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