Digging to Australia by Lesley Glaister

Broom asked.
    â€˜No … not really …’
    â€˜That seems a shame.’ Her eyes lingered again on our painted mouths. ‘Now, be good girls and wash that stuff off your faces.’ I tensed, expecting an argument, but Bronwyn meekly led the way upstairs to the chilly bathroom where we both scrubbed at our lips with coarse coal-tar-smelling flannels. I thought about Johnny as I rubbed and tasted the soap.
    â€˜What was that word again?’ she asked. ‘Her …’
    â€˜â€¦ Maphrodite. Do you always do what she says?’
    â€˜Her-ma-phro-dite,’ she repeated thoughtfully. And then, ‘Well … since Dad … she gets upset so easily. You’ll come to the bazaar? Go on.’ She clutched my sleeve in her pleading way. The skin around her mouth was pink from the scrubbing.
    â€˜Might as well,’ I said.

12
    There was a thief at school. Miss Clarke’s face was grave. She stood before us waiting for the culprit to speak up. Someone had stolen money from her desk. It was one of us. It could only have been one of us, she said, and until the culprit revealed herself, we would all suffer. Miss Clarke’s eyes were very small. She looked at us each in turn. The silence was terrible. In the distance we could hear the rumble of the rest of the school proceeding as usual. I thought about the money. I wondered how anyone could steal money from Miss Clarke’s desk, how anyone would dare. I shifted uneasily. Someone had a cold and every time she drew her breath to cough or sneeze we all tensed as if she was drawing her breath to confess.
    â€˜I am disappointed,’ Miss Clarke said. ‘Deeply disappointed.’ She left a long pause for this to sink in. ‘I’ve given the thief a chance. If she’d put her hand up then, then that would have been the end of it. All over and forgotten and a lesson learned.’ She looked at her watch. ‘We’ll wait in silence until the bell goes.’
    I wondered what would happen when the bell did go. Perhaps she would call the headmaster. There was the sound of a netball bouncing outside, and a shout, and the drone of an aeroplane passing overhead.
    Somewhere in the room there was a thief. The word made me think of masks and sacks of swag and windows lolling open; of men with scars and stubble. But this room was full of girls in bottle green. One of us was a thief, and also a liar, and also, a coward. Someone was squirming and scared. Stealing is taking what doesn’t belong. I thought of the Great Train Robbery and how I used to scan the hedgerows for the loot, how I’d thought of buried treasure when I dug my hole. Digging to Australia. Australia was where they used to send thieves. Peggy was a thief, a peacock thief, and she sailed to Australia on a convict ship and was never heard of again. But everyone takes things that don’t belong to them. There was the Christmas money I’d spent on myself, there was the smoke and the greasy taste of the lipstick. I began to squirm. Someone in the room was a thief. I thought about Johnny and wondered who he really was and why he was in the church and what he was building. I thought that Mama and Bob were thieves in a way. They’d stolen the truth from me and ruined everything. They’d given it back when it was too late. I couldn’t forgive and forget. Everyone’s jersey was bottle green. The popular girls, the lucky ones, even Bronwyn, had smooth-knit shop jerseys in the regulation shade. Some of us had home-made affairs in not- quite -the right-shade of green, cardigans with peculiar buttons, or cable patterns, or saggy fronts. Mama had knitted mine in a fancy basket stitch. ‘Just that little bit different,’ she’d said proudly, stupidly, because she didn’t understand. The point was to be the same as everyone else, not to stand out. Everything about me had to be that little bit different, and now I knew that I was