by Sandy McKay
Then she whined over at Mum, who told me to ‘just get off your sister’s back’.
“And while I’ve got you both here,” said Mum, “who nicked all my make-up out of the bathroom cupboard? I told you, Allie, you’re too young for make-up. You can’t wear it until you’ve enough money to buy your own.”
“I didn’t nick your make-up,” said Allie.
“Well, you can hardly blame Colin, can you? You can’t blame him this time. I don’t think you’re interested in lipstick, yet, Col. Are you?”
I decided it was time to join Dad in the kitchen.
Dad was making chocolate afghans. He’d got quite good at baking lately and afghans were his specialty. Sometimes they spread thin all over the tray and other times they looked like dollops of dog poo but today they looked perfect and Dad looked pleased with himself.
I figured it was safer in here than in the lounge where the argument about the make-up was heating up.
When the phone rang I thought it was Lizzie. It was definitely the voice of a female and it definitely wasn’t Monica. Yahoo! I thought. She’s decided to come clean and confess her feelings for me. I was just about to say ‘all is forgiven’, that I felt exactly the same about her, and would she like to come to the movies on Friday, when the voice asked if Louise Kennedy was available please. I had to think for a minute about who Louise Kennedy was.
“Mum, it’s for you.”
Mum was still steaming over Allie not owning up to nicking the make-up and when she came to the phone she actually sounded quite rude.
Then the tone in her voice changed completely. She got all business-like. “Yes, yes, I understand. Of course. Yes, well, I’m very pleased. It’s a good price and a lovely property. Yes… Yes… Yes… We’ll wrap up the final details in the office tomorrow. Pleasure doing business with you. Thank you so much.”
Lay off it Mum, if you get any more sickly sweet you’re going to turn into toffee.
When she’d finished on the phone, my-mother-the-business-woman launched into her official victory routine, yahooing like a mad thing, punching the air like she’d just scored a try and giving me such a squeezy hug I thought I was going to collapse from lack of oxygen.
“I’ve done it! I’ve done it!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.
“I’ve just made four-thousand dollars commission and we’re all going out to dinner to celebrate.”
Dad, who was just pressing the walnuts into the chocolate icing on his afghans, said he was really pleased and he’d love to go out to dinner – but first he’d just nip down to Paddy’s to get an old cake mixer Paddy had been keeping aside. Then he’d be right with us. Rather a pathetic attempt at excitement, I thought, even by Dad’s standards.
Then Mum dropped her bombshell.
“Well, make the most of it because that place won’t be there for too much longer.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“The Council have rezoned the land and Paddy’s going to have to shut down or set up somewhere else.”
“Who told you that?”
“I know because this section I’ve just sold is right next door. The Council have guaranteed that the tip will be gone in six months. They’ve given us their written guarantee.”
9
“Since 1975, enough crude oil to fill 1,154 Olympic-sized swimming pools has been spilt at sea.”
I RANG PADDY straight away, being careful not to mention anything about Mum. I didn’t want him to know I was related to the woman who was going to make a tidy profit from his loss, the woman who may even have had some involvement with Orange Lips and the high heeled brigade. Who knows how low these Real Estate Agents will stoop?
“I’m gonna fight it, laddie,” he said.
“The Council’s only done this to protect their own landfill. I’m cheaper than they are and I run a good business. There’s something very fishy going on here. These guys have had it in for me for years, and old Orange Lips and the high heel brigade have just played right into their hands. Well, I’m not gonna take it lying down. You see if I’m not. I’m gonna fight. I’m gonna fight it to the bitter end.”
“But first there’s something else I gotta do.”
Great minds think alike.
Neither of us wanted some toffee-nosed rich person building a house over a truck load of chocolate bars. That wouldn’t be fair.
“I’ve been thinking about that chocolate, lad, and I reckon you’re right. It’s not fair having all that grub buried in the ground when there are people out there going hungry. What’s the use of sticking by an agreement if the Council aren’t prepared to stick by theirs anyway? How’d you like to give me a hand?”
I thought it was a choice idea but first I had some homework to finish. I had a report to write about how the family were doing with the new recycling regime.
Well, what was there to say? No-one gave two hoots about recycling. They all thought it was a big joke.
The bucket I put out for kitchen scraps got filled up with paper in less than one day. Mum refused to stop buying baked beans on account of her being a ‘working mother’ and not having time to cook anything else. Dad tried hard but kept forgetting. Allie thought the whole thing was just some hair-brained scheme her little brother had dreamed up to make her life miserable. She hadn’t been very cooperative since she got blamed for nicking Mum’s make-up. I wasn’t going that great either. I kept forgetting to put the milk bottles out and ended up having to go to the dairy for plastic ones.
To be honest, the recycling stuff was harder than it looked and I thought our rubbish pile was getting bigger rather than smaller.
I wrote in my folder: Family is starting to become aware of the need to recycle. Need a little more time for proper effectiveness.
You had to be positive. That’s what Mr Read said.
At school we were learning how to recycle paper.
And when you thought about how much paper the average person used in a day it made good sense to recycle the stuff. Letters, newspapers, school books, school notices, junk mail, loo paper…
Byron and I had plans to make our own notepaper, wrapping paper and gift card sets. We thought if we designed some fancy logo and did some cute artwork we could sell it for a massive profit.
It was easy enough to do. You tore the scrap paper up into little bits, soaked it in water for a day or so and then spread it out on some mesh to dry. And whammo, recycled paper. Our first lot had turned out a bit thick but we figured with a bit of practice we could get the recipe right.
Today we had to tell the class what proactive things we’d been doing on the recycling front. Things like lobbying, making protests, writing letters… that kind of stuff. The stuff Peter Peat had been talking about.
I said I’d been protesting to my family but I hadn’t got round to a more global scale yet. When it came to Lizzie’s turn she giggled, flicked back that shiny black hair of hers and said she’d taken all her Dad’s beer cans to the recycling depot in the week-end. Then she giggled again. She had a great giggle.
Ryan ‘goodey-goodey’ Halimore had written to the Yum Yum Chocolate Factory complaining about the packaging on their boxed chocolates. He said in his letter that if they didn’t scale it down a bit, they would be responsible for the ‘instinction’ of several species of wildlife. He also said they would miss out on his family’s custom this year, which was sure to have a major impact on their yearly profit margins.
Mr Read said well done, but that he’d spelled extinction wrong. Ryan looked like he was going to burst into tears.
Then Mr Read did a bit of a rave about how Planet Earth belonged to all of us and it was up to the future generation to make sure its resources weren’t squandered. He said sometimes you had to do things that were difficult or unpopular when something important was at stake. Sometimes even illegal if you felt strongly that the law was wrong or unfair or immoral. I didn’t think this was the sort of thing teachers should be saying to their pupils, but the very fact that
Mr Read risked saying those things made me think again.
I decided I’d been pussy-footing around for long enough. It was about time I did something really brave.
It was about time Allie stopped delivering all those dead trees into people’s letter-boxes, anyway. I’d tried reasoning with her, but now it was time for something a little more dramatic.
The man delivered the mail in a bag on our front steps on a Thursday. When Allie got home she folded the pamphlets, put them into a canvas bag and shoved them through letter-boxes.
It was all pretty useless stuff. What was on special at the supermarket that week, the latest tropical holiday bargains… that sort of thing. Just people trying to get us to buy things we didn’t even need and sacrificing the lives of innocent trees in the process. I thought I was perfectly within my rights to do what I did.
Of course Allie didn’t agree and she was so busy having a wobbly she couldn’t see the logic behind my actions at all.
“You what?” she said when she came home and found there was no mail to deliver. “You did what?”
I tried to explain that I’d shredded it all up to save everyone a lot of trouble but she didn’t seem capable of listening. Instead she did a very impressive impersonation of a two-year-old throwing a tantrum. Allie can be surprisingly violent when she wants to be. She started screaming and kicking and the next minute she was pulling me round by my hair roots. I thought I was going to lose it completely. My hair, I mean. I imagined the headlines…
‘Boy sacrifices scalp to save rain forest!’
I guess this was what the teacher meant by standing up for your convictions. But Allie was a complete thickhead and couldn’t see the global implications of my actions at all. Not even when I offered to ring her boss and explain that it was a political act. I’d take the rap, I said. I wasn’t afraid to stand up and be counted. Besides there was no use acting if your actions weren’t noticed. Right?!
But Allie wasn’t interested, which worried me a lot. It was her planet too, after all. She was too obsessed with her silly calorie counting. She didn’t give one hoot about the rain forest.
She told me she thought I was nuts and then I heard her talking on the phone to her boss. She made up some story about the cat peeing all over the mail. It was very silly and mean to blame the cat, especially when the poor thing had had such an unfortunate start in life.
So standing up for your convictions was not as easy as it looked and now I’d got myself in trouble with Mum and Dad. Mum got so mad with me I thought she was going to hyperventilate and then she went roaring off in the car with her hang-glider strapped precariously onto the roof rack and her cellphone left ringing on the table. Dad started revving up his mower engines and Allie just thumped around slamming doors and muttering about what had she done to deserve a brother like me. Talk about an over-reaction.
Then I made things even worse when I told Dad the teacher reckoned lawnmowers were a waste of energy and we should plant our backyards in native shrubs instead. Dad didn’t see the funny side at all and told me to pull my head in.
“A guy’s got to make a buck when and how he can, Colin,” he said. “This is the real world you know. Not just some fantasy Mr Read la la land.”
And now I’d been grounded which meant the chocolate digging would have to wait.
I rang Paddy and he said there was no hurry, it wasn’t going rotten or anything. In fact, he said, burying things without the right amount of water and sunlight could actually preserve them quite nicely which was what often happened in landfills. And then he went off on his high horse about how newspapers had been dug up and read 15 years after they were buried.
I guess I sort of understood how Mum and Dad might have felt with me raving on all the time.
But Paddy had some bad news of his own. Old Orange Lips had been on his case again and this time he’d had a letter from the Council to confirm it.
Dear Mr McTavish,
The Council regrets to inform you that the lease on section 248D has expired. In line with national policy the Council has taken the opportunity to rezone the land. This will change its status from industrial category A to residential category C. In effect this means the land will no longer be suitable for your current operation. I trust this won’t be too inconvenient and that you will be able to re-locate. Your lease expires in six months time and you have ten days to appeal this decision,
Your loyal servant,
Gavin Sparrow
“Loyal servant, my bum,” said Paddy.
To appeal the decision he would need a lawyer and lawyers cost money. Lots of money. Paddy was down in the dumps – in more ways than one.
I felt guilty about Mum. I didn’t dare tell Paddy that she’d been out celebrating her new property deal. I felt like a traitor and very ashamed of my own mother. She was proving to be very hard work all round, my Mum. The other day when I told her we should be using unbleached toilet rolls she nearly snapped my head off.
“Okay then, Mr know-it-all, Captain Planet, Mr Greenpeace, or whatever you want to call yourself. You do the shopping. You buy whatever you want but there’s no way I’m wiping my bottom with that dirty looking unbleached stuff. No way.”
“But the planet, Mum. The planet. We’ve all got to do our bit.”
“Stuff the planet!” she said.
Stuff the planet! My mother said that. God’s honour, she did. It was enough to drive a kid to drink canned Coke.
Then I told her she was getting very hard-hearted in her old age. Very cynical. She didn’t care about anything since she got that job. Not even cooking. All she worried about was selling houses and getting commissions. What did she care if half the rain forest was disappearing? She didn’t care about anything. She was as bad as Orange Lips…
Then she got even madder and told me I was turning into a spoiled, cheeky little brat and if she wasn’t selling houses we wouldn’t be able to buy ANY toilet paper. Bleached or unbleached. Then she said that unless I learned to speak properly to my mother, who spent all her days working so I could have a roof over my head, I was grounded for another week.
10
“Twenty percent of the world’s population in rich western countries use 70 percent of the world’s energy,”
PADDY had to do something.
So he went next door, to the flash, two-storied Oamaru-Stone mansion that belonged to Orange Lips and her husband Arnold. I could just imagine him standing on the top steps between those two stupid concrete lions, as he tore the letter to shreds in front of her. Paddy can look very ferocious when he wants to. He’s a small man but he’s wiry and firey and he used to be a boxer. If I was Orange Lips I would have been messing my pants.
“I’m not leaving that place without a fight,” he said to her. “If you want a fight then you’re going to get one.”
Orange Lips looked shocked, as it was only six o’clock in the morning. She was standing there in her pink fluffy dressing gown and matching slippers with pom poms on.
“It’s not up to me,” she said – all quivering and scared.
“As president of the Rosewood Residents’ Association, I’m merely representing the people of the district. We’re concerned about our property values.”
“For heavens sake,” said Paddy. “It’s a recycling centre, not a casino.”
Then Orange Lips trembled some more, bit her lip, slammed the door and tottered back inside.
Paddy felt better after that and he was in a good mood when I arrived with my spade for a spot of chocolate digging. I was feeling better too. At interval Lizzie Bennett had spoken to me for the first time in weeks.
“Move over,” she said, shoving me sideways on my chair so she could get to sit in the sun. Move over – the way she said it… Wow… I have never heard anyone say ‘move over’ with such style and wit and charm. It made me feel all goosebumpy just thinking about it.
I was also feeling more positive after chatting to Mr Read about Mum and the trouble I was having with
her. He told me to go easy. “One step at a time, Colin,” he said. “You can’t change the world in a week. And you can’t change the habits of a lifetime in a week either. Lead by example, that’s the best way.”
He reckoned Mum would come round in the end. I just had to give her time.
“You can’t bully people into changing.”
Then I told him about what was happening with Paddy and how the town’s only recycling centre was in danger of being closed down.
“Now that’s serious,” he said. “That’s really serious.”
I didn’t mention anything about the chocolate though. I thought I better not.
That night I apologised to Mum. I said I was sorry for being so stroppy but I’d been under a lot of stress lately. She accepted my apology and offered me a compromise.
“I promise to give the unbleached loo paper a try, if you remember to put the milk bottles out and help around the house a bit more.”
It was a deal and we shook hands to confirm it.
I was going to mention that it would be a good idea to use recycled paper bags at the supermarket, when I remembered what Mr Read said. One step at a time. So I told her a story instead about Mr Read’s friend from Egypt who has a sort of hose pipe in his loo. After he’s finished it sprays his bum clean which saves them a lot on toilet paper. I said perhaps we could look at installing one ourselves.
Mum said she’d heard enough about toilet gadgets for one day.
Dad dropped me off at the recycling depot and said he’d pick me up at the gate in an hour. I hoped that’d be enough time. Paddy laughed when he saw my spade.
“I think we’ll need something a bit bigger than that, lad. Good thinking though.”