It has often been said that if you met a Homo Erectus in the street and wearing clothes, you wouldn't dream of wondering if she was really a person... a human being. I'd been wandering around the paloeanthropology gallery at the London Natural History Museum for about half an hour. Most people just dip in and out of the galleries, but with me in taking their time, was an unlikely looking American couple. She, late twenties, I guessed. Clearly an expert in the field and explaining exhibits in detail to her younger, taller, conservatively dressed, male companion. It was her commentary that first caught my attention, but when I peeped round the display, what I saw kept it.
She was a bit shorter than me with spiky, short pink hair and an elfin face. Her eyes were alive, green and intelligent, complexion pale with freckles around her nose. She wore a knee length, light weight summer coat over a green, much shorter skirt and a green and black striped jumper. On her feet were Docs with a spring flower design, and she wore over-the-knee green and black striped socks which left an enticing band of bare leg below her skirt hem.
I love the Natural History Museum. My Dad used to bring me here on Sunday afternoons to wonder at the dinosaurs. I would gaze in awe at the allosaurus skeleton in the great hall and hope that I'd make friends with some other little girl. The ritual was always the same; I'd swap tentative glances with someone who was just as shy yet just as eager as me to have a companion with whom to have adventures in the darkened galleries. We'd circle around each other, testing, sounding each other out, orbiting closer until eventually, much to Dad's amusement, we'd speak and within thirty seconds become firm friends. At least, firm friends for the rest of that afternoon.
I felt like I was a kid again, circling around the display cases. Was it deliberate that we were now standing looking at the same exhibit; a magnificent diorama with a disconcertingly life-like, and startlingly human looking in her nudity, Homo Erectus woman gazing out at us? We had seemed to be being drawn to one another... catching each other's eye across a display case or around a cabinet or marble column, and quickly looking away again. Contriving to get close without seeming to do it on purpose, then exchanging smiles over naive questions from the man. And now, here we were, standing side-by-side, the tension feeling like static in my hair, drawing me towards her... but our eyes were fixed on the woman behind the glass.
