Digging to Australia (6 page)

‘You're a solitary soul,' he said, just as if he could read my thoughts, ‘wandering here at all hours.'

‘Have you been watching me?'

‘Not watching, no. By no means watching. But I've seen you. I've heard the swing. Frightened me out of my wits when I first heard it. Ghosts, I thought. Phantasms. Quite understandable given the setting, don't you think? Do you fear ghosts?'

‘No such thing.'

‘Ah … such simplicity,' he said, and I began to feel offended. ‘But don't you feel it a mite unwise all the same?' he continued, ‘to wander alone in such a very secluded spot? A young girl alone. Haven't your parents warned you?' I shook my head, although, of course, they had. They were always warning me. ‘How old are you?' he asked. ‘No!' he held up his hand, ‘Allow me to hazard a guess. Thirteen, or fourteen?'

‘Thirteen,' I said. ‘Actually it's my thirteenth birthday.'

‘No … is it really? Well then, many happy returns. Perhaps we should celebrate. And fortunately I have at hand the means.' He pulled a squat silver flask out of his pocket. ‘Will you take a spot in your tea?'

‘What is it?'

‘Irish malt, a peerless tipple.'

‘Whisky?'

‘That's it. Will you have a drop? To celebrate?'

‘I've never … well all right then,' I decided. Jennifer might not have drunk whisky in a church with a strange man, but Jacqueline did. The man sloshed a good drop into the two china teacups. He put another biscuit on the saucer for me. I sipped at it, wrinkling my nose at its manly smell. It was good and strong and tasted festive, Christmassy. It made me feel light-headed, and odd. The biscuit in the saucer had soaked up the slops and was soft on my tongue. ‘Sherry trifle,' I said and my voice sounded loud and foolish.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘It reminds me,' I said.

‘Well, here's to you. Thirteen today, eh?' he looked at me as if I was the first girl ever to reach thirteen. As if I was unique.

There was quiet for a few moments but for the sounds of our sipping. I struggled to swallow silently but made a gulping sound. And then I grinned. ‘What's the joke?' he asked, but I shook my head. I didn't want to say, it would have sounded ridiculous, but I was thinking of Alice and the cake and the little bottle and her obedient eating and drinking and all the growing and shrinking she did. I felt tiny now, as if I had shrunk. The roof of the church was miles above, impossibly far, as was the distance to the door. I shivered.

‘What's that?' I asked, pointing to the wooden frame-work.

‘You
would
laugh if I told you that,' he said. He unscrewed the top of the flask and tipped some whisky straight down his throat, then he put it in his pocket. ‘I see you're dressed for school,' he said.

‘I …'

‘It's perfectly all right. You don't have to make excuses to me. I wasn't much of a one for school myself when I was your age. Has brains, lacks application, that sort of thing. However, pleasant as this is, I must get on.' He pulled a long canvas bag out of the shadows and took from it a large saw. He ran his thumb along its jagged teeth. In the bag I could also see a hammer and a chisel. I had the sudden thought that I was in danger. Or I would have been in danger if this man had been dangerous. Mama would have gone berserk if she could have seen me. That thought gave me some satisfaction.

‘Can I help?' I asked.

He looked at me for a moment, considering. ‘I don't see why not,' he decided. He gave me a pair of pliers and a claw-headed hammer. ‘Go round looking for crooked nails,' he said. ‘Any nail that isn't strictly functional. Old wood you see. And extract them.'

‘I'll try,' I said. ‘And if I help you, will you tell me what it's going to be?'

He didn't answer, but grinned and went off into the gloom, and presently I heard him sawing. A spot of light illuminated the top of his head. His hair was yellowish brown, a tobacco colour. He whistled as he worked, but breathlessly, as if all his energy was going into his arms.

I felt very peculiar. I may have been slightly drunk, and I was chilled so that I couldn't feel my fingers and toes. I wandered around, peering at the planks, which were old and splintery. Now and then I found a nail and wrenched it with the hammer and jiggled it with the pliers. Some came out and some didn't. It didn't seem to matter. After a while the smell of freshly sawn wood, the dust from it, began to irritate my nose and I sneezed.

‘Gesundheit!' he said. ‘I'd forgotten you were there. How are you getting on?'

‘All right.'

‘Methinks it's time for another cup of tea,' he said.
Methinks?
I thought. He was invisible to me, across the building, behind the chaos of wood, in the darkness. ‘Would you mind awfully? There's water in a bottle. Everything's there.'

I fumbled around and filled the kettle and lit the stove. The blue flame wavered in the air and gave off a thin streak of warmth before I put the kettle on top. I looked inside the suitcase beside the stove. It was very neat – shipshape, Bob would have said – all rows of things arranged nicely, not how I'd thought it would be at all. As well as cutlery and crockery there was a jar of marmalade, a loaf of bread, a china butter dish, cut glass salt and pepper pots, a pot of anchovy paste and a wedge of a cheese I did not know, threaded with veins of mould. There were sausages too, wrapped in greaseproof paper.

‘Where do you live?' I called. ‘You must live somewhere, apart from here, I mean.'

‘Around and about.'

‘But you're not a tramp, and you're not a gypsy. Are you?'

‘Some of us defy classification,' he called back. There was a crash as he dropped something. ‘Bugger.'

‘Oh.' The water began to bubble in the kettle. I fiddled about, picking things up and examining them. I ran my finger over the decorative crest on the handle of a knife. I picked up the fat wad of sausages. ‘It must be nearly dinnertime,' I said hopefully.

He laughed, and I jumped because he had approached silently and was close behind me. ‘I tend to dine in the evening, personally,' he said.

I flushed. ‘I only call it dinner because that's what it's called at school.'

‘Oh don't mind me. You go ahead. The frying pan's there.' He indicated the wall and I noticed for the first time that there were pots and pans hanging from nails, and a picture too, a photograph of a boy dressed in a stiff grown-up suit. I went closer and peered at it. The boy's face was pinched and weak. He looked as if he was about to open his blanched lips and whine.

‘My grandfather,' the man said. ‘Married my grandmother at eighteen and only lived to sire one child. A boy fortunately for the family name. My father. And then snuffed it. A consumptive. To my grandmother's relief, I imagine. He wasn't much fun by all accounts.' The boy's eyes glistened resentfully.

I reached for the frying pan. When the sausages began to sizzle, a wonderful sweet fatty smell rose and spread, incongruous in the mustiness. ‘Sure you don't want any?' I asked.

‘You've tempted me,' he said, and I put another couple of sausages in the pan. I sat on a box and poked at them until they curled and split. I felt very grown up then, cooking for a man. The sausages were delicious eaten between clammy slices of bread. I licked my fingers and wiped my mouth on my sleeve, but noticed that he dabbed delicately at his own with a napkin. There was only one, in a silver ring. When he had finished he rolled it up and put it back in the ring, sausage fat and all.

‘Not much as birthday parties go,' he said. ‘Will you be having one this evening?'

‘No,' I said. I shivered.

‘You're cold,' he observed. ‘If you care to look in that box you'll find a rug. Wrap yourself up in it while you drink your tea.' I stood up and opened the lid of the box and found a thick tartan rug inside, which I wrapped around myself, settling down once again on the box. The rug made me feel colder at first, the cold of the earth absorbed into its fibres, but gradually my own warmth crept into it and I began to feel sleepy.

‘There was always a party, I remember,' he said. He had closed his eyes. ‘With a conjurer, or a clown, and fifty or so children I'd never seen in my life before. Quite an ordeal.'

‘Why?' I asked. ‘I mean, why didn't you know the children?'

He didn't answer. He rubbed his head and then ran his hands over his cheeks. I could hear the grating of his bristly skin against his palms.

‘What's your name?' I asked.

‘My name? Must I have a name?'

‘Of course you must!'

‘Well then, let's say Johnny. Will that do?'

‘Yes … I suppose so.'

‘All your characters must have names.'

‘What?'

‘You said I must have a name. Why is that? No, let me guess. So you know what to call me. So you know how to think of me. So you know how to refer to me.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘But you won't do that last thing. You won't refer to me.' He stated it as a fact, not a question that required an answer.

‘Now, more about you. You are the one who has come to me. Do you want or need something from me?'

‘No.'

‘I think you are mistaken. You sought me out.'

‘No … I didn't know you were here.'

‘Not consciously. But you did know.'

‘I tried to go away, when I saw you … but you followed me out.
You
called
me
.'

‘Only in obedience.'

‘This is nonsense!' I stood up.

‘Sit down a minute longer,' he said, and I did, but only because my legs were suddenly weak. He had splashed more whisky in our tea. ‘I've grown curious. You have aroused my curiosity. You don't add up.' He gazed at me with his clear eyes until my cheeks felt hot. ‘Are you really not afraid of me? Not just a mite afraid? Not a smidgin? Perhaps you need to be afraid. Is that it?'

‘No.'

‘And it really is your birthday?'

‘Well …'

‘Ah ha … a lie?'

‘No.'

‘Well is it or isn't it? Surely the answer to that is in the nature of an absolute. A question that can be answered with a simple yes or no.'

‘I've always believed my birthday to be on a different day. Now I know the truth.'

‘Ah ha. Result, methinks, confusion. Loss of sense of identity. Yes?'

‘I suppose that's what it is,' I agreed, reluctantly. ‘Loss of something, anyway.' He leant back and stretched. ‘I honestly wasn't looking for you, or for anyone,' I said. ‘I was just wandering around outside, just being alone when I heard you whistling.'

‘Must endeavour to refrain from that,' he said.

‘Just before I heard you whistling, I had a funny sort of experience,' I said, remembering.

‘Which was …'

‘I was reading something on a gravestone, one of the old ones that aren't even on graves anymore.'

‘An enigma, those. Don't belong.'

‘There was something about … loosening a silver cord or something …'

‘I've seen it.'

‘And as I was reading it something happened … everything went … oh I can't explain it.'

‘Try.'

‘Well, as if everything held together. As if I could see how everything held together, only very precariously, like some sort of balance. As if it all made a sort of sense.'

‘And you felt what? Joy?'

‘Something like joy, only not as simple,' I said. Johnny was looking at me intently.

‘Epiphany' he said. ‘Have you read Joyce?'

‘Who?'

‘James Joyce. No I don't suppose you have yet. You must. Read
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, for a start. There's a moment in there. Epiphany.'

I thought the word sounded holy, like something from a church service. ‘It had nothing to do with God,' I said.

‘Did it not?'

‘No, it was the world. Just the world.'

‘A wild angel appeared to him …'

‘No angels. No nothing. Anyway there's no such thing.'

‘As?'

‘Angels. Or God. Or ghosts.'

He laughed. ‘I'll tell you what. Borrow the book.' He bent down to reach it. He was like a sort of conjurer. The church was like a conjurer's cave. Cosy now, despite the cavernous cold of it. There seemed to be endless things concealed in the shadows. I saw now a bookcase, just a low thing. He drew a small volume out and dropped it on my lap. I leafed through. It was damp. The print was tiny and dense, impossible to read in the poor light.

‘I may not read it,' I said.

He shrugged. ‘That's of no relevance to me. Take it or leave it. Now I really must get on.' He had switched away from me and I was disappointed. The strange conversation had been exhilarating. I always knew exactly what Mama and Bob would say next. I liked the surprise of Johnny's utterances, the not-quite-sureness of whether he made sense, or whether I quite understood. And now it had come to an end. I decided to take the book, so that at least I'd have an excuse to return. It just fitted into my coat pocket. ‘Work to do. Dark soon,' he said. ‘You'd better be getting home.'

‘But it can't be that time …' I stood up and let the rug drop from my shoulders. And all at once the chilliness closed round me. ‘I'll come back soon to see you,' I promised.

‘Not too soon,' he replied, and disappeared almost immediately into the gloom. I opened the narrow side door and stepped out into the chill afternoon. Johnny was right. Time had passed, more time outside the church than within. And if I dawdled now, I would be home at the right time.

8

At tea time I opened my present. It was a white jewellery box. When I opened the lid I saw that there was a ballerina inside the mirrored top, twizzling on one toe to a tune which Mama said was called the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.' It wasn't something I particularly wanted, or didn't want. ‘Thank you,' I said. Mama showed me the little key at the back to wind up the music when it ran down.