Page 12 of Kiwi Sin
I’d woken that first day with the back hurting slightly less, which meant I’d be working soon. I healed fast, I was doing it again, and I didn’t have to pay attention to pain. Some things, it seemed, didn’t change. It was five-thirty, the time I’d been waking since I’d left school and started living in the unmarried men’s dormitory, so that was another thing that hadn’t changed. My body still knew how to wake up.
I listened, but heard nothing from the rest of the house. No feet overhead, no doors closing or toilets flushing. Five-thirty was too early, maybe, even though the sun had risen. I considered going outside and walking around the city to orient myself, but I didn’t know when the family would wake up, or whether they’d want anything from me. So I used my four personal possessions—the toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, and razor—and got dressed, and after a bit, when all was still quiet, sat on the edge of the bed and finished the book. There was much more than kissing in it, it turned out. In fact, I was so engrossed, I forgot how hungry I was until I heard noises overhead at last. A cupboard door opening, a grinding sound, and those footsteps I’d been listening for.
They were making breakfast, which sounded like a very good idea. I’d made tea before my reading session with some experimenting—I wasn’t sure how long you kept the bag in—and used the toaster to make four slices with butter and jam, so I wasn’t as hungry as when I’d woken, but I was still pretty hungry. Fortunately, I’d fixed a toaster or two before and knew how they worked. Now, I went to the kitchen, opened the carton of eggs that stood on the benchtop, and looked around inside the cupboards—full of an immense number of mysterious items that I had no clue what to do with—until I found a pan.
You’d need a pan to cook anything. You couldn’t just drop the food onto the cooker. That was obvious. I wasn’t an idiot.
Right, then. I had a pan. I had the eggs. You’d crack them, obviously, because you didn’t eat the shells. Crack them straight into the pan? Yes. They’d be flat, then. Fried, they called that, and it seemed like the easiest way, so I did it. Four eggs, filling the pan, looking flat. Looking especially flat, because I’d broken the yolks on two of them. The eggs I was served had always had the yolks intact. Better chickens, maybe, or better cracking technique.
Right. Time to cook. There was a sort of metal box set into the benchtop with a gray glass top and a door underneath. That had to be the cooker, because nothing else was, and when I opened the door, I recognized an oven. Again, because I’d helped my father fix two or three of them when something had gone wrong. Other than those occasions, I’d never been inside a kitchen, and definitely not while the ovens were actually in use. Women brought food out to the dining room in huge bowls and pans, but how it changed from bags of flour and potatoes, baskets of eggs and slabs of beef to become food—that was a mystery.
Think.Some cooking happened in ovens, and some happened on the top of the cooker, obviously, because kitchens had both. There were burners on top of a cooker, normally, like coils, that conducted electricity to radiate the heat that would warm the pots. I remembered seeing those, and I knew a reasonable amount about electricity, so that was all good and made sense. Except that the top of this box had no burners, and no markings at all except an outline drawn around the edge of the glass screen, and a smaller square in the bottom center with a name printed on it. It didn’t mean anything to me, so it was probably whatever firm had made the cooker. The problem was—there were no coils, and there were also no controls.
Wait, though. Therehadto be controls somewhere, for the oven at least. The oven I’d fixed had had temperature markings, so it had a thermostat, and you needed to set it. I looked on the wall. A switch to turn on the power to the oven, because it said “oven” on it. I flipped that.
And nothing happened. I pressed all around the edge of the cooktop surface to see if something would slide out of a recess. It was the only thing I could think of. That, or maybe one of those boxes with buttons on it, like the ones for the TV. I didn’t see anything like that, which was a good thing, because if that was what it took, I was probably going to end up with the cooking equivalent of black-and-white fuzz.
I pressed in the bottom square. A sudden chime sounded, so loud that I was surprised it didn’t bring everybody running, and I jumped back. White letters were flashing on the glass, though.
Cooktop
Oven
That was all, but you were obviously meant to choose. How?
Pressing had turned the thing on. I pressed the word “Cooktop,” and the letters went away, to be replaced by
1
+
–
Right. Now we were getting somewhere. I pushed the +. The thing was a cooker. You needed to increase the heat in order to cook.
A little illustration now, to the right of the symbols. A sort of wavy triangle. Oh. That would be a flame. Heat!
I pressed the + again and got two flames, pressed the–and was back to one, then kept going until the screen registered five flames. That seemed to be the maximum, because pushing the button again made nothing happen. Good. Hotter was better, surely.
I passed a hand over the surface. Nothing.
Maybe it took a while. I waited one minute, then two, then five. Still nothing.
I turned the wall switches off, then turned them on again, and started over with the pressing and1and so forth. Still no heat.
It was broken.
More noise upstairs. They’d be done with their breakfast, probably, and getting ready for their day.
I looked at my four eggs, sitting hopefully in their pan. Then I found a glass, poured the raw eggs carefully into it—they went in with a sort ofplop—stirred them hard with a spoon until the remaining yolks broke, added some milk, stirred some more, and drank it down.
It wasn’t delicious, but it was nourishment.
I was sitting on the bed again, starting to read one of the shooting-and-explosions books—it had been left here, so it was obviously the sort of thing people did read, and I needed more background information about life Outside than that you were apparently meant to lick a woman’s private parts when you had relations, which was news—when I heard a knock at the door.
I put the shooting book down and went to answer it, and found Jack. He said, “We’re leaving for school in about fifteen minutes. I walk with Grace, so she’s safe. Mum says, first, do you want to walk to school with us so you can learn where you are, because you never know where you are unless you walk. She’ll fix your dressings again afterward, she says. And second, do you want to go to the supermarket with her and Madeleine later, so you can make yourself food today, or would you rather eat with us for a while?”
I said, “I’ll walk with you.” I wanted to add, “I’d rather eat with you,” but I didn’t know what was right. Drew hadn’t said, “Come live with my family,” he’d said, “Come live in my granny flat.” The granny flat had a kitchen. You were meant to cook for yourself in it, obviously. People Outside liked being separate. I said, “I should go to the supermarket. I don’t have any money, though.” It was easier to confess to a kid.
