Digging to Australia (2 page)

Our back garden was surrounded by low walls but inside these Bob had built a high wood-slatted fence. Mama had insisted on this if Bob wanted to sunbathe naked. But there were knot-holes in the fence, and I used to press my eye against one at the bottom of the garden and watch people walking their dogs. Once I saw a boy and a girl kissing. I wasn't allowed to use the footpath by myself because it was so secluded. And, Mama warned me, there was danger in seclusion. Although I had given up the idea of Australia, or Wonderland, I still kept at my hole, partly because Bob was waiting for me to give up.

‘Getting close?' he'd say, or, ‘Through the earth's crust yet?'

One very hot afternoon I was messing about with the hole, digging and scraping listlessly, just waiting for tea-time, when I got down to some damp gravelly sand. It was grey, not at all like seaside sand although it was pretty in a clean, glistening way and it was surprisingly easy to dig. It was fun to dig after the stiffness of the earth, and so I carried on a bit longer just to see what would come next. I was digging very close to the fence, and suddenly to my surprise the sand began slipping away. I could hear it falling. There was a brick missing, two bricks, three, in the wall that supported the garden, and the sand and the soil gave way and fell down onto the footpath, leaving a space big enough to drop through. It wasn't far to jump and I stood on the footpath for a moment, scared and thrilled, looking up at the high walls and fences on our side, and the low gates and ramshackle sheds on the other. A marmalade cat which had fled when I landed crept back and rubbed itself against my legs. Its fur was quite hot from the sun. I didn't stay long that first time. It was enough that I had done it – got somewhere. I stood alone where I was forbidden to be until the cat sauntered off, and then I scrambled back up through the gap. I was very dirty, for the earth was still loose, but I could see how I could widen it so that I could get in and out more easily.

‘I'm giving up my hole,' I announced at tea time that day.

‘Thank goodness for that,' Mama said. And Bob merely smirked.

3

Every day I slipped through the hole and walked on the footpath. It was a game, the game of a lonely girl. And it wasn't as dangerous as Mama and Bob thought. Nothing ever happened to me. I hardly ever saw anyone. A woman and a dog said hello sometimes, as if it was quite an ordinary thing that I should be there. I discovered that this path was part of a labyrinth that threaded between and behind houses, that you could walk for miles this secret way, and see into people's back gardens, see their end-of-the-garden clutter – broken bikes and lawnmowers, old window-frames and dead Christmas trees in pots. On the hot afternoons the path were full of pollen and bees. Poppies grew in one place, and I took some home for Mama to make into ballerinas with crumpled scarlet skirts. She asked me where I got them but I didn't say. I was good at being vague.

Lots of cats lived on the paths. Most of them were sleek pets with collars and little bells, playing at being wild but never straying far from their saucers of milk. They had their own territories though and sometimes I surprised two cats, frozen into attitudes of defence, that would slink off unwillingly at my approach, shooting threatening looks over their shoulders at each other. I wanted a cat, but Bob wouldn't have one in the house. What I wanted most was a little white kitten with blue eyes. Mama said that white cats were always deaf, that it was hereditary, but she didn't know why.

One day I went further than usual. I followed the path to a road, and although it was a busy road with shops, I crossed it in order to follow the path further, where it went between the post-office and the first of a terrace of houses. It was narrow and dirty and dustbin cluttered. I didn't like it and wouldn't have gone far, if I hadn't spotted another cat, either half-grown or starved and stunted. Its fur was dirty and looked grey where it may really have been white. One ear was ragged and its eyes were rimmed with pus. It slunk away when it saw me and cowered as if it expected a kick. When I reached my hand out towards it, it fled. I followed it, and it was like following the flicker of a tiny pale shadow. I followed it as far as a cemetery and then I lost sight of it. The cemetery had the air of a forgotten place, no vases of flowers on graves, nothing pretty, except for the wild things – convolvulus, willowherb, honeysuckle – that grew and twined around the slumped gravestones. Long grass and weeds and brambles were tangled everywhere. The church cast a cold shadow; it made me shiver despite the heat. It made me remember that I should be in the garden where Mama and Bob thought I was, behind the hedge, reading
Alice in Wonderland
for the hundredth time. Out of the shadow, in a patch of sunlight, was the one beautiful gravestone, a lofty white angel, only a little weatherbeaten. Her eyes were pure and blank and the end of her nose rubbed away. Grace Clover was the name I made out on the stone underneath,
Mercifully taken to the arms of the Lord, Dec. 24th 1868
. It didn't seem very merciful to me to let someone die on Christmas Eve.

At the far edge of the cemetery was a tangled hedge of briars and brambles. It was taller than me, taller than a man. It looked as if it would be impossible to get through. It looked as if it had been growing for a hundred years. It made me think of the Sleeping Beauty. The sun fell on the briars as the bees hummed and bobbed about the frail flat pink dishes of the flowers. I tried to see through the spaces between the leaves but the hedge was too dense. I walked about for a little longer, searching for the cat, thinking that I should get back home before I was missed, trying to read the words on the lichen-encrusted stones. Most of them were blunt lozenges, like old teeth, but some were carved into shapes. Apart from Grace Clover's angel there were other stumpier angels, grizzled and grimed, there was a dove with something broken off in its beak, and a fat black chalice. I found a grave where three infants lay, the children of Hannah and Matthew Sparrow. They had all died at birth and never even been named. It was a stumpy little stone, not pretty at all, and the surface was flaking away. If I ever had babies and they died, I thought, I would choose a stone with elves and rabbits and have a nursery rhyme inscribed upon it.

And then I saw the cat again, poor skinny creature. It ran through the grass as if chased and disappeared through a small hole at the base of the hedge. I knelt down and looked where it had gone. Through the dense scratchiness I could see a bright patch of sunlight on concrete. The ground where I knelt was also concrete, an overgrown path. I pushed my hand in a little way. A thorn snagged the arm of my blouse and I snatched it free. And then I pushed my arm into the hedge, but it was too thick. I could not reach through to the other side. I lay on my stomach and I wriggled my way into the hedge. The buttons of my blouse scraped on the ground and I knew I would be filthy and that Mama would scold. For a second I thought I was stuck, the weight of the hedge pressed on my back and I panicked because nobody in the world knew where I was. But I could not go back, I could only go forward, so I forced myself on, screwing up my eyes against the batting leaves. A caterpillar, dislodged by my wriggling, fell in front of me. It was a strange colour, a sort of turquoise, a colour I had never seen in nature before. It reared itself up and seemed to look at me. We looked at each other for a moment and it seemed to satisfy its curiosity first and inched off in such a disdainful way that I almost laughed. Once it was out of the way so that I was sure I wouldn't squash it, I eased myself through and stood up and looked around me.

I blinked in the brightness of the space, a triangular space, absolutely light and hot. It must have been midday, for I recall no stretching of shadows. There were swings, one swing, rather, and four dangling chains, the ground hollowed between them where many feet had scuffed. There was a roundabout, old and splintery, traces of red paint still visible. There was a climbing frame, peaked like a witch's hat. The seesaw was just an iron stump.

There was no way in, other than the way I'd forced. The hedge of briars around me was high and thick. The air buzzed. I was in, but nobody else could come. The space under the hedge seemed to have healed behind me. The ground reflected the sun's white glare and beat its hotness onto my head.

The cat wasn't there. It must have squeezed its way out again as I struggled in after it. I don't know why I followed the cat. Because I wanted it, I suppose.

I put my foot on the roundabout and pushed. It would not give at first, not until I pushed with all my might and then it gave with a terrible harsh cry like a donkey's bray, and I could hear the pattering of stuff falling underneath, flakes of rusting iron, perhaps, or splinters. It moved only a little, then creaked to a stop.

I sat on the swing and held the warm chains. I swung backwards and forwards, just a little to begin with, shy of the emptiness. But, despite myself, my legs bent backwards and forwards more and more eagerly until I was swinging high, high enough to jolt the frame. I cut a cool slice through the air and my pigtails hung down behind me, grazing the ground with their ends as I rushed forward, my head back, squinting through my lashes at the sun.

‘Never look straight at the sun,' Bob had often advised, ‘or you'll go blind.' Also, ‘Never go out in the midday sun, not without a shady hat. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. It addles the brain.' And he would know, I supposed, having been a desert rat.

But still, despite his advice, I swung in the midday sun and I trailed my hair in the dust and I dared to let the brightness into my eyes, so that when I stopped and stood up I felt myself stagger and my eyes dazzle with fuzzy coloured images. Addled.

You never knew with Bob whether what he said was nonsense. When I was a tiny girl I took it all in, sucked it all in like a sponge, truth and lies and the in-between things, because it isn't all black and white.

I squeezed my way back and my hair caught on a thorn, and I knelt on something sharp and hurt my knee. I looked round the graves once more but there was no sign of the cat. My hands were scratched and beaded with blood from the catching thorns. I licked the blood away as I hurried home, afraid, making up excuses for my absence. I didn't know how long I'd been gone but it felt like ages and ages. I was sure that I'd missed lunch, that they would have discovered my escape, that would be the end of the game.

And I was right about the hole. Bob greeted me flushed and filthy, in a great state about the disappearance of half the garden.

‘Subsidence,' he said grimly. ‘That's
all
it is.' He had been mixing concrete, and he was so troubled by the subsidence that he didn't think to ask where I'd been. And neither did Mama. Apart from tutting at the state of my clothes, she said nothing. She was just washing the lettuce when I arrived in the kitchen. It seemed that less time had elapsed than I'd thought. ‘Lay the table, dear,' she said, as if everything was perfectly ordinary, ‘but for goodness sake, wash your hands first.'

The playground was all mine. Not many children have one all to themselves, a real playground with a swing and a roundabout and a climbing frame. There was a fluted green street lamp that poked its head incongruously up through the top of the hedge like some almost-smothered creature. I visited the playground whenever I could, whenever it was fine. Now that there was no hole to drop through, I went round the corner to enter the secret network of pathways. I pilfered Bob's secateurs and clipped myself a passage through the briars, only a narrow space, not wide enough for anyone to see. I liked to clamber up the climbing frame and peer over the top of the hedge where there were, across a stretch of waste ground of perhaps ten yards, the backs of some houses – part of a new estate. They had small gardens, the beginnings of gardens, sparse newly seeded lawns, small shrubs, spindly trees, nothing established. The houses were pale brick, with pastel wooden panels, yellow and blue, bright in the sun. Sometimes I saw people going in and out of the houses. Two of the houses, next door to each other, had families with children. The women would stand in the gardens chatting over the fence, or throwing remarks over their shoulders as they pegged out washing on their revolving umbrella affairs. The woman from the blue house was the one I saw most. She had two boys, very little, always dressed in identical clothes, who followed her in and out of the house like ducklings. It gave me a funny feeling, watching like that when they couldn't see me. Powerful. Sometimes the boys strayed off the path onto the grass and she slapped their legs and made them squeal. They were nothing to do with me and I didn't care about them, but I liked to watch.

Mama and Bob never missed me. Or they never said. I was always back in time for dinner or tea. It was always like the first time, that summer. However long I felt I'd been away I always got home at the right time. Bob was pleased with me for spending so much time in the fresh air, but he never kept track of me. He had converted part of the vanished garden into a pond and he spent long hours beside it, lying flat on his face, watching the golden fishes glide through the stroking fronds of weed.

Perhaps they knew I was wandering off and thought it was all right. Perhaps it
was
all right. After all, I wasn't a baby. Perhaps they trusted me. Perhaps they knew the secret way I went, threading through the pathways, but if they did they never said. But then they never said lots of things, things they should have said, omissions that amounted to lies.

PART TWO

4

Things changed, as things do. First the roses died. Fat vermilion hips took their place, reminding me of the sticky syrup Bob used to force down me every morning. The leaves began to fade and then to yellow and fall. I didn't like it. Each time I visited the playground it seemed less secret, less secure. Through the gaps I began to glimpse the gravestones: the dove, the chalice and the shape of the angel amongst the other blunt stubs. The hedge was still thick enough to hide me more or less. Only a determined observer could have seen me, and there was never anyone in the cemetery. All the dead were long forgotten. But still, I took care and wore my dull green school gabardine mac and hid my crimson beret and gloves in my pocket.