Clare Houston - An Unquiet Place

Joseph’s voice cut into the darkness: ‘Hannah? You out there? Ready to go?’

Hannah stepped forwards to take Alistair’s hands in hers. ‘Give me a little time to think,’ she said. His back was still to the light, and she couldn’t see his expression, but felt his disappointment.

As she moved towards the house, he tugged at her hand. ‘Hannah? Thanks for being honest. It’s important.’

Kobie leant his head against the mud-plastered wall. The ancient stool had stood outside his doorway for as long as he could remember. It was worn smooth with the weight and slide of many, many bodies doing what he did now. Sitting in the cool of an evening, a cigarette pinched between his fingers. The stars were bright tonight against a deep navy-blue sky, the moon just a silver sliver hanging low above the horizon so the farm was dark below it. His gaze was drawn to the hill behind the house and suddenly he sat up, his body rigid. A fire lit on the edge of the plateau, and then another and another, until the top of the hill glowed with the scattered, small blazes. Small smudges of orange against the black night. The smell of distant smoke reached his flared nostrils. Kobie’s heart jolted. Fire on the farm could be a disaster, even in the middle of summer. There was a drill for this. Alistair needed to know. The water tankers had to be hitched up, the workers roused, the neighbours called. Before he could call to his daughter, just as suddenly as he had seen them, the fires disappeared. With them vanished a sound Kobie only registered when it was gone. The sound of people. That low indistinct hum of humanity.

He pressed his left hand into his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose, but when he looked again, the hill was a black absence against the brighter sky. The night, once more cool and quiet. The skin of his arms and neck rose in a shiver, but he leant back against the wall and brought the stub of his cigarette to his lips, drawing deeply, his eyes not leaving the hillside.

January 1902, Goshen Camp, Orange River Colony

Dearest Wolf,

We heard a good story. A trader came into camp and brought the news that Christmas day was a triumph for General De Wet at Groenkop. He overran a Khaki camp and captured over two hundred men! Were you there? So close as the crow flies, just a wagon ride away. Did you feast from the captured wagons and drink to your success? Did you think of us at all?

Life in the camp carries on, such as it is. People continue to arrive. Some have been forced by their circumstances simply to walk in. Their homes have been demolished, their crops and livestock looted or destroyed. Their last hope of survival is to work in the camp for food. I look at them with such judgement. I know what the Lord says about judging others, but, Wolf, what I wouldn’t give to walk out of here! I swear I would scrape a life for myself in a cave in the mountains if I could. I’ve had enough of the death and the work and the months of being hungry. The feeling that I’m walking circles in a desert, getting nowhere and achieving nothing. Oh, to have space. To wash myself clean with no one watching. I would indeed turn my eyes to the hills. Relish the solitude, the distance from other people’s grief. It has become too much for me.

The cemetery is full. There is no more space on the flat ground, and people have begun to disinter the old graves, burying the first body deeper so that there’s room above it. It is done quietly; the British are terrified of disease and would no doubt halt the practice immediately. But what is to be done? There is no more room.

The students began arriving in the week after Christmas, most in small cars loaded with sleeping bags and pillows. Sarah soon realised that her anxiety about their accommodation was in vain. That they had a roof over their heads was a luxury for them. They were full of praise for her arrangements. Alistair gave the group the use of a spare farm pickup and two quad bikes so they could get from the homestead to the site. It wasn’t long before a routine emerged. Joseph held a meeting every morning, and ran through the work that needed to be done, getting feedback from the day before and setting the students to new tasks.

They spent the morning on site, coming back down for lunch. Alistair had to get used to seeing bodies on mattresses, fast asleep in the shade of the farmyard oaks. They were back on site for the afternoon, working until the light dimmed. The strum of a guitar and floating laughter carried across to the main house in the evenings. The farm felt alive, like it hadn’t been in years. And yet he was in turmoil. The dig would come to an end. Joseph would wrap up his investigation and go back to Cambridge. What would be left to keep Hannah in Leliehoek? Would she leave? He had said he would cope if their relationship did not work out, but he felt that he was already in too deep. The thought of going back to empty days spent at his desk, with only his dogs for company, was too awful to contemplate.

Alistair found himself venturing out if he saw Joseph’s car to sit and drink a beer with him, talking or simply sitting, listening to the joking, teasing banter that emanated from the shed.

It was clear that with a group of students mixed together over a couple of weeks came politics. Alistair saw the interest that more than one girl had in Joseph. Despite the opportunities, Joseph showed nothing but professional interest in the students. He was friendly, but kept himself apart, preferring to hang out with Alistair in the evenings, perhaps in the hope that Suzanne might join them.

‘Are you still driving across to Hannah’s to sleep?’ said Alistair on one such evening.

‘Ja,’ Joseph said, leaning his head back into Alistair’s couch. ‘Let’s just say it would complicate things if I started sleeping in the shed. I don’t feel like fending off’ – and he used his fingers to punctuate – ‘“sleep walkers” in the middle of the night.’

Alistair grinned. ‘So you’ve noticed the attention?’

‘You’d have to be dead not to notice! Those girls have the subtlety of a jack hammer.’

‘I’ve got two spare rooms here if you want one,’ said Alistair, leaning forwards to mute the sound of the TV as the rugby game came to halftime and an advert segment began.

Joseph turned his head to Alistair. ‘Hey, thanks. I’ll take you up on that. I still want to be at Hannah’s every now and then, but it’ll make getting to the site so much easier.’

‘No problem. Tina, my housekeeper, will be delighted to fuss over someone.’

‘Being fussed over sounds awesome. I certainly don’t get that at Hannah’s.’

The camp investigation moved slowly forwards, helped by the student labour force. Alistair had managed to source aerial photographs going back a few decades, and Joseph brought Hannah to the farm one afternoon to talk through their progress.

Joseph spread the photographs over the kitchen table. ‘You can see in these, even over thirty years, that the basic look hasn’t changed as much as one might expect, even after fires have been through. Can you see these areas?’ He pointed to patches on the photographs. ‘These areas are clearer and the vegetation is sparser, growing lower than say here,’ he said, gesturing to other places, ‘which looks like compacted ground.’

‘Couldn’t it be naturally shallow, maybe stone just below the surface?’ said Alistair.

Joseph shook his head. ‘And be this regularly spaced? I doubt it.’

‘What would have compacted it?’ said Hannah, holding her hair to one side as she pored over the photographs.