The Exiles

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    Naomi received this information without flinching, and by the time Ruth found her half an hour later she was already hard at work, meeting Big Grandma’s challenge.
    ‘Aren’t you coming with us?’ asked Ruth. ‘We’re going swimming and making sure that stuff is still where we left it.’
    ‘I’m doing this,’ replied Naomi, clipping and clipping on her aching knees. ‘Oh, damn these horrible shears. They’re all the wrong shape!’
    ‘What’s wrong with them?’
    ‘They twist my wrists. If you see that boy again, you know, what’s his name? Graham. Ask if he’ll lend us some books.’
    ‘Why don’t you come with us? You don’t really have to do that. We’re going to get ice cream at the shop.’
    ‘Yes, you leave it if you want to,’ Big Grandma called, overhearing them.
    ‘I’m doing it,’ replied Naomi crossly. ‘I don’t want to go to the rotten beach anyway,’ and she turned her back on them and continued to hack off chunks of stiff grass, all mixed up with dandelions and weeds. Disturbed ants crawled over her hands, and once she chopped a big fat slug into two soggy halves before she noticed it.
    ‘When did you last do this?’ she asked Big Grandma.
    ‘Ages ago.’
    The morning slipped away without her.
    ‘Stop if you want to,’ dared Big Grandma.
    ‘I said I’d do it,’ Naomi answered, ‘I’ll plant the lettuces when I’ve finished this.’
    ‘I could do them myself,’ threatened Big Grandma. ‘Now, if you like.’
    ‘I like planting things,’ said Naomi grimly.

    Phoebe and Rachel bought plastic sea-side spades at the shop, but the handle of Phoebe’s snapped off in the first ten minutes of digging. Over and over again one or another of them would go back to the end of the road, and carefully pace along the beach the distance they thought they had gone the day before, and then they would search that patch for the protruding saucepan handle. Other times they just dug in likely looking places. Other times they hunted for the remains of the bonfire, but the tide had covered the part of the beach where they had picnicked and washed all traces of the ashes away. They tried lying on their stomachs, hoping to see the handle rise up on the horizon before them. They walked miles and miles in circles, quarrelling.
    In the end they gave it up and went swimming, reluctantly deciding that if Naomi could not remember the place they would have to swallow their pride and go and ask Graham if he could. They did not want to do this.
    ‘I told you we’d lose it,’ said Rachel.
    ‘You didn’t.’
    ‘Well, I knew we would anyway.’
    ‘Well, why didn’t you say so?’ demanded Ruth. ‘We could have put a mark or something. What’s the good of saying you knew we’d lose it when it’s lost?’
    ‘Naomi will know where it is,’ said Phoebe hopefully. ‘She chose the place to dig. Let’s go home and get her.’
    Naomi was still gardening, planting out the remains of the lettuces.
    ‘They don’t look like lettuces to me,’ commented Ruth. ‘I bet they’re weeds and it’s one of Big Grandma’s jokes. Why are you doing it anyway?’
    ‘Because I want to,’ Naomi answered. ‘Look where you’re treading! You’ve squashed that one flat already.’
    ‘It’s only bent. I just knocked it. Stop digging for a minute, I want to talk to you.’
    ‘You wouldn’t like it if someone trod on you and then said you were only bent!’
    ‘I wouldn’t care. Listen. Do you remember where we buried that stuff yesterday?’
    ‘Of course I do. Anyway, we left that handle sticking up.’
    ‘It’s not sticking up now,’ said Ruth sadly. ‘We’ve looked everywhere.’
    ‘Big Grandma says it’s dinner time,’ shouted Rachel, running down the garden path to find them. ‘And that boy Graham’s come and Big Grandma asked him to stay and he’s telephoned his mum and she says he can and I can’t stop Phoebe being awful to him and I thought you said we’d got to be nice because of his books!’
    Ruth and Naomi, immediately grasping the seriousness of the situation, hurried to the rescue and found Graham laying the table in the kitchen as if he had lived there all his life. He took no notice of Phoebe, who was pulling her face into a pig-like expression, and making grunting sounds. Ruth and Naomi looked at each other and then at Phoebe, and the next thing she knew she was lying on the living room floor, gagged with a tea towel.
    ‘Listen, you horrible brat!’ whispered