‘So how did Nan turn that frozen milk into cheese?’ I persisted, trying to get him back onto the topic.
Grampy stared at me with his good eye. Then he cleared his throat. Clearing his throat was always a prelude to one of his famous maxims. Grampy was one of the oldest guys around. He commanded a certain respect in the community and was always offering advice to people. It was only natural that he would have something authoritative to say about cheese-making.
‘Eat hearty, my boy,’ he instructed. ‘Because you never know when you’ll eat again. You might get yourself lost on a muster or stuck in the tractor down the swamp or just be too damn busy to break for lunch. Eat hearty, lad, always.’
The prospect of having to carry out such vile tasks, let alone getting stuck or lost while doing so, gave me some food for thought. Maybe Grampy was right. Homemade cheese and toast wasn’t much of a meal. I also liked the idea of heeding his advice, to make up for my father, who never did. He was always complaining about Grampy and his endless advice which he ignored as a matter of principle. He’d do things his own way, and if it proved unsuccessful he’d swear so much the dogs would all run and hide from him. I felt someone had to make Grampy believe his wisdom was appreciated. I liked the way he’d tell me things, even if it was for the umpteenth time. He always said it like it was top secret, eyes wide and expression dead serious. So I abandoned the idea of dieting, out of respect to Grampy.
A week after I’d made that decision, Babe announced that she was going on a diet and would only eat raw carrots and celery and crispbread thinly spread with cottage cheese. My mother was terribly excited by Babe’s new plan. It was, after all, a vegetarian diet, albeit a rather drastic one. My mother decided to make a special trip to Dunedin to buy the essentials for the new diet. She cursed the inadequacies of the local shops for my father’s benefit. Secretly she was always eager for an excuse to visit Dunedin and call upon her friends from the university yoga society that she only got to see occasionally. She took Babe with her and together the two of them spent a frivolous hour, and almost a month’s worth of her housekeeping budget, in Sanitarium. My mother bought all sorts of foodstuffs, not approved by Pink, which she hoped to tempt Babe into trying.
For the entire day they were away my father complained about my mother and her whims and the dangers of the diet she so passionately desired for herself and everyone else. Finally, he conceded that it might be alright for women to eat ‘that muck’ but to expect a man to was nothing short of ‘bloody stupid’. My fate was sealed. It should have been the easiest thing in the world for me to simply announce that I too would join in the new diet, but now I realised to do so would be an act traitorous to my entire gender. My father would never forgive me if I was to break rank at the nightly roast dinner.
He was prone to hoarding particularly nasty farm chores until Babe or I did something to annoy him. For instance, I knew that all the manure under the gratings at the woolshed hadn’t been cleaned out for well over a year. It was beginning to ooze through the cracks. Lou, who was always hanging around my father and trying to be helpful, had even been so foolish as to point it out to him. ‘I know, I know,’ said my father, in a voice that sounded particularly malevolent to my expert ear.
There was no way I wanted to cop that one.
So that night when my mother arrived home, the boot of the Holden piled up with boxes of foods and vegetables I’d never even seen before, I pretended not to be interested. My father and I sat in the lounge and watched ‘Zorro’, which was now of particular torment to me. He didn’t send me, as he usually did, to help my mother up the path with her parcels. He had, however, dispatched me off earlier in the afternoon from the woolshed to get the roast on. This was a welcome reprieve from helping him trim the stud ewes’ feet.
So when my mother staggered into the kitchen with her plastic bags of eggplant and zucchini and broccoli, a copy of The Creative Vegetarian tucked under her arm, she was greeted by the smell of roasting leg of mutton. Babe followed at her heels, dubiously clutching a small sack of wheatgerm. She sniffed the air appreciatively. My mother noticed and handed Babe the recipe book. ‘Pick out whatever you fancy, dear,’ she said. ‘And I’ll make it for you tonight.’
Babe flicked straight to the desserts section. It looked as though she had been converted during the course of the Dunedin excursion to fully fledged vegetarianism. ‘I would like,’ she finally decided, ‘banana buckwheat pancakes with homemade apricot ice-cream.’
My mother looked alarmed. ‘Is that in there?’
Babe nodded and held up the recipe as proof.
‘I thought you were wanting to diet, dear, and be more conscious of what you were eating,’ my mother said.
‘Then I’ll have my crackers and lumpy cheese,’ snapped Babe.
That, I discovered, was what crispbread and cottage cheese actually was. I was relieved that I’d decided to support my father in his masculine meat-eating fraternity. As we tucked into our roast dinner, Babe miserably nibbled at a cracker. My mother, too, had opted for crackers after she had discovered that the recipe for bean stew required overnight soaking of the beans. When my father maliciously asked Babe to pass the gravy for the third time, she finally burst into tears, and ran off to her bedroom, detouring via the oven and snatching two roast potatoes as she went. My father had instructed me to make sure that I cooked plenty of roast vegetables that night, just in case Babe and my mother could be tempted.
After dinner I went to find Babe, but she was in bed with the lights turned off, pretending to be asleep. I pinched her latest issue of Pink and retired to my own bedroom. There was a ‘Would David date you?’ quiz, and I discovered to my delight that he would, if I told a few sneaky lies. Alongside was a photograph of him shirtless which I wanted to rip out, but I knew Babe would notice. Even though she professed to loathe David Cassidy, it didn’t mean she would let anyone else enjoy him semi-nude. I would have to wait a few weeks before I stole it and added it to my ‘private collection’ of cuttings from magazines of men in their togs or with their shirts off. They were mostly Bullworker advertisements from The Listener of men who had once been nine stone weaklings but had been transformed by Bullworker into ‘rippling brutes’. I undid my shirt and examined my own body. I had ripples, but they weren’t of the Bullworker approved variety.
I went to the bathroom and weighed myself. I had put on two pounds since the previous night. I felt terribly guilty for having eaten such a big roast dinner. I decided to have a very hot bath in the hope that it might melt the extra two pounds off. I had seen a program on television where people got into tubs of hot water with only their heads poking out the top, and emerged later, half the size of what they had been before.
I ran the bath from the hot tap only. The entire bathroom became enveloped in steam. The water was ferociously hot. It took forever to slowly ease all of me into the water. The heat was almost more than I could bear, but its intensity reassured me that it must be doing something. It was only when I was completely submerged that I remembered that the program with the sauna sequence had been a cartoon. People also got blown up or fell off cliffs in cartoons and came out of it looking just fine. I lost faith in the idea and clambered out.
Then my father barged into the bathroom. ‘Hurry up in there,’ he growled. ‘And you better not have taken all the hot water, or there’ll be trouble.’
Trouble usually meant some unpopular task around the farm that he didn’t want to do himself.
I dried myself off and hopped onto the scales. It was difficult to read because of the steam, but it looked as though I’d lost the two pounds. I didn’t peer too closely, in case I was proved wrong. I scampered across the passage into my bedroom, put on my pyjamas and jumped into bed. The Pink magazine had disappeared from beside my bed. Babe had retrieved it while I was in the bath, which was a shame. I had wanted to look at the photo of David Cassidy, one more time, before I turned off the light and went to sleep.
I reached
for my cow’s tail instead. I kept it coiled in the drawer of my bedside table. l held it up high, admiring its glittering blondness in the light of my lamp. With my other hand I reached for the hairbrush that I kept alongside it in the drawer. Slowly, reverently, I began to brush ‘my hair’. With every stroke of the brush, I whispered under my breath ‘fabulous’. I had mastered about fifteen different ways of saying it, though I wasn’t sure how distinctive each of those fifteen ways was. Fifty different ways just seemed inconceivable.
I heard my father go into the bathroom. I switched my light off, arranging ‘my hair’ so that it rested upon my chest. I lay there in bed, tensing, waiting for my father’s roar, when the hot water ran out. It didn’t come and I fell asleep. It wasn’t until the next morning that I learnt he had gotten engrossed reading The Farmer on the toilet, and so by the time he came to run his bath I was asleep and deaf to his curses and commands for me to boil water in the kitchen and bring it through to him.
My father left a note on my bread and butter plate that next morning. ‘I have a special job for you after school today over at the woolshed.’
7
Chapter 7
Aunt Evelyn developed something of a knack for launching new nicknames upon me. She was responsible for one even worse than Fatty, and for marring my looks for life. It was Aunt Evelyn who decided I needed glasses.
The world had become a blur. I realised, one day at school, that I was having to strain to see the blackboard. I didn’t think anything of it, dismissed it as another curious development in the process of growing up. Like what was happening down below. Turning twelve had brought with it so many mysteries and complications and things I didn’t fully understand. Having my vision fail me was just something else to endure. I tried to pretend that none of it was happening.
Aunt Evelyn was relieving at school the day she made her discovery. She would probably never have noticed if she hadn’t been making such a special effort with me. I’d been doing my best to avoid her since Lou’s birthday. My days at school had become a torment and I blamed her. No one called me Billy anymore. I was now Fatty.
But I couldn’t avoid Aunt Evelyn that day. She sat at the teacher’s desk, right in front of the class. Every time I looked up, she’d be staring at me intently with a concerned smile on her face. Her smile got on my nerves. I tried to keep my head bowed, but I could sense Aunt Evelyn’s eyes were still upon me. That smile was relentless. It haunted me. Mocked me with a sympathy I no longer trusted.
When I was obliged to look at the blackboard, I stared right past her. Suddenly, she snapped to her feet and swooped down on me. ‘You’re squinting,’ she crowed. ‘You’re squinting at the blackboard. You need to have your eyes examined.’
She led me into the staff room and rang my mother. ‘Your son needs to go to an optician,’ she declared, as if she was some sort of doctor delivering a diagnosis. ‘I’m surprised no one’s noticed before. I noticed immediately.’
I hated Aunt Evelyn anew. She seemed to consider it such a triumph to have observed what my mother had failed to. When the truth was if she hadn’t been staring at me so much she probably wouldn’t have noticed a thing. But what really irritated me was the undertone of criticism in Aunt Evelyn’s voice. She was prone to this sort of manner. It wasn’t exactly criticism. It was more subtle than that – she possessed this attitude of being assured of her own superiority.
Which is not to say that Aunt Evelyn wasn’t also outspoken in her opinions. Particularly when she got on the phone and was being goaded from the other end by the likes of Velda Pile. She always talked loudly on the phone, just as she sang ‘Happy Birthday’ too loudly. Lou and I hadn’t been able to avoid overhearing her talking to Velda recently, about my mother. ‘She lives in a world of her own,’ Aunt Evelyn had said. ‘And it’s a weird sort of world I’m telling you.’
Lou and I didn’t discuss it. But I could tell from Lou’s face that she was ashamed of her mother, her loud voice and her disloyal remark. Aunt Evelyn seemed to be making a lot of careless and rather cruel comments. Perhaps she’d always done so and I’d failed to notice. I’d never been the victim of one of them before.
Despite this disenchantment with my aunt, when the topic of my future career came up, I was tempted to overlook her betrayals. She started to bring it into conversation all the time, and I soon realised why. In the past, discussing my career had established an affinity between us. She’d ask me what I wanted to be and I’d say ‘an actor or a singer, just like you Aunt Evelyn’.
But I noticed, for the first time, something smug in the way she asked that question. As if she’d already anticipated both my answer and how she in turn would respond to that answer. She would play the supportive aunt, a contrast to my mother ‘who was in a world of her own’, and my father who was always telling me that I’d be a farmer and that was that.
That morning, as we stood in the teacher’s staff room, Aunt Evelyn’s hand lingered on the telephone that she had hung up, as if she still relished the recent conversation. She glanced at me, her triumphant smile softening a little. ‘You can still be an actor with glasses Billy,’ she said, ‘a character actor.’
I hesitated before replying. It was the moment when I might have confided my new aspiration, ‘I want to act the poof’. I could imagine how Aunt Evelyn would smile and nod her head encouragingly, then start talking nineteen to the dozen about how I might go about accomplishing my goal. But as I was mulling over this possibility, I looked up into her self-assured smile, already gloating its victory at winning me back. My confession shrivelled on my tongue. I was overcome by a greater urge. A desire to hurt her. For I knew exactly how to do it.
I curled my own mouth in an imitation of her same smile and lied. ‘I want to be a farmer,’ I said, ‘like Lou.’
Aunt Evelyn gasped. She would not hear of Lou’s ambitions for the farm. She literally refused to hear them. Long ago, it had been deemed a taboo subject. Lou claimed it was the one thing that could reduce Aunt Evelyn to tears.
Her face had dissolved into disbelief but once she registered that I had actually said what she thought I’d said, she struggled to regain her composure. A stiff expressionless mask slid over her features. Only her eyes betrayed her, larger than usual, slightly shocked and blinking furiously.
‘I don’t believe you’d make a success of that,’ Aunt Evelyn snorted, with a short, cruel laugh.
‘But I’d have Lou to help me and she’s an expert,’ I said. ‘We’d get along okay.’
Aunt Evelyn turned and walked away from me, pretending not to have heard. For a moment I felt my own brief surge of triumph. Had I made her cry? The thought of Aunt Evelyn in tears was almost impossible to contemplate, and for me to have purposefully induced them was a victory of sorts, but one that ultimately left me feeling guilty and uneasy. It was no longer Aunt Evelyn’s smile that haunted me. It was those eyes. Blinking. Struggling to keep back the tears. Aunt Evelyn ceased her special-effort campaign after that and I began to fret and wonder if perhaps I had made a mistake.
My mother took me to Dunedin the week after Aunt Evelyn’s diagnosis to have my eyes tested. I was excited by the prospect of getting glasses. I’d convinced myself that they’d improve my appearance which always dissatisfied me whenever I looked in the mirror. I wanted a big change. Ideally, I would’ve liked to have been slim with long, sleek dark hair like David Cassidy, instead of being fat with wispy blond hair. But if I couldn’t have that, then having glasses would be a major new cosmetic flourish. It could only be an improvement.
I had so set my heart on having glasses, that when I was sat up in the optician’s chair and told to read off the letters of the alphabet way down the other end of the room, I deliberately made mistakes. I could read the letters quite well if I closed one eye, but I made up entirely different sequences. Once, I made the mistake of reeling off seven letters instead of six, and I thought the optician realised what I was doing. But instead he gasped, ‘Double vision as w
ell’.
My mother squirmed in her seat guiltily. How had she failed to notice that her son was half-blind?
Meanwhile, I was doubly delighted with myself. I would get my glasses, and I had also realised how easy it was to deceive grown-ups, people I had always perceived as superior and quite infallible. It was a revelation that my mother could be so easily duped. When the time came to choose the frames, my mother took charge and selected a pair of heavy black frames. ‘They look lovely,’ the optician assured her.
Which wasn’t what the kids at school said when the glasses finally arrived in the mail a week later and I got to wear them for the first time.
‘Yuck.’
‘Revolting.’
By playtime, I had a new nickname. Fatty Four-eyes.
When I got home from school that day, I told my mother I didn’t want to wear glasses any more. ‘But you have to, so you can see properly,’ she said.
‘But they give me a headache,’ I complained. ‘And I don’t see any better with them.’
‘You just need to get used to them,’ she said.
I couldn’t confess what I had done. It would mean another new pair of glasses and another trip to Dunedin. Petrol was expensive and everyone had been urged to try to conserve it. My father would have a fit. So I took my glasses off at every opportunity, or let them slip down my nose so that I didn’t have to look through the lenses. I hoped these tactics would help the kids at school forget about the glasses and stop tormenting me.
They didn’t. Everyone loved the way the new name glided off their tongues. Wherever I went, it was chanted, ‘Fatty Fatty Four-eyes’.
I was crushed after that first day at school in my glasses. When I got home, I studied myself critically in the bedroom mirror. I looked nothing like David Cassidy and a lot like Billy Bunter, a resemblance I hoped no one else would notice. I couldn’t believe how much I’d changed. A year ago, I’d been a normal eleven-year-old boy with blond hair, blue eyes, and a skinny frame like everyone else. Friends of my mother had declared me adorable and ruffled my wispy hair. Slowly, over the next year, their compliments petered out. Those same women said nothing to me, just looked at me, and I could tell they were thinking the same things that the kids yelled at me at school.
50 Ways of Saying Fabulous Book 1 20th Anniversary Edition Page 8