‘Ellie?’
There was a note of amusement in his voice.
In just a moment now, as the game required, he would grasp her wrist, give a shout, ‘I’ve found Ellie,’ and bring the others into the room; but he did not want that, not yet.
He brought his fingertips to her cheek, through the light gauze of the curtain, and she flinched. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t be scared.’
They stood for a moment longer, neither in the game nor quite out of it, very still, with the breeze moving and the curtain lifting and falling with her breath. She had seen him, he knew that, and for some reason it did not bother him. If anything he felt relieved, as if a weight had been taken from him. Only one other person had ever seen him like that, and that was different. It was a man. It put you at risk, of course, but Digger had not let him down.
He took Ellie’s wrist, very gently at first, and they stood a little longer without moving. Then he tightened his grip and called.
VI
1
DIGGER’S FIRST DAYS back at the Crossing were spent clearing an infestation of blackberry canes that had invaded the open area between the store and the river and overgrown all that remained now of the ferry, the old wheelhouse and its machinery and the planked approaches to the wharf. Stripped to the waist in the November heat and armed with a machete, he waded into the massed entanglement of it. He used a gloved hand to push aside the barbed shoots, hacking at trunks as thick in places as his own wrist and grubbing out strand after strand of fibrous roots.
It was a single dense growth, its root-system as extensive and as deeply intricate below ground as above. Somewhere at the heart of it was the tap-root, but he never found it. Over and over again he thought he had; he put the machete in and dug out a fleshy tuber. But further in there was always another, tougher stock. At the end of the day his arms, chest and back were criss-crossed with scratches, and despite the gloves he wore his hands were torn, but the work was a pleasure to him. It was a way of getting down to the ground of things. In his sleep that first night he went on with the work, moving with almost no effort now and scarcely feeling the sting of the thorny shoots as they whipped out and clung to him. He saw the bones of small animals that had got trapped in the undergrowth, bandicoots, bush rats, a feral cat; turned up objects he had thought never to see again, that shone out of the over-arching growth with an unnatural luminescence, as if they had managed somehow to preserve the last ray of sunlight they had been touched by, or the last moonlight, before a new shoot launched itself, knitted into the thicket and shut them in.
There was a sun-bonnet of his mother’s that had once been blue and was sodden and stained now to a colour he could not name. He tossed it on to the pile he was making, along with a smashed storm-lantern, the crumbling head of a spade, some bald tennis balls, and from deep under, where so little light got in that the undergrowth was hollow, the battered pudding basin that had been Ralphie’s water-tin. He saw it glowing like a full moon in the half-darkness, reached in, pulled it out, and sent it clattering on to the heap.
His mother came out to bring him cups of scalding tea or jugfuls of iced water, and would stand there while he drank.
She took no interest in the progress of the work. She would have preferred him to begin on the roof, which leaked in places, or to put in new slumps for her lines, and he would get around to these too, in time; but it was the blackberries that had priority. So when she stood waiting for him to finish drinking it wasn’t the work that held her, it was him: the fact that she had him here. Gulping down cold water, he watched her over the rim of the glass, hungrily taking him in.
At the end of the day, casting his gloves aside, he set fire to what he had hacked and torn out and dragged to the bank. The thorny strands crackled and burned fast. The place began to resemble the Keen’s Crossing he had left, though there was much that could not be restored. The Crossing now was a dead end. The highway had moved a mile downriver and there was a bridge, a three-spanner, high above the stream.
It surprised him, given this and the war and all, that his mother had been able to hang on so long, but she would, of course, if anyone could. He was struck again by her tenacity, that strength in her that he too had drawn on ‘up there’ and used to pull him through, and was conscious once again of how alike they were, and how different.
At the table, still shirtless in the heat but with the grime and ash washed off him and peroxide on his cuts, he listened in a numbed way to her talk, which was ceaseless as she went over the list of her grievances: the same bitter anecdotes and illustrations of the hardships she had put up with and his father’s many deficiencies. Her war with him had intensified. He was a more powerful presence to her now that he was gone than he had ever been when he was sitting out on a stump somewhere in the dark, sulking and cursing, or when he was traipsing mud from his boots over her floors.
What she could not forgive was his refusal to knuckle down to the hard truth of things: which for her meant marriage, home, family, all she had spent her spirit over the years in amassing and preserving, and which she had expected they would share.
‘He’s a conquering hero now,’ she told Digger. ‘Lording it over the Japanese. I ask you!’
Digger felt sorry for her. There was no end to the injustice she felt, and since no story she told in illustration could contain the whole of it, no story was ever finished. It opened out at one point or another into a new one, approached some new and deeper injury, and that one led on to the next. The worst of it was, he wasn’t even here to face her. He had escaped even that. Digger learned to listen and not to hear.
She told him as well what she knew of Jenny. It wasn’t much. She was in Brisbane somewhere.
At the end of the week, when the yard was cleared and he had dealt with the roof, Digger made his own enquiries, took the train to Brisbane and brought her back.
So there they were, all three, united again. Back, Digger thought, despite the seven years and all that had happened, in a life that was barely different in its essentials from the one he had left.
His mother still weighed out and packed orders each Friday night in the room behind the store, and a boy called Cliff Poster came on his bike at eight on Saturday morning and went back and forth, as he had, making deliveries.
She still had her garden, and a war now with the cats. She set Jenny to watch out for them if she couldn’t do it herself. A bucket of water was kept ready under the clothes-line to slosh at them.
She still did the washing out in the yard, using a tin tub and a scrubbing-board, and ironed in the kitchen late at night.
She and Jenny shared one room now, and Digger slept in his old bed on the other side of the wall. They could talk right through it if they wanted.
He was surprised, lying on the narrow cot and looking past the windowsill at the same moonlit view, to recall how light-headed and restless he had been in the old days; waiting, fully awake and counting the seconds till the rest of them were asleep, then easing himself off his cot so that the springs didn’t squeak, pulling on his pants, and tiptoeing out, his boots in one hand, his shirt in the other, to finish dressing in the dark.
The difference now, he thought, lay in the load of ballast he had taken on; none of which might be measurable in real terms. He could still have made the grade as a featherweight, and none of what he was carrying would have registered on his mother’s scales, out there in the shop. But it made a difference just the same.
He worked as an odd-job man, and, since it was all word of mouth up here, soon had a reputation as the man to get: ‘Get Digger. He’ll fix it.’