I looked at the sea, for a moment – the cold, cold Atlantic – and I knew that dream had gone. This was my reality. Barclay Bay.
Then Ben stood up, shaking off sand that had blown in on the wind, and held out a hand to help me up. “Let’s walk,” he said. “It’s too cold to lounge around on beaches. And,” he added, “you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
But we did talk a bit, on that first brisk walk along the firm sand at the edge of the waves. About music, mostly. About Mrs Marais and the pod-people. Ben says it’s not a pod (well, I knew that): it’s a meteorite that’s coming at full moon. He read about it on the Internet, back in Cape Town a couple of weeks ago: a meteorite that will land, the scientists think, somewhere in the sea off the west coast of Africa. A small meteorite. One that is entirely unlikely to have any persons on it, of any description. There might be a bit of a light show, Ben said; the astrophysicists are all twittering about this “once in thousands of years” event, but Ben says he’s heard that kind of stuff before.
It was an easy kind of a talking – perhaps because neither of us said anything about anything. It was nice.
*
Sometimes I think about Lisa, who is – who has always been – in my class at school, as if we were bonded together for life from when we were both little. And I wonder what she would think about my life here. Not much. If I wanted to write to her (which I don’t), what would I tell her?
Well, the big thing is the sound. I expected (if I expected anything at all) for Barclay Bay to be peaceful. Well, New York begins to be quiet, in my memory, compared to here.
It never stops. The sea bangs and crashes away all day, and especially at night. I lie in my double-down sleeping bag with my hot-water bottle cuddled up beside me. I’m in charge of making them for anybody who wants one (Ben never does) every night, and they are my single luxury in this forsaken place.
The tent seems even more fragile when there is a storm at sea, and then it makes sounds of its own – sudden cracks of nylon and creaks of guy ropes, little whinnies and lifts as if it is about to gallop off with the gale. Sometimes I think it is.
And then there are the endlessly screeching seabirds and the rattle of the stones on the beach and the hiss of the water streaming back out. But what there isn’t is any kind of traffic, or siren, or shouting – yelling of any sort – or roaring, except from the sea.
And the colours of the sea?
Green. Green grey, stream grey, clean grey, quiet grey, mist grey, missed grey, sad grey, calm grey. Grey-grey.
And the shapes of the sea are shift-shapes that drift endlessly, aimlessly against a flat horizon. My eyes follow the lines of the surf as it breaks, breaks … rolling along, left to right, left to right as the current and the wind takes it and the creamy foam grows like a lacy bedspread knitted over a jade-green blanket.
I listen to my music in my earphones, and everything dances to the sound of the sea. Everything.
*
Where do I come from? Not aeroplanes.
Where do I come from?
Where do I come from?
Africa. Maybe. Maybe Africa. That’s what I hoped for. To belong to Africa, where we all come from. Maybe that accounts for the strong sense I have of … of coming back.
Have I been here before? Am I mad? Will I start seeing pod-people soon?
Help me.
Why did I write that? Who is going to help me? Who is? Who is?
Who IS?
Help. Help me.
Please.
*
Peter says that archaeological digs are like pinpricks on the world.
“There is so much of the world,” he said one day when I was watching him measuring some mussel shells. “So much of it … And so few resources … And so few people who really want to know – really – what the world was like in another time that is not ours.” He sighed. “If you think how many people lived on this earth, and how many live on it now, covering the place with car parks and shopping malls and blocks of flats … and then you think about choosing a place to excavate … Well, you have to have a gambling streak to think you’ll ever find anything.
“And then, how are you going to know? How are you going to sense what is a metre, or more than a metre, under the place where you have planted your feet? You dig your samples, and you analyse the results, and you think and think and think about where you are going to make your commitment … and then …” Peter looked a little despairing. “Then you look at the spot of ground only spit-distance away, and you wonder if you shouldn’t be digging there.”
He smiled at me sadly. “It’s kind of fun.”
Then he brightened a bit. “On the other hand, if you think how much stuff they threw away – every instant of every day for tens of thousands of years … Well, we’re in with a chance!”
That was on one of his less optimistic days, when not even a broken ostrich-shell bead had turned up, just endless bits of seal bone. They ate a lot of seal meat, our lot; seals washed up on the beach, Peter says, after storms. And a hell of a lot of mussels, judging from the midden heap, and quite a lot of another shellfish that leaves behind a hard and beautiful swirl of mother-of-pearl, like a little coin, dotted with short, blunt spikes on the one side, and smooth and clean and beautiful on the other. I collect them on the beach. (I am making my own midden in my tent.)
“Too recent,” Ben muttered to himself the other day when I was standing nearby. “Too recent! Where’s the stuff that matches the dates of the earlier samples? Where’s the promise of the finds we made last year?”
And I thought, with a sad, sinking feeling, that maybe Peter was “spit distance” away, and they would dig and sift and sort and label, and it would all turn out to be … well, too near to now. Peter needed to find something really old, something really different. Peter needed to be on the cover of National Geographic. Peter needed a break, dammit.
I think archaeology is a bit like looking through a telescope, and then a microscope, and then the telescope again. We talk (or, at least they talk and I listen) and they talk and talk about people who may or may not have wandered this coastline many thousands of years ago, looking for food. That’s the telescope, focusing their gaze on a time that is so far away that nothing now is the same, except the sea, and the tides, and the stone and the moon rising and setting. Only those things remain the same … And maybe that’s what excites Peter about this project.
In the middle of a conversation, these scientists I am stuck with at Barclay Bay will be looking though the microscope, sifting small, small traces of larger things between their fingers. There’s a real microscope, of course – a pretty basic one because of having no electricity – and they run a silent war over who gets to spend most time looking at the things they find. When Peter says that they are “close”, he means that he has convinced himself that certain … well, he says “indicators” are here, crunching under our feet. Small things looming large in a microscope that whisper in his ear that “they” were here.
But there is more. Since I was very small, Peter has told me stories of the beginning of the world and the beginning of life. And the beginning of people. That’s his fascination: to find the earliest evidence of us as people, of us as thinkers and communicators and tellers of stories and makers of beautiful objects. To find a connection.
Sometimes I think, when he shades his eyes and looks along the beach, that he sees them coming, bending to pick up driftwood for their fire and stopping to collect mussels from rock pools.
And who were they?
“Fully modern humans,” Tim said (irritatingly) when I asked, but then got vague