Etiquette for a Dinner Party (10 page)

In the taxi, on the way home from the jazz club, she thinks about the boat trip. 'You can reverse a river, Peter. A natural flowing river. Imagine that.'

Later, she makes the call. 'Hi Mum — it's me, in Chicago.'

'Hello love — what time is it over there?'

'Just gone eleven. At night. How's everything Mum?'

'Eleven at night? So are you ahead or behind, exactly?' Her mother's voice sounds next-door close; there are none of those echoes that can distort long-distance calls.

'Behind, Mum. Eighteen hours, I think it is. It's about four o'clock there, isn't it.'

'Yes, four o'clock. So what day is it there?'

'It's Wednesday.'

'Oh, so we're ahead of you.'

'Yep.'

'So, love. Are you having a good time?' Trish pauses for the briefest time. 'What's it like there, Ruth? What's Chicago like?'

Ruth thinks for a moment before she answers.

'Fabulous, Mum. The trip of a lifetime.'

I saw Gabrielle Baxter down the main street of Paeroa. She was about a block ahead and walking in the same direction as me. There were two teenage girls with her. They all stopped outside Glamour World.

I'd been following Gabrielle for a while, but it was only when she turned towards the shop that I knew for sure it was her. It was the way she walked. I thought:
funny how people getolder but their walks stay the same
.

When she was twelve, her body was tall and pale and upright, like a skeleton wrapped in frayed tissue paper. She sort of drifted, rather than walked. These days she'd be a supermodel but back then she was just skinny.

So there she was, thirty years on, with that same walk. The two girls went into the shop and she followed.

I got that funny little thing when your stomach lurches halfway up your throat and the skin across the back of your head goes tight. It felt like I'd seen an ex-boyfriend. I got the curiosity. You know how it goes. You need to see whether he still wears an earring. You need to check out his wife and kids.

That's how it was. Overwhelmingly, I needed to spy on Gabrielle Baxter. I didn't have anything specific to do in town. Next thing I knew I was following her. Then I thought
for Christ's sake, get a grip
. She was in Glamour World and I stayed in the street shuffling backwards and forwards in some sort of dopey little solitary tea dance. I messed around in my handbag, pretending I was looking for something. Then I forgot that I was only pretending to look for something and I panicked because I couldn't find it.

We were friends in our last year of primary school. In fact, it wasn't a year — the Baxters arrived in the middle of winter. Sharemilkers usually stayed two or three years, but by the following season the Baxters had moved on. It was just a few months, the entire extent of me and Gabrielle Baxter. .

We sat on the mat, us big kids at the back. Mr Frank's exact instructions were to chat among ourselves until the sharemilker kids arrived. We were too excited to whisper, even, which was a waste because normally total silence was compulsory. There were powdery grey mud wedges in the fluffy tops of my new slippers. I'd just got them from McKenzies in Thames, where the shopping was superior to Paeroa. I picked the wedges out and squashed them into the gaps in the mat.

It was the first school day after the first of June, which was the day every year that sharemilkers came from other places to their new jobs. Gypsy Day, our parents called it. The sky was nearly black and the rain which had been going on for weeks had turned into sleet. It felt like ice needles when you ran into it. There was stinking mud as far as you could see. This is not normal mud but the type with cowshit mixed through it. It has a certain disgusting smell that you never get used to. We wore gumboots to school and swapped them for slippers at the classroom door but the mud still got everywhere.

Mr Frank was marching up and down in front of the blackboard, rubbing his hands together. He wore his beige walk shorts and matching socks pulled right up to his hairy knees. Why he couldn't wear longs in winter like a normal person and spare us all the sight of his big purple kumara kneecaps, I don't know.

There were some noises out in the cloakroom. Mr Frank took huge steps towards the door, as though the sharemilkers would all change their minds and rush off to enrol their kids at Netherton if he didn't hurry up. I stopped cleaning my slippers and watched through the glass window in the door. I saw the tops of heads being kissed by mothers. There was one father out there and he didn't kiss anyone.

Mr Frank had already done the maths and explained it.

There were six of them coming to our class, and four more going to the Little Room. Our school only had two classrooms — the Big Room and the Little Room — so every June the big drama was whether enough sharemilkers' kids would come to keep the second classroom open.

Ten kids in total was a lot, we all said. But Mr Frank reminded us that sharemilkers were leaving too. I remember the Campbell and Kelly kids looked sad when he said that — they were the ones going — but Mr Frank just ignored them and carried on with the explanation.

Apparently, we were going to hang on to the classroom this year. By the skin of our teeth, is what Mum said about it.

Finally they came in. They lined up at the front with Mr Frank, in the space between the mat and the blackboard. They were mostly boys, but there was a girl at the end of the row. She had blonde hair which I swear was a proper hairdo. How can I describe it? Well, it was parted down the middle and then it came down straight to just above her shoulders and it flicked up at the ends. I had never seen anything so neat in my life — not in real life, I mean; on TV there were The Chicks and that's what the hairdo was like, Suzanne's off The Chicks.

She (the sharemilker girl, not Suzanne) had cheekbones that looked like they were going to pop through her skin any minute. She had big brown eyes and her skin was so white you could probably see her insides through it if you got close enough. It looked amazing against her blonde hairdo.

Sorry to go on about it but I can't say enough about this hairdo. Most of us kids had the same haircuts — our mothers did it with the sewing scissors. They parted it on the side and snipped around the ends to keep it tidy. The purpose of haircuts was to keep hair tidy — that's what I'd thought until I saw the new sharemilker girl. It became clear to me that it was possible to look like Suzanne in real life, if you were lucky enough to have the right type of hair.

Her dress was definitely bought, not homemade. It was a smocktop which fitted her perfectly. She wore proper Levi jeans. Levis! I didn't even know they made Levis that small. Around her neck she wore this lovely silver cross. But the thing I couldn't believe — couldn't take my eyes off — was her earrings. In each tiny earlobe she had miniature crosses, the same as the one on her necklace.

She had her ears pierced.

It dawned on me that I was looking at a tart. I'd never seen one before. I started again, from the top of her head down to her shoes, which I didn't mention before but they were the exact slingbacks that I had been begging Mum to get me all summer. I never got them, they weren't practical.

Only tarts get their ears pierced.

This was a fact. My mother had said it often enough, when we stopped by Johnson's Jewellers in town to look in the window. She'd be admiring the rings, and I always ended up looking at the tiny sparkling earrings. Mothers weren't always right but I accepted her word on this one. None of the girls in my class had their ears pierced, and definitely none of them had had sex.

I couldn't help it. I looked at the earrings, then at the crotch of her Levis, at the place where she did it. Up and down I looked, trying to tie it all up. I saw that even though she was so skinny she was starting to get boobs, and I thought what's the bet she's got a bra. One of the colourful unpractical ones from McKenzies. One time, when I looked up, she was staring straight back at me.

Mr Frank was at the end of the new kids' line, grinning like a kid himself. His hair flicked down towards his Mr Magoo glasses. He grabbed the long ruler off the chalk ledge and used it as a sort of leaning thing, like Dick Van Dyke in that part of
Mary Poppins
when he dances with the penguins. This was not something he normally did, so maybe he was nervous too. I watched it bend in the middle, wondered whether it might just snap and wouldn't that be a laugh, in front of the new kids. But it didn't.

'Ah . . . well, right,' he said, and waited. It sounded like the end of something, not the beginning. We locals knew he started most of his talks like that, but the new kids looked confused.

'As you all know, we have some new children joining us today . . .' He looked down the line of kids and smiled again, quickly. You could see his eyes flicking across them, and then back, as though he was skim-reading a book. He kept going back to the girl, as if she might be the bit he was looking for.

'Welcome to you all. I'm Mr Frank, your teacher and also the headmaster of Pekapeka Primary.' Mr Frank's body swelled up when he said this, and he got on with his walking back and forth. Like a cocky bloody rooster. That was Dad's usual description of Mr Frank, not mine.

'Perhaps you'd like to take turns to tell us what your name is, where you've come from, the things you like doing and whose farm you are working on!' He swung around and tapped the first one, a boy, lightly on the shoulder with the ruler.

The boy had red hair and black-dot freckles and snot coming out his nose. He had his arms crossed in front of him like the All Blacks do in newspaper photos. I could see his shirt fabric sticking out through a hole in the elbow of his jersey. I knew what my mother would say about this. Poor little buggers . . . a needle and a bit of wool, that's all it takes. He said his name was Wayne Bennett and he'd come from down south. And that he lived on the Maxwell's farm and liked feeding out. You could tell, the way he said it, that he'd done this talk before. He didn't look at Mr Frank, or any of us; he just stared at a spot somewhere on the back wall.

Hailstones smashed against the windows as the other kids had their turns telling us about themselves. They had to shout over the noise of the storm and the windows rattling. Mr Frank threw some more coal in the big black burner during one boy's talk so I missed his details entirely. Then Mr Frank went back to his desk. He wrote notes while they talked, and thanked each of them as they finished.

I never listened to the boys. Their stories were always the same — duck shooting and calving — and also they were younger than me and even from the back of the mat I could tell that the smell from them was pretty bad. I am certainly not saying all sharemilker kids smell, but the boys usually do and no one can deny this. But the main reason I didn't listen was because of the girl. I tried not to stare but somehow I kept looking back at her, like you do when there's a beast being killed on the farm.

Finally, it was her turn. Mr Frank put his pen down and sat back in his teacher's chair. His hands were clasped together and were resting on the edge of his desk. I wondered if he'd seen the earrings.

'My name is Gabrielle Baxter,' she said. Her voice was soft and buttery, not much more than a whisper. I leaned forward, watching her lips, listening.

Gabrielle Baxter Gabrielle Baxter Gabrielle Baxter. I said it inside my head, then I whispered it, to see how it sounded. Gabrielle Baxter. Mixed up with the sound of the wind and the rain outside, it had a delicious flavour.

'We are on the Mitchell farm. We came from Taranaki.'

I just knew it, that she'd come from somewhere amazing. Taranaki has a mountain — I'd seen it on the calendar in the hall. September. The mountain is a proper shaped one, an upside down ice-cream cone, not like the ones near Taupo. It has snow on it. Paeroa has no mountains, no hills even, just a stupid bottle. I could picture Gabrielle Baxter on a farm on the mountain, like Heidi. Heidi with earrings.

'My Dad's name is Ian. Mum's name is Bridie. She's sick. She'll probably die in July.'

She had finished her talk. She looked at Mr Frank, who seemed a bit shocked. His mouth was open and he was blinking slowly. He shut his mouth and opened it again. Then she looked at us kids on the mat. I looked across at Julie Bray and Erin Donovan, who was my best friend. There was a lot of looking going on generally. I could see Julie and Erin were both thinking about Gabrielle Baxter in the same way as me. They were staring at her earrings and her Levis. When I turned back to Gabrielle Baxter, I smiled at her. I shoved Brian Macey with my elbow and wriggled away from him. I never took my eyes off Gabrielle Baxter. I patted the little space on the mat between Brian and me. She looked at me for a bit longer, then made her way through all the legs and bodies and slippers that had come off people's feet, and sat down next to me. .