Page 19 of Kiwi Sin
We were at Drew’s gates, so I hopped out and said, “Tell Mum congrats for me. Seriously, tell her …” I paused. “That I’m proud of her. It feels good, earning a pay packet.”
“It does,” Dad said. “Just as good for a woman as a man, I reckon.”
“Maybe even more,” I said. “And thanks for the lift.”
“See you tomorrow,” Dad said, then turned the boxy twenty-year-old compact around with the competence he brought to everything he did and headed down the hill.
Hannah was outside when I got up to the house despite the chill in the air, weeding the flower borders with Madeleine and Grace helping. Well, Grace was helping a bit. Madeleine was mostly getting dirty.
When Hannah saw me, she sat back on her heels and smiled. Her belly was showing more now, but the rest of her looked thinner, her face tired. Drew was gone this week, because the rugby season was well underway, and that meant heaps of travel.
I said, “I’ll do that. Just show me where you need it done.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “Being out in the fresh air feels good, and you’ve been working hard all day.”
“Nah,” I said. “Least I can do.” I set down the backpack in which I’d carried my lunch and put my hand out for the cultivator.
She said, “You can help, then, and I’ll appreciate it. Ten minutes more for me, because I need to start dinner. I’ll tell you what. You finish weeding the front, and I’ll feed you. Fair?”
“Fair,” I agreed.
We weeded in silence for a while, other than Grace exclaiming over a worm and Madeleine deciding that the loamy earth might be chocolate cake, taking a taste to find out, and being sadly disappointed, with the emphasis on “sad.” Finally, Hannah said, “Excuse me for asking, but is something bothering you?” and I wondered, as always, how she knew.
I said, “I think I need a car. And my own flat, of course, but I knew that. I can’t keep getting lifts, though. My mum’s got a job, and I’m thinking that once she’s got her Restricted license, she’ll want to drive my dad to work, then use the car to get to her own job.”
“A job,” Hannah said. “That’s wonderful. And of course you don’t need to move. We’re happy having you here. The kids love it, especially Jack.”
I said, “It was an offer until I got on my feet, and I’m on them.” I didn’t know much about Outside, but I was sure of this. “But I need a car as well, because Gray’s got a new job coming up that’s farther out, with no bus stop close by, and he wants me on it. So—a car, or a ute. A ute would be good.”
“They’re awfully expensive,” Hannah said, “even used. A uteanda place of your own? That’s so much cash outlay, unless you’re buying the car on credit.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“When the bank owns the car, and you pay it off slowly, with interest added to compensate the bank for their risk. Or, really, just because they can.”
I thought about that. “It doesn’t sound right. It sounds like moneylending.”
“It is,” Hannah said. “But there aren’t many other choices. I’m not sure how you’d establish credit to get that loan, not without paying rent and utilities somewhere, at the very least.”
It was a chicken-and-egg situation, you see. I needed a flat to get a car, if I did that “credit” thing, but if I got a flat, I wouldn’t be able to afford a car. The problem was, I knew Hannah was probably right, and when Jack and I started to research it, I realized she wasdefinitelyright. I was nowhere close being able to afford both flat and car, hard as I was working to save. Not after three months, I wasn’t. Not starting from nothing. And Gray had suggested I start doing evening study for a trades certification, “because if you’ve got one, I’ll have to pay you more.” The classes weren’t exactly walking distance from Drew’s place, though. It would be the bus plus the walk, but if I had to get a bus and then walk home from work, eat dinner, then walk and getanotherbus to class … Well, no. The times didn’t work. I needed a car.
“Plus,” Jack pointed out, “you need furniture if you have a flat. You need chairs, and a table, and a bed, and dishes, and pots and pans, and a carpet, and a TV, and everything.”
“You do?” I hadn’t considered that. “Don’t they come with all that?”
“No,” he said. “I guess you could get a tent, though, and set it up on the floor. People sleep in tents all the time and eat sitting on the ground when they’re camping, so that would work in a building, too. You wouldn’t even have to worry about it raining! You could carry some tree stumps up to your flat for chairs, and you could buy camping dishes and a camping pan to cook in and a sleeping bag. And some hangers for your clothes, because there’ll be a rod to hang them on in the closet. Then you wouldn’t need any furniture at all. You could use a torch instead of having lamps, too. There’s a kind of torch you wear on your head. That’d be efficient.”
I said, “Might be easier just to make a table and stools and a bed. I know how to make furniture.”
“You do?” Jack said. “I never heard of anybody making furniture.”
“You learn heaps of things at Mount Zion,” I said, “because they do everything for themselves.”
“But it isn’t nice,” he said, “or you wouldn’t have left. Mum told Dad it was awful. ‘So horrible,’ she said after that show was on TV, that one that you were on, where Gray Tamatoa hit that guy. She said, ‘I can’t stand to think about it. That poor girl.’ I don’t know who the poor girl was, though.”
“My cousin,” I said. “Frankie. And, yeh, it wasn’t the best. But some things …” I paused.
“What?” Jack asked.
