Unconquered

My daughter wants to know what it looked like, and I have to tell her nobody knows. They've got the back of its head. That's it. A chunk of skull a vicar picked up at the foot of a cliff a hundred years ago, and it sat in a London drawer with thirty million other things until a man opened the drawer and said, oh. That's where a brain was. She says, so the claws in the picture? Borrowed, I say. From its cousins in Argentina, who were bigger, and later, and left their hands behind. She says that's cheating. It's a bit cheating. It's what you do with a stranger at the door: you look at the face and say, you must be one of the — and you're nearly right. They scanned the inside, I tell her, the room the brain sat in, and the hole where the spine went in was oval, not round, and there's a ridge at the back shaped like an hourglass, and that's how they knew the family. Not from the claws. From the room. The room told them who its people were. She likes that. She's eight and the smallest in her class, and someone's been saying things at the coat pegs; I don't know what yet. So I read her the name. Invictibellatrix. Unconquered warrior, the girl kind. The people who named it wrote that it's for anyone who gets pushed around, that tomorrow is theirs. Because this one was small and early, a tiger, not a giant, and the giants came later, on her side of the family. She says, so they named her after her cousins' grandchildren. I say, I suppose they did. She says that's cheating too. Then she asks if she can keep the picture with the claws, and I say yes, as long as you know which parts are hers, and she goes off with it, one hand on the back of her own head like something she's only just found out she's got.