Deleted Scenes
The Big Dig actually changed quite a lot from submission to publication. There were a few elements in the early draft my editor felt weren't working or could be improved, so I ended up doing a fairly major overhaul of the story.
Here's a deleted scene from the end of the story, which will make absolutely no sense unless you read the explanation that follows. You'll see how significantly the story changed in between drafts, but if you've read The Big Dig, you'll also recognise elements in here I felt were too good to lose, and which did make it into the final story, although sometimes in a different form.
Nine
The crane was huge.
The crane guys were pretty big, too.
They had blue singlets and flannel shirts. They had hard hats and gloves.
They knew what they were doing.
They just leaned in over the back fence and hoisted it out.
We took the sheet of wood off first, of course. The vege garden, too. Mrs Karasinski said it was okay. She said it was perfect. It was spring and she was getting ready to plant.
“You dig it up for me,” she said. “Good to turn the soil over. Get the worms moving.”
The crane guys gouged the pool out of the ground like a scab. They hoisted it high in the air and drove the crane, slow and steady on its caterpillar tyres, all the way up the vacant strip of land.
Faces watched from behind every fence. The whole neighbourhood had come out to see.
Even Mum was there. Troy had won her over. It was easy, he said. He just asked her to imagine what her summer would be like if we didn’t have a pool to go to.
“Wow.” I shook my head in admiration. “Good thinking.”
We waited behind the fence with Mum as the crane approached. We watched the pool pitch and sway at the end of the ropes. We watched as it swung back and forth, back and forth, until it was positioned above the hole.
We watched as they lowered it,
lowered it,
and dropped it
in.
Perfect.
“See?” Troy punched me lightly in the shoulder. “Told you.”
I nodded. Yeah. He was right. It was all falling into place. Into the hole, in fact. The hole with the sharp, clean sides which the backhoe had finished digging out in less than an hour, skillfully operated by a blue-singleted backhoe guy while we sat under the tree, sucking on the orange slushies we had bought with our $11.50.
The backhoe guy was at Mrs Karasinki’s now, using the piles of dirt we’d dug out of the hole to fill in the space where the pool had been. As the crane-guys brought the pool up, the backhoe guy had taken the dirt down.
It was perfect, Troy said, almost like we’d planned it that way. “Two eight by four holes. Dirt goes out, dirt goes in.”
We paid the backhoe guy and the crane guys, then Ronnie leafed through the remaining notes. Mr Donald J. Quigley of Dallas, Texas had transferred the money to Ronnie’s parents’ bank account as soon as the auction ended, desperate not to lose his biscuit tin parrots. Then Ronnie’s parents had paid us, in cold hard cash.
“That’s weird,” said Ronnie as he finished counting.
“What?” I leaned over his shoulder to peer at the notes fanned out in his hand. In his palm lay one gold and one silver coin.
“Eleven-fifty,” he said. “There’s exactly eleven-fifty left.”
Weasel whistled. “Three tickets to BayView. Must be fate.”
Ronnie closed his fist around the notes. “Nah.” He shook his head. “It’s not fate. It’s just maths.”
We didn’t even think about going to BayView this time. In the first place, we had a pool, almost. In the second place, we had work to do.
We had to sort out Mrs Karasinki’s vege garden. It was part of the deal. Now the soil was all turned over, we had to dig it into rows. We had to build up twelve neat rows with drainage in between. We had to plant seedlings and stakes and little wire cages.
It took us hours, but that was okay. There was nothing like it for working up a sweat, for making us look forward to a dip in our very own backyard pool, which was filling slowly and steadily at this very moment via our newly duct-taped formerly exploding hose, supervised from a lounge chair in the shade by our newly enthusiastic formerly exploding mother.
By the time we got up there, half the neighbourhood had beaten us to it. There were kids diving and bombing and splashing. There were kids squirting each other with SuperSoakers.
Mum shrugged and sipped on her slushie. “They were hot,” she said. “What could I do?”
That was when we had the idea.
We looked at the pool full of kids and back at each other.
“Hey‒” I said.
“We should‒” said Weasel.
We looked at Ronnie and he was smiling. “Yeah,” he said. “We should.”
That night, when everyone had gone home and it was so dark we couldn’t see where the pool ended and the night began and Mum said we had to get out no matter what, we slid the old wooden cover over the top, where it slotted in exactly perfectly, almost like we’d planned it, then we went inside and made the sign.
“Welcome to The Pit”, Community Pool
Admission
50c
FREE!!
**No noodles or kickboards allowed**
We’re not allowed to charge people. That’s what the council said. They have rules about that, about what you can do and who you can do it with and how much fun you’re allowed to have, about how fast you can walk, how deep you can dive, and the sound you’re allowed to make when you’re about to be knocked unconscious by a pink noodle. If we charged people, we’d be running a business and then we’d be subject to tax and safety rules and various other forms of blahblahblah.
But it’s okay, because we’re not running a business. It’s a backyard pool, that’s all.
And if the kids who come to bomb and run and yell want to drop a couple of bucks in an old biscuit tin sometimes, an old biscuit tin with a checkerboard pattern that we’re quite happy to leave lying around the side of the pool until some sucker decides to sling us a couple of hundred bucks for it, then that’d be their business, wouldn’t it?
And if we should happen to add it all up at the end of the day and sling Troy a few bucks for walking up and down the pool not at all like any kind of official lifeguard which anyone can see because he’s not wearing green and blue, or yellow or anything remotely resembling a uniform, and every now and then give him a bonus on top for keeping an extra special eye on the highly smooshable Melanie Gittens, then that’d be our business, wouldn’t it?
When kids come to check us out, kids who are used to BayView and its Wave-of-the-Future-ness, we’re ready for them.
We tell them they might have to wait a while, because there’s a strict seventeen-person limit at any given time. According to the Geek-watch, that gives each person 1.8 square metres of elbow and SuperSoaker room, unless we store some people underwater, which our not-at-all official lifeguard advises against.
We remind them that noodles are not allowed and bombing is compulsory and that we might clear the pool at any moment just because we feel like it, because it’s feeling a bit crowded and we want more than 1.8 metres for a while, or because it’s time for a SuperSoaker battle, just the three of us.
If anyone complains, we kick them right out, because it’s our pool and we make the rules and there’s always someone waiting in the shade under the tree to take their place. And if they stand around muttering and saying fine then because they don’t even care and why would they want to come here anyway when we haven’t even got a spa, that’s when Weasel gets that look on his face because he’s always had beans on toast sometime in the last twenty-four hours. And he sidles over to the ledge in one corner of the pool and Ronnie and I take a step back, because we know what’s coming.
Weasel says, “Come on in, mate. I’ve got your spa right here.” And all the little kids who were getting back in start squealing and holding their noses and clambering over each other to get out again because anyone who knows anything about The Pit knows you don’t want to be anywhere near Weasel when he gets his homemade spa going.
Weasel looks up at us and grins and Ronnie and I look down at him and grin right back.
Because it’s a backyard pool with an old metal slide on one corner and a stream of bubbles rising from the ledge. It’s a backyard pool with an old wooden cover that smells of tomatoes and capsicum, and a lump of concrete up one end which, if you squint your eyes at just the right angle, bears a freakish resemblance to King Neptune but is way less likely to squirt water out its nose.
And it’s perfect, all of it.
It’s almost like we planned it.
THE END
So, how did this scene fit into the story?
In the original draft, Troy, the lifeguard from Newton Pool, had a bigger role to play. His family, who lived up the street from Nathan, had a below-ground pool where all the neighbourhood kids used to swim when they were small. After a near-drowning incident, his parents drained the pool and filled it in and that was when the boys all started riding their bikes to Newton Pool.
Later, when the boys realise their mud-pit is not going to make it as a pool, they talk to Troy, and he tells them that their pool was not in fact filled in, but simply boarded over. The shell is still there, in the ground, and it's about the same size as the hole the boys have dug. Near enough, anyway.
Of course, to get the shell out and move it requires a crane, which requires money, of which they don't have enough, even with their unspent BayView money. To deal with this, I had Ronnie wheeling and dealing on Ebay while Nathan and Weasel were digging, selling old biscuit tins they dug up along the way to collectors all over the world.
My editor's main concerns about this storyline were that:
i) it wasn't realistic that the boys would actually end up with a real pool because it would be affected by council regulations - fencing laws and the need for special permits and things like that. That's always a challenge for a writer, to work out to what extent a story set in the real world needs to be 'realistic' in a strict sense. Realistically, the boys in Going for Broke would not have been able to break a world record, even the one they ultimately did, and I guess I applied the same sort of 'fuzzy realism' to this story. But my editor was right that there were problems and that there was a better ending out there. I'm much happier with the new direction I took the story in as a result of the rewrite.
ii) Ronnie wouldn't be able to use ebay as you need to be over 18 to do so. Although I suspect there are ways around this for any enterprising boy, rewriting the ending meant that I didn't need the boys to have so much money. So I could cut the ebay/biscuit tin storyline altogether and this problem was solved.
There were other problems, too, other issues with the story that needed to be addressed, but eventually I wrote my way through them all and my editor said "Yes! You did it! This is great!" and I sighed a sigh of relief and before I knew it the book was on shelves and you were reading it and I hope you had as much fun doing so as I did writing it, only without all the frowning and deleting and staying up way too late and walking around the house muttering to yourself like a crazy person and whacking your head repeatedly on the desk.