“Around an hour. Music?”
Joe would have preferred conversation but he nodded. He listened hard while Kaden occasionally sang along. The words sometimes baffled him, but he liked the rhythm and found himself tapping his foot.
The themes to the songs were similar. Almost all were based around love. Love won or lost, wanting love, missing love, pretending not to need it. It was clearly something important to almost everyone on the planet and yet it was also a source of pain. Relationships had to give more pleasure than pain otherwise people wouldn’t want them, would they? Joe had read about love, though he wasn’t sure he understood it. Had Kaden once loved Harris? Had Harris loved Kaden?
Joe stayed quiet and instead of analysing, which only worried him, he listened and learned.
They parked at the cliff top beside a tower.
“That’s an 18th century Georgian lighthouse,” Kaden said. “Naze Tower. It’s now a museum and a view point.”
It thrilled Joe how old things and places were revered and preserved for people to visit and look at. Not something done on his planet. They had history but were all about the now and the future, not the past.
The wind hit them hard as they got out of the car. Joe hurriedly zipped up the jacket he’d borrowed. He wasn’t used to feeling cold. Before, his body…Stop.He didn’t want to remember that life.
“We need boots not trainers,” Kaden told him and opened the back of the car. “There are lots of rockpools.”
They went down a series of concrete steps to the base of the cliff and the beach.
“The tide’s going out and it was rough last night,” Kaden said. “Best time to come here is when the beach has been churned up, which exposes new material.”
“What material?”
“Fossils.” Kaden’s eyes shone.
Joe searched through the mass of information he’d collected since he’d been with Kaden. Then he was excited too.
“We’ll go left.” Kaden stepped onto the beach. “Want to know about this area?”
“Yes, please.” Though he likely knew it anyway through Kaden’s memories.
“What you can see, those dark areas at the base of the cliff and on the beach, that’s London Clay laid down around fifty-four million years ago. Clay that’s now turned into rock. The red layer above it is two and a half million years old. This was once all under the sea so you can find pyritised wood and fruits, bivalves, gastropods, sharks’ teeth, various bone fragments. All sorts of stuff.”
This was a completely new concept for Joe. If any of thishadhappened on his home planet, he’d not known about it. Evolution was not a concept they had, though he could see they must have developed from something. He really didn’t know what he was looking for now, but he stayed close to Kaden, watching his hands as he shifted stones. It felt intimate, the way he moved, so focused and careful.
It was several minutes before Kaden picked up something and gave a pleased shout. He turned it over to examine it, then handed it to Joe.
“What do you think this is?”
“Er… It’s a rock. An unattractive one. It doesn’t even sparkle.”
Kaden laughed. “It’s a fragment of fossilised whale vertebra. It’s from the Red Crag layer so around two and a half million years old.”
Joe gasped. “Almost as old as—” He’d been going to saymy planet.
“As what?”
“The whale’s mother.”
He chuckled. “How do you think I know what it is?”
“The shape. Sort of like a disk and the hole in the centre is for the spinal cord. You’ve found one before.”
Kaden stared. “Have I?” But it wasn’t a question, more an accusation.
“Yes, it’s in the box under your bed.”
“How the fuck do you know that?”
