Digging to Australia Read Free Page B

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.
    Yellow leaves rotted squelchily on the concrete. It was a wet autumn. It rained every morning and turned still and misty each short afternoon. The seat of the swing was damp, the chains cold in my hands. They left a sickly iron smell, a brownness on my palms. It was strange to swing in the dusky after-school afternoons. I didn’t swing so high, not high enough to churn the frame in the ground and cause the noisy jolting. Sad speckled thrushes sang in the hedge. Seagulls blown inland for the winter drifted above, grey as puffs of spume. The climbing frame was slippery, but I didn’t need to climb so high to watch the people in the houses.
    Mama and Bob never asked me where I went in the