The Dinosaur Feather(9)

The truth was that things between Anna and Thomas were a total nightmare. They had known each other only five months, and they didn’t live together. Obviously, they would live together now that they were having a baby.

It had started with a chance meeting in a bar in Vesterbro. He was way out of her league, she thought, when she spotted him by the window to the courtyard where he stood with his arms folded, feet at ten to two, with a very straight back and a cigarette in a clenched fist. His T-shirt was rather tight, but it was probably hard to resist the temptation to dress like that when you had a great body, which he did.

Smug, Anna had thought. Thomas was a doctor at Hvidovre Hospital, he was currently training in his specialty, and he was in his mid-thirties. His hair was short, almost white; his skin was fine and freckled, and his eyes were very intense. He left at ten to two; just like his feet, Anna thought, as she watched him exit the bar.

He called her two days later. She had told him her name, and he had found her on the Internet. Dinner? Okay. From then on, they were dating.

It had gone wrong almost immediately. Anna still couldn’t understand exactly how it had happened, but the fact was that she had never been so miserable in all her life, and how this was linked directly to her being madly in love got lost in the drama. Or it did at the time. Thomas loved her, he told her so. But she didn’t believe it. You’re a bit paranoid, he laughed. Anna, however, loved him to distraction. The more he kept her at arm’s length, the more she loved him. She didn’t have a clue what was going on. She didn’t know if they were a couple, if he loved her (he said he did), or if he didn’t (he behaved that way). He would arrive several hours late, or fail to show up altogether without a phone call of explanation. She didn’t know if they had a future together; she didn’t know where he was, why he said the things he said, why sometimes she was allowed to go out with him and his friends and other times not: “Why would you want to do that, sweetheart?” She could offer no reply. She just wanted to go.

Thomas told her to calm down. “Don’t ruin it, it’s fine as it is,” he would say. She tried, but it didn’t work. Thomas had only met Anna’s parents a few times, and none of the occasions had been a success. Anna had never met Thomas’s parents. In the spring Thomas wanted a two-week break; “I love you Anna, never doubt that, I just can’t have this pressure all the time,” he had said and looked irritably at her. In fact, he had been so exhausted after an all-night argument, which Anna had started, that he nearly gave a patient the wrong medication. During their two weeks apart, Anna did a pregnancy test.

“Looks like we’re having a baby,” he said and smiled when they met up again. Anna stared at him.

“Are you pleased?”

“I would have chosen a different time,” he said.

They moved in together shortly before Lily was born. That was nearly three years ago.


The Natural History Museum was an upward extension of the Institute of Biology, and it towered like a decorated ferry over the surrounding buildings. The top two floors of the museum were open to the public. The rest of the building consisted of laboratories and offices symmetrically arranged around a fireproof core where collections of insects, mollusks and vertebrates had been gathered, identified and preserved by Danish scientists for hundreds of years. The Vertebrate Collection on the third floor housed a vast amount of vertebrates; downstairs were two invertebrate departments with mollusks, and furthest down was the whale basement, which included the mounted skeleton of an adult baleen whale.

Anna’s external supervisor was Dr. Tybjerg. He was a vertebrate morphologist who specialized in the evolution of cynodont birds. He was Professor Helland’s polar opposite. He had brown, thinning hair, dark eyes, a small nimble body, and he wore pebble glasses at work that made Anna smile because he looked like a parody of himself. Dr. Tybjerg was shy and very earnest. He never canceled their meetings, and he always arrived well prepared, bringing with him any books he had mentioned at their previous meeting or a photocopy of an article he had promised her. His speech was staccato. He added impressive amounts of sugar to his strong black tea. To begin with he had found it hard to look her in the eye and had clammed up like an oyster on the few occasions Anna had asked him personal questions.

Dr. Tybjerg was the first person to take Anna to the Vertebrate Collection.

“You can’t learn about bones from books,” he said, as they walked down the corridor to the collection. “And you must never,” he added, giving Anna a stern look, “draw any conclusions about bones from drawings or photographs—never!”