36
Bulletins From The Coal Face
Bill’s Christmas Day hadn’t been too bad, because for once Meg’s Mother hadn’t featured in it and they’d been able to spend it at home with a tree from Jake Carrano’s paddock and the frowsty old decorations they’d had for five million years and that lived in a box on top of their wardrobe for eleven months of the year or, if Meg could get away with it, eleven and a half months, and the fairy lights that always blew the fuse unless he remembered to turn everything off before he screwed the blinking one in, which somehow he never did.
The only points worthy of note about Christmas Day, really, had been Michael sulking because they hadn’t chucked away three thousand dollars on buying him a small computer, Andrew sulking because they hadn’t chucked away two months’ combined salaries on buying him a pair of Reeboks but only two months of Meg’s salary on a pair of gigantic Reebok clones with those strange upstanding tongues that came halfway to the knee and entirely prevented all movement of the ankle, and Connie sulking because a miracle had occurred and Meg’s Mother had sent a frilly dress that for once was not P,I,N,K but blue. Possibly the old bat had gone colour-blind at last? Roger was already sulking, presumably because Anne Wiseman had gone down to the Austins’ farm. The huge present wrapped in gold foil and adorned with sixteen gigantic red and green bows and emblazoned with the words “To Roger, From Anne, XX” apparently did nothing to mitigate the situation. Certainly not with the twins sniggering over the XX and Connie reading out laboriously: “Tuh-oo Ruh-og-ger, Fruh-om A— A— Whass this, Mum?—Ann-nnn-nuh! Kiss, Kiss.” And, as Bill had pointed out, none of these points were all that worthy of note, actually, in that they all might have been expected.
As Meg had pointed out, his passing out in mid-afternoon after having washed down indecent quantities of Christmas dinner with indecent quantities of that brandy those Fools from Number 3 had presented him with wasn’t particularly worthy of note, either, because she at least had expected it. And there was no point in going on whingeing about not being asked over to Number 10 for Christmas, because in case he hadn’t noticed, Tom and Jemima were a YOUNG COUPLE WITH A BABY and in case he hadn’t noticed, so were Darryl and John, and THAT WAS WHY THEY’D ASKED THEM AND NOT US, and SHUT UP ABOUT IT!
Passing only a half-dozen or so sneering remarks in re lemon hand-knitted creeper suits that both Dirk Overdale and Boris Aitken were gonna grow out of before the weather was cold enough for the poor little tykes to be swaddled in ’em, Bill did eventually shut up.
Boxing Day was rendered cheerful by Roger’s spending the entire day rushing out to the letterbox in case there might be a mail delivery, in spite of the fact that he had been told times innumerable that there WOULDN’T BE, and by the twins collapsing into a truly terrific sulk, in fact the worst sulk Meg had ever witnessed in all her suffering years as the mother of twin boys, because Starsky had gone off with Bob to the airport to meet the Winkelmanns and take them up to Sol’s and they hadn’t even known about it until it was too late! –That was, until Ivan and Mason, in the worst sulk Meg had ever seen them in, had come down and told them about it.
June came down around four, looking glum.
“What are your lot doing?” she said glumly to Meg, who was sitting on the verandah.
“Sulking. What are yours?”
“Sulking,” acknowledged June. “It got worse after Bob and Starsky came back.”
“It woulda done, yeah.”
There was a short pause. June glanced wistfully over at Number 10. “What are they up to, this arvo?”
“Dunno. –Oh, that’s right: Jemima’s got little Boris,” recalled Meg.
June’s face lit up. “Ooh!”
“You could go over,” noted Meg sourly.
June goggled at her. “Can’t you?”
“Darryl’s on our bed, do you think I should leave her to the tender mercies of a houseful of sulking males?”
“Is Bill sulking, too?”
“Yeah. He said Darryl’s period might be complications after the baby and I told him he was a wanker, so he started to sulk, and then he came out to the kitchen and found out I’d made a pot of tea without giving him one, and got worse.”
“I wouldn’t worry about him!”
“I’m not worrying about him,” said Meg, staring at her.
“No-o... But Darryl won’t mind!” she encouraged her.
Meg sighed. “Connie’s got in beside her.”
June smiled. “She won’t mind, that, either. Come on, Meg!”
The real reason why Meg was reluctant to go over to Number 10 to drool over babies Dirk and Boris was, of course, that she’d bawled Bill out on the subject of leaving Tom and Jemima ALONE about fifty times since Christmas Eve, but naturally she wasn’t going to admit that to June. “Um... Oh, all right!”
They hastened over the road to Number 10 with shining morning faces, even though it was around four.
Down at Number 3 John woke up in his new hammock on the verandah at five-thirty and for a moment panicked because he didn’t know where he was. Then he went inside and found that his wife and son had disappeared. He wandered groggily up the road to Number 9, not noticing that the goat was following him.
The front door was wide open, and Bill was in his usual position. “OY!” said John.
Bill woke up with a start. “Norra sleep— Oh, it’s you,” he said, sitting up on the sofa.
“Have you seen my wife and kid?” said John mildly.
“N— Aw, yeah, your wife’s on our bed,” he recalled.
“Oh.” John wandered over to the bedroom door and peered in. He closed the door quietly and came back into the sitting-room, smiling. “Connie’s in there, too.”
“Yeah? Be since I looked,” said Bill, yawning.
“The duck’ll be since you looked, too, will it?”
Bill immediately shot to his feet, face empurpled.
When he’d hurled the duck bodily down the front steps, and John had quietly closed the bedroom door again and they were back in the sitting-room and Bill had automatically resumed his normal position, John said mildly: “Thought you weren’t intending to get another lot, after we ate the last of them at Tom and Jemima’s wedding reception?”
“Intending!” said Bill bitterly.
“Oh. Er—haven’t seen Boris, have you?” he asked diffidently.
“Yeah, drove off not five minutes since in your Alfa,” said Bill with satisfaction.
“Idiot. –Hell!” he gasped, rushing out to the bedroom.
He came back in ten seconds or so looking sheepish and reported: “Thought one or other of ’em might be smothering him.”
“Yeah: them or the duck. Don’t they teach you about atavisms in them posh English colleges?” said Bill heavily.
“Not actually, no. She has tried to indoctrinate me on the subject, but although I’m intellectually convinced, emotionally I’m afraid I still cringe at the very notion of having him on the bed.”
“Yeah. Well, I admit I rolled on Connie only two weeks back, but that was because I didn’t know she was there. –They do that!” he said impatiently as John goggled at him.
“What, hypnotize your unconscious form into rolling on them?” he said faintly.
“No, ya cretin,” said Bill, scratching the whiskers: “sneak into your bed when you’re not looking. Usually when you’re just working yourself up to thinking about doing it,” he clarified sourly.
John’s hefty shoulders shook.
“I’ll give it two years,” said Bill nastily. “Then you’ll see exactly what I mean. Yeah: and if he’s got goozzy eyes it’ll be a lot less than that, and I have that fact from the lips of the fair Lady C. herself!” he added happily.
“Eh?” said John weakly. “Goozzy eyes?”
“Polly reckons that having Katie Maureen even in the room when they were thinking of doing it put Jake off; right from the time she was—uh—well, one-ish, I think it was!” He smirked.
“Eh?” said John weakly.
“She usedta look at ’im with them goozzy eyes of hers, what are ya, Aitken, simple?” he howled.
“Uh—oh! I see!” gasped John. He went into a sniggering fit.
“Yeah, hah, hah. Wait until it’s Boris goggling at ya with them great peepers!” said Bill happily.
“I’d have said Jake Carrano was made of sterner stuff!” gasped John.
“Well, he isn’t, and lemme tell ya, them goozzy eyes are enough to make any bloke quail—and watch that fucking rug, she’ll do me if ya crumple it up like that with ya great clodhoppers.”
Meekly John straightened out the rug. “What exactly are goozzy eyes, or am I merely betraying the ignorance of the untutored collegiate?”
“Not untutored: no experience of Life,” explained Bill with relish. He waited until John had finished choking and said illuminatingly: “You know! Goosegog eyes! Green!”
“Eh?” said John weakly. “Goozz gogs?”
“Green! Chinese goosegogs, ya Pommy twit!” he howled.
“Chinese goosegogs?” echoed John faintly.
“YES! Chinese gooseberries!” shouted Bill. “Kiwifruit, ya fathead!”
“Actinidia deliciosa and Actinidia chinensis,” said a cold voice from the doorway. “And shut up, you’ll wake up Darryl, Meg says she’s as green as a—” Roger hesitated. A reluctant smile twitched his mouth. “A Chinese goosegog,” he murmured.
“Go and look in the letterbox,” groaned Bill.
“I see,” said John weakly. “Goosegog: yes. I’m sorry, Bill, I’d honestly never heard the expression before.”
“Probably because it’s part of the idiolect of Number 9 Blossom Av’, and unknown throughout the entire civilized world,” noted Roger coldly.
“We should never ’a’ let ’im go to varsity,” moaned Bill.
“I thought he was doing Engineering?” said John in astonishment.
“Shut up!” he choked. “Uh—you want anything in particular, Rog, apart from enlightening John as to the botanical appellation of Whojamaflickus chinnywhatsit?”
“Yeah: is there any beer?”
“Not if there isn’t any in the fridge: no,” sighed Bill.
“Oh. Blow. Um—will the wholesalers be open?”
Bill scratched the whiskers. “Boxing Day? Dunno.”
“What about The Tavern?” said John hopefully.
“Uh—yeah, actually, I think it might be. Well, not like ANZAC Day, eh?”
John looked at him blankly.
“Only the RSA’s allowed to sell alcohol on ANZAC Day, that’s what it’s for,” explained Bill laboriously.
“No! –Ignore him, he’s living in the Dark Ages,” explained Roger. “Only the RSA’s allowed to sell it in the morning, but the pubs are open these days on ANZAC Day afternoon!”
There was a blank silence.
“Well, I did hear a rumour to that effect—once,” conceded Bill, “only it’s a Helluva drive to The Tavern from here on spec, and in any case what with years of training yerself to get ’em in the day before ANZAC Day—”
“I know!” said Roger eagerly. “The Tavern’s really foul: let’s go to the Kowhai Bay pub!”
“There isn’t a pub at Kowhai Bay,” said John in terrible confusion.
“’E means that one up on the highway well past Kowhai Bay,” explained Bill. “In the direction of north,” he explained.
“Oh, yes! I know! The Farmer’s Arms!” said John pleasedly.
The locals looked at him blankly. After moment Bill said: “Well, be that as it may, it does have beer on tap.”
“Yeah, come on!” urged Roger.
“Um—just a minute: have you seen Boris, Rog?” said John on a sheepish note.
Roger gave him a kindly look. “I know there’s nothing like indoctrinating them young, John, but in New Zealand minors aren’t actually allowed to drink in pubs.”
“Nah: ’e’s lost ’im,” explained Bill.
“He’s probably over at Number 10, I saw Meg and June heading over there surrounded by a cloud of pinkish maternal glow,” he explained kindly.
“Got it all sussed out,” explained Bill glumly. “Sad, really, at his age. Leaves nothing to grow into, does it?”
“Well, only genius, possibly,” agreed John, grinning. “I’ll just nip over—”
Bill bounded up and seized his arm in an iron fist. “We’re leaving in five seconds, old mate. If you wanna come, ya can give ’em a bell, or nothing. ’Cos I know what you’re like when the pinkish maternal cloud hits ya!”
Over Roger’s sniggering fit John said sheepishly: “Very well, then; hang on.” He went out to the phone.
Five seconds later they all three piled into the station-waggon, leaving the house to the sulking twins, the sleeping Darryl and Connie, the goat, who took up a sentinel’s position on the front verandah the minute Bill was in the car, and, since the front door had, of course, been left open, the duck Bill had earlier chucked out. It came into the sitting-room and settled down happily on a newly re-covered cushion that the fool who had latterly been recumbent upon the sofa had knocked to the floor and there let lie.
“She likes him, I’m sure,” said June on a defiant note at around lunchtime next day, putting a plate of something very odd in front of Bob.
“Of course she likes him, June, everybody likes him!”
“He’s more her type than that Hugh ever was,” said June, scowling.
“Yes,” he sighed. He picked up a fork. “What is it?” he said weakly.
“Eat it,” replied June grimly.
Bob sighed. Mum had given June another cookbook for Christmas. It had been entirely well intentioned, there was no spite in Ida Butler, but fancy cookbooks always gave June these bloody guilt feelings and that made her ratty; and then she tried to cook out of ’em and the bloody recipes were always a failure and that made her rattier... The present effort was greenish and sort of sludgy. Not hot—warmish. Bob poked at it cautiously with the fork.
“STOP POKING AT IT AND EAT IT!” screamed June.
Bob began to try to eat it. Christ.
June sat down opposite him, looking grim.
“Where’s Ivan and Mason?” he said cautiously.
“Sent to their room,” said June grimly.
“Oh. Um—didja get all the shopping done, love?”
June took a deep breath. “Considering Ivan whinged non-stop for some bloody cretinous video-game thing, and Mason whinged non-stop for junk food, I did fairly well, yes.”
“I said you could leave the kids with me,” he said weakly.
“Yeah,” she retorted swiftly, “and have them whingeing non-stop to go up to the Inlet with Starsky while you’re trying to get that new order done!”
Bob poked glumly at the greenish sludge,
June picked up her fork grimly and plunged it into the greenish sludge on her plate.
Silence fell. June chewed desperately. Bob’s ploy was to swallow without chewing and thus with the least tasting possible. Unfortunately the sludge had lumps in it, so this wasn’t as easy as you might have thought.
June took a sneaky drink of water. She looked cautiously at him. Bob’s eyes remained on his plate.
June put her fork down. “Bob, don’t eat it,” she said weakly. “It’s awful. I think the eggs must have sort of... curdled.”
“It’s all right,” said Bob gamely.
“No, it isn’t: I shouldn’t have used marg where the recipe said butter.” She paused. “Or silverbeet where it said spinach, I suppose. And it did call for three whole avocados instead of just over half a brownish one... Leave it, Bob.”
Bob left it. “What were those lum— I mean solider bits?” he asked.
“I dunno,” admitted June. “It was all meant to be whirred in a blender, really. I think Ida thinks we’ve still got that thing that Starsky made the concrete in.”
Bob gulped. “That was yonks back.”
“Yes. Well, all her kitchen equipment’s in spotless condition.”
Bob knew this. He thought she meant faultless, actually, in this instance, but didn’t correct her.
“What would you like instead?” she said generously.
Bob hesitated.
“Bread and cheese and pickled onions?” she said generously.
“Yeah! Great!”
Normally June didn’t let him have pickled onions except on the very rare occasions when she was planning to be utterly elsewhere for some hours. For example, say by some miracle her and Meg had managed to arrange to get time off from the slave-galley’s galley to go to a Saturday five o’clock flick in town, June would then let Bob have pickled onions for his tea. And she and Meg would pick up fish and chips or Chinese takeaways in Puriri before coming on home.
June set a large loaf of crusty white bread, the marg, the mousetrap cheese and the homemade pickled onions on the table in front of him. “I’ll make a pot of real tea, shall I?”
“Yeah: great,” he said thankfully.
June began to make a pot of tea. Bob attacked the loaf. “Wasn’t there any sliced bread left?” he said cautiously.
“No. No multi-grain at all.”
“Hell,” said Bob in awe.
“I tried the Superette, too. They didn’t have any bread left.”
“Crikey. Um—can the kids come out?” he said cautiously.
That, however, was going too far, mellowed though she was by confession of her own weakness. “Those little toads!” she said fiercely.
“Oh. Well, righto.”
They’d eaten half the loaf and June had actually got to the point where she’d collapsed in giggles when Bob tried to force a small pickled onion between her lips, when the phone rang. June went off to answer it, as Bob had just put a huge piece of crust in his mouth.
She came back with a peculiar expression on her face. “That was Meg.”
“Mm?” said Bob, withdrawing the Forbidden R. Butler Finger hastily from the jar. Everybody had everybody else’s germs in a family, why she was so bloody particular— “What?” he said in alarm, looking at the expression on her face.
June sat down slowly. “Polly just rang her.”
“Shit, is everyone okay down at the farm? Polly’s dad?”
“Yes, they’re all fine. Um… she was wondering if we—Meg and Bill and all of us, I mean—if we’d like to use their bach for a week!” she gulped.
Bob’s face lit up. Then it fell. “I’ve got to get this bloody order filled for the crafts boutique!” he wailed.
“Yeah. Um—well, if we went on up, maybe you could get it done quicker with us out from under your feet?”
A determined look came over Bob’s face. “Tell ya what I’ll do: I’ll frame up some of those lithographs from that set I did when I was doing Polly’s!”
June just about passed out: the magic word “set” at last! “Yeah, great idea,” she croaked. “Um—the bach is only small, you know, Bob: two rooms, and the small room’s only got two little single beds.”
“Be okay: take us back to our student-flat days, eh?” he said, grinning.
“Mm. Well, Meg and Bill are older than us, I think they ought to have the main room.”
“Yeah, ’course.”
“Meg said Polly said she was sorry she hadn’t thought of it earlier, only with all the aunties and so on staying at their place for Felicity and Ted’s wedding—”
Bob shuddered slightly. “Right.”
“So we can go, then?” she said eagerly.
“Yeah, ’course! –Oh, fuck, what about the boys?”
“Don’t say that! Um—well, Jake’s ringing Bob Grey: he’s going to get him to bring their tents over. The boys’ll love it. And it’s safe as houses up there.”
“Yeah. Hang on: what about Connie, though? They’ll tease the poor little sod unmercifully if she has to share a tent with them.”
“Tease her? They won’t get that far: they’ll have refused point-blank to let her come near them!” said the mother of three male offspring strongly.
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“Um—well, I suppose she can sleep on a sofa in the main room, or something, Meg says it’s quite big,” said June on a guilty note.
“She’ll be getting into their bed before poor old Bill can say ‘Jack Robinson’!” he choked.
“Yes. Don’t laugh, Bob, I think she’s sweet: I really miss the way Mason used to get into ours,” she said wistfully.
Bob smiled a little. “Mm.”
There was a short pause.
“I suppose I’d better let them have some lunch,” said June on a guilty note.
“Mm,” he agreed mildly.
June hurried up the passage.
It did occur to Bob that, if rumour hadn’t lied, this famous bach of the Carranos’, besides being miles up the boo-eye beyond the black stump, had no TV and no video and he rather thought not even a radio, either. Ida had had their old TV fixed (again) as a Christmas surprize for the kids—as well as presents, of course. This time the fixing—he rather thought Bob Grey must have been on the job—had entailed a brand new aerial, which worked. Ivan and Mason, apart from periods spent sulking over not being taken to the airport to met the Winkelmanns, had been glued to it since five a.m. Christmas morning. Er... No, it could stay behind: there definitely was not, he had a feeling in his bones, going to be room in the car for it! Whistling tunelessly under his breath, he inserted the Forbidden R. Butler Finger into the pickled onion jar...
They finally took off, with the tents packed onto the roof-rack of Bill’s station-waggon, around teatime. At one stage Bob had honestly believed that June and Meg were gonna make them put it off till tomorrow because of the Grate Bread-and-Toilet-Paperless Puriri Supermarket Crisis. Fortunately he’d bethought him of his mother’s emergency store cupboard and freezer, and had shot round there like a rocket. Six loaves of thawing bread were now in the boot, a further four were in two chillybins (also Ida’s), and the back seat under the boys’ feet and most of the back window behind the boys’ heads were lined with rolls of toilet paper. Strangely, this last fact had caused Ivan an excruciating embarrassment, but everyone ignored it.
Bill only managed to get them lost once in Carter’s Bay, but fortunately Bob knew the trick of getting out to the roundabout, not to mention the right road to take off the roundabout: the one with the big green sign that indicated you were on the way to Kingfisher Bay, right, and Opononi—wrong: the Opononi by-pass, which was destined to branch off the Inlet road opposite the Kingfisher Bay turnoff, wasn’t even begun, but the makers of such signs were evidently an optimistic crew.
Miles and miles and miles up Carter’s Inlet, June said faintly: “This can’t be it.”
“Must be: there hasn’t been another house for five hundred K or so,” said Bob cheerfully.
“That creosote job’s older than ours!” gasped June.
Bob cast the experienced R. Butler eye over it. “Yeah. About ten years older, I’d say. S’pose she likes it silvery.”
June swallowed. There had been a minor dispute over the old garden furniture earlier in the summer, when Bob had had one of the horrible energetic, doing-everything-up-for-summer fits that sometimes overcame him in early summer. She was about to argue that, old creosote or not, this little wooden house in its wide, unmown paddock could not possibly belong to the Carranos, when Bill pulled up alongside and yelled: “This is it!”
Not only for the reason that he was wearing his Special Holiday Hat, to wit, a bright red cap with a very realistic pink stuffed thing on top of it in the shape of a baby’s bottom, a reliable indicator that he was in a very silly mood indeed, June said weakly: “Are you sure, Bill?”
“Yeah, ’course!”
June still wouldn’t have taken his word for it, only Meg called briskly: “Yes, we’ve been here before. Wait until you see the inside!”
June looked at her dubiously. The tales earlier purveyed by Meg, to wit, of polished kauri floors you could see your face in, Persian rugs everywhere, and genuine objets d’art on the white-painted hessian walls, now seemed to lack a certain verisimilitude. Could Meg have been pulling the leg of humble inhabitants of Blossom Avenue that barely knew her rich friends? She opened her door. “Come on, Bob.”
“Nah! Bring the car up the drive, Jake always does!” shouted Bill breezily.
It wasn’t a drive, but a short stretch of rough gravel which admittedly was wide enough to drive a car onto but which went nowhere near the house, which was set well back from the road, with clumps of bushes at its either side. Not garden-type bushes, scraggy natives. Beyond these you got a glimpse of the water, which must be very near. There was no path to the house. They followed Bill up onto the lawn. Well, grass. Bumpy grass.
Bill got out waving a bunch of keys. “Spare keys, old Bob Grey had ’em,” he explained breezily. June began to wonder how in God’s name she was going to get through a week of Bill being breezy.
The front of the little creosoted house evidently faced onto the Inlet. Well, that was a nice touch, thought June as they trudged round to it. It had a verandah with French windows opening onto it. Holland blinds were drawn right down over these and at the other windows as well.
“Keep the sun off the Persian rugs, ya see!” explained Bill breezily. June gave him a jaundiced look.
Bill opened the French windows—well, first he turned the key the wrong way, but after several people had shouted at him he turned it the right way and flung them wide. Naturally it took a minute to accustom one’s eyes to the dimness...
“Oh, help!” wailed June.
Meg came up very close. “It’s all right,” she said in a comforting voice: “Polly swears Katie Maureen’s wee-ed on those rugs innumerable times, and before then they were wee-ed on by innumerable camels and dragged across the dusty desert and stuff.”
“’Pissed on by innumerable camels’ is the operative phrase, I believe,” corrected Bill solemnly. He went in and started pulling up Carrano Holland blinds in a horribly off-hand, breezy manner. “Good, innit?” he said, coming back to the door and grinning at June.
“Go in, June,” said Meg in a kind voice.
June tottered in.
Bob followed limply. After a few moments’ dazed staring at the crimson Persian rugs on the polished kauri floor his eyes lifted. “My God, that’s a Don Binney!” he said in a shaken voice.
June glanced at it limply. “Oh, yes: Tui, Carter’s Inlet, isn’t it? We’ve got that,” she added.
“We’ve got a cheap print,” said Bob in a hollow voice. “This is It.” He tottered across and gaped at it.
“Polly’s very fond of it,” said Meg.
There was a short silence.
“I love the bedspread and the cushions and things,” said June weakly, looking at the huge bed smack, bang in the middle of the back wall, facing the French doors. So as you could wake up and see the Inlet.
“Yes. Indian cotton, I think. That navy and dark red looks good with the rugs, eh?” said Meg cheerfully. “I think it was very sensible just to cover these divans with this sort of oatmealy colour, don’t you? It would have been too much, otherwise.”
June sat down limply on one of the tailored oatmeal divans under the front windows. “Yes.”
“See the curtains? Aren’t they super?” said Meg on a wistful note.
June had seen the curtains, yes. Full length navy velvet to draw over the French windows and matching shorter navy velvet for the windows behind the divans. “Mm. Super.”
“The kitchen’s all guh-knotty pine!” shouted Bill’s voice informatively. “With yellow vinyl, bit like their kitchen at Pootercow Bay!”
June just swallowed.
“Put that stuff in the fridge, Bill!” shouted Meg.
There was an infinitesimal pause, then the rich, soft, wh-whh... plup! of an expensive fridge with actual seal round its door being opened, and Bill’s voice said in a high, excited squeak: “Ooh!”
“AND LEAVE JAKE’S BEER ALONE!” shouted Meg. She smiled at June and explained, waving to their right: “The little bedroom’s through there. Are you sure you and Bob don’t mind the single beds?”
Bob had torn himself away from the Don Binney and was reverently examining a large blue glass bowl that stood on a beautifully restored antique kauri sideboard very near it. “No, it’ll give me a chance to catch up on some rest,” he said in a vague voice. “Hey, seen this, Meg?”
“Yes. Lovely!” said Meg brightly, nodding.
“Put it down—please,” begged June, screwing up her face.
“Bob’s used to handling arty things and stuff,” said Meg comfortingly.
“Mm.” June drew a deep breath. “The boys,” she said with huge determination: “are going to spend the entire week in the tent, meals and all! And if they need to go to the toilet, they can use the back door!”
“Good idea,” said Meg mildly.
Bob put the blue bowl down.—June sent up a short prayer of gratitude.—“Where are they?” he said without interest. He went over to the door, and laughed.
“What?” said June dully, not turning her head.
“OY!” he shouted, ignoring her. “THIS ISN’T A PIPI BEACH, YA NONGS!”
Answer came there none.
He turned back. grinning. “Connie’s still strapped in, isn’t she?” he said to Meg.
“What? Oh—yeah. They haven’t let her out, have they?”
“Not unless they drowned her immediately, no,” he said, grinning. “Shall I go and get her?”
“Righto, then, Bob: thanks. And there’s a box of stuff under her feet, could you bring that?”
“Wilco!” said Bob cheerfully. He strode off, whistling tunelessly.
“They’re both in awfully good moods,” said June dully.
“Mm. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they, let loose in a bach full of Jake’s beer!”
Their eyes met. June smiled reluctantly. “Mm. –I didn’t really think it’d be this flash,” she admitted.
Meg had realized this. “Well, I’m not very good at describing things.”
“Yes, you are, Meg, it’s exactly like you said.”
There was a short pause.
“It isn’t fair! I wish it was mine!” cried June.
Meg patted her shoulder, grinning. “Yeah. Only recollect what goes along with t!”
“Eh?”
Grinning, Meg said: “Well, ours can be bad enough when they get into a bloody all-boys huddle, but Polly has to put up with a macho twerp all the time!”
Their eyes met again. Abruptly June collapsed in an awful sniggering fit.
Meg laughed, too, but inwardly she was sort of sagging. It had been touch and go, there, for a minute or two: she’d been afraid June was going to burst into tears. That was rather the effect the Carranos’ bach did tend to have on the uninitiated, true; only it wasn’t the way you wanted to start a week’s holiday, exactly. Phew!
After a week’s effort Sol had finally persuaded Junior to get out in the sun and relax. And Abe not to buy that cabin-cruiser, but that was another story. Jimmy Burton was in charge of the store today: a week of the Great Noo Zealand Christmas Holidays at home with his younger brothers and sisters had rapidly palled, as Sol had known it would, and he was only too glad to be able to come back to work and earn some cash, and so the rest of ’em were headed up the Inlet for a peaceful day far from the madding motellers.
Sol was in his own runabout with Michaela, a hamper, and Junior, while Abe was in one of the store’s runabouts with The Giant Sun Umbrella and a polystyrene container that you coulda called a hamper but that the locals called a chillybin because for it kept things chilly and the Aussies, believe it or believe not, called an “esky” because for why the mind boggled. Sol sold ’em at the store: they were real popular with the boating crowd, specially the boating crowd that had forgotten it might need to eat or drink or lost its last one overboard during the last drunken party over to Kawau Island. With terrific difficulty he had persuaded Jimmy towards the beginning of this season to let him paint a new sign for ’em that said: “CHILLYBINS. ESKIES. Picnic hampers”—plus an extortionate amount of dollars. The effort had been rewarded because so far over the holiday fifteen separate Aussies and two dozen assorted Yanks or Limeys had come in and said with huge sighs of relief: “Oh: you do sell eskies/hampers!” Plus of course the normal fourteen dozen or so locals that had said: “Oh: you do sell chillybins!”
Milly Watson was still on vacation and Akiko was still down at the Mitchells’ farm with the Carranos so the crafts boutique was closed. And to say truth Sol was beginning to get just a little fed up with the chore of managing the boutique as well as the store. If he could have afforded to put in an experienced manageress he would have; but he couldn’t. And Milly, who you mighta thought mighta done it, was one of them middle-aged females who always bleated that they couldn’t before stopping to think that perhaps they might. They were pretty common in these here parts, Sol was beginning to discover. The type was less common back home, maybe it was a gene that Yankee enterprise had long since bred out? Well, he didn’t know: only it was Helluva trying to have to deal with, day in, day out.
After they’d gone round to the boatyard and collected ’em, Euan was in a third runabout with Starsky and Little Abe. The latter had not gotten up at crack of dawn to get there, he had slept over with Euan and Starsky, but as normally Euan did get up at crack of dawn and without any doubt whatsoever would have made the boys do likewise, you could chalk that one up as a red-letter day in the Winkelmann family annals, yes, sir!
Sol led ’em up to Sol’s Cove (he and Michaela had officially named it, Christmas Day, sometimes that seemed a lifetime ago). No-one else had yet discovered it: it was just a-settin’ there, all quiet and peaceful-like. He hadn’t yet let on to Abe it was Sol’s Cove, but he wasn’t taking any bets Michaela wouldn’t let it out all innocent in the course of the day.
It was still quite early but Abe embarked on a wrassle with The Giant Sun Umbrella regardless.
Little Abe began to scream he wasn’t gonna have none of that stuff on him but Starsky floored him with a brief dissertation on the ozone layer, the Antar’tic Hole, aerosol sprays and emissions from refrigerators, and after that Sol was home laughin’. He smothered the both of ’em in sunscreen cream. As Euan was also smothering himself the wind woulda been taken outa Little Abe’s sails in any case. Euan also anointed his nose carefully with pink paint. Michaela looked at it enviously and said: “That stuff’s awfully expensive.”
Euan offered it to her immediately, noting: “The original white zinc stuff’s not that dear, only it has gone up.”
“Yes, it’s got trendy,” she said seriously, carefully anointing her nose.
“C’n I?” gasped Starsky.
Tolerantly Euan let him paint his nose. After that if anyone had been worritin’ theirselves some about Little Abe’s nose, they was home laughin’.
Sol then shook Junior back to life and made him smother himself in sunscreen cream.
“Huh? Oh—sure, Ruthie says they got more ultra-violet down here,” he said foggily. Little Abe immediately favoured him with a brief dissertation on the ozone laver, the Antar’tic Hole, aerosol sprays and emissions from refrigerators.
Sol didn’t point out that even in Noo Zealand the more literate part of the population pronounced it “Antarctic” because for one thing he didn’t believe for one moment a single member of the Winkelmann family would ever have noticed the lapse and for another, he was just so damned relieved to see Michaela listening and nodding seriously.
Starsky and Little Abe then rushed up across the grass and started doing their best to destroy the Environment by tearing hunks off of trees to build a hut, but if no-one else was going to point out this inconsistency in their attitude to the Environment, Sol sure as Hell wasn’t. For the one thing, it was obviously gonna keep them out of everyone’s hair for hours.
After that he thought he better give Abe a hand with The Giant Sun Umbrella, because for it was winnin’. When it had wrassled the both of them to their knees he panted: “Whose idea was this, anyroad?”
“Shut up!” panted Abe.
There was a short pause for panting.
“Now!” gasped Abe. “You hold this end in the sand, see, and—”
Junior wandered over and said in a surprized voice: “Pop, I don’t think you’re doing that right. We got one just like it: Ruthie says—”
“GEDDOUDA HERE!” howled his father.
Looking mildly surprized, Junior wandered off.
They finally got the thing up but they were well into injury tine by the end of it.
Abe then spread a plaid rug under it. Sol looked at it dubiously, it wasn’t no S. Winkelmann rug, it was clean, fluffy and— “Jesus Christ, is this one of them mixed wool and mohair things from the tourist-trap boutique at the Royal K?”
“Sure! They got good rugs there!”
Sol shut his eyes.
“Hey, what is it with you, fella?”
“Abe, those are the dearest rugs bar none—bar none,” he said with emphasis, “in the entire country. Believe it!” he added as Abe opened his mouth.
“Oh. –Well, okay, Sol, boy,” he said, rallying, “you tell me where else I was gonna find a rug in these parts, New Year’s Eve!”
He had a point. “You gotta point.”
“Say what,” he remarked amiably, but with evident satisfaction. He fetched the hampers and set ’em neatly on the rug. Then he sat down on the rug, opened a hamper, and opened one.
“Abe, for Chrissakes, it’s barely ten in the morning,” sighed Sol. “Why punish your liver, just because Pat’s not here?”
“Wal, I don’t see none of that there billy tea,” he said pointedly: “that some folks was a-goin’ on about last night until other folks was well nigh dead of boredom.”
Euan and Michaela had come up during this exchange and listened unashamedly. Now Euan said with interest: “They’re rather alike, aren’t they?”
Michaela nodded seriously. “That’s what I was thinking.”
Euan’s shoulders quivered but he said to Sol: “Shall I build a fire?”
Sol had been momentarily struck dumb with indignation so Abe said: “He cain’t talk, Euan, he’s struck dumb, no-one never told him before he got it from the Winkelmann side.”
Euan choked.
“Yeah, sure, build a campfire,” Abe continued cheerfully: “a fire’s always good, huh?”
Sol recovered the power of speech and said: “Even without no billy tea.”
Abe just snorted mildly.
Junior had wandered up again. “I’d sure like a cup of tea, if there was one on offer,” he said wistfully.
“JUNIOR!” shouted Sol.
“Huh? Sol, you know I can’t build a campfire, I’d offer like a shot if I thought I could, only you know what happened that last time you and Gabe took me camp—”
“YES!” shouted Sol. “Not that! SIT—DOWN!”
“Huh?”
“I think he’s implying,” said Euan kindly, laying a hand on his shoulder, “that you’re wandering about like a lost soul.”
“Oh,” said Junior, looking puzzled. “Well, until Pop got the sun umbrella up there wasn’t anywhere to sit.”
Sol gulped. Even Euan swallowed.
“You could come for a walk down the beach with me,” said Michaela kindly. “We could look for driftwood for the fire.”
Junior’s face lit up. “Okay!” They walked off forthwith.
Sol’s legs gave under him and he sank down onto the most expensive plaid rug in the country.
“Yah,” noted Abe airily.
“Yeah: sucks, boo,” agreed Euan in his vernacular. “Are you gonna give me your expert opinion on where to build this fire, Sol, or not?”
“Uh—yeah. Hang on, we better make it one that we can barbecue over. I got my barbecue grill in the boat,” he admitted.
“Good,” said Euan mildly.
“Wait,” said Abe hoarsely.
They looked at him enquiringly, and waited.
“You don’t mean to tell me,” he said weakly to Sol: “that you still got— that it’s the barbecue grill?”
“Looks a bit like a radiator grille off a bull-nosed Riley,” explained Euan kindly. “Dates from around 1492,” he added kindly.
“Yeah. The original one Columbus used,” agreed Abe weakly.
There was a brief silence.
“You mean you actually brung that out here with ya?” he croaked.
“Sucks, boo,” noted Sol airily, walking off.
By eleven-fifteen there was still no sign of the Butlers and Bill’s lot, who were supposed to be joining them for the picnic lunch, and Sol was beginning to wonder if they’d eaten themselves to death on the contents of Polly’s freezer, or drunk themselves to death on the contents of Jake’s booze cupboard or, in the case of Bill, both. But then there was a horrible sputtering, farting noise and a runabout wove into sight, veering madly all over the inlet. They watched with interest as it ran aground on a sandbank.
“What fool let Bill steer?” wondered Euan, as the frightening hat bent agitatedly over the side.
Sol peered. “Connie, I think. –Uh, nope: the responsibility’s equally hers and Mason’s,” he determined, as another small life-jacketed figure rose to peer interestedly over the side and Bill screamed on the mild morning air: “Don’t do that, you’ll tip us over!”
“What fool let the two littlies in a boat with That?” Euan then croaked.
Needless to say this conversation was taking place at the water’s edge. Where they two of them had discovered it was possible to get yourself whilst your jaw was a-saggin’ and your knees had gone rubbery and without even bein’ aware you was doin’ it.
Abe came up and put a fatherly hand on Euan’s shoulder. “You better get on out and haul them off,” he noted. “Well, rescue them kids,” he amended, grinning.
“Yeah,” said Euan, gulping. “I’ll just— BILL!” he shouted. “LEAVE IT!”
Bill had been visibly about to gun the outboard. “It’s all right!” he called. “Have her off in a jiffy!”
“NO-O!” screamed Euan desperately.
“Idiot,” noted Sol. “We’da hadda tear that outboard right down and rebuild ’er, how much do you think we coulda charged for a nice little job like that?”
“Bill hasn’t got any money,” said Euan tersely, hopping into a runabout. “DON’T—DO—ANYTHING!” he shouted terribly.
Bill watched meekly as Euan started up and steered out cautiously, with due precautions as to sandbanks, to rescue him. They heard him say: “Have you got a rope, though?” and Euan wither him utterly and then they didn’t hear him say anything more.
Euan lifted the littlies into his runabout and brought them straight in. Abe grabbed Connie immediately.
“We came in a boat!” she panted.
“I gotta lifejacket!” panted Mason. He wasn’t all that macho when his big brothers weren’t there to set him a bad example.
Sol had grabbed him immediately. “Yeah, you look great: like a real dinkum sailor, huh?”
“Yeah!” he beamed. “I can steer! Bill let me steer!”
“Pity he didn’t let ya steer all the way,” noted Starsky in a sort of numbed voice. Apparently it had never occurred to him heretofore that their neighbour down at Number 9, even though Grown Up, was a cack-handed twat.
Little Abe had also emerged from the hut as the farting and stuttering of the outboard had rent the morning air. He also had been temporarily struck dumb. It was true his own father was also cack-handed but then no-one in the Winkelmann home circle didn’t let Junior nowheres near the steerin’ end of a boat, no sir.
“Jeez, ya see that?” he finally breathed. “Straight into the sandbank and whammo!”
“Puts it real well,” noted Sol.
“Jeez, don’t he know nothing about boats?” the boy croaked.
“Wal, no,” allowed Sol fairly.
“Jeez!” he breathed.
Starsky gulped. “Where’s Dad?” he wondered feebly.
Sol had two guesses: One, he was snoring his head off in Jake Carrano’s bach under the influence of Jake Carrano’s booze: Two, he had fallen overboard some time back and Bill had never noticed. But on the whole Starsky was a mite too young for either of them, so he refrained.
Abe gave Connie a smacking kiss. “I guess they shoulda let Connie and Mason take turns steering, huh? Where’s your mom, Connie?”
“Gone a shops,” she said indifferently. “C’n I come under your big umbrella?”
“Huh? Oh—sure—in a minute, huh? Let’s just see if Euan manages to get your daddy off of that sandbank, huh?”
“He can leave him, for mine, let’s just see if he manages to get the boat off,” muttered Sol.
Mason returned to this: “Mum and Dad’s gone a shops, too.”
No-one had taken much notice of Connie’s remark, after all she was only six. But Mason was going on nine, now. So there was a puzzled silence. Finally Michaela said: “Which shops, Mason?”
Mason obviously didn’t know. “Big shops,” he ventured.
“Superette!” said Connie brightly.
“Shut up, that’s down in Puriri,” noted Starsky. “Ooh!” he gulped as Bill nearly fell in.
“What’s keepin’ that hat on, Superglue?” wondered Abe under his breath.
“Gotta ’lastic. Under a chin,” explained Connie. She beamed. “Like mine!” She held up her little satiny chin. Sure enough, the battered straw thing that did duty for a sunhat was held on by a grubby piece of elastic.
Abe gulped. “I see, sweetie,” he said numbly.
“Bill ain’t got no false pride,” explained Sol kindly,
“Hell, he ain’t got no pride at all!” gulped Abe.
“Or you could put it like that,” he noted.
There was a short silence. Some of them were wondering if Euan would have to get on down the boatyard and fetch a bargepole to shove it off.
“Sol, you did tell June and Meg that Swadlings’ wouldn’t be open, didn’t you?” said Michaela nervously.
“Y— Uh, I told ’em they was up at the Bay of Islands over the weekend...”
“That was last weekend,” noted Abe with his usual commercial acumen.
“Yeah!” gulped Starsky. “Help, Mum’ll be furious if she went all the way into Carter’s Bay and the shop was closed!”
“Puts it real well,” noted Sol.
“Well, maybe somewheres else’ll be open!” said Junior brightly.
“NO!” they all shouted except Mason and Connie.
“—No,” echoed Connie gamely.
“There isn’t anywheres else,” explained Little Abe tersely. Boy, some guys sure had dumb fathers!
“Mason, did your mom and Connie’s mom go on down to Puriri shops?” asked Abe with his usual commercial acumen.
“Um... Dunno. They went to the big shops, eh, Connie?” he produced.
“Big shops…” she said vaguely. “HULLO, DADDY!” she screamed.
Bill got out of Euan’s runabout, grinning unabashedly. “Gidday, gidday,” he said amiably. “He thinks it might be easier without me weighing it down.”
“Something like that,” said Euan grimly. “Might have to float ’er off,” he noted to Sol. Sol just raised his eyebrows slightly. “Yeah,” acknowledged Euan. “Hey, Starsky, can you nip up and bring me the longest branch from your hut?”
Starsky opened his mouth to whinge, then realized that in the circumstances that would be to align himself with the wrong peer group entirely. Not to say make him look approximately the world’s biggest twat after W. Coggins, Esq. “Yeah, righto! We’ll shove ’er off, eh? Come on, Little Abe!” he gasped.
Little Abe was a sharp kid, you could give him that. He never said not one word about spoilin’ the hut, just raced off like the wind in Starsky’s wake.
“Bill,” said the ever-optimistic Junior: “which store have your wife and June gone to?”
“Uh—dunno,” the Coggins brain produced. Sol had a fair idea it wasn’t just the influence of the hat percolatin’ down to it, neither.
“Big shops,” offered Connie.
“Puriri shops,” offered Mason.
“Uh—don’t think so,” he said, scratching the whiskers.
“There, see, he ain’t shaved, neither!” said Abe triumphantly to his son.
“Pop,” said Junior, writhing: “he’s not staying at the Royal Kingfisher Hotel.”
“So?”
Junior swallowed.
“We on vacation, or not?”
Junior swallowed again.
By the time Bill had sat down under the sun umbrella, opened Abe’s hamper, and opened one, he had more or less remembered that Meg and June had said they might go for a foray over—um—that jumping-off place for Kawau. He thought. To Junior’s kindly enquiry after Roger he replied blankly that he was okay—well, they hadn’t heard anything to the contrary, so probably he hadn’t burned the house down yet. He then remembered that he’d forgotten Ivan—
But Sol was already halfway down the beach streaking for the runabout. It was only five minutes or so up the Inlet, and sure, Ivan was a big boy now, Sol guessed he must be all of eleven, but nevertheless those were five of the most heart-stoppin’ minutes of S. Winkelmann’s entire existence.
Ivan was sitting placidly on the low bank of the Carranos’ little beach reading a comic.
“Hullo,” he said mildly.
“Hi, Ivan,” croaked Sol. “You all ready, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“No more of ’em inside, huh?” croaked Sol.
Ivan replied literally in the way of his kind: “No, Mum and Dad and Meg have gone off to find a shop that sells that fancy bottled water, because Dad and Bill drunk all Polly an’ Jake’s. And the twins are walking, they left ages ago.”
“Bob and Bill were drinking water?” gulped Sol.
Ivan looked mildly puzzled. “Um... I think Dad said that lots of wine makes you thirsty,” he reported in a dubious voice.
“Oh! Yeah, it sure does in the quantities they’ll have drunk it,” he recognized. “Bottled water, huh?”
Ivan nodded.
“Jesus, I think they might have to go all the way down to— Jesus, the Puriri supermarkets won’t be open, will they, Ivan?”
“Dad said they might be and Mum said he was an idiot,” he reported.
Uh-huh.
“They went somewhere else, I think,” he reported vaguely.
Driving madly all over the North Island, desperately seeking bottled water... Yeah. And he didn’t believe the “ages ago” bit, kids had no sense of time, but if the Michael and Andrew didn’t turn up at the cove pretty soon Someone was gonna have to trudge off up the road lookin’ for ’em...
Ivan had returned to his comic. He looked up and added: “Dad said those shops wouldn’t be open, either. Can we go?”
“Oh, sure! Uh—you all ready?”
He looked all ready, he had his lifejacket on. Well, his lifejacket and his swimming trunks.
“Yeah,” he said vaguely, getting up.
“Why didn’t you come with the others?” asked Sol in a very weak voice, though he had sworn to himself he wouldn’t.
Ivan looked vague. “I wasn’t ready. Um, there’s a chillybin in there,” he offered.
Sol gulped. “You mean the house isn’t locked?”
“Bach,” Ivan corrected him firmly. “No.” Suddenly he opened a warm, grimy, sticky hand and thrust it at Sol.
Sol took the warm, grimy, sticky keys gingerly. “Okay, you wanna show me this hamp— chillybin?”
Ivan duly did so. Sol checked the back door while he was at it: it was unlocked, all rightee. Jee-sus! He led the way out. On the front verandah Ivan reported in a vague voice: “We’re not supposed to come this way.”
Sol was locking the French door “Huh? Oh: across the Persian rugs and stuff? No, I don’t guess you are. Never mind, you look clean enough.”
Ivan examined the soles of his feet. Pitch black. “Yeah,” he agreed.
Well, nothing had come off onto the Persian rugs, true. Sol tottered down to the runabout.
“This is keen! C’n I steer?”
Sol let him steer for a bit, he couldn’t do worse than Bill, that was for sure.
The twins turned up around twelve, just when Sol was really starting to worry. “Hey, it’s keen back there! Hey, we saw a snake!”
Several people immediately bellowed: “THERE AREN’T ANY SNAKES IN NEW ZEALAND!” so Sol gathered that Michaela, Euan, Junior and Abe had all been as worried about the dumb little jerks as he had. Mason then also bellowed it but Sol had a fair idea that was because he was real pissed off at having been unanimously excluded from the hut as Too Little by Starsky, Little Abe and Ivan.
Pausing only to sneer through their noses at Mason: “Heeow would YEW kneeow?” the twins went off to the hut.
“I did make them put sunscreen cream on,” said Bill in an apologetic voice.
“Look, jest get back in that there doghouse!” Sol ordered him heatedly. “Say, Junior, you recall that way we usedta build a huge great sand boat when you was little?”
Junior’s face lit up. “Yeah!”
“Sand boat?” said Mason in a rude voice.
“San’ castle!” cried Connie.
“Yeah. Like a full-size boat. That you can sit in,” explained Junior eagerly.
“Hey, I remember!” said Abe eagerly.
Junior leapt up. “Come on, Pop! Come on, Sol! Over here!”
Junior and Abe, pausing only to wrest a couple of kiddies’ beach spades off of Connie and Mason, shot down the beach and began arguing hotly over the best position to build a boat that, after five hours’ concerted effort, you might sit in and gradually have the tide come and fill up as you sat. Provided, that was, that there was a decent tide.
After a few minutes Euan said kindly: “Possibly someone should tell them that although this is a tidal inlet—”
“Yeah. But on the other hand, iffen you dig more’n six inches down, it’ll fill with water anyways,” noted Sol.
Euan grinned and got up. “Yeah. Come on, Michaela. –Put your hat on,” he added automatically. Michaela put her hat on and they hurried off, Euan ordering her on the way to look out for large pieces of shell, suitable for digging with.
“Sand boat,” said Connie in a puzzled voice.
“Yeah,” agreed Sol, picking her up and hugging her. “Come on, Connie, you wanna help build a great big sand boat that’ll fill up with water that you can sit in?”
“Yeah!”
“Me, too!” wailed Mason, grabbing at Sol’s leg.
Gasping, he conceded: “Yeah, sure: you, too, Mason.” He juggled Connie onto one hip one-handed and removed Mason’s hand from in amongst the hair and flesh of the opposite thigh. “Come on, we’ll all help build the big sand boat, huh?”
“Yeah, and Starsky an’ Ivan can’t come in it!” said Mason fiercely.
“They sure as Hell can’t!” he agreed fiercely.
“The twins can’t come in it either!” cried Connie.
“Too right,” agreed Sol.
“Little Abe can’t come in it EITHER!” shouted Mason.
“You said it, kid,” said Little Abe’s great-uncle with feeling. “Come on, now!”
They hurried down the beach and joined the other kiddies at the embryo great big sand boat.
When June, Bob and Meg finally made it about one-thirty, after several plunges through the undergrowth to wrong little coves entirely, they were still hard at it.
“What are they up to?” said Meg dazedly.
“It’s a big sand castle... I think,” said June weakly. “It must be a medieval one: you know, with an outer wall and, um, moat.”
“It’s a bloody funny shape for a medieval castle,” said Meg dazedly. “And why are they letting Connie sit in the middle of it?”
“I know what it is!” cried Bob suddenly. “We used to make them when I was—” He was off and running.
“God, it’s a male peer group,” said Meg grimly.
“No, it isn’t!” replied June with a nervous giggle: “Connie and Michaela are in it!”
“All right, it’s a—” Meg’s eyes narrowed. “A sub-adult peer group,” she said grimly. “A demonstration of the Peter Pan syndrome in action. Them as never grow up and them as haven’t yet.”
June gulped. “Yeah.”
“None of them have thought about L,U,N,C,H, of course,” noted Meg grimly.
“Um—well, it looks as if they’ve had a fire at one stage,” said June weakly.
Meg took a deep breath. “Can’t any of them do ANYTHING right?”
June chewed her lip. “We are on holiday, Meg.”
“Yeah, but wouldn’t you think just for once—!” Meg breathed heavily for a while.
June looked at her anxiously.
“Oh, well,” she said.
June smiled. “I think I might go for a dip: I don’t care whether it’s supposed to be lunchtime or not, I’m awfully sticky.”
“After all that vain searching for Évian, yes,” agreed Meg grimly.
“I think I’ve seen it in The Deli,” said June. “We could get some next week. Well, tomorrow or the next day, probably.”
“Yes, well, we’d better: Akiko’ll be arriving any day now and may justifiably wonder why her employers’ entire stock of expensive imported bottled water has disappeared,” said Meg awfully, walking down towards the sun umbrella.
Under it she found Bill. Under the hat. “I might have known!”
Bill sat up with a start. “Norra sleep—”
“You were so! Well, you can blimmin’ well come for a swim with us!”
“All right,” he said amiably, blinking. “Ooh, you gonna do a strip-tease, June?” he added eagerly, as June began to undress.
“She’s got her togs on underneath, fool!” said Meg fiercely, beginning to undress.
“Oh,” he said sadly. After a minute he offered sadly: “I’ve only got my shorts on.”
“Good, they’ll do for togs,” said Meg immediately. “Come ON!”
Bill shambled after them to the water with a hang-dog expression on his face. Once down there, though, and once they’d waded out a hundred yards or so, June expressing astonishment that it was just as shallow here as it was up at the Carranos’ bach, he cheered up immensely and was soon splashing them and ducking them and—
“What the Hell came over him?” panted June as they escaped at last and he began to pretend to be a whale.
“Dunno!” gasped Meg. “Oxygen round the brain for the first time this week, I think!”
They ran up to the sun umbrella and grabbed up their towels.
“Ooh, yes!” gasped June, catching sight of the hat and realizing what she meant. “Must be!” She giggled, but she also looked longingly at the hat.
“Don’t you dare!” cried Meg.
June towelled herself slowly, looking longingly at the hat.
“Great, huh?” said a growly voice behind them. June gave a yelp and leapt ten feet.
“Um—yes, it is quite good,” admitted Meg reluctantly. “He got it second-hand at the last school fair. How are you, Abe?”
“Swell!” he assured them. “Go on, June: try it on!” he encouraged her.
Beaming, June tried on the hat. “How do I look?”
“Frightful,” said Meg clinically.
June beamed.
Abe eyed her faded pale blue one-piece. “Wal, you sure as Hell look a million times better’n him, June, honey!”
June gave a high-pitched giggle. Abe smirked.
“Come on,” said Meg resignedly. “What about lunch?”
But evidently—or so Abe maintained—it was a Winkelmann family rule that ladies didn’t get to move a finger at beach barbecues. Uh-uh. No way. He would round up— He went and ruthlessly rounded up Sol and Junior. Euan, looking a trifle sheepish, followed in their wake but Bob remained brazenly with the sand boat.
… “This is the life,” admitted June, some forty minutes later, lying back under the sun umbrella full of a mixture of barbecued beef sausage, barbecued sweetcorn, Sol’s homemade wholemeal bread, and light-beer.
Meg burped contentedly. “Ooh—pardon! –I’ll say!”
“More beer-yuh!” wailed Connie.
Meg sat up groggily. “Bill! You didn’t—?”
“Well, the boys are drinking it, didn’t expect me to be sexist, didja, and stop the poor little thing?”
The boys were drinking it because they’d liberated some and taken it to the hut and if that meant they were intending to have their lunch in the hut, everyone had decided they were welcome to it. Besides, it was only light-beer.
“More beer-yuh!” wailed Connie.
“Bill, don’t give her any more! Intoxication depends largely on body weight! Look at how small she is!” said Meg strongly.
Bill blinked at her. “Nah, it’s the togs that are small, Meg, all this stuff round the outside of ’em’s—”
“Don’t SAY things like that!” she cried.
“More beer-yuh!” wailed Connie.
“I think she’s pretty drunk already,” noted Euan, looking at her critically.
Immediately Connie decided: “I love Euan!” and got on his knee. One or two people looked sideways at Euan’s very pleasant, well muscled, tanned young thighs and thought: Lucky kid.
“C’n I’ve some of your beer, Euan?” she asked, looking up at him soulfully.
“See?” said Meg tiredly, dragging her eyes away from his thighs.
“Have some Coke, Connie. Look, Euan’s having Coke!” he said, suiting the action to the word.
Connie condescended to drink out of Euan’s Coke can. He looked at them desperately after she’d done so.
“Hah, hah,” noted Connie’s proud mother.
“Sucks,” agreed Connie’s proud father.
“What did you expect?” added June, casting a sour glance at what she could see of the thighs.
“Have some more, Connie,” said Euan weakly.
“No, ’s your turn now!” she said brightly.
At this Michaela promptly collapsed in a sniggering fit. Meg, with a last wistful glance at what she could see of the thighs, followed suit. So did Bill and June.
Bob had long since lost interest: he was investigating a funny-looking bottle in their chillybin that hadn’t been there when him and June and Meg had left the bach...
Quite some time later Bill was flat on his back under the hat, snoring, Abe was flat on his back snoring, and Meg and June were just flat on their backs, alternately closing their eyes restfully under their sunglasses and gazing restfully up at the red and green stripes of the umbrella.
Sol and Michaela had gone for a walk together and June and Meg were prepared to discuss this fact, only not quite yet. Bob, Junior and Euan had returned to the sand boat and, having righted the bits that the eager but ignorant Mason and Connie had ruined, were eagerly getting on with it. Connie and Mason were being allowed to carry things for them.
Eventually Connie came up, panting, and tugged at Abe’s hand. “Abe, Abe!”
“Uh?”
“Come on! You gotta help us!”
“Uh?” he said, varying the note somewhat.
Mason ran up and seized his other hand. “Abe, Abe!”
Abe groaned.
“Come on! Junior says you gotta putta mast in!” cried Mason.
“Putta mast in,” agreed Connie, vague but willing.
Abe groaned and sat up. “Boy,” he said, putting his hand on his middle: “those sausages were fillin’, huh?”
“Real meat,” said June with her eyes shut under her sunglasses.
“Mm, from John Aitken’s real butcher,” said Meg with her eyes shut under her sunglasses.
“Makes ’em himself,” murmured June.
“Now, would there be a market for them?” he wondered.
“No,” they both said immediately.
Abe sighed. “I don’t guess so. Boy, they was good, though. –Huh?” he said to the two objects tugging his arms out of their sockets. “Oh, the mast! Sure, sure! Now, first we gotta find a good long piece of—” He scrambled up and went off, holding their hands.
“He’s very nice,” said June with her eyes shut under her sunglasses.
“Mm.”
After a few moments Meg rolled onto her side and added, propping herself on hr elbow: “Far too nice for that awful Pat woman!”
“Yeah. Well, she did buy some of Michaela’s pots... But, yeah.” June took off her sunglasses and yawned. “Trade That in for one like Abe,” she suggested, looking at it with loathing.
Meg also looked at it with loathing. “I’d like to!”
From under the hat Bill whinged: “What’ve I done?”
“Largely, nothing,” said Meg grimly. She got up, and picked up her sunhat. “Come on, June.”
June groaned, but got up obligingly.
Under the sun umbrella Bill removed the hat, and groaned.
“In his way, Abe’s almost as nice as Sol, really,” said June with a smile as they wandered over to the low point.
Meg glanced back at Abe and Connie earnestly comparing the length of good long sticks and smiled. “Mm.” The smile then faded and she added viciously: “Almost! Pity someone didn’t point that out forcibly to Phoebe before she gave him the Order of the Boot! What does the woman want, for God’s sake, Prince Charming?”
They had, actually, already had this conversation during the last few weeks. Once or twice. “Dunno. Must do,” June agreed.
They picked their way over a sort of rocky outcrop.
“Well, what do you think about Michaela?” asked June eagerly.
Meg swallowed. “Um—well, I’ve said, haven’t I? I think it’d be ideal.”
“Yes, but how far has it got?” said June tensely.
“Um... Well, not very far, I wouldn’t say, June,” said Meg reluctantly. “Well, I mean, didn’t Bob say the boys fetched her from next-door on Boxing Day?”
June scowled. “Yeah.”
“Well, there you are. They can’t be sleeping together yet.”
“Well, why aren’t they sleeping together?” cried June crossly.
“Um—maybe it’s a bit too soon. You know, after Phoebe. Well, I mean, she only just went off to Tasmania before Christmas,” said Meg in a feeble voice.
“Huh!”
“I suppose men have certain—um—sensitivities, too,” ventured Meg uncertainly.
“Pooh! And anyway he was keen as keen, you could see that, that time he had tea with us! “
“What? Oh, the roast pork.—That was great.—Um, yeah, but all the same, June, it is a bit soon.”
June scowled. “Yes. All right.
They walked on a bit in silence. After a while, in an absent-minded way, June wandered into the shallows. Meg joined her. Ooh, lovely! The water was warm! They paddled on...
Sol and Michaela had come back. Michaela joined the sand boat builders eagerly but Sol sat down heavily beside Bill, sighing. “June and Meg given it away?”
“Mm? No, they went off in the other direction from you, I think.” Bill investigated his chillybin. He found the strangely-shaped bottle. “Ah! –Tact.” he explained.
“Huh? Oh! Yeah—sure,” said Sol with a grin. “What is that?” he added weakly.
“If Bob’s left any,” said Bill, looking critically at the label, “it’s a genuine Can’t-Pronounce-It from Can’t-Pronounce-It.”
Sol looked at the label. Impenetrable. “Maybe Polly had it up here for cooking,” he gulped.
“Or possibly for putting into up-market cocktails,” said Bill mildly, producing a plastic cup from the hamper. He poured.
“Hell, you can’t drink that much, Bill! Not of that stuff!”
Bill held out the plastic cup. “No, thought you might like half.”
“Uh—thanks.” Sol sipped weakly.
“What’s it taste like?” asked Bill eagerly.
“Genuine Cain’t-Pronounce-It from Cain’t-Pronounce-it,” admitted Sol, passing it back.
Bill tasted it eagerly. “Crumbs,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” Sol accepted the paper cup. He sipped.
After the paper cup had passed back and forth several times Bill said slowly: “Hey, if I was to say something, wouldja swear you’d never breathe a word to any of Them?”
“What: to assorted females?”
“Yeah,” he said simply.
“I swear on the flag.”
“Good.” Bill scratched the whiskers. “Ginny Austin,” he said finally.
Sol swallowed.
Bill waggled the eyebrows knowingly. “Yeah. Well, I’ll tell what I know, and you can tell what you know, and then we’ll take a blood oath never to breathe a word, okay?”
“Yeah,” he said sourly.
Bill related the saga of the pineapple and the Saturday shopping.
Sol told him of seeing Ginny in Ralph Overdale’s car, Christmas Day.
Bill knocked back the last of the Can’t-Pronounce-It from the cup. “Mum’s the word,” he concluded sourly. “If Meg and June get hold of it, that’ll be our peaceful holiday down the gurgler and no mistake.
“Yeah. Uh—look, if they are having a thing,” he said awkwardly. “I don’t see that it can do her much harm. Well—older man, all that,” he said uneasily as Bill goggled at him. “Widen her horizons some, teach her what’s it all about?”
“John Aitken said something like that.” He got up. “I didn’t believe him any more than I believe you.” He mooched off, scowling.
Sol sighed. Well, at least Bill had had the sense not to mention it to Meg, he thought with relief, unaware that very shortly, Fate was about to strike.
Fate struck the following weekend. Meg and June had agreed, when Polly had rung again, that they’d love to stay on for the weekend, if she was sure— Polly had been sure, and Akiko would be coming up from the farm on the Monday, so the easiest thing would be to leave the keys with Sol. They’d agreed to this. Meg had then guiltily rung Roger at home but he’d been astounded to hear from her and assured her, on being asked, that everything was okay, why wouldn’t it be?
On the Saturday, having earlier ascertained that Swadlings’ dairy would be open, Meg and June went for an all-girls trip into Carter’s Bay. June thought she might check out the Garden Centre while she was at it. At the Garden Centre they bumped into Daphne Green, Polly’s housekeeper. Of course, her aunt lived up here, didn’t she?—Yes, and Tim really should be back at work but they thought they’d stay just for the weekend, and the kids loved it at Aunty Kath’s…
Meg invited them eagerly round for afternoon tea, ably seconded by June.
The Greens turned up for afternoon tea in plenty of time, Daphne in a well-ironed sunfrock and Tim, looking washed, scrubbed and cross, in a well-ironed shirt and well-ironed shorts. The kids looked sort of similar. Tim’s eye brightened immediately, however, when Bill led him gently round to the Inlet side of the house and explained: “This is what we’re doing.”
They had unearthed some collapsed deckchairs from the bach’s shed and, with much effort and several badly pinched fingers and thumbs, had set them up. Plus a couple of collapsed sun umbrellas, with ditto. Tim sank into a deckchair immediately. Bill pressed a frosted can tenderly into his hand.
“He could have been doing that at Aunty Kath’s!” noted Daphne from the French doors.
“You mean he would have been doing that at Aunty Kath’s,” corrected Meg.
Daphne gave a high-pitched giggle. “Yeah!”
“Come and sit down,” said Meg kindly, gesturing to the three deckchairs set on the verandah in the shade.
Daphne sat down gratefully, pausing only to shout: “Chrissy, if the boys don’t want you, leave them ALONE! –She’s a tomboy,” she explained sadly.
“Mm. How’s she getting on with the tennis?” asked Meg kindly.
Daphne told them about that and the conversation wandered off onto schools, and the price of school shoes, and the teachers the kids might expect to have this year, and the price of school uniforms for those who were at Puriri High, and the awful price of school shoes, and the rigours of Christmas, and the row Tim and Mum had had—though actually, you couldn’t entirely blame him: Mum was pretty ghastly, she kept giving Chrissy pink dresses and stuff...
And then it was time for afternoon tea, more or less, and after about fifteen kids had been driven off it they had it. Tomato sandwiches and jammy scones. Pretty much what the Greens would have had at Aunty Kath’s, actually, except that she would have had different jam.
“What is this?” said Daphne finally.
“It was the only jam there was in the cupboards. We never thought there might not be any jam,” explained June, “so we didn’t buy any.”
“They don’t do much cooking up here,” explained the Carranos’ housekeeper. “What is it?”
“Rose-petal,” said June, seeing that Meg had lost her nerve.
“Heck! Did you hear that, Tim? No wonder it tastes... Heck!”
“Thought it tasted funny,” agreed Tim, wrinkling his freckled nose and not noticing that Bill was trying to give him an anguished, warning look.
“Funny!” cried Daphne loudly. “It’s wonderful!” She glared.
“Yes!” agreed Meg and June fiercely, glaring.
Tim subsided.
“We’re not wasting it on the kids, of course,” said Meg happily.
“Heck, no!” agreed Daphne in horror.
“We found some treacle for their scones,” said June comfortably.
Tim looked wistfully over at the tent, where the little ones could now be observed smearing themselves with treacle scones.
“Forget it,” murmured Bob in his ear. Tim jumped. “Have another mato sammie,” suggested Bill in the vernacular.
It might help to take the taste of scent away, this was true. “Ta,” he said weakly.
After the afternoon tea Bill thought he might as well crack another six-pack but Meg thought he mightn’t. Well, what were they gonna do all arvo? he whinged. They could take Tim for a nice ride in the boat and Bob could steer, decided Meg.
After the customary whingeing that it was too hot and they were too full, and the customary warnings from their wives to wear their hats, they put the hats on—Bill, of course, assuming The Hat, and Daphne giving an audible gasp at the sight of it—and went.
“Good riddance!” said Meg, sagging in her chair. Daphne herself probably wouldn’t have gone that far, not aloud, but she looked at her gratefully.
“Bob almost caught a fish the other day: he’ll take them up to the very spot, we won’t see hide nor hair of them for hours,” said June comfortably.
Daphne giggled. “I get it!”
The ladies got down to it.
As the sun moved further behind the house they really got down to it. Finally Meg gave in altogether and went and fetched the sherry.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said cheerfully, pouring Harvey’s Bristol Cream, “but it’s awfully nice! And Polly did tell us to drink anything that didn’t have a hand-written label on it.”
“I think those are French—one-offs, or something,” said Daphne vaguely.
“Oh—right,” they said vaguely, nodding.
They were all on their second sherries when Daphne said: “That nice boyfriend of Vicki’s is working up here these holidays, isn’t he? We went for a drive down the Marina the other day and saw him there.”
They nodded. “Euan,” agreed June.
After a short digression during which the distance currently separating Euan and Vicki and the seriousness of Vicki’s intentions were discussed, Daphne said slowly: “So Ginny’s all by herself in that house, then?”
“That dump, ya mean!” said June.
“I suppose so. She’s got a lot of swot to do,” said Meg.
“It’s funny,” said Daphne slowly, “but I could have sworn I saw her down The Arcade with that sleek sort of man that Polly knows: he’s a Sir.”
Meg and June looked doubtful.
“Um—he lives at Willow Plains, I think.”
Meg choked. June gasped.
Daphne then proceeded to retail the encounter in tremendous detail. It amounted to no more than she’d already said, but Meg was even more horrified at its implications than Daphne had thought she’d be. June was frankly incredulous: he was so creepy, she said, shuddering all over. Meg thought the word was slimy. “Ugh!” agreed June, shuddering all over. She then, just in case Daphne hadn’t heard it, retailed the story of Ralph and Jemima and the ladder. It was fair to say it lost nothing in the telling. “Ugh!” cried Daphne obligingly.
The ladies looked at one another triumphantly.
Meg retailed Daphne’s tale to Bill the minute she got him alone that night.
“Shut up,” he muttered, looking uncomfortably over at the closed door of the little bedroom that June and Bob were using.
“Well, what do you think?” she pursued.
“Nothing,” he muttered, squirming.
“Nothing!”
“Uh—well, uh… Well, why should I think anything?” he said, rallying. “Lot of fuss about nothing! Prolly—uh—bumped into him, said Hi, he said Gidday, and they—uh—you know. Went out of the Arcade together and into bloody Daphne Green’s overheated imagination,” he ended, glaring.
Meg goggled at him. “You know something!” she discovered.
“Rats,” said Bill uneasily.
“Wait!” she cried.
Bill swallowed.
“That pineapple!” gasped Meg. “The twins said— Of course I never took a blind bit of notice, I thought it was just some bloody story you’d made the poor little sods swear to because of what you must have thrown away on, the thing! –Bill,” she said tensely, approaching her face to his: “was Ginny with him that day?”
Bill went very red and mumbled, edging away: “Who, ‘him’?”
Meg gasped. “She was! –She was, wasn’t she?” she said fiercely.
“All right, she was!” the driven man howled. “Are ya satisfied? And just shut up about it and let me get some sleep!” He pulled his pillow angrily over his head and held it there.
Meg gulped. “How gruesome,” she said limply.
Bill raised the pillow slightly. “Balls. And don’t you go spreading it around: for all we know there isn’t a word of truth in it!” He replaced the pillow.
There was a short silence.
“Oh, dear!” said Meg
Bill peered out cautiously from under his pillow. “Look, don’t start that,” he said uneasily. “Probably nothing it.”
“I’m not,” she said angrily, sniffing. “And turn that light out!”
Bill sighed, and turned the up-market Seventies Habitat-mod bedside lamp off.
In the adjoining room Bob had been similarly badgered into revealing All. Well, he didn’t know about the pineapple encounter, but he did unfortunately know, because Euan had mentioned it to him, that the twins’ old bach had been flooded out. June made a mental note to tell Meg first thing. She still thought the whole idea was yucky, of course. Fortunately Bob was able to agree with her wholeheartedly on that one: yep.
By the time they were home again and life had resumed the even tenor of its way, both June and Meg had had time to think it all over. So when Meg collected June one morning for a joint foray to Puriri supermarkets in the station-waggon without any of Them, June said uncomfortably: “Um—Meg, has it occurred to you that if Michaela’s sort of more or less got Sol and he’s gone off Phoebe—and, um, Ginny’s got Big White Bone-Cutter, um...”
“That leaves nobody for Phoebe,” finished Meg in a hard voice. “Yeah. Well, serve her right!” she added viciously, passing a Porsche.
June gasped and shut her eyes.
“Boy, School’ll be bloody this year,” predicted Meg grimly.
June had opened her eyes. She swallowed. “Yeah. When does your term—I mean semester—when does it actually start, Meg?”
“Too soon,” said Meg grimly.
June swallowed again.
“Why can’t I win the bloody Golden Kiwi?” cried Meg loudly.
“Um—you never buy a ticket!” said June with a high, nervous giggle.
“I’m going to this year, believe you me,” said Meg grimly. “Every bloody week.”
June wasn’t that sure that they had New Zealand’s national lottery every week, but she wouldn’t have taken a bet that Meg, who was rabidly opposed to gambling in any form, wouldn’t in fact buy a ticket whenever they had it. Because— Well, heck!
Next chapter:
https://theamericanrefugeeanovel.blogspot.com/2022/10/waiting-for-other-shoe.html
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