Dunger

by Cowley, Joy

  So now Grandma’s in the back with me, but she fell asleep almost as soon as we left the shop and since she’s as deaf as Grandpa, his shouting doesn’t wake her up. When the old man gets mad, his comments get a bit disconnected from reality, like when we found ourselves on the road to the airport and he bellowed, “I didn’t come here for a haircut!” And then, when we had to stop at a red light and the car in front was a bit slow in moving on green, he yelled out the window, “What colour are you waiting for? Purple?”

  Grandma sleeps through it all, making a breathing noise, not quite a snore, that flutters her peacock-feather earrings. Her hair is bright orange with two centimetres of grey at the scalp, and with her pillow she takes up three-quarters of the seat, which is okay because I don’t need much space, just a corner to sit and text Jacquie and Herewini and tell them I’m about to make my fortune. I make sure to mention the amount for two reasons: first, so they’ll stop being sorry for me having parents too poor to take me to Queenstown; and second, so they’ll eat their hearts out with envy. A thousand bucks is a lot of money. But they’re my best friends so I might buy them a little something afterwards like a scarf or a belt.

  If I can’t be with my friends, at least we can text each day. When I packed my cell phone charger, the brother-creep laughed at me. “They don’t have electricity!” he said, which I already knew. But I’m sure I can easily introduce myself to Grandma’s neighbours or a shop that won’t mind if I plug it in. Dad says the old bach is the only house without power. Nice neighbours. Problem solved.

  Grandma wakes up with a snort at Kaikoura when Grandpa brakes to avoid hitting a truck full of sheep. She swears at him, then tells him it’s time for lunch so he should pull in at a teashop.

  “Time for the F word,” Grandpa says cheerfully. He always says it. He means Food and he thinks it’s funny. Actually, he thinks all his jokes are hilarious.

  Will turns his head. “It’s called a café, Grandma. They serve cups of tea in cafés.”

  “So be it, Einstein,” she says. “You find us one.”

  Occasionally, Will can be practical. In seconds, he spots a place close to a free car park, and I’m helping Grandma get her swollen ankles out of the car, feet on ground, walking stick in hand. She doesn’t say thanks, but that’s okay, it’s my job. She’s awfully slow, she and Grandpa both, and they sit at the table nearest the door, puffing after the five steps up from the street.

  Grandpa waves some money at us. “A pot of tea and sandwiches for us, and get what you like for yourselves.”

  Will and I are looking along the glass case at sandwiches and custard tarts when I spot this awesome bit of eye-candy behind the counter. He’s so very cool, with long floppy hair and eyes like wet bath mats. He reminds me a bit of Mr Leverton, our geography teacher. I think it’s really pathetic the way my friends carry on about Mr Leverton. He might have a Hollywood smile, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a waste of time being a fan. He’s too old, he’s a teacher, and he’s engaged.

  “Can I help you?” the café guy says.

  I flash back a smile. “Yes, please.”

  I’m wearing my yellow outfit, a halter top with just a bit of padding in the bra, and a short skirt that sits neatly on my hips, but you know what? It’s all buried under the extremely hideous T-shirt Grandma made me wear. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter because the guy sees me – you know, really looks at me, as though I’m the only person in the room. He doesn’t even talk to Will. When he gives me the change, he touches the palm of my hand, making a shiver go down my back. “I’ll bring the tea and milkshakes over,” he says.

  He does, too. He comes out from the counter, absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, holding a tray in one hand like a professional waiter. As he leans over my chair to put the tray on the table, he sort of accidentally on purpose puts his other hand on my back and leaves it there.

  Grandma grabs the teapot and says, “You know she’s only thirteen.”

  The hand goes away.

  I am furious with Grandma, “I’m not thirteen!”

  “She’s fourteen years, seven months and nine days,” says Will.

  I turn to look at Mr Gorgeous but his face is like a window with the blind drawn down. He smiles politely at Grandma and Grandpa and says, “Enjoy your lunch.”

  Back in the car, Grandma tells me how forgetful she is; how once, when unpacking the grocery order, she put the toilet rolls in the freezer and a packet of frozen chicken wings in the bathroom cupboard. I think she expects me to laugh, but I don’t. I look out the window. You can’t tell me she didn’t know the age of her only granddaughter. But if she thinks I’m worried about it, she’s got another think coming. I couldn’t care less. I mean, he’s not the only hot guy on the planet.

  After her long sleep and lunch, Grandma’s very chatty, but it’s all about her, on and on. Not once does she ask me about my position in the netball A team, not even a question about school and the subjects I’ll be taking next year. What I get is her varicose veins and what the eye specialist said about her sight and how she used to go fishing at the bach for huge snapper. She doesn’t even talk about Dad, her own son. She is extremely self-absorbed.

  I admit to curiosity concerning the famous bach. Dad always talks about childhood holidays there as “twelve on a scale of one to ten”. Lissy and I have never been there. I remember there were invitations, but Mum always said she couldn’t take children to a place with no electricity and an outdoor toilet. So why is she sending us there now, on our own? You have no doubt discovered, as I have, that parents can practise grand deceit, yet look extremely injured when their child tells a tiny white lie. Such is the pecking order in families. Mind you, I’m not complaining, just saying that the bach could be interesting. Unlike Melissa who only packed a cell phone charger, I have a torch with spare batteries, a compass, my Swiss Army knife, and the survival rations already mentioned.

  “The chimney will be brimming with birds’ nests,” Grandpa says cheerfully. “That’ll be your first job. Clean it out, so’s we can light the fire.”

  “I thought my first job was map-reading.” I don’t say it all that loud but his ear scoops it up.

  “Map ain’t no job.” He puts on his cowboy accent. “You gotta do better than that, pardner. Lasso the ladder! Break in the chimney!”

  I keep my finger on the map because we’re approaching Havelock. “I think we turn right to get on the Sounds road.”

  “Chuck that thing away, pardner. From here on in, I know the way like I know my own ask-your-mother-for-sixpence. Me and the horse can go there blindfold.”

  Grandma leans over and pokes me in the back. “Don’t take any notice of the old fool. You hang on to that map, Will, or he’ll have us up a tree. We’ve got to get there well before dark.”

  “Why?” Melissa sounds nervous, probably thinking of werewolves and vampires or the fact that she packed a cell phone charger instead of a torch.

  “I don’t see too well,” Grandma says.

  Grandpa turns off on the Sounds road, and I get our first view of water and green hills. Dad has told us tales of a narrow dirt road, winding into wilderness like a never-ending snake, but I think that was pure hyperbole. The road is curvy but sealed and there are houses everywhere, almost suburban.

  The old folk get excited when they recognise familiar landmarks, the bay where there was a bush fire back in 1972 and the house with the jetty that once belonged to a circus lion tamer. It amuses me that Grandpa can remember all this trivia and yet forget my name. Twice, he has called me Alistair – my father’s name – and for the rest of the time it’s some substitute like boyo or pardner or tama, depending on which accent he’s trying out.

  “Are we nearly there?” Melissa asks.

  “About two hours, girlie,” says Grandpa.

  “Two hours!”

  “One and a half,” Grandma says.

&n
bsp; “It’s two hours from here, you daft old chook,” Grandpa shouts. “You’ve forgotten!”

  “You want a bet? One hour, thirty minutes!”

  “Two! You’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on, and mark my words, you’d be better off without it. Two hours!”

  They’ve started one of their stupid arguments, and it goes on for about five kilometres until it’s time for a toilet stop. Only there aren’t any toilets, just bushes at the side of the road. Melissa is full of Dad’s stories about possums and wild pigs, and she refuses to get out of the car. But she is also full of milkshake and bottles of water, so she has to get out after we’ve all finished. She still won’t go into the trees, so she squats down on the road behind the car where we can’t see her. Too bad another car comes along.

  Silly Lissy! She never gets it right. She jumps into the back seat, screaming at us all for laughing, and then she opens her cell phone to text her friends and shut us out. Bet she’s not texting what just happened, though.

  I have to admit that Dad is right about the road. It gets much narrower and there are fewer houses, an occasional farm but mainly forest with tree ferns and manuka hanging over the edges of the dirt road in front of us. Sometimes, we glimpse the sea through a clearing. Grandpa tells me that the black lines in a bay are a mussel farm, but I don’t see any boats. I get a feeling we’re going nowhere. Well, the nearest thing to nowhere.

  The sun shines low on the water and the trees cast long shadows on the road. If I were a poet I could write something about sunset in the Sounds, but I’m William, eleven and a half years old and just plain worried. Do they really expect me to clean a chimney in the dark?

  I check my watch. One hour and forty minutes since the argument. We have now taken another turn-off and are on a track that isn’t a road. Grass grows down the middle and ferns brush the car on each side. The ruts reveal how primitive the springs are in these old cars. Whoa! If I didn’t have a seat belt on, I’d flatten my face on the windscreen.

  The track takes us down to the edge of a bay that is half in sunlight and half in dark shadow. On the shadowed side there’s a stand of old macrocarpa trees. Grandpa pulls over and stops. Neither he nor Grandma says a word.

  “Are we here?” I ask.

  I already know it. Inside the circle of trees is a wooden hut with a brick chimney, a verandah, a water tank and a corrugated iron garage. The grass and scrub around them have grown almost as high as the hut’s windows.

  This is the famous bach of my father’s childhood.

  There are no neighbours, the nearest town is Havelock and my phone battery is flat. I can’t stand it. I really can’t. But I don’t know what to do.

  Grandma says, “If you get desperate, you can use our phone. Mind you, it’s a party line shared by three houses.”

  There is hope. “How far away are they?”

  “The nearest is the Hoffmeyers but they’re going to the North Island during the week. Then there’s Emily Adamson – no, she died and I heard her house was for sale. Maybe our phone won’t be busy. But right now, you’d better get busy, my girl. The car has to be unpacked before dark.”

  That’s my job, wading through the long grass to the car and back to the cottage with boxes of food and clothes, the wet weeds around my legs full of creepy things I can’t see. Dad talked about wasps in the Sounds. Suppose I tread on a wasps’ nest? Those things can kill you.

  “Put the boxes on the table!”

  The inside of the bach isn’t too bad, except it stinks. There’s a wooden table with a pile of flax tablemats at one end, and a big pottery bowl where I’m supposed to put the fruit. The floor is made of bare boards that creak a bit, and the rugs look handmade. I guess that the blankets on the couch, patchwork and crochet, are also handmade, which sort of goes along with Dad’s stories about the hippy era. Grandma lights candles and stands them along the table and bench. “Tomorrow I’ll get the lanterns sorted,” she says, pointing to a couple of old-fashioned lanterns, the kind you see in movies, hanging from the ceiling. “Take a candle to help you see in the cupboards.”

  When I open the first kitchen cupboard, I nearly drop the candle. The shelves are covered with mouse poo. I can’t put food in there!

  “What’s wrong, girl?”

  “Mice, Grandma. They’re everywhere, thousands of droppings!” I shudder and so does the candle flame. “They smell bad!”

  “Clean it, then,” she says.

  I hold my breath as I take out all the cans and boxes in the cupboard – old, out-of-date food that has to be thrown away – then I get a hearth brush and sweep out the shelves. When I’ve finished, the cupboard still pongs like a mouse toilet. I’ll have to scrub it clean. Grandma gives me a bucket and I turn on the kitchen tap. It rattles but nothing comes out.

  “Well now, that’s another job for the morning,” says Grandma. “Just leave the boxes of food on the table. Somewhere in the car there’s drinking water, so we won’t shrivel up in the night.”

  “What about a shower?”

  “Eh?”

  “I really need a shower!”

  “Have a swim,” she says, “but watch out for the sharks.”

  I finish unpacking the car. Grandpa has opened the garage door and the ladder is now up against the side of the house. Will is up there, banging around on the iron roof and poking the handle of a rake down the chimney. It’s quite dark now. He could miss his footing. With one day over and nine to go, it would be a real pain if he gets a broken leg. “You be careful!” I yell.

  Grandpa comes into the kitchen to look at the black wood-stove. He opens a little door at the base of the chimney and straw pokes out. “Just as I thought, chock-a-block,” he says. “No way but to burn it out.”

  He calls Will down the ladder, and gives him a kerosene-soaked rag and a box of matches. I stand below, with Grandma leaning on her stick, and we watch as Will climbs back up the ladder, pushes the rag down the chimney and drops a lit match. I expect an explosion, but it’s just yellow flame, some sparks against the dark sky, and a crackling inside the bricks. In about five minutes the birds’ nests have fallen down as ash in the stove, and Grandpa is saying, “Most effective, boyo,” which has my brother acting like he’s just invented a cure for cancer.

  Grandpa sets some paper and pine cones in the fire part of the stove. “Time for the F word. Chicken with potatoes and gravy. How does that sound?” He strikes a match, then says, “Oh dammit!” and blows it out. “We can’t!” He looks at me and Will. “This stove heats the water and since there’s no water, a fire will bust the pipes.”

  “Another thing for the morning,” Grandma says.

  The candlelit dinner is cold baked beans with bread, but that doesn’t matter because I’m too tired to eat.

  Grandma gives us sheets to make up the bunks in the spare room. “Will takes the top bunk. Melissa, you’re on the bottom.”

  But Will refuses to sleep in the same room as me, and in a childish tantrum, he takes his sheets out to the couch in the living room.

  I borrow a word from Grandpa. “Good-oh.”

  The birds wake me up. There must be millions of them, all chirping at once. I open the back door and smell a mix of wet grass and sea, better than the mouse-poo stink that fills the house. I had this idea that the long-drop toilet would be the stinkiest place, but it isn’t, probably because it hasn’t been used for four years. It is full of cobwebs, some of them across the hole. I think my pee might break them, but the webs just sag like old curtains, and I don’t drown any spiders. The hole under the cobwebs is very deep. All I can see at the bottom is some old yellow newspaper, now wet.

  When I come out, there’s blue smoke by the garage. Grandpa is up. He’s made a fire with wood in half a drum with a bit of reinforcing iron over the top to hold a pot of water. I look up at the chimney, remembering the mission so well accomplished last night.r />
  Grandpa is already dressed. “Want a cup of coffee?”

  “I’d rather have cocoa, if that’s all right.”

  He pours hot water into two mugs. It’s coffee but it’s made with condensed milk and tastes all right. I sit beside him on a log and look around at the place in morning light. Growing around the bach are eight macrocarpa trees, big, with lumpy trunks and sprawling branches, and beyond the car I can see some of the bay, the water a dark green colour with glints of light. In the other direction, behind the bach, there is a hill covered with native bush, mostly manuka, I think. I ask, “Is that where the water comes from?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The water.” I point. “Is the stream up there?”

  “Yep.”

  I say to him, “I fixed the chimney. Maybe I can solve the water problem, too.”

  He doesn’t answer, but just sits staring at the hill and slurping his coffee. I wonder if he has ever thought about getting a hearing aid. He takes his time. When he has sucked the last drop from his mug, he stands, rubbing his knees. “Put your gumboots on,” he says. “We’d better see to the water.”

  Going up the hill is hard work, even for me. The path is overgrown with scrub that gets thicker, and Grandpa has to stop every few steps to get his breath. We come to a place where we can’t go on – the bush is far too dense. I turn and look back. The sun is still behind the hill and the bay is green, dark in the shadows. Everything smells wet, as though the tide has come over it during the night. Grandpa points sideways with his stick and says, “Better go up the stream.” For once he’s not shouting. It’s more of a gaspy whisper. But at least he knows where the stream is, not far to our left, through some trees and down a bit of a bank. He digs his stick into the dry earth and leans on it, then he waves his free hand at me.