The Exiles

box, wrapped her plaster in a carrier bag, and went out into the black, waiting garden. By torchlight she chose the largest spade in the garden shed.

    It was astonishingly difficult. Naomi had been prepared for hard work, and perhaps a certain amount of awkwardness, but she had never thought it might be actually impossible. For a start her torch kept falling over. It wouldn’t stand so that it shone on the bit she was trying to dig, and she didn’t think she could dig in the dark. And anyway it was difficult to dig with a broken arm. First you balance the spade on the bit you want to cut. Then you tread on it with one foot, to get it stuck firmly into the ground. Then, keeping your plaster out of the way of hitting the spade handle, you jump on top of the spade, so as to press it right in. After that you stand on the ground and lean on the handle to lift up the spadeful of soil. Then with your good arm low down on the shaft, and your broken one across the top to balance it, you raise the spadeful, turn it over, and drop the soil into the same space again.
    That is one dig.
    Naomi dug one dig and she thought she might as well give up. After five more spadefuls she thought perhaps she was getting the hang of it, and then, after a few more she decided she wasn’t after all, and what was worse, she fully expected to break her arm again any minute. But she still went on digging.
    By the time Ruth found her she had dug a row and a half and had just finished calculating that there were probably eighteen and a half still to go.
    ‘You look awful – all hunched up in the torchlight, swearing and cursing,’ said Ruth.
    ‘Go away.’
    ‘Look at those slugs and worms coming out,’ remarked Ruth. ‘I bet they’re hypnotised by the light.’
    Naomi, ignoring her, painfully and slowly finished the row.
    ‘Shall I hold the torch?’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Naomi bitterly, ‘you do a bit of work too. I’ll dig and dig with my broken arm and everything and you stand there and hold the torch.’
    ‘All right,’ said Ruth.
    For a long time Ruth stood in the empty night, shining the torch on the edge of Naomi’s spade.
    ‘Seventeen and a half to go,’ said Naomi a long time later when she had discarded the carrier bag as being much too clumsy to work with.
    ‘Nearer thirty,’ said Ruth.
    Naomi moved the spade one width along the row, balanced it, stepped on it, jumped on the top, heaved up the earth and turned it over. ‘Thirty!’ she said. ‘It can’t be!’
    ‘Stop and work it out yourself.’
    ‘I can’t stop.’
    Slowly the glow of torchlight traced Naomi’s weary progress to the end of the row.
    ‘Let me have a go.’
    ‘No. It’s my goodbye present. I’ve got to do it.’
    ‘It’s freezing just standing here.’
    ‘Well, go in then,’ said Naomi beginning another row.
    For a long time the garden was quiet except for the wind in the ash tree, and the squelch and tumble of Naomi’s spade. Suddenly the circle of torchlight wavered wildly and shot over the garden.
    ‘Hold it steady.’
    ‘I think I fell asleep.’
    ‘Go in then.’
    ‘All right.’
    Naomi found herself alone and furious with the hopeless torch. ‘Coward!’ she thought. ‘Coward and traitor! I’d have stayed with you!’
    She was so angry she forgot how tired she was. She forgot to move the torch. She dug in the dark, thinking of Ruth warm in bed, while her sister toiled alone in the miserable Cumbrian wind, in the pitch dark, miserable, Cumbrian garden.
    The row was finished, and the next, without Naomi noticing them pass. All her thoughts were taken up with Ruth. It would have been better if she’d never come down at all, rather than come to abandon her broken-armed sister in her time of need.
    ‘Cup of tea!’
    There was Ruth, standing on the path, dressed in all she possessed, holding a mug of tea in each hand.
    ‘Tea?’ asked Naomi, limp with gratitude. ‘I thought you’d gone back to bed.’
    The tea was boiling hot, thick with tea leaves, and very sweet. Ruth had poured it into the two pewter mugs that usually stood on the mantelpiece in the kitchen. They held a pint each, which was why she had chosen them. Both were very dusty and there happened to be a stray button in the bottom of Naomi’s, but such trifles presented no problems in the dark.
    ‘I feel like I’ve come alive again,’ said Naomi, tipping the dregs and the button out onto the ground and picking up the spade.
    ‘Shall I do a