Page 14 of Kiwi Sin
“No,” I said.
“It is,” he insisted. “Ask Mum. I’d get detention, that’s all. And only if I wasverylate.”
“Well,” I said, “let’s go, then, so that doesn’t happen.”
“Grace and I can explain more things on the way,” he said kindly, “if you need to understand.”
So, yes, when Hannah had taken me grocery shopping later that morning,aftertelling me to take off my shirt for her and changing my dressings, chaperoned only by a very young child, and we’d walked up and down endless aisles whose shelves were stacked high with packets and cans, almost none of which I recognized as anything I’d ever eaten before, and not even as food, other than the photos on the front, and I’d thought,I need to choose things to eat, somehow, out of all this. And sort out how you cook them, or I’m going to starve—I’d been able to keep the panic at bay, because I had a guide.
Until that evening, of course, when I decided to try the fried eggs again along with a couple of sausages. I set the pan on the glass cooker, as instructed, and the eggs cooked in about thirty seconds. And then I tried to take them out of the pan.
I ended up eating a messy, undelicious pile of rubbery egg-white slivers that were black on the bottom, mixed with chalky, overcooked bits of yolk and nearly raw sausages, then working for about an hour to chisel and scrub the burnt mess out of the pan, halfway through which process Jack came downstairs and told me I had to melt butter in the pan first so the eggs wouldn’t stick, and maybe not cook them on five flames.
Oh.
“You’ve invented a new thing, though,” he said encouragingly. “Charcoal eggs! Maybe you’ll be famous for it!” And I had to laugh.
By the end of that first week, Jack had shown me which pans you used on the cooktop and which you put into the oven, which would be useful once I had a clue what I would put in those pans, and had demonstrated with the vacuum cleaner and the toilet brush, too. From Jack, I learnt that you cleaned your house every week if you wanted it to stay “nice enough for my Mum, I guess, because I never think it looks dirty when she says we have to clean it,” and that boys cleaned, too, which was why he knew how. He taught me to use the dishwasher, though I didn’t need it, because I usually ate standing up and out of the same bowl every time, which I washed afterward and put in the rack beside the sink. What was the point of sitting down if you didn’t have anybody to talk to?
Jack had also shown me how the microwave worked and the easiest things to cook in it, none of which tasted very good, but they’d kept me alive so far. Then there was the bank—once I’d got my first pay packet, which seemed like a startling amount of money and probably wasn’t—the EFTPOS reader at the shop, the very idea of a “debit card,” and so much more. Jack had shopped for my phone with me, which had used up too much of the money in that pay packet, and he’d shown me how to use it, too.
I knew now how totally clueless I’d been, and I was the one who’d been out of Mount Zion before! I’d known how to read road signs, I’d been in a bank, and I’d ridden in a lift. I knew how to drive, and I even had a driving license. By Mount Zion standards, I was a dangerous sophisticate. By Dunedin standards, not so much.
In return for his guidance, I helped Jack use his dad’s tools in an extremely well-equipped shed to make a gift for a girl at school he was desperately in love with. Which didn’t seem like it could be allowed, but apparently was.
When he said, “It has to be a jewelry rack, because jewelry is what girls like,” I was dubious. Unless I truly knew absolutely nothing, how much jewelry could a nine-year-old girl possess? But I helped him design it and coached him in fashioning the thing, then showed him how to sand it— for about three times as long as he thought necessary—before the two coats of varnish that healsothought were over the top.
“If a thing’s worth doing,” I told him, as my own dad had told me, “it’s worth doing right.”
When he ran down to my flat a few days later to announce with triumph that he’d given it to the girl—Serena—he also informed me that he was now her boyfriend. “So it worked!”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Her boyfriend?” You see how useful it was to have somebody that you could ask these things of.
He said, “You hold hands on the playground and say she’s your girlfriend.”
“Oh.” Yeh, nine-year-old romance was probably about my speed. Except that I’d never held hands. I’d read all the porn books from the bookshelf during the past weeks, though. There was heaps more to learn, clearly, and stuffing up there would be so much more embarrassing than fusing the eggs to the pan.
Last Friday, in a dramatic turn of events, Jack had come down for his usual evening visit, flopped into a chair, and said, “D’you want to watchWellington Paranormalwith me? Also, Serena and I broke up.”
“Go ahead and switch it on,” I said. “Because I’ve finished burning these sausages. You sad, then?” I knew about that now. The porno books were full of breaking up.
He shrugged. “Nah. Holding hands is boring.” And punched the button on the remote. I knew the name now, and which buttons to push, too. It wasn’t too much to learn after all. It was just too much to learn in one day.
They’d all taught me, in fact. Hannah, by tactfully taking me along on her shopping expeditions and making gentle suggestions of what I might need. And, of course, Drew, who’d taken me in at a moment’s notice at six o’clock in the morning, and had gone with me at the end of my first day working for Gray to buy new clothes. “As you’re a good size,” he’d said, “and I know what will work for you.”
When I’d objected to him paying for them, telling him, “I’ll buy them once I get paid. It’s only two more days,” he’d said, “Mate. You’ve got one pair of trousers, two of my T-shirts, two pairs of undies, and two pairs of socks, and it’salso two more days until Friday. If I don’t buy you some clothes and Hannah doesn’t get over her tactfulness and tell you to buy some deodorant and washing powder, not to mention finding you another pair of trousers to wear while you wash those, Gray’s going to turf you out for smelling up the jobsite. You’ve already got a pong to you. Keep track in that notebook of yours and pay it back when you can, if you like.” Which I’d done, and thought that people Outside didn’t seem all that evil so far, and also that they certainly seemed to have enormous houses, not to mention heaps of money to throw about on clothes and toiletries and groceries for random strangers.
Now,thatwas more like what I’d heard. The Devil’s wages.
* * *
On this particular January morning,six weeks into my Outside journey, Drew, who’d alternated with Hannah and Gray himself in transporting me to and from the jobsite thus far, braked to a stop in front of the rapidly rising steel framework that would eventually be student dormitories for the university. I thanked him and climbed out, and he stuck his head out of the window and said, “Forgot to tell you. Come upstairs for dinner tonight. We’re doing racks of lamb, and we’ll have too much otherwise.”
I said, “Yes. Of course,” with extreme gratitude—I was getting tired of sausages, even though I knew how to cook them all the way through now—and he gave a wave, said, “Six-thirty, then,” and drove off.
I turned and nearly ran into the wall that was a big Samoan fella named Afoa, because he was standing stock-still, staring after the car. I said, “Nice, eh,” a bit proud that I knew what it was: a Mercedes. Car makes were different, it turned out, and to my non-surprise, the most expensive ones were the best, especially if everybody knew they were expensive.
Afoa said, “Bloody hell. How do you knowhim?”
