The Rocks Below by Nigel Bird Page A

returned to the microscope to give the sections another look. Maybe, if nothing else, she’d be able to discover what had gone wrong.  
         This time, when she looked down she saw something she had missed in her earlier haste.  
         Sure, there were animal cells in the sample. But they were inside the rock rather than being on it. In fact, they weren’t just inside the rock, they were part of it. Cells with a nucleus, a membrane, cytoplasm, mitochondrion and ribosomes. The works. And all within the structure of the stone itself.  
         Halleluiah.  
         She thought of crabs and crustaceans, but that wasn’t it.  
         Some kind of symbiosis?  A new fusion between life and minerals?  The perfect, living and breathing shell?  
         And discovered by Dr Jenny Wilson.  
         Dame Jenny Wilson?  Lady Wilson?  Her ladyship?  
         The Lady Of The Bleeding Toe.  
         If it was the same with all of the slides, she’d be famous. And respected. And loved.  
         One more test and if she was right, she’d call a press conference to announce her discovery to the rest of the world.  
     
    American Graffiti
    Talk about painting the town red.
         Hashtag and Sam had tagged the harbour wall and the entrance with anti-fracking slogans and symbols that would have graced any art gallery. They owed their skills to many years of misspent youth, hours hanging around skate parks and days of practising free-running and graffiti on the estates of the towns and cities in which they’d lived.  
         Course they hadn’t used any old spray paint for this job. It was an eco-friendly alternative that would eventually return to its organic components.  
         With the rest of their team out on the paddle boards, they’d covered the whole of the area. The tips of the rocky outcrops were no longer bird-dropping white and the man–made walls looked like they’d been decorated by some crazy exterior designer from the nineteen-sixties who hadn’t taken off their rose-tinted spectacles since.  
         Sam and Hashtag stood on their boards and paddled gently through the steady sea to their final target, the boulder on the beach.  
         When they reached the shore, they pulled the board onto the land and lifted their art materials.  
         In their full, black wetsuits it was almost impossible for them to see each other when the green harbour light wasn’t on. Even when the light flashed, they would have been virtually impossible to spot from the road because of the shoe polish they wore on their faces.  
          “ Let’s get this over with,” Hashtag called over to Sam in a loud whisper. “I’m bloody freezing.”  
         Sam’s teeth were chattering too madly to offer an answer. If it hadn’t been for the shoe-polish he was wearing, he was pretty sure he’d be glowing blue. Worse still, now he didn’t have his cast anymore his leg was aching like crazy in the cold and he longed to have his crutches back so that he could take the weight off for a while.  
         They made their way over to the boulder and got the cans ready for their final tag of the night.  
         It was a pretty slick routine they had, Sam working around the top and Hashtag working up from the bottom until they met in the middle to make one large mural.  
          ‘ FRACK OFF’ it said after their first burst. It may not have been the most imaginative phrase, but it had been the one that had taken off.  
         Next, Sam unrolled the stencil he’d carried over and the pair of them set to taping it to the stone so they could get spraying.  
         It was a job that required concentration and these two were perfectionists, all of which meant they didn’t notice what was happening below.  
         At the base of the boulder the surface of the stone was shifting shape. It no longer looked like hard rock at the base, but more like a curtain