50 Ways of Saying Fabulous Book 1 20th Anniversary Edition (2 page)

‘You prefer culture to cows, Billy-Boy,’ Aunt Evelyn often said. ‘Like me.’

In fact she said this so many times that it wore thin as a compliment. I began to wonder if in fact she wasn’t mourning her own daughter’s lack of interest. Nevertheless there was an affinity between Aunt Evelyn and me, and it was her I thought of when I found myself confronted by this enigma. For that was what
acting the poof 
became. I couldn’t find out what it meant. All day at school I puzzled over what Arch had said, trying to find some clue in it. How could you have fifty different ways of saying fabu­lous? I consulted all the dictionaries and encyclopaedias at school. Poof wasn’t listed. I was loath to ask the teacher. There had been disdain in Arch’s voice when he’d described it. He had practically spat out the words. His tone made me hesitate. Was it something not to be encour­aged? But then he’d heard about it from his father, who had no time for anyone having any fun.

Old Man Sampson was the meanest farmer around. Everyone said so. Especially when it came to money. He’d recently hired someone with a really weird name to help out on his farm. This person had no previous farm expe­rience at all, so he didn’t have to pay him much. Old Man Sampson allowed Arch to do just about everything round the farm. He even kept Arch home from school if he had a big day ahead like lamb marking or mustering. So it stood to reason that he wouldn’t be encouraging Arch to fool around, play-acting or whatever
acting the poof
actually meant.

I didn’t entirely trust Arch’s definition. He didn’t have much of a memory for anything he was told. But I couldn’t question him. That would betray my fascination. Aunt Evelyn was my only hope. She had a wealth of experience in the world of theatre, and to my mind
acting the poof
seemed bound up in that realm. It sounded theatrical, flam­boyant, the sort of exotic masquerade that I adored. My imagination became more fevered. Perhaps there was a course for it at drama school or university. I resolved to ask Aunt Evelyn at the first opportunity.

That moment on the bus was an epiphany for me. When I went to bed that night I felt that I had finally resolved my contradictory ambitions for myself.
Acting the poof
sounded like the sort of occupation that I’d be good at. Not like farming, at which I was an unmitigated failure. Finally, I had the answer to the question adults were always asking me. ‘What are you going to be when you grow up, Billy­ Boy?’

If my father was around when I was asked, I always felt obliged to say that I was going to be a farmer or an All Black. ‘Not that I’ll be very good at it,’ I’d add later, in a whisper.

But if he wasn’t in earshot, I’d invent a more exciting career for myself. I’d say I wanted to be a pop star or an actor on television or that I wanted to write plays or travel through outer space.

‘Oh, you want to be an astronaut,’ some friend of my mother’s would exclaim.

‘No, I just want to be like Judy,’ I’d reply and the woman would look baffled.

But now I knew. Now I finally knew exactly what I would say. When I grew up, I was going to
act the poof
.

That night, in bed, I lay my ponytail across my chest and tried to recite fifty ways of saying fabulous.

Throughout my childhood I was puzzled by the incongruity of my parents ever getting married in the first place. They seemed so at odds with one another. Not that they quarrelled. It was their aspirations that set them apart and proved a constant source of antagonism between them. My father believed in hard work and more hard work, and watching the rugby on television for relaxation. My mother had ideas. Rather original ideas by the Serpentine plain’s standards. No one, least of all my father, could understand them.

I used to ask both of them independently about how they met and eventually married, but neither of them would reveal very much. ‘I’ve been asking myself that same question for years,’ was my father’s standard reply.

My mother merely muttered that ‘it happened a long time ago’, as if that explained everything.

Quizzing Grampy and Aunt Evelyn was more enlighten­ing. Perhaps Grampy felt neglected. His television set held more appeal for his grandchildren than anything he had to say. He attacked the subject with zeal. ‘Jack and your mother met over a meat pie and now she refuses to eat them any more. It’s a bad sign, a bad sign,’ he lamented, before launching into his version of the story.

Aunt Evelyn was wonderfully indiscreet. But I asked her in a weak moment, on the drive home from the opening night of
The King and I
. There had been a party afterwards with bottles and bottles of Cold Duck. When the time came to go home, Aunt Evelyn wouldn’t allow Uncle Arthur to drive. ‘You’re drunk. You’ll kill us all,’ she said dramatically.

There was no alternative but for Lou to take the wheel. Aunt Evelyn sat in the back seat with me and told me things she probably shouldn’t have. ‘Reebie used to confide in me back then,’ she said. ‘Before she got all those weird ideas.’

Both Grampy and Aunt Evelyn insisted, and even my father admitted as much himself, that before he met my mother he was getting anxious about finding a wife. Jack was twenty-five years old. Practically everyone else his age had already married years before and snatched all the likely girls from the district in the process. To make matters worse, his younger brother, Arthur, had married the school teacher from Crayburn, Evelyn Wills, just a few days after Jack’s twenty-fifth birthday. Grampy set Arthur up on the adjoining farm, which he’d had the foresight to buy several years earlier. This meant Arthur and Evelyn had their own farm to run with their own house all to themselves. Arthur had escaped. Even if it was only two miles down the road, it was still a decent distance from Grampy and his relentless advice.

Jack realised that to find someone, he was going to have to venture beyond the Serpentine county. This was all very well, except his father regarded an excursion to the nearest range of shops at Glenora as a frivolity. To Grampy a holiday was going down to the river block to check on the sheep and taking along a picnic lunch. Jack loved the farm life, but he loathed always being told what to do. Grampy upheld that there was only one way of doing things; his way. When Arthur had lived at home, it had been possible on occasion for the two brothers to persuade Grampy of the value of their own ideas. But on his own, intimidated by his father’s disdainful stare, Jack’s initiative faltered, his voice betrayed him with hesitations and stuttering. Even to his own ears, his suggestions sounded weak and doomed for dismissal.

Grampy regarded Jack as a boy. Even though he knew he was twenty-five, he treated him as if he were years younger. To do otherwise would mean confronting the fact of his own age and the retirement his wife was constantly anticipating as if it was Christmas. Grampy had only recently granted his eldest son the privilege of a beer after a hard day out on the farm, and that was only after a terribly humiliating scene. Grampy had needed two of the neighbour’s sons, Bob and Jimmy Spratt, to help him with their big muster. When they’d all finished, just as the sun was going down, he invited the Spratts in for a drink. He poured them both a beer (Lion, when everyone drank either DB or Speights), then offered Jack a lemonade. Jack left the room rather than accept the drink, hoping Bob and Jimmy hadn’t noticed. They had of course, and let him know it, next time he saw them at rugby practice. Inevitably the whole team heard about it and for the rest of the season everyone was ragging him and offering him a lemonade instead of a beer after a game. Jack was older than both Bob and Jimmy by a couple of years, a fact he pointed out to his father. Grampy looked incredulous. ‘Is that so? Somehow they seem older.’

It was his mother who explained to Jack that both Bob and Jimmy were married, and Bob already with two kiddies. From Grampy’s point of view you were still a lad until you got yourself wed and started setting up your own family. ‘You’ve got to find yourself someone, Junior,’ said Nan. ‘Then he’ll start treating you like a man and giving you responsibilities.’

Nan had her own reasons for pushing Jack into marriage. Once Jack was married and starting a family, she could argue that the house was too small for all of them and Grampy and her could retire down the plain to Crayburn, preferably next-door to her best friend Janet Scott. Nan was an avid golfer and bowler and had been extremely frustrated the past winter to have missed several important matches due to the roads being clogged with snow. She also wanted a brand new house like Janet’s, except with central heating through­out and not just in the sitting room.

Nan drew up a list of the local possibilities for Jack, headed ‘Girls you might marry’, and left it on his pillow one evening. Jack glanced through the list before screwing it up. It only confirmed what he already knew. There was no one around the district that he was in the least bit interested in marrying. They were all too young or played golf. Jack was definitely not going to marry a golfer. They were always off playing a round and leaving their husbands to put the dinner on, Nan being the prime offender. He was going to have to take a holiday and look around for a wife. Nan was rather suspicious of outsiders and slightly affronted that her list had been discarded. She had taken some time over it and ranked the possibilities in order of congeniality. However, she could understand, and promised to persuade Grampy to give Jack a holiday.

‘What does he want to go gallivanting off for? And where does he think he’s going to go anyway?’

‘Jack, he’s twenty-five years old. He’s a man with needs of his own.’

Grampy didn’t want to consider what these needs might be. He quickly gave his assent rather than dwell on them or have his wife explain them to him. And so Jack took himself off to Dunedin to stay with his old high school friend Herb Day, who’d gone on to work in the Cadbury Hudson chocolate factory and got himself engaged to one of his co­-workers.

The visit was not a success. Herb wanted to spend his evenings at home in his parents’ sitting room, chatting on the phone to his fiancée, Barbara, about what had happened to them both since they’d last seen each other at work, a few hours previously. Sometimes talking on the phone wasn’t enough and Herb would visit Barbara at her mother’s house where the two of them would revise their guest list and menu plans for the wedding. This was torture to Jack, cruelly reinforcing his own hopeless bachelorhood. There was nothing he could do. The one time Jack finally suggested the two of them might go out to the pub for a drink, Herb replied that Barbara didn’t like pubs, even lounge bars, and wouldn’t want to come. ‘But that’s okay. We can go, just the two of us,’ said Jack.

‘Barbara likes us to play cards on Friday nights.’

So they played five hundred. At Barbara’s house. Jack was partnered by Barbara’s mother. The next day Jack told Herb that something had come up on the farm and he had to get home to help. ‘That’s a shame,’ said Herb. ‘It’s Barbara’s church dance tonight. Barbara’s mother loves to dance. She was looking forward to a foxtrot with you.’

Jack mumbled something he hoped was interpreted as dis­appointment and left as soon as he decently could. He drove down past the oval and decided to stop and watch the girls playing hockey. One girl on the team took his fancy and he cheered every time she hit the ball, to try to get her attention. She didn’t seem to notice, but her boyfriend did. He came over and told Jack to put a sock in it or he’d knock his teeth in. Jack retreated to his car. He consoled himself with the thought that if she played hockey, she would probably have turned to golf later in life.

Jack set off on the long drive home, brooding on the hopelessness of his situation. To cheer himself up, he decided to stop off at McGregor’s tearoom in Palmerston, for one of their famous mutton pies. Food was always a good consoler. It was there, at McGregor’s, that he saw Reebie for the first time. She was sitting at the table nearest the window, staring out into the street with such a sorrowful expression on her face that Jack felt convinced she must have been jilted by some fellow.

McGregor’s was busy. Jack took advantage of this to approach Reebie and ask if he could share her table. She nodded, but barely glanced at him. Her eyes were on the street. Slowly Jack ate his pie and in between bites stared at Reebie. When he had finished, he went and bought himself another and ate that one in exactly the same manner. When that pie was gone too, there was nothing to do but stare at Reebie without any distraction whatsoever.

‘Are you waiting for someone?’ Jack finally asked.

Reebie turned her attention to Jack. She gazed at him with such a grave expression on her face, that Jack felt quite fearful. Something was profoundly wrong. ‘Tell me,’ he said gently, ‘what’s the trouble? Maybe I can help.’

‘I doubt it,’ she replied.

But she confided in him anyway. ‘It feels better to tell someone,’ she said, managing a smile.

Reebie was a nurse at the Cherry Farm Psychiatric Hospital. She and one of the other nurses had taken several patients out for a walk after Sunday lunch, when Maxwell Powell (antisocial behaviour and petty theft) had suddenly burst into a wild sprint across the park and disappeared out the hospital gates. Reebie set off after him, but she was too late. She reached the road just in time to witness Maxwell climbing into a truck he had somehow persuaded to stop.

She waved frantically at the truck, trying to make the driver understand that he was taking a certified psychiatric patient aboard, but he was oblivious to her. The truck set off down the road again. Reebie’s training had never broached such a situation. She couldn’t imagine what she should do, when surprisingly another truck, headed in the same direction, pulled up alongside her. The driver leaned across the seat, opened the door and told her to jump in. Reebie had inadvertently flagged a truck down. She had never hitch­hiked in her life and had been warned of its dangers time and time again. Yet, without hesitation, she clambered up into the cab. ‘Follow that truck,’ she commanded, vaguely aware that she sounded like a Hollywood movie heroine. ‘There is an escaped patient aboard.’

‘What’s he in for?’ asked the driver, pressing down on the accelerator.

Reebie refrained from answering. The patient was a noto­rious pantie stealer, whom the doctors were currently considering for chemical castration. Reebie noted that it was a bright summery day, with a bit of a breeze. Perfect washing weather. Everyone would have their smalls out on the line today.

They lost sight of the truck somewhere between Wai­kouaiti and Palmerston. A farmer waited for the first truck to pass and then decided to chase his sheep out onto the road. The truck Reebie was in was forced to practically stop, and timorously edge its way through the mob. Reebie was beginning to feel extremely agitated. Not only was her charge speeding away from her with every wasted second, but the driver had begun to eye her in an appraising fashion. ‘It must be interesting being a nurse,’ he ventured. ‘You’d have such a wide knowledge of the human body and all its functions.’

Reebie didn’t like to think what he might be implying. ‘My training concentrated on the mind and its aberrations,’ she said tersely.

‘Oh yeah,’ said the driver. ‘Like perversions and that sort of stuff.’

Thankfully they cleared the last of the sheep and conver­sation became impossible as the driver revved the truck noisily through its gears. Reebie gazed hopefully at the road ahead. Gradually she became aware that the driver was regarding her in rather the same way and wasn’t keeping his eyes fixed on the road as he ought to.

‘I think I’ll get out at Palmerston and search around for him there,’ she said quickly.

The driver sighed. ‘I enjoy a bit of company on the road.’

When he stopped to let her out, he mentioned hopefully that he regularly drove past the nurses’ home. ‘Do you?’ smiled Reebie. ‘I’ll look out for you then, and wave.’

Reebie set off towards the houses and the washing lines with their strings of vulnerable undies. She trailed up and down every street, but it was all in vain. Maxwell was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t dare ask anyone if they’d seen him for fear of provoking alarm. Finally, she gave up and wandered back to the shops to revive herself with a cup of tea at McGregor’s. She took the seat by the window in case Maxwell should saunter past with someone’s washing, and that was where Jack came upon her, dolefully contemplating her failure and anticipating the reprimand she would receive upon her return to the hospital.

‘But you did all you could,’ said Jack. ‘Even putting your­self at risk with that truck driver.’

Reebie sighed. She would probably be transferred to one of the villas where the patients were largely immobile and all they could do was shit themselves.

‘Here, I’ll drive you back to the hospital and you can explain. I’m sure they’ll understand that you’ve done your best.’

Jack ushered Reebie out of McGregor’s and into his car. He gave a little skip as he hurried around to the driver’s side. What exciting circumstances to meet under. Jack had already decided that Reebie was the one for him. He would take her away from this work, which seemed terribly dan­gerous and quite unsuitable for such a nice girl. She seemed far too tender-hearted and good to be in such a position, fretting about some pervert, who in Jack’s opinion should have his throat cut. That was how it was on the farm. The sick and the deformed of the flock were slaughtered.