Digging to Australia (11 page)

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Good. I've been meaning to ask if you'd like to join Sunday school with Bronwyn?'

I shook my head. The pastor returned and I had the feeling that there was going to be another prayer so I put on my coat. ‘See you tomorrow,' Bronwyn called after me as I left.

It was a clear night and the stars were like nail heads hammered to the sky; the frosty path rang underfoot as I walked. I put my hand in my pocket for my gloves and found the present.

I stopped beneath a street-lamp to unwrap it. The paper was printed with crackers and puddings. Beneath the Christmas paper was a layer of brown paper and inside that was a box. Inside the box was nothing – and I was not surprised.

I stood still for a moment and it was as if I was standing on something very fragile, like a skin of ice stretched above a dark space, a hole that was not a passage to Wonderland or sunshine, but just space, just nothing. I screwed up the wrapping paper and flung it into a hedge. There was a contraction in my throat as if I was going to cry, but the moment passed and instead I felt a frosty smile spreading across my face. For he was a joker, the one who had given me nothing as a gift, a joker and a fake, and I recognised that in him. My laughter made silly plumes in the lamplight. I flung the empty box into someone's hedge and I ran home, clattering my feet. I ran home to Mama and Bob.

Bronwyn said it was a mistake. She said that lots of other children had been given empty boxes. It was just a mistake, she said. It should have been beads for the girls and water pistols for the boys. Complaints had been made, she said, but I didn't hear anyone complaining. I was there all the time and I didn't hear. And Bronwyn got
her
beads.

I sat with Mama and Bob and I tried to make it all right again. I kept my eyes off Bob's body and I answered Mama when she asked me questions. I told her about the bazaar, about the tea and the cakes and the raffle, but I didn't mention Father Christmas. When I was very small, noticing that Father Christmas didn't come to Mama and Bob, I'd asked Mama when he would stop coming to me. ‘When you're thirteen,' she'd said, and that had seemed a safe time away when I was six or seven, a nevernever time. But now I was plunged into being thirteen and had to suppose that he wouldn't come again. I felt cheated out of knowing that the previous Christmas had been the last, but I didn't mind too much otherwise. For the past two or three years I'd been awake when Bob tiptoed into my room and replaced my empty stocking with a full one. I had glimpsed the suppressed excitement on his face in the light shining in from the landing as he crept out with a sort of exaggerated tiptoe. I had remained awake then for ages, prodding with my toe the lumpy weight that lay across the foot of my bed, curious, but tired too, and unwilling to spoil the surprise before Christmas day began.

I tried to regress that evening as I sat between Mama and Bob. Mama was knitting, and Bob had a book and I tried to pretend that everything was cosy and normal, to return to the self I had been before my glimpse of the greyness that lay behind everything. Before it had infected my soul.

I said, ‘Do you remember the year Auntie May ruined the pudding?' and Mama laughed at the memory. Auntie May was old, senile, Bob said, but Mama would click her teeth at him when he said it. One year Auntie May had poured methylated spirits over the pudding to make a flame, and it had flamed all right, so fiercely that we couldn't put it out and we had all flapped uselessly around until eventually Bob had the presence of mind to smother it with custard. And then we couldn't eat it because of the terrible scorched methylated taste. I had been given the job of dissecting the shrunken relic on Boxing Day to rescue the silver threepence before we took it to the park to feed to the ducks.

‘And it sank!' Mama remembered, ‘before the ducks could even try it! It sank like a stone.'

‘A blessing in disguise for the ducks,' Bob remarked.

‘Is she coming this year?' I asked.

Mama paused to count her stitches, her glasses balanced on the end of her nose, her lips moving soundlessly. ‘Sixty-eight,' she finished, ‘thank heavens for that. Of course she'll be here.'

‘More gaga than ever,' Bob muttered.

‘It wouldn't be Christmas without Auntie May,' Mama said.

‘It will be have to be, sooner or later,' Bob pointed out. ‘She's had a good innings.'

I was quiet. Auntie May had always called me Jacqueline, and nobody took any notice. She only came to our house once or twice a year, always on Christmas Day, and sometimes at Easter too. She couldn't walk more than a step or two and had to be fetched by taxi from the old people's home where she lived. Mama visited her often, as I had done when I'd been younger, but that habit had fallen off. She had always called me Jacqueline and looked at me blankly when I corrected her, and said ‘Oh yes …' in her trailing way and then continued to call me Jacqueline, or else nothing at all.

Auntie May was Mama's great aunt and she was a hundred and one. She'd always looked the same to me, tiny, with a lizard face, long scaly hoods to her cloudy eyes and fingers warped into claws. Her voice when it came had a prehistoric sound, dry and gravelly, even when I bent my ear to her lips, very far away, like a radio tuned to another century. Auntie May had always been as old as you can get in my eyes, and Mama and Bob considerably younger. Not young, but about half-way along the line of life – middle-aged. But Mama was old now, a grandmother, nudging Auntie May off the end of the line in order to take her place. I looked resentfully at Mama's greyness.

‘Time for bed said Sleepy Head,' Bob yawned. ‘Are you going to join us for the daily dozen in the morning, Jennifer?' I flinched. I thought they realized that I'd finished with all that. I hadn't thought they'd ask again. Mama pushed her needles through her squeaky wool while they waited for my reply.

‘I don't like it,' I whispered. I felt precarious. I wanted to hold on to what I had and not be pushed. The memory of our flapping flesh and flailing limbs all incongruous and naked amongst the curtains and the flowery cushions frightened me. I wanted us to be normal. It was bad enough the way Bob went on. That was almost too much to bear without the rest of us … I looked gratefully at Mama's woollen skirt and stockings and slippers. If only we didn't have to be naked, I wanted to say, but I couldn't. I didn't want an argument. I wanted us to be safe. So I sat dumbly, misery clogged in my throat, until they gave up waiting for an answer.

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?'