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.