Digging to Australia (7 page)

‘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 forgotten. 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.

The classroom was warm and brightly lit. The fog pressed itself against the windows. There was the smell of girls and woolly jumpers, and someone was sucking Parma Violets. Bronwyn muttered under her breath. I couldn't concentrate. I stared out into the nothingness of the fog until my eyes hurt with having nothing to focus on. I tried to remember the stupid Christmas card rhyme. I tried to think of the warm things about Christmas that keep it rooted to the earth, cakes and puddings and blazing logs, but my mind was strange that day. I'd stopped believing in God when something terrible had happened. A mountain of coal waste had slipped down onto a school in Wales and killed the children. Either there was no God, I reasoned after that, or God was a terrible thing. In Bob's newspaper I'd seen the faces of two people whose children had been killed, and whenever I tried to think about God after that, whenever I saw the picture-book God with his flowing beard and cornflower eyes I saw the grainy twisted grief of the parents superimposed. No, I tried not to believe in God but there was something that was playing in my mind, something above the density of plum pudding, beyond the warmth of the flame. The nearest I could get to it was the idea of angels. Not Mama's host of paper angels, not the blank eyes of the stone angel, not a Christmas-card angel lit like a birthday candle with a halo of light. It was easier to say what the angels in my head were not than what they were.

The scrabbly sounds of writing and crossing-out and sighing filled the room. Bronwyn kept trying to attract my attention but I took no notice. Miss Clarke was hunched over something on her desk, frowning and chewing her nails, and suddenly I remembered a dream. I had to force it back into my head, screw my brain into a recognition of it before it was snatched away again like a wisp of chiffon and gone forever. The feeling of the dream remained once the substance had gone, and I took up my pen and wrote a poem:

Angels flopped from the sky

And hunched upon white gravel

Gnawing, anxiously, their feathered wing-tips.

They sought hay and warm breath

– a messiah. But there was nothing.

No star, even, to point the way.

Lost angels rose and clanked

and scattered black shadow-feathers

on what seemed to be white gravel. Or snow.

It wasn't Christmassy of course. I was puzzled by it, but it did catch the feeling my dream had left, like the negative of a Christmas card, a bit of dark brought out into the light. I called it ‘Lost Angels.' It was the first proper poem I'd ever written.

It didn't win the competition. Miss Clarke didn't mention it, or call on me to stand up and read it out like some of them. And I was grateful. I would have died of shame to have had everyone staring at me, and listening to my dream, as much as if they peeled off my clothes and looked at my naked skin. Bronwyn wasn't called upon to read hers either, but I sneaked a look. She'd written four lines entitled ‘Stockings.' Susan Carter, the first girl in the class to boast a colour television, won the prize, a chocolate snowman, for her poem about a fairy on top of a Christmas tree.

At the end of the day, Miss Clarke called me to her desk and waited, before she spoke, until we were alone. Bronwyn waited outside the closed door, peering nosily through the glass panel.

‘About your poem, dear,' Miss Clarke said. ‘I was very … well rather taken aback …' She left me room to speak, which I didn't take. ‘Are you all right? Quite happy I mean?'

‘Yes Miss,' I said.

Her pink face was crumpled with concern. ‘It's not that it's bad,' she said, ‘it's just that's it's a little unusual … rather a bleak vision for a child before Christmas …'

‘It was from a dream,' I said.

‘Ah …' Miss Clarke sighed with relief. ‘A dream. Dreams are funny things. Best take no notice. Think about something nice instead. And by the way, always remember there must be a verb in every sentence. ‘Or snow's isn't one because it hasn't got a …'

‘Verb.'

‘Good girl. You won't go far wrong if you remember that. Now run along.' I went towards the door. ‘And if you do have a problem … some thingummy at home … you can always talk to me, or one of the other teachers. You do know that.'

‘Thanks Miss,' I said.

‘What was that all about?' Bronwyn demanded, the moment I was outside. ‘Was it because you skipped off yesterday?'

‘No. She just thought my poem was a bit …'

‘Weird,' supplied Bronwyn. ‘Come on. Will you walk home with me?'

‘All right,' I agreed, since I was in no hurry to see Mama and Bob. The fog and the gathering darkness had combined into a brownish soup. We dawdled back to Bronwyn's house, stopping to look in the window of a corner shop at the boxes of chocolates with bows on the lids.

‘My dad used to buy Mum boxes like that,' Bronwyn sighed.

‘Tell me about your dad,' I said.

‘I don't like to talk about him,' she said.

‘Go on.'

‘Are you my best friend?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Will you keep it a secret, anything I tell you? Cross your heart and hope to die?'

‘Of course I will. Who would I tell?'

‘You must never mention Dad in front of Mum,' Bronwyn said.

‘I know, you told me.'

‘She gets terribly upset. Her hair went grey overnight when she heard the news. She's quite young really.' Bronwyn's voice had become throaty and confidential. ‘I've never told anyone before. Not the details.'

‘When was it?' We resumed our walk, and I let her take my arm.

‘
I
know,' she said, and she got hold of my plait and put it round her shoulder like a scarf so that we were tied together. I had to walk in step with her because otherwise it pulled but I let her do it because I wanted to know. I'd never known anyone with a murdered parent before. I'd never touched tragedy. ‘It was about six months ago,' she began. ‘In the spring. He was an aero-plane pilot you know. We were quite rich then. He was always giving me presents. He gave me most of my dolls. He was handsome, with dark hair and eyes and a mole on his cheek, just here.' She touched the skin beside her mouth. ‘And then one day he didn't come home. The police came instead. They told us he'd been murdered by gangsters.'