50 Ways of Saying Fabulous Book 1 20th Anniversary Edition (6 page)

I left Roy to shrink and hurried back across the lawn to the house. When I got inside, everyone started asking me if it was true about Roy. ‘Go on Fatty,’ said Arch. ‘Tell ’em what we saw, how big and hairy it was.’

I blushed. I hated this new name Arch had invented and I hated Arch even more. Everyone was staring at me and snickering, whispering my new nickname amongst themselves. I wished I’d stayed outside in the hedge with Roy.

‘Come on Fats, tell us,’ said Peter Hammer.

I hesitated. It occurred to me that by confirming Arch’s story, I could probably deflect this attention away from myself and focus it all on Roy. Surely, this revelation about Roy was big enough to make everyone forget about me and how fat I’d become. Just then Roy himself sidled into the room. Everyone was staring at me so no one else noticed him. He looked beaten and weary, like one of the farm dogs after they’d been shouted and sworn at for chasing the sheep the wrong way. It was that look on his face that made me change my mind.

‘I didn’t see nothing down there and you know that, Arch,’ I said. ‘It’s just a story you decided to make up and told me to back you up.’

Arch stared at me in disbelief. Everyone started jostling him and punching him for making up stories. His protests were lost in the jeers of the others. I couldn’t see Roy any more. I was beginning to worry as to whether I’d done the right thing. Undoubtedly I’d made an enemy of Arch.

Then Mr Schluter appeared in the doorway. ‘Arch, I’ve come to collect you and Roy,’ he said.

Mr Schluter wore strange clothes too, just like his son. He had on dirty khaki overalls and white gumboots. I’d never even seen white gumboots before. All the farmers round the district wore hobnail boots or black gumboots. I’d heard my mother on the phone saying that he’d never worked on a farm before and that he had a few funny ideas about what it entailed. ‘I guess city folk often have naive ideas about country life,’ she’d said in a wistful kind of way.

Arch stamped up to Mr Schluter. ‘I’m driving home. My father always lets me.’

Mr Schluter looked at Arch doubtfully. ‘Roy,’ he called, and Roy glided out from the crowd to stand beside his father.

‘Thank Lou for the nice party,’ Mr Schluter instructed.

Roy and Arch mumbled a thank you in unison. ‘Be seeing you all,’ said Mr Schluter to no one in particular and turned to go back outside.

Arch raced ahead of Mr Schluter to beat him to the driver’s seat. I watched them from the doorway. Mr Schluter was having a hard time getting Arch to move over to the passenger’s seat. Finally, I heard him raise his voice, and Arch slid across. Meanwhile, Roy had climbed up on the back of the jeep and was crouching there beside the dogs, patting them, though Mr Schluter was insisting he get in the front. Roy didn’t want to. He didn’t want to have to sit beside Arch.

Eventually, Mr Schluter gave up, slammed his door, started the jeep and set off down the drive. It was obvious he hadn’t got the hang of driving it. He had trouble getting from second gear into third. I could imagine Arch telling him how he could drive a whole lot better than that, and he probably could. Old Man Sampson had taught Arch to drive when he was eight years old. According to a phone conver­sation of my mother’s that I’d overheard, he’d only hired the Schluters because Mrs Sampson was going to have another baby and had refused to help with the feeding out any longer.

Lou came up beside me. ‘That Roy didn’t give me a present. Everyone else in the school did, except him.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t know. Maybe it’s different in the city, where they come from,’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ said Lou. ‘But the least he could’ve done was show me his dick, if it really is so big and hairy. That wou­ld’ve done as a present, having a squeeze of it.’

I didn’t confide, even to Lou, that I’d usurped that particular birthday privilege. It was our secret, Roy’s and mine. The fact that he’d gotten hard when I’d touched it, made me feel pretty confident that he’d want to fool around again just as much as I did.

The day after the birthday party, when I climbed into the school bus, I was greeted with a chorus of my new nick­ name. Fatty Fernando. Fatty Fernando. Fatty Fernando. ‘Zorro’ had just begun a new series on television and was being eagerly watched and discussed by everyone at school. Fatty Fernando was  Zorro’s bumbling opponent. From the delight everyone was taking in the new name, I could tell it had the resonance that was going to make it stick.

I shuffled to the back of the bus, ashamed that Babe and Lou were witness to my humiliation. They sat right up the front, gazing out the window, pretending not to hear or not to know me. I couldn’t tell which. They stared at their feet when Arch started singing the theme song from ‘Zorro’, and everyone else joined in. Except them of course, and Roy. He turned those big moony eyes of his on me to emphasise that his silence was a mark of friendship. I looked away. I hated him and cursed myself for being stupid enough to feel sorry for him. I’d spared him and sacrificed myself to the worst that Arch could think up.

I blamed Roy. But it was Aunt Evelyn who was my real nemesis. It had been her drawing attention to the fact that I had put on weight that had made everyone take notice. Adults were authoritative. Especially Aunt Evelyn, the sometimes school teacher. No one would have thought of calling me fat until she opened her big opera-trained mouth. All the kids at school were so used to seeing me every day, that they just accepted me as I was. They were accustomed to me and no one thought to comment because no one had really noticed the change.

Of course, there had been occasional comments on my weight, but none of them had made me feel embarrassed or alarmed or even made me stop to consider my shape as a problem. Instead, the remarks had usually made me feel dubiously pleased with myself. ‘You’ll be like your uncles,’ my mother insisted. ‘They all grew out, then up and look at them now.’

My mother’s three brothers were all monsters, six foot three and big solid men without being at all fat. It was reas­suring to think I’d end up the same way and that being fat was just a phase that would effortlessly work itself out into proportion. That my father wasn’t tall gave me a few uneasy moments. In fact, he was decidedly short. So were Uncle Arthur and Grampy.

My father noticed my weight increase too. ‘You’ll be an asset round the farm now you’re starting to get so big and strong,’ he remarked kindly one day. Not that I liked helping round the farm, but it was nice to be praised and told I’d be an asset to someone.

About the only thing I could find to enjoy about working on the farm were the smokos and meals in-between jobs. My mother often baked something special for morning tea, like pinwheel scones or muffins, especially if it was a frosty morning. The tins were always full of fresh baking for afternoon tea; usually yo-yos and afghans and Belgium biscuits because they were Babe’s and my favourites. Practically every night there’d be a roast dinner. Or at least that’s how it had been until my mother began to rebel, and place the future of those roasts in doubt.

My mother had developed some strange new ideas about food. They complemented her strange new ideas on a variety of other matters. She renounced meat. To be a vegetarian on a farm was simply unheard of. Generally, meat featured on the menu three meals a day, seven days a week, a fact my mother pointed out. ‘It’s ridiculously excessive,’ she said and promptly served up a meatless meal, that none of us could identify or felt particularly inclined to eat.

We all nibbled politely in silence. My mother was the only one to clean her plate. After the meal, while my mother was clearing up, my father went to the fridge and made himself a cold mutton sandwich and sat back down at the table to eat it. Babe and I were urged to go and watch television. From the lounge room we could hear my parents arguing in low voices. The upshot was that my mother cooked two meals from that day forward: one with meat and one without. Neither Babe nor I dared show too much interest in what our mother ate. Our father had a word to us on the sly, warning us that the future of the nightly roast dinner was at threat if we showed any inclination for ‘vegetablerism’.

My mother’s new diet coincided with my own realisation of how fat I had actually become. I weighed myself when I got home from Lou’s party and was horrified to find that I was over ten stone. In fact, I was closer to eleven stone. I was only twelve years old, not even five-foot tall, and I weighed practically
twice
as much as my contemporaries. It was alarming. Embarrassing. I didn’t want anyone to know how much I weighed. As I stood there on the scales, unable to believe the evidence before my eyes, I resolved to go on a diet. A
secret
diet.

It was bad enough being teased about being fat. I didn’t want to be teased about being on a diet as well. As far as I knew men never went on diets. There were never diets for men in any magazines. I’d never heard of a man not eating something because he was concerned about his weight. It just didn’t happen. Practically every man I’d ever encoun­tered had a beer gut swelling over his belt.

That night, after the party, I went to bed with a stack of Babe’s
Pinks
to research possible diets. Our mother had treated both Babe and me to a magazine subscription a few months previously. She’d said that we could choose whatever we wanted. Babe had already made up her mind before we even got to the newsagent in Glenora. She knew exactly where
Pink
the new British girls’ magazine was on the mag­azine stand. She thrust a copy of it at our mother who examined it sceptically, then tried to persuade Babe into something more worthy. ‘
Look and Learn
is very interesting,’ she suggested.

Babe was adamant. ‘You said I could choose for myself,’ she whined loudly so that the shopkeeper would hear.

My mother sighed and was obliged to agree. ‘Well, that means you can have
Look and Learn
then, Billy-Boy,’ she said, turning to me.

Her smile was tightly strained. I knew better than to argue.

The only thing I ever bothered reading in
Look and Learn
was the comic strip in the back. But the magazines that Babe and my mother had subscribed to fascinated me. For my mother had taken out a subscription to
Cleo
, the shocking new women’s magazine that featured nude male centrefolds.

Cleo
was never left lying around the lounge room. Babe and I pestered my mother for weeks to show us the centrefold. Finally one day she took us to her bedroom, retrieved a copy of the magazine from under the bed and opened it to the centre page. ‘There,’ she said, thrusting the naked man’s torso beneath our noses. ‘Satisfied?’

I was more than satisfied. I was tremendously excited. It was a strain to act blasé for my mother’s benefit. I actually felt tremulous from the thrill of seeing the centrefold. Now that I knew exactly where my mother kept the magazines, I resolved to return and study the centre pages of every issue much more closely at the first possible opportunity. Next golf day.

I was also intrigued to notice that my mother didn’t offer her
Cleos
to Aunt Evelyn. Usually, the two of them swapped their magazines with remarks like, ‘This has a great recipe for a six tin sausage casserole,’ or ‘This one says shocking things about Princess Anne and her horses.’ But the
Cleos
remained discreetly under the bed. I couldn’t decide whether my mother was too embarrassed to offer them to Aunt Evelyn, or whether perhaps Aunt Evelyn already subscribed herself.

Pink
was rather tame by comparison, though still a lot more interesting than
Look and Learn
. It was full of tips on all manner of important subjects such as how to sew tartan onto your clothes Bay City Rollers style, and competitions to win a date with David Cassidy. It also offered dieting advice. That night, after the scales had revealed the sorry truth, I read every
Pink
article on dieting. They all seemed to advocate the same basic strategy: munching on carrots, celery sticks and crispbread thinly spread with cottage cheese.

This was all rather foreign and not particularly practical to me. Carrots were the only thing on the
Pink
diet that were familiar. Unfortunately they were also the preferred nourishment of the rabbits who regularly raided my mother’s vegetable garden. These rabbits infuriated my father who had wasted many of his evenings, hiding behind the raspberry bushes with his shotgun, waiting for them to appear. When they failed to, he laid poisoned carrots around the perimeter of the vegetable garden. The inevitable happened. Somehow, one of those carrots ended up in the salad my mother served to the local Wrightson’s agent. The poor man had to be induced to vomit and then rushed to Glenora hospital. My father blamed my mother and my mother blamed my father, but the upshot was that the vegetable garden was abandoned to the rabbits.

Carrots became a word fraught with highly-charged significance in our home. My mother decided it was best not to serve them again until the incident became a distant memory. Wrightson’s became extremely inflexible with our credit account after ‘the attempted poisoning’ much to my father’s chagrin. I would wander out to the vegetable garden and look longingly at the carrots. They were my possible salvation according to
Pink
magazine, but they were all either half-nibbled by the rabbits or potentially lethal.

So I turned to celery. I had a vague idea it was a vegetable but no idea what it looked like. The range of vegetables I was familiar with was rather basic. My father insisted on potatoes, carrots and frozen peas and would eat nothing else. When carrots became an unmentionable, they were tactfully supplanted by cauliflower on our dinner plates, which no one ever ate, except my mother. Celery was another enigma for me.

Whenever we went to the Crayburn Superstore or to the more extensive Glenora Four Square, I would always rush straight to the vegetable section. My mother was terribly impressed by this behaviour. She presumed that I too longed to forsake meat but was too scared of my father to suggest it. But I was only in search of celery and I never found it in either of those two shops. I didn’t dare ask for it either. Celery was renowned as excellent for dieters. I didn’t want my secret intentions to be deciphered and mocked.

The only dietary option left to me was crispbread and cottage cheese. These at least were slightly more familiar. I interpreted crispbread as a bizarre British name for toast. Cottage cheese I assumed to mean homemade cheese. Toast was of course easily obtainable, and I began to eat it at every opportunity. I even demanded that my mother make my sandwiches out of toast. Homemade cheese was more of a challenge. The old dairy where Nan used to make cream, butter and cheese when she lived at the farmhouse was disused. Over the years, it had become a dumping ground for various tools and odds and ends that my father couldn’t be bothered putting away properly or throwing out. I knew that one day I would end up being instructed to clean it out and put everything in its proper place. It was another of those tasks my father was saving for a rainy day.

I investigated the contents of the dairy and tried to work out what was used for what. But with all my father’s junk in there I couldn’t be certain if the object I had discovered was a churner or some new device for mixing sheep dip. I gave up. I hadn’t been able to find a recipe for cheese anyway. I had gone through all my mother’s recipe books and even written to the most famous cook in New Zealand, Alison Holst.

Alison had her own cooking show on television and had written a virtual library of recipe books. I couldn’t believe none of her books had a recipe for cheese. I wrote to her care of the television show, asking for one. I got a letter back pointing out that we were living in the 1970s and busy mothers preferred to buy cheese (‘there are many different varieties now available’) from supermarkets and spare them­selves the extra work. So I wrote to New Zealand’s other celebrity cook, Tui Flower of the
New Zealand Women’s Weekly
cooking column. She tersely replied that homemade cheese was before her time and was I making insinuations about her age?

The one person who could have solved the problem for me, Nan, was dead. So I approached Grampy, who did have a very sharp memory for ‘the old days’. My request set him off on a long story about how when he was my age, he’d had to milk the cows at six every morning, whatever the weather. He claimed that one day the snow was so deep that he’d had to shovel it out from beneath the cow’s udder to get at her teats. He reckoned that by the time he got the buckets of milk back to the dairy that morning, the milk had frozen solid.

‘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.