Page 67 of Kiwi Gold
She’d said, though, “This is good enough. For wading, and so forth.” I hadn’t said much, just, “I’ll go in with them, then, if they want to,” and had run into the water with the girls as they did some more shrieking, then swum out with Amira when, as a person could have predicted, she’d decided to plunge straight in. Which had resulted in her being knocked over by a wave and coming up sputtering, saying, “Swimming here isn’t like in the pool. I didn’t know it would knock youdown.”
After that, she’d stayed in the shallows.
Joke. Of course she hadn’t. After that, she’d tried it again, Laila had almost visibly bitten her lip and let her go, and I’d stayed calm and said, “Let me show you how to dive through the wave.” And had thought,No more medical emergencies. Who thought the beach was a good idea?Especially once Yasmin had decided she wanted to learn to dive under, too. But we’d all survived, hadn’t we? We’d even seen an albatross.
After that, there’d been the grouting part of the entertainment, which was safer. I’d done it with the girls, with Laila once again sitting on the toilet seat, her ankle propped on the edge of the bath and wrapped with ice, because she’d done too much walking out there on the sand, when she’d had the wind blowing her skirt up around her thighs and teasing tendrils of dark hair out from their knot, and had been trusting me with her girls.
It hadn’t been Date Number Two in any way. It had felt like it, though.
Now, on the porch, Yasmin came running up behind Amira. She didn’t have any issues with me, apparently, because she threw her arms around my legs and hugged me, and I had to crouch down and give her a cuddle.
“Why are you outside?” she asked.
“Amira and I are having a conversation,” I said. “About our grout party, and the beach. Why is your shirt lumpy?”
She reached inside her collar and pulled out a hideous, ragged stuffed orange monkey with a screaming, permanently-open mouth and one ear entirely chewed off. I knew that inanimate objects couldn’t carry fleas, but I wouldn’t have bet money on this one. I also wouldn’t have called it a comfort object.Imight be dreaming about savage monkeys tonight. This was a demon in monkey form, was what it was.
“Because I have to carry Monk,” she said, then stuffed the monstrosity back inside.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s reasonable.”
“If I get sad,” she said, “I have to have Monk on my skin.”
“Absolutely,” I said.
Amira said, “You aren’t going to be able to take him to school, though. The other kids will laugh, even if he’s in your backpack, and you can’t have him on yourskin. Nobody has a lovey when they’resix.”
“Iknow,”Yasmin said. “That’s why I need himnow,so I can get done being sad before school happens.”
“Being sad doesn’t work like that,” Amira said. “You can’tplanto be sad. You justgetsad.”
“Oh,” I said, “I don’t know. It may work like that sometimes. Are you sad about your dad, then?” I asked Yasmin.
“Yes,” she said, wrapping her arms over her monkey-bulging torso. “I’mworkingon my sadness, and Monk helps me work.”
Amira made an exasperated sound very much like“Argh,”like a character in a comic. “You’re supposed to work on beinghappy!”
“Iam,”Yasmin said. “Sometimes I work on being sad, and other times, I work on being happy. Like, the beach was very fun.” She had her hand around my leg again. “But the grout party was funner, especially when we did the Wild Rumpus afterwards.”
FromWhere the Wild Things Are,that one was. The girls and I had cleaned off the newly grouted tile, including the final stage, where they’d stepped outside the door, clapped their hands over their ears, and done some happy shrieking while I used a soft brush on the end of the drill to give the thing a final polish. Afterwards, the three of us had turned up the exceptionally peppy music they’d played all afternoon, which I’d swear was exactly the same stuff my mum had played for my sisters, the kind that sounds like it’s being sung by people taking enormous doses of amphetamines, the sort of people you have to refrain from knocking over and sitting on in real life, just so they’ll shut up.
What the hell, though. Know your audience. We’d danced through the bath, the kitchen, and the lounge to the tune of breathless voices being overly excited about eating their breakfast and putting on their raincoats and boots and riding the bus to school. I’d shown them how to do some pogo-sticking, at the end, and we’d bounced up and down until we’d looked like three very dirty, grout-smeared, head-banging punk rockers, and Laila had laughed so hard, she’d had to set down the plates.
Possibly not my most dignified moment, and no doubt the stuff of nightmares to Violet-Next-Door, but it had been worth it to see Laila laugh, not to mention her quiet pleasure at having her bath fixed, at having one more job scratched off her list. No tiles falling on her head, the girls able to have their bath at my place that night and Laila doing the same, then leaving too fast again, but Date Number Two was scheduled for … well, for now. Thursday night, because I was leaving for Saudi Arabia on Saturday morning.
“We had the Wild Rumpusandkebabs,” Amira said now. “And you had a bottle of beer even though it’sharam,like Grandad does sometimes.But that was heaps of days ago. Probably ten days.”
“No,” Yasmin said. “It wasfourdays ago.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Amira said. “Four is a short number, and it was a long number of days.”
Yasmin sighed in a heartfelt way and said, “The Wild Rumpus was Sunday, and today is Thursday. That’s four. The days go Sunday, Monday …”
I broke in, since Amira was looking … well, exactly like Lexi had used to look when Larissa had tried to explain various logical and factual things to her. “That’s not how it goes in myfeelingbrain, though,” Lexi had always answered, as if that ended the discussion.
“It feels like a fair bit ago, yeh,” I said. “But I’m here now.”
“Can we go to the beach with you today, then?” Amira asked. “You and Mummy?”
