in indecision. They had a long wait in emergency, because by now Jacob seemed to be fine. He told Cynthia how he had felt he was falling, not from the little rock but down a great cliff, as his life flashed before his eyes. He saw the light at the end of it. It was hours before he was seen by a doctor and sent home, and by that time Cynthia was too worried about him to attempt any bonfire on the beach. They stayed at a small, innocuous bed and breakfast which was already on the way back to London.
Cynthia and her brother never got close, and eventually he suffered a cardiac arrest and suddenly died. She held as a comfort the image of the light he saw at the end of his near-death experience in Dorset. A year later, when it was time to set the stone for his grave, she drove back just in case the ammonite was still there. To her surprise, there it was, exactly as they had left it, about a quarter revealed from the belly of the woman bending down to wash her hair. Cynthia found the stone mason again, and he helped her load the entire rock onto her van this time. She went back to her old sketchbook, and thought about simply carving the stone woman in the style of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth as she had first envisaged, instead of trying to get 'her ammonite' out of the rock. In the end, she did not have the heart to do even that. She simply lumped the whole thing on his grave. Maybe others would see in it the woman washing her hair, maybe not. Maybe they would find something different. The ammonite was there now, for all to see. At the end of the day, she didn't even know him.
Writing stories is a little like stonecarving. Sometimes one comes with a plot fully formed and one hacks away at the quarry, regardless of the shape of the rock. Sometimes one looks at the rocks of life and sees something hiding just beneath the surface, waiting to be told. If you take a moment to look at the rocks, maybe you will see something there. It's not always about finding ammonites.
