by Sue Orr
I looked at the faces of the ladies in the photo, and they were all cheerful. This meant they had done it on purpose — got all dressed up from their waists down, then left their top clothes off. And then actually stood there with their legs up while someone took their photo. When I thought about this, how they had posed for the photo and also how much they were enjoying it, the sick feeling started to go away.
They were not like the legs. There were differences between them. The boobs I mean. Not between two boobs on the same lady, but between one lady’s boobs and the next. Some were higher up than others, and there were also differences in size. There were no really little ones, or really big ones, but you could see there were some variations. The main difference, though, was colour. You’d have two pink boobs, then two brown ones. Then white ones and some black.
You know how I said there were two problems? The second problem was the worst. It was Pop. He was in the photo.
He was right in the middle of the row of ladies, with his arms linked up to them. He was the same height as them but both his feet were on the ground; he must have decided not to try a leg kick. His grey hair was shiny from his Brylcreem and his forehead was wet. His chin was up high. He was wearing his best blazer, the one he always wears to the RSA, and you could see his two war medals sparkling on his pocket. The 1939-1945 Star on the left, and the Italy Star on the right. His face was all red and he had the biggest smile I have ever seen anyone do for a photo.
I looked at the boobs again, counted them. Forty. Then I looked at the rest of the page. People had signed their names all over it. There were different colour signatures — black, blue, red. There were tidy little names, and big scrawly ones with flicks at the end. The people who had signed the page didn’t care if their names went onto the actual photo, or even over the top of someone else’s name.
You could work out some of the names. There was Estelle and Jacqueline and Lili. At the top of the page, Jacqueline had written: Cher Reginald. Reginald. That was the long version of Pop’s name, Reg. I knew it was Jacqueline because it was the same handwriting as the word Jacqueline.
I felt an idea sliding into my brain. These were the names of the girls in the photo. They had signed Pop’s name; he knew them and they knew him. The sick feeling started to come back. I imagined Pop up close to these ladies, with their bare boobs right next to him, probably almost touching his best blazer. Straight away, I thought again about Gran sitting in the bath, her face upset and her hands covering herself. I lifted the picture up to my face and sniffed it again. It smelled worse this time. .
That night, I pretended nothing was wrong. I kissed Gran and Pop goodnight and went to bed at the usual time. I left the curtains open and watched the black sky and tried to sort things out.
The sky stretched around the Earth, past the edges of where I could see, around to strange places on the other side. I tried to imagine rows of half-naked ladies in black stockings underneath this same sky. My brain was starting to get there, but then Pop appeared in the middle of the ladies, and turned my guts into knots again.
Pop always says if you think slowly enough about a problem, you end up making the right decision. That is what he did in World War Two at Cassino. He and four other New Zealand soldiers were stuck inside a Sherman tank, trying to clear the road to Rome. It was snowing outside. They were in there for days, and although they had plenty of food and water, there was still the big problem of needing to go to the toilet. Every time they opened the lid of the tank, the Germans would try and shoot them.
Pop thought about the problem for a whole day. Then he came up with the idea. When they needed to go, they did their business in empty shell cases and dropped them down through a hatch underneath the tank. The Germans couldn’t touch them.
Strategy was everything, according to Pop. Without strategy, the Germans would have won the war and we’d all be driving silly little cars with motors in the boot. He talks to me just about every day about strategies. About how he and the other good guys in the war had to try and come up with tricky ideas to beat the Germans and also the Italians, who were confused about good versus evil and ended up on the wrong side of things.
It was thanks to Pop’s strategies that I was ready for it, when the kids at school asked how come I lived with my grandparents. I told them the story just the way Pop and I practised when we were out on the farm.
We’d be walking through the paddocks, moving stock, when he’d just come out with it. He always put on a kid’s squeaky voice.
‘Where’s your Mum and Dad? How come you live with your Gran and Pop?’
‘My mother died when I was born,’ I’d say. ‘And my father is in the New Zealand army, serving overseas.’
‘Whereabouts?’ Pop was good at pretending to be a nosey kid. He’d stare at me, and I’d have to look him straight back in the eye when I answered the next bit.
‘I can’t tell you. That’s classified military information.’
Then Pop would grin, put his big boney hand around my shoulders, and tell me to go and open a gate.
Lying there in bed, I realised I was going to have to find a strategy to use against Pop. Just thinking of it made me feel sick again. .
If Gran ever found out what Pop had been up to, who knows what she would have done? She might have packed all his flash overseas clothes back into the new travel bag and chucked them out. She might have chucked him out too.
The plan I’d come up with started with spying on Gran. I needed to know for sure that she wasn’t on to Pop and his overseas naked friends. Gran was not big on talking, not like Pop who talked to anyone about anything. If she already knew about the ladies, Pop was in big trouble. We all were.
I decided to read the encyclopedias in the bookcase, as a cover for keeping an eye on her. Also, it was a good way to bring the topic up. I pulled out volume one and sat on the sofa. I could get a good view of the kitchen from there. I turned the first few pages. They were feathery light, like the paper of Pop’s roll-your-owns.
Gran was doing her usual jobs. She’s the exact opposite of Pop. Her hair is still quite dark and she’s really little, not much bigger than me. That’s not to say she’s a softie — no one would ever say that about Gran. She’s the sort of person who makes up her mind and sticks with it.
After a while, I got started. I asked her had she ever read the encyclopedias.
‘No,’ she said. She was standing at the kitchen bench, making a cup of tea and having a smoke. She could flick the ash off the end of the cigarette with just a little tap of her finger.
‘Why not?’ I kept turning the pages, not looking at what was on them. I was keeping a close eye on Gran.
‘I don’t have time for reading. Too busy.’
It was true. Gran just worked. That’s all she did. Not the cool farm jobs like Pop, but the boring house stuff.
‘Why did you buy all these books then?’
‘I bought them for you. Not long after you were born. A man came round selling them.’ She turned the silver teapot round on the bench. Gran says you need to do this three times to get good-tasting tea.
‘How come?’
Gran gave the smoke another flick and the ash went into the sink.
‘So you could learn about the world.’
She turned around then. Her arms were folded and the cigarette was burning between her fingers. She smiled at me and I thought that she might have been pretty before she got old. ‘There’s a big world to see, when you grow up.’
‘But aren’t you even interested in what’s in them? Everything’s in these books,’ I said. ‘Everything ever invented.’
‘No,’ said Gran. ‘I’m not interested. Not in the slightest.’
I waited for a bit, to see whether she was in the mood for further talking. She seemed okay.
‘What stuff interests you, Gran?’
‘Looking after what’s left of this family. That’s what interests me. And getting a meal on the table every night.’
I was tempted to get her to talk about my mother. Sometimes you could do that, if she was in the right mood. You could get another tiny piece of information. As long as you stayed away from mentioning my father.
Then I remembered my strategy and the importance of not getting distracted. I took a big breath.
‘What about other reading stuff? There’s other stuff on the bookcase … from Pop’s big trip.’
I watched her closely. She turned around and stubbed out the cigarette on the edge of the sink. Then she looked over, towards the bookcase, towards the Big Trip Box.
‘I should probably go through it. It’s only gathering dust. Some of it could be thrown out now.’
I felt really sick this time. It looked as though she might get cracking on the box straight away, but she didn’t. She went outside with the empty clothes basket to get the washing off the line. .
Before, I was thinking about the photo quite often. But after the talk with Gran, I couldn’t make my brain think about anything else. I had blown the spy mission, made things worse. The photo of Pop and his lady friends was in my head everywhere I went, whatever I did.
At four o’clock, Pop and I went to feed out. We loaded the hay bales on to the tray on the back of the tractor — Pop lifting them on, me using my whole body to push them into place. I pushed so hard that one of them fell off the edge of the tray into the mud. I swore and I didn’t even care if Pop heard.
‘You okay, son?’ He stopped loading bales and watched me. His face was wet with sweat, like it was in the photo. I couldn’t bear to look at him any more.
‘Yep,’ I said.
‘You sure? You don’t look okay.’
‘Yes.’
We headed off across the paddocks. Pop drove the tractor and I sat on the bales on the back. When we got to the cow paddock, the cows ran towards us, their big fat ugly udders swinging side to side. I leaned over the back of the hay bale tray and spewed up onto the muddy tracks from the tractor tyres.
Pop brought me back to the house then finished feeding out by himself. Gran ran a hot bath for me, which was nice but didn’t fix anything. On my way through the sitting room I checked to see whether the Big Trip Box was still on the bookcase. It was, so I took it down.
The first thing you see in the box is the little London bus ticket. It somehow always stays on top, even though it’s so small. I pressed the ticket down flat over my knee and stretched it to get all the creases out. I thought about Pop, him climbing up onto a red double-decker bus on the other side of the world. It would have been morning for him and the middle of the night for me. I would have been asleep while he was getting his ticket off the driver and scrunching it up in his big hand and putting it into the pocket of his blazer.
And then, days later, him flying back around the outside of the Earth — he and all those other old soldiers wearing their RSA blazers. Gran would have found the bus ticket in the pocket. She would’ve gone to throw it away, but then had second thoughts and put it in the trip box. .
Pop goes to the RSA on Saturday nights. The RSA is like the pub, except if you haven’t been on New Zealand’s side in a war you can’t go. Gran says not that you’d want to, she says all they do there is drink and talk about dubious and unproven acts of bravery, whatever that means. But I would give anything to go. To the RSA, I mean, not to a war. To hear the stories about the Germans. About the Japs who nearly invaded New Zealand and are the reason we can’t buy a Toyota Corona.
Pop came in from feeding out and Gran yelled at him to take off his shirt and trousers and socks. And to not walk all that grass through the house. Then I heard the shower going and him singing ‘God Save The Queen’. I went into their bedroom to wait for him.
I started off on Pop’s side of the bed but I ended up sliding down into the dip in the middle, where I slept when I was little. Pop came in with his towel wrapped round him and steam coming off his body. I closed my eyes while he got dressed, till he gave the order — At Ease, Corporal — then I watched.
His war medals are in his socks and hankies drawer. He keeps them in a black box with dark red velvet inside. He pulled on his blazer, then he opened the drawer and lifted out the box. He stood in front of the big mirror on Gran’s dresser and pinned the 1939–1945 Star to the front pocket of his jacket.
It was my turn. I took the Italy Star, with its striped ribbon — red, white, green, white, red — and six shiny golden points. GRI in the middle, with a little VI underneath. I stood on the bed, and pinned the medal on his jacket.
‘Can I come with you?’ I knew what he would say. But I always asked.
‘No son, you’re too young.’
‘When will I be old enough?’
‘When you’ve served your country.’
It had to be right then. I held my breath, then I said it.
‘You know that guy you told me about in the war, Pop, the guy Freyberg?’
‘General Sir Bernard Freyberg, VC.’ Pop always held his chin up high when I pinned on the Italy Star, as though he didn’t quite trust me not to prick his neck.
‘What did he do, again? At Cassino?’
‘He led the New Zealand soldiers, son. He made the decision to retreat, when we couldn’t overcome the Germans.’
‘So he gave up?’
‘He didn’t give up. He was saving lives. New Zealanders’ lives.’ Pop looked straight at me. We were eye to eye, with him standing straight in his blazer with his medals and me on the bed. ‘He did the right thing.’
I’d finished pinning the Italy Star to Pop’s pocket. I slid down off the bed and knelt beside it. Underneath was the card with the red windmill. I stood up and handed it to Pop and the sick feeling came rushing back.
He opened it and looked at the photo. He smiled — it was the same smile he had in the photo. The smile started to turn into a laugh — just a little one at first, then it got bigger and his shoulders started to shake. His medals clicked against each other.
He turned the card around, so the photo was facing me. He looked as though he was going to say something about it. Like he was going to do show and tell. He was still laughing.
This was not how I had planned things. He wasn’t ashamed. He didn’t even look upset that I had found the photo. I tried hard not to cry. I didn’t have a strategy for this. I just had my question. So I asked it.
‘Does Gran know about your naked friends from overseas?’
He started to laugh again. The more he laughed, the harder it was for me to keep the tears from coming.
Pop pulled me over to him and hugged me hard against his blazer. I could feel the points of the star medals pricking my face. We stayed like that for ages and then I felt his big body go still against me. The laughing had stopped. We just hugged each other until I stopped crying.
We sat on the side of the bed and I told him about my mission earlier in the day. How I thought that Gran didn’t know about the photo. There was still time, I told him. He still had a chance to get rid of it.
‘Are you sure about that, son?’ He had a bit of a smile, and I reckon he was starting to realise how close he had come to wrecking our family. For someone so good at strategies, it was strange how he’d gone to the other side of the world and forgotten about thinking things through to the end.
‘Pretty sure,’ I said.
I looked at the card in his big rough hands. It looked like a weird thing from another world, maybe even from outer space. ‘At least it’s out of the Big Trip Box now,’ I said.
Pop opened the card again and looked at the photo. He still had the funny little smile — I couldn’t tell exactly what he was thinking but I was guessing he was a bit embarrassed about his lack of planning.
‘We can do better than that,’ he said, and he ripped the card into pieces so small you could never in a million years guess what it had been before.
I heard a noise behind me and I turned around. Gran was standing by the door, smiling at Pop and me. I knew for sure, then, that I’d done the
right thing.
SUSTENANCE
‘You have dirt under your fingernails,’ Linda said. She was pouring English Breakfast tea from a white china pot into fragile teacups.
John looked at his hands, and there it was.
‘It’s not dirt,’ he said. ‘It’s earth.’ He was surprised to see it too.
He cupped his hands and stared at the tiny wedges of black at each fingertip. Then he remembered that he had knocked the pot plant off his desk at work the day before, as he was reaching to answer the phone. He had felt dismay, anger, then an unexpected rush of pleasure as he got down on his hands and knees and slowly scooped the black moist earth back into the terracotta pot. It had crumbled then formed again in his palm. He pressed it down firm against the roots of — what was it? — some plant, he didn’t know the name. He had taken longer than was necessary to clean up the mess.
He got up from the table, kissed Linda goodbye, and went to work.
At the office, he saw immediately that someone had moved the pot plant to the far corner of his desk. He appreciated the thoughtfulness, but put it back where it belonged. Next to his snow globe, that tiny world with the strange little boy lifting his arms to the sky. Other people had the Eiffel Tower, or London Bridge, or something else famous in their snow globes. His was an oddity — a gift from Linda on their first wedding anniversary. .
John sold real estate. He’d done so all his working life — thirty-something years. In the early days he’d made a go of it, but now everyone else in the company outperformed him.
He often wondered why. How a person could attract less business the more trustworthy he became. He worked by the rules, made sure all parties to a deal came away feeling good about things. But nowadays people seemed to prefer the younger agents: the girls with the short skirts and winter tans, the lads with the European cars and cryptic number plates. 10DAIT, for example, on the black Porsche that swung in next to his old Ford in the car park each morning.