The Year I Turned Thirteen and Broadened my Mind

by Lynne Roberts

  Chapter 4

  Amber and I thought we were in for some peace until the next foreigner came but that night Kevin showed up. He knocked on my outside door just after I’d gone to bed and I was almost asleep. I leapt about six kilometres in the air and wondered if it was an axe murderer then realised that axe murderers would probably not bother knocking so I opened the door. I knew something was badly wrong because Kevin had been crying.

  Kevin never cried. He and I had been best friends ever since Mrs Parsons’s class in Year one when we sat together. Mrs Parsons had made this big deal about my name being Robinson, even though everyone calls me Robbie. It’s my dumb grandfather’s fault. He wanted someone to ‘carry on the family name’ but he only had to look in the phone book to see there was no danger of Robinson dying out. It was Mum’s surname before she got married and because her brother had said he’d never get married she felt obliged to call me Robinson instead and make her Dad happy. Of course five years later Uncle Eddie gets married after all and has two boys so she needn’t have bothered. Mrs Parsons said that if Kevin was my friend he would have to be ‘Friday,’ after Robinson Crusoe, which we hadn’t even read at that age. Kevin said, “It’s not Friday, it’s Thursday.” Mrs Parsons thought he said he was thirsty so she said he could go and get a drink. She meant at the drinking fountain but Kevin walked to the corner dairy and bought a coke which he shared with me at playtime and we were inseparable after that.

  I asked Kevin what was wrong. He was standing there looking miserable with a backpack and his school bag. “Have you run away from home?”

  “I think home’s run away from me,” said Kevin with what sounded like a sob. He sat on my bed and then told me his Step-Dad had kicked him out. Kevin was supposed to mow the lawn every week and he hadn’t done it this week, as he’d been too interested in what was happening at our place with the girls, and ended up giving my Mum a hand with the flowers. So his Step-Dad went ballistic and said he’d had enough of Kevin and he could go and live with his real Dad. So his Mum, who is expecting another baby, thought that was a good idea and went and saw his Dad in the bus and made him agree to take Kevin. She packed up Kevin’s stuff after school and told him to go and when Kevin got there the bus was gone.

  “Perhaps he’s just gone for a ride somewhere. Or maybe he forgot you were coming.”

  “No,” said Kevin positively. “He knew all right. It’s just that he doesn’t want me either so he’s taken off.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I thought I could stay in the tree hut,” Kevin said tentatively. “I can’t go home again.”

  “Good idea.”

  It was still warm at night so I fished out my sleeping bag from the cupboard and gave Kevin my spare pillow. Fortunately it wasn’t too dark so he was able to see to climb the ladder. I told him I’d sneak him some breakfast the next morning. “Then we’ll see what to do. Your Dad might have come back or I can ask Mum if you can stay here.”

  The next day after school Kevin went straight to the treehouse while I talked to Mum.

  “Mum, Kevin’s parents don’t want him. Can he come and stay here?”

  Mum looked shocked. She said of course Kevin’s parents wanted him and I wasn’t to say things like that. She said he couldn’t stay here because we needed the room for the farm helpers and anyway it was his parents’ responsibility to look after him. And my new room wasn’t big enough for another bed. Kevin looked at me hopefully when I climbed up to the tree hut with a handful of biscuits. I felt terrible when I told him what Mum had said.

  “And we have a Japanese boy coming tomorrow so there really isn’t room. Do you suppose your Mum will take you back?”

  “I’m not going back,” said Kevin defiantly. “I can stay here. We built it really well. I don’t need much, just food.”

  The tree hut was built well. Dad had helped Kevin and me build it the summer when we were both eleven. It had a wooden floor and walls with a corrugated iron roof and a sack hanging down for a door. It was really private as the only window looked out through the tree leaves and it was at the very end of the garden.

  “You come round to meals quite a bit anyway, and I’ll take extra lunch for school. That way you can eat some for breakfast and some for lunch.”

  “Okay, thanks.” said Kevin gratefully.

  This worked well for a couple of weeks. The Japanese boy, Hiroshi, was the opposite of the Argentinean girls, much to my mother’s relief. He worked hard and was anxious to help in any way he could. Amber hated it because he kept staring at her and she couldn’t tell him to stop because his English was practically non-existent. She started to hide in her room, which made it worse, as he stared at her even more when she finally came out.

  Hiroshi was keen to learn English and would point to something then solemnly repeat what we said before writing it down in a little notebook. I looked over his shoulder once when he was writing but it was all in those weird looking characters and I couldn’t understand any of it. We were tempted to teach him some swear words but decided it wouldn’t be fair when he was so in earnest about everything. He spent nearly all his spare time reading a Japanese/English textbook and would come out with some really weird sentences occasionally. He knew “yes” and said it all the time. Mum didn’t realise at first that “yes” was the only English word he knew. She showed him the patch of flowers she wanted weeded and pulled up a weed. She pointed to the garden and said,

  “Pull out all these weeds, do you understand?”

  Of course Hiroshi said yes then pulled out everything – weeks, flowers the lot. Mum was horrified but said she had to take most of the blame for not keeping a better watch on him. So after that she made sure he knew what to do and the other only problem was getting him to stop. He would have worked 16 hours a day if she’d let him. He loved Mum’s cooking although he didn’t eat much and was nearly as weedy as Kevin.

  Hiroshi found Kevin in the tree hut one night but Kevin told him it was a secret and made him get his dictionary so he could show him. Kevin then made up some story about having to hide from foreign spies and his life being in danger. Hiroshi obviously swallowed all this garbage as the day before he left he bowed and presented Kevin with a huge, wicked looking knife. He gave us all presents and did lots of bowing and saying “yes and “good boy” which Mum had said quite a lot to him and he obviously thought was what people said to each other. Mum gave him a jar of her home-made plum jam which he was really pleased with even though he pronounced it “prum.”

  Mum was sorry when Hiroshi left because he had worked so hard and been really polite, bowing to her and Dad all the time and treating her like a fragile piece of porcelain.

  The day Hiroshi left an Israeli girl called Nirit arrived and that was when the trouble with the food began. Mum had been surprised I was suddenly taking three times the quantity of food for my school lunch. Dad had laughed and said he could remember when he was a growing boy and how he was always starving and didn’t Mum know that a good definition of a boy was “an appetite wrapped in a piece of skin.”

  Mum is pleased when people eat the food she cooks and is inclined to be irritable if you don’t eat your tea because you’ve been stuffing yourself with biscuits. She’d done some research into the Jewish religion and proudly cooked food that she assured Nirit was “kosher’ or okay for her to eat. Nirit turned it all down. She was a great disappointment. She’d come straight from doing her military training so Mum was hoping for a good strong worker. Unfortunately, Nirit was short and dumpy and had decided to come to New Zealand and get thin. Her diet was a simple one and consisted solely of carrots. The only food she would eat for breakfast, lunch and tea was raw carrot.

  “At least its cheap dear,” Dad pointed out when Mum complained to him about this. “Easy to prepare too.”

  So Mum sat and fumed while Nirit rejected all her home cooked meals and sat eating carrots. Naturally she got weaker and weaker and spent most of her time lying down and
complaining bitterly about being forced to work in the glasshouse.

  Mum was expecting to save money on food and was surprised to find the opposite. She kept opening containers and finding all the contents had gone. And all the week’s baking vanished in the first two days. The last straw was when she opened a tin of condensed milk to find it was empty. Someone had cunningly made a hole in it and sucked it out then covered the hole over again with the price label.

  Naturally I got the blame for this.

  “It wasn’t me,” I protested, but wondered rather guiltily if Kevin was sneaking inside to pinch food. He denied this when I asked him about it and things got a bit unfriendly for a while. I asked Amber if it was her but fortunately Dad got up one night to get himself a glass of water and caught Nirit inside the pantry stuffing herself with biscuits. He told her off for being so silly and made her eat a proper breakfast the next day. She scowled through the fruit and cereal, sulked through the toast and marmalade, then announced she would be leaving that day. We were all rather relieved to see her go and she certainly hadn’t got any thinner. The only thing that had happened was that her skin had gone a strange orange colour. Kevin said he thought she was probably going to turn into a carrot because she ate so many.

  Nirit hadn’t really broadened our minds at all about Israel because she never talked about it. They had obviously impressed on her in the army that the rest of the world was avid for secrets of Israeli life to use as a weapon against them or something. She hardly talked to us at all but spent hours on the phone every night jabbering away to her family in Israel. They all seemed to need to speak to her every day and all shouted madly as if you had to yell into the telephone because it was calling from such a huge distance away. Mum and Dad thought she was calling them collect and were not impressed when the phone bill arrived, after she had gone, and found out what she had charged up to our phone.