Archaeology

“Just down to a metre, don’t dig no further, you’ll find it there.” But we do not find it there, nowhere near it but we do find a pipe. Jerry, so self assured, is proved wrong. And if he ever has a woman looking after him she will have to be strong, patient and forbearing, God help her. Just down there and the two of us covered in dust, and all the time Mr Brenner bringing us mugs of tea, asking have we found the problem? Of course it could be that Jerry, the irreproachable has got his bearings wrong. But that wouldn’t be at all possible now would it? “No Mr Brenner we’re not quite at the crux of the problem.” “The crutch of it you say?”

Mr Brenner sits at the kitchen table worrying over the leaky pipe in his cellar that he hasn’t seen but is damaging the foundations of the house next door. His neighbours aren’t speaking English, that’s how Mr Brenner puts it. “Them, they aren’t speaking English.” Not that they can’t, they aren’t. He states it as a fact, nods at them in greeting, smiles, and occasionally gives the little girl sweets when he remembers.

We come up for a break, we’re crouched terribly low down there and my back’s not good, the lumbago stirs at the very sight of a sack of cement. Jerry follows me up, mumbling. Jerry takes the chair and I have the box to sit on. I share my sandwiches with Mr Brenner; he doesn’t have much in, some tins of spaghetti, sad sort of stuff like that. Doesn’t do you any good at all you tell him, and he says “Look at me seventy three and never a day off sick in my life.” We try not to look and wonder if he hasn’t missed his right arm ever. Or his left ear for that matter, if we’re discussing lost property. Jerry pointed out he might have been born without them, made on the Friday afternoon shift as they say. Which seems careless. We ask him how he lost his arm and he laughs and says at cards. We don’t go any further.

Mr Brenner claims to have been a mercenary in the Belgium Congo. But that is just so much of that says Jerry waving his hand in front of his face as if he’s after smelling something bad. Of course Mr Brenner forgets and denies being in the Congo. We think he’s had a bang on the head, a thrombosis or something because he’s forever making up stories. “So you didn’t lose it in the Congo?”

“I did not,” he says outraged “I lost it down the Jackdaw Lane to a Missy whose name I forget, Jesus I felt like Jonah in the whale, I went right up inside her. Thought I’d never get out.”

“I thought I’d seen you somewhere before.” Says Jerry they both laugh at that one, I find it in bad taste.

Mr Brenner prefers my sandwiches, so I bring extra rations. I don’t let him prod them too much in the lunch box. I try and get them out there on the table double quick, it’s the more hygienic thing to do. He can give them a poke then if he wants. He’s not too fond of the sight of Jerry’s teeth, he tells me in confidence, it puts him off eating. He has a point, Mr Brenner, because I don’t savour sitting opposite Jerry at tea time if he happens to have a blocked nose, the potatoes going round and round his mouth, the self same mouth he says he uses for kissing. I can’t see it myself. Not him, he looks like an unemployed Jesus, and what’s the good of that? Or a Marxist. Mr Brenner has never said anything about it. His hair is short back and sides, he does it himself, I don’t quite know how, but he does.

We get back down there and dig another bit of the hole. Jerry bends down and pulls up a fragment of something, but that’s not a piece of pottery, I can tell that. Mr Brenner is behind us now slowing things up. He has a picture torn from a book it looks like, or a magazine. He wants to show us. We stop to have a look at it, a woman, not bad, dressed up as an Indian. “That’s me old girl friend Cloud Dancer. A genuine Puma Indian she was. Came over here thirty five years ago. Ran The Fox she did. She gave me a name. On account of the fact that I was from here, I was called Cloudy With Sunny Intervals.” Now that was a good one, and we both put our tools down for a laugh. Mr Brenner could have been on the stage. He peers down into the hole, he can’t see any water. There’s no burst pipe. “Makes you think doesn’t it?” He says, and we ask him about what? He sighs and tells us we have all got to go sometime. Mr Brenner has the blues now, so we all stop at that signal for a brew.

He’s already got the kettle boiling so his fit of melancholy is well timed. He wonders when we might be finished with our work? Jerry says for a while yet, we’ve not located the pipe that’s causing all the havoc next door. “How do you know if they aren’t speaking English that they’re having any trouble at all?” He asks. “You know I never see them myself? What are they?” We don’t know, we haven’t spoken to them, they don’t have water in their cellar. We are in truth excavating for a 3rd Century Roman Villa in the foundations of Mr Brenner’s house. We’re after Roman artefacts, not fixing burst pipes.

Mr Brenner doesn’t believe in the Stone, Bronze or Iron Age, anything that comes before Adam and Eve is nothing but an invention he tells us. Dinosaurs? “Are you after seeing them, great monsters they want us to believe in?” No Mr Brenner is having none of that. And you might think then that Mr Brenner is a religious man, a God fearing man, not at a bit of it, he just can’t stand bullshit. If an Evangelist knocks on his door and tells Mr Brenner the good news, God is coming soon, well says Mr Brenner if he is arriving soon he can come round himself the next time. Mr Brenner gets the biscuits out, they are soft and stale but if you dip them in your tea they are passable. I don’t think much of our chances of finding the villa. More chance of finding an old coal mine.

I don’t know what we would do with that if we found it. Mr Brenner might not be too happy to have a long line of miners queuing for the use of his toilet every minute of the day, not that he would notice the coal dust in the basin. It would be a tight squeeze for the tea break in the kitchen, they’d be wanting a social club as well, God knows where we’d put that, but then it would be handy for a cheap pint.

We’re back down there for the final haul. It’s Friday so we’ll be off for a drink later. Get back to the room and have a wash, then out, hope is the anchor of the spirit – and that is where we will be headed. I’m sorry we have found nothing, not so much as a coin. This dig is not going so well. We hoped to have something to sell by now. Mr Brenner asks where we go for a drink. We tell him no where special.

Well Monday comes around again and we get back around there to Mr Brenner’s house, we start there good and early. Jerry is a little frustrated by the lack of progress and he is hacking at it down there. I’m trying to find the sugar and Mr Brenner has a woman at the door telling him she’s from the social services and Mr Brenner tells her he’s sorry but he thinks he’s too old for that carry on. The woman says; “I don’t think you understand.” She is interrupted by Jerry who has run up from the cellar cursing. He pulls me back down with him. Water is filling the hole! Jesus! Water! We crouch down and peer in, bubbling up it is. He’s only gone and hit a bloody pipe. Mr Brenner comes down next, and he’s happy, he says, “You’ve found it.”

Then as suddenly the flow stops. It’s a bad smell, very bad. Jerry says; “That should fix it.” I inspect the hole through the stink, the pipe is not damaged, we’ve no idea where the water came from. I’ve had enough now, we could flood the whole place and then where would we be? Two weeks we have been down here, sweating away, for what? For nothing. Mr Brenner’s got no Roman remains down here.

We go upstairs. “Is that the end of it then lads?” Mr Brenner asks. Jerry says it could well be, although he mentions that we could always check for Roman remains while we are down there with the hole open.

“Will you do that?” Asks Mr Brenner. Why not we tell him, it won’t cost extra. He’s happy about that. Jerry is very pleased with himself now. “At least we fixed his leak for him.” We made it in the first place and it stopped if its own accord. We have permission to dig, that’s piece of good news.

“Do you think we might get in the paper?” Asks Mr Brenner. Jerry says it’s by no means certain, but there’s always a chance. Mr Brenner says he better put his blazer on, we say there’s no hurry, if we discover something he’ll be the first to know. Plenty of time for putting on the best suit, as it were. All three of us feel buoyed up by this happy conclusion to the day.

We sit outside, on the wall, and watch the people pass down the street going to the shop with no cheese. Mr Brenner doesn’t go there, they’ve no cheese he says. He shows us a photograph, of a Chinese woman, a page torn from a magazine “She ate no cheese. They don’t you know?” He says putting the picture back in his pocket. “She liked that shop. No milk in her tea neither, didn’t like cream. Wouldn’t touch it, nothing from a dairy.” We are amazed by this, “What happened to her?” Mr Brenner shakes his head lost in private reminiscences of his lost love. “Was she before or after the Puma Indian?” Asks Jerry, the fool. Mr Brenner is shocked, “I’ve never been with an Indian in me life, whose been saying that?”