Читать книгу Hap - Lesley Beake - Страница 9

2

My mother always says that an archeological dig wouldn’t be a dig without some lunatics. (And she would know.) Our particular lunatic is Mrs Marais, who is clearly barking mad. I suspect too much moon has not done her any good.

Peter and I first met her when we stopped for some sandwiches on the way in. Barclay Bay doesn’t have much in the way of snack joints, restaurants, cocktail bars, cafés, take-aways – or shops. Or buildings, even.

Mrs Marais’ emporium is like what an old farm kitchen might have been, with stern photographs of the local church’s elders and betters staring down to prevent any thoughts of revelry over the cream scones. There are green-checked plastic tablecloths, and cushions crocheted with leftover wool, chairs of every size and shape and description painted odd colours and, strangely, Christmas balls strung from the roof at regular intervals, and a gift “shoppe” full of her handmade preserves.

Mrs Marais herself is like a summing up of the place where she lives – large and over-filled with goodies, and pretty eccentric. She wears enormous kaftans and seems to drift across the floor as if she is on wheels. Her voice changes too, either thundering in an imperious, mountain-bootish kind of way, or whispering like satin slippers.

“Ah,” she said as soon as we had extricated ourselves from our Extreme Clothing, and fixing us with her rather bulging blue gaze, “I expect you have come to see the rock art.”

Well, we hadn’t, although Peter tells me there is a lot of it in the mountains around here. He made a kind of agreeing/not-agreeing sound, but I don’t think she heard him.

“Have you checked my website lately?”

The answer was clearly no, but that didn’t stop Mrs Marais.

“We’ve found another one,” she told us. “My son, Jan, went out with me to photograph it,” and she whipped out, quick as a flash, a rather bent, out-of-focus photograph of a round hole in a grey rock.

“That’s where the pod landed,” she said. “We’ve got photographs from all over these mountains. Of pod traces.” She was edging rather furtively towards a much-fingered photograph album on a side table when she suddenly stopped.

She looked at us craftily. “Are you with the rock art people?” she asked.

“No,” Peter said. And just for a moment he was looking at me and I was looking at him, and we shared something we haven’t for a long time, and he smiled.

Mrs Marais narrowed her eyes. “Are you with the archaeologists then?”

Well, short of lying, there wasn’t much Peter could say, so he acknowledged rather quietly that yes, indeed we were.

“I knew it!” Mrs Marais shrieked. “I could tell.”

Second time lucky, I thought.

*

Three days later she turned up, with her son, in a battered old truck. The dig is supposed to be off-limits to the public, being in a pretty remote nature reserve, miles from anywhere, with signs all over the entrance gate telling people that access is prohibited because of the fragility of the environment. Some kinds of plants and small animals live here that don’t live anywhere else at all. And the road is appalling. No ordinary car could get up it. But Mrs Marais had a permit stuck onto the windscreen of the truck with a couple of Elastoplasts. I expect the authorities give her permission to go anywhere she wants, just to get rid of her.

She pounced on Peter the moment she had maneuvered herself out of the cab.

“I just had to come,” she announced. “There’s been a new development.”

For a moment we all kind of froze. Then Nadia moved nearer to Peter, a little nervously, I thought, and Ben did something I’ve noticed him doing before, and gradually effaced himself from the group until he had drifted out of the circle to the other side of the big tent, where the sorting table is set up. Christine, who happened to be passing with some about-to-be-washed laundry, stopped dead in her tracks. Tim and I just stood, waiting to see what would happen.

“It was on the news,” Mrs Marais went on, without pause to introduce her son, or say hello, or ask how we were, or any of the things normal people do. “And I thought you needed to know.”

Peter roused himself from the hypnotic state that seems to come over him when Mrs Marais is around. “Er … er, good.”

“It’s due at the full moon,” she said. “It’s them, you know. We’ve been predicting a landing for some time, haven’t we, Jan?”

We all turned to look at Jan, who was not looking at us. He was looking at something behind us, over the sea, something that I, when I turned to look, couldn’t make out. As he stood there in his dull-red anorak, contemplating the sea, the wind whipped up his thinning hair from where he had carefully combed it over his bald patch.

“Ja,” he said.

“And now it’s official,” she finished triumphantly. “Because it’s on the news!”

Tim was the first to recover from the sudden impact of a Mrs Marais.

“What is?” he asked.

Mrs Marais turned her bright eyes on him as if noticing for the first time that there was anybody there besides Peter.

“A pod, of course,” she said, but mildly, as if these things had to be explained regularly to unbelievers. “A pod from The People, expected to arrive on earth at the full moon.” She smiled kindly at Tim. “As they usually do.”

And suddenly she was getting back into the truck, and Jan was climbing in as well.

“Goodbye!” she called as he reversed off the track and turned to face the way they had come. “I’ll be back if there is any news. We have only three weeks to prepare, so we’ll be very busy!”

The truck started to pull off, but then came to a sudden halt and Mrs Marais rolled down the window for one last shot.

“And Christine …”

Christine muttered under her breath.

“I would really get that washing out if I were you. Rain on the way.”

And then they were gone, with only a faint haze of dust to show that they had ever been.

“No good will come of this!” Christine pronounced loudly, reactivating herself and the washing in the direction of our one and only tap. “No good will come of anything to do with that woman!” she added over her shoulder.

Peter polished his glasses, something he does a lot when he doesn’t quite know what to say.

“Hmm, well … as my wife … er, my ex-wife used to say, a dig isn’t a dig without some lunatics!” Then he looked at me and gave a little twisted half-smile of apology because he had mentioned her, and usually we don’t. And then he went to see what Ben was finding at the sorting table.

I went back to doing what I had been doing before, which was reading my way through the pile of books I’d brought. But I couldn’t help thinking how strange it was that the only real connection Peter and I had experienced so far had been around Mrs Marais. And that maybe we should invite her back.

*

What are we here for? Not here, as in “on this earth” (although I sometimes wonder about that too) but here, in this particular place, Barclay Bay? We are here because of the meticulous research of one Peter Westford, my father, Peter the Great.

Peter has been planning this dig for four years, coming here whenever he could get away from lecture commitments, driving up the long and lyrical (his word) highway from Cape Town on his off-weekends, thinking all the way. Watching the flowers at the side of the road in winter, and the dry grass lining the highway in summer; smelling orange blossoms in the season before the citrus begins. Thinking some more, and then taking the longer, slower road full of potholes and corrugations to this lonely coast.

When he got here, to Barclay Bay, wandering the wild dunes and the lonely beaches, and thinking about the early people he was looking for, he thought he had found It (“It” being the place where we are all now living). I know this because he told me, one cold afternoon when I was watching him sifting through some tiny pieces of shell and bone.

“It’s not just the research, and the reading of other people’s papers, and the talks in the tea room between lectures, you know, Lucy,” he said, carefully examining a seal bone that had turned up, and not looking at me. “It’s not just bones … bones and stones. It’s a kind of compulsion. And a lot of … well, instinct. I walked this coast for months, taking photographs and writing notes, before I suddenly came on this bay – I didn’t even know its name then – and I knew that this was where we were going to find something remarkable. I knew.

“All over the world, people are studying relative hut distances and measuring the effects of volcanic soils on bone … and what’s it for? This is what we are! Does it matter what we were?”

Then he answered his own question. I expect Peter does this a lot in lectures, and I expect the students smile a little bit, like I was doing, because it is so … so Peter.

“Yes! Yes, it does! The bones and stones are spread like a net over the land; a net that holds the slivers of history that may slip through if we are not very, very careful with them. It is our duty, our responsibility … our quest to find what we can from where we began. And maybe discover something to help us unravel who we are. Yes.” Peter shook his head seriously. “Yes. That is what I have been doing all my life. That is what I do.”

And I smiled again, a gentle smile, an inward smile, because – suddenly – I felt a wave of something that was more than just affection for funny old Peter. It was a memory of how we used to be when I was little. When he was Dad.

Suddenly I remembered a day long ago, with Peter at the sea. Mom wasn’t there; it was just us. It wasn’t sunny, or hot; it was cold and grey, and Peter made me wear my jersey in case I got chilled, and we played on the beach. I don’t remember playing much when I was little. Maybe as a family we have always been too absorbed in the past to think about the now. But that day was … Well, it was like being set free a little; as if we were off duty.

We did the things that fathers and kids always do: building castles and making dams against the sea that didn’t work (never work, couldn’t work). And then we ran about at the edge of the sea. And I remember watching our footprints in the sand as the sea swept in over them, and then Peter was holding my hand and we were walking backwards, so we could watch them, two sets of steps, printed in dark sand. And the sea curled in, curled in and swept them away.

It was as if we had never been there.

The result of Peter’s peregrinations is this camp, at this place about five hundred big steps away from the sea, under this rocky overhang. With this particular team of diggers and these particular measured, squared-off, numbered areas of strong string that mark the dig and what we will, or may, find in it. It is a living floor, one that was probably lived on for many generations. The archaeologists can see that from the large midden of shells and bones, the rubbish heap where residents threw away what they didn’t eat. Peter and Ben, Nadia and Tim are sifting away the tiny, tiny pieces left in the dust, digging down slowly and carefully into the remains of other people’s lives and building up, even more slowly and carefully, a picture of what those lives were like.

“Ben’s good,” Peter said to me that day, while the wind whistled through the black plastic laid down around the newly dug bit of excavation. “Meticulous, almost to a fault. Nothing gets past him. And Nadia …” (he shot me a mildly challenging look, but I didn’t respond), “is good too. Her strength is the recording. And the sketches. The plotting on diagrams and the photography of what we find.”

Gloomily, I contemplated the perfection of Nadia.

“She produces meticulous records.”

“And Tim?” I asked. “Is he just here to carry stuff around?”

Peter frowned. (I deserved that.) “No,” he said. “He’s pretty damn hot too. It’s not his fault that he looks so young.” Then he shook his head quickly, shaking off the irritation I had provoked. “Look … sorry … this dig is pretty important to me. You know that. There’s … well, I just know there’s something here. It’s not just the … well, the indicators. It’s a feeling I have – have always had. Since I first came to this bay. They were here, those very early people. I know it.” Peter stared at the sand-rock floor of the shelter where he had pinned his scientific measurements as well as his hopes. “They were here, Lucy. They were here.”

Yeah. Sure.

Yeah. Sigh.

*

Tides sweeping in, sweeping out, sweeping in again. There is something reassuring about the horizon at the sea. It doesn’t do anything alarming or surprising. It’s just there.

I go down to the sea a lot. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? There’s not a lot of competition for my attention, with everybody crouched over their sieves and sorting trays all day. And I have to move about, because it is so damn cold all the time.

I went to look at it – the horizon – late one afternoon, when the sun was making a last guest appearance between clouds. Skies are important here. They change constantly. Sometimes we have two or three of them going at the same time: a feisty, windy one behind us, spreading back over the Sandveld to the red-rock mountains; one lit up with light and energy over the sea; and a dark and stormy night approaching from the northwest. We can feel a cold front in our bones in advance of it coming.

Maybe it was in my mind to see what Jan had been looking at, maybe not. I didn’t really have anything better to do anyway. I found a little hollow where the wind wasn’t quite so whippy, stuck in my earphones and let myself flow into the music.

I am in the flat. I can smell New York coming in through an open window, hot and petrol-smelling, with horns honking and sirens somewhere not too many blocks away. I know I am here, and that there is something I am supposed to remember … but I don’t know what. All I feel is a sense of … sadness? Grief ? Despair? It is as if something terrible has happened, and I don’t know what it is.

I can’t remember.

I wasn’t asleep – my eyes were still open – but I wasn’t quite there either because Ben looked concerned when I finally focused and saw him standing in front of me, his hands deep in the pockets of his rain jacket and his collar turned up against the chill.

“You OK?” he asked.

I took out my earphones. My heart was thumping inside my chest, but I tried to look cool.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “Just listening to some music.”

Ben made the kind of sign you make when you want to ask if you can join somebody, and I made the kind of sign you make when you say they can, and then he settled his long length into the side of my dune, filling up the space.

“I don’t mean right now. I mean, you know, are you OK generally?”

I looked at him, and I felt a little fizz of anger that he should ask. Who did he think he was? And then almost immediately I was ashamed. Until then, nobody, not even Peter, had asked how I felt about being stuck at Barclay Bay at the back of the back of beyond.

“Take as long as you need,” he said after a while, a bit sarcastically, but it made me smile. “Good,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if you could do that!”

“I wish …” But I didn’t know how to go on.

“Yeah?”

“I wish … it was warmer!” I finally said. But that wasn’t what I had wanted to say.

I wished it was different, that’s what I wished, and that my mind would be still and not swoop around in great circles and loops that took me to places and times where I didn’t want to be. In my heart was the fast-vanishing dream of the sunlight of Africa and Kiaia’s warm hug when I was afraid, when I was … When I was alone. Had I imagined she would be waiting for me at Cape Town airport? That she would hold me tightly and everything would be right again?

Yes. I had.

In my deep-heart, I had hoped that here, in Africa, there would be an end to my fear and my nightmare. My remembered Africa would make everything right again, swept clean by the laughter of a remembered time and a remembered love.

I looked at the sea, for a moment – the cold, cold Atlantic – and I knew that dream had gone. This was my reality. Barclay Bay.

Then Ben stood up, shaking off sand that had blown in on the wind, and held out a hand to help me up. “Let’s walk,” he said. “It’s too cold to lounge around on beaches. And,” he added, “you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

But we did talk a bit, on that first brisk walk along the firm sand at the edge of the waves. About music, mostly. About Mrs Marais and the pod-people. Ben says it’s not a pod (well, I knew that): it’s a meteorite that’s coming at full moon. He read about it on the Internet, back in Cape Town a couple of weeks ago: a meteorite that will land, the scientists think, somewhere in the sea off the west coast of Africa. A small meteorite. One that is entirely unlikely to have any persons on it, of any description. There might be a bit of a light show, Ben said; the astrophysicists are all twittering about this “once in thousands of years” event, but Ben says he’s heard that kind of stuff before.

It was an easy kind of a talking – perhaps because neither of us said anything about anything. It was nice.

*

Sometimes I think about Lisa, who is – who has always been – in my class at school, as if we were bonded together for life from when we were both little. And I wonder what she would think about my life here. Not much. If I wanted to write to her (which I don’t), what would I tell her?

Well, the big thing is the sound. I expected (if I expected anything at all) for Barclay Bay to be peaceful. Well, New York begins to be quiet, in my memory, compared to here.

It never stops. The sea bangs and crashes away all day, and especially at night. I lie in my double-down sleeping bag with my hot-water bottle cuddled up beside me. I’m in charge of making them for anybody who wants one (Ben never does) every night, and they are my single luxury in this forsaken place.

The tent seems even more fragile when there is a storm at sea, and then it makes sounds of its own – sudden cracks of nylon and creaks of guy ropes, little whinnies and lifts as if it is about to gallop off with the gale. Sometimes I think it is.

And then there are the endlessly screeching seabirds and the rattle of the stones on the beach and the hiss of the water streaming back out. But what there isn’t is any kind of traffic, or siren, or shouting – yelling of any sort – or roaring, except from the sea.

And the colours of the sea?

Green. Green grey, stream grey, clean grey, quiet grey, mist grey, missed grey, sad grey, calm grey. Grey-grey.

And the shapes of the sea are shift-shapes that drift endlessly, aimlessly against a flat horizon. My eyes follow the lines of the surf as it breaks, breaks … rolling along, left to right, left to right as the current and the wind takes it and the creamy foam grows like a lacy bedspread knitted over a jade-green blanket.

I listen to my music in my earphones, and everything dances to the sound of the sea. Everything.

*

Where do I come from? Not aeroplanes.

Where do I come from?

Where do I come from?

Africa. Maybe. Maybe Africa. That’s what I hoped for. To belong to Africa, where we all come from. Maybe that accounts for the strong sense I have of … of coming back.

Have I been here before? Am I mad? Will I start seeing pod-people soon?

Help me.

Why did I write that? Who is going to help me? Who is? Who is?

Who IS?

Help. Help me.

Please.

*

Peter says that archaeological digs are like pinpricks on the world.

“There is so much of the world,” he said one day when I was watching him measuring some mussel shells. “So much of it … And so few resources … And so few people who really want to know – really – what the world was like in another time that is not ours.” He sighed. “If you think how many people lived on this earth, and how many live on it now, covering the place with car parks and shopping malls and blocks of flats … and then you think about choosing a place to excavate … Well, you have to have a gambling streak to think you’ll ever find anything.

“And then, how are you going to know? How are you going to sense what is a metre, or more than a metre, under the place where you have planted your feet? You dig your samples, and you analyse the results, and you think and think and think about where you are going to make your commitment … and then …” Peter looked a little despairing. “Then you look at the spot of ground only spit-distance away, and you wonder if you shouldn’t be digging there.”

He smiled at me sadly. “It’s kind of fun.”

Then he brightened a bit. “On the other hand, if you think how much stuff they threw away – every instant of every day for tens of thousands of years … Well, we’re in with a chance!”

That was on one of his less optimistic days, when not even a broken ostrich-shell bead had turned up, just endless bits of seal bone. They ate a lot of seal meat, our lot; seals washed up on the beach, Peter says, after storms. And a hell of a lot of mussels, judging from the midden heap, and quite a lot of another shellfish that leaves behind a hard and beautiful swirl of mother-of-pearl, like a little coin, dotted with short, blunt spikes on the one side, and smooth and clean and beautiful on the other. I collect them on the beach. (I am making my own midden in my tent.)

“Too recent,” Ben muttered to himself the other day when I was standing nearby. “Too recent! Where’s the stuff that matches the dates of the earlier samples? Where’s the promise of the finds we made last year?”

And I thought, with a sad, sinking feeling, that maybe Peter was “spit distance” away, and they would dig and sift and sort and label, and it would all turn out to be … well, too near to now. Peter needed to find something really old, something really different. Peter needed to be on the cover of National Geographic. Peter needed a break, dammit.

I think archaeology is a bit like looking through a telescope, and then a microscope, and then the telescope again. We talk (or, at least they talk and I listen) and they talk and talk about people who may or may not have wandered this coastline many thousands of years ago, looking for food. That’s the telescope, focusing their gaze on a time that is so far away that nothing now is the same, except the sea, and the tides, and the stone and the moon rising and setting. Only those things remain the same … And maybe that’s what excites Peter about this project.

In the middle of a conversation, these scientists I am stuck with at Barclay Bay will be looking though the microscope, sifting small, small traces of larger things between their fingers. There’s a real microscope, of course – a pretty basic one because of having no electricity – and they run a silent war over who gets to spend most time looking at the things they find. When Peter says that they are “close”, he means that he has convinced himself that certain … well, he says “indicators” are here, crunching under our feet. Small things looming large in a microscope that whisper in his ear that “they” were here.

But there is more. Since I was very small, Peter has told me stories of the beginning of the world and the beginning of life. And the beginning of people. That’s his fascination: to find the earliest evidence of us as people, of us as thinkers and communicators and tellers of stories and makers of beautiful objects. To find a connection.

Sometimes I think, when he shades his eyes and looks along the beach, that he sees them coming, bending to pick up driftwood for their fire and stopping to collect mussels from rock pools.

And who were they?

“Fully modern humans,” Tim said (irritatingly) when I asked, but then got vague and busy with some notes he was making.

Peter looked worried when I cornered him.

“Yes, yes … fully modern is correct. They would have … you know, communicated. Been able to use language, been able to think about … well, higher things. Not just live on a … you know, basic level.”

That wasn’t much help.

But Ben stopped what he was doing, when I asked him, put down the delicate tools he was using to pick away at a bit of petrified dune, and actually looked at me. He was pleased. Maybe he thought I was finally showing some interest in the stuff that interested them so very much.

“The early people who lived on this coast would have had the same brains, the same minds, that we – and all people – have,” he said quietly.

I was standing so close to him, and looking at him so carefully, that I saw his eyes change while he thought of some deep aspect of what he had just said, saw the flicker of sadness change his expression.

Same minds, I thought, just thinking about different things. But what?

I like looking at Ben. His skin is like dark chocolate, smooth and strong, and he has fine, long-fingered hands with pale, oval nails. There is a kind of fascination about watching Ben when he is working at the stones, in the way the muscles of his forearm move under the skin and the way he frowns when he concentrates.

“That was what made them different from those who had gone before. They were more like we are,” he said, suddenly, after a moment, startling me out of my watching.

Immediately I understood. They were the beginning of us.

I walk on the beach, beside the line of the tide, and my footsteps wash away behind me in lines of creamy foam and sometimes … Sometimes I almost catch a glimpse of something that isn’t really there.

A flicker of thought, of sound. The beginning of a sigh or a laugh, swept away on the wind.

They would have heard the sound of the sea, and that wouldn’t have changed over however many thousands of years. They would have had dark to be afraid of, and pale sun to warm them on winter days. They would have heard birds sing and watched fire burn. They would have felt the rocks, sharp under their bare feet, and the cool drops of rain on a sharp winter wind. They would have sat together doing things, making things … and been content.

They would have loved each other …

They would have.

They would.

* * *