Seed- Part One

by D B Nielsen

  ‘What’s it worth? Have you ever heard of the Parable of the Pearl?’ he asked quietly, his mellifluous voice filling the darkness of the void which surrounded them, ‘It’s from the Bible, The Gospel of Matthew. It goes something like this: “...the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man, a merchant seeking fine pearls, who having found one pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has, and buys it.” This artefact, gentlemen, is that pearl...’

  SAGE

  ARTEFACT

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two winged lions prowled Babylon’s Processional Way against a bright blue glazed brick background. The intense lapis lazuli coloured banners fluttered erratically against the Ionic columns of the British Museum’s façade facing Great Russell Street, drawing the arrested gaze of the museum’s many visitors and, among them, my own. By their own volition, my legs ground to a halt and an unexpected surge of pride engulfed me along with the notoriously-reliable English weather, making me recall my earlier intention to spend as little time outside in the raw elements as possible. The icy November wind buffeted my slim frame and I once again yearned for the salty summer breeze of Bondi Beach as I launched myself through the museum’s draughty entrance, escaping from the wild London weather into the equally chill interior of its soaring Great Court.

  The museum’s newest exhibition had only recently been opened to the public with its various collections and antiquities on loan from the Louvre and the Meeting of National Museums in Paris and the Staatliche and Pergamon, which housed the Vorderasiatisches Museum, in Berlin. My father and his colleagues, archaeologists of some renown, had spent the better part of their lives piecing together the history of Babylon with its ancient wonders of the world. The Hanging Gardens. The Tower of Babel. The imperial city; centre of science, art and commerce. At least, it had been once – over two millennia ago.

  Since 2003, my father, Professor Robert Woods, had drawn attention to the threats posed by the Middle East conflicts; new threats to the cultural heritage of Babylon and the archaeology of Mesopotamia, modern southern Iraq. He and his team had worked tirelessly, ceaselessly to put together this exhibition, even going so far as to move our family to London so that my father could lend his invaluable expertise without distraction. I guess my father was as much an acquisition of the museum as the priceless mosaics, sarcophagi and clay tablets dubiously acquired, bought or donated over the years.

  My yearning for Bondi Beach was tied up in this pattern of migration. Our family had followed Dad’s treks around the world; his seasons of field work and academia. We’d been lucky enough to settle into a leafy suburb on the north shore of Sydney for the past two years when he’d accepted a position at the University of Sydney, heading its Department of History and Archaeology. Long enough for my sister and me to sit our Finals and graduate from high school. Just.

  It wasn’t until we’d finished our last exams that we were told of the decision our parents had made to move to London. The timing was deliberate; they had waited until our Finals were behind us before dropping the bombshell, as they didn’t want either of us to be distracted from our exam preparations. The news, its suddenness and finality, rocked me.

  I’d made plans; both short term and for my future.

  We’d finally graduated and a whole summer of fun was awaiting us. My friends, sister and I had planned to attend Schoolies; an end of school tradition where most teenagers travelled up north to Byron Bay on the tip of New South Wales where we were headed or to the Gold Coast in Queensland for sun, sand and surf.

  And, of course, meeting hot guys.

  We’d been planning this trip for the better part of a year. We’d even bought our plane tickets and put down the bond for the beach house we were leasing. Not normally being the outdoorsy type, I was surprisingly looking forward to it.

  Then there was the Formal; the black tie event that was being held this year on a cruise ship circling Sydney Harbour. My sister and I had spent a whole weekend shopping for eveningwear. And I’d found the perfect dress. I had a vision of myself drawing admiring gazes and comments as I gracefully made my entrance.

  Now the dress and everything else we owned were packed into shipping containers probably somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, making their slow way to London. At least my dress had the experience of cruising the harbour on a summer evening, probably the only time that was going to happen now.

  But mostly, I was disappointed in not being able to attend university with my friends. I’d argued with my parents that I was mature enough to attend university on my own, half a world away in the southern hemisphere, but they were not convinced. They insisted that, for now, the family remain together. This was probably due to the guilt they felt in constantly uprooting us children for the sake of their careers. Or maybe it had something to do with my younger siblings. But, whatever the case, they were adamant.

  ‘Sage,’ my Mum had said to me, so often it was becoming a mantra, ‘there are plenty of excellent universities over there. Some of the best in the world. You could easily get into Durham or LSE if Oxford falls through. Think of all the possibilities. You can even take a gap year.’

  I could see the pleading in her eyes. Eyes that were a replica of mine; a warm amber like the colour of burnt sugar. Hard to resist the appeal in those eyes, that face – so quick to laughter, to show concern – with its deceptive youthfulness. Mum didn’t wear much cosmetics, any beauty creams or concealers which claimed to provide the secrets to eternal youth or the ability to arrest the aging process. She liked her laughter lines, claiming that they were earned like battle scars. She was right – they became her.

  Lately, however, I’d become aware that her normally smiling eyes filled with concern when they fell upon her eldest child. She hid her worry from me but I knew it was there; the persistent thought, What was she going to do with me?

  My sister, Saffron – Fi to me, Safie to my parents and younger siblings – had applied to Oxford to study Art History, so it wasn’t going to affect her that much. It was merely a matter of waiting for the results due at the end of next month.

  Huh! I thought, Some Christmas present!

  For me, all the plans I’d made, some silly, some not so silly, had gone up in flames. My parents thought they could pull some strings with the universities over here, seeing as I hadn’t bothered to apply knowing that I was going to get my first round offer from the University of Sydney. But now I found myself filling in the late application forms that they stuck beneath my nose daily, and I honestly didn’t want to know nor did I care what it was going to cost them to get me in on such short notice. I know my indifference was annoying them, but I figured they deserved it. In some childish part of my brain, I wanted to make them as miserable as I was.

  And it was working.

  Tormenting them had produced an unintended result; their desire to make me happy. Spoilt brat that I was, in an effort to please me, they had agreed to let me have a trip to Paris in lieu of Byron Bay. I didn’t let on that Paris was even better than Schoolies – so much for my claim to being mature!

  The only thing that seemed to compensate my abandoned plans was the Manor House near Kent we now lived in. Even I had to admit that the house and surrounding countryside was beautiful. Too early in the season for snow, the landscape retained its drenched mossy greenery. The silver birch trees shimmered against its lushness like something out of a fairy tale and, most evenings, the sky reflected the same silvery-grey hues while, during the day, it remained an oppressive and unchanging waterlogged gunpowder. I assumed it was something to do with the unrelenting drizzle or heavier rainfall. But, if it weren’t for the Manor House, the shift to London would have been unbearable.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like London, I did. I loved the history and the architecture; I loved the theatres and the shops.

  What I detested was not having a say in the matter.

  As I stood now in the museum’s Great Court, after retreating from the bracing wind outside, watching the tide of huma
nity, the ebb and flow of school groups and tourists and foreigners on cultural tours, I felt my muscles slowly unclench, the congealed blood in my veins beginning to flow once more. The difference in temperature between the outside and inside brought a stinging sharpness to my cheeks. I could feel the blood rush into them turning them a blushing red. I rubbed my frozen hands together, feeling my fingertips tingle back to life and finally relaxed into a perfect sense of ease.

  The British Museum was one of my favourite places, along with Sydney Harbour, the Gamla Stan in Stockholm, Massachusetts in the autumn with the leaves turning a fiery russet, and the entire city of Paris any time of the year. Each of these places we had been relocated to as Dad had worked, in one capacity or another, for the University of Sydney, Stockholm University, Harvard and the Sorbonne.

  Normally I would have lingered, tracing and retracing my steps amongst the Elgin Marbles, the Egyptian collection with its permanent exhibit of the Rosetta Stone, and the fascinating display of the many items found when they dug up the Sutton Hoo.

  But not today.

  Dad had left a sheaf of papers on the kitchen counter at home, distracted whilst answering the incessant ringing of his BlackBerry. As usual, he was late for work and had rushed out of the house without a second thought.

  Luckily, Mum, Saffron and I were driving into London from the Manor House as Fi needed to purchase darkroom chemicals for processing her film and Mum had managed to hire a childminder from a local agency to care for our younger siblings. Fi had taken a course in photography last summer and somehow had managed to sustain her interest long enough for it to become a hobby. The good part was that I already had an idea of what to get her for Christmas. Though Fi and I were identical twins, we didn’t share identical tastes or interests.

  If I had been alive in the nineteenth century, I’m sure I would have been labelled a “bluestocking”, a social pariah. I liked learning, was good at it. I spent most of my time devouring books from Jane Austen to Mary Shelley, from the Aztecs to the Tudors. It was probably pure luck that I hadn’t developed a hunchback like poor Richard III from being bent over a book reading. I often lost myself in fantastical alien worlds where the Lizzie and Heathcliffs, Aragorn and Hamlets, Thursday Next and Harry Potters were intimates of mine. I liked the idea of bonnets and tea parties, treasure hunts and sword fights and was fascinated that history, at times, proved to be more unbelievable than fiction.

  My childhood had been spent immersing myself in books – maybe it was my way of coping with the frequent moves. Up until the time I’d turned fifteen, the only stability we’d had in our lives was when we spent our summers with my Uncle Daniel in Argentina on his estancia, or with my Aunt Lily in New York where she worked in theatre designing costumes for Broadway musicals. It had been difficult to make lasting friendships, more difficult still to form an emotional attachment to a place knowing that we’d be moving whenever my Dad got restless. And until we’d come to live in the Manor House, there was no place I’d ever truly called home.

  But I always knew I could count on the permanency of those worlds in books, I could escape whenever I wanted to Middle Earth and Hogwarts, to journey with Frodo or fight Voldemort with Harry. Like gamers who led both a fantastical virtual life and an ordinary one in the real world, my world was found between the pages of a book. At times, those characters and places seemed as real to me – perhaps even more real – than my own reality. I wanted to believe in them so badly. They were like a talisman against the dark.

  Luckily for me, the twenty-first century meant that my quiet, bookish ways went largely unobserved or ignored by the majority of people whom I met in my life. At seventeen, being bookish wasn’t glamorous.

  Fi, on the other hand, was much more aptly named. Saffron. Spicy. Feisty. Fi was the yin to my yang; more passionate, more rebellious, more daring. Just ... more. More than me. My friends, in reality, were more like Fi. Actually, it was true that I pretty much shared Fi’s friends. Because of her gregariousness, Fi made friends so much easier than me, and I found that I could fade into the background like a wallflower behind their exuberance. It was often easier to give in to their suggestions and plans for weekend parties or outings to the beach or shopping. Often, such as at the beach, I could bring a book along, reading and maybe even sunbathing whilst they swam and surfed. And when it came to being that little bit more responsible, I’d be the one volunteering to be the designated driver or remind them when homework assignments were due.

  I guess that’s why Mum and Dad were so concerned now – I was the responsible one, the level-headed one. They counted on me to take care of my siblings when they were too busy with their work. They didn’t even have to ask, we had just fallen into a pattern and that pattern had never been broken. Until now.

  It wasn’t that I envied my sister; I loved my sister and knew I would never be like her. Hell, I didn’t want to be like her. It was bad enough that people always confused us because of our looks, which were very similar to our mother’s, and the only thing that separated us in appearance was the fact that Fi liked to enhance hers by wearing make-up and lots of bling whilst I played mine down. And there also was that time eighteen months ago when Fi had lost a lot of weight, virtually starving herself to look like the stars on Gossip Girl or Revenge or whatever show it had been at the time – though I could never see the attraction in either those TV shows or in dieting. No, that wasn’t it. What sometimes made me depressed, however, was her ability to fit in and my understanding that I never would. I didn’t expect to find my niche in London, I only knew that there were some places where I didn’t stand out like a sore thumb; happily for me, the British Museum was one of them.

  Which was why, it was I who found myself playing the role of courier today. Truth is, Fi wouldn’t have been able to find the British Museum much less Dad’s office – not because of her navigational skills, which were far better than mine, but because it held no interest for her – whilst I spent practically all of my free time between the various museums and the British Library. So ignoring the lure of the galleries and the enticement of a hot drink at the Court Café, I headed off in the direction of Dad’s offices near Conservation, stopping only briefly at Security to pick up a Visitor’s Pass. I always felt incredibly privileged that I could wander onto dig sites or behind the scenes at museums and galleries because of my father.

  Moving into the warmth of the museum, I felt like Jason with his skein of wool navigating the labyrinth, with its endless galleries and corridors and staircases. The offices Dad and his team occupied were in an older section of the museum, built long before the restoration of the King’s Library and the museum’s earlier expansions which had been designed to give its interior more space and light. Instead, they were accessed through a long corridor, giving a vague impression of a cathedral’s nave, with its vaulted twelve-foot ceiling in the same dark wood panelling of the walls and floors. Alcoves symmetrically lining the walls held glazed tiles, carvings and clay tablets depicting animal forms of lions and horses, and scenes of hunting and warfare favoured by the artisans of Mesopotamia.

  Through an open archway, its lintel carved elaborately in a Greek key pattern, I finally reached the heated, stuffy reception room. A worn Victorian chesterfield in antique green flanked one wall, its cracked polished leather proclaiming it a period original. Above it, a series of framed posters advertising the exhibition warred with a Caravaggio, also on loan from the Staatliche in Berlin, depicting a grinning, naked Cupid prevailing over all human endeavour; music, science, war, government. A menacing, mischievous urchin with a sardonic grin; he looked incredibly pleased with himself as he trampled the objects at his feet. Opposite, stood a bas relief of an Assyrian winged bull which dominated the room. Its effect was dramatic as, I supposed, was intended.

  I crossed to the dour-looking woman seated behind the mahogany bureau in one corner of the room. The ceiling lights beamed down on her auburn head, bringing out the highlights that she must have paid a for
tune for. I found myself churlishly thinking that the placement of the desk was no accident. I made a soft sound, between a humph and a cough, just in case she hadn’t noticed my entrance. Staccato tapping continued as she deliberately ignored me, only breaking off when I forcefully made my presence known.

  ‘Hi Sylvia,’ I greeted Dad’s receptionist with an enthusiasm I didn’t feel and which I knew to be reciprocated.

  It seemed to take eons for Sylvia to tear her gaze away from the computer screen in front of her. I’m sure, if she had thought of it, she would have given a long-suffering sigh before acknowledging me.

  It wasn’t really Sylvia’s fault that she had an aversion to me – during the few weeks Dad took to settle into his new role, I’d managed to make myself a bit of a pest, and Sylvia’s initial helpfulness had slowly dimmed to a resigned acceptance that she would not be getting rid of me any time soon.

  ‘Sage,’ she nodded in my direction, barely glancing at me before her eyes slid back to the monitor, ‘what can I do for you?’

  ‘Dad accidentally left some papers behind and I was just bringing them over,’ I said, looking past her to his closed door.

  She must have caught my furtive glance from the corner of her eye as she hurriedly stated, ‘Look, why don’t you leave them with me? Your father’s quite busy this morning. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure he gets them.’

  ‘No, that’s okay. I was going to ask him anyway if he was free for lunch.’

  She gave me a condescending smile as if to say, Your father’s a very busy man. He hasn’t time to waste humouring his teenage daughter, before stating, ‘His schedule’s very tight today.’

  I was starting to become irritated but, managing to keep my cool, I told her, ‘Well, I’ll just pop in and hand these to him then, won’t be a sec.’

  ‘Look,’ her voice was sharp with annoyance now, ‘you can’t go in there. I’ve told you, he’s bus–’