The City & the City - China Mieville [143]
The boy peeped. He looked at the bone brontosaurus that Billy had seemed to greet. Or maybe, Billy thought, he was looking at the glyptodon beyond it. All the children had a favorite inhabitant of the Natural History Museum’s first hall, and the glyptodon, that half globe armadillo giant, had been Billy’s.
Billy smiled at the woman who dispensed tickets, and the guard behind her. “This them?” he said. “Right then everyone. Shall we do this thing?”
He cleaned his glasses and blinked while he was doing it, replicating a look and motion an ex had once told him was adorable. He was a little shy of thirty and looked younger: he had freckles, and not enough stubble to justify “Bill.” As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Di Caprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.
Billy’s black hair was tousled in a halfheartedly fashionable style. He wore a not-too-hopeless top, cheap jeans. When he had first started at the centre, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking for such a job. Now he knew that he surprised no one, that no one expected scientists to look like scientists any more.
“So you’re all here for the tour of the Darwin Centre,” he said. He was acting as if he thought they were present to investigate a whole research site, to look at the laboratories and offices, the filing, the cabinets of paperwork. Rather than to see the one and only one thing within the building.
“I’m Billy,” he said. “I’m a curator. What that means is that I do a lot of the cataloguing and preserving, stuff like that. I’ve been here awhile. When I first came here I wanted to specialise in marine molluscs—know what a mollusc is?” he asked the boy, who nodded and hid. “Snails, that’s right.” Mollusca had been the subject of his masters thesis.
“Alright folks.” He put his glasses on. “Follow me. This is a working environment, so please keep the noise down, and I beg you not to touch anything. We’ve got caustics, toxins, all manner of horrible stuff all over the place.”
One of the young men started to say, “When do we see …” Billy raised his hand.
“Can I just …” he said. “Let me explain about what’ll happen when we’re in there.” Billy had evolved his own pointless idiosuperstitions. According to one it was bad luck for anyone to speak the name of what they were all there for, before they reached it.
“I’m going to show you a bunch of the places we work,” he said lamely. “Any questions, you can ask me at the end: we’re a little bit time constrained. Let’s get the tour done first.”
No curator or researcher was obliged to perform this guide work. But many did. Billy no longer grumbled when it was his turn.
They went out and through the garden, approaching the Darwin with a building site on one side and the brick filigrees of the Natural History Museum on the other.
“No photos, please,” Billy said. He did not care if they obeyed: his obligation was to repeat the rule. “This building here opened in two thousand two,” he said. “And you can see we’re expanding. We’ll have a new building in two thousand eight. We’ve got seven floors of wet specimens in the Darwin Centre. That means stuff in formalin.”
Everyday hallways led to a stench. “Jesus,” someone muttered.
“Indeed,” said Billy. “This is called the dermestarium.” Through interior windows there were steel containers like little coffins. “This is where we clean up skeletons. Get rid of all the gunk on them. Dermestes maculatus.”
A computer screen by the boxes was showing some disgusting salty-looking fish being eaten by insect swarms. “Eeurgh,” someone said.
“There’s a camera in the box,” said Billy. “Hide beetles is their English name. They go through everything, just leave bones behind.”
The boy grinned and tugged his father’s hand. The rest of the group smiled, embarrassed. Flesh-eating bugs: sometimes life really was a B-movie.
Billy noticed one of the young men. He wore a past-it suit, a shabby-genteel outfit odd for someone so young. He wore a pin on his lapel, a design like a long-armed