Digging Up Dirt

by Pamela Hart

  But it was worth every penny. I loved to walk down the wide streets shaded by old, old trees to the park by Blackwattle Bay on the harbour, across from the boatyard where the mega-rich moored their white ultra yachts and craftsmen restored old wooden boats, plank by careful plank. At sunset the air was full of fruit bats heading home to the Moreton Bay figs in the park, and watching them fly across the city skyline under the moon was enough to make me fall in love with Sydney all over again.

  Then again, I’ve always loved Sydney. Even in the rain, which was still coming down steadily.

  Boris was sitting on a milk crate inside the open front door, drinking a coffee from the shop around the corner. He couldn’t possibly have visited the shop without telling Gracie, the owner, all about the ‘skellington’. I was sure the story was already spreading through the city. We’d have media all over us before we knew it. Well, I thought smugly, the ABC’s got the exclusive.

  We trooped in, leaving our umbrellas outside. The middle of my floor had been pulled up, the chipboard sections leaning against my pristine new walls.

  ‘Boris!’ I said reproachfully, pulling them away and inspecting the damage. ‘Keep them off the new plaster.’

  ‘Sorry, miss, I just chucked ’em down when I saw—’ He pointed towards the bare ground under the floor.

  ‘Oh. Yes. Okay.’ I peered in, jostling for position with Terry and Dave. All I could see was a white bit of something sticking up from the hard-packed earth. There were some other disturbances in the earth around it, but they looked more like the edges of broken crockery.

  ‘Mate, can’t see shit down there,’ Terry said. ‘I’ll bring in the lights.’

  I hoped my ancient electrical circuits would take the load.

  Boris, cheered by having other men there, pulled up more sections of chipboard and hauled them out to the skip on the road.

  Terry and Dave carried in the lights while Mirha began to write up the shooting list and get the releases ready for the talent. A release is a document that says you allow us to film you and use the footage in our show. Anyone who appears on camera has to sign one, and it includes permission to use stills or photos in social media as well. Mirha is twenty-one (all PAs are in their early twenties, for some reason). As always, her hijab, loose top and trousers in various shades of turquoise were the height of style; her perfect grooming always made me feel like a slob. She smiled nicely at Boris and asked him to sign a release.

  Boris was a good ten years older than Mirha, but he didn’t seem to be thinking much about the girl back home in Croatia right now. He had some impressive muscles, thanks to his work, and he was flexing all of them at the same time. It made it quite hard for him to sign the paper. I don’t think he even read what it said. He grinned, showing off the gold tooth, and Mirha giggled.

  The main room of my house makes an L shape. As you walk in the door, the room stretches the width of the house. About ten feet in front of you is a corridor that leads to the kitchen out the back. Originally there had been a bedroom on the other side of the corridor, but the wall between that room and the parlour had been pulled down to make a bigger living space. It would have been nice to have pulled the corridor wall down, but it supported the floor above, so it had to stay. My plan was to have a dining alcove where the bedroom had been.

  Terry set up lights in that area and one on the staircase that led to the bedrooms. ‘Mate, just get down in the hole, will you, and don’t look at the camera? Just want to set up the shot.’

  Boris got in the hole, resting on his crowbar and trying not to look at the camera, as instructed, but having trouble because Mirha was standing right behind it, as PAs do, and he kept checking that she was still watching him. Terry’s lights were warming up the small space nicely. They might even help my plaster dry out faster. He set up the camera and adjusted the lights while Dave fiddled with his recorder, getting some atmosphere down before shooting started. A sound technician always lays down an atmosphere track. It’s an empty soundscape which can be used to provide a sense of continuity to a montage of shots, or which can fill in the gaps between edited conversations. It’s the mortar of sound editing, and ideally it has no identifiable components.

  I took a few shots for the program’s Facebook page. We’d use them when the episode went to air, but I tweeted a couple out straight away—we had a lot of teachers who followed the show’s Twitter account and we liked to give them a heads-up on a new episode so that they could plan lessons around it.

  Archaeology for little ones—Australian history under your floorboards!

  Then Julieanne came through the open door and all three men immediately straightened up, sucked in their stomachs and smoothed back their hair, like they’d rehearsed it. Terry and Dave began handling their tech equipment with what they clearly hoped was masculine vigour. Terry even did that thing with his fingers where you make a rectangle and look through it, pretending he was setting up a shot of Julieanne. Dave extended the boom microphone in a frankly Freudian gesture.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, smiling sweetly at Terry and Dave and ignoring me. I don’t think she even noticed Mirha. Then she turned the smile on Boris, who blushed. ‘Isn’t this exciting?’ It really was a terrific impersonation of a nice person.

  That sounds bitchy. Look, there are many people in the world who like Julieanne Weaver. There are many people in the world who like me. However, Julieanne and I do not like each other. We never had. It was one of those instant antagonism things—on her part at first, and then on mine. I still don’t really understand it.

  Julieanne was one of those tall, blonde, blue-eyed women who look like they are channelling Barbie—Executive Barbie, in this case, thanks to the raw silk navy trouser suit and navy stilettos. I wondered just how gorgeous this new contractor she was sleeping with was. She didn’t usually dress quite this well for work.

  I didn’t have to wonder long, because someone tall, dark and, okay, not quite handsome, but definitely attractive came through the door. Pale skin, good bones, maybe a bit lanky. I instinctively stood up, sucked my stomach in and smoothed my hair back, then realised what I was doing and laughed at myself. He smiled at me and I was suddenly conscious of my old jeans and cotton top, my standard work clothes. My part of the ABC is dag city. If I wore a suit to work everyone would think I had a job interview. Besides, my work takes me into factory floors, farms, fish markets … I have to be ready for anything a location can throw at me. I keep gumboots and overalls in the back of my car, and a respectable skirt and blouse in case I have to interview someone who might care how I look.

  Julieanne’s guy didn’t seem to notice the clothes. Like Julieanne, he was peering into the hole. Terry looked at me and I twirled my finger to indicate he should start shooting. He signalled Dave and they both began doing their thing, while Mirha took notes. The cameras are almost soundless, so neither Julieanne or—what was his name?—noticed.

  ‘I’m Poppy McGowan,’ I said to the other archaeologist, since Julieanne clearly wasn’t going to introduce us.

  ‘Bartholomew Lang. Call me Tol.’ He glanced around briefly but I’m not sure he actually saw me. He couldn’t wait to look back to the hole.

  ‘I’ll have to change,’ Julieanne announced and looked at me for the first time. I pointed up the stairs to the bedrooms—those rooms were in pretty good shape as they’d only been added to the house about twenty years ago. They had chipboard floors, too, but those were solid and dry.

  Julieanne disappeared upstairs, carefully skirting the hole in the floor and the light on the steps, but Tol jumped right into the hole. Terry followed the movement.

  ‘Wait for me!’ Julieanne said, moving faster.

  ‘Mmm,’ Tol replied, bending over and inspecting the bone. ‘I think you’ve got an animal here. At least, I hope you have.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, peering down, but keeping out of camera range.

  ‘Because these’—he pointed to something invisible on the surface of the bone—‘are bu
tchering marks. Whatever this was, it was chopped up and probably eaten. So let’s hope it isn’t human, eh?’

  He smiled up at me wryly, and I couldn’t help but smile back. God, he was attractive. Hazel eyes, a long, thoughtful face and wonderful hands. I’m a sucker for hands. I had to remind myself sharply that I had a boyfriend and Tol had a girlfriend and this was business. And I had to get them out of here quickly so Boris could finish pulling up the floor and the electricians could come in on Thursday.

  Tol poked at the bone a bit more with those long-fingered, sensitive hands. I told myself to stop drooling. Looking away from his hands made me realise that, unlike Julieanne, he was in ratty old jeans and a faded polo shirt. Then he pulled a tarnished, pointed trowel from his back pocket and began to scrape the dirt away. The lights glinted off the trowel and out of the corner of my eye I saw Terry nod with satisfaction. I took a shot for social media. It was a very Indiana Jones moment.

  ‘Where’s the hat and leather jacket?’ I blurted out like an idiot.

  Tol looked resigned, as though lots of people had made that joke in the past, but he was still a little amused. ‘In the car, actually,’ he said. ‘But no whip. The trowel is my weapon of choice.’ He brandished it briefly at me and I laughed. Couldn’t help it. Really. There was just something about the gleam in his eyes.

  Then Julieanne ran down the stairs in, God help me, khakis, like she was going on a dig in the desert. But that would look good on screen. She handed Tol a trowel and brush and jumped brightly into the hole, then took them back again. The other men craned forward to get a better view as she bent over the bone.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked Tol.

  Wow, she must really like this one. I’d never heard her ask someone else’s opinion before.

  ‘Sheep,’ he said. He scratched a little more at a different spot and pursed his lips. ‘It’s got a tail.’

  ‘A tail?’ she said, standing up straight, trowel in hand. Her blue eyes sparkled with anticipation. I felt my stomach drop. Anything that excited Julieanne about my floor was bad news for me.

  ‘Pretty sure,’ he said. He turned politely to me. ‘I’ve done a fair bit of digging in the Middle East and you get a lot of animal bones there.’

  ‘We have records from the early colony which mention fat-tailed sheep being brought out by the First Fleet, but we’ve never had any proof they were farmed successfully!’ Julieanne said. ‘This could be a significant find about the early colonial food supply.’

  I groaned, quietly. The cameras were still rolling.

  ‘Let’s wait for the carbon-14 dating,’ Tol said, ‘before we get too excited. It might be from much later. It might not even be a fat-tailed sheep. Some other breeds don’t get docked.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Julieanne said, ignoring him, ‘we’ll start digging and document all this properly.’ She regarded the bones in the dirt with great satisfaction, her mouth curving into a perfect toothpaste-ad smile. ‘I love a real dig!’

  She exchanged a collegial smile with Tol, who was also looking forward, it seemed, to a real dig. He waggled his trowel at her like Groucho Marx with a cigar, and she laughed.

  My house, an archaeological site. I was doomed to spend my entire life at my parents’.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘How interesting!’ Mum said enthusiastically. ‘A real archaeological dig in your own backyard.’

  ‘If it was in the backyard I wouldn’t mind,’ I said gloomily, stabbing at my grilled pork chop with my fork.

  ‘Stop playing with your food,’ Dad said, as if I were five again. ‘Eat it up, it’ll do you good.’

  I’d lost five kilos since I’d moved in three months ago. Partly it was because I was driven out of the house on long walks to get some peace and quiet. And partly it was because my parents believed in ‘good, plain food’, which meant no takeaway—the source of my extra kilos in the first place.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter if you have to stay here a little longer,’ Mum said. ‘We don’t mind.’

  They beamed at me, and I had to repress a rude word.

  Don’t misunderstand me. I love my parents. And my two brothers and my three sisters and my nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles and cousins … you get the idea. I’d been grateful when Mum and Dad had offered to let me move home until the house was renovated. Otherwise I’d have had to rent somewhere, and that would have meant no new tiles in the bathroom, cypress pine instead of recycled Huon pine floorboards … lots of little things I couldn’t have afforded without their support. They only lived two blocks from the new house, so it was convenient. Dad was terrific about going over to let tradesmen in and closing up again afterwards. It was nice having dinner ready on the table when I came home. Even my laundry was done if I left it in the dirty clothes basket.

  But.

  I’d lived away from home since I was twenty, and I was used to being independent. Not isolated, mind. My mother had called me every day of my life since I’d moved out, except for the two years I’d spent in London working for the BBC, and you know what? I’d got to the point where it didn’t drive me crazy any more. But talking on the phone once a day and living together … big difference.

  Mum and Dad had snapped right back to me being fifteen and them having a right to know everything about my life. Which was a problem, because they are very strict Catholics who think that having sex before marriage means you’ll go to Hell. And not in any metaphorical sense—the fire and brimstone way. So they’d like to think I’m still a virgin, even in my late twenties, and unless they ask me outright I’m not going to tell them any differently. Which makes sneaking time in with my boyfriend Stuart a bit tricky.

  I rang Stuart after seven-thirty, because he likes to watch the news. Watching the ABC news is one of his rituals. Old-fashioned, I know. I’ve suggested he could vary the routine, but he says it helps him unwind. I don’t want to give the wrong impression of Stuart. He’s a great guy. He’s clever, good-looking, very sweet—but he does have … habits. He’s an accountant; a very high-powered one with an international firm, high finance, top end of town, all that stuff—and I guess he likes things to be well-ordered. Once the ritual is out of the way he’s very flexible and he came straight over.

  My parents like Stuart. They think he’s suitable husband material, just the right kind of guy to settle me down and stop me being so ‘arty’. He’s not a practising Catholic, which is a black mark, but he was raised Catholic, and they assume he’ll revert to the old ways once he has children. I can’t actually see that happening, but if it keeps them happy …

  So you would think that when this highly desirable beau turned up at their door that they would tactfully excuse themselves to give us time alone, right?

  ‘Come through to the kitchen, Stuart,’ Mum said. ‘We’re just having a cup of tea.’ You could visit my family at any time of the day or night and they’d be ‘just having a cup of tea’. I once counted fifteen separate pots made in a single day.

  So we sat around the kitchen table and my parents told Stuart a highly coloured and inaccurate version of what had happened that day while I tried to explain the reality.

  ‘They’re going to turn the house into a museum,’ Mum said. ‘Early convict life, real exhibits, maybe even some live sheep.’

  ‘I could have a look at the bones,’ Dad offered. ‘See if they’ve been butchered by an expert or not.’

  He could, too. Dad was a butcher and then became a meat inspector for the Department of Agriculture. He was one of the people who make sure our meat is fit for human consumption. I’d suggested doing a show on meat inspectors to Jennifer Jay but she’d gently suggested that perhaps seeing the sweet little lambs slaughtered and gutted would upset the children. I’d been really interested when Dad took me to the abattoir when I was six, so I didn’t quite buy that argument, though the idea that the teachers wouldn’t like it carried more weight.

  ‘So they’re digging up your floor?’ Stuart asked me. ‘No, than
ks, Mrs McGowan, no more tea. I’ll have some more cake, though.’

  Since Stuart came on the scene five weeks ago, my mother had started baking a lot of fruitcake, because he liked it. She was shameless. When he came for dinner she made him his favourite meals. She’d offered to go over to his place during the day so the washing machine repairman could get in.

  The only way I’d found to cope with this was to acknowledge the obvious: ‘She wants me to get married and have babies,’ I’d said to him after the third time he visited and was given fruitcake.

  He had smiled understandingly. I hadn’t told Mum, but Stuart had made it quite clear on our second date that he wasn’t interested in marriage. That he liked living alone. And that the thought of having children made his flesh crawl. I, in turn, had made it clear that this was okay with me. I was looking forward to at least some time living alone in my beautiful little house. Maybe not the rest of my life, but a while. And, well, did I mention Stuart’s a hunk? He looks like a champion surfer, all blond hair and tanned skin—one of his other rituals is running through the Royal Botanic Gardens every lunchtime. Living alone would be great, but living alone and having a gorgeous boyfriend would be better.

  ‘What’s that going to do to your schedule?’ Stuart asked. He had helped me draw up the renovation schedule, complete with Gantt chart and checklists for each tradie.

  ‘Buggers it completely,’ I said.

  Dad frowned. He didn’t like any of us using bad language, even my brothers. Ours was really a very feminist family, if feminism means both boys and girls being raised by the same standards. The boys were expected to be virgins until they got married, too.