90 Packets of Instant Noodles (7 page)

I kill some time in the shop today. I want to check out the full range of what I can buy, rather than just heading straight for the instant noodles. There's only so many of those things one human being can eat—after a while, they start tasting like plastic string. Even the odd cheese and cracker in between doesn't trick this ole dog.

There's a deep freeze I haven't noticed before. I peer in. Frozen meat. Chicken legs, steaks—sausages, even. Sausages! Some kind of fish. Looks nasty. And pet meat, fishing bait. Frozen vegies. Some of it looks half a century old.

‘What are you after, love?' the woman calls out to me.

‘Oh, I'm just looking,' I say, and add, ‘thanks.'

‘No worries, just let me know if I can help with anything.'

It's weird, being in charge of what I eat. It's made me realise how little I can cook. Like, nothing. I'm going to have to raise the bar a bit. I think I've got instant-noodle constipation.

I wander around looking at what's on the shelves. Bickies—I'd forgotten about them! I put a packet of Kingstons into the basket, on top of the barbie pack chosen from the freezer. (I need meat, man!) Then I get to the chips and crackers section. But
five
bucks for a big bag of barbecue Samboys—come on! I take one of the small packets for $2. Tins. Tuna, salmon,
sardines,
baked beans (yes yes yes), beetroot, peas, baby carrots, corn ... I pick up a small tin of corn. Fibre. Could help.

I grab a packet of pasta and a jar of Paul Newman sauce. From the fridges I take a carton of milk and a square of cheese. I see the fruit. Aah, fuck. I mean,
fruit.
Really.
I look suspiciously at the apples, oranges, bananas and pears, and turn away. I turn back. Dad's in my head. I take a banana and a pear. And two spuds.

On my way to the counter I grab a four-pack of AA batteries for the old torch. They're $9! The thing had better bloody work, at that price.

The woman passes me the police register to sign and date while she rings up the stuff on the till.

I eye the stuff I've bought once I've done the paperwork, and consider my backpack. I open the zip to a full smile. Tins at the bottom, I spose, and the spuds. The sauce can slot in down the side. I jam the milk down the other side. Cheese can sit on top. Fruit right on top, unless I want pureed pear and banana smeared on everything. I look at the chips—they have to go right on top or they'll be shards. And then I see the Kingstons. For fuck's sake. I pinch the packet at the neck, knowing they'll be swinging from my hand for the entire way. I breathe out, trying to be cool. It so doesn't matter, and yet it does, you know? Hiking 17 k's with a packet of Kingstons in your hand and squeezing a bag of Samboys to death. The whole thing sucked.

As I leave the shop, a truck passes, spraying me with road grit. Of course.

Two—or is it three?—weeks go by in a strange, slow blur. I sleep, I wake, I make food, I fix things, I write letters (some of which I don't send, thank Christ), I get letters (some of which confirm that there's a whole lot of living going on out there that I'm missing out on). The stack of paper is lower now, put it that way. The stack of noodle packets isn't. They crinkle like crazy insects when the big gusts come through. A piece of tin on the roof chimes in when I'm up for a blowy night, when the trees start eggbeating overhead.

But it's a couple of branches arching over the shack that I worry about when the wind really gets up. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out where they'll fall if they snap off. They're big swinging branches. Some of the lower leaves tickle the roof every now and then; make grating sounds that aren't natural, somehow. I wake to them uneasily. It's not nice.

I'm feeling a fixathon coming on. Must be that extra cup of tea I had for brekky. I'm thinking rope ... looping a length of rope around the dodgy branches, pulling them
away
from the shack and tying the other end to another (solid) tree. So, if they break, they'll be yanked towards the strong tree rather than just dropping on the roof of this joint. Simple, eh?
Genius,
I reckon.

‘Oh, what the—'

Something's eaten right into one of the bags of pasta, through the plastic and everything. There's pasta shapes lying at the bottom of the shelf and rat poo everywhere and I make the decision that enough is e-fucken-nough. I rummage through the shack's junk pile and pull out the live trap. It's quite big, could maybe fit a cat or a puppy, but it's gunna have to do until I go to the shops and buy some rat traps. I put a hunk of cheese inside and a couple of stale crusts of bread, leave the trap right beside the food shelf, and get back to making myself a snack.

Another trip to town. And I remember to ask the woman in the shitty little shop about mousetraps.

She chuckles. ‘They're one of my best sellers,' she says, pulling a couple off the shelf behind her.

I won't even go into the hike back. It's hideous. Too many kilos in my pack. Again. You'd think I'd have learned by now.

Correspondence news: two in, three out. One from Bella and one from Dad. I haven't opened them, yet. I want them to last. They're my only form of entertainment out here, until next week, anyway. I'm really glad for them, despite all the crap I gave Dad about it before I left.

Dear Dad,
I think.
Can you believe your letters are my new night out? I'm spending tonight with yours, and am gunna save Bella's to take down to the pool tomorrow. Gives me something to look forward to. Pretty tragic, eh.

But, just quietly, I'm stoked she keeps writing.

And now to rodent news,
I report loudly.

I'm glad of those two mousetraps I bought, as when I got back here it was very bloody obvious that I'd not caught any mice or rats in my cage-trap. Which is not to say the cage was empty. I'm looking at this thing right now, wondering what the hell I'm going to do with it, does it bite, where's its mum, and many other things that unfortunately it can't answer.

It's a baby fox. Or a midget fox. I mean, it's kitten-sized; it's
young.
It's got grey fur and a toilet-brush tail, and has just been sitting there looking at me for the last hour. It ate the cheese and stale bread; they were gone when I got home. Now it seems to be wondering what's for dessert. I've got a very dented apple here, must be weeks old, but I'm worried that this guy might go for me if I open the cage door.

I'll have to deal with it a bit later. I'm absolutely shagged—in the tired sense, sadly. I need food. I look at my pack. It's bulging with all the stuff I bought today. It came to nearly fifty bucks this week, which I can't figure out, seeing as I didn't buy anything expensive.

Tonight: macaroni cheese, à la instant packet. It's probably ralpho but hey, it's easy, and there's only Joely here to impress.

The fox has been curled up snoozing, but just having it in here has made it hard for me to chill completely. I half expect it to wake up and cut sick and try to get out of the cage or something. Eventually, after tea, and while it's still asleep I lean down and open the door to deliver the rancid apple. It works until I pull my hand out too quickly and semi-slam the door and the little fella wakes up. He's all freaked out for a minute until he sees my offering. He sniffs it and then rips into it like it's some kind of fox caviar, holding it down with his front paws. He's
hungry.
Maybe he needs something to drink, too, but what do foxes drink, for Christ's sake? Hanrahan never taught us that one. I fill an old plastic container with water and put it down on the ground not far from the cage. Experiment time. I go to the front door of the shack and open it and a million moths fly in, which solves one hypothesis but not the one I was testing. Then I open the door of the trap, creep back and wait to see what happens.

Nothing. Nothing happens—for a minute or two, anyway. He looks pretty scared in there but he's sniffing the air, trying to catch the scent of whatever is on the breeze. I'm sitting on the floor a few metres away. After about a century he stands up and shakes himself like a dog. He looks at me and then at the bowl of water. He starts coming out, very slowly, stopping every few steps to watch me. He heads over to the water and laps it up, splashing the stuff everywhere, until the bowl is nearly empty. Then he makes a sort of gurgling, burpy sound in the back of his throat and I think he's gunna barf it all back up, but he swallows it down and yawns, thank god. He points his nose to the forest air coming in the door and stands there a few minutes, twitching and alert. Then—and this is the incredible bit—he turns around and walks back to the cage, goes in, curls up, and settles down to sleep.

What is this? Am I getting adopted here? I stare at him with my gob open, thinking,
Go and visit your mates, you idiot, go and be where you're meant to be,
go and stalk things in the night and watch out for whatever it is that eats you. Oh, and if you see any numbats, come back and tell me, will ya?
But he's not going anywhere and I spose I need the company as much as he does, so I leave him and rest my weary limbs on the fungal couch, with the old man's letter.

There's something very Bold-and-the-Beautiful about my life at the moment. I shake my head. Mum and the jammer are going to get married? I thought it was putrid enough that they were living together but, fuck—getting
married?
What are they
on?
Even though she and Dad have been divorced for ages, I still think of them as together, somehow, a couple, in some way. Maybe just because of the past, because they were together for so long. But this is like, not anymore. Mum and Scott are ... I mean, he's going to be my
step
father. My other father. My surrogate father. My stepdad. I am stunned at the thought. If he
ever
tries any of that authority stuff with me I'll put the dogs on to him, seriously. He is
not
my
dad.
Or
any
kind of dad.
Dad's
my dad. Full fucking stop.

And Dad is being so kind of embarrassingly
revealing
in his letters—it's too honest for me just now, it really is. He never talks like this at home. Must be something about putting it down on paper that gets him all loosened up or something. I wish he'd stop it.

I heave my body up and limp over to the stove to put the kettle on. I don't even
want
any more hot drinks, but what else am I going to do? I catch sight of the cage as I'm moving around and try to be quiet so I don't wake Foxy. There's something vaguely (and this is another word I do not use very often, and certainly only in the privacy of my own home and amid times of obvious stress)
comforting
about that little guy being over there. The door to the cage is open, so he can come out and wander around if he wants. In fact, he can get out of the cabin through a broken floorboard. I was going to fix it because the wind howls up through it, but right now it's handy. A fox flap. There's no way I wanna be dealing with fox piss in this joint along with everything else.

I carry my cuppa back to the sofa and drag all the rugs on top of me in a big bundle. It's cold. Or maybe that's just me. Mum's getting hitched. That's her. Faaaaaark.