The Dig

I’d been sitting there maybe half an hour when she came out of the house and over to the car. At first I pretended to read the paper but I could tell it didn’t look natural so I tried staring straight ahead. I studied a distant point somewhere on the horizon and even though that felt even less realistic than reading the paper I had no choice now but to go with it. It was almost a relief when she finally knocked on the window and I could give up on my imaginary vanishing point. I wound down the window and turned to face her.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You heard me’, she said. She was right.
‘I’m just eating my lunch,’ I said, and pointed toward the still-wrapped sandwich on the passenger seat. ‘I’m lunching. You know, just having some lunch’. Lunching? What the hell was I talking about?
‘I’ve seen you hanging around out here before,’ she said, and before I could say anything else about my lunch or maybe about the newspaper she was talking again. ‘You can either tell me what you’re doing here or I can get on the phone to a couple of blokes I know and you can talk to them instead.’ I could tell that she meant it. She was clutching the top of her dressing gown so there was no way I could peek inside. I’d only seen this action performed by the most angry of women. When I saw that I realised the jig was up. I told her the truth. I told her just about everything.
‘Why don’t you come inside,’ she said, and I could see that her grip on the gown had loosened just a little.

*

‘How long,’ she said
‘How long what?’
‘Since - you know.’ I did know but I hadn’t thought about it for a very long time.
‘Six years,’ I said. In the circumstances it was as good a guess as I could be expected to make.
‘Hmm,’ she said, and I understood exactly what she meant. ‘Would you like some tea?’
The place looked mostly the same. I’d left behind a lot of furniture and I guess the landlord was too cheap to replace any of it. My carriage clock there on the mantelpiece. My lamp there in the corner. Even the mug the tea was in looked familiar. She offered me a seat in my armchair - the armchair I’d hauled back from a flea market in the rain one night in 1997. Some things you don’t forget. I sat down while she stood in the doorway. She was probably still thinking things over. For the first time I had a chance to look at her. She was pretty in her way. Strawberry blond hair and pleasantly thick ankles. Things I hadn’t seen in a long time.
‘How come you’re not at school?’
‘Oh, I’m too old for school.’ she said. ‘And I don’t go to college.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ll go later,’ she said, and that seemed to settle it. I hadn’t prepared anything else to say and there was a moment of silence while I tried to think of something. I kept hoping she might interject, but she didn’t. I noticed a picture on the mantlepiece that I thought might stimulate the conversation. I stood up to get a better look. The girl was there but even younger. On each side of her were two smiling women.
‘This is a nice picture.’
‘That’s my Mum. On the left. I'm not sure who the other woman is.’
‘Aha.’
‘Simone,’ she said. ‘That’s her name. Simone. Weird isn’t it?’ I wanted to ask which of the women she meant but by then she’d already gone back into the kitchen. ‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘Do you want anything?’
‘No. Thank you. But can I ask you a question?’
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Let me eat something first. Are you sure you don’t want anything? You hadn’t even touched that sandwich.’

*

I had told her that it wouldn’t be long but in the end I’d been digging for half an hour or more before I found it and even though it was cold I’d worked up quite a sweat. When I finally saw it I didn’t know what to do. I looked down into the hole for what felt like a very long time.
‘Is that it? That’s it, right?’
‘That’s it.’
She crouched down to get a closer look and I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. I leaned the spade against the fence and stretched my back. ‘What is it?’ she said.
‘It came out of a Happy Meal. She used to call it Dirtzilla.’
‘Dirtzilla. Cool’. She picked it out of the dirt and brushed it off with her thumbs. ‘Here’, she said, and I took it.
“God, she cried for hours after she lost it - she just couldn’t remember where to look. We were out here for ages digging but in the end it was easier just to get another Happy Meal but the toy from that one wasn’t the same and, well, that was that really.’ It weighed almost nothing in my hand and I studied it’s ugly little face, it’s tiny scaly hands. ’You know if you run him under a hot tap he changes colour. She loved that.’
I laughed, but I didn’t know why. The girl hooked her arm through mine and put her head on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry for what happened to you’, she said.
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘But thank you for this.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she said. Then her grip tightened around my arm and we stood there together for a long time in silence.