Aunt Effie's Ark (8 page)

“Who can't behave himself,” he repeated.

“Don't you dare answer me back!”

“Answer me back!”

“I'm in charge!”

“In charge!”

“How dare you?”

“Dare you!”

“Hold out your hand!”

“Your hand!”

Daisy's mouth went all wizened with pleated lines around her lips. She hiccuped, sniffed, and cried. Marie took off her panama hat and led her away. Peter threw the strap on the fire. “We know everyone's here,” he said and threw the attendance roll on the fire, too, and Ann and Beck helped the little ones change into dry pants.

We read the new School Journals while Marie taught the little ones their alphabet. Peter let Daisy ring the bell for lunch.

“Ding-ding-ding-ding!”

“Thank you, Daisy.”

“Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!”

“That'll do, Daisy.”

“Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!”

“I said that'll do, Daisy!” Peter had to take the bell off her.

We sat in our desks and unwrapped the lunches Marie and Peter had made for us. While we swapped our dry peanut butter sandwiches for dry Vegemite sandwiches, Peter looked through the peep-hole.

“I can't see the Tattooed Wolf,” he said, “but we won't go outside till there's been no sign of him for a couple of weeks.”

“Why does the Tattooed Wolf keep calling Aunt Effie The Name We Dare Not Say?” asked Jared.

“I heard him, too,” said Casey. Lizzie and Jessie both nodded.

Peter looked at Marie. “What about a game of
kingaseeny
?” she said very loudly.

One foot at a time, Peter and Marie walked towards each other, picking up for who would go in the middle, and we played kingaseeny up and down Aunt Effie's enormous kitchen for the rest of lunchtime. We had school again from one till three. We did arithmetic: long division of pounds, shillings, and pence for the bigger kids, and playing around with blocks for the little ones.

That night, Lizzie and Jessie taught the small pig his alphabet, and Daisy made the geese stand in a row and answer, “Present!” to their names. When the
gander
flapped and hissed, she stuck his head under his wing and made him stand on one foot till he got dizzy and fell over.

We worked hard to catch up. On Friday, we put our finished lessons into a green canvas mailbag that Marie closed around the neck with a little leather belt, padlocked, and dropped into the Underground
Letterbox
. There was a sucking noise, and it disappeared. Peter said it was a vacuum system, like the way they made change in the big shops in Auckland. He said the mailbag with our lessons would shoot along an underground pipe all the way to Wellington.

Early Monday there'd be a whistle, and the green canvas bag would be back with our old lessons covered
in ticks and crosses, and this week's new lessons.

“Alwyn told us there are little men in the pipe, and they catch the mailbag and run all the way to the
Underground
Correspondence School,” said Lizzie.

“Alwyn makes things up,” Daisy said with a frown.

“He told us if you stick your finger in the
Underground
Letterbox, the little men will pull you down, and you'll never be seen again. Alwyn says he knows a boy who disappeared down the Underground Letterbox.”

“Alwyn had better watch out!” Daisy snapped.

In fact, Alwyn stuck some dirty old blotting paper in the Underground Letterbox. Then he sent a pine cone, a dead mouse wrapped in his lunch paper, and a drawing of a warship firing its guns at the Tattooed Wolf. A message came back before lunchtime. It said, “If Alwyn doesn't stop playing with the Underground Letterbox, it'll suck him down the pipe to Wellington. And the Prime Minister will eat him when she comes out of hibernation!” Alwyn wouldn't go near the
Underground
Letterbox after that, and he pulled faces at it whenever it whistled.

As we fed the stock, one evening, Hubert looked over his glasses and said, “I think it's stopped
snowing
. It's raining.”

“What's rain?” asked the little ones.

Back in the house, Peter lifted up the little ones so they could see the rain through the peep-hole. Already the snow had melted and sunk several feet below Aunt Effie's windowsill.

Peter flung over the rope ladder Aunt Effie kept rolled up in case of fire. We climbed down and stood in the rain, thinking we could feel the snow sink beneath us. “He hasn't melted.” Lizzie pointed up at the roof.

“That's not our snowman!” Ann screamed.

“Ooowhooooo!” The Tattooed Wolf dived from the roof, but missed us and went headfirst into a soft patch. Shrieking, piggybacking the little ones, yelling at each other to get out of the way, we scrambled up the rope ladder. Marie slammed and locked the steel shutters just as the Tattooed Wolf hammered on it. “Ooowhooooo!”

“How did he climb up to the window?”

“Somebody left the rope ladder hanging!”

“Who was last up?”

“It doesn't matter.” Marie pulled out her pocket knife and slashed the ropes where they went under the shutters.

“Ooowhooooo!” We heard a splash in the snow as the Tattooed Wolf fell again.

“He painted himself white to look like the
snowman
,” said Peter. “He put on his hat, stuck his pipe in his mouth and, with his tattoo, he looked just like him.”

“What happened to our snowman?” asked Casey.

“The Tattooed Wolf ate him!” said Alwyn, and the little ones cried.

Peter tied a mirror to a long stick, poked it up the chimney, and we took turns looking at the Tattooed Wolf as he climbed on to the roof and crouched there, pretending to be the snowman again.

“We know you're there–ere!” we chanted up the chimney. “We know you're there–ere!”

“Ooowhooooo!” He slid off and slunk away. “
Ooowhooooo
!”

That afternoon, Daisy smiled her superior little smile and said, “Remember the stuffed heads that used
to hang around Aunt Effie's bedroom?” She smiled and wouldn't say any more, so we rushed upstairs.

Aunt Effie lay snoring in her green canvas invalid's pyjamas. We threw on wood so the flames lit up the walls, but there were no stuffed heads of wild animals. Nor could we see the stuffed head in the shadows, the one Alwyn said was a man's.

“What are we going to tell Aunt Effie when she wakes up?” cried Jessie.

“What was the last time any of you saw them?” asked Peter, but nobody remembered.

“It just goes to show how some people never use their eyes!” Daisy clicked her teeth in her most
irritating
manner and wouldn't tell us anything more.

We tried being nice to her. Alwyn didn't repeat
anything
she said for quarter of an hour, and then forgot, so we all shushed him. We made Daisy a nice cup of tea. We let her sit in Aunt Effie's chair. We showed her our schoolwork and asked her to check our spelling. When she looked at our hands and said our fingernails needed cleaning, we cut them and cleaned them and lined up to show them to Daisy again. We brushed our hair, we tucked our shirts into our shorts, we didn't rush around screaming, but Daisy just smiled a nasty little smile and clicked her teeth.

Actually, she was bursting to tell somebody, and we were the only ones she had to talk to. But she made our lives miserable until she just couldn't keep it to herself any longer.

“All those months some people were disporting yourselves on skis,” said Daisy, “I was the one who kept the fire burning in Aunt Effie's bedroom.”

In fact, Peter and Marie carried up coal to Aunt
Effie's
fire each morning and again in the evening before we went to bed. They would never let it go out. But they looked at us and shook their heads, and we knew we mustn't say anything.

“Well,” said Daisy, clicking her teeth smugly, “one day I was cleaning out the ashpan, a thankless task nobody else ever thinks of doing.” Marie and Peter emptied the ashpan twice a day, but they held their tongues.

Daisy was enjoying herself. “While other people were hooliganing round in the snow, not doing their jobs, I saw cobwebs between the stag's antlers and thought the stuffed heads might need dusting.

“I always say if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well! I tied a tea towel over my hair, put on my pinny and took the stepladder upstairs, the cobweb broom, dusters, a bucket of soapsuds to wash their glass eyes, and a hearth brush to give their fur a good brushing. And they weren't there!

“I took the stepladder back downstairs. I carried down the bucket of soapsuds, the hearth brush, the cobweb broom, and the dusters. I took the tea towel off my hair. And I took off my pinny and folded it and put it back in the drawer.”

We sighed. Peter looked at us to keep quiet, and Marie put her hand over Alwyn's mouth.

“Remember years ago when we were little?” Daisy asked, “We thought the stuffed heads used to change places?”

“All but the man's head,” Jazz said. “It always hung in the same place – in the shadows.”

“We used to think they stood on little platforms and just stuck their heads through holes in the wall,” said Daisy. “And they didn't just change places: sometimes we caught them blinking, and they even winked at us.”

“We remember!” For some reason we all wanted to please Daisy.

“Well,” she said, “I decided I'd look for them.”

She had gone upstairs alone to the floor above Aunt Effie's enormous bedroom. We admired Daisy when she told us that. Going upstairs! Opening all those doors in the dark! On her own!

“How could you do it, Daisy?”

“Some of us know how to bear responsibility.” She smiled and clicked her teeth. “Even if it didn't seem to matter to some people, I didn't want to have to tell Aunt Effie all the stuffed heads had disappeared.”

In the end, after much talk, Daisy took us upstairs, showed us a door we hadn't seen before, and opened it. Inside were all the missing heads – attached to their animals. Each wild animal stood in a stall. The elephant, the stag, the buffalo, and the antelope had mangers of hay. The crocodile had a trough of fish. His stall smelled rather strong. The lion was
munching
a leg of something, but covered it with a giant paw and snarled when he saw us looking. The snake had a troughful of mice that it was swallowing in a rather refined way, rather like Daisy at table. Each stall had a tap for water, and every one had a dunny in its own little room next door.

“Don't say ‘dunny'!” said Daisy. “‘En suite' sounds much nicer.”

“It's a lot of hard work mucking out the barn each
morning,” said Casey, looking at the elephant's dunny. “Nobody has to muck out your stalls!”

The wild animals smiled in a way that reminded us of Daisy. “I think you'll find we are somewhat superior to that rather common downstairs lot,” said a kudu with a high-bridged nose. It looked and sounded very like Daisy.

“We thought you were alive,” said Ann. “We noticed you changed places.”

“And sometimes you winked at us!” said Victor.

The kudu simpered and pointed her spiral horns at a little door in her stall. She slid back a tower bolt, opened the little door, and we were looking down into Aunt Effie's bedroom.

“Go ahead,” said the other wild animals, and we stuck our heads through their little doors and grinned at each other. Aunt Effie lay snoring beneath us. The fire danced in the chimney. We could feel its warmth on our faces.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” Peter asked the wild animals.

“We're perfectly happy, thank you.” As the kudu had said, they were all very well-mannered, except for the lion who growled, “I wouldn't mind a taste of something different now and then!” He showed his huge teeth, and blazed a tawny eye at the gazelle who flicked his tail and stamped his delicate feet.

The elephant lurched over to the lion's door. “We've got a long voyage ahead of us. Anyone who misbehaves, I sit on them!” The lion snarled but cringed and went back to licking and crunching his leg of meat.

“Something else for a change!” he muttered, but
the elephant stamped one huge foot, and the lion put his ears back and rolled his eyes. It was easy to see he was scared of the elephant.

“Does Aunt Effie know you're alive?” Lizzie asked a rose-spotted leopard, while Peter spoke quietly to the elephant.

“It was Aunt Effie's idea,” said the leopard. “She can't abide dead stuffed heads!” We stared at each other when the leopard said that – all wondering the same thing.

“Is it true those downstairs animals don't have dunnies?” the leopard asked in a casual voice. But we noticed the other wild animals were listening for our reply.

“Thank you,” Peter said to the elephant. “Come on, everyone!” and he took us out so we didn't have to answer the leopard's question.

Swinging her arms importantly, Daisy led us
downstairs
. That night, she insisted on carving the roast we had for dinner and kept telling us to mind our table manners. “What's the point of putting out serviettes if nobody uses them?” she complained. “Lizzie, they're not for blowing your nose on!”

“Aunt Effie calls them table napkins,” said Casey.

“I always think serviette sounds nicer,” said Daisy. “It's French…”