Egyptian Enigma

by LJM Owen

  Awesome!

  It being a Friday evening, it seemed to Elizabeth that most of Canberra had hit the road at the same time, many likely headed to the coast to cool off over the weekend. As she circled her car up and around one of central Canberra’s ubiquitous circular avenues on ramps, she caught sight of the giant orange metal twist that hovered over her destination on the western shore of the lake. She stuck to the left lane across Commonwealth Avenue Bridge as chaotic lane-changers increased the danger for everyone else, while achieving little.

  Pulling into the carpark of the Cochrane Smith Museum, named after one of the few indigenous Tasmanian women who had left audio recordings of their native language, she spotted Alice standing near a side door of the rambling modernist gallery. Her long dark hair whipped around her face, mirroring the fluttering of her loose white cotton skirt in the gusts of wind that blew off the lake and eddied around the angular building.

  As she reached the brilliant young geneticist, Elizabeth bent down to give her a quick hug. ‘Hello! How have you been?’

  ‘Great!’

  ‘And how’s your mum?’

  Alice’s enormous brown eyes clouded. ‘Not well. She needs her wheelchair to go anywhere now. I’m lucky we have some community services come and take her down to the club a couple of times a week, but otherwise she’s housebound. I just can’t move her up and down the stairs myself any more.’

  ‘Oh, Alice, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise how far her MS had progressed. Is there anything I can do to help?’

  Alice gave a small shrug. ‘No, it’s our life and I know things could be worse so we’re quite happy muddling along together. Mum’s a positive person, always sees the bright side of things. Even though her legs are too weak for her to walk now, her arms and hand–eye co-ordination are fine, so she spends her days crocheting for local charities while watching her favourite soaps.’

  As they talked, Elizabeth and Alice had entered the museum’s foyer and walked beneath round steel beams and massive glass panels framing interesting views around the museum. They wove through the maze of exhibitions and meeting rooms on the ground floor, making for the elevator to Alice’s underground work area.

  ‘Getting involved in your investigations is really the one thing I do for myself,’ Alice continued. ‘I know it’s good for me to have something else to focus on.’

  Elizabeth wasn’t sure what to say to that. ‘Well, I couldn’t complete them without you, so they’re more our investigations rather than mine, don’t you think?’

  Alice beamed. ‘Really? That makes us Team… Team…well, we’ll have to come up with a name later.’ She reached out to swipe her pass at a security plate. A red dot on one side blinked rapidly, accompanied by a beep. Heavy stainless-steel doors slid open to take them to the museum’s state-of-the-art research facilities located far below the public spaces.

  ‘How about you?’ Alice asked, as they entered the elevator. ‘How was your trip?’

  ‘Fantastic! I’ve got pictures on my phone. I can show you later.’

  ‘Great. Maybe after I’ve shown you the lab we can go to the staff room and grab a hot chocolate. I have some feedback from Dr Marsh on two of our papers to go over with you…’

  Elizabeth felt a thrill at the prospect of seeing her name on a series of papers in reputable journals later this year, courtesy of her Olmec and Maya investigations. How fabulous would it be to add an Egyptian paper or two to the list?

  ‘Plus I have some homemade ube ice cream in the freezer.’

  Elizabeth was a sucker for anything made with the Filipino purple yam. ‘Temptress.’

  The elevator doors opened to reveal a dazzling white laboratory containing row upon row of stainless-steel examination benches and sinks, pristine white Formica working benches and hooded fume cupboards.

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘I know!’ Alice almost squealed. ‘And look,’ she pointed toward a corner of the room, ‘there’s the printer.’

  With its single robot arm poised over a large blue flatbed, multiple cables running from the back to various power outlets and computer screens, the simple design of the 3D printer failed to convey the enormous difference the technology could make to a range of human endeavours including medicine, education and – most importantly, from Elizabeth’s point of view – ancient Egyptian mummy identification.

  ‘My supervisor said I can use it after hours as long as we pay for all the materials we use and purchase any data we need.’

  ‘This is wonderful, Alice. And where will we work?’

  ‘That’s the only difficulty. We can’t keep what we print out here. Since this isn’t an official research project of the museum, my supervisor can’t allocate us any space.’

  ‘Hmm. I don’t think that will be a problem. I’m sure Dr Marsh will let us use a space at the uni then.’

  Alice nodded. ‘So, how about we go next door to the staff room, grab that ube and hot chocolate, and you tell me all about this prince from the Golden Tomb.’

  ‘Done and done!’

  —

  Near the bottom of the stairs in Elizabeth’s house, the door to Taid’s library stood slightly ajar. Welsh choir music, low and insistent, drifted through the crack, along with a hint of bergamot. Even on the hottest summer’s day, Taid could be found nursing a cup of his stand-a-spoon-up-in-it Earl Grey tea, thickened with sweetened condensed milk, while he worked.

  Rapping on the door, Elizabeth pushed it open so that she could enter. Taid looked up from his enormous desk, the surface a jumble of hard-bound volumes, papers and curios. He closed the red leather book he was reading.

  ‘P’nawn da, Beth bach.’

  ‘P’nawn da.’ Good afternoon.

  ‘And how are you?’ he asked, as she settled into the library’s chesterfield sofa.

  ‘Excellent!’ Elizabeth craned her neck to see the title. ‘What are you working on there?’

  ‘Nothing as interesting as you are, if your grin is anything to go by.’ Taid pointed to a teapot nearby and raised his eyebrows. ‘Paned o de?’ Cup of tea?

  Elizabeth shook her head. ‘Dim diolch.’ No, thanks.

  Taid dipped a spoon into an open can of condensed milk, then dribbled it into his cup.

  Elizabeth tsked. ‘Grandmère would kill you if she saw you doing that.’

  ‘Why do you think I come in here to drink my tea?’

  Elizabeth looked idly about the library as Taid stirred his cup. Overflowing floor-to-ceiling bookcases built from reclaimed Tasmanian oak enclosed three sides of the room. The fourth wall was a row of sliding glass panels where light streamed in through sheer curtains, filling the room with an ethereal glow. Today the panels lay open to the delightfully cool courtyard, spray from a Moroccan tiled fountain evaporating to lower the temperature throughout by several degrees. Loki lay in the shade of one ivy-covered wall, idly flicking her tail.

  ‘So, my Snowdon lily, to what do I owe the pleasure? Using my impressive powers of deduction, I can see you have news.’

  Elizabeth grinned tightly. ‘Remember I mentioned seeing the mummy from the Golden Tomb in the Cairo museum? When I first got back?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Henry’s had a brilliant idea. We’re going to track down as many items from the Tomb as we can, print them out using a 3D printer at the museum, and see if we can work out exactly who built the Golden Tomb!’

  Thankfully, if they could access the scan data for free through academic channels, and Alice arranged the printing at her work, the only cost to the group would be spools of filament – easily afforded when split between six of them.

  ‘Marvellous, Beth! But…’

  ‘How do you know there’s a but?’

  Taid winked.

  Elizabeth sighed. How could he read her so well? ‘There’s just one hiccup. We don’t have anywhere to work. The
re’s no room at the museum where Alice works, and I checked with Dr Marsh this week but she said she can’t allocate any space to us as the investigation isn’t officially attached to the university. I’m looking into the possibility of a space at the Library, though it’s not looking good…’

  ‘But apart from that one hiccup, you’re feeling good about everything you’ve taken on this year?’ Taid’s spoon swooped in for another load of oozing sweetness.

  How did he have any teeth left? ‘Well…mostly, yes. Work’s going okay. I’m a bit worried about the tutoring, to be honest. I was really lucky to get the chance to do it this year, but it’s a one-year trial only. If I do well, Dr Marsh will keep me on next year, but at the moment I feel as though I’m not getting through to everyone in the class.’

  ‘Perhaps your expectations are too high.’

  ‘Maybe. I’m also concerned Dr Marsh may not like the papers Alice and I have been preparing. She’s asked for a lot of changes to the Olmec ones.’

  ‘Which may simply mean she’s trying to help you achieve the best-quality papers you can before submitting.’ Tink, tink. Taid tapped the edge of his cup. ‘It’s a lot, you know, working all week, tutoring at night, and then this Golden Tomb project. When will you rest?’

  Elizabeth huffed. ‘You don’t have to worry about me, Taid. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I have a right to be worried. You seem…different, lately.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve been watching you since you returned from Egypt. Something in you has changed, but I’m not sure what.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Did something else happen to you while you were there? Oh, I don’t mean anything bad, just…somehow, your attitude to everything is slightly different this year. You’re slower to judge, more thoughtful, perhaps. At first I put it down to you being shaken up by the theft of your journal, but that’s not it…’

  Elizabeth tried to be honest. ‘I didn’t know that it showed, but yes, I’ve been trying to change my behaviour since I got back. While I was on the trip I thought deeply about a few things… You know how travelling can change your perspective? Anyway, I remembered the joy I felt working on the excavation when I first went to Egypt, and how many years I poured into becoming an Egyptologist.’

  Taid nodded.

  ‘But I also thought about what happened after we lost Dad. I can see now that I was, well, maybe not selfish exactly but self-centred and a little petulant about having to pitch in to help the family keep the house.’

  ‘You were a tad difficult.’

  Elizabeth swallowed, looked down, then raised her eyes and met Taid’s gaze steadily. ‘Well, I don’t ever want to be like that again. Finding out about Mai last year was difficult to take, but I learnt a lot from it. Even though we had the same father, even though we were born just a few months apart, we’ve had such different lives. I’ve always had you, and Grandmère, and Nainai, and I had a mum and a dad who loved me. I’ve had acceptance and support and Mai…hasn’t had much of those.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. I’m trying to want less and take less for granted, given how much I already have.’

  ‘With the exception of wanting to find somewhere your group can work?’ There was a catch in Taid’s voice.

  Oh, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. ‘I was wondering about the garage.’

  ‘That might be a little cold in winter. How about in here?’

  ‘Taid, this is where you work.’ Elizabeth looked around the cluttered room. ‘There isn’t really any spare space.’

  ‘It’s where I work through the week, but you could conduct your research in here on weekends. I saw what you had at the university laboratory last year. We could move a few things around, set up something similar here: a table for you to work on, clear some shelves for your bone boxes. What do you think?’

  Elizabeth leapt from her chair and threw her arms around Taid’s shoulders, knocking his teaspoon to the floor. ‘Oops!’ She picked it up to take it to the kitchen. ‘That would be wonderful! Are you certain?’

  ‘Nothing would bring me greater pleasure than to support the expansion of humanity’s understanding of its past…’

  Elizabeth kissed his bald pate.

  ‘…especially if it means someone else has to tidy up in here on a regular basis.’ He looked up, the Welsh green eyes Elizabeth had inherited blinking owlishly at her from behind smudged glasses.

  Maybe things weren’t going as smoothly as she’d hoped on the tutoring or paper-writing fronts but, by all the gods, she would discover the identity of the occupant of the Golden Tomb and restart her research career in Egyptology, or her name wasn’t Dr Elizabeth Pimms!

  Swatting Taid playfully on the arm, she turned to run up the stairs and let the others know they had a workspace.

  Chapter Four

  Several Sundays later, Elizabeth sat in the loungeroom, listening for the sound of a car in the driveway. In the past few weeks, Nathan and Alice had sorted out the data required to 3D-print the skeletal remains inside the mummy from the Golden Tomb sarcophagus. There had been a few false starts – the first attempt had resulted in femurs the size of matchsticks – but after some additional calibration and double-checking of the original scans, Alice had announced her success. So Alice, Nathan, Rhoz and Llew were all on their way over to join in with a Full Pimms Breakfast ahead of their first skeletal analysis session.

  Elizabeth heard someone arrive. She opened the front door to a slightly dishevelled Mai and smiled. ‘You can use your keys, you know, it’s okay. You don’t have to knock any more.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel right yet, that’s all,’ Mai said, as they walked towards the loungeroom.

  ‘This is your home now too,’ Elizabeth said. ‘We’d like you to be here any time you want.’ Nainai Cho had thoughtfully added a single bed swathed in purple throws and cushions to her suite for Mai. ‘I’ve been meaning to organise a movie night with you. Any chance you can stay over next Saturday?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So you get to experience the full insanity of a Pimms family weekend.’

  Mai’s laugh seemed forced as she sank into the oversized sofa.

  ‘How are you going?’ Elizabeth asked, taking a seat next to Mai and tucking her feet to one side.

  ‘All right,’ Mai mumbled.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Mai shrugged.

  ‘Could you try to explain what’s wrong?’

  Mai looked at Elizabeth, half pleading, half defiant. ‘I don’t know how to be part of this family.’

  ‘Oh.’ Elizabeth stared at the patterned bricks of the room’s masonry heater as she searched for a way to help Mai. ‘I’d like to make a suggestion,’ she said eventually. ‘Has anyone asked you to join one of our group counselling sessions yet?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Maybe no-one’s mentioned it. Sam, Matty and I go to see a counsellor about once a month.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Things between us haven’t run so smoothly over the years…there’s some emotional baggage we’re working through,’ said Elizabeth. That was the understatement of the year.

  ‘Things between you seem fine now.’

  Elizabeth grimaced. ‘That hasn’t always been the case, trust me. And Dr Strzelecki’s great. She’s helped us in so many ways.’ She touched Mai’s shoulder. ‘She can handle anything a Pimms can throw at her.’

  Mai managed a half-hearted smile. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  She seemed genuine.

  ‘You’re welcome to attend our next session, if you like.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Good. Let’s go see if Nainai needs any help in the kitchen. The others should be here soon.’

  Confident that Mai would be fine, Elizabeth wrappe
d an arm around her shoulders as they went to join the pre-meal preparation frenzy.

  Time for a full Pimms Family Sunday Breakfast and then on to the hunt for the identity of the occupant of the Golden Tomb.

  —

  Nathan, Rhoz, Llew and Alice all arrived at the house within minutes of each other and were duly introduced to Elizabeth’s family in a melange of people and excited felines.

  ‘Your house is beautiful!’ Alice said, as she and Elizabeth placed the boxes containing the printed skeleton from the Golden Tomb mummy in Taid’s library.

  They felt much lighter than regular skeletal remains boxes. ‘Thank you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘For everything.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ Alice smiled warmly.

  ‘I may not have bones, but I brought a cake.’ Rhoz handed Elizabeth a shiny white patisserie box.

  Elizabeth pulled up the lid to take a peek inside at a scrumptious fruit flan. ‘Yum!’

  As everyone gathered beneath the conservatory chandeliers, Elizabeth realised her family had never had eleven people seated around the table before. Rhoz was bent over in her chair patting Loki and Paris, who had ingratiated themselves with her immediately. Thoth’s choice of visitor was surprising: as soon as Nathan had sat down, Elizabeth’s large grey and white striped cat had jumped onto his lap and begun to purr loudly.

  ‘Serotonin junkie,’ he teased, as he scratched the top of her head.

  Sitting next to Alice, Elizabeth saw that Seshet had settled quietly on the geneticist’s feet.

  Grandmère clapped her hands loudly and, by virtue of a breakfast bribe, convinced the cats to take up their traditional positions in the conservatory’s corner chairs. She then returned to the kitchen to help Nainai.

  Even laden with sufficient food to feed twenty, the conservatory table still had room to spare. The family’s guests were audibly impressed as Grandmère Maddie and Nainai Cho ferried in platters of bacon, eggs, pastries, freshly baked bread, steamed dumplings and…

  ‘Mussels and laverbread!’ Llew exclaimed. ‘I had this with my uncle every weekend when I was growing up.’