Page 67 of Catch a Kiwi
Delilah rolled off the bed, where she’d been lying on herstomach and scrolling on her own phone, and Priya asked, “Are you disabled or something?” Which was direct.
“Ha,” Delilah said. “Ifeeldisabled. I have a bruised tailbone. I have to sit on a donut.” She held up the inflatable plastic ring. “It’s for hemorrhoids, but I don’t have hemorrhoids. I’m making that clear. I just have a bruised tailbone.”
“Oh,” Priya said. “OK.”
I said, “It’s kind of you to invite us.”
“We always invite people the first night,” Priya said. “It’s an adjustment.”
“Oh,” I said, with no idea what she was talking about.
When we were walking up the track through trees and lawns and beds of flowers, Delilah proved she was equally blunt by asking, “Do you get lots of people staying in the caravan, then? Why, if you have a house? Don’t you like company?”
“Two houses,” Priya said. “But there’re heaps of them, yeh. Family coming out, or whatever. Daisy and Gray always let them stay, even though it can make Daisy cross. She’s studying to be a nurse practitioner besides doing her job, so she gets stressed. Which means she decided it would be down to Frankie and me to look after people. Cheers for that. Not like she asked me or anything first, right?”
“Totally,” Delilah said.
“To make it worse,” Priya said, “Frankie hates doing it, so it’s mostly me. My next older sister Oriana was the best at cooking and cleaning and being kind and all, but she got married and lives with her husband now, so there you are, it’s down to me. Did Daisy show you the yurt yet?”
“Uh … no,” I said. If Daisy didn’t like to have people staying, why had she invited us? This was awkward.
“I’ll show you, then,” Priya said, “as you’ll want to do your washing in it. It’s just Frankie and me in here. Dove’s in the house with Daisy and Gray. She’d like to be in the yurt, butit’s Frankie’s and my independent place, for grown people. We even have our own bedrooms. I’m seventeen, and Frankie’s twenty.”
Delilah asked, “How many sisters do you have? And wait—how old’s the one who got married?”
“Four sisters,” Priya said, “and five brothers, but only one of them’s out, and he doesn’t live with us. Oriana’s eighteen. She insisted on getting marriedbeforeshe was eighteen, which you can’t do without going to court. You can’t believe what a big deal it was. Daisy wasn’t best pleased. I think Gray had to talk her into letting her do it. Of course, Frankie and I don’t understand it either. Why would you want to get married when you’ve finally got your freedom?”
“Wait,” Delilah said. “Out? Out of where?”
“Mount Zion,” Priya said, as if it meant something, and Delilah and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Here’s the yurt.” We followed her up a ramp into a round building that I guessed was a yurt. A very large one, with wood ribbing supporting the roof like spokes in an umbrella, windows everywhere, and a view to die for.
“Laundry’s just back here,” Priya said, showing us a cupboard behind the extremely modern and sleek kitchen. I didn’t carehowmuch cheaper Dunedin was, this place had to have cost a mint, with the sea at the bottom of the extensive gardens and two full homes on the enormous parcel.
“That’s about it,” Priya said, closing the cupboard door. “We only lock the door at night, because everything’s fenced and the gate’s alarmed. Knock first, but if we’re not here, come in and do your washing. Here, let’s go over to the house.”
Once again, Delilah said what I didn’t during the short walk over to a charming villa that looked like it had been built at least a century ago. “If Daisy’s a nurse,” she said, “how does she afford all this? New Zealand’s way expensive.”
“Oh, that’s Gray,” Priya said breezily. “Here we are.” Up the stairs to a covered porch and inside, and if the yurt had been immaculate, this was more so. Completely remodeled, but surely the polished wide-plank flooring was original, the walls finished with plaster and painted a soft cream, the furnishings simple but elegant. A smell of scorching ruined the atmosphere, though, and a cry of, “Shit. Shit.Shit,”proclaimed disaster.
Priya rushed through a door into a sleek, modern kitchen, where a thin girl with dark hair almost as short as Priya’s was looking into a Dutch oven and swearing, a huge hardback book and a spiral notebook open on the counter.
“What happened?” Priya asked.
“Buggered the sauce,” the other girl said. At that moment, smoke began to pour out of a wall oven, and the smoke alarm started to shriek.
I didn’t think. I ran over there, grabbed a tea towel, opened the oven door, and was greeted by a cloud of black smoke emanating from a lump of cinder. I pulled the tray out with a tea towel that was hanging on the door, closed the smoke away, dumped the tray in the sink, and started to flap the tea towel around the smoke alarm. Which was when Priya shrieked along with the alarm, and I looked over to see a huge pot boiling over on the stove in a mass of steam. I wielded my tea towel once more, wrapping it around my hand and arm to protect it from the boiling water, and managed to turn off the induction burner, then realized the other burner was on as well under the pot of scorched red sauce and turned that off, too. During all that, the smoke alarm continued to shriek, a dog was howling somewhere, and Delilah was laughing. Frankie, the thin girl, threw up her hands and shouted over the noise, “I’m rubbish. Daisy’s going to?—”
That was when Daisy came running into the room, tyingthe belt of a dressing gown. She was followed by a dark man who was as big as Roman and looked even tougher. He grinned, said, “Frankie cooking, eh,” and started opening windows, while a younger teenage girl trailed along behind, looked shyly at me, and blushed. And my phone rang.
Roman, I saw from the screen. Withdrawal might be tactful here anyway, so I stepped out of the kitchen, away from the shrieking, and swiped to answer. I was startled by the head of a chocolate Labrador sticking out of the wall as if it were mounted there, but realized when the dog withdrew its head that it was a dog door and this was the dog, who had wisely opted for avoidance of the smoke and shrieking. After which I finally shouted, “Hello?” into the phone.
“What the hell?” Roman said.
“Smoke alarm,” I said. At that moment, it stopped, which only left a whole lot of voices.
“You burning the place down?” he asked.
“Trying to avert disaster. What’s up?”
