Digging to Australia

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘Why didn’t you come in. Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

  Mama raised her flushed face from her hands and looked at me again. ‘And your hair! Mrs Broom told us about your hair. What a thing to do! It was so lovely. Of course, we’ll have to go to the hairdresser’s and get it tidied up. But it’s not the last you’ve heard from Bob on the subject. Oh Jennifer, didn’t you think about us at all? About how worried we’d be? Half out of our minds we’ve been … and Mrs Broom too.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d know,’ I said lamely.

  ‘And what have you done to your thumb?’ she said, noticing the bloodied handkerchief.

  ‘Just cut it,’ I said. ‘It probably needs a wash.’

  ‘Cut it how?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘What do you mean, “don’t know”!’

  ‘Just cut it on a bit of glass.’

  ‘What bit of glass? Where? How?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Mama jutted out her chin and breathed fiercely, her eyes raised to heaven in exasperation. She turned angrily to get the first-aid box out of a drawer. ‘I’ve never been so tempted to give you a good hiding,’ she said. ‘You’ve ruined Christmas, you realise that?’ She ran hot water into a bowl and tipped some TCP into it. The antiseptic smell rose in a steamy cloud. I kept my eyes averted while she unwrapped my thumb and washed and dressed it more roughly, I thought, than was absolutely necessary. ‘You’ll have a scar,’ she said. ‘And serve you right. “Don’t know,” indeed! I’ll give you “don’t know.”’ She was over the worst of the shock now and was taking it out on me with this grumbling and scolding that sounded like someone else’s parent, not like herself at all. She wasn’t good at it. I went faint when I saw the blood in the basin, and ended up in bed, which was the best place by far until Mama and Bob had simmered down.

  I slept for an hour or so, stretching my toes luxuriously between the clean winceyette sheets, but the day was bright, and the curtains not thick enough to prevent the sunshine from disturbing me. It was strange to be in bed, listening to the birds and the passing cars and the household sounds downstairs, and yet not ill. I felt well and strong. I felt as if some balance had been redressed and that now I could start again. I had not meant to hurt and worry Mama and Bob, just as they had not meant to hurt and worry me – but we had all done it, just the same. They had deceived me for thirteen years, and I still smarted at Mama’s insensitivity. There was no cruelty involved, all it was was stupidity, and although I could forgive most things, I could not quite forgive that. Still, I had, inadvertently, paid her back, and that would have to do.

  I stretched again and wriggled my toes. The radiator creaked its comforting warmth into the room and the curtain stirred in the breeze from the open window behind it. I remembered being ill in bed a long time before, ill and feverish, and I remembered Mama reading to me from Alice in Wonderland. I climbed out of bed and found the book and snuggled back between the sheets to read about Alice, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare squabbling about the words.

  ‘Then you should say what you mean,’ the March Hare went on.

  ‘I do,’ Alice hastily replied; ‘at least – at least, I mean what I say –that’s the same thing, you know.’

  ‘Not the same thing a bit!’ said the Hatter. ‘Why you might just as well say that “I eat what I see” is the same thing as “I see what I eat”!’

  ‘You might just as well say,’ added the March Hare, ‘that “I like what I get” is the same thing as “I get what I like”!’

  I laughed at that and laid the book down again. I closed my eyes and saw Johnny in a tall hat, bent, with a feather drooping from the brim. I saw him in the dim church, a tea-cup held to his lips, his little finger elegantly crooked, playing with words, talking his sensible nonsense. I wondered whether he was back yet, and whether he’d read my poem. I might never know what he thought of it now, because I might never go back. Not that I thought he was the killer. The bones in the church were old. They were simply old bones in an old cemetery – nothing sinister. They were nothing to do with Johnny. But Mama’s fears had penetrated me at last. Someone was the murderer after all, and I shouldn’t be putting myself in danger again, going to dark places alone. I was lucky to have got away with it. I had been like bait on a hook, or fruit arranged in a bowl, asking to be taken. And it couldn’t have been Johnny, even if the body had been new. Why would he go off and leave it there like that, for anyone to see? A murderer would be more careful.

  I got out of bed again and found paper and a pen. I arranged myself against the pillow, with Jacqueline’s camera beside me and began to write her a letter. I found it difficult to write to someone I had never met. I didn’t know whether she would ever get the letter – that depended on whether I could find out where she was – and that made it easier to write. I could be freer in what I said. As if, more as if, I was writing to myself. I wrote about how I tried to dig to Australia, and about the playground and the church, about Johnny and his wings and about Bronwyn and the bones. It took me ages to write. I copied out my poem for her and told her that I planned to be a poet when I grew up. Although even as I wrote that I wasn’t so sure. I told her about my hair. I asked her to send me a photograph. I sent her all my love.

  Mama brought me up some lunch on a tray. She sat on the edge of my bed for a moment, looking at me wistfully. Then she picked up Alice in Wonderland and smiled. I saw the gap where she was missing a tooth.

  ‘What are we going to do with you?’ she asked, and I knew I was half forgiven.

  ‘Mama,’ I began. ‘I’d like to send a letter to Jacqueline.’

  ‘Oh.’ She put her hands together as if in prayer and looked down at her fingertips, compressing her lips.

  ‘Will you give me her address?’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ We looked at each other and she did her sigh and she looked terribly tired and worn, an old thing about to become unravelled.

  ‘Don’t you think I’d like to get in touch with her if I could?’ she asked quietly. ‘She is my child. Sometimes I can’t believe that she can have gone like that. Just gone and left you. Us. I used to think she’d be back. My own flesh and blood. So little feeling.’

  I went cold. I pulled the blankets up over my chest. The curtain shivered. ‘What do you mean? You made her go.’

  ‘What nonsense.’

  ‘You made her go because of the shame. Because I’m illegitimate.’

  Mama gave a humourless laugh. ‘Shame? Whose shame? Can you imagine Bob being ashamed? Or me?’

  I closed my mind quickly, a curtain whisked across before I saw too much. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Mama sighed. ‘Well, of course, that’s up to you.’

  ‘Why would she?’

  ‘She had her own life to live …’

  ‘But why would she lie about it? Anyway, I don’t believe you.’

  ‘We all have our own version of the truth.’

  I put my head back and looked at the ceiling. It was papered in nubbly paper and painted the palest pink. I remembered Bob painting it. I remembered the splashes of paint on his shoulders and back.

  ‘She had her life to be getting on with,’ Mama said quietly. ‘She wanted you adopted. We persuaded her to let us keep you, but her condition was that she would never come back. Not see you. Not until she felt ready. She said we could tell you when you were thirteen, if she hadn’t been in touch by then.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. That wasn’t how it was, not how it was supposed to have been. That wasn’t it.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mama continued. ‘There’s been nothing until now. And now … a Christmas present for you. No address nor any message. But an Australian postmark.’

  ‘Australia!’

  ‘Couldn’t get much further away, could she?’

  ‘Like Peggy.’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘The ancestor!’

&
nbsp; ‘Oh yes … rather different circumstances.’

  ‘But still, Australia.’ Although, as Mama had said, she couldn’t be further away, it made me feel nearer knowing where she was.

  In the garden, all that time ago and without knowing what I was doing, I had been digging my way to her.

  ‘She may not live there,’ Mama pointed out. ‘She may only have been visiting. Working, or on holiday or something. Now eat your sandwich.’ There was a tomato cut fancily up on top of the bread. ‘It’s a tomato rose,’ Mama explained.

  ‘She lives there all right,’ I said. ‘I can feel it in my …’ I stopped and shivered.

  ‘Well you might be right. Eat your lunch, then have a bath and come downstairs.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. I waited until she was out of the room before I got the letter out from under my pillow and read it through. And then I hid it in my trinket box. I didn’t believe Mama. It was her way of making it right, putting herself and Bob in the right. Her version of the truth. Only her version.

  I bathed and washed my hair and brushed it flat. It made my head look small, the wet hair clinging darkly where it had been so fair before. Mama went out to telephone Mrs Broom and put her mind at rest.

  ‘I’ve invited Bronwyn to tea,’ she said when she returned.

  ‘But I don’t want her,’ I said. ‘I can’t stand her.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Mama said. ‘She’s your friend. And it’s the least I can do after all the worry you caused her poor mother.’ Bob rattled his paper and I shut up. He hadn’t directed one word or glance at me since I’d been down. He was dressed respectably, but oddly, in trousers and a purple blouse of Mama’s which was softer round the neck than any of his shirts. He had lost weight over Christmas, and he and Mama were only waiting for the January sales to buy him some new shirts.

  ‘What shall we have for tea?’ Mama asked. ‘What does she like?’

  I shrugged. I didn’t want Bronwyn in my home, or in my room. She was a liar and I didn’t trust her. I hated the thought that she knew about Jacqueline. I wished there was a way that I could stop her knowing.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re sitting there frowning like that,’ Mama said. ‘You’ll age dreadfully if you don’t watch your expression. What about corned beef and bubble and squeak? Give the turkey a night off?’

  Bob grunted approvingly and waggled his foot so that his slipper fell off.

  ‘Where’s your charm bracelet?’ Mama asked. She sat down on a low stool in front of her macramé – which was growing in a long lumpy swath from the back of a kitchen chair – and began knotting.

  I paused and then felt a dull shock like the sound of a very distant bomb. I had worn the bracelet to Bronwyn’s house and I hadn’t seen it since. I certainly hadn’t had it on when I arrived home. I craned my mind back to the night before. I remembered it being there as I ran along the road with the dog at my heels, I recalled the way it clashed against my wrist. The memory of a sensation bothered me. There was the cold feeling as I cut my thumb, and it came to me that the bracelet had slid off at that moment, had fallen into the suitcase with Johnny’s belongings. I even remembered the clink of it, heard but not comprehended at that moment in the dark and the panic.

  ‘And baked Alaska,’ Mama said. ‘No. Too fussy. What about a good old apple tart?’

  ‘And a drop of your nice custard, Lilian,’ Bob added. He folded the paper onto his lap to tackle the crossword.

  ‘Jennifer can make the tart,’ Mama said, and I got up immediately since there was a certain prickle in the air, a certain behave-yourself-or-elseness.

  I switched on the transistor radio that Mama kept on the kitchen windowsill. Hancock’s Half Hour was on and I half listened, and even obediently chuckled as I rubbed fat into flour, my wounded thumb held clear, and rolled out the pale pastry to line the pie plate. All the time I knew that I was going to have to go back to the church and retrieve my charm bracelet. I didn’t want to. I didn’t think I wanted to. I was confused. I didn’t even know whether or not I was frightened of Johnny. He wasn’t a killer, I knew that much. So there was no need to be afraid. He was a friend, supposed to be a friend. He was a better friend than Bronwyn. Bronwyn only wanted me because she had no real friends. She made me do things, go to tea at her house, tell her my secrets, laugh at her mother – and now she was worming her way into my house so that she could mock Bob in Mama’s blouse. I sliced the apples fiercely and made a good apple tart with cinnamon and brown sugar and a handful of sultanas, and I put it in the oven to bake. I switched off the radio.

  ‘Bits of wondrous rarity in old English, Lilian? Four letters. What do you think?’ I heard Bob say, and I was stirred by an exasperated fondness.

  It was mid-afternoon, still light. There was time before dark to get to the church and retrieve my bracelet. If I ran I could be back before the apple tart was cooked. With any luck Johnny would not yet have returned and that would be good. It would be best, after all, not to see him again. Or not for a while anyway, not until the queasy feeling I had about the bones faded away.

  I put my head round the sitting-room door. ‘I’m just going out for a few minutes,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ Bob said. He scribbled viciously in the margin of the newspaper.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, young lady. After your performance I’m surprised you’ve got the face to suggest it! You’re staying put.’ He sounded like a bad actor laying down the law, not like Bob at all.

  Mama pushed her glasses up her nose and looked at him with surprise.

  ‘Understood!’ he insisted. I nodded.

  ‘Where were you going, dear?’ Mama asked.

  ‘Just for a walk.’

  ‘Well not now,’ she said, nodding towards Bob, who had bent his head over his paper once more.

  ‘All right then,’ I said. ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Bronwyn will be here soon, anyway,’ she soothed. I paced around the house like a prisoner, thinking furiously. I must get the charm bracelet back before Mama realised it was missing. ‘Eighteen karat, that is,’ Bob had said, and I had promised to care for it, and there were all the charms to come. I knew I must get it back but there was some relief in the knowledge that I couldn’t go now. I couldn’t go alone.

  I went into my room and squinted out at the garden through the camera. Mama tapped at my bedroom door and came in. She stood awkwardly.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’

  ‘Yes, why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Well … Bob … you know. He’s cross. He was so worried. And he’s upset about your hair.’

  ‘I don’t see why. It’s my hair. I don’t see why I shouldn’t cut it.’

  Mama sat down on my bed. ‘It’s just one of his little foibles – women and hair. You know what he’s like.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ve wanted to have mine cut for years. A nice tidy perm. I look a sight, I know I do.’ Her hand went up to her thin hair, and she tucked a loose wisp behind her ear.

  I looked at her critically. ‘It would look better,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you ask Bronwyn? She does her mum’s.’

  ‘How you dare even suggest it!’ Mama exclaimed, and then added wistfully, ‘It’d be more than my life’s worth.’ The resignation on her face made me crawly in my stomach. ‘I think yours is rather nice, actually,’ Mama admitted. I let her stroke it. ‘It suits you short. Why don’t you let me put a couple of rollers in for you? Give it a bit of a lift. Bob’ll come round in time, you’ll see.’

  ‘If you want,’ I said.

  Bronwyn’s mother walked her to the door. ‘Praise the Lord that you’re back safe and sound,’ she said to me. ‘You did give us a turn, disappearing like that. And I would have blamed myself if anything – you know – had happened.’ She looked tired and her eyes and her nose were twitchy and pink.

  Bronwyn raised her eyebrows at me and I looked away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It wa
s very stupid.’

  ‘Where were you?’ Bronwyn asked.

  ‘She was just walking,’ Mama said quickly. ‘Won’t you come in for a cup of tea, Mrs Broom?’

  ‘Betty. No, I mustn’t stop, thanks all the same. I’m off to a meeting. I’ll call for Bronwyn at …?’

  ‘Eight o’clock?’ Mama suggested.

  We went into the kitchen with Mama to look at my apple tart which was cooling fragrantly on the table, but Bronwyn fidgeted and fretted. She wanted to get me alone. ‘Can I see your bedroom,’ she asked, and Mama said, ‘Go on, Jenny,’ and I had no choice but to lead her up the stairs. Hardly anybody from outside ever came into our house and it felt strange. I saw it all afresh and was quite proud because it was so much brighter and warmer than Bronwyn’s house. A window was open in every room, as always, but it wasn’t damp and cold. The radiators, Bob’s pride and joy, pumped heat around the house, compensating for the draughts. Bob was always bleeding them and listening intently, his head cocked to one side, judging the health of the system by its gurgles and groans. I had never seen it as something to be proud of before, but Bronwyn was obviously impressed. She stood with her bottom against the radiator in my bedroom, looking round at my things.

  ‘This is my camera,’ I offered.

  She took it from me and turned it over in her hands. ‘Not new,’ she sniffed. ‘Where’s your ring?’ I opened my trinket box, and we watched the pirouetting ballerina for a moment before I opened the secret compartment and took it out. ‘Pretty,’ she said grudgingly. She tried it on all her fingers but it would only fit her little one. She handed it back. She picked the lipstick up from my dressing table.

  ‘You can have that if you like,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ She wound it up.

  ‘I don’t like the colour,’ I said.

  ‘Really? I think it’s fab.’ She put it in her pocket quickly. ‘Thanks.’

  She opened my wardrobe and looked through my clothes, then, satisfied with her investigation, she took off her shoes and curled up on my bed with her feet underneath her. ‘Go on then,’ she said.