Digging to Australia (3 page)

Yellow leaves rotted squelchily on the concrete. It was a wet autumn. It rained every morning and turned still and misty each short afternoon. The seat of the swing was damp, the chains cold in my hands. They left a sickly iron smell, a brownness on my palms. It was strange to swing in the dusky after-school afternoons. I didn't swing so high, not high enough to churn the frame in the ground and cause the noisy jolting. Sad speckled thrushes sang in the hedge. Seagulls blown inland for the winter drifted above, grey as puffs of spume. The climbing frame was slippery, but I didn't need to climb so high to watch the people in the houses.

Mama and Bob never asked me where I went in the afternoons, but one day I came in quietly, not exactly planning to eavesdrop, but still, closing the door gently, taking off my wet shoes and pausing in the hall for a moment before I went to join them in the sitting room.

‘Where
does
she get to?' I heard Bob asking Mama. There was no reply. I could picture Mama's face. She would be pressing her lips into a narrow line and frowning as she pinched folded paper into a crease. That was her origami time. She wouldn't answer until she'd finished the bit she was on. ‘Are you going to tell her today?' Bob said and his voice was unusually urgent. ‘Don't tell her, Lilian. There's no need to tell her, let things lie, that'd be best.'

‘There!' Mama said. She darted a look at Bob as I opened the door. ‘Look, Jenny.' She held up a paper frog. ‘And watch.' She did something to it that made its paper legs flex as if it was hopping. She laughed and then sighed and put it down.

‘Eh?' said Bob, looking at Mama.

‘Bob wants to know where you've been,' Mama said. ‘Not that we mind you going out.'

‘I've just been walking,' I replied. I wanted to ask, Tell her what? but I couldn't. There was a nervous creeping feeling inside me. I did and I didn't want to know.

‘She just walks,' Mama relayed to Bob.

‘Alone?' Bob asked her.

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Christmas angels,' Mama announced. ‘In silver and gold paper. A flock of them.'

‘Herd, surely,' Bob said.

‘Host,' I corrected.

‘Whatever. Don't you think that would be lovely? Different anyway, for Christmas. Nearly tea time,' she said, when we didn't reply.

I went upstairs and put on my slippers and washed my hands. There were tiny flecks of paint from the climbing frame between my fingers. I unplaited my hair and brushed the separate wriggling worms together. My hair had never been cut. It reached my thighs and was another thing that made me feel different at school. Nobody else had hair that went past her waist, and lots of them had it short. The popular girls had
all
had theirs cut short recently. Mine wasn't pretty hair, not a special colour or thick or curly, just thin and pale and straight. Not cutting it was another of Bob's foibles. Mama wasn't allowed to cut hers either, although she had it bobbed as a girl. Mine had fine tapering ends like baby hair and was a terrible business to wash.

Before meals we always had to pause for a minute. It was a compromise. Because Bob didn't believe in God, we didn't say grace. At school we mumbled
for what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly grateful Amen
as fast as we could and then tucked in, but at home we just left a gap where grace would have been. I grew up with it so it didn't strike me as strange until I was quite old. When I asked Mama the reason why, she said it was good manners not to pounce on the food like wild animals. And if there
was
a God he would see that although we didn't actually
believe
, at least we didn't take our food for granted. That's what she thought Bob thought. She couldn't remember properly. And even now I don't pounce on my food.

Once we'd started eating, there was a lot of unusual and nervous eye contact between Mama and Bob. And then Mama cleared her throat.

‘It's your birthday next week,' she said. We were eating bloaters. I stopped mid-chew, my mouth clogged with the salty flesh.

‘But …'

‘I know.'

‘But my birthday's in June!'

‘You'll be thirteen on Thursday. Do shut your mouth when you're eating.' I swallowed painfully. Mama and Bob were both concentrating on their plates, extracting the hair-like bones from their fish.

‘But Mama! My birthday's in June, it's not till June. Tell her, Bob!' Bob's eyes swivelled everywhere but at me. He dabbed at his mouth with his serviette. There were breadcrumbs caught in the fuzz on his chest.

‘Another cup, I think, Lilian,' he said to Mama, pushing his cup and saucer towards her. As Mama poured the tea, I noticed that her hand was trembling.

‘Ready for a top up, Jennifer?' she said.

‘Is she all right?' I asked Bob. ‘Has she gone mad?' I held onto the sides of my chair to keep me from toppling.

‘There are things that you don't know. Many things.' Mama's voice was solemn and her forehead was stamped with a frown. She kept looking at Bob for support but he would not look back.

‘Things best let lie if you ask me,' Bob mumbled.

‘What things?' I demanded. ‘That my birthday's in
November
?'

‘I just wanted to prepare you. We'll say no more for now. Your birthday's next Thursday. Not another word till then. Get on with your bloater. Or a nice slice of malt loaf?' She held a plate of withered brown slices towards me.

I got up and stumbled from the room. My chair tipped over but I didn't go back and pick it up. I had the strange sensation as I lurched upstairs that the earth was tilting beneath me, a pole or an axis or something shifting, leaving me all askew, unsure of my bearings. A November girl. An autumn girl. And almost thirteen. That wasn't me, didn't feel like me. And why? From my bedroom I could hear them murmuring downstairs and I hated them. I hated them with their bloaters and their malt loaf and their secrets.

I pulled the net curtain back from my window and looked out at the dark massed bushes in the garden. There were blurred orange street-lamps in the distance, but no stars or moon. My breath misted the glass and I ran my finger through it, leaving a dripping trail. I watched the drips chasing each other down and gathering in a pool on the sill. I didn't belong, that was obvious. I wasn't who I thought I was. I'd always felt different, that's why I didn't have any proper friends. That's why I never got invited to a birthday party, or to watch television after school. That's why I hardly ever answered questions at school.

Miss Clarke asked a question and I knew the answer and nobody else did but I couldn't put up my hand. I couldn't single myself out. I would sit feeling dizzy, the answer leaping against my pursed lips, my hands heavy as cricket bats. Before I could force one into the air she'd tell us and I'd know that I'd been right and then everyone would learn the answer. But nobody would know that I'd known first.

Maybe the teachers knew what it was that was odd about me. Maybe everybody knew. I drew a miserable face on the window and tears rolled out of its eyes.

I got into bed with my clothes on and pulled the blankets over my head. I didn't sleep. It was too early and there was an awful gnawing inside me, a mixture of hatred and anxiety and curiosity – and a terrible taste of bloater in my mouth. Later, Mama knocked on my door. ‘Are you all right, dear?' she asked. ‘Would you like some cocoa?' I didn't answer. I heard her open the door a little and sigh into my room before closing it as gently as if I was ill.

5

I went to school the following morning without speaking to them again. I did the daily dozen sullenly, my eyes on the floor. I ate only a piece of toast for breakfast despite Bob's insistence on protein first thing. Breakfast was all heavy sighs and avoided eyes.

I slammed out of the house without a word. I looked back at the door and knew that behind it stood Mama, her hand outstretched, her goodbye frozen on her lips. I spoke to no one in the playground, but that wasn't unusual, all the popular girls giggled and skipped and linked arms and whispered secrets. I hung around by the door, twizzling the end of my long pigtail in my coat pocket, wishing the bell would go, wishing I hadn't come to school, that I'd dared to play truant instead. I could have gone to my playground and been properly alone. It was public solitude I detested. When, at last, the bell went and we filed in and sat at our desks, I saw that there was a new girl standing by Miss Clarke's desk. She was bigger than anyone else, with frizzy dark hair and a full-sized bosom.

‘This is Bronwyn Broom,' Miss Clarke said when the fidgeting and rustling had ceased. ‘She's joining us as from today. I want you all to be considerate and help her settle in, show her the ropes. Now. Let me see …' She eyed us all speculatively, skipping over the popular girls and letting her eyes rest on me and the empty half of the double desk that was mine. ‘Yes, of course, Jennifer Maybee,' she said. ‘I'll put Bronwyn next to you and you can help her find her way around. Sit down, Bronwyn.'

Bronwyn came and sat beside me. I managed a sort of smile but she just looked awkward and lumpish. She had olive skin, and thick black eyebrows like a man's.

‘Jennifer will share her books with you for today,' Miss Clarke said. She was our form teacher and also took us for English and history. ‘Now, where were we?' She opened her own book. We were reading a dreadfully long and tedious poem by William Wordsworth called
The Prelude
. We were going round the class reading aloud, and some girls mumbled and some stumbled and the rest of us yawned. And when we'd read some of it we had to write a paraphrase. It had been going on for weeks.

I opened the book and pushed it into the middle of the desk. Bronwyn leant towards me and her hair tickled my cheek. She smelt faintly of sweat, but also of bacon, and I began to feel hungry. Bronwyn didn't look at me once for the whole double lesson. When it was her turn to read out loud, she faltered so badly, and made so many mistakes that Miss Clarke let her off for the day, putting it down to nerves. I saw Bronwyn sneak a peppermint into her mouth, and then, to my surprise, she pushed one along the desk to me. It was warm from her pocket. I sucked it furtively as I wrote my paraphrase. When I'd finished my work, I looked at Bronwyn's exercise book and saw that she'd hardly started, that her writing was babyish and hardly even joined up and her spelling was hopeless.

When the break-time bell went we all slammed our books inside our desks and made for the door. Miss Clarke beckoned Bronwyn and me to her desk and bade me look after Bronwyn. ‘Show her the lavatories and so on,' she said, and her eyes rested on me for a moment and I could see she was thinking that the responsibility would do me good. Bronwyn didn't say a word. She followed me out into the playground and we stood together by the wall, eating peppermints and shivering in the dampness, while the other girls paraded their link-armed friendships, or shouted the words of their clapping games so fast that I couldn't make them out, or dived around after a ball.

She stuck close beside me all day although we hardly spoke two words to each other. She even followed me into the toilets and waited right outside the door as if she thought I would try and escape. I wasn't talkative. And I was preoccupied, but she didn't seem bothered as long as she had someone to hang on to. At the end of the school day, when the final bell had gone and girls streamed eagerly out of the doors, she suddenly grasped me by my upper arm and looked at me intently. I was surprised by the paleness of her blue eyes in her olive face.

‘Would you like to come to tea?' she asked.

I hesitated, thinking about Bob. If I went to tea with her then I'd have to return the invitation. And anyway, I didn't like her particularly.

‘No thanks,' I said.

‘Please,' she said, and she wouldn't let go of my arm. I tried to pull away. ‘Please come.'

‘No, sorry.' I managed to jerk my arm free. She looked as if she would cry. There was something in her eyes that I recognised. That filled me with a chilly dullness. It was the fear of rejection.

‘Mum will kill me,' she said.

‘Why?'

‘She said I was to make friends.'

‘Why should she kill you though? It's not your fault. You're a new girl. It's only your first day.'

She sniffed and then smiled. ‘Well not exactly kill me,' she admitted. She looked very different when she smiled, as if a light had been switched on inside her. ‘But she'll be dis-app-oin-ted. She worries.'

Whenever she said a long word she broke it up, as if she was learning to spell it. It made me pity her. ‘Oh all right then,' I said.

At once she changed. I thought she'd be grateful, but she was as cool as if
she
was doing
me
the favour. ‘Would tomorrow be all right?'

‘Fine,' I said, puzzled. She lived in the opposite direction to me and I watched her walk away. From the back she had a fed-up matronly air, with her big splayed feet, like an exhausted washerwoman.

I didn't go straight home. I wandered along the main road looking into shop windows. Some of them were decorated for Christmas already. There were miniature snowmen and Christmas trees planted, as they had been every year since I could remember, amongst the gloves and stockings in the haberdashery. This was Mama's favourite shop, for it sold knitting wool and sequins, teddy bears' eyes and crochet hooks, all the sorts of things she needed for her hobbies.

I went into the newsagent's shop and looked at the Christmas cards, reading the soppy verses: ‘
Though Christmas may, perhaps, provide new customs, fun and pleasure, The old sweet memories it brings our hearts will always treasure
,' until the newsagent began to scowl suspiciously at me, and I went back outside and crossed the road and went down the footpath to the cemetery. I didn't like walking on the narrow slippery path in the dusk, and as I walked I repeated to myself the la-di-da Christmas verse. I didn't think I liked books or poetry, or words particularly except for communication, but I could tell that was not good compared with some of
The Prelude
, not the same sort of thing at all. I'd found myself reluctantly entranced that morning by the part where the boy rows in his boat into the middle of a shining lake amongst mountains.
It was an act of stealth and troubled pleasure
, were the words that had caught my attention because they exactly described my feelings whenever I approached the playground.