Diamonds in the Mud and Other Stories Read Free Page A

leave my house. I want us to make a good family for our grandchildren.’
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    â€˜I will give you the new phone number for my beach house,’ Tessa says. ‘I have move . . . leave that bastard man.’ She is weeping again.
    â€˜When I go to shopping, I look at the people,’ she says. ‘I look at the man and the wife and some are holding their hand. It cuts my heart like a knife. My hands are empty. Always now my hands are empty.’
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    Seven months after she moved away I see a woman walking to my door and I don’t recognise her. She is slim, her hair is blonde. She is wearing an expensive frock and diamond earrings and she sits in my kitchen, chain-smoking, chain-talking.
    â€˜He came to my side at the christening and he said, “Hello, my wife”. I know then he is still part of my life. So I come home. Is better for the children. And he has changed. Yes, I am sure he has changed.’ Her eyes will not meet mine. They wander the kitchen like trapped birds, seeking escape. ‘Do you think that man can change?’ she asks.
    I turn away. My own eyes are leaking. A tear seeps free to trickle down the side of my nose, tickling all the way. I walk into my laundry and run water into an empty bucket while I wipe at useless tears. I can’t hear her; I can’t speak to her above the sound of running water.
    I add detergent to the bucket, toss in a clean hand towel then make much ado about rinsing it cleaner while I try to erase evidence of my own tears.
    â€˜I’ve missed you, my friend,’ I call, my voice tested for control and found wanting; I run more water into the bucket until I can laugh again at futility.
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    â€˜We are rip up, all apart – losing everything we working so hard for. “Hello, my wife”, he say at the christening. I make his words mean, “Hello, my darling wife. I love you”. The bastard toss to me the breadcrumbs and I gather them up and try to hold them together without spreading too much butter, eh? You are my wife, his words only say. Your place is for cook dinner and wash clothes so I go to her looking like the big man.
    â€˜Is over. Is finish. That bitchy woman has got guts to make telephone to him at my home – at my home! “Is Christos there?” she is asking me! You know what I say to her? “Ha,” I say, “sorry, darling, he is out with his eighteen year old tonight. I think is you turn tomorrow. Hold on. I will look in his book”. Ha. That bitch. I hope I cause big, big trouble for him.
    â€˜We don’t go to the judge. They just taking more money. We are agree, we selling this house. He will keep the shop. I will have the beach house.’

    My friend Tessa lives alone now. Her house is far from my suburb, but today I have driven there. I park my car and for minutes watch her walking slowly along the beach. She is picking up seashells and bottle tops and juggling them in her hands.

The Gravedigger
    â€˜Where do you hail from, lad?’
    His words were aimed at me and I didn’t feel like talking. I leaned at the bar fingering a full glass, wanting him and the world to get lost. The second beer had gone the way of the first; I was trying to nurse this one.
    â€˜I’m speaking to you, lad. Where do you call home?’
    I turned me back on the silly old bastard, lifted me glass and poured that beer down. Home was a sore point. Home was no place. Home was me van and me bed-roll. I got slotted into the system around the age of four, went from foster care to training centres, then finished me education at the bluestone college with the big boys.
    That’s where I found the book. I’m no reader, never was, but it didn’t have enough big words in it to put me off, just pictures of the outback, and as the weeks wore away the months and turned them into years, it got so I could smell the heat and freedom in that book.
    â€˜What do you do for a crust,