Digging to Australia by Lesley Glaister

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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Gesundheit!’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten you were there. How are you getting on?’
    â€˜All right.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Where do you live?’ I called. ‘You must live somewhere, apart from here, I mean.’
    â€˜Around and about.’
    â€˜But you’re not a tramp, and you’re not a gypsy. Are you?’
    â€˜Some of us defy classification,’ he called back. There was a crash as he dropped something. ‘Bugger.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜My grandfather,’ the man said. ‘Married my grandmother at eighteen and only lived to sire one child. A boy