Love and Muddy Puddles (5 page)

Normally we’re not allowed to slam doors—it’s another one of Mum’s toilet cleaning offences. (If you break a rule, she doesn’t yell. She just gets the toilet brush and holds it out to you. We have a lot of toilets and most of them are very clean.)

But there are some times in your life where a door slam is completely and utterly necessary. This was one of them.

I threw myself on my bed gasping for breath. My hands were shaking. I was so angry and upset that I was practically hyperventilating.

This was unbelievable. Was my dad crazy? How does someone who carries a briefcase, wears a tie and catches the bus to work at a bank every day just suddenly announce, out of nowhere, that a whole family is going to move? From the city to a farm? And in the next six weeks?

I couldn’t help it. I actually started talking out loud, even though there was no one else in the room.

“It’s not fair! Not not not not fair!”

My mind was whizzing with protests. 
He’s not the only one in this family. I have rights too. And I don’t want to go anywhere. I love this house and I love the beach. And what about school? He wants to drag me away from my life and plonk me on a farm! I don’t do farms. They smell, they’re muddy and there’s nothing to do.

I rolled over and thumped my fists on my bed. Did Dad expect me to cheer like Charlie and Josh? I mean, they love that stuff. Charlie could spend her whole day on a horse. Josh would give anything to drive a tractor around. They didn’t care about mud and dirt and icky things.

Tears were prickling out of my eyes so I threw my hand over the side of my bed and scrabbled around for a box of tissues. I blew my nose snottily and dabbed at my face, trying not to wreck my mascara.

I turned to the teddy sitting on my bed. He was white with gold flecks in his fur and his name was Ruffles. I got him for my fifth birthday and for some reason he had the sort of face that just looked like he was listening to me. I snuggled right up to his nose and looked him in the eyes. He stared back like he understood.

“Yesterday it was like it was all beginning. And today it’s all ending. My future, according to Dad, is gumboots and mud. I mean, a farm? For real? And I won’t get to see my friends except for holidays and...”

I sat up suddenly, my eyes opened wide. Friends? Forget friends. This was it for me. There was no way that I could tell Saffron, Tiger and the other girls in the group about Dad’s ridiculous plans. I would be dropped so quickly and so hard that you’d be able to hear the sound of my bum hitting the floorboards from the other side of Sydney.

I started sniffling again. This was even more of a disaster. I’d be a country bumpkin for the rest of my life and no cool, beautiful people would ever want to talk to me again and my skin would get rough and I would never be able to go shopping for trendy stuff because there are no decent shops in the country, not that it would matter because no one who was any good lived on a farm anyway.

“I might as well move to the moon,” I sniffed to Ruffles. “And the only friend I’ll have left will be Sam because once I get the flick they’ll just move on to the next person.”

The next person! I hadn’t even thought of that. There would be at least 20 more girls clawing to take my place, all of whom would be super-happy to see me go. All the hard work that I’d done to get into the group would have been pointless.

“I am so angry,” I said firmly to Ruffles, holding his arms so tight that he probably would have squeaked if he’d been alive. “If this is true, and Dad isn’t just playing a joke, I don’t know if I will ever get over it. I am going to hate living on a farm. I am going to hate all the ugly country people.”

I turned over, looked at my ceiling, narrowed my eyes and pulled my teddy bear in front of my face.

“And, Ruffles,” I said, “I am probably, no, I’m definitely, going to hate my dad forever.”

I needed to have another cry. A serious cry. Forget about the mascara—my face was over for the day. After about 10 minutes of wet and snot I noticed that my tears were starting to make stains on my purple satin pillow case so I sat up, gulping and sobbing, and sat limply on the side of my bed. My hair was thrown all over my head but for once I totally didn’t care.

After a few minutes I heard noises on the stairs and then there was a tap at my door and Charlie stuck her head around.

“Are you okay?” she said, coming to sit on the bed. She put her arm around me.

“What do you think?” I said bitterly. “I mean, moving to a farm? Is Dad for real? Is he crazy? He’s a merchant banker, for Pete’s sake.”

“I think he really is going to do it,” said Charlie. “I mean, it is kind of crazy, but I think it will be okay.”

I groaned and threw myself back onto the bed, face down.

“I’m going to hate it!” I said, muffled by the cushions. It sounded more like 
Ibgodahadet
. I put my head up again for air. “There’s just no way I can be happy on a farm.”

Charlie bumped down on the bed next to me. Our chins were nearly touching.

“I know,” she said. “I know you’ll hate it. I know you’re going to be miserable.” She propped herself up on her elbows. “But at least you can be miserable with me there.”

I stuck my tongue out at her and tried not to smile. “Sometimes I just do not believe that we are twins. Who are you, strange person? Why am I the only one of my kind in this family?”

Charlie flopped over on her back and stuck her legs up in the air. Her big toe on her left foot was poking through her sock as usual. She picked at her toenail.

“They want you to come downstairs. We’re going to talk about it. Dad’s got pictures from the internet up and everything.” She flicked the bit of toenail away on to my floor and I shuddered involuntarily.

“Gross, Charlie, don’t do that. Pick your toenails in your own room.” I said.

“Well, I can’t, because you’re in here and I want to be with you. If you want to get me out of your room you’ll have to come with me,” she said, rolling her head around so she could see my disgusted face.

“Oh, alright.” I sat up. “But I’m not going to be happy. This whole farm thing is completely ridiculous. Give Dad a week. As soon as he sees sense, he’ll be back to normal.”

I stood up and checked my mascara in the mirror. Streaks. Big ones. “Let me just fix this and then I’ll come.”

I grabbed a cotton ball and wiped my face, reapplied my eye liner and straightened up my mashed hairdo.

“Here,” said Charlie, holding out something small. “Your bindi fell off.”

I peeled it off her finger and pressed it firmly back on my forehead. If I had to go and talk about insane life changes with my crazy dad, I would do it with as much style as possible.

Taking a deep breath I followed Charlie down the stairs. As we went into the lounge room I held up my chin slightly, tightened my mouth and walked with exaggerated model-like steps over to the sofa. Looking from left to right I surveyed the room and sat with a flourish, my back straight and my head high.

“Oh good, Coco,” said Dad, putting his head up from the laptop on the coffee table. “You’ve come back. I was just about to show everyone the photographs of the farm on the website.”

Mum smiled at me, an encouraging sort of smile. “It really looks great, Coco,” she said. “You okay?”

This was unbelievable. Did they have no idea that when I ran out of the dining room screaming it was because I was definitely not okay? I don’t think Dad had even really noticed that I had been gone for half an hour or more.

I blinked at Mum a few times with a stern face, hoping that she would get the message that I was angry. I didn’t want to talk. I thought I’d just burst out crying which wouldn’t be dignified or stylish at all.

She opened her mouth to speak but just at that point Dad started to talk.

“So here it is,” he said, adjusting the screen so that we could all see.

Josh and Charlie were kneeling by the coffee table sticking their heads in close trying to see the photograph of a big green field. They looked like 10 year-olds. I stayed on my sofa, refusing to be keen.

“It’s a hundred acres, with a stream running right through. It backs on to national forest and it has quite a few different paddocks, and an olive grove and a piggery,” said Dad. He had a huge smile on his face, and I’ve never heard his voice so excited. He was whipping through the photographs like he couldn’t show them fast enough.

“Oh, it’s so beautiful,” said Mum. “Just look at all that land—and the view!”

“Are we going to get pigs?” asked Charlie. “I think they’re so cute.”

“I don’t know yet,” said Dad. “We will just have to take it slowly and see what we can do. There are no pigs in the shed at the moment.”

Pigs?
 I thought to myself. My mouth tightened. 
I’m never going in a pig shed. You can forget that!

“So where exactly is it?” said Josh. “What’s the nearest town?”

Dad fiddled around for a minute and brought up a map on the screen. “Here we are in Sydney.” He pointed to a large yellow spot. Then he moved his finger down ten centimetres.

“This is it here, approximately,” he said. “It’s about two hours south, just in from the coast. I guess the nearest town is probably Kangaroo Valley.

Kangaroo Valley
? I thought to myself. My neck felt tight. 
That’s not even a town. It’s a postcard caption
.

We visited Kangaroo Valley on our last family holiday. Well, I say visited, but I mean ‘stopped in’. It’s the tiniest little pit stop I’ve ever been through. If ever there was a town that was blink-and-you-miss-it, it’s Kangaroo Valley. It had a bakery. And a shop selling rocking horses. And I think that was it. Oh, wait, there was also a sign saying ‘World’s Best Pies’.

As if. I don’t even like pies. Could this be any worse?

Oh yes, it could.

“But it’s not in town,” said Dad. “It’s about 30 kilometres out. It’s down a fire trail. And apparently if it rains a lot the road gets cut off sometimes.”

“Awesome,” said Josh.

“That’s cool,” said Charlie.

Mum put her hand on Dad’s and held it like she was really pleased. No-one even looked at me.

Out of town? Down a fire trail? And the road gets cut off? 
My back got straighter and straighter. Could this be any worse at all?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes, it definitely could.

“Dad, where’s the house?” asked Charlie. “Is that the end of the photos? They don’t have any pictures of the house.”

Dad’s eyes lit up. He looked like a little boy about to open a long-awaited Christmas present.

“Well, this is the best bit. There is no house!”

We looked at him blankly.

“We’re going to build it ourselves!” he exulted, throwing his hands out wide as if he was inviting us all to the best party in the world.

“Oh my goodness!” said Charlie, but she was smiling.

“This is awesome!” yelled Josh.

“Oh, David,” said Mum. “This is your dream, isn’t it! You’ve always wanted to do this—and now you are!” She actually hugged him. They looked at each other with dewy eyes and then, urrrgh, they kissed on the lips. 
Spare me, Mum and Dad. That’s disgusting. Parents should not kiss.

“I said there were no pigs in the shed. So we can clean it out and live there,” Dad said, his words practically falling out of his mouth with excitement. I just about fell off my chair. But it didn’t seem to stop him talking. “It has power and water and we can set up a camp kitchen. And the house shouldn’t take too long to build if we all do it together. Maybe half a year?”

That was it. I’d had enough. Dad started burbling on about 
passive solar this and that, own vegie patch blah blah, yada yada, mud bricks, compost toilet, eco-friendly ra ra ra, completely self-sufficient.
 And from the looks of it, everyone else thought he wasn’t crazy. He’d obviously infected them with some greenie-wildlife-warrior virus that I was (thankfully) immune to. Or he’d turned into some sort of magician/cult leader/crazy man and they’d all been brainwashed. There was no other explanation.

I had to say something. I had to put a stop to this insanity.

Rather than tears and yelling and protests, which obviously hadn’t worked the first time, I decided to try to knock holes in his arguments.

“Dad,” I said. “It sounds lovely.” I stretched out the word laah-ve-ly as long as I could. “But really. I don’t think this is going to work. You want us all to live in a pig shed,” and here I shuddered for effect, “for six months while we all build a house out of mud. But the fact is, we...” and I gestured to Charlie, Josh and myself, “...need to go to school. We just won’t have time to help build a house, however environmentally-friendly and wonderful and all that stuff it is. Plus, if it 
does
 rain and the road 
does 
get cut off, we’ll have to miss days. And I know you think getting a good education is the best thing we can do to have a good start to our lives, right?”

I looked around with the warmest, friendliest expression on my face that I could muster. The image I wanted to send was of a girl who loved school so much that she couldn’t bear to miss even an hour.

“So, even though it’s a really great adventure,” and here I put on a super-smiley face and made my voice sensible and comforting, “I just don’t think it’s practical. Maybe we should just go for a holiday to a farm. That would be fun.”

“Come here Coco,” said Dad, still smiling. He patted the cushion of the sofa he was sitting on and made like he wanted to hug me. I cringed stiffly away.

“I have an even bigger surprise for all of you,” he said. “How would it be to take a year off school? We can home-school while we get the farm set up and the house built. It’ll be a huge education in heaps of ways. You guys can help build in the day time and then we’ll do catch up school lessons at night. We won’t have a TV or the internet for a while, so you won’t have anything else to do.”

I felt ill. My head was spinning and my heart was pounding. No TV? No internet? 
Home school? 
Was my dad insane? What had gotten into him? This couldn’t be real. Surely I wasn’t hearing this? No one was even listening! Dad had gone nuts and everyone else thought it was wonderful. What had happened to my family? How had normal Eastern Suburbs people suddenly been transformed into a bunch of crazy, mud-loving tree-huggers?

My happy face dissolved into a pout. I stood up, wobbling slightly on my legs which felt like jelly, opened my mouth and screamed like a baby.

Waaaaaaah.

Then I ran out of the room, still screaming, thundered up the stairs and slammed my door—again—behind me.

If they were going to go crazy, I could too.