The Find (11 page)

Read The Find Online

Authors: Kathy Page

BOOK: The Find
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18

—
♦ —

SCOTT FED THE BLINDING WHITE
, plastic-smelling trainers on to his father's feet, pushed down to feel where his toe was. A few aisles away, he held the sweatpants against him to check for length. Phoenix House had sent a list: shaving equipment, toiletries, so many pants and shirts and underwear, shoes, and — mind-blowing, Scott thought — swimwear and gym kit. They had stopped on the way there to buy what they could.

‘Looking good.'

‘Why are you doing this?' Mac asked as Scott steered him towards the checkout. ‘Jackie wouldn't like what you're doing to me—' he said, tearing up. The vast jelly of a woman at the till, and a bleached blonde and her teenage daughter behind them in the line, were staring hard.

‘Leave Mum out of this, okay? You're going so they can make you better. So you can stay alive.'

At Phoenix House, Mac had been assigned a third-floor room with brand-new furniture and a strong smell of paint, to be shared with one other man who hadn't yet arrived. The window was small, but you could see the jumble of the city, and beyond it, the sea.

Scott unpacked Mac's things while Mac sat down on the bed, began to light a cigarette, then remembered the ‘not in the bedrooms' rule. Scott began to realise, then, how huge this was, how he himself, in the same position, might not be able to come through. He rested his hand on his father's shoulder.

‘There's a patio, remember?' They went to find it, settled into two chairs with an ashtray between them.

‘I might go away for a while. But I'll keep in touch, okay? There are always the Prices in an emergency. Their numbers are written in the book I gave you.' Scott's heart thumped in his chest. He had, he felt, to offer something more. ‘I'm a hundred percent behind you.'

‘I'm not feeling so good,' Mac said, coughing, shaking his head.

‘There's a doctor right here. You're already booked in, okay? They'll fix you up.'

He'd have liked a blessing. A good luck, a wink, even from this wreck of a parent. A wave of the hand, saying: yes, go. But, nothing. Mac said nothing and ash fell on his chest as he sucked on the cigarette. His eyes watered, and his hands shook as he put the cigarette down and made as if to pick up a drink that wasn't there, then closed his eyes in despair. Skin, teeth, eyes, hair, fingernails, every bit of him that Scott could see looked broken and you didn't want to imagine the insides. He felt the tears building.

‘Behave yourself now. Good luck.' He got to his feet, and then bent down and kissed the top of his father's head.

The air outside smelled of summer coming. He was free, now, he could take off — right now, even — though probably he owed it to Lauren to give notice. He could get himself to Vancouver, set up a job, a place. Insist, after Phoenix House, that this was their home. Better himself, bit by bit. He could, as Matt had been telling him to, just vanish with no forwarding address, nothing — drive south until the truck died, just believe something would turn up. Travel, seek his fortune, have incredible adventures, wheel, deal, make tax-free money and end up somewhere like in Rio or Cancun where stunning women lay naked on beaches fingering themselves and just waiting for him to come along and help them out. Matt would give him a deal on an ounce or two of his best to get him going and it would be better than money in the bank... The danger, there, was of ending up in a Mexican jail... Perhaps, he was thinking, perhaps — insane as it sounded — he would try and avoid weed completely for a while? If Mac could do it, perhaps he could, should? It was then, just as he was about to open the driver's side door, that his phone rang.

‘Who?' he asked, pressing his hand over his free ear to cut out the traffic noise.

‘Anna Silowski. How are you?' He remembered the cheque then. How it must still be in the back pocket of his black jeans. ‘I'm calling,' Anna told Scott, ‘because there's an opportunity that might interest you.' Though the truth, or another part of it, was that minutes before she had picked up the phone and called the Mountain View to obtain Scott's number, Anna had been on the verge of explaining everything to them at work and withdrawing herself from the dig.
You must do whatever you need to do to get through
, she had told herself, and then she had picked up the phone.

‘Is this a good time? Do you have a few minutes?' The tightness in her voice took him right back to that night in the bar.

‘I thought you might be interested in joining the dig as a community volunteer. We start June sixth.'

‘Hey, thanks.' He frowned at the phone in his hand, ‘But I'm thinking of travelling,' he told her, ‘and I don't know anything about palaeontology.'

‘You'd learn,' she said, ‘and we do need a local volunteer, and also someone in charge of the food. And as well as that, what I really need,' she said, and gradually her voice became hers again, ‘what I do need is a particular kind of personal assistant. I told you about my… circumstances. And you dealt with things very well that night and I feel you could help keep me on track during the dig. I know it's a lot to ask,' she said. ‘You'll want to think it over.'

It was the way she said
It's a lot to ask
that made him decide he would go: the way she had asked him for this enormous thing, acknowledged the scale of her request, yet refused to beg.

Just over a week later, Scott found himself carrying a sixty-pound pack and at the same time dragging a cart loaded with canned foodstuffs and many litres of liquid up five kilometres of riverbed which, Anna Silowski said, was once a tidal flat covered with mussel beds, crabs and something rather like kelp.

19

—
♦ —

ALL I WANT
,
ANNA WROTE IN HER PERSONAL
notes the night before the dig began,
is to bring her (I shouldn't think of the specimen this way, but I do) safely out of the rock. I will not go to pieces. I may have done a crazy thing asking Scott to join us, but the fact is I already feel
better because of it. It's as if I had handed the most difficult part of my life, the endless questioning, over to him, and I need not think of it now.

‘I had hoped to arrive before Dr Swenson,' she said to him as they climbed out of their white van in the carpark next to the river access and saw, from the two other vans already parked, that the other half of the excavation was already there.

‘Dr Swenson will be excavating the other specimen,' she explained to the team as they prepared to unload, ‘the larger one partly buried under the cliff — and quite how he will do so I don't yet know. It's fair to say that he and I do not get on. This is not an ideal situation, but we all have to make the best of it, okay?'

Scott divided the catering supplies between two carts, and took one of them, dragging it behind him as he followed Anna along the trail that led to the river.

The rest of the team: confident, handsome Jason; Felix, oval-faced, his head shaved a few days ago to save on effort and shampoo; Ai Lin (who, Scott thought, could at first glance be either a very delicate, rather female kind of male or a slightly masculine woman) and Greta (blonde, Californian, very definitely female) chatted away in a language Scott did not understand:

‘What functional morphology tells us isn't always clear.'

‘What really interests me is the taphonomy—'

Jason, in baggy cord shorts and oatmeal t-shirt with a T. rex skeleton printed on the front, took turns with Felix to drag the second cart. Jason was doing something called a post-doc and, Scott calculated, had been studying, if you counted grade school, for twenty-eight years. Jason had known from age six what he wanted to be and now he was there, right at the beginning of a brilliant career.

‘So,' Jason turned briefly to Scott, ‘Anna said you were a member of the local community?'

That, then, was her translation for completely unqualified, ignorant, acting camp cook, unofficial minder, if/as/when required?

‘Quite the opportunity!'

‘I'm looking forward to it.'

His t-shirt was stuck to him.

Downstream were the swimming holes where his mother had watched him play when he was a kid; older, he went there on his own to join the daredevils jumping from the cliff above: Thompson, Jay and Walker from the reserve, skinny Carl and Matt from town. There was a thin path that took you almost to the top, and from there, you had to climb across to one of the ledges, turn around and then stand, clinging to the rock behind while you psyched up: that could take three minutes or half an hour, the sweat running down your sides and your spine, but once you were up, everyone was watching and there was only one way to go. The minutes went by until some combination of boredom and terror tipped the balance and you stepped into the air — plummeted down, hands to sides, straight as a needle, in. The time under the water wasn't time at all; it was some kind of extra, other thing. The water swallowed your speed; silver bubbles of air ballooned above your head as you pushed back towards the light, suddenly very much alive.

The pool was warm but not so very deep; towards the end of July their feet would start to touch the rock at the bottom and by mid-August they couldn't jump anymore. And once you were past sixteen you just didn't do it anyhow. Skinny Carl died in a crash but the rest of them were still around, and now he travelled in the opposite direction, pulling the cart. It took two hours to get there. If nothing else, he would be fit, he thought, at the end of this.

Anna had outlined the main parts of the specimen in chalk, and now the team spent time on their hands and knees, familiarising themselves. It was bigger than all of them, Scott thought, and that was just the collapsed bones, not the thing as it would have been, the wings spread wide, soaring.

‘I aim for this to be totally intact,' she told them, smiling.

‘Move over,
Quetzalcoatlus
,' Jason grinned back at her. It was hard not be very aware that opposite and only slightly upstream the Swenson team had already unpacked and were more or less ready to go, but Anna kept her back firmly to them while she spoke.

They might, she said, be able to drill some holes in the shale tomorrow; meanwhile, they should collect rocks to hold their guy ropes and put up with the sag.

‘The helicopter will bring in heavy equipment,' she explained, ‘more chemical toilets, supplies and so on first thing tomorrow. Meanwhile, please do your best to minimize impact. Not too much washing, please! Every three or four days someone gets to go back to town, shower at the room we're retaining in the hotel, and bring back fresh supplies. Scott has kindly agreed to co-ordinate...'

‘Listen,' she said, looking carefully into each face, ‘I'd very much prefer it if we keep the details of our approach to ourselves. This two-team thing is crazy, but the reason for it is something that might have legal repercussions so I'm not at liberty to explain in detail.'

‘Big fight,' Scott heard Jason whisper theatrically as they broke up, ‘Bone Queen versus Stone Man.'

For ten minutes in the middle of that first afternoon, Scott escaped and lay in the greenish glow of his tent, the book he had found in the library unopened on his chest. The title,
Reading Fate
, bugged him and besides, he was not used to reading much. He tucked the book back under his sleeping bag, fantasised instead about rolling a joint: an amazing thing to do in such a confined space, even though the label inside the tent warned against smoking. Me in a tent, he thought, Mac in his brand-new, paint-smelling room. Who would crack first?

He had enough of Matt's best left for an emergency, but aching limbs and the feeling of being a different species to the rest of them and there on false pretences didn't quite qualify. He was just a few miles away from home, and within spitting distance of ancestral territory; if he ran, he could be back at the carpark in an hour and a half.

He wished there was something better than thin foam and polyester fibres between him and the riverbed. Someone, rather than something. Someone real — for example, Greta, another surprising palaeontologist. He could see she would be in demand. Ai Lin, then. Both — they appeared behind his closed eyes in thongs, total opposites. He had better not, something warned him, go too far along this route, and it was fortunate he did not:

‘Scott?' Anna was right there, just outside the tent. ‘Are you there?'

‘We'll talk later,' she told him as he emerged, ‘meanwhile, come and meet Dr Swenson and his team, please.'

Swenson reminded Scott of the Marlboro Man — the firm jaw and stubble thing. Kevin was pale, with thick mouse-coloured hair that needed a wash. The twins, Gunnar and Joe, gangly, crested with identical blond manes. Marc, heavyset, monosyllabic. After the hand shaking, the two teams stood around, welded to their beers. Most of them, Scott realised, had met before, online at least, and normally they would get on like a house on fire, but in this situation, they were uncertain what was allowed or required of them.

Later, when he cooked burgers on the barbecue, one of Swenson's team called out, ‘Smells good over there!'

‘
Is
good,' Greta yelled back.

They sat in the failing light, listening as the bickering of the ravens gradually thinned, and then, without them noticing, stopped. Swenson's team erupted now and then into laughter. Ai Lin told Scott to call her Lin.

‘It's so good, to get out of the museum, away from the desert,' she told him, waving at the deepening blue above them and the trees, minute by minute becoming silhouettes. ‘And my life here is so different to what it would have been if we'd stayed in Hong Kong. Sometimes I can hardly believe all that still exists.' How come they made the move? How old was she? Scott was going to ask, but Greta decided to have a campfire, and Lin got up to help find fuel.

‘Come on, before it gets totally dark. There's stuff down here we can use.'

Anna stayed, working on her laptop. Light from the screen lit up the planes of her cheeks, the underside of her eyebrows.

‘Scott, I'm making it very clear to everyone that you're here to learn and help me out, and if it does create any problems we'll just have to deal with them in a professional manner as they arise.'

‘Sure,' he said into the growing darkness. He could hear the hum of the fan on her laptop, the voices of the others on the other side and his own team calling out and laughing as they followed Greta downstream.

‘I guess you might feel somewhat stranded in amongst the rest of us palaeos?' she asked.

‘Somewhat,' he said, feeling, and enjoying, the odd sound of the word in his mouth.

It was the weirdest job: a mixture of the very basic and totally subtle. The extra, important part of it — warning her if she behaved badly, reassuring her — had been discussed, but even that was not quite it, not quite all that she wanted of him and there was no sense, even now as he sat there across from her of
how
he was supposed to do what she'd asked for, no contract, nothing. And, another thing, which he'd realised at dinnertime, was that he had forgotten to bring his pills: all sorts of bad things from psychosis to suicide to mass murder were supposed to happen if he stopped them suddenly, though so far, although he felt different — too aware of things, not sure how they fitted together — it was okay.

She gestured at the rock beside her, ‘Why not sit down?' He was becoming familiar with the way in which Anna could command and beg at the same time.

‘So this is where you grew up? Your mother was from around here, too?'

‘She was from the reserve.' He pointed at the cliff behind her. ‘Left it to marry. Hoping for better things. Qualifications. Job. Nice house. Sober husband. Got some of them.' He shrugged. ‘It was okay to start with, I think.' Though that side of things had always puzzled him: how did you get from the wedding photos to the fist in the face? Was the way it ended somehow waiting in the beginning?

‘I'm sorry,' she said, ‘if I—'

‘It's totally fine,' he told her, ‘but I need to sleep, now.' More than anything he needed to be alone, unseen and unremarkable, and he could hear the others returning. Later, inside his tent, he smelled smoke, heard the spit and crackle of damp wood and Anna saying goodnight, then her footsteps as she passed by.

He lay in the darkness and tried to imagine his parents as they once had been. They'd met at a dance in the community hall. Mac was new to town, and also ten years older than her. Maybe he was growing weary of life on his own, just the days in the mill and evenings in the bar. Lonely. She was sitting outside with her friend, watching who went in. She'd come down to the town for a night out — and maybe she was looking: she wanted to escape the future lined up for her: the housing, the kind of life her mother had, the feeling of being separated off from the bigger world. She wanted things on her own terms, but they weren't that extreme: a second chance at education, some kind of qualification. A child or two, not too many.

At that point, Mac's drinking was likely nothing compared to what she was used to and maybe he got a grip on it while he was seeing her. Didn't feel the need. And he wasn't prejudiced, at least not if it was a good-looking woman you were talking about. He never did care what people thought.

They drove out at weekends. Visited Vancouver. Borrowed a friend's boat and pottered along the coast, married soon, the reception in the old Community Hall. Ten years later, it had got pretty bad, but surely everything
began
well, with the house and her getting her early childhood educator qualification and work in the daycare on Smith Street. When he was born, she took him there with her.

He could remember coming down the yellow slide in the yard there on a bright winter's day with her watching him. Her hands were stuffed in her pockets, one of granny's knitted hats with the dangling pom-poms covered her hair and ears; other kids milled around. She had to watch everyone, but she watched him especially.

‘You just slipped out,' she'd tell him back then, when he asked about being born. ‘No trouble. Perfect!' He made her happy. He made up for a lot, she said.

Feeling trapped was the worst thing. The computer was the last straw, but being trapped was what had stoked the anger that nearly drove him to smash a rock into his father's head. Did Mac too feel trapped? Trapped in himself, his drinking, his thoughts about what his wife might be doing when he wasn't there?

Wind blew through the trees above the camp, rustling leaves, rubbing branches together. He liked the dark, the feeling of everything outside being so close: he thought he could listen all night and yet before long, slept, and then woke half-numb, at first not knowing where he was, then slowly remembering. He liked hearing the other tents unzipped and deciding which person it was that struggled out of it. He liked hearing Anna walk past and call out ‘Scott? Early start,' and then the coolness, the half-light of outside and the tang of their coffee in the air,
the warmth of its steam on his face and the sweet, scalding liquid on his tongue.

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