Digging to Australia

by Lesley Glaister

  I sat up in bed and read some of Johnny’s book so that I would have something to say when I returned it. There were pages about a political argument over Christmas dinner. I didn’t understand the politics but I could just picture the family sitting round the table, and the great red fire, and the ivy twined round the chandelier. I could almost smell the aroma of warm ham and celery and turkey, all steamy and fragrant in the Christmas glow, and I thought the argument was a shame. It was a shame when things had to change, when people had to realise things. It made me sad. It made me sad that I couldn’t properly look forward to Christmas ever again. I could and would pretend, and sometimes I might even believe my own pretence but it was only a thin skin, only a wrapping like the jolly paper on the empty box. Mama and Bob were terribly easy to fool. I only had to smile once or twice, make some light-hearted remark and they would believe that everything was all right again. But then perhaps it was, for them. I put the book under my pillow and switched off my lamp. ‘Jacqueline,’ I whispered into the dark. ‘Mother … Mum.’ I thought ‘mum’ a dull sort of a word, a numb sound. I would never call her that. If I ever got the chance, I decided, I would call her Jacqueline.

  14

  Saturday was a mild sunny day. The dazzling kind of day when the moss on walls and paths is brilliant green and the bare shafts of twigs gleam golden in the bushes. Flowers still bloomed in gardens, late roses, geraniums even, still scarlet in their pots. Midges danced between the gravestones. I went to my playground. I had Johnny’s book in my pocket ready to return, but first of all I wanted to be alone. Birds thrilled in the unseasonal warmth. I sat on my swing, and swung gently to and fro, adding the faint squeak to the song of the birds. The sky was a tender blue, flushed to a wintery pink round its rim. When the sun set it would be cold, but for now it was mild and it was beautiful. A blackbird, his beak bright as a buttercup, snatched a morsel from the ground, hopped on his delicate feet and then flung himself upwards with a little feathery burr.

  Something had happened at home that morning. Bob had appeared at the breakfast table clad decently in trousers. Only he wasn’t decent, he looked more naked than ever, somehow, with his too-tight khaki trousers biting into his paunch. I had heard, late into the night, the buzz of conversation between Mama and Bob, the result of which must have been the decision to forgo his nakedness in my presence. I said not a word about it, and neither did they. Otherwise, Bob had been as usual, except for the sheepish look on his face when he asked me to pass him the milk or the marmalade. I could tell that he wanted me to say something, or to make some sign of approval, but I said nothing. What was there to say? I remained quiet but I experienced an exhilarating shock of power. I had caused this change of a lifelong habit simply by sulking and staring, and all he wanted in return was my pleasure. I would not acknowledge the difference.

  I took Johnny’s book from my pocket, but I did not read. The sun danced too brightly on the pages, it made my eyes smart. I climbed the climbing frame and peered over at the houses. The pregnant woman was standing in her garden wearing a dressing-gown and wellington boots. She was doing nothing, just standing, staring straight ahead. As I watched, she began to run her hands over her belly, as if exploring. She pressed first the top of the great bulge and then ran her hands round underneath, and her mouth was moving as if she was talking to the baby inside her. The upstairs curtains of the house were drawn and I wondered if someone was ill, one of the boys, or the husband. There was a Christmas tree in a pot outside the back door, ready to be taken in and decorated. It was still two weeks until Christmas and I knew that Christmas in this house would be fine, the children would believe in Father Christmas, that they would have a magical time. Looking at the pregnant woman made me think about Jacqueline, and how I, once, had been curled like a fat bud inside her. She might have another child, or several by now. I might have brothers and sisters somewhere, preparing for Christmas, unaware of my existence. I even imagined for a moment that that was Jacqueline, standing there, so dreamily pregnant in her garden, and that she was thinking about her stranger-daughter, dreaming about how it might have been if she had kept me. I looked harder, more critically. No. This was an ordinary woman. Nice, but not striking. Jacqueline, I knew, would be tall with high cheekbones and dark hair, and she wouldn’t be living in an ordinary place like this. She couldn’t be living so close to me, so close that we might have bumped into each other on the street.

  All at once, the woman’s eyes focused on me and for a fraction of a second, our eyes met. She turned quickly and went back into her house. I was far away, only a distant figure peering over a hedge, over a gap of wasteland. I represented no danger. But almost immediately the upstairs curtains parted, and the husband looked out, the woman behind him, pointing at me. I climbed down. I had meant no harm.

  I sat back on the swing. Now that I had been seen, the place was spoilt. I waited glumly to see what I would do next, grinding the cigarette end I’d left there the time before into the ground with the toe of my shoe, and then I heard a movement in the hedge, a frenzy of rustling and shaking that was more catastrophic than any bird or animal might make. I tensed, waiting to see who or what might appear. And, of course, it was Johnny, with thorns tangled in his hair, who emerged accompanied by many tiny ripping sounds.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, just as if he’d stepped through a door into a drawing room. I looked away, angry with him for entering my place. In the brightness and warmth of summer it had been mine, with the pink and green and the golden buzz of the bees. But now winter had stripped the briars and sent the bees to sleep and made it cold and so often dark that I was losing the feeling that it was mine. And now hostile eyes had seen me, and Johnny himself had penetrated my place like a rude shout finally destroying a fading dream.

  ‘It’s been some time,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to see you back.’

  ‘I’m not here to see you.’ I looked at my feet and at the ground, anywhere but at him.

  ‘You’re offended,’ he said. ‘I was out of sorts when you called before. Accept my profoundest apologies. Up and down like a bloody seesaw, I’m afraid.’ He looked around, but of course there was no seesaw, just the iron stump.

  ‘You didn’t offend me,’ I said. ‘I was surprised though. You were so different.’

  ‘Well, aren’t we all, from time to time?’ he said. ‘Aren’t you?’ He pushed the roundabout round and round, causing the terrible dry screeching sound. I put my hands over my ears.

  ‘Shush!’ I shouted.

  ‘Let me push you round, Jacqueline,’ he said, and I was taken by surprise. I had forgotten who I was supposed to be.

  ‘No.’ The roundabout grated to a stop.

  ‘This place is redolent with the past,’ Johnny remarked. ‘High jinks. Think of all the children …’ His finger traced the carved initials still visible on the surviving remnants of paint on the frame of the swing.

  ‘None lately,’ I said. ‘Except for me.’

  ‘No. And not for some time. That hedge didn’t grow overnight. Mysterious, methinks.’

  ‘Like your church,’ I said, ‘that isn’t really a church. That’s strange too.’

  ‘Makes no odds.’

  ‘I was thinking, there must have been a church, a real church, there once. What about the old gravestone?’

  ‘Till God the silver string unloosed …’

  ‘Silver cord, yes.’

  ‘It will have been moved from somewhere else.’

  ‘But why should anyone want to move an old gravestone?’

  Johnny shrugged. ‘People do things for their own reasons. Or for no reason at all.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘it isn’t a holy place now.’

  ‘Holy place,’ Johnny mused. ‘Holey places graveyards. Get it?’ But I would not smile.

  ‘Lacks sense of humour,’ he noted.

  ‘I don’t want you here,’ I said, and the feeling of power that Bob had triggered in me that morning glowed under my ribs and made me brav
e. ‘Get out.’

  He gave a surprised laugh. ‘That’s nice! After all my hospitality to you! What’s brought this on?’

  I knew I was being unfair. I shrugged and I felt my face grow thin and sullen. ‘I didn’t invite you,’ I mumbled. ‘It’s my place, that’s all.’

  ‘Ah, but it isn’t, is it?’ Johnny said. I tossed my head back and began to swing. ‘It isn’t really yours any more than the church is really mine. We borrow them, such places, such spaces, in the same way that we borrow our bodies.’

  ‘Borrow our bodies?’

  ‘Yes. Bodies are puppets, just puppets, machines …’

  I swung higher and higher in an effort to dodge the possible truth of this, and the frame clanked and swayed.

  ‘And when you’ve worn it out, or someone’s wrecked it, you bugger off somewhere else,’ he shouted. ‘The only thing that’s truly yours you cannot see.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ I mocked. The frame jolted violently.

  ‘Watch it,’ Johnny warned. ‘Stop. Look, the ground is coming up. It’s cracking.’ I slowed down and put my feet to the ground and saw that around the base of the swing there were indeed fresh cracks in the concrete.

  ‘It wouldn’t fall down, would it?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t ask me. I wouldn’t risk it though.’ He smiled at me and I met his eyes for the first time and they forced a smile from me.

  ‘I’ve brought your book back,’ I said.

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Some, bits of it … I found it difficult, but I like it, what I read of it. The way it’s written.’

  ‘Well you would.’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘With your poetic soul.’

  ‘Oh yes …’

  ‘Do finish it. It deserves to be finished. My intention is to remain in the immediate vicinity for an indefinite span which may indeed exceed the quarter. That should allow you ample time to digest such a slim volume.’

  I laughed. ‘You do talk funny, sometimes,’ I said.

  ‘Do talk funny,’ he repeated, ‘there’s grammar for you.’

  ‘Well you do.’

  ‘I like to exercise my vocabulary,’ he conceded. ‘And you’re not the first to remark that I employ, upon occasion, a somewhat idiosyncratic, not to say eccentric, idiolect.’ He grinned broadly, and I was reminded of a clever little dog sitting up to be patted.

  ‘But you don’t always talk like that,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t always do anything.’

  ‘And when you go, where will you go?’ I asked.

  He turned away. ‘I’m about to put the kettle on,’ he said. ‘Can I interest you in a little refreshment?’

  ‘Won’t you tell me what it is?’ I asked, walking all round the wooden structure. ‘Go on. I won’t tell. Who would I tell?’

  ‘Can you not see what it is?’

  I squinted at it from all angles, and racked my brains but had no idea. It was an enormous thing, a kind of scaffolding or framework.

  ‘Look at it without preconception of possibility,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon?’ I said. But I quite understood him. I closed my eyes and opened them again and let myself see whatever was there, and suddenly I could see it was wings. It was so obviously a pair of wings that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t been able to see it before. I was standing at one wingtip and recognised now that the structure was symmetrical, joined in the centre. Each wing was hinged and jointed in several places so that it would flex and flap like a bird’s, rather than than stick out stiffly like the wing of a plane.

  ‘Well, it looks like wings,’ I said, feeling ridiculous.

  ‘Absolutely!’ he exclaimed. ‘What perspicacity she shows.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wings. For the purpose of flight.’ He looked pleased, no, more as if he was suppressing pleasure or glee.

  ‘Really? Truly?’

  ‘Unfinished of course.’

  ‘But will it be possible? For you to fly?’

  ‘Daedalus did it. Do you know your Greek myths? And his son – Icarus – but he flew too close to the sun, youthful high spirits …’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘He fell into the sea with an almighty splash, like a great fried fowl.’

  ‘And Daedalus?’

  ‘He made a safe landing. A brilliant man, Daedalus. He accepted no impossibility.’

  ‘Like you?’

  Johnny laughed, pleased. ‘They’re not complete, of course. Once I’ve completed the basework, I’ll have to cover them.’

  ‘With feathers?’ I suggested.

  He furrowed his brow at me as if this was ridiculous. ‘Feathers my foot! No, silk. I have silk. A parachute. I’ll be like a butterfly, a bloody butterfly. No, a moth, soft as a moth.’ I looked back at the heavy splintery wood. ‘You’re sceptical,’ he said, and I thought that I was more than that. ‘Look at this,’ he said and bent down and from somewhere in the shadows, behind his suitcase, he pulled a stream of what looked like water flowing upwards into his hands. He pulled until his arms were full and it billowed to his feet.

  ‘Beautiful,’ I breathed.

  ‘Come outside,’ he said. He walked towards the door, the stuff trailing behind him like a bridal veil. Outside in the sunshine he flung it up, brushed off the clinging woodshavings and spread it out, a thin glistening skin through which the gravestones jutted like bones. ‘Go over there.’ He indicated the other side of it and I obeyed and then between us we lifted and lowered the silk, in unison at first, the silk gasping against the air, and then we got out of time and flapped it crazily so that it billowed and rippled like moonlit water in a storm. I shouted with laughter.

  ‘See, it almost has a life of its own,’ Johnny said, laughing too. He gathered it up into his arms. I followed him back into the church and watched as he made the tea.

  ‘I still don’t see how you’re going to fly,’ I said. ‘You could float with the silk maybe, but the whole thing together will weigh a ton.’ I put my hand on a wooden strut. A shaft of sunlight struck it, making a brass nail head gleam in the centre of an odd streak of red paint. He lifted his eyebrows at me. ‘In fact,’ I dared to say, ‘I think you’re potty.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he agreed, regarding me with blank eyes, and now I was not sure whether they were mad or wise.

  ‘Where did you say you were from?’ I asked.

  He smiled. ‘You’re wondering if I’ve escaped from the loonybin now, aren’t you?’ He added sugar to his tea and stirred the spoon round and round in his cup, making an irritating repetitive clink. ‘Or perhaps I’m an outlaw, an escaped convict. What do you say to that?’

  ‘I had an ancestor who was a convict,’ I said, and I felt proud.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘She was called Peggy and she stole a peacock and she was transported to Australia.’

  ‘A poacher then.’

  ‘No … I think it was more of a pet,’ I said, hesitantly, realising how much of what I knew was my own invention.

  ‘She went on a ship you say? To Botany Bay?’

  ‘Is that Australia?’

  Johnny held his finger up to silence me. He put his cup down and turned away. He slicked his hair back from his brow and turned back, stepped into a spot of yellow light, put one foot on his box, cupped his hand over his ear and began to sing in a curious nasal voice, as if he had troublesome adenoids.

  ‘Come, all you daring poachers, that wander void of care,

  That walk out on a moonlight night, with your dog, your gun, your snare;

  The harmless hare and pheasant – or peacock – you have at your command,

  Not thinking of your last career upon Van Diemen’s Land.

  ‘There was poor Jock Brown from Glasgow and Auntie Peggy too,

  They were daring poachers the country well did know;

  The keeper caught them hunting with all their guns in hand,

  They were fourteen years transported into Van Diemen’s
Land.

  ‘The very day we landed upon that fateful shore

  The settlers gathered round us, full forty score or more;

  They herded us like cattle, they sold us out of hand,

  They yoked us to the plough, my boys, to plough Van Diemen’s Land.’

  I had laughed all the way through the song at the serious way Johnny included Peggy in the song, but I stopped when he had finished, picturing Peggy with her paper crown on her head, bent under the weight of the yoke, the furrows of the earth stretching red behind her.

  ‘They built Australia. Made it what it is. All those mad bad people. You’d think it would have turned out worse,’ Johnny said, sitting down on his box.

  ‘Although there were people there already, weren’t there?’

  ‘Aborigines, yes.’

  ‘I wonder what they thought when the convicts arrived?’

  ‘I doubt if anyone thought to ask. And by the way, for the sake of accuracy I must point out that Van Diemen’s Land is in Tasmania, not Australia itself.’

  ‘More directly underneath than Australia if you look at the globe,’ I said.

  ‘Is that so?’

  I looked hard at Johnny. He had changed again. All the fun had suddenly gone from him and he actually seemed smaller, his shoulders narrow, his voice flat. He had finished with me. I couldn’t get used to it: the sudden way he changed. He went to the door and flung the dregs from his cup out into the grass. ‘Must get on, while there’s still a bit of light.’

  I put my cup down beside his suitcase, and looked at the picture of his miserable grandfather, held for an instant by the pale gleam in his eyes. I wondered if insanity ran in the family.

  ‘Mad as a hatter,’ I thought.

  Johnny began getting out his tools, ready to work. ‘Are you perchance, referring to me?’ he said.