Digging to Australia (26 page)

In the morning there were two red-and-blue-edged airmail letters on the mat. Mama scooped them up and handed one to me. We said nothing. I carried mine upstairs. The writing on the front was sophisticated. The ink was green. The postmark was Adelaide. I was washed over with a wave of confusion. The timing was wrong. I had been awake all night forcing Bronwyn from my mind and now Jacqueline had written. After all my longing. The timing was way out. At this moment, Jacqueline was irrelevant. But I opened the envelope. Inside was a short note and a photograph. I slid my finger over the glossy surface of the photograph before I looked. Jacqueline wasn't the only subject of the photograph. There were four of them: Jacqueline, a tall man with a red beard, and two children. Jacqueline smiled out of the distance at me. Her hair was very long and neither light nor dark. It was as long as if it had never been cut. It hung in a tapering plait over one shoulder. I put the photograph on my bed and walked to the window. The children were girls, that made it worse. If they had been boys it might have been all right. One of them was not much younger than me. The girls were tall and golden. I kept glancing back at the photograph, learning it in small glimpses. Jacqueline was wearing a long Indian dress. The man's hair was long and his shirt was open to show his chest. They were in what might have been a vegetable garden. In the background were some sort of animals. Horses? Cows? Were they farmers then? They looked like hippies. Jacqueline was much shorter than the man and she was very round. She might have been pregnant. The tiny squinting points of her eyes met mine. She looked like Bob.

Because she looked like Bob I allowed the thought that perhaps Mama had told me the truth. The Jacqueline who had been so cruelly banished – who had been forced to rip the threads that bound her to her child – was not this dumpy woman with the tatty rope of a plait, with her bare feet planted squarely in the red earth.
That
Jacqueline had been tall with bone-structure and high heels and flashing gems and eyes.
That
Jacqueline would never have done what this Jacqueline did. This Jacqueline was ordinary and did things that were weak and selfish and then tried to make amends. Thirteen years too late.

I read the letter. I had three sisters now. One – Abigail – had been born shortly after the photograph had been taken, at home with her sisters watching. The big girls were called Joanna and Lucy. Would I write to them and say hello? They all wanted me to visit. Jacqueline would pay my fare, Mama's too. Could we come for Christmas?

Mama came into my room. She looked as if she, too, had had very little sleep. But there was a trembling precarious brightness about her. She held her letter in her hand. ‘A separate envelope!' she said. ‘Talk about extravagant!' She fed greedily on the photograph, and read every word of my short letter.

‘Well?' Mama said. ‘Are you happy? Isn't this what you wanted? Are you going to write?' I shrugged. ‘You don't have to, dear, but I shall. I must let her know about Bob. I'll tell her you're fine, shall I? I could send her the nice snap of you in the garden.'

It was slipping out of my hands. I didn't want to become a third person. ‘I'll do it,' I said. ‘Let me, please.'

‘All right then,' she said. ‘We'll both write. And we'll have to think about whether we want to visit, to fly all that way! Can you imagine!'

When she'd gone downstairs I took the long letter I'd written Jacqueline out of the secret compartment of my trinket box and read it through. It was hard to do because it was full of things I wanted to forget. And it made me sound selfish and cruel. And perhaps that was the truth. It also made me sound ridiculous. I considered sending it just as it was. I imagined the effect it might have on her. Quite a surprise, an ugly load to get through the letterbox. Would she let my sisters read it? My golden half-sisters. Eventually I put the letter away and took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote to her from the girl I wanted to be. I was clever and bright and untroubling, a girl made of best handwriting and cheerful words. I said that Bob had ‘passed away peacefully' and that Mama and I were ‘over it now.' I said I wanted to be a nurse when I grew up, or perhaps a teacher. And that was the truth. I'd abandoned the idea of being a poet now that I felt included in the world. I wanted to be doing something useful. Not reflecting. Not thinking too much, not letting my mind slip into the interstices between the dark and the light. I was happy to be fooled by the surfaces of things – and no poet could be content with that.

I sent her the photograph of me with its silly paper smile. The letter was so innocuous that I let Mama read and approve of it before licking and sticking down the envelope. But I kept the real letter for myself and made myself read it sometimes as a sort of penance to appease the shades of Bob and Bronwyn that hovered in my curtain folds at night.

26

One afternoon after school, weeks later, Susan and I wandered together round the shops and then she went home and I was left near the cemetery. I had avoided it until that day as I tried so hard to avoid thinking about Bronwyn. Nobody mentioned her anymore. It was almost as if she had never been. The space she'd left had closed, and it was only from within myself that the bad feelings came. I paused outside the cemetery. The council had started to clear the site and already the whole place looked different. There was a film of dust over the greenness. There were the rutted tracks of a bulldozer between the graves, and Grace Clover's angel had been knocked down, or had fallen. Its head had broken off, leaving a clean, glistening fracture, and the stone eyes gazed up at the sky. I looked up to where they looked and was dazzled by the sun. With the shimmering sunbursts in my eyes it took me a moment to realise why the cemetery seemed so open and different, and then I saw what they'd done. The briar hedge that separated the playground from the cemetery had been uprooted. It had been piled into a mountain of broken branches and scattered petals. A yellow bulldozer beside it was at rest. No one was there. The workers must have gone for tea. There was a smell of sap and earth, a faint rose scent. Bees still buzzed around the blossoming chaos. Birds did not sing but chirruped indignantly. The playground had gone. The swing frame and the roundabout and the seasaw stump were smashed and piled together, like a giant child's discarded toys. I was dwarfed between them and the mountain of wrecked briars. I could see straight across the strip of wasteland now to the neat back fences of the houses. I could hear a radio playing The Tremeloes, very faintly. I closed my eyes and heard a baby cry. I suppose it was the baby the woman in the house had been expecting the last time I'd seen her, the time she'd seen me. The last time the playground had been my own.

I walked back to the church. Some rosebay willow herb had rooted itself in the gutter. Looking up at it and the way it flamed pink against the blue sky, I did not at first see the heap of rubbish outside. It was a stack of old planks, or broken ladders, wormy old stuff, fit only for burning. As I began to turn away, something caught my eye, the glint of a brass nail head. I bent down to look more closely and I saw that there was a streak of red paint where the nail was embedded in the wood. I looked again at the splintery old mess, spotted with worm holes. I looked fruitlessly for a sign that it had ever been more than the junk it was: that it had ever been wings.

The great arched doors of the church were flung open and for the first time I saw it filled with light. It was smaller than I'd thought, just a space walled in with stone and slate. The floor was perfectly flat. There was no hollow in it and no bones. I walked round and round but it seemed so different in the light that I could hardly remember where Johnny's things had been, and where I had seen the bones. The police had found no sign of them, no sign even that the floor had been disturbed. And it had been so dark that night after all, and I had been tired, half asleep. Perhaps I had dreamed the bones. Or perhaps it was wood that I had seen, just a collection of old sticks that the darkness and my own fear had transmuted into bones. That may have been it. It is strange what sense the mind will make of fragments – especially a frightened mind.

I walked home. The afternoon was hot and tired. Cats lolled in the sunshine, people dawdled, even the yells of children were languid. I imagined Jacqueline walking along this same street, with the same sun shining upon her. And now it shone upon her in another land. Where now it would be winter. The sun was hot on the back of my neck. ‘Indian summer,' Bob would have said. And this time last year he would have been out in it, in his deckchair, doing his crossword, brown and naked but for his sunhat, quite secluded behind his tall wooden fences, and trellis screens choked with clematis and honeysuckle. The tarmac path felt sticky under my feet, the smell of sun-baked creosote rose from fences and gates. An ice-cream van blaring a crackly tune drew up in front of me. I fished in my pocket and bought myself a lolly.

‘What about Australia then for Christmas?' Mama said later. We were in the kitchen and she was arranging a potted spider plant in her latest macramé plant holder. I was polishing my shoes ready for a birthday party.

‘Remember Peggy?' I asked.

‘Yes, of course. Shall we go, do you think?'

‘What about Auntie May? This could be her last …'

‘It could be,' Mama agreed. ‘Poor dear Auntie May.'

‘I'm going to have a bath,' I said. ‘I'll think about it.'

‘That's right. We'll have to make up our minds soon. Like it?' Mama held up her creation.

‘Lovely,' I said.

I locked myself in the bathroom and turned on the taps. I crumbled the last of the bath cubes into the water and the faint fragrance of peaches filled the steamy air. There would be no Bob this Christmas and no games. I thought about Peggy, sent to Australia for stealing a peacock. I thought about the hole in the garden, the dirt under my nails, Bob smiling down, encouraging my efforts: ‘Put your back into it, girl.' I screwed my eyes up against the sunny stream and tried to remember where I had thought I was going: Wonderland and Australia rolled into one, a place of light and gold and Christmas dinners on the beach. I'd tried to dig my way there once, now I was offered a chance to fly. The bath cube's residue was gritty against my back and bottom. I shifted my weight and thought of Auntie May on Bob's chair beside the Christmas tree, her little feet dangling, and the humorous gleam in her ancient eyes.

I opened my eyes to the ordinariness of my body beneath the soapy film on the surface of the water and I knew that Christmas dinner on the beach would only mean sand in the food, and that I would just be one of many to Jacqueline. I would meet her one day, but there was no urgency. I had seen her now, a small distant woman with a look of Bob.

I relaxed back, breathing in the scented air. It was hot in the bathroom with the sun shining through the frosted glass, and the water warm against my skin. I closed my eyes.

I close my eyes and put my fingers in my ears and I sing. I sing in the bath with the sun sparkling through the steam and making peacock feathers of my lashes. What happened to Bronwyn I do not know. I do not know whether Johnny was involved, or whether Johnny was ever more than a dreaming fool. There are awful things that run through my mind like trains rattling on their tracks. But I have this way of stopping them reaching their destination, of jolting them off their tracks. I screw up my eyes and I put my fingers in my ears and I sing. I sing

Empompey polleney,

Pollenistic,

Empompey, polleney,

Academic,

So fa me,

Academic.

Poof, poof.

About the Author

Lesley Glaister (b. 1956) is a British novelist, playwright, and teacher of writing, currently working at the University of St Andrews. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Society of Authors. Her first novel,
Honour Thy Father
, was published in 1990 and received both a Somerset Maugham Award and a Betty Trask Award. Glaister became known for her darkly humorous works and has been dubbed the Queen of Domestic Gothic. Glaister was named Yorkshire Author of the Year in 1998 for her novel
Easy Peasy
, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award in 1998.
Now You See Me
was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2002. Glaister lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with her husband, author Andrew Greig.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1992 by Lesley Glaister

Cover design by Connie Gabbert

ISBN: 978-1-4976-9413-2

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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