WHEN JOANNA WAS DOING HER RESEARCH – God, it seemed like someone else’s life now! – she filled in the details, conscious of her twenty-first century eyes, trying not to impose things on the world that weren’t there in the 1800s. It was forensic work, really. She could go back and find out what had happened: she could recreate the roads people had taken, track them like ants. When you looked at lives like that, if you got up high enough, it all made sense, like reading a map.
It was one of the things she had loved about her job – that she could read and read as much as she wanted, until the screen was the only still point and the world itself shook and blurred at the edges when she turned back to it. Joanna didn’t mind being left alone as long as she managed to find the single important thing that was hidden between the lines of all the text generated over all the years by hundreds of other serious people – people like her! – who had thought that something small was important, and laboured to bring it into the light. Joanna was a shovelbum; it was that simple. She did her time in the paper trenches; she was proud of the notches on her ballpoint. Viola didn’t get that, and neither did Jan.
Eee-eeeee! said Doctor Renfield. What’s that? Oh, the sound of the world’s tiniest violin!
“Leave me alone,” said Joanna. “I’m working.”
It wasn’t strictly true. She should have been busy with the precise whereabouts of the remains of Saartjie Baartman’s father, but Joanna had wandered onto a couple of websites about her new locale. Fish Hoek fascinated her: the myriad churches, the villagers divided between the mountain and the valley, their unwillingness to bend with the rest of the country to laws that made life easier. Fish Hoek was still dry – you could drink wine and beer in restaurants, but there wasn’t a bottle store within the perimeter. It went with the puppety “Good mornings!” of the neighbours; with the wool shop that sold crocheted hats; with the poster of the frog in the CNA that said, Homework Gives You warts!! The place had the feel of a stage set about it, and everyone with their parts.
They’re vanilla, whispered Doctor Renfield. And you like rum-and-raisin.
The people were proud of their small world – of THE FAMILY BUTCHERS on Main Road who made The Best Wors in the Western Cape! They were proud of the aquifer that fed their gardens; they were proud of the Cape Granite and Peninsula Sandstone fynbos that occurred nowhere else in the world. So what was it about it all that bothered her? Joanna hopped from site to site, skimming the same information over and over until she knew it by heart.
But then there was the little electric jump in her chest that, like a metal detector, told her she was close.
The letters shifted and blurred on the screen. Here, she told herself. Now wait just a minute. She slowed her skimming. The Cave the World Forgot. The capital letters jutted out, and once Joanna had seen the slogan on the site, she would see it everywhere – plastered on smudged flyers and pamphlets, in carefully scripted museum captions.
It had been comforting to her when she first moved to Fish Hoek that there was a site nearby, something that she knew about but that most other people didn’t care about. It made her feel like she was part of something bigger, a figure in the long Chain of Being. It made her feel like she belonged.
But Peers Cave had its own, official, history beyond Joanna’s imagination: South Africa in the 1920s wasn’t Egypt. Amateur archaeology was still the pastime of only a few dedicated individuals, even with Raymond Dart’s controversial discovery of the Taung skull a few years before. Victor and Bertie Peers, like so many white people who loved Africa, were great mountain walkers. Back then they were free to dig wherever they wanted – and to dispose of whatever they found however they wished. They began their preliminary excavations in the cave at Skildergat Kop in 1925, but it was only in 1927 that the work with explosives began. At the time, Skildergat was only the second cave in the country that had produced the full sequence, from Earlier through Middle to Later Stone Age. That it was a desirable address – a warm, dry spot overlooking the Fish Hoek Valley – was pretty obvious. The cave had been continuously occupied for two hundred thousand years: about as long as we’ve been us, thought Joanna.
It also contained the southern-most rock paintings in Africa. (If, that was, you disregarded MASI P MASSIVE!!) The paintings were towards the back of the cave, mostly entoptics, dots and lines in faint ochre strokes, and handprints. The image of the prints with their long fingers plucked at Joanna. She wanted immediately to march up the side of the hill – there was a steep and sandy path between the fynbos – and place her hands in them. The walls would fall away and she would find herself behind the face of things, deep in the brown machinery of the Earth.
Or else she would be falling upwards into a starry dome, like the one that the angry daughter had decorated with the embers of her mother’s cooking fire, the roasting roots and the ashes thrown up in rage and spoilage to form the Milky Way. Everything around her, thought Joanna, was about the beauty and meaning that emerged from something terrible and irrevocable. But it wasn’t like that. Her life wasn’t going to be turned into a story that made people say, See, she had to go through all those things because otherwise she would not have found happiness, or grown as a person, or some other bullshit. Her life was boring, and she was stuck with it.
Peers Cave was only a dark space now, but at first it had been a wonder. When the archaeologists arrived for the 1929 joint meeting of the British and South African Associations for the Advancement of Science, they went from the mail steamer to the cave before anywhere else. Joanna pictured them setting off at a run, trailing valises, holding onto their bowler hats. Sir Arthur Keith had said, portentously, It will be a long while before so perfect a discovery as that made by the Peers is repeated.
That would be the same Sir Arthur Keith who had to eat his words about the Taung Child? asked Doctor Renfield. I’d take them with a pinch of salt.
In the first layer the Peers men – and then the Peers women, too: it had turned into a family affair – had unearthed two women and four children, nearly anatomically complete, tucked neatly into the wall and lying on their sides. Two of the skeletons were head to head, as if in conversation. There were the usual funerary objects with them, the things that weren’t grave goods when they were made: ostrich egg shells, an iron spearhead, awls, rope. The women had medicine bags tied around their waists – curative herbs against the reckoning that was coming. One of them was lame.
There were more skeletons in the deeper layers, nine in all, but the one that had drawn most attention from the Western world was from the middle layer, a shortish man, nearly middle-aged, that the newspapers called The Fish Hoek Man. He was at once twelve thousand years old and thirty, the same age as she would be soon. Joanna pictured him lumbering towards her like a golem, fisting the mud from his eyes and groaning in his forgotten language that the white men had disturbed his sleep.
She scrolled down and stopped. Oh, God. What was that?
The photograph was dark, a copy of a copy. The black box was open. Inside it was the tiny skeleton, skull turned to the side as if the soil was a pillow. A ring of shells was arranged around the head, like a halo. Further down the bones, a string of glaring white ostrich-shell beads was twined around the hipbones. The child was about two years old. It was impossible not to imagine it in the flesh.
That could be James, Joanna said to herself. They’re about the same size.
The Peerses had gently removed the bones and arranged them in that black box in the exact position of death, stored the child in his wooden mausoleum.
How he must miss his mother.
Joanna kept reading. The Peers family was of that robust settler kind. In pictures father and son rested, sweaty, on their many-tined garden forks. They were dressed in the khaki shorts the boys in Joanna’s high school had had to wear for Cadet practice, in the years before they were called up for the army. There were other, less publicly displayed photographs of the daughter dancing with one of the skeletons from the cave; another of her with a heavy snake like a stole around her shoulders. They were supremely unafraid of what they had found. It was the sort of thing that you could never get away with now. The last Peers daughter had died decades ago, though the traces of her family’s legacy were everywhere in Fish Hoek. You couldn’t drive up any of its roads without the identically white-toothed houses of Peers Hill Estate grinning down at you. Joanna wondered how many old ladies there were left in places like Marina Gardens, their stories about dances with pythons trailing like scarves from their knotted knuckles. Nobody knew the things you had done unless you told them, and kept telling them, until they were true.
And it had all happened up there, in the Skildergat cave, both far away and close to home, because most people didn’t look up. They hadn’t a century ago, and they didn’t now. You heard nothing about them, those skeletons. The others were in a back room of the Museum, kept in cardboard boxes in acid-free paper and stuffing, their graves destroyed, restless in their wrapping. No wonder the staff didn’t want to talk about what was in the storerooms. So far the government made a distinction between the remains of individuals who had been known in life, and the anonymous dead, but Joanna didn’t see how that was a comfort.
And Skildergat itself – the empty bell jar, the splintering packing case – was unprotected. Anyone could go up there and add their own graffiti to the rock paintings if they liked. They already had. There were a few half-hearted signs pointing up the mountain to Peers Cave, along the track like a path on a gigantic scalp, but they were markers for hikers and dog-walkers, mostly, people who carried plastic bags for poo. It really was the cave that had been forgotten. There was no space in the public memory for the ancient dead, the ones who went unclaimed. They had no family; they didn’t belong in the morgue; they were not buried in the land they had loved. No wonder their spirits roamed the suburbs and sat on the sagging fences, lost and hungry and homesick.
They had found compatriots in the other spectres haunting the town, Joanna thought. The pensioners counted their steps, mingling with the shoppers in Valleyland, languishing unseen in the small shade of the playground at the beach. They were tolerated, invisible, and they had nowhere else to go.
Not like me, thought Joanna with pity and relief.
I have a home. It wasn’t perfect, and Jan was really getting up her nose, but she was in her prime. She could stand to lose a little weight but she was hale and hearty and safely cloned in the person of James.
And the terrible thing that everyone had to deal with at least once in their lives – the death of a parent – she had already done. Nothing else would ever be that bad again.