We were making hay when my father returned. He kept glancing at the gloomy sky, muttering and swearing, and occasionally invoking Jamie as the cause of all his problems. Rain was inevitable, the unbaled hay would be ruined and it was all Jamie’s fault. He relieved Lou of the driving and pushed down harder on the throttle. Lou went back to the house. There was no question of her helping me. It was a race against the elements. The bales spilled out faster than ever. But we couldn’t beat the rain. I heard my father curse over the tractor’s engine and guessed that the first drops had splattered on his windscreen. We still had a good third of the paddock left to bale. He kept at it for another ten minutes and then stopped the tractor. ‘Damn rain,’ he muttered.
He got off the tractor and surveyed the paddock, his face sinking further as he realised how few of the stooks were actually standing erect as they should have been. ‘What a shemozzle,’ he said. ‘You can’t leave the hay in such a state. The rain’ll get into all those single bales. You’ll have to stack ’em up Billy-Boy, protect ’em from the rain.’
I said nothing. I didn’t even look at him. I couldn’t believe he expected me to walk around the paddock for hours, restooking the hay by myself. ‘I’ll send Lou back with a parka for you so you don’t get so wet. Maybe she’ll give you a hand.’
I knew his concerns were inspired less by the rain and more by what the neighbours would think. He had a horror of the neighbours witnessing any task shoddily done. Unfortunately, the hay paddock was right next to the road. Everyone would see this monument to my ineptitude. ‘It won’t take you long,’ lied my father. ‘And then when you’ve finished, I’ve got a special Christmas present for you.’
I knew what his special Christmas present was. My school uniform wrapped up in Christmas paper. He’d made a big fuss about my school uniform, announcing that he would take me to Hallensteins himself and have me outfitted. The two of us drove down to Dunedin after an early dinner one night. This allowed my father to spend the night with his old school friend Herb Day and reminisce about their school days over a few Scotches. Herb’s son Ian had already been at school for four years and they tried to embroil him in their reminiscences, comparing their achievements with his own. But Ian was taciturn. ‘Ian’ll help young Billy settle in,’ Herb assured my father, though the look Ian gave me behind his father’s back seemed to contradict that.
Later that night, when Ian and I lay in our twin beds, the light just switched off, he informed me that seniors didn’t bother talking to juniors and not to come up to him and embarrass him in front of his friends. He turned away from me and went to sleep.
The shopping expedition was as humiliating as I knew it would be. There were no shorts or jackets to accommodate my shape. The only jacket that would actually button up came to round my knees. ‘Maybe he’ll grow into it,’ the shop assistant said. ‘They do grow around his age, don’t they?’
She peered at me over her glasses. ‘Or has he done it already?’
My father glared at her and then at me in the jacket. It looked ridiculous but he bought it anyway. ‘With some adjustments, it’ll be very smart,’ said the shop assistant.
My father strode away from me across the hay paddock to where the ute was parked at the gate. I didn’t even want to open his present. He would insist I put the stupid uniform on, which was still unadjusted, and everyone would laugh at me. He glanced back at me and I ambled towards a muddle of bales as if I intended to fix them. He drove off in the ute and I sat down on the bales instead. I didn’t have the strength or inclination for any more work. I’d had enough of working on Christmas Day and I didn’t want to have to face Lou again either. The ute had disappeared out of sight. I decided I was going on strike. Though I couldn’t go home, there was somewhere else I could go.
I walked across the paddock and out the gate, across the road and then slipped through the fence on the other side. I was going to Dragonland. Christmas had already been ruined for me. I decided I’d disappear for the day and miss it altogether. I enjoyed thinking of the distress my absence would cause my family. I felt a pang of disappointment about missing Christmas dinner: the turkey and new potatoes and then four different desserts for afterwards. But I told myself that sitting opposite a baleful Lou would kill any sense of pleasure I might have taken in the food.
The rain didn’t let up. I was wet through but I didn’t care. I hoped I would catch a cold, get sick and have an excuse to stay in bed and avoid more hay-making. Maybe contract pneumonia and make my father feel guilty. I walked through the paddock above the road and then slipped through the next fence onto the hill block. I stopped to catch my breath. The rain had settled in. I couldn’t even see across to the other side of the valley. I was isolated in a cold grey alien world. I was in outer space. I was Judy. I began to toil up the hill. I knew strange life forms lurked behind the craggy rocks, watching me pass, admiring my silver spacesuit, wanting to capture me and wonder at my exotic beauty.
The sheep track I trudged up grew more and more treacherous from the rain. My gumboots gave no grip and I slipped a few times. There was no Lou to come to my aid. I had to pick myself up. The rain fell even more heavily. I could only just make out the Dragon rock looming above me on the horizon, while behind me the world had been swallowed up by the rain. I could no longer see the road or the farmhouse. I wondered if Lou had reported me missing from the hay paddock. I panted from the exertion of the climb.
By the time I reached the rock, I was shivering from the cold, exhausted and beginning to feel pangs of hunger. I had convinced myself that I was on the brink of pneumonia. There was only one place to shelter. The Dragon’s mouth. Standing at its entrance, it seemed even darker and more forbidding than ever. But I was too wet and cold to have irrational qualms about it. I ducked my head and crept into the cave, sitting as close to the front as I could without getting wet.
Gradually, I began to feel more at ease. I stretched out on the rock cautiously, rolling around, trying to get more comfortable. It was impossible. I was lying on a big crack. I rolled aside, and as I did, I noticed there was actually something stuffed down the crack. Some papers. I pulled them out, and slid down to the entrance of the cave so that I could see them more easily out of the shadows. They were pages from a magazine. I unfolded them carefully but my hands were wet and the pages became sodden. Nevertheless I recognised them. It was the photo spread from the Playboy, the one Arch had brought to school and which had gone missing.
I managed to spread the pages out. I studied the photos: the big breasted women slapping one another, the astronaut who’d crash-landed on their planet and found himself promptly stripped of his spacesuit. It was very peculiar that Lou had stolen them. Playboys were for men, just as Cleos were for women. Had Lou stolen them for the shots of the naked man, not that you saw much of him? Or for the women? I didn’t know what to think.
I was still puzzling over what I’d found when suddenly I looked up and saw Lou striding towards me. My first impulse was to stuff the pages back down the crack in the rock. But then I thought of what she’d said to me in the hay paddock. How she had hurt me. I decided I would enjoy watching her realise that I had discovered her secret.
Unfortunately, she had the hood of my parka pulled forward tight, clasped by her hand, half shrouding her face. I could only see her mouth. It wasn’t smiling. She stopped a few feet short of the cave and stood there. Eventually, she pulled the hood off her head. I expected her to be blushing, her eyes staring at the ground, not daring to look at me. Or perhaps to fix me with one of those famous contemptuous stares of hers which would slowly waver away with her mounting shame. But her expression was bland, totally unreadable. ‘My mother told me to come and get you. She gave Uncle Jack an earful for leaving you out there in the rain. Said he was a heathen to be working on Christmas Day and forcing you to do the same.’
I forgave Aunt Evelyn everything. She was still my kindred spirit. ‘I figured you’d be up here when you weren’t in the paddock,’
she continued.
I didn’t say anything. I was a bit disappointed. I had wanted to see Lou rattled. She calmly undid the buttons of the parka and flung it aside. She was wearing Jamie’s clothes underneath, the ones we’d stolen for our show. He had left without them. ‘Put the parka on,’ she said.
‘I’m already wet. It doesn’t matter.’
We stared at one another. ‘Well? You coming?’ she asked.
‘I’ve caught pneumonia,’ I said resolutely. ‘This cave is my grave.’
‘But I’ve come to save you,’ said Lou, equally firmly but with a glimmer of a smile.
Did I want her to save me? Did I really want to keep playing the same roles in these childish games: me the helpless maiden, Lou the chivalric hero. I didn’t know anymore. ‘Go on,’ said Lou. ‘Put it on.’
‘I want to die,’ I moaned, closing my eyes.
I lay there like that for a while, feigning death, but the silence that followed pricked my curiosity. I couldn’t resist peeking at Lou to see what she was doing. She wasn’t even looking at me. She was fumbling in her pocket. When I peeked again she had her knife clasped in her hand. That made me open my eyes. She flicked the blade out. I lay back prone on the rock. ‘Kill me,’ I commanded her. ‘I don’t want to live anymore.’
Lou grinned at me and slowly approached. The expression on her face was of grim concentration. It was exactly the same look she had when she approached possums she’d trapped, that she was about to bash on the head with her hockey stick. I began to have second thoughts about dying. Lou raised the knife in front of her face and I knew she was going to plunge it into my diseased heart. I began to protest and then to scream, begging her to stop, not to do it, when I realised what she actually intended the knife for. I sprang forward to try to stop her but it was too late.
I was silent, in awe of what she had done. She was staring at it too and then slowly a grin stole across her face. ‘It’s your Christmas present,’ she said and she held it out to me, with both hands.
Her long red plait.
I didn’t know what to say. All I could think of was how Aunt Evelyn would carry on. ‘This will ruin your mother’s Christmas,’ I said.
Lou shrugged. ‘It’s too late now. It’s done.’
I stared at the plait, entranced, still shocked by the rashness of Lou’s act. ‘It’s better than a cow’s tail,’ said Lou. ‘Even if it is the wrong colour for Judy. It’s the real thing.’
I smiled and reached out for it. ‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Just a moment,’ she said.
Deftly, she undid the ribbon at the end of the plait and retied it at the top to keep the cut ends together. Then she tucked it up under my hat and took a few moments to arrange the plait so it draped over one shoulder. I couldn’t help thinking that Aunt Evelyn would have been delighted to witness Lou fussing over her own hair for once. She stood back to admire the effect and clapped with delight. ‘It looks better on you than it ever did on me.’
‘And you look just like Jamie without it,’ I told her.
It wasn’t true. It hurt me to even say his name to her. But I knew it was what she wanted to hear more than anything else. It was Christmas after all. Lou beamed with pleasure.
I slid forward to sit on the brink of the cave. The rain had eased and there was even a glimmer of sun, hinting its intentions through the clouds. The closed-in look to the valley was dissipating. I could see the river meandering through the swampy flats, and the Field of Blood surely greener than any other paddock in the entire valley. Lou was staring at the view too, her fingers constantly at her hair, fascinated by the rough, cropped feel of it. ‘Everything is going to be different when you go away,’ she murmured, so softly I wondered if she meant for me to hear.
I muttered some reassurance but it wasn’t convincing. I’d had a change of heart about boarding school. I had been looking forward to it because it meant escape from the farm and all the chores I hated. I’d managed to ignore the ominous stories that filtered through of what went on at boarding school. But the time was drawing closer and closer. The school uniform was bought. It was no longer so easy to ignore. Our visit to the Days’ had been intended to fuel my anticipation and reassure me of what lay ahead. But instead, both Ian and his father had made remarks which filled me with foreboding.
Ian Day had deigned to give me some advice as I dressed the next morning, while he lay in bed smoking. ‘I wouldn’t wear those glasses next year if I was you. They’ll spell trouble right off. Mark you out as a poofter.’
While his father, over breakfast, had urged me to visit them on weekends. ‘You’ll need to get away, son. It’s a tough place to grow up for a country lad like yourself. Boys can be cruel. But you’re welcome here anytime.’
‘I wish next year would never come,’ I said to Lou, a tremor of intensity in my voice. ‘That this summer could last forever.’
Lou turned to face me, her expression electric and for a moment it was true, she did look like Jamie. She had his same infectious smile spread right across her face and it transformed her. She winked at me and I knew she must’ve been practising that in the mirror.
‘We can string it out,’ she whooped. ‘You bet we can.’
She skipped towards me and I sprang to my feet. ‘Is that my spacesuit?’ I asked her, pointing to the parka.
Lou giggled. ‘It’s your antipneumonia spacesuit,’ she corrected.
‘Help me put it on,’ I said, and Lou held it out so that I could slip into it easily.
‘Come on Judy,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to eat on this planet. It’s lifeless and barren. Let’s go back to the spaceship.’
We started prancing down the hill together, Lou playing with my hair, unravelling it out of the plait. We’d only gone about a hundred yards when we heard Babe calling us. She was right down by the first fence, too scared of the dragon to venture any further. ‘Come and open your presents,’ she was calling. ‘I can’t wait any longer.’
The sun flashed through the clouds, dazzling and brilliant, as if to reinforce the promise of the final childhood summer that lay ahead of us. Lou and I exchanged glances and began to run, screaming to Babe, in between our laughter, that the dragon was chasing us and we were having to flee for our lives. Lou stumbled on Jamie’s jeans that were too long for her but I didn’t wait for her. I ran, borne up by the sensation of my hair flowing out behind me loose and lush. I could imagine how glorious it must look, glittering red in the sunlight, almost as if Judy’s beautiful blonde hair had been set aflame by the furious gasp of the fire-breathing dragon.
50 Ways of Saying Fabulous
Book 1
By Graeme Aitken
‘If I knew fifty ways of saying fabulous, I’d use them all to praise this charming first novel.’ EDMUND WHITE
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Sweet, fat, theatrical Billy-Boy was never cut out to be a farmer, but as his father’s only son he’s obliged to try. The cows are wayward and the chores are gruelling, but Billy finds escape in a fantasy world. A place where the turnip paddock becomes a lunar landscape, a lavender bed jacket a slinky space suit, a cow’s tail a head of beautiful blonde hair, and where Billy can become Judy Robinson, heroine of TV’s Lost in Space.
But in an isolated conservative farming community in 1970s New Zealand, not everyone approves of Billy’s transformation. On the brink of adolescence, Billy is beginning to discover that growing up is far more complicated and confusing than he could ever have imagined. While the mysteries of sex confound him, emotions are unleashed which urge Billy to betray those closest to him.
50 Ways of Saying Fabulous is a poignant and endearingly comic novel. Anyone who grew up in a small town, grew up feeling that they didn’t fit in, or simply grew up will find this book funny, touching and unforgettably evocative of childhood lost.
Praise for 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous:
‘I loved this funny sad tale of growing up a sissy in New Zealand. Graeme Aitk
en proves that even the most extraordinary events can occur to wonderfully ordinary people. If I knew fifty ways of saying fabulous, I’d use them all to praise this charming first novel.’ EDMUND WHITE
‘Thoroughly engaging.’ INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
‘A funny but also achingly sad first novel’. OBSERVER
‘A sort of gay Adrian Mole … There are laughs aplenty but also moments of agony … Told with bare faced honesty, it is a warm, cruel, funny tale.’ THE SUNDAY AGE
‘Touching and sad, 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous also has some very funny moments.’ THE TIMES
‘An entertainment, a gentle, poignant story of a fat boy who fantasises romance and glamour without yet having a name for what he is … Aitken writes with a distinctive voice, one that is wonderfully evocative.’ DENNIS ALTMAN, THE AGE
‘… an important work … What Aitken has demonstrated fabulously is his skill in the art of telling a good story … his honesty and fearlessness in confronting those squirmy adolescent secrets is to be admired.’ CANBERRA TIMES
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50 WAYS OF SAYING FABULOUS: From Manuscript to Movie
By Graeme Aitken
The film, 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous, is based upon my first novel which was published in 1995. Developing the project and raising the money to get the film made was a very long and sometimes frustrating process. Ultimately, it took ten years and there were plenty of disappointments and setbacks over that time. I was extremely fortunate that producer Michele Fantl and writer/director Stewart Main didn’t give up on bringing 50 Ways to the screen. Though to start the story of this gestation from book to film at the very beginning really means going back to how the book came to be published. That, in itself, was no mean feat.
50 Ways of Saying Fabulous Book 2 Anniversary Edition Page 11