Digging to Australia

by Lesley Glaister

  21

  ‘Hi Jenny, have a good Christmas?’ It was Susan who spoke to me, came up to me in the playground on the first frosty morning of term.

  ‘Did you?’ I replied and a warmth swept through me, lighting my cheeks.

  ‘OK. I love your hair. It looks tons better short. Suits you.’ I looked around for the popular girls who would surely claim her, who might even be laughing at me now, laughing at my credulity. But there was nobody there. There was no joke. She was simply being friendly. ‘I heard about … you know …’ she said breathily, rolling her eyes and moving her face close to mine. ‘What happened?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You know, my uncle’s a policeman, he said you’d gone missing and nobody knows where.’

  The rumour spread and soon other girls were clustered around us, all the popular girls and me in the centre. All at once I was someone special. I had a sort of glamour even, and I had become part of a crowd. And from outside the crowd I was watched by Bronwyn, and whenever she got the chance, she clung to me like ivy, a terrified lonely look in her eyes. And there was nothing I could do but turn my face away. After school I walked past Bronwyn and went home with Susan and watched Blue Peter on their television – a colour television – curled up on the sofa. We were allowed to drink Ribena and eat chocolate biscuits while we watched. Her mother was young and ordinary and wore slacks and a carried a dribbling baby on her hip. She accepted me as a friend of Susan’s without a second glance. And when I looked at myself in the mirror in Susan’s bathroom – a bathroom with talcum powder foot-prints on the floor – I saw a normal girl with bright eyes under a straight fringe, the sort of girl the world is full of, neither beautiful nor hideous, neither brilliant nor stupid. A satisfactory kind of girl.

  And it wasn’t just for that day, not a fleeting change. Only gradually did I learn to trust the change, to take it for granted. At first I was afraid hour by hour and then day by day and then week by week that it would change back, that I would put a foot wrong, say the wrong thing and slide back to aloneness – or to Bronwyn. She was always there, just in case, near. For she didn’t believe in me either. I was never cruel to her, but still she was left behind, left out. I still talked to her and sat beside her in class, and accepted her peppermints under the desk. But it was Susan I met afterwards, Susan I linked arms with in the playground. And Bronwyn was left lumpish and alone, but it was not my fault. I couldn’t help it if the miracle – the sudden transformation into a popular girl – had happened to me and not to Bronwyn. Her presence was a snag in the smoothness of my new life. She was a reminder of things I might otherwise almost have succeeded in forgetting. She was the only one who knew how frail my newfound popularity was, the only one who expected it to end.

  I turned my face away from the church when I had to walk that way. I almost forgot about the playground, I had no wish to mope around alone. Susan had claimed me as her best friend and I basked in the honour. It was a tricky business; playground politics were extremely delicate. The web of friendships and enmities and jealousies and tenuous loyalties spread newly before me, a complex revelation, and I trod with caution. I learned games with mysterious words, skipping and clapping games, and I muttered the words to myself like spells when I was alone to keep me safe and ordinary, to keep me balanced on the frosting. Empompey polleney, pollenistic, empompey, polleney, academic, so fa me, academic, poof, poof. Everything was clever and mysterious and belonged to me and my friends and nobody else and it kept me from falling through. And I knew without having to learn it that I must never fall through, for there was nothing beneath all the thick new frosting but emptiness.

  Sometimes I took Susan, or one of the others, home and Bob slunk away and Mama tried too hard to be nice. She was just too old, I could see my new friends thinking that, although nobody said. Because we had no television nobody wanted to stay at my house anyway and so I usually went elsewhere, most often to Susan’s. And nobody laughed at Mama, or at Bob. I just told them I lived with my grandparents and it was fine. I couldn’t remember where the shame lay. Now that Bob wore clothes and kept out of the way everything was quite ordinary. And ordinariness was all that I had ever craved.

  One morning I woke late. I knew that it was late because it was fully light and the birds were chirruping lazily, over the frenzy of their dawn awakening. Something was different. I never usually drifted awake so naturally. I lay puzzling, and then I knew. There had been no lumping and thumping downstairs this morning. There had been no daily dozen.

  When I went downstairs, Bob was in his dressing gown at the table. He didn’t look up. Mama put a bowl of porridge on the table in front of me and I sprinkled brown sugar thickly on top, and he didn’t make his usual complaint.

  ‘Aren’t you well?’ I asked. The paper lay still folded beside his plate.

  ‘Leave him be,’ Mama advised.

  I shrugged. I was late anyway, and impatient with the sorrowful old face. There were deep fuzzy lines from his nose to his chin which his razor had missed. His face looked as if it had been smeared downwards. I got up to go. I had to tread with care. I could not let myself stumble just because an old man took the grumps at breakfast.

  ‘Mama,’ I asked, in the evening after Bob had gone early to bed. ‘Don’t you do the daily dozen anymore?’

  She was kneeling on the floor in front of a gigantic curtain she was making out of hairy green string and bamboo beads. She shook her head. ‘I’m worried about him,’ she said. ‘More than forty years we’ve had that palaver, year in, year out. I don’t know what’s up with him. Not that it isn’t a relief for me. I get enough exercise about the house – but I do worry.’ Mama executed a complicated knot and then pushed her glasses up her nose to look at me. ‘He’s only gone and lost heart,’ she said sadly. ‘That’s only what he’s gone and done.’

  ‘He’s just old,’ I said, and I didn’t mean to sound cruel, but after all, Mama and Bob were exactly the same age. She hunched her shoulders miserably and threaded a long bead onto the bristly string.

  22

  My periods started and, at first, I told nobody. It began one morning when I awoke with a dull tolling in my belly like a muffled bell. When I got up I felt the stickiness. The blood was uneven and seeping and dangerous. I had expected a clean crimson flowering every month, not this ragged aching brackish leak. I stuffed wads of tissues in my knickers and struggled through the day self-consciously, certain that I would leave a stain behind me wherever I went, certain that it showed on my face, the shameful, sticky, womanish thing.

  Mama saw the evidence and bought me a pink elastic belt with hooks and a packet of sanitary towels. It was a private event though, every month a succession of packets smuggled, rustling deafeningly, under my cardigan into the toilet. When Susan started, shortly after me, she was proud. She came round early one morning to make her announcement and I didn’t admit that I had beaten her to it. It wasn’t suffering as far as she was concerned, nor dirty, nor shameful. It was a cause for celebration. Her mother took her out for tea. I was amazed to see that she kept her sanitary towels in the bathroom at home, quite openly, so that even her father could see. I pretended some weeks later that I’d started too, and she linked arms with me in a special way and gave me plenty of advice. Mama never said a thing, but every month a packet of sanitary towels appeared like magic in my underwear drawer.

  The worst part was getting rid of the things. I saved them up in a bag under my bed until I had finished, and then crept downstairs late at night when Mama and Bob were asleep and put them in the stove. Bob would have gone mad if he’d seen me. He loved that stove, that heating system, as if it was alive. He tended the stove, regulated the heat, regulated the circulation of warmth around the house as if he was nursing some great greedy temperamental heart. I felt stealthy and mutinous feeding the bloody wads into the stove, and kept well out of the way next morning as he riddled out the clotted ash and cinders.

  Just as the first green nubs of spr
ing began to force themselves up through the earth and the tips of the twigs to unfurl, just as the sun became warmer and the evenings light until after tea, Bob took to his bed. I visited him every day, and sat in the old straw chair beside him, and tried to help him with his crossword. He was different and it was harder to know quite how to be with him. We had nothing much to talk about; there was no more need for me to sulk and flounce. He withdrew from all corners of the house, as if long roots were withering back to a central corm. As the spring turned to early summer, Mama and I let the stove go out and the pipes go cold. Usually this was a major event, accompanied by much ritual decoking and chimney sweeping. Mama mentioned to Bob what we had done but he didn’t say a word. His concerns had shrunk to the size of the room. Mama and I carried trays of food up to him at mealtimes and then carried them away again, scarcely touched.

  Mama was drawn with worry. Every day she urged him to let her call the doctor, but he wouldn’t hear of it. One day I found her crying in the kitchen. I stood by, appalled. Something prevented me from putting my arms around her, but I filled the kettle for a cup of tea. Susan was waiting outside for me on her bicycle. I had borrowed another bike and we were going for a ride and a picnic. It was spring, the first warm day of the year. I really wanted to go. With my fingers crossed I asked Mama if I should stay, but she shook her head. I was ashamed of my relief. I went to the door and called to Susan to wait. Mama stopped crying and sat with her hands limp on the table, turned up with the palms open. I had never seen her hands so still before. I thought it meant that Bob would die.

  I made her a cup of tea and cut her a slice of cake and then I went off with Susan. We sped along on our bikes, breathing in the warm polleny air. The lanes outside the town were a fervent juicy green, the May flowers as thick as clotted cream in the hedgerows. We raced, and I shouted with laughter and rode downhill with no hands for a dare, and all the time I felt my new knowledge balanced on my head like a solemn hat. Bob would die. It rode with me and only served to make the day more vivid, the cake and ginger beer and sausage rolls more delicious. Susan told me she was going away to spend a few days with some relatives, and only that dulled my enjoyment of the day a little. But we rolled down a hill and made daisy chains and tried to paddle in a stream – but the water was icy. We poked at frog-spawn and minnows with sticks, and Susan told me the story of the film she’d watched the night before. She lay on her back, a blade of grass between her lips, her eyes closed, the sun glinting on her short ginger lashes. I lay down beside her and chewed the green taste out of another blade of grass and then I tickled her nose with a feather fallen from the sky and she sneezed and giggled. I never wanted to go home.

  I was flushed and silly from the sun when I returned. Mama hovered nervously in the hall as if she was trespassing in a stranger’s house. The doctor was upstairs with Bob. ‘He’s furious,’ she whispered as I came in.

  ‘Who?’ I could hardly see her, the inside of the house was so dark after the sparkling brightness.

  ‘Bob. I called the doctor against his wishes. I was so frightened. He’s not right. I don’t like it. He hasn’t been right for weeks.’

  We waited together in the hall until the doctor, a tall bent woman, came downstairs. Her face was grave. ‘How long has he been like that?’ she demanded of Mama, accusingly, almost as if it was her fault.

  ‘I can’t say for sure … he’s got worse. Weeks and weeks …’

  ‘Months,’ I corrected. ‘Since about Christmas. Remember, Mama?’ Mama nodded.

  ‘Perhaps you could put the kettle on?’ the doctor suggested to me, indicating the kitchen door with her eyes. ‘I’d like to have a word with your grandmother.’

  Mama darted me a terrified look, and then, with a frozen face, led the doctor into the sitting room. I watched the heavy way she walked, her hands groping in front of her as if reaching for other hands to hold. I splashed my face with cold water from the kitchen tap and put the kettle on to boil. Of course, this was how it would be if Bob was to die. It would be sad and terrible, but, I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t suppress a little leap of excitement. Not that I didn’t love him in a dull familial way, not that I wouldn’t miss him. But it would be new, a new way of living, and I craved the new and different. And it was awful having an invalid in the house, the smell of illness, a shrunken familiar stranger who looked up at me beseechingly from his bed, as if my youth and strength were things that I could share.

  When the doctor had gone we didn’t bother with the tea but went and sat outside on the bench beneath the window.

  ‘I’ll have to mow the lawn,’ Mama said. We looked at the grass that had grown long and ragged. The care of the lawn was another one of Bob’s foibles and he was reluctant to let anyone walk on it, let alone tend to it.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I offered. She stretched her lips into a smile.

  ‘Well?’ I asked.

  ‘She wants him in the hospital for tests. But of course he won’t go. She’s left a prescription for pain killers, that’s all she can do if he won’t co-operate.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘It’s something rather delicate – to do with his water-works.

  He won’t tell me, let alone the doctor. So we don’t know quite what it is. Well how can we if he won’t have any tests? But she doesn’t think the prospect’s good. Not if he keeps on like this. Not if he lies in bed and doesn’t eat and lets himself go.’ Her voice trailed off in despair. We sat quietly in the blatant sunshine and a blackbird thrilled me with its song.

  23

  Once Susan had gone away the days were dull. All the other girls had paired off like lovers and I didn’t have the nerve to interfere, to upset the balance. Home was a miserable place. A half-finished plant-pot holder dangled from a chair. Mama was too sad to finish it. There was a sickly quietness everywhere and a smell of soaking sheets, for Bob had become incontinent. I sat with him the mornings after Mama had cleaned him and propped him up against his pillows and folded the paper at the crossword for him. I sat and watched his bleary eyes strain at the crossword puzzle, the branched yellow bones of his hand clutching his pen.

  ‘Why won’t you go to hospital?’ I asked him impatiently. ‘It might be something simple. They might make you better.’

  ‘No use,’ he muttered, ‘happier in my own bed.’

  ‘But you’d be even happier if you were better.’

  ‘I’ll not get better.’

  ‘Not if you don’t try! Try for Mama at least. She’s exhausted.’

  ‘Look after her for me …’ He reached for my hand but I pulled it away.

  ‘Do you actually want to die?’ There was a little shock in the air like a gasp. I had the feeling that Mama was hovering somewhere listening, her hand flying to her mouth. I had spoken the words that had not been spoken. Bob was ‘not right’ and ‘not getting any better,’ ‘there wasn’t much hope,’ but we had not said the word ‘die’ before, or the word ‘death.’

  ‘Leave me be,’ he said and I went out gladly, afraid that I might throw something at him if I had to stay any longer and listen to his plaintive voice.

  One day I arrived home with a bag of groceries for Mama. The house was quiet. I guessed that Mama was upstairs with Bob. It was a warm and sunny day, a picture-book spring day, and the shops were full of Easter eggs. As I had walked I had been thinking about Johnny. I went to the butcher’s and I remembered Mary and her warning. I remembered the prickly snarl on Johnny’s face and I wondered if Bronwyn had ever gone back. I had not dared, not again, not after I’d seen something in his eyes, something that replaced the blankness.

  I never warned Bronwyn. Why not? Was it simply carelessness, forgetfulness? Or was there intention in this omission? No. It was just that I didn’t see the point. She wouldn’t go. I knew for all her talk, she’d never have the nerve to go.

  I walked along the main road to the church, and hesitated outside, overcome with curiosity, just wanting to know if he was still there. I didn�
�t want to enter the place. I didn’t want to see him. I just wanted to know whether he was there. I certainly didn’t really think he would be. I walked softly between the graves where wild flowers were tangling in the long grass. I made no sound. I held my breath. And then I heard whistling. It made me cold, despite the sun, as if I’d opened a door onto a landscape recognised from a dream. I ran then, not caring that the eggs were jolted in their box or that a tin of beans was squashing the lettuce.

  When I opened the door I was greeted by the depressing smell of fried liver. Mama was making yet another nourishing lunch for Bob to leave. I put the shopping on the kitchen table beside an exercise book which I didn’t at first recognise. Puzzled, I picked it up. It had Bronwyn’s name on the front. There was some of her scrappy work in the front, a story never finished, a spelling test with red crosses beside it. I flicked through to the end, and there were the angels I had drawn for Bronwyn, hermaphrodite angels with wings and leering faces and breasts and penises jutting like giant thumbs.

  ‘Well?’ Mama said. She had come into the kitchen silently and was standing beside me looking over my shoulder. I put the book back on the table. ‘Well?’ she repeated. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Mrs. Broom doesn’t say nothing. She says blasphemy. She says sexual perversion. She came round here trembling like a … I don’t know what … aspen or linden or something … and I didn’t know where to put myself.’

  ‘It wasn’t just me,’ I objected. ‘It’s Bronwyn who’s sex mad. I only drew them for her because she can’t draw.’

  Mama pursed her lips and shook her head as if it all was too far beyond her.

  ‘Did she say it was me?’ I demanded.

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘I’ll kill her,’ I said. A trickle started inside me like the first inkling of a landslide. I tasted rage.