EARLY BIRD BOOKS
FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY
LOVE TO READ?
LOVE GREAT SALES?
GET FANTASTIC DEALS ON BESTSELLING EBOOKS
DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY!
Digging to Australia
A Novel
Lesley Glaister
for Pete
with love
Empompey polleney,
Pollenistic,
Empompey, polleney,
Academic,
So fa me,
Academic,
Poof, poof.
These are words to clap with rapid slapping hands in a playground full of girls. They are words to chant so fast that they spill like glitter off the tongue, dazzling the girls who don’t know. Mystifying the girls at the edges who lurk in doorways and long for the bell to go.
They are also a way of stopping thought. Not forgetting entirely, for that is impossible. But a means of jolting a memory off its track. A barrier of gibberish.
PART ONE
1
Mama told me, a very long time ago, that an ancestor of ours had been transported to Australia. The ancestor’s name was Peggy, and all she’d done was steal a peacock. She was sent on a convict ship to Australia and never seen again. Fancy stealing a peacock. That’s all that is known of Peggy. I don’t even know whether the peacock was alive or dead. And that matters. Did she steal it for its beauty, or for her dinner?
We were standing in the kitchen and Mama was filling my hotwater bottle. My bare feet were cold against the floor.
‘Where’s Australia?’ I asked.
She pointed at the floor. ‘The other side of the world,’ she said. ‘As far away as you can get.’
I considered this. I already knew the world is like a ball. Bob had demonstrated with an orange how it moves around the sun. We used the orange for the sun and his globe for the earth. Of course, the scale was all wrong. To get the proportions right, he said, I would have had to carry the orange into the centre of town.
The globe was beautiful. It was an old heavy thing on a rickety stand. The land was all brown as mud and the pale sea netted with fine lines, meridians and tropics, things that had no meaning for me, although I liked the names. Sometimes I would spin the globe round and round so that it rattled and rocked and then read the name of the place where my finger pointed when it had stopped: Madagascar, the Tropic of Capricorn, the Solomon Islands, Peru.
‘What’s it like in Australia?’ I asked.
‘Topsy turvy,’ Mama said, screwing the lid on my bottle and wiping it with a tea-towel. ‘Their seasons are all upside down. They eat their Christmas dinner on the beach.’
I went to bed that night thinking how glorious that must be, the crackers and the pudding and the holly against the gold and blue of sand and sea. I could just picture Peggy in some sort of long, old-fashioned dress but otherwise looking just like Mama, with the peacock strutting beside her on the shore, a purple paper crown upon her head.
One birthday – when I still believed my birthday was in June – Mama and Bob gave me a book. I was disappointed. I wasn’t much of a one for books. Boring, I thought as I unwrapped it, although I looked pleased. Mama had made the wrapping paper herself, potato prints in powdery paint that came off on my fingers. On the flyleaf she had written, ‘To Jennifer, Happy Birthday, Love from Mama and Bob, June 1964.’ The first ‘e’ in Jennifer was altered, as if she’d started to write something else by mistake. I put the book on the shelf in my room and didn’t look at it again for ages. It wasn’t until I was ill, feverish and fretful and bored, that Mama began reading it to me. The book was Alice in Wonderland.
Mama sat on the edge of my bed reading. Her voice was monotonous and soothing. She paused periodically to wipe my face with a cool flannel. The room was cold, for Bob insisted that we keep a window open in every room in all weathers, except fog. This was extravagant because it meant keeping the stove roaring all winter to feed the radiators, but it was one of Bob’s foibles. Our lives were ruled by Bob’s foibles. I think this was a good one though, for we rarely suffered from colds. The lace curtain stirred slightly in the breeze. Mama shivered, but I burned. The sun shone coldly into the room, sharpening the edges of things so that they hurt my eyes. I kept them closed and listened to Mama, and her voice was something safe and solid to hold onto in the helter-skelter of my fever, something healthy.
‘Starve a fever,’ Bob proclaimed, and so I had not eaten for two days. Mama, who went along with Bob in most things, eventually sneaked me up a terrible nourishing drink – raw egg beaten into milk – and stood over me while I drank it, tears of disgust standing in my eyes. The story was silly, I thought, until she came to the part where Alice falls down the hole, and I had to open my eyes to stop myself from feeling as if I was tumbling downwards past cupboards and pictures and jars of marmalade on shelves. ‘Down, down, down,’ Mama droned, ‘Would the fall never end? “I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?” Alice said aloud. “I must be getting near the centre of the earth.”’ I wondered if it was possible, not to fall of course, but to travel somewhere, through the earth, to get to Topsy-Turvy Land, the Antipathies, Alice called it, but I knew that couldn’t be right.
Mama put the book down. ‘All right?’ she said. ‘I’ll have to stop now, it’s time to cook Bob’s dinner.’ Mama had a gap where a tooth had fallen out. Not a front tooth, but one at the side that you could only see when she smiled. She rarely smiled properly because of this, especially in public, but sometimes she forgot. She smiled at me as I lay in bed though. I know because I saw the dark gap in her mouth and it gave me my idea. I would dig to Australia.
Down at the end of the garden, past the lawn and the vegetable plot and the fruit trees, was a patch that was mine. I had grown nasturtiums and radishes and marigolds but I was fed up with gardening, nothing turned out like it looked on the seed packet. I did like to be outside though. I like activity and fresh air. I loved to dig.
When I was well enough to go downstairs wrapped in my dressing-gown, my legs weak and fuzzy, I had a look at Bob’s globe. I put one finger on the tiny smudge that was Britain and reached my arm round to find the opposite side of the world. It wasn’t quite Australia, it was a place in the Tasman Sea. The nearest speck of land was called Loyalty Island. But it was near enough. I don’t think I really believed I could do it. Certainly I knew it wouldn’t be easy or quick. I was prepared to take weeks, months even. Bob said it would be impossible, but that only spurred me on. If it had never been done before, then that was the best reason to try.
I had been excused the daily dozen while I was ill, but as soon as I was better Bob insisted that I join them again. It was a dull morning, a school morning. Bob took off his dressing-gown. Mama hastened to the curtain and twitched a gaping corner shut.
‘Come along then,’ Bob said. ‘Breathe.’ He began to inhale and exhale loudly, swinging his arms backwards and forwards in time with his breaths. He had his back to the fireplace, feet planted squarely apart. Bob was naked. His body was pink and plump beneath a curling grey fuzz. His chest made me think of gorilla breasts and his paunchy belly cast a discreet shadow on the soft giblets beneath.
Mama slipped out of her dressing-gown. She stood behind me, as always, so that I could not see her, only hear a rustle as the soft fabric crumpled on the floor.
‘Come along, Jennifer,’ Bob said. I never had the gumption to refuse, not then. I unbuttoned my pyjamas and took them off.
‘Shoulders back,’ Bob said and I stood up straight between them, aware of Bob’s eyes on my naked front, and Mama’s on my back. ‘Now, breathe in … and … over and …’ and we embarked upon the stretching, the toe-touching, the arm ci
rcling and the ungainly joggling about the spot. The open window sucked the curtain against it with a sad gasp and an oblong patch grew damp with rain. I wondered, as I always did, why it was called the daily dozen when there was never a dozen of anything as far as I could tell. This was another of Bob’s foibles, this morning ordeal. I think it was his worst. No, the worst was the nakedness. We weren’t allowed clothes for the exercises, that was bad enough, but what was even worse was that Bob wouldn’t wear clothes at all in the house.
Mama and Bob had both been naturists once, they had met at a camp-site where everyone frolicked naked in the sun. That’s what they said, only all I could think of was brambles and goosepimples and rain. Mama had changed her mind gradually over the years. She thought bodies terribly boring, she confided to me once, when there were so many lovely clothes to wear. Mama went along with Bob in the mornings though, and I thought little about it. It was just what we did.
‘And down and down and down and down,’ Bob continued, breathless now, stretching one leg to the side and bending his knee like an archer so that his belly drooped almost to the floor. The grey curls on his chest were moist with sweat. ‘And cease,’ he said finally.
2
I had no proper friends at school, that was why I didn’t like it. It wasn’t because I was stupid that I never answered questions, it was because I was shy. I couldn’t have friends like the popular girls because I didn’t know how. It would have been all right if I’d been the same as them but I felt that I was different. I could never ask a friend round for a start, because Bob, being retired, was always there, and always quite bare. I couldn’t let anyone else see his giblets and his great round woolly bottom, all creased from his chair. Word would have got round and they would never have stopped laughing. And he was an old man, all grey and done-for, not like the fathers I sometimes noticed dropping their daughters off at school, with black or brown hair and shirts and ties and cars. Bob wouldn’t get a television either. Not everyone had one then, but the popular girls did, and they invited their best friends home for tea and Blue Peter. Everyone wanted to be friends with those girls. Bob said that televisions gave off gamma rays that rotted the brain. Instead we played games. The family that plays together stays together, he used to say, rubbing his hands and squelching his behind on his leather chair, and my heart would sink.
It was later that I started to dig the hole. It was a hot day marooned in the middle of the summer holidays, and I was twelve, already old enough to know that it was an impossible venture. But it was something to do. In the beginning the digging was easy. The soil was loose and I had got down a foot or more before it became really hard work. The soil grew darker and harder, packed solid, and there were stones, great knuckle-like flints and shards of slate that jolted the spade and refused to give. I had to get down and grub them out of the earth with my hands. There were worms threaded in the earth, and sometimes I sliced one into two flinching pieces with my spade. I was sorry to hurt them, but Bob said that both halves would live so that there’d be two worms instead of one. Mama said that was nonsense and only the half with the head would live. And I still don’t know whether either of them was right – or whether both halves die. There were centipedes too, and millipedes, and other grubs and scuttling creatures, and fine roots stretching from somewhere. I worked hard with my mind on another place, a place where I partly belonged because of Peggy the ancestor. I worked until there were blisters on my hands, thinking of buried treasure, ribbed caskets opening to spill gold doubloons and pearls. And soon I knew for sure that I would never get anywhere. Not this way. I had made a trench that I could stand in up to my waist, but that was nothing. Our garden backed onto a footpath, hidden from view by a high wooden fence, but we were above the footpath, so that even with all my digging I still hadn’t reached the level of the ground behind. If I crouched in my trench I could get my head below the surface and breathe in the private smell of the earth, and feel the coldness. The soil was complicated, seen close to, not haphazard. It was an arrangement of filaments and pebbles and grains and damp-looking living things. It was a live thing in itself, and that surprised me. I licked the earth and recognized the taste of potatoes.
Our back garden was surrounded by low walls but inside these Bob had built a high wood-slatted fence. Mama had insisted on this if Bob wanted to sunbathe naked. But there were knot-holes in the fence, and I used to press my eye against one at the bottom of the garden and watch people walking their dogs. Once I saw a boy and a girl kissing. I wasn’t allowed to use the footpath by myself because it was so secluded. And, Mama warned me, there was danger in seclusion. Although I had given up the idea of Australia, or Wonderland, I still kept at my hole, partly because Bob was waiting for me to give up.
‘Getting close?’ he’d say, or, ‘Through the earth’s crust yet?’
One very hot afternoon I was messing about with the hole, digging and scraping listlessly, just waiting for tea-time, when I got down to some damp gravelly sand. It was grey, not at all like seaside sand although it was pretty in a clean, glistening way and it was surprisingly easy to dig. It was fun to dig after the stiffness of the earth, and so I carried on a bit longer just to see what would come next. I was digging very close to the fence, and suddenly to my surprise the sand began slipping away. I could hear it falling. There was a brick missing, two bricks, three, in the wall that supported the garden, and the sand and the soil gave way and fell down onto the footpath, leaving a space big enough to drop through. It wasn’t far to jump and I stood on the footpath for a moment, scared and thrilled, looking up at the high walls and fences on our side, and the low gates and ramshackle sheds on the other. A marmalade cat which had fled when I landed crept back and rubbed itself against my legs. Its fur was quite hot from the sun. I didn’t stay long that first time. It was enough that I had done it – got somewhere. I stood alone where I was forbidden to be until the cat sauntered off, and then I scrambled back up through the gap. I was very dirty, for the earth was still loose, but I could see how I could widen it so that I could get in and out more easily.
‘I’m giving up my hole,’ I announced at tea time that day.
‘Thank goodness for that,’ Mama said. And Bob merely smirked.
3
Every day I slipped through the hole and walked on the footpath. It was a game, the game of a lonely girl. And it wasn’t as dangerous as Mama and Bob thought. Nothing ever happened to me. I hardly ever saw anyone. A woman and a dog said hello sometimes, as if it was quite an ordinary thing that I should be there. I discovered that this path was part of a labyrinth that threaded between and behind houses, that you could walk for miles this secret way, and see into people’s back gardens, see their end-of-the-garden clutter – broken bikes and lawnmowers, old window-frames and dead Christmas trees in pots. On the hot afternoons the path were full of pollen and bees. Poppies grew in one place, and I took some home for Mama to make into ballerinas with crumpled scarlet skirts. She asked me where I got them but I didn’t say. I was good at being vague.
Lots of cats lived on the paths. Most of them were sleek pets with collars and little bells, playing at being wild but never straying far from their saucers of milk. They had their own territories though and sometimes I surprised two cats, frozen into attitudes of defence, that would slink off unwillingly at my approach, shooting threatening looks over their shoulders at each other. I wanted a cat, but Bob wouldn’t have one in the house. What I wanted most was a little white kitten with blue eyes. Mama said that white cats were always deaf, that it was hereditary, but she didn’t know why.
One day I went further than usual. I followed the path to a road, and although it was a busy road with shops, I crossed it in order to follow the path further, where it went between the post-office and the first of a terrace of houses. It was narrow and dirty and dustbin cluttered. I didn’t like it and wouldn’t have gone far, if I hadn’t spotted another cat, either half-grown or starved and stunted. Its fur was dirty and looked grey where
it may really have been white. One ear was ragged and its eyes were rimmed with pus. It slunk away when it saw me and cowered as if it expected a kick. When I reached my hand out towards it, it fled. I followed it, and it was like following the flicker of a tiny pale shadow. I followed it as far as a cemetery and then I lost sight of it. The cemetery had the air of a forgotten place, no vases of flowers on graves, nothing pretty, except for the wild things – convolvulus, willowherb, honeysuckle – that grew and twined around the slumped gravestones. Long grass and weeds and brambles were tangled everywhere. The church cast a cold shadow; it made me shiver despite the heat. It made me remember that I should be in the garden where Mama and Bob thought I was, behind the hedge, reading Alice in Wonderland for the hundredth time. Out of the shadow, in a patch of sunlight, was the one beautiful gravestone, a lofty white angel, only a little weatherbeaten. Her eyes were pure and blank and the end of her nose rubbed away. Grace Clover was the name I made out on the stone underneath, Mercifully taken to the arms of the Lord, Dec. 24th 1868. It didn’t seem very merciful to me to let someone die on Christmas Eve.
At the far edge of the cemetery was a tangled hedge of briars and brambles. It was taller than me, taller than a man. It looked as if it would be impossible to get through. It looked as if it had been growing for a hundred years. It made me think of the Sleeping Beauty. The sun fell on the briars as the bees hummed and bobbed about the frail flat pink dishes of the flowers. I tried to see through the spaces between the leaves but the hedge was too dense. I walked about for a little longer, searching for the cat, thinking that I should get back home before I was missed, trying to read the words on the lichen-encrusted stones. Most of them were blunt lozenges, like old teeth, but some were carved into shapes. Apart from Grace Clover’s angel there were other stumpier angels, grizzled and grimed, there was a dove with something broken off in its beak, and a fat black chalice. I found a grave where three infants lay, the children of Hannah and Matthew Sparrow. They had all died at birth and never even been named. It was a stumpy little stone, not pretty at all, and the surface was flaking away. If I ever had babies and they died, I thought, I would choose a stone with elves and rabbits and have a nursery rhyme inscribed upon it.
Digging to Australia Page 1