Page Title

PROLOGUE - SURFACE

I don't know who I'm writing this for - Dad I suppose, but maybe me as well. So much is clear now and it feels important to get things down on paper before everything really hits me and the utter devastation starts. The book is finished but I'm adding this as I've got this train journey to think and remember and not worry about anything practical at all. When I see the church and everyone in black I think that's when the floodgates will open and that'll be it.

We've just flashed past a graveyard somewhere near Peterborough. If he'd known that he would die doing what he loved, like he did, I think he would have settled for that. Life is such a flimsy thread we can't take anything for granted and he always worried so much about me…………..All the things you don't want to flood into your mind uninvited - this is real guilt now but I must write it down. Stupid things like "I won't be able to go out tonight" at the same time as "What can I wear that's black?. Then just after that the awful guilt about being able to think such trivial nonsense and then, a split second later, the realisation that you're not thinking rationally about anything……….

The Pennines swelling out of the Midlands plain. The hills that interweave throughout all our lives - the same hills I want to see from my Uni flat, but can't. All sorts of memories. Walks in the country, setting off fireworks in the back garden, the horse rides on the farm, the tickling games…. Oh that really hurts. It feels like too few memories. Here I am, just starting out really at twenty. Twenty doesn't seem so old when I think about those bones in the drawer. What's twenty out of a hundred thousand or so? I'm hurtling through England towards my family and I haven't a clue what to say to them.

It was hard deciding how to tell this story. I have told it from the outside, from a stranger's viewpoint, using the third person so it feels objective even if it is all really from my perspective. I've had to fill in a lot of gaps. When we first came back from Peru feeling beaten and displaced, it had all seemed so vivid, even to me as a nine year old. Tamsin and I have tried to put it all together - back in the right order at least. We wanted to lay the ghosts of the past and tie up all the loose ends. But now everything's up in the air again. Nothing's certain anymore.

So the book finally got finished and this will probably be the Prologue - the start; but in this case it all begins with an ending. The writing itself was a journey, an adventure. He didn't see the final drafts or nod his approval - but the last time I saw him, he was smiling.

Joanna Renouf 2008

WEATHERING

"We imperceptibly advance from youth to age, without observing the gradual, but incessant, change of human affairs; and even, in our larger experience of history, the imagination is accustomed, by a perpetual series of causes and effects, to unite the most distant revolutions."

Charles Lyell

The Progress of Geology 1813

PUERTO DIAZ, PERU, 1973

They stopped halfway along the dark corridor and his father pushed the bedroom door open with his boot. The dark interior was warm, earthy and damp. The boy threw his bag on the thinly covered bed, sat next to it and watched the big man wrestle the two soft black cases through the battered doorframe. His father had calmed down a bit now - he had been raging in the jeep and scared the boy by banging his fists down hard on the edge of the steering wheel. The two bags were dropped loudly on the bare boards and the tall, muscular figure was silhouetted for a moment against the shutters before he pushed them open outwards. Harsh light spilled into the room and the boy looked around at the sparse furniture. The bed was uncomfortable and he shuffled on it, not wanting to stand up in case it provoked another outburst. The sound of the market outside flooded in with the afternoon's heat.

His father on the balcony leant heavily on his elbows on the hardwood railing and looked out over the town. The boy could see the big patch of sweat soaking his shirt across his shoulders and the usually wavy black hair was wet and plastered down. His father lowered his head so it hung heavy on his neck and spoke softly without turning his head.

"Well, what are we going to do now Lewis?"

The boy didn't say anything but looked from his father's back to the broken electric fan on the table by the window. Sometimes it was better to stay quiet. The man sighed, turned around and walked over to the bags, shaking his head.

"I can't believe it. Such a stupid thing to do."

He unzipped one bag and dumped a small pile of clothes on the bed. Lewis watched him change his shirt, the tendons in his arms moving under the skin as his large hands fastened small buttons. As he did up the shirt he gave the boy a lop - sided smile and then came and sat on the bed next to him.

"I'm going to have to go out. You'll be ok here - you can read your book, I'll only be gone a few minutes. Then we'll get some food somewhere. I expect your mother will be here later. Don't leave the room though, will you?"

The boy watched his father check his pockets for money and keys and then he paused at the door as he was leaving.

"Don't worry, I'll be back soon - I'll bring you a drink." He disappeared from view through the door and was just pulling it shut when the boy suddenly felt the pang of loneliness and blurted out

"Where are you going?"

His father was already outside. His hand slid out of sight, there were a few indistinct words and then the door clicked shut.

The cicadas began to whirr in the trees outside as the small boy lay in the musty room. As dusk fell he buried his face in the pile of clothes and as he sobbed, his father walked purposefully down a narrow street on the other side of the bustling town. Nobody ever saw him again.

SYNOPSIS

IN BRIEF - SURFACE LAYER

In 1996, Lewis Renouf was beaten up and left for dead in the Peruvian rainforest. He had been trying to investigate the disappearance of his father twenty years previously, on a paleontological expedition. On gaining consciousness, the only way he could get back to the town where he last saw his young daughter was to run alongside a gas pipeline for three days. During his journey he revisits both his own time on the expedition when he was a boy and considers the cyclical nature of both human life and the rock strata that he works with. Delirious and exhausted, he collapses short of the town. In this book, his daughter, Joanna, has pieced together the whole story of the original expedition, the mystery of her grandfather's disappearance and together with Tamsin, a Biologist based at a new gas drilling station, seeks justice. They are thwarted by an indifferent police force and her grandfather's murderer who is still at large. The reader is taken on an ever quickening journey of discovery which ultimately ends with revenge from an unlikely source.

UNDERLYING STRATA

This novel is an allegorical narrative investigating different scientific theories about human evolution. Just as there is a literal search for human fossils, there is also a search for truth buried in the imperfect memory of a lost father and the search for the main characters own identity. The structure of the book reflects the strata of rock, and the nature of the rock cycle, with the story being told through an interweaving of past and present events, main characters providing the link between the two. To find out what has happened in the past, Lewis and his daughter must metaphorically dig through the layers. The novel starts with a funeral and there is an air of foreboding throughout. Once Lewis and Jo have escaped from their past and, later, literally, from his pursuers, there is a lighter tone but there is always an element of helplessness felt by two ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.