Digging to Australia

by Lesley Glaister

  I felt very peculiar. I may have been slightly drunk, and I was chilled so that I couldn’t feel my fingers and toes. I wandered around, peering at the planks, which were old and splintery. Now and then I found a nail and wrenched it with the hammer and jiggled it with the pliers. Some came out and some didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter. After a while the smell of freshly sawn wood, the dust from it, began to irritate my nose and I sneezed.

  ‘Gesundheit!’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten you were there. How are you getting on?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Methinks it’s time for another cup of tea,’ he said. Methinks? I thought. He was invisible to me, across the building, behind the chaos of wood, in the darkness. ‘Would you mind awfully? There’s water in a bottle. Everything’s there.’

  I fumbled around and filled the kettle and lit the stove. The blue flame wavered in the air and gave off a thin streak of warmth before I put the kettle on top. I looked inside the suitcase beside the stove. It was very neat – shipshape, Bob would have said – all rows of things arranged nicely, not how I’d thought it would be at all. As well as cutlery and crockery there was a jar of marmalade, a loaf of bread, a china butter dish, cut glass salt and pepper pots, a pot of anchovy paste and a wedge of a cheese I did not know, threaded with veins of mould. There were sausages too, wrapped in greaseproof paper.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I called. ‘You must live somewhere, apart from here, I mean.’

  ‘Around and about.’

  ‘But you’re not a tramp, and you’re not a gypsy. Are you?’

  ‘Some of us defy classification,’ he called back. There was a crash as he dropped something. ‘Bugger.’

  ‘Oh.’ The water began to bubble in the kettle. I fiddled about, picking things up and examining them. I ran my finger over the decorative crest on the handle of a knife. I picked up the fat wad of sausages. ‘It must be nearly dinnertime,’ I said hopefully.

  He laughed, and I jumped because he had approached silently and was close behind me. ‘I tend to dine in the evening, personally,’ he said.

  I flushed. ‘I only call it dinner because that’s what it’s called at school.’

  ‘Oh don’t mind me. You go ahead. The frying pan’s there.’ He indicated the wall and I noticed for the first time that there were pots and pans hanging from nails, and a picture too, a photograph of a boy dressed in a stiff grown-up suit. I went closer and peered at it. The boy’s face was pinched and weak. He looked as if he was about to open his blanched lips and whine.

  ‘My grandfather,’ the man said. ‘Married my grandmother at eighteen and only lived to sire one child. A boy fortunately for the family name. My father. And then snuffed it. A consumptive. To my grandmother’s relief, I imagine. He wasn’t much fun by all accounts.’ The boy’s eyes glistened resentfully.

  I reached for the frying pan. When the sausages began to sizzle, a wonderful sweet fatty smell rose and spread, incongruous in the mustiness. ‘Sure you don’t want any?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ve tempted me,’ he said, and I put another couple of sausages in the pan. I sat on a box and poked at them until they curled and split. I felt very grown up then, cooking for a man. The sausages were delicious eaten between clammy slices of bread. I licked my fingers and wiped my mouth on my sleeve, but noticed that he dabbed delicately at his own with a napkin. There was only one, in a silver ring. When he had finished he rolled it up and put it back in the ring, sausage fat and all.

  ‘Not much as birthday parties go,’ he said. ‘Will you be having one this evening?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I shivered.

  ‘You’re cold,’ he observed. ‘If you care to look in that box you’ll find a rug. Wrap yourself up in it while you drink your tea.’ I stood up and opened the lid of the box and found a thick tartan rug inside, which I wrapped around myself, settling down once again on the box. The rug made me feel colder at first, the cold of the earth absorbed into its fibres, but gradually my own warmth crept into it and I began to feel sleepy.

  ‘There was always a party, I remember,’ he said. He had closed his eyes. ‘With a conjurer, or a clown, and fifty or so children I’d never seen in my life before. Quite an ordeal.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I mean, why didn’t you know the children?’

  He didn’t answer. He rubbed his head and then ran his hands over his cheeks. I could hear the grating of his bristly skin against his palms.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘My name? Must I have a name?’

  ‘Of course you must!’

  ‘Well then, let’s say Johnny. Will that do?’

  ‘Yes … I suppose so.’

  ‘All your characters must have names.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said I must have a name. Why is that? No, let me guess. So you know what to call me. So you know how to think of me. So you know how to refer to me.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘But you won’t do that last thing. You won’t refer to me.’ He stated it as a fact, not a question that required an answer.

  ‘Now, more about you. You are the one who has come to me. Do you want or need something from me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you are mistaken. You sought me out.’

  ‘No … I didn’t know you were here.’

  ‘Not consciously. But you did know.’

  ‘I tried to go away, when I saw you … but you followed me out. You called me.’

  ‘Only in obedience.’

  ‘This is nonsense!’ I stood up.

  ‘Sit down a minute longer,’ he said, and I did, but only because my legs were suddenly weak. He had splashed more whisky in our tea. ‘I’ve grown curious. You have aroused my curiosity. You don’t add up.’ He gazed at me with his clear eyes until my cheeks felt hot. ‘Are you really not afraid of me? Not just a mite afraid? Not a smidgin? Perhaps you need to be afraid. Is that it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And it really is your birthday?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Ah ha … a lie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well is it or isn’t it? Surely the answer to that is in the nature of an absolute. A question that can be answered with a simple yes or no.’

  ‘I’ve always believed my birthday to be on a different day. Now I know the truth.’

  ‘Ah ha. Result, methinks, confusion. Loss of sense of identity. Yes?’

  ‘I suppose that’s what it is,’ I agreed, reluctantly. ‘Loss of something, anyway.’ He leant back and stretched. ‘I honestly wasn’t looking for you, or for anyone,’ I said. ‘I was just wandering around outside, just being alone when I heard you whistling.’

  ‘Must endeavour to refrain from that,’ he said.

  ‘Just before I heard you whistling, I had a funny sort of experience,’ I said, remembering.

  ‘Which was …’

  ‘I was reading something on a gravestone, one of the old ones that aren’t even on graves anymore.’

  ‘An enigma, those. Don’t belong.’

  ‘There was something about … loosening a silver cord or something …’

  ‘I’ve seen it.’

  ‘And as I was reading it something happened … everything went … oh I can’t explain it.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘Well, as if everything held together. As if I could see how everything held together, only very precariously, like some sort of balance. As if it all made a sort of sense.’

  ‘And you felt what? Joy?’

  ‘Something like joy, only not as simple,’ I said. Johnny was looking at me intently.

  ‘Epiphany’ he said. ‘Have you read Joyce?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘James Joyce. No I don’t suppose you have yet. You must. Read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for a start. There’s a moment in there. Epiphany.’

  I thought the word sounded holy, like something from a church service. ‘It had nothing to do with God,’ I said.
/>   ‘Did it not?’

  ‘No, it was the world. Just the world.’

  ‘A wild angel appeared to him …’

  ‘No angels. No nothing. Anyway there’s no such thing.’

  ‘As?’

  ‘Angels. Or God. Or ghosts.’

  He laughed. ‘I’ll tell you what. Borrow the book.’ He bent down to reach it. He was like a sort of conjurer. The church was like a conjurer’s cave. Cosy now, despite the cavernous cold of it. There seemed to be endless things concealed in the shadows. I saw now a bookcase, just a low thing. He drew a small volume out and dropped it on my lap. I leafed through. It was damp. The print was tiny and dense, impossible to read in the poor light.

  ‘I may not read it,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘That’s of no relevance to me. Take it or leave it. Now I really must get on.’ He had switched away from me and I was disappointed. The strange conversation had been exhilarating. I always knew exactly what Mama and Bob would say next. I liked the surprise of Johnny’s utterances, the not-quite-sureness of whether he made sense, or whether I quite understood. And now it had come to an end. I decided to take the book, so that at least I’d have an excuse to return. It just fitted into my coat pocket. ‘Work to do. Dark soon,’ he said. ‘You’d better be getting home.’

  ‘But it can’t be that time …’ I stood up and let the rug drop from my shoulders. And all at once the chilliness closed round me. ‘I’ll come back soon to see you,’ I promised.

  ‘Not too soon,’ he replied, and disappeared almost immediately into the gloom. I opened the narrow side door and stepped out into the chill afternoon. Johnny was right. Time had passed, more time outside the church than within. And if I dawdled now, I would be home at the right time.

  8

  At tea time I opened my present. It was a white jewellery box. When I opened the lid I saw that there was a ballerina inside the mirrored top, twizzling on one toe to a tune which Mama said was called the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.’ It wasn’t something I particularly wanted, or didn’t want. ‘Thank you,’ I said. Mama showed me the little key at the back to wind up the music when it ran down.

  ‘Now show her the secret compartment,’ said Bob.

  ‘See if you can find it,’ Mama urged. I ran my finger over the smooth wood. The inside was padded and lined with red velveteen. ‘Press,’ Mama said.

  ‘Press where?’ I pressed my fingers methodically on the spongy interior until I felt a little space in the padding, and then the inside of the box slid gently forward revealing another shallow drawer in which there was another present.

  ‘Cunning, what?’ said Bob proudly.

  ‘Open it then,’ Mama said. I unwrapped a gold charm bracelet with one charm, a golden wishbone, attached to it. ‘Every birthday and Christmas from now on we’ll add to that,’ she said. ‘And by the time you’re twenty-one …’ She sighed pleasurably at the thought; and then her eyes anxiously sought mine for an answering sign of pleasure or gratitude. I closed the box, putting an end to the music, and the dizziness of the dancer.

  I fastened the bracelet on my wrist.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll look after it.’

  ‘I should jolly well hope so,’ Bob remarked. ‘Eighteen karat that is.’

  ‘There,’ Mama said. ‘Now we’d better eat our tea.’ She had baked my favourite food, bacon-and-egg flan and a marble cake, each slice a swirl of brown and yellow and pink. Everything was all right. I was careful and controlled. Everything was all right as long as I could keep edges around what I was feeling. If I thought of this day as just a day and not as part of a year that had been turned upside down, then it would be all right. Sense of identity, I thought as I chewed. The afternoon with Johnny was hard to credit in the hard-edged electric light with the fat cake in the middle of the table. The golden wishbone tickled my wrist. Mama lit the thirteen candles on the cake and they sang to me, Bob’s voice a low grumble beneath Mama’s tremulous piping.

  ‘By the way,’ Mama said, as I got up to leave the table, ‘a girl called round this afternoon.’ She spoke as if this was the most natural thing in the world, as if girls called round every day.

  ‘A girl?’

  ‘I think it must have been Bronwyn. A big girl.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes. She called to see if you were all right, since you weren’t at school today.’

  ‘Oh.’ I steadied myself on the back of the chair.

  ‘Ask her where she was, then,’ Bob said.

  All at once I felt the careful edges dissolving. ‘You may well ask,’ I said and my voice was cold. I left the room, walking carefully as if the floor was unsafe.

  ‘Jennifer!’ Mama said, ‘wait. We’re not angry. I’m sure you can explain …’

  I stopped half-way up the stairs. ‘Explain!’ I shouted. ‘Explain! You still haven’t explained about my birthday.’ There was a silence. ‘Well?’ I felt something now. I felt what I should have felt in the morning when I read Jacqueline’s letter, I felt rage. It gripped me by the scruff of my neck and shook me so that my voice came out in jagged pieces. ‘Tell me why? Why did you lie?’

  Mama came out of the dining room and looked up the stairs at me. Her hair was quite grey. She was an old woman. I hated her for her age and her wrinkles and the snaky veins on the backs of her hands. Suddenly they seemed deliberate, as if to prove how old she was, that she couldn’t possibly have been my mother, lying old grandmother that she was.

  When she spoke, she did so quietly. ‘Jacqueline’s birthday is in June,’ she said. ‘Midsummer’s day.’

  ‘But that’s mine.’

  ‘No. It’s Jacqueline’s. When she went we decided to keep the occasion. We thought it would be easier.’

  ‘Easier!’ I gasped. ‘Easier? Easier for who?’

  ‘Stupid,’ she said, ‘we can see that now but …’ But I ran upstairs and slammed the door so hard that the whole house flinched. I flung myself down on my bed and wept into the bedspread. I made as much noise as I could, gulping and gasping and sobbing until my shoulders ached and my nose and eyes stung. I’d never cried like that before with every bit of me. Although it couldn’t have been every bit, because there was enough left over to be aware that Mama and Bob were listening, and there was even a bit of me that enjoyed the abandon, that looked on with interest at what I could do.

  When I’d worn myself out with crying, I lay in a blank state, my shoulders convulsing, my cheeks itching from the drying tears. I knew they’d be relieved downstairs, I knew Bob would be saying things like, ‘I’m glad she’s got that out of her system.’ And then they’d carry on as usual. And sure enough, after a pause, I heard a buzz of voices, and then the washing up being done, and then the radio.

  I did not join in with the daily dozen in the morning. Bob sent Mama upstairs to call me, and then he called me himself, but I remained curled up in the warmth of my bed. Mama came up eventually, but I turned my face away.

  ‘Aren’t you well?’ she asked. ‘Can I get you something? Some aspirin?’ This was a sure sign that she was worried, because Bob didn’t go along with aspirin. I wondered if he knew she’d offered it. I didn’t answer and she left the room eventually, sighing. I heard a short muffled argument downstairs, and then a silence, and then the rhythmic lumping and thumping sounds of the exercises, and Bob’s barked instructions. The muscles in my arms and legs twitched in response, so well trained were they, so obedient. So obedient no more.

  Bob would not speak to me at breakfast time, and I would not speak to Mama. I ate my boiled egg and bread and Marmite and drank my tea with my eyes fixed on the brown Bakelite cruet in the middle of the table. Then I got up and left the room. As soon as I’d gone they started fretting in burrowing undertones. They made me want to laugh. They were so simple. My shoes were warped and stiff after their soaking and subsequent drying out on the stove. I should have stuffed them with newspaper. Bob usually did it for me, but he’d neglected to this time, or maybe just forgo
tten. The pinching of the stiff leather against my toes seemed somehow fitting. I would have left the house without a word, but Mama darted out into the hall with a folded piece of paper in her hand. ‘A note,’ she said, ‘for Miss Clarke, excusing you for yesterday.’ I took it. ‘Jenny,’ she began, putting her hand on my sleeve, ‘I know it’s been a shock …’

  ‘Ha!’ I said and snatched my arm away. I went out and slammed the door. It was a foggy day. The first of my new life.

  9

  Bronwyn was waiting for me outside the school gates. ‘I never thought you’d be the type to bunk off,’ she said. ‘You’ll be in for it, today.’

  ‘No I won’t,’ I said. ‘Mama wrote me a note.’

  ‘Who’s Mama?’

  ‘My grandmother.’

  ‘Why do you call her that?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Read it if you like.’ I said. Mama had a special way of folding notes that saved using an envelope, she folded and tucked them into a neat square. I unfolded it and held it out to her. She read it, frowning, her lips moving. ‘You lucky thing,’ she said. ‘I wish my granny lived with us. Mum would never cover up for me like that.’

  I put the note in my pocket. She linked her arm through mine and we walked into the playground. It was awkward, I couldn’t walk quite in step with her. I saw the popular girls smirking to each other as we walked past. Bronwyn was oblivious. I let her hold onto me but my own arm hung limply. She wanted me to go to tea again, and I said I would. I didn’t mind going. It was better than being at home.

  Miss Clarke said she’d decided to give Wordsworth a rest for a week or two. ‘I propose a change this morning. I want you all to write a poem for Christmas.’ There were faint groans. ‘Christmas is the theme,’ she said, ‘but try to be original. Try not to rhyme “holly” with “jolly”, for instance.’

  ‘Does it have to rhyme?’ someone asked.

  ‘No, free verse if you prefer. But don’t forget rhythm.’

  ‘Does it have to be religious?’

  ‘No, no. Look, take an image … something associated with Christmas. A robin, for instance. A poem about a robin would be fine. You needn’t mention Christmas as long as there’s a seasonal theme. And, I’ve a little prize tucked away for the winner …’ She beamed round at us, and then set to concentrating on something on her desk.