Etiquette for a Dinner Party Page 8

  ‘Is your mother really that sick?’ Erin said, after a while. I couldn’t believe that she had asked. Just like that. I tucked my feet in under the seat, waiting, and so did Erin. Only the slingbacks kept swinging.

  ‘Yes. She has cancer in her head.’ The butter had gone from Gabrielle’s voice; instead the sound was hard and flat. I wondered if she was going to cry but her eyes were dry and her face was just the same.

  ‘Can’t the doctors fix it?’

  God, Erin, I thought. Trust you. I held my breath, waited for the answer.

  ‘Nup. It’s eating her brain up. Soon there’ll be nothing left.’

  I was thinking about someone’s brain being eaten by little worms, though I had no idea if cancer came in worms or something else. Gabrielle’s mouth had turned into a little pink straight line and her eyebrows had sunk a bit towards her eyes, as though she had a headache. She shook her hair, then blew upwards towards her fringe, like you do when you’re really hot and there’s no breeze.

  ‘I don’t care, you know. I don’t care that she’s going to die.’ It sounded like she meant it.

  The next few days turned out to be not much fun after all. For a start, it was confirmed that I was not getting my ears pierced. I brought it up that first night, after I had washed and dried and put away the dishes. This seemed a good time to ask.

  Mum was sitting at the kitchen table, making our lunches for the next day.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. She didn’t even look up from the breadboard.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know why. Only tarts get their ears pierced.’

  ‘No they don’t. Gabrielle Baxter has pierced ears.’

  She was spreading Vegemite across thick slices of white bread smeared with butter. She put the knife down.

  ‘Gabrielle Baxter is …’

  I thought she was going to say a tart, but then she got that look, the one that means she was going to talk about people less fortunate than ourselves. People in Africa, or China, or sharemilkers. Her head tilted to one side, and she breathed out heavily through her nose, almost like a little snore.

  ‘You know that Gabrielle Baxter’s mother is very sick, Sammy …’

  ‘So? She’s got these cross earrings, little silver ones that match her necklace.’

  ‘That poor kid …’

  I was not getting it. There was Gabrielle Baxter with earrings and being called ‘a poor kid’, so apparently she was not a tart. It seemed there was a new category of people who could have their ears pierced — girls whose mothers were due to die shortly. I looked at Mum sighing, breathing sadly over the sandwiches, and I wished that she had cancer too.

  I tried another approach.

  ‘If they’re crosses, she probably believes in God.’

  ‘Mmm …’ Mum started another pile of sandwiches. I could tell she wasn’t really listening.

  ‘So how could someone who believes in God be a tart?’

  ‘You’re not getting your ears pierced.’

  It got worse. The next day at school, Erin and Gabrielle spent all morning tea and lunchtime whispering. When I went over to them, they’d stop and stare at me.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, just the once. They were on the jungle gym, hanging upside down. Erin had the usual shorts on under her dress, but Gabrielle wore these amazing witch’s britches. They were red, and they had black lace trims. My stomach ached for witch’s britches and earrings.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Erin, her black pigtails dangling nearly to the ground. Then she looked at Gabrielle, and giggled. They both giggled, their faces red from hanging. I stood there a bit longer, waiting.

  Julie Bray and the others were playing hopscotch over the other side of the playground. Julie saw me and waved out.

  ‘Come and play Sammy.’ Her voice carried clear across all the other noise. The boys were playing bullrush. The local boys were out in the middle, doing the tackling, and the sharemilker boys were the runners. One after the other, the new boys were being knocked to the ground and sat on by the entire group. The little kids had the big skipping rope out. They were chanting ‘Oliver Cromwell lost his shoe, at the battle of Waterloo …’ while the rope smacked hard against the asphalt.

  I pretended I hadn’t seen Julie. I went to the girls’ toilets and waited until the bell rang for the end of lunchtime. I felt like crying, but I knew that if I did Gabrielle and Erin would come in. So instead I locked the door of one of the toilets and sat on the edge of the seat holding my stomach.

  The next day Erin had red witch’s britches too. She and Gabrielle hung upside down through morning tea and lunch, and from a distance their witch’s britches looked like clothes on the washing line. I was dying to know were they new or had she borrowed them from Gabrielle.

  I could have put John right, explained that I was not a lawyer, just a secretary. But it had given him a bit of a thrill, thinking that a girl from Pekapeka Primary could become a lawyer, so I let him have the moment.

  He usually went across to the Masonic for a beer and a pie for lunch, and would I like to come? Neither the beer nor the pie appealed, but I said yes. I liked the whole idea of it. You know, just running into an old schoolmate and being invited out for a pie. I imagined laughing about it at work on Monday.

  As we crossed the road, I took a quick look at his hands to see if he wore a wedding ring. I was home for just two days, catching up with Mum and Dad. I didn’t need the drama of small-town gossip about me and someone else’s husband. But John’s finger was bare and there was no telltale crease to suggest he’d slipped the band off. Exclusively a city man’s trick, I thought.

  Inside the Masonic it was easy to forget it was the middle of the day. Tattered dirty canvas blinds hung low over the sash windows. The big barn of a room was warm and still. On the back wall, a huge television screen played horseracing from somewhere in Western Australia. The smell was old beer; in the carpets, polished hard into the table tops. It was a comfortable smell; I didn’t mind it at all.

  Two old men in Swanndris and gumboots stood at one of the leaners in the middle of the room. Each had a copy of Best Bets and a pen. They were watching the screen and didn’t look our way. Apart from them, the bar was empty.

  ‘The usual,’ John said to the guy pouring. ‘Pie and a lager, Sammy? My shout.’

  ‘Thank you John. Very kind.’

  I hadn’t eaten a pie in years, but now I was really craving one. Either was fine by me, I told John, when he asked steak or potato top.

  We took our pies and beers to another of the leaners.

  ‘So … Sammy Walker. How about that, eh? What’s it like in the big smoke?’

  ‘Pretty good. Lots going on … you know, bars, clubs. That sort of stuff.’ I cut into the pie horizontally, lifting the pastry lid off. I put the lid to one side of my plate for later. Then I scooped up tomato sauce with the edge of my knife and smeared it over the meat inside. I used the knife like a spoon, stirred the sauce in, then picked up my fork and ate the meat out of the centre.

  John was laughing. I looked up, grinning. I knew what was coming next.

  ‘Gizza dip,’ he said.

  It was what we used to do. Bought lunches — the big Friday treat at Pekapeka Primary. We’d trade dips into pies.

  ‘Go on. Gizza dip.’

  ‘Where’s your Sally Lunn?’ John always dipped his Sally Lunn buns into everyone’s pies. He’d end up with several pies to himself. The girls found the whole idea of raspberry-flavoured coconut and mince disgusting.

  John leaned back in his chair, smiling. He picked up his handle of beer. It looked good — little beads of icy water sitting on the outside of the glass. I thought about all the times I’d scoffed at blokey beer ads. Then I picked up my own handle and drank. Big gulps, like a teenager.

  ‘So Sammy Walker.’ John was starting all his sentences like this. ‘Let’s hear all about it. Hubby? Kids?’

  ‘Nup, none of the above. Still looking for Mr Right. What
sort of beer is this?’ I couldn’t believe how nice it tasted. You could drink it quickly — it was very more-ish.

  ‘Lion Red.’ John was grinning again. ‘I suppose you’d be more of a Chardonnay girl?’ He went to the bar and came back with two more beers.

  John had a nice face — not unlike David Beckham’s, in the pub light. The more I looked at it, the less mullet-like his haircut seemed. He had obviously done well for himself — fought off the pre-ordained life on the farm. I drank some more Lion Red.

  He asked me other questions about work. He wanted to know if I’d defended any famous criminals, whether it was really like Judge Judy in the courtroom. It was too late to put him right about my job, so I answered his questions. I knew the stuff pretty well, having been in the job so long. Better than some of the lawyers I worked for.

  ‘How long have you been at Nissan?’ I asked him. He said it had been six years or so. He’d started out on the farm, working with his older brother, but the land couldn’t sustain the two of them. So he’d tried his hand at car sales, and discovered he liked it.

  ‘It only works out if you stay,’ I said, interrupting him.

  ‘Hmm … ?’ He leaned forward, frowning.

  ‘I mean, you’ll be happy here if you stay put. Don’t go away anywhere. Then you don’t know any better. You can’t go wandering off, you know. It’s too hard to come back.’

  I remembered about seeing Gabrielle Baxter in the street. was going to ask John about her but somehow the moment ended up with me reaching out and touching his hand.

  One of the two old guys with the Best Bets yelled out ‘Go you little beauty’.

  ‘You were my first boyfriend, you know,’ I said. ‘I decided that one day, when we were outside washing paintbrushes together …’

  ‘Sammy, I’m married.’ He pulled his hand back, watching me closely as I looked again at his ring finger. ‘C’mon … you know us country boys. No wedding rings.’

  I laughed, got down off my bar stool and walked round to him. I gave him a big hug and his shoulders relaxed into me. .

  I have God to thank for me and Gabrielle Baxter becoming real friends. And I mean that. Literally.

  On Friday morning, we had roll and notices as usual. My stomach pains had got worse during the week and I couldn’t eat my breakfast that morning. Mum asked if I wanted to stay home that day, but how could I? Erin and Gabrielle would have a whole day together to plan for the weekend. Not that they were including me in anything, but I couldn’t bear the thought of not knowing what I was missing out on.

  After notices, it was religious instruction. Us Catholics had it in the Big Room and the Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists went to the Little Room. There were lots more of them than us, which I thought was surprising given that we were going to heaven and they weren’t. Then again, as Mum said, they had to combine to get the numbers. There was another tiny group of kids — the heathens, Mum called them — who didn’t have religious instruction at all and they were on dishes duty in the staffroom. It was a fact that they also ate the teachers’ biscuits while they were in there, which proved they were in the right group.

  After notices, Mr Frank read out the names of the Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist sharemilker kids. I waited for Gabrielle Baxter’s name but he got to the end of the list without saying it. Then it was the Catholics. There was only one name, and it was Gabrielle’s.

  You should have seen the look on Erin’s face, honestly. I thought she was going to cry. There she’d been, all week, making sure she had Gabrielle Baxter to herself and then on Friday she finds out that Gabrielle is a Catholic. I smiled at Erin and Julie, and all the other non-Catholics getting ready to go through to the other room. Erin glared at me. We both knew what this meant. We’d meet the Baxters at church, there would be plays afterwards. My stomach relaxed and uncurled, like a cat stretching out in front of the fire. Gabrielle slid over on the mat to sit with me.

  Father Brindle was fat and old. He had grey hair around the sides of his head and also out his ears but none on top. His face had bumps and sunken-in bits, and it looked like a potato that had been kept too long. I should add that I am talking about a red skin potato, because that was the colour of it. The parents said he had a problem with the bottle, which is why some weeks he didn’t come at all and instead we had Mrs Crawford, who read us cowboy comics hidden inside the Bible. I would have liked it to be Mrs Crawford, for Gabrielle’s first time. But this was not one of those weeks unfortunately.

  Father Brindle sat down on the teacher’s chair, which Mr Frank had left at the front of the class. Everyone moved back. Father Brindle had a certain smell and I will try to describe it but really you had to be there. It included incense from the church, wet dog (he had an Alsatian called Rex that he sometimes brought to school) and finally a smell which could be onions but also the bottle the day after. With the big burner going in the corner, the smell soon pumped out across the whole room. I tried breathing through my mouth instead of my nose, but there was no getting away from it.

  He sat back in the chair, his little legs stretched out in front of him. Then he closed his eyes and tilted his head back. ‘Let us start with the Our Father.’

  At the end, he waited. His eyes stayed closed and his head didn’t move. I wondered whether he had gone to sleep, and I looked at Gabrielle and rolled my eyes. ‘Hangover,’ I mouthed.

  Finally, he opened his eyes and sat forward.

  ‘Today, we are going to talk about sacrifice,’ he said. ‘How the Lord Jesus sacrificed his life for us, so that we can look forward to eternal happiness in Heaven.’

  I closed my eyes and tried not to breathe in the smell of Father Brindle. It was exactly the same talk as last Friday. This happened a lot, but there was no use in pointing it out. He would just say your faith was questionable, and did you want to go to Heaven or not. When I next looked over at Gabrielle, I was glad no one had stopped him. She was sitting with her knees crossed, leaning forward on her elbows, listening hard to every word he said. .

  It turned out that the Baxters were the sort of Catholics that went to church hardly ever — just once a month or so, Gabrielle said. They had gone every Sunday before her mother got sick but since the cancer had taken hold of her entirely her father hadn’t bothered. I said I knew what she meant, we were that sort of Catholic too. Except no one had cancer and it was more to do with whether Mum and Dad had been out somewhere on the Saturday night.

  It was lunchtime and we were walking around the playground, just us, with our arms linked. I was the happiest I had ever been in my life. We stopped walking now and again and did wash the dishes, dry the dishes, turn the dishes over. We were back to back, arms linked and I was surprised how strong she was for someone so thin, how she could pull my arms right out of their sockets if she wanted to.

  I wanted to know what Gabrielle thought about what Father Brindle had said. About eternal happiness in Heaven.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said. Wash the dishes, dry the dishes and we were back facing each other.

  ‘But how do you know, for sure?’ This was the problem with me. I couldn’t believe something unless there was proof.

  ‘I’ve seen it.’ The tiny crosses in her ears caught the sun. ‘I’ve seen how a person looks in Heaven.’

  ‘How can you? You’re alive, and they’re dead.’

  ‘Come over tomorrow. I’ll show you.’

  That afternoon, as I got off the bus, I called out ‘see you tomorrow Gabrielle’. I made sure I shouted it loud enough for Erin Donovan to hear. .

  When I first asked Mum if I could go to Gabrielle Baxter’s place, she said nothing. This came as a surprise to me. Usually she had an opinion on things.

  ‘Well, can I?’

  ‘Who will be there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Well her mother will be. I don’t know who else.’

  ‘Will her father be there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.�
�� Then I got it. I’d never asked to go to a sharemilker’s place before.

  ‘You’d better ask your father,’ she said.

  I told Dad that Mum said it was okay with her if it was okay with him. Then I told Mum that Dad said it was okay. Normally this worked, but by bedtime I still didn’t have a definite okay.

  The next morning, while they were both still asleep, I biked to the Mitchell farm. I rode past our sharemilkers Mr and Mrs Visser washing down the cowshed yards. I rode over the Mitchell’s cattle-stop and down the metal driveway. It hadn’t rained for three days but the muck was still thick and smelly, like Rotorua mudpools. Mrs Mitchell was outside in her gumboots, hanging out the washing. She waved out to me and I waved back. Maybe she thought I was coming in, because she stood there staring, her big cane washing-basket in her hands, as I kept peddling past their gateway to the sharemilker cottage.

  Gabrielle was waiting on the porch steps. I threw my bike into the paspalum that grew long all around the house. In my head I could hear Mum: ‘Twenty minutes, and those lawns would be tidy. Where’s the pride?’ but I shut her voice out. The pale blue paint was peeling off the house and before Mum could say anything, I got in first. ‘It’s not their house, they’ve just arrived. The Mitchells should have painted it for them.’

  It was only eight o’clock, but Gabrielle was wearing a minidress with purple swirls all over it, and white Beatle boots that came up to her knees. She came closer and I saw that she was wearing make-up: pale blue eyeshadow, black mascara and shiny orange pearl lipstick. She looked beautiful.

  ‘Come and see my room,’ she said, and we walked through the house. Let me say right now that once you get inside a sharemilker’s house, it’s really no different to a normal house. I don’t know what I was expecting — lots of cardboard boxes maybe, camping gear instead of a normal stove. I blamed this on my parents and all the other adults calling the first of June Gypsy Day. I always expected to wake up one day and the sharemilkers would have disappeared in the night. But none of this was true.