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.
* * *
CHAPTER