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Cape Town, 21 June 2010

I hate airports. I hate them with a passion born of long hours sitting in them; nasty stainless steel affairs that swallow real people at one end and spit them out at the other as soulless wanderers, lost in fatigue, stamped with the mark of travel and weariness.

I’m in one now. Again. In disgrace, in sadness and despair, and on my way to my father this time. Peter. Peter the Great; the renowned archaeologist with all the answers about the past, and none of the answers for now, for here, for me.

Ahead of me lies another endless field season, a winter of discontent at the edge of Africa and the end of everything. And here he comes, swinging along in that way he has. Deep in thought about something – early humans, if I had to take a guess. That’s where his mind lives: in the Middle Stone Age.

Mine doesn’t live anywhere much. Sometimes my brain just rushes about thinking about things, and it won’t stop. Once I saw a magazine article where they called it “binge thinking”. I like that. Flash, flash, flash, my brain goes, busy, busy, busy. Sometimes it picks up bits of what other people are thinking. Sometimes it stops thinking my own thoughts and starts thinking theirs, and when I come back … Well, I wonder where my own thoughts begin and end.

Peter hasn’t seen me yet, and for a moment I am still Lucy, still myself, at least in my own head. Just one of the airport people who sat in the plane and ate the food and watched a film and went to sleep like they wanted us to when they dimmed the lights, and woke up when they put them back on again, to a black sky over Africa. It was safe in the aeroplane. Nobody knew me. Nobody expected anything of me. Nobody looked at me. Nobody wondered about me … and I didn’t have to wonder how much they knew about me.

And then the dawn over the Cape and Table Mountain sticking up into the pale-grey sky, tinged with cool gold from the sun. And it had begun. Sigh. That’s not a word or a sound, by the way: it’s how I feel.

Sigh.

We are archaeologists. That’s what my mother used to say when “we” was another word that was not just a sound. And “we” was my mother, who has fine blonde hair so long she can sit on it, even at her age, and Peter the Great. And me.

“We are archaeologists,” she often said when people were coming in the door of her grand inherited New York apartment, taking off their coats with the snow-stars still on the collars, and handing over the bottle of French red, looking around to see what kind of Art the archaeologists had.

“We’ve been working mostly in Africa,” she would say while they edged towards the black-leather couches, suitably impressed by the Jackson Pollock on the wall above the piano. “And we have been greatly involved with the discoveries of Our Beginnings, in the Rift Valley.”

And the fire flickered and flared up, casting weird shadows on the artifacts brought back from places strange, while she spoke of the dig where she had met my father, and the moment when they both, simultaneously, saw the fibula on which they would base their joint paper on the human ability to walk upright and, more importantly, when humans decided to do so.

Joint paper. Hmm.

“And since then, my husband,” (that’s Peter the Great), “has continued with our work while I …” (glance to Lucy, sitting in shadows), “… have stayed home to look after our child.”

So that’s it, really, the paper on the beginning of Lucy, child of African skies and two people digging, digging in the dirt to find out where we came from.

But where … where do I come from? Not from New York. Not from the apartment with the cool marble hallway and the thick, soft carpets under my feet. Not from the hot, noisy streets and the cab drivers wistfully remembering other places, places where they came from. No. Not there.

It has not been easy for my parents – or for me.

I began when flames burned bright in the communal fire of the dig, when my mother, aged twenty-three, and my father, aged twenty-nine, threw caution to the winds on the wing of a great discovery (and a lot of Kenyan beer, I later heard from one of their colleagues) and conceived their own African artifact, who was me, sixteen years ago, in the red dust of Africa. Africa is the first thing I remember.

There is a peppery flavour to Africa, dust that prickles in the nose like sherbet and zooms and zooms, and zooms, around in the air and is part of it. There is space in Africa, stretching blue and gold into ever-ness. And there is warmth – soft brown warmth that, for me, was Kiaia, who cared for me when I was a baby, and who I can still remember, especially when I close my eyes.

There is laughter in Africa, soft in the night, and heart-smacking in the bright sun; people who can laugh with amusement until they cry. There is noise too, from the moment you open your eyes and people are clanking about with galvanised pails of milk, to the dark-night when somebody is chopping at wood and somebody else is swaying home drunk from the shebeen down the road and the cockerel is crowing, and it isn’t even morning yet, and somebody calls out angrily, and somebody else laughs. It is love.

I have, of course, other loves. Africa is the easiest. The others are more difficult but, as Peter strolls down the marble walkway, hands in his pockets, casting an observing eye upon everyone assembled, but not yet seeing me, this is not an appropriate thought.

Peter. My father. I have not seen him for eighteen months and my heart still gives that little jump that it used to when he came back from somewhere away, when I had stayed behind. I watch him as he walks, taller than most of the people hurrying the other way, slightly stooped from too many hours over the microscope and the computer. He is older than when I last saw him. His light-brown hair is greyer. What will he think when he sees me? Will he know how I have changed? Will he notice anything different? Will he feel a sharp sense of pain when he realises that my heart is just sad now; like cool water that has been taken out of the refrigerator, and then forgotten?

He sees me. His face lights up as he smiles; his blue eyes that I used to think were blue as the sky on a perfect day.

“Lucy!” he cries, and holds out his arms as if I will run to him. And I think that he has noticed nothing, but I step forward into his embrace.

“Hi, Dad.” And inside me there is a little sob, too quiet for anybody to hear.

I remember why I am here and stiffen my back. I am here as child-of, the person who will-be-person, but is not yet. I am here as Peter’s daughter.

And because my mother can no longer bear to have me under the same roof.

*

Hmm. Africa, of course, is different wherever you go in it. This – as Peter remarked slightly apologetically before we were even out of the car park, and before he’d gone back to pay because he’d forgotten that you have to stick your ticket into the machine before you drive out – is a winter rainfall area. Which means that when I come here from hot summer in New York, it’s cold and damp and grey here, and the much-talked about Table Mountain might as well not be there, because we can’t see it. A cold front has swept in behind my plane, bringing with it a forecast ten days of rain, wind and cold. Sigh.

But the mountain is undoubtedly there; I glimpsed it from above the clouds as we came in. And four hundred and fifty-odd kilometres along a wild and dangerously rocky coast is the site where Peter and his crew are sure they are going to “find something”. It might not be as important as the joint (ha!) discovery, but they know it’s there. They have visualised it in their research and in flow charts and tables of probability – and in their imaginations. They have found, and more importantly dated, something that makes them absolutely sure that they are on the brink of a great discovery. Which means that they think they are going to find the oldest of some kind of behaviour, or put archaeological thinking about human origins back a few tens of thousands of years. It’s what they all want to do. Sigh.

“Lucy,” Peter said to me, seriously, before we, and the ancient Land Rover, were even on the freeway: “We are very, very close.”

I looked down at the seat belt (rather grubby grey-nylon fibre with a dull steel buckle) and I thought, Yeah.

And yeah is not just a sound or a word either, but the way that I feel. Because Peter has been promising me the world and a really ancient relative since I arrived on the planet, and except for those four teeth in Ethiopia when I was six, he hasn’t found anything since.

Yeah.

Sigh.

*

Barclay Bay, 29 June 2010

Barclay Bay is where we are “really close”.

How shall I describe it? Let me count the ways.

It is cool-cold grey mist driving across granite-coloured water in early-morning paleness. The sky, in the morning, when we gather at the fire with mugs of coffee between chilled hands, is feathery apricot and palest green. The surf creams in and rolls back, and the pebbles on the rocky beach are a thousand shades of stone.

It is the sound of the rolling rocks, rolling, rolling, rolling in the force of the waves and the strength of the tides, and the moon. Here in Barclay Bay, I cannot but see the turning of time as the moon grows and swells and the tides turn, turn and turn again. It scares me. A week in New York is just a week. Here it is a quarter of the moon, and what have I done? Who have I been?

When I got here eight days ago it was midwinter. And at my other place it was midsummer. I can hardly remember it now. Here at the end of Africa the bright-green leaves on deciduous trees and the melting-hot pavements of New York are … unreal, mostly.

Here the silvery-spiky fynbos that is the natural vegetation clings to short, rolling hills – petrified dunes, Peter tells me. Places that used to be beaches, but are now stone; hard and sand-grey. Here, Peter says, our early ancestors came to gather and find and hunt what they could to survive. Seals maybe, washed in on a storm. Seabirds. Fish stranded in rock pools. Oysters scraped from boulders and shellfish steamed over fires. Maybe once in a while a whale washed up and they hacked off some of the meat and stored it in the cool, damp sand at the edge of the sea, until the carcass stank too much and the band moved off to another beach … more fish and oysters.

I wonder what it was like. How different were they from us?

Did they feel frightened? Did they laugh? Did the children play? Those are the things I want to know – not what kind of teeth they had, or how many tons of mussels the group got through in an average year. But, Peter explains to me, that’s how we can begin to guess at the things I want to know. Archaeologists have a lot of patience.

“It’s a clean start, Lucy,” Peter had said when he switched off the ignition and the Land Rover juddered to a halt at the camp after the trip from the airport. “I don’t know everything that happened this summer in New York … Well, I know the basic … Well … Well, your mother was a bit … well, not just a bit, hysterical when she phoned me in Cape Town.”

I stared out of the window at the chill mist. It was back.

The heat … New York at its worst, with traffic noise beating at my ears and the heat draining away all energy, and the sight of the shiny black-painted door with the seven steps and the familiar brass number that said home, and air conditioning and cool … cool … coolness … and …

Peter was holding my hand. He had taken it in his and was looking at me with concern. His eyes were kind, but infinitely sad as well.

“I want you to know that your … your personal life … is private here at Barclay. You can take your time. Rest. Read. Think. There are no distractions, no cellphone signal, no radio even. This is as remote as it gets these days, so you are free of … well, everything you left in New York. But if you want to talk, I’m here.”

The colour peach … the scent of that perfume she always uses … the sound of the door clicking sharp-shut, the sound of his voice …

I couldn’t look at my father. Peter is such a good man. I’ve always thought that.

“Thanks,” I said, looking out of the window at the mist. The prison of mist that there would be no escape from. Not until Peter had finished what he had come to do.

“Right then,” Peter said with forced cheerfulness. “Let’s go see Barclay Bay Archaeological Excavations …”

*

We have a rather tatty camp around two roofless, derelict cottages. This is not what you might call a well-funded operation – actually the opposite. But it’s much better than those early ancestors we are looking for would have had. They would have lived in shelters or under overhanging rocks, where they would have been protected from at least the worst of the wind that whips past here from somewhere deep in the Antarctic. They wouldn’t have been as wimpish as we are. We moan about the cold all the time, in spite of our state-of-the-art tents and sleeping bags and “Extreme Clothing”, as the label on my rain jacket says.

We are a band too, of a sort. The others, like me, are here because of Peter. They are, like me, doubtful about his ability to solve their problems. Peter is too, I think.

I look at them over the rim of my mug in the mornings and I see them getting ready for another day of hunting and gathering theories, and maybe even facts, about early hunter-gatherers on the west coast of South Africa. Eyeing each other hungrily and wondering if any of the others have come up with their own unique concept. Yet. Or found something that will rock (sorry) the archaeological world.

“It’s bloody freezing!” Nadia always says when she arrives at the morning fire. “Bloody freezing!”

Nobody contradicts her. It always is.

Ben might raise his eyebrows – that’s about all Ben ever does in the line of social interaction – but everybody else just concentrates on getting ready for another day of digging and measuring, lifting and carrying, sorting and noticing.

Christine, if she has remembered to turn up for work, usually tries to make it better for Nadia.

“Ag, it’s not that bad, Nadia! I remember when my mother couldn’t get up on a morning because she was frozen stiff in her blanket. White with frost, she was, and Pa had to heat water on the fire and melt her out!”

I like Christine. She always has a story to tell, and if there isn’t one ready to hand she makes one up on the spot. She lives with her husband Frikkie in a fallen-over kind of house about ten minutes’ walk from here. Frikkie fishes from the rocks – we see him out there almost every day – and sometimes brings his catch, if there is one, to sell, and then Tim cooks it over the fire for us in the evening.

That’s about the best thing we eat, because Christine is not the most brilliant cook on the coast – and most of our food is tinned anyway, which doesn’t give her much of a base to start from. Peter was a bit apologetic about Christine.

“It’s not as if we really need anyone as a camp manager,” he said, “but Christine and Frikkie have lived here since before there were any archaeologists working at the coast. They think of the job as a kind of feudal right!”

So that’s why Christine comes over, on average every second day that we expect her to, and does a bit of campkeeping and laundry, and – sometimes – what passes for cooking. I suppose that helps to free everybody’s mind for “higher things”, like doing maths about mussel shells.

“Ag, man,” Christine says, “my ma used to say that you’d better do forward what you might not be able to do afterwards.” And then she drifts off to sweep the floors of the roofless old cottages, leaving me to think about what exactly that means.

If I concentrate – hard – I can live in this world, I think, and keep the other one out. If I am fierce about it, I can forget everything except this reality, the reality of Barclay Bay, and just be Lucy again. So that is what I am trying to do: be me. Be me, and watch the others – in the absence of anything much else to watch.

By about eight-thirty everyone is as motivated as they are going to be, and work starts. Peter is in charge. Ben is next in the chain of command. Ben is Peter’s great white hope – well, perhaps I should rephrase that, because Ben is black. Ben is Peter’s star student, the one Peter thinks will carry the torch, or take on the mantle, or whatever graduate students do. Ben thinks so too. I think Ben has the general idea that he is a lot smarter than my father. Maybe he is.

Nadia is the cling-on. I’ve not been on many digs, not since “the teeth” when I was six, but I remember the type. She laughs at all Peter’s jokes and follows him about, offering to help. She has a pale, sharp (and I have to admit, beautiful) face, and silky black hair. The kind that I have always thought would look better on me than my own blonde arrangement. If I could summon up the energy, I might hate her, but I don’t … yet. I’m still thinking about it.

And then there is Tim. The girls I used to know in New York would say he was geekish, but not bad. If I close my eyes and think of Tim, he is brushing back that blonde hair that is forever falling into his eyes, and then looking up and smiling. His smile always takes me by surprise and I always have to stop myself from smiling back, as if there was something deep and meaningful between us. Which there isn’t. Tim’s OK. But that’s all.

I’m reserving judgment on Tim because he doesn’t say very much. Ben doesn’t say very much either, but his is a strong silence. Tim’s might be an “I haven’t got much to say” silence, so I am waiting to see.

And why are we all here? Well, the main purpose of the exercise is to (carefully) retrieve from the ground … well, anything that might be interesting, but usually isn’t, and then transfer it, by way of sieving, onto trays and then sort it into packets, which Nadia labels in her rather Gothic script and which will, ultimately, be taken back in boxes to the University of Cape Town, where more people will examine and discuss our little bits of bone, stone, charcoal and shell – and the occasional ostrich-shell bead. They haven’t found any more of the Middle Stone Age tools Peter discovered here last year, lying on the dune rock not far away, and there’s been no drama either, just endless loads of bits with no real significance (that I can see) in the greater scheme of things.

If we ever actually find anything fascinating, there will be hypotheses (or, as ordinary people would say, theories) about what it means, or might mean, or could mean. The arguing about the hypotheses will go on for a long time, and people’s careers and access to funding for more research will hang in the balance.

Peter is himself hanging in the balance right now, not having found anything to argue about since “the teeth”. Sometimes I catch him looking a bit … well, a bit desperate. There have been too many field trips and digs where nothing really happened, too many theories shot down in flames by the big guns in archaeology. My mother, an avid reader of archaeological journals and other people’s papers, comments on this regularly, like a kind of mantra: “I see your father is out of favour again,” she says, and smiles.

I sit on a rusty old fold-up camp chair and listen to music on my earphones, and watch them and wonder about how their brains work, inside their heads; what’s going on in there.

Judging from the conversation, all that’s going on is measurement of shell sizes over the years (years, as in thousands of –), and sea levels over even more thousands of years, and kinds of stone tools, and how and where they were made … I haven’t once heard anybody talking about fashion or music or sushi bars. It’s kind of refreshing.

So here we are, for the next six weeks, trapped at Barclay Bay and we’d better get on with it, because nothing much is going to change.

And that’s our band of hunter-gatherers.

Except, of course, for Mrs Marais.

* * *