Digging Up Dirt

by Pamela Hart

  ‘Come around and have a look,’ I said. ‘It’s sort of interesting.’

  My parents made encouraging noises. It wouldn’t occur to them to have sex on the bare floorboards of an unrenovated house, so they never suspected that Stuart and I might. Had, in fact, with the help of a yoga mat.

  Stuart and I walked the two blocks to my house, sharing my father’s golf umbrella. It could have been romantic, but Stuart was intent on sorting out the conflicting stories my parents had told him.

  ‘They’re using your house to shoot footage for the show?’

  I nodded. ‘The one on archaeology I set up with Annie.’

  ‘So you’ll be getting location fees,’ he said with satisfaction. Location fees were paid to people whose houses or businesses were used to film in. Not to public places like museums or the zoo that had a publicity reason to help us, but to private citizens, to compensate them for the upheaval in their lives. And believe me, nothing upheaves like a film crew.

  ‘Nope. ABC policy. No location fees for employees.’

  He frowned. ‘What about the electricity for the lights? Do you get reimbursed?’

  I had never asked about that, but I bet not. Something like that was too open to abuse. ‘Doubt it.’

  ‘It should be tax deductible,’ Stuart mused. ‘You should take a meter reading every day before they start and again after they finish and calculate the charges, then you can include it in your return.’

  Stuart would actually do that, even if it were only a few dollars in question. He was very good at keeping track of things.

  ‘Mmm,’ I said, as we turned the corner to my street. I was more worried by the phrase ‘every day’. How many more days would my house be off-limits? It was private property, so they couldn’t force me to agree to a dig, but a) Jennifer Jay would think this was a great story, particularly as she wouldn’t have to pay location fees and b) Annie would insist and c) my own historical conscience would stop me chucking the lot of them out in time for the electricians.

  But maybe it would only take them a few hours to establish that the bones were not old enough to be from the early colony. And then my house could get back on schedule.

  I had given Julieanne a key so that she could get in the next day, because it was Dad’s golf day and I had to be at Luna Park early. We were shooting the ‘before the gates open’ material with another camera crew, and that started at six-thirty. But I wasn’t pleased to arrive at my gate and find my door still open and Terry’s lights blazing.

  ‘Check the meter straight away,’ Stuart said, but I charged into my living room, ready to shout at Julieanne about invasion of privacy and breach of trust and a few other things.

  ‘What are you still doing here? Oh—hi,’ I said.

  Tol was the only one there, hunkered down, carefully scraping dirt from around one of the crockery bits. He looked up and smiled.

  ‘I thought, if we could get a date on one of these sherds, we could settle the whole argument about whether this is really a historically significant site. We’ll carbon-date the bones, but it takes time. Hi,’ he added to Stuart.

  I introduced them and they nodded at each other.

  ‘I suppose you didn’t consider the expense of the lights to Poppy?’ Stuart said, rather belligerently.

  Tol blinked. ‘No, I didn’t. I thought it was more important for Poppy to get the dig over with before the electricians came in.’

  At least someone had been listening!

  ‘And?’ I said eagerly. ‘Can you date it?’

  ‘Help me get it out,’ he said. He handed me his trowel and handed me into the pit.

  Tol picked up a medium-sized paintbrush and crouched down, gesturing for me to do the same. Hunched over, we seemed even closer, and I was having trouble concentrating.

  ‘Just clean around that sherd,’ he said.

  I took firm hold of the trowel by the blade, to keep it steady.

  ‘What do you think the handle’s there for?’ he asked, amusement in his voice. He put his hand over mine and eased my fingers back until I was holding the handle. I was conscious of the warmth of his skin and of Stuart glaring at us.

  ‘Now try.’

  I aimed the point of the trowel at the pottery, but Tol grabbed my hand again.

  ‘You’ll scratch the sample,’ he said. ‘Just scrape it gently away sideways, like this.’ He guided my hand as he spoke, so that I was pushing dirt away from the pottery rather than stabbing at it.

  ‘Are you two going to be long?’ Stuart asked, a definite note of complaint in his voice.

  ‘Now that Poppy’s helping, it shouldn’t take long at all,’ Tol said cheerfully.

  ‘Take some photos for Insta, will you?’ I asked, handing Stuart my phone.

  Stuart scowled, but complied. It didn’t take long. Ten minutes later, after photographing the pieces ‘in situ’, as Tol said, I climbed out of the pit.

  Tol eased the small piece of brown pottery I had uncovered from the ground. ‘I’ve already mapped its position,’ he said, as though we were about to criticise him. He lifted it up to the light and brushed some dirt from the broken edge.

  ‘I’ll have to wash it—’ he was saying when Julieanne walked in, dressed for dinner in a slinky blue jersey dress that made Stuart’s eyes pop out.

  ‘Tol! Are you ready?’ Then she saw the pottery in his hand. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. Her tone was not pleasant.

  ‘I’ve already photographed it,’ he assured her, but that wasn’t the problem.

  ‘How could you work on my site without my permission?’

  Tol went very still. ‘Your site?’

  ‘Of course it’s mine!’ she said, low and hard. I winced. It would have been better if she’d yelled. ‘I’m the official museum archaeologist. I’ll be lead author on the papers.’

  Tol relaxed. ‘Oh, I don’t care about that,’ he said. ‘I just thought Poppy would like to get a firm date as soon as possible so she can get on with her renovations.’

  ‘She won’t be doing any renovations any time soon,’ Julieanne said. ‘This is a major site. An important discovery. It has to be fully excavated. Right out to the walls.’ She looked around as though she’d like to knock the whole house down immediately.

  I must have looked stricken, because Tol climbed out of the pit and patted me kindly on the shoulder. ‘Excavating right out to a wall isn’t such a good idea,’ he said, trying to make a joke of it. ‘They have a tendency to fall down on top of you if you do that.’ He smiled at me. ‘I know about walls. Don’t worry. Yours are safe with me.’

  How could I not like this man, even if he was Julieanne’s current squeeze? And he had a beautiful voice, warm and smooth and reassuring, like hot chocolate.

  ‘If the other material in the strata is of late date—’

  ‘That won’t prove anything!’ Julieanne said. ‘There’s been building, earthquakes—’

  ‘Earthquakes?’ I protested. ‘When?’

  ‘The Newcastle quake from the seventies was felt here,’ Julieanne said, then ploughed on. ‘There’s no way to tell about dates for the bones until we get the carbon-14 results. That could be days. Weeks, the way they’re backed up at the lab. In the meantime, I intend to get right down to bedrock.’

  ‘We’re on clay,’ I said. ‘Bedrock is six feet down! Maybe twelve! You are not digging a twelve-foot hole in my living room!’

  We glared at each other.

  ‘I vote we just put the floorboards back over it and pretend it never happened,’ I said, knowing that would infuriate her. But even I wasn’t prepared for the full Psycho Woman treatment.

  ‘You’re a Philistine!’ she shouted. ‘You don’t care about history! You were always trying to sabotage the real historians when you worked at the museum, and you haven’t changed!’

  I knew what she was talking about, of course: one of the worst afternoons in my life, when I had to listen to Julieanne nominate a stump-jump plough as the central piece of an exh
ibition, even though it didn’t fit in the display case we had to work with. She nominated it sixteen times, even though the curator in charge of the exhibition explained fifteen times that it was too big and she’d have to find another, smaller object instead. He was very patient. I, on the other hand, went from being exasperated to being bored to being downright scared of someone who was incapable of accepting that the world wasn’t the way she wanted it to be, to being really, really cross, so the sixteenth time Julieanne said, ‘But it would be much better if we could have the plough’, I exploded.

  ‘You can’t have the plough because the fucking plough doesn’t FIT THE CASE! Deal with it. Move on. Because we’re sick of hearing about the plough, Julieanne.’

  ‘How dare you!’ Julieanne had gasped, and rushed out of the room.

  If I hadn’t sworn at her, which I don’t normally do, I might have got away with it. As it was, I had to apologise the next day and the powers that be suggested it might be better if another audio-visual person worked on the exhibition, which was fine with me.

  But I didn’t work with her any more, and no one was going to make me apologise for defending my own house, even if she was more upset than I’d expected. It wasn’t like her to lose it.

  ‘I’m sick of hearing about the plough, Julieanne,’ I said, sweetly.

  She raised her hand as though she wanted to slap me across the face, then stiffened.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘That would be assault before witnesses.’

  Stuart and Tol had frozen. Julieanne breathed through her nostrils, her teeth clenched, hand still raised. I’d never seen her this angry, and I wondered why she was so stressed. It couldn’t be just me—she didn’t think I was that important.

  ‘I’ll get a historical protection order from the council,’ she said. ‘Then you won’t have a choice! Come on, Tol.’

  She swept out. Tol stayed a moment longer to put the sherd of pottery in a plastic bag and tuck it into his pocket. He was carefully not meeting my gaze. What was he doing hanging around with Julieanne? Was he a masochist? Then it occurred to me that maybe this was the first time he had seen Julieanne being Psycho Woman.

  He turned towards the door, which brought him face to face with me.

  ‘She feels very strongly about things,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘TOL!’ Julieanne shouted.

  ‘Have a nice evening,’ I said, and moved aside. He quirked his mouth to one side and left.

  I turned to Stuart wanting hugs and reassurance.

  ‘What plough?’ he asked.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We turned off the lights and locked up. With a possible early start the next day if the weather was good, dallying with Stuart didn’t have as much appeal as usual. Besides, Julieanne had a key. I’d be looking over my shoulder the whole time.

  I found that I was, surprisingly, worried about Julieanne. All right, we’d had our differences in the past, but threatening to slap me—that wasn’t like her. She had to be seriously stressed about something to let me get under her skin like that. Well. Not my problem. My house was my problem.

  The rain had stopped and an easterly was shredding the clouds away from a crescent moon. The smell of the sea was surprisingly strong, and I breathed it in deeply, trying to feel calmer about my poor little house. We saw Julieanne and Tol standing by a beaten-up silver Lancer as we skirted the skip. Julieanne had put on a matching jacket that transformed the dress into something surprisingly respectable. Elegant, even. Tol looked dirty and comfortable. We were going to have to walk past them, but I didn’t want to talk to Julieanne again, so we moved slowly down the path, hoping they’d go before we got there.

  ‘You can’t come to the preselection meeting looking like that,’ Julieanne said loudly. ‘You know how important this is to me—why couldn’t you have made an effort?’

  Stuart winced. I made a mental note never to use that approach with him. Not that I would. A combination of whining and accusation doesn’t work with anyone, as far as I know.

  ‘My place is only five minutes away,’ Tol said placatingly. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

  Julieanne sniffed disapprovingly—no, really, she did, just like in Victorian novels. ‘I suppose it’s too much to expect a suit?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tol said, quite pleasantly, but very firmly. ‘Suits are for weddings and funerals. And even then I don’t wear a tie.’

  I approved. Very close to my attitude to stilettos, though I had been known to make an exception for dinner with a very attractive man. But it was not the right answer to give to Julieanne.

  ‘Nothing I do matters to you!’ she snapped. ‘Can’t you see that tonight is vital?’

  Tol shifted his feet. ‘Look, Julieanne, we’ve only been seeing each other a couple of weeks, and you’ve always known I’m going back to Jordan … I’m not that comfortable being paraded around as though I’m a permanent fixture in your life.’

  ‘Oh, just help me out! I can lock in the Christian vote if I turn up with a man—they suspect me of being lesbian as it is, because you never come to the meetings!’

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed.

  She whipped around like a viper ready to strike. ‘Shut your mouth, Poppy!’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just the thought of you as a lesbian is—ridiculous.’ So was the idea of her in Parliament. I’d heard rumours she was trying for preselection for the Australian Family Party, a splinter group of right-wing hardliners, mostly funded by the Pentecostal churches. Maybe that’s what she was stressed about. I hadn’t believed the stories, but even more, I had trouble believing they’d preselect a single, childless young woman whose morals more closely resembled Mary Magdalene’s than the Virgin Mary’s. But clearly, Julieanne was sculpting her image, and Tol was part of the package.

  Looked like he was only now finding that out, and not liking the idea.

  ‘Just don’t introduce me as your fiancé,’ he said.

  ‘I’d never do anything like that,’ Julieanne said, looking hurt and vulnerable. She moved closer to him and began whispering, stroking his chest, laying on the sugar with a trowel. His face softened. She really did look fabulous. I guess I could understand how a man could get blinded by that. For a while, at least.

  We walked past them at a brisk pace and were almost to the corner when her voice rose in a shriek.

  ‘You’re ruining my life, you selfish bastard!’

  Stuart and I looked around involuntarily. Julieanne pushed Tol with both hands so that he staggered, only prevented from falling by a rather sharp picket fence. Then she turned her back on him and walked fast in the other direction, her heels clicking on the footpath.

  Tol just watched her go. Then he went to the car, pressed the key fob, and tried to open the door. It took him a couple of tries and I realised his hand was shaking. Was it with distress, or anger? I would absolutely have understood if Tol had wanted to whack Julieanne. But I was glad he hadn’t. Very glad, for some reason.

  Then Tol was in his car and pulling out from the kerb. He’d be all right.

  ‘Come on,’ Stuart said, his voice thick with distaste. ‘I could do with a cup of tea.’

  I laughed, and tucked my hand through his arm. ‘Well, I happen to know where you can get one.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tuesday

  As I ate breakfast, the rain started pounding on the roof, and I groaned. No excuse to put off the dig. Luna Park would have to wait. I sent the appropriate emails.

  At least I didn’t have to rush out the door. I spent some time on my own social media (which tends to get neglected in favour of the program’s). My last post complaining about my renovations being delayed had received lots of sad face emojis and sympathy, with my friend Alex offering to come over and evict the archaeologists in person. Which I’d have paid to see, because although he’s a big guy, butch he is not.

  It would take too long to describe Alex properly, but I’m a bit like his big sister—he’s been one of my b
est friends since he was sixteen and I was eighteen. He runs a musical instrument shop. Did I mention he was gay? After offering to evict the archaeologists, he had made a crack about fat-tailed sheep, which started a hilarious if very rude thread, complete with Freddie Mercury GIFs. It was very funny. It did make me notice, though, that my friends were far more successful in cheering me up than my boyfriend had been the night before.

  While I was online, I checked out the Australian Family Party’s website. It still looked a very bad fit for Julieanne to me. Highly religious and very, very conservative. What on Earth was she doing in that company?

  Annie called me while I was having my second cup of tea.

  ‘Julieanne’s already put in a complaint about you,’ Annie said. I could hear the laugh in her voice. All right for her. ‘I just opened the email.’

  ‘Did she tell you she almost slapped me across the face in front of witnesses? I could’ve had her charged with assault.’

  ‘Oh, shit. I’m glad she didn’t—I need her for the fundraiser. She’s very good at schmoozing money out of rich old men. And you want the footage for your show.’

  ‘She’s going to ask for an historical preservation order from the council!’

  ‘It’ll sort itself out,’ Annie said soothingly. ‘Are we booked in for the Shakespeare?’

  Annie and I were theatregoers. Had been ever since uni. This time, it was a production of Much Ado About Nothing, which was one of our favourites.

  ‘Yep. Two weeks from today. All set.’

  We discussed where to go for an early dinner beforehand, her children’s latest crises at school (‘Ruby keeps contradicting the teacher! And worse, she’s always right!’), her cat’s objections to dry food, and a few other matters pertaining to some friends who were getting married. A proper natter, in other words. It was very calming. A return to normality.

  So there I was, letting in Boris, and Terry and Dave and Mirha and Julieanne and Tol and three students and the PR girl from the museum who doubled as the staff photographer. Did I mention my house is only twelve feet wide? It was crowded in there.