Etiquette for a Dinner Party (15 page)

'So Mum . . . what do they say?' Lee's voice has changed. The light-heartedness has gone. There is no sidetracking Lee when she wants to talk serious business. You know you should be grateful, but this conversation can take place on another Thursday, when you are alone.

'What do who say?' You try to divert her anyway.

'The doctors. What did they say.'

You stretch your own legs out now, next to hers. Your ankles have disappeared, swallowed by the disease. She points her toes again and you try to copy her. But the skin is stretched tight, ready to split. You contemplate telling a lie but she can see for herself how things are. Your legs, your skin.

'There's plenty of time, Lee. Early days.' If you don't look at her, she won't see the lie.

'But you will need one. A new kidney.'

'Yes. I will need a kidney transplant.'

You let the moment sit between you. That's what the doctor did for you. The sheep are nodding again. They are quite still, watching you and listening and waiting to hear what will happen next.

'Mum, I will give you the kidney.'

There is a sound that comes from deep inside you. It comes out as laughter but really you are not sure that's what it is. Not sure at all.

'No, Lee, no. You have two children. You will not be giving me one of your kidneys.'

'Yes. Yes I will, Mum. Yes I will.' Her voice is breaking up.

'No, and that's the end of it Lee.' .

Now that the call is over, they have moved away. You put the telephone on the floor at your feet, next to Lee's shoes, and you sit and look at the tree in peace. The breeze that came before has gone and the flowers are still. The tree is at its perfect best.

After a time, you stand. You wait for a moment, for the pain in your legs to pass. As you make your way out of the day lounge, you see that they are up to something. Madeira Wiseman is at the centre of things, of course. They huddle around the little glass-top table, where the telephone usually sits. The cords for the telephone lie slack on the carpet. They are frantically pushing the telephone plugs into the wall sockets.

They stop as you pass by. Each of them looks up at you with wide empty eyes, mouths hanging open. And so they should be frightened, you think, playing the silly games that they do. You leave them to it. You have mail to collect.

I never meant to find it, the thing on Gran's bookshelf. I wasn't looking for bad stuff. But after it happened, I couldn't pretend. When you're ten, you can't ignore something that could ruin your grandmother's life.

It was like a big red birthday card. It was in Pop's Big Trip Box. The box is full of stuff from when Pop went overseas with the RSA, to visit the places he fought at in the war.

The red was the colour of blood. I sniffed it. The smell was smoky like your clothes after Guy Fawkes night. On the front there was a big picture of a windmill. It was also red and the only reason you could see it was because of the black background.

Then, up above, there was writing from another country. Big fat black letters with fancy bumps and twirls.
MoulinRouge 1974
was what it said.

Inside, on the left, there was more writing with a heading that said
La Carte.
On the other side there was a photo that had been stuck to the cardboard. It was of a row of ladies. They wore frilly, short skirts and their legs looked like they were covered in black chicken wire. Their arms were joined up and each one of them was kicking a leg high in the air. It was amazing that these ladies all had exactly the same legs, and they could get the timing right for the photo. I thought about how much practice that would have taken. Like our whole class doing a high-jump together.

You're probably thinking that you wouldn't get worried, looking at something like that. Well, you're wrong because there were two big problems.

The first problem was that even though the ladies had these fancy costumes on the second half of their bodies, they had nothing on their tops. Not even singlets. Not even bras. There were boobs everywhere. I looked from left to right, then back along the line again. I felt a bit sick from the shock; it was the same feeling as the time I burst in on Gran when she was in the bath. Gran had a terrible look, all her wrinkles rushing towards the middle of her face. Her hands flew up to her boobs but not before I saw them. They were different to the boobs in the photo. That's all I want to say about that.

I looked at the faces of the ladies in the photo, and they were all cheerful. This meant they had done it on purpose — got all dressed up from their waists down, then left their top clothes off. And then actually stood there with their legs up while someone took their photo. When I thought about this, how they had posed for the photo and also how much they were enjoying it, the sick feeling started to go away.

They were not like the legs. There were differences between them. The boobs I mean. Not between two boobs on the same lady, but between one lady's boobs and the next. Some were higher up than others, and there were also differences in size. There were no really little ones, or really big ones, but you could see there were some variations. The main difference, though, was colour. You'd have two pink boobs, then two brown ones. Then white ones and some black.

You know how I said there were two problems? The second problem was the worst. It was Pop. He was in the photo.

He was right in the middle of the row of ladies, with his arms linked up to them. He was the same height as them but both his feet were on the ground; he must have decided not to try a leg kick. His grey hair was shiny from his Brylcreem and his forehead was wet. His chin was up high. He was wearing his best blazer, the one he always wears to the RSA, and you could see his two war medals sparkling on his pocket. The 1939-1945 Star on the left, and the Italy Star on the right. His face was all red and he had the biggest smile I have ever seen anyone do for a photo.

I looked at the boobs again, counted them. Forty. Then I looked at the rest of the page. People had signed their names all over it. There were different colour signatures — black, blue, red. There were tidy little names, and big scrawly ones with flicks at the end. The people who had signed the page didn't care if their names went onto the actual photo, or even over the top of someone else's name.

You could work out some of the names. There was
Estelle
and
Jacqueline
and
Lili.
At the top of the page, Jacqueline had written:
Cher Reginald.
Reginald. That was the long version of Pop's name, Reg. I knew it was Jacqueline because it was the same handwriting as the word
Jacqueline
.

I felt an idea sliding into my brain. These were the names of the girls in the photo. They had signed Pop's name; he knew them and they knew him. The sick feeling started to come back. I imagined Pop up close to these ladies, with their bare boobs right next to him, probably almost touching his best blazer. Straight away, I thought again about Gran sitting in the bath, her face upset and her hands covering herself. I lifted the picture up to my face and sniffed it again. It smelled worse this time. .

That night, I pretended nothing was wrong. I kissed Gran and Pop goodnight and went to bed at the usual time. I left the curtains open and watched the black sky and tried to sort things out.

The sky stretched around the Earth, past the edges of where I could see, around to strange places on the other side. I tried to imagine rows of half-naked ladies in black stockings underneath this same sky. My brain was starting to get there, but then Pop appeared in the middle of the ladies, and turned my guts into knots again.

Pop always says if you think slowly enough about a problem, you end up making the right decision. That is what he did in World War Two at Cassino. He and four other New Zealand soldiers were stuck inside a Sherman tank, trying to clear the road to Rome. It was snowing outside. They were in there for days, and although they had plenty of food and water, there was still the big problem of needing to go to the toilet. Every time they opened the lid of the tank, the Germans would try and shoot them.

Pop thought about the problem for a whole day. Then he came up with the idea. When they needed to go, they did their business in empty shell cases and dropped them down through a hatch underneath the tank. The Germans couldn't touch them.

Strategy was everything, according to Pop. Without strategy, the Germans would have won the war and we'd all be driving silly little cars with motors in the boot. He talks to me just about every day about strategies. About how he and the other good guys in the war had to try and come up with tricky ideas to beat the Germans and also the Italians, who were confused about good versus evil and ended up on the wrong side of things.

It was thanks to Pop's strategies that I was ready for it, when the kids at school asked how come I lived with my grandparents. I told them the story just the way Pop and I practised when we were out on the farm.

We'd be walking through the paddocks, moving stock, when he'd just come out with it. He always put on a kid's squeaky voice.

'Where's your Mum and Dad? How come you live with your Gran and Pop?'

'My mother died when I was born,' I'd say. 'And my father is in the New Zealand army, serving overseas.'

'Whereabouts?' Pop was good at pretending to be a nosey kid. He'd stare at me, and I'd have to look him straight back in the eye when I answered the next bit.

'I can't tell you. That's classified military information.'

Then Pop would grin, put his big boney hand around my shoulders, and tell me to go and open a gate.

Lying there in bed, I realised I was going to have to find a strategy to use against Pop. Just thinking of it made me feel sick again. .

If Gran ever found out what Pop had been up to, who knows what she would have done? She might have packed all his flash overseas clothes back into the new travel bag and chucked them out. She might have chucked him out too.

The plan I'd come up with started with spying on Gran. I needed to know for sure that she wasn't on to Pop and his overseas naked friends. Gran was not big on talking, not like Pop who talked to anyone about anything. If she already knew about the ladies, Pop was in big trouble. We all were.

I decided to read the encyclopedias in the bookcase, as a cover for keeping an eye on her. Also, it was a good way to bring the topic up. I pulled out volume one and sat on the sofa. I could get a good view of the kitchen from there. I turned the first few pages. They were feathery light, like the paper of Pop's roll-your-owns.

Gran was doing her usual jobs. She's the exact opposite of Pop. Her hair is still quite dark and she's really little, not much bigger than me. That's not to say she's a softie — no one would ever say that about Gran. She's the sort of person who makes up her mind and sticks with it.

After a while, I got started. I asked her had she ever read the encyclopedias.

'No,' she said. She was standing at the kitchen bench, making a cup of tea and having a smoke. She could flick the ash off the end of the cigarette with just a little tap of her finger.

'Why not?' I kept turning the pages, not looking at what was on them. I was keeping a close eye on Gran.

'I don't have time for reading. Too busy.'

It was true. Gran just worked. That's all she did. Not the cool farm jobs like Pop, but the boring house stuff.

'Why did you buy all these books then?'

'I bought them for you. Not long after you were born. A man came round selling them.' She turned the silver teapot round on the bench. Gran says you need to do this three times to get good-tasting tea.

'How come?'

Gran gave the smoke another flick and the ash went into the sink.

'So you could learn about the world.'

She turned around then. Her arms were folded and the cigarette was burning between her fingers. She smiled at me and I thought that she might have been pretty before she got old. 'There's a big world to see, when you grow up.'

'But aren't you even interested in what's in them? Everything's in these books,' I said. 'Everything ever invented.'

'No,' said Gran. 'I'm not interested. Not in the slightest.'

I waited for a bit, to see whether she was in the mood for further talking. She seemed okay.

'What stuff interests you, Gran?'

'Looking after what's left of this family. That's what interests me. And getting a meal on the table every night.'

I was tempted to get her to talk about my mother. Sometimes you could do that, if she was in the right mood. You could get another tiny piece of information. As long as you stayed away from mentioning my father.

Then I remembered my strategy and the importance of not getting distracted. I took a big breath.

'What about other reading stuff? There's other stuff on the bookcase . . . from Pop's big trip.'

I watched her closely. She turned around and stubbed out the cigarette on the edge of the sink. Then she looked over, towards the bookcase, towards the Big Trip Box.

'I should probably go through it. It's only gathering dust. Some of it could be thrown out now.'

I felt really sick this time. It looked as though she might get cracking on the box straight away, but she didn't. She went outside with the empty clothes basket to get the washing off the line. .

Before, I was thinking about the photo quite often. But after the talk with Gran, I couldn't make my brain think about anything else. I had blown the spy mission, made things worse. The photo of Pop and his lady friends was in my head everywhere I went, whatever I did.