Digging to Australia Read Free

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