“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.