Hap
Lesley Beake
Tafelberg
This book was awarded the Gold Sanlam Prize for Youth Literature 2017
To Megan, Melissa and Janette – The Posse
HAP
Hap lay on her skin blanket, looking into a white mist that enclosed her and her place. The day floated like a bird on soft water. There was nothing to see but white. There was nothing to smell in the cool, damp air.
Even the sound of the sea on the rocks far below, even the sea was quiet today.
They had eaten a large fish trapped by the tide in a pool, and some berries and bulbs the younger girls had collected. The people were quiet, resting in the white day. Even the children were still. The babies slept.
Hap reached out to the rock surface and touched it gently with the tips of her fingers feeling, with her eyes closed, the rock-feel, the loose flakes of stone, the lichen patches. When she opened her eyes, the rock colours were brighter in the white light than they had been before, glowing in the fine, damp air, soft moss greens and gentle sun colours against the deep, dark grey of the stone.
And there, at the top of the rock where she lay, just where the overhang of their shelter began, she saw the painted hand.
It was faded, almost to the colour of the rock, but it gleamed in the pearled light with a different texture. For a moment Hap studied it. She had seen such hands before … in the mountains where her family travelled in summer to the cool streams and the deep-shade shelters beside the great river. Her people had made them in the time-gone. This she knew; the people who had lived here before. The people who had made the old paintings, the animals and the dancers, the paintings on the rock that her grandfather and his sister still made when they had been to the other side.
Who had made this painted hand? It was a small hand, slender and delicate, a girl’s hand. Had a girl made it? A girl like herself ?
Hap knelt on the smooth earth floor of the shelter, and reached up to it. Gently she placed her own hand over the painting, touching her precious bone bracelet with her other hand, holding her palm against the rock.
It fitted perfectly.
LUCY
I am on the plane, on the way to away. It has taken all day for the closing of the suitcase and the checking of the ticket and the “Have you got everything?” and “Have you got enough money?”
Affirmative. All I want is to get away. Away to a place that isn’t the maddening heat of New York, which I never want to see again, ever.
We, the passengers, have eaten … well, been served some stuff on trays, and I had a bit of a soft roll and something that once was chicken. Nobody really wanted their dinner, but you always get it anyway on planes. The air stewards bring it around regardless, the ones that show you where to get your life jacket “in the unlikely event of landing in the sea” and mock-smile while they hand out the drinks.
We have struggled around in our too-small seats, trying not to bother the stranger next to us, and now the stewards have dimmed the lights and are trying to settle us down to our in-flight entertainment.
A film flickers in front of me now, on the screen that is too small to really see. I took the headphones off about a thousand air miles ago, because you can’t hear above the noise of the engines anyway, and now I slump, half awake, half nothing, hypnotised by the flicker and flash of an adventure somebody else is having.
And sometimes … sometimes in this half dream, my mind loses its tight control of what may not be remembered, and I begin to see the marble floor of my mother’s bathroom – her peach-coloured towels, the scent of her talcum powder and the glorious feeling of being un-sticky in the air conditioning – and I begin to hear his voice, the voice I may not let my mind hear …
My face is reflected in the dull plastic of the window. I wonder what is behind that faint image of me. Is it Africa yet? Have we crossed that sea where we are “unlikely” to need our life jackets?
I reach out my hand; I touch the wavering reflection that is me, Lucy.
“Please close your window shutter. The other passengers are trying to sleep.”
My mind weeps.
PART ONE
DARK MOON
CHAPTER
1
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