‘OI, I’VE LOST IT. Help, Derik, you’ve got the fork.’
Disco’s sausage spat and flamed on the bed of embers. I wrapped the piece of bent wire in my cuff and stabbed. The rescued sausage made a red slice in the dark. I lifted it high and wrote, hey! against the leaves and stars then dropped it onto Disco’s piece of newspaper. ‘Have some charcoal.’
‘Thank you Goddess for this food. Make us wise and make us good.’ Disco’s spit sizzled as he bit into it.
Across from me Marti blinked at him then carried on laying a hatchwork of sticks over the fire. They smoked and sighed then flared up. ‘So, tell me how it went.’
‘Fast,’ Disco said between bites.
‘Frozen,’ I added.
‘Frustrating.’ Disco.
‘Fruitless.’
‘Free — and filthy.’
‘And finally … freaky.’ Disco and I rolled together, laughing.
Marti tutted and sighed. ‘Come on, guys. Fair’s fair.’
We groaned.
‘Come on, I’ve been sitting in the dark wondering if I’d seen the last of you. While you’ve obviously been having a hilarious time.’ She threw a thick branch on. ‘I thought you’d forgotten all about me.’
That pulled us together. Disco glanced at me and began. ‘We caught the bread truck.’
‘And the bread truck caught us.’
‘Yeah. We weren’t that good at hiding. That was the fast frozen part. He was a maniac driver but at least it didn’t take long.’
‘Then he made us unload the whole thousand pies and loaves at Mosgiel.’
Disco swallowed the last bit of sausage. His lips were black in the firelight. ‘But from there we walked to Derik’s grandparents’. That was the bit Dek found freaky.’
Marti looked at me, head to one side.
I said, ‘Did you know, a few people have done stage one and stage two, got endorsed and calibrated at the same time — if they wanted to? Most wait a week but Pops wanted to know right from the start what it would be like.’
‘And?’ Marti leaned forwards, spreading her hands against the fire.
‘Well, my gran was normal, like usual. And my sisters were fine.’ I gulped.
I’d got a lump in my throat there, too, seeing Caro and Ella hunched at the computer, chattering over Sim City; their lives were going on as if nothing had changed. ‘It’s just another holiday for them,’ I said.
‘But your granddad,’ Disco prompted.
‘Yeah, he’d gone kind of … not exactly like a zombie, but … sort of ironed-out.’ I couldn’t think how else to put it. Pops usually cracks jokes, teases, pretends he’s going to cry. He gets irritated with my grandmother, then a minute later kisses her or pokes a flower in her hair. It’s never dull, seeing them together. If you had to graph Pops’s emotions they’d show permanent seismic activity. Until today.
Disco and I found him in the garden shed where he was arranging tins like soldiers on the shelves. ‘How did the calibration go, Pops?’
‘Derik? There you are.’ He glanced at Disco without curiosity. ‘I’m really very pleased with the outcome and I want your grandmother to get fixed up as soon as possible.’ He ran his hand along the row of tins, making sure they were dead in place, then he came out into the garden.
‘I know I was doubtful initially but since I had it done a great calm has fallen on me. For the first time in my life I am truly calm.’ He smiled over his glasses at me, then took them off and folded them in his hands.
That kind of talk might be normal in someone else’s grandfather but I felt like I was crossing a railway track and the bells were all twangling. Then I figured he must be kidding. I squeezed him in the side, just above his trousers, the way he did to me, often.
‘Derik — are you trying to rib me? I’m no longer ticklish, apparently.’ The cool tone hollowed me out. Pops went on. ‘I know your parents have been opposed to Endorsement since its inception and I was prepared to back them all the way. You know I got endorsed in order to support you all.
‘But truly, the balm of the last twenty-four hours has been very, very welcome. I think you could say the scales have fallen from my eyes.’ Pops dropped his glasses.
I laughed. Nervously. He stooped and picked them up without his usual ‘bugger’, dusted them on his handkerchief and told us to come inside.
Gran had got herself busy. I could see that was her way of coping with her new reformed husband. She gave me the usual smacking kiss and put her arm round Disco, pulling him into the kitchen after me.
‘As soon as I saw you out in the garden I took soup from the freezer; it’ll be hot soon. You’ll stay for that, won’t you?’
Pops sat at the table, and began to arrange with military precision the soup spoons, knives and plates Gran had thrown there. Disco and I sat down.
‘The girls have been angels, needless to say. The things they can do on that computer!’ Gran was slicing a loaf, still hot from the bread-maker. ‘Have you seen the city they’re making, Brian?’
Pops flicked a crumb from the table-cloth. ‘Still making a city? Couldn’t they be helping you here in the kitchen, Susie? They don’t get enough of that at home.’
Gran clamped her lips and shook her head at me. That was the kind of thing Pops would say, to tease us. He was so proud of my mother even though she refused to learn any domestic skill not essential to survival. But there was no joking in his voice now. He sounded genuinely puzzled about the girls’ preoccupation.
‘I’ve seen things with new clarity today.’ As he spoke, he re-stacked the heap of bread Gran had put on the table. ‘I wonder, seeing how I’ve felt this last twenty-four hours if your generation mightn’t now see a great settling down, a settling in, once they’ve retrieved from the past the appropriate values for social harmony.’
Marti cleared her throat. Her face glowed. ‘Appropriate values includes women going back to the kitchen? Is that where he was leading? Where this whole experiment is leading?’
I shrugged. It was too painful to say out loud all my grandfather had spouted. ‘Maybe — if calibration can make him go back and want the past. I mean, that’s how he would’ve grown up — expecting women to run round after the men.’
‘So calibration makes people look back, instead of forwards? What do you call that? Anti-gress? Is that a word?’ Marti’s voice was climbing. She put her hand to her throat as if she was choking. ‘Is that what they mean it to do, Derik?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think the main thing they want is for people not to get sick so they won’t cost the government so much. And Pharmix gets to make lots of money, selling their machines and chemicals. Anything else is a side effect, I guess.’
‘Pretty damn serious side effect,’ said Marti.
‘It might just be Pops’s particular medicine,’ I said feebly.
Disco whacked a stick onto the fire, making a dazzle of sparks. ‘Don’t you ever think though, that we have had enough so-called progress? I mean, our grandparents grew up without TV, jets, computers, blenders, instant noodles, whatever. Now we’ve got all that. We’ve got enough. Everything’s so fast and the earth’s in such a mess, wouldn’t slowing way down help?’
Marti frowned and looked into her cupped hands. ‘You have to try and understand change, keep up with it, maybe even get ahead of it. Not go back to the dark ages.’
The treetops shushed overhead. What kind of ‘ages’ were we in, where, to feel safe, people had to run off into the forest? ‘You make it sound like change happens all by itself,’ I said. ‘People make it happen — and we’re people too. We should have a say when the change is for bad, not good.’
Disco carried on poking, piling the embers up against Marti’s log. ‘My parents don’t seem to think they lived in the dark ages. The best of times, they reckon they had, growing up. What if we stopped here, made things simpler now, instead of more complicated?’
The fire was throwing out a good heat but I was shivering cold at the core. It was one thing to bat these ideas around in class discussions. It was another to feel that the course of your life depended on how well you could figure them out. ‘Whatever we do, it’s got to be because individual people decide to do it. Not because a whole population is made to think the same way.’
‘Calibration would probably stop people killing and hurting each other though, eh?’ said Disco. ‘If everyone was as unfazed as your grand-dad.’
‘Might stop them getting excited too, about … anything.’ Marti glanced at us. Her face was gold in the firelight; her eyebrows arched and knitted, her mouth twitched with emotion. ‘They’d rather stay in their comfy lounge rooms than go out and light fires under the stars.’
‘People are like that already,’ said Disco. ‘Maybe Endorsement gives them what they really want — an easy life, not too exciting, no worries.’ He smoothed the ember pile into a glowing bank. ‘Anyway, we worked out with Dek’s grand mother how to stop Pops getting his next dose.’
‘Yeah, like disabling the car next Friday. Or her throwing a sicky so he can’t leave the house. And hopefully he’ll realise what he’s been missing, when the chemicals wear off.’
Marti put her hands to her flushed cheeks. ‘Man, what a lucky escape. We could be half way to being zombies, you guys.’
‘Healthy zombies though.’ Disco wiped his dirty mitts together.
‘We wouldn’t be here, looking like we’d eaten coal for dinner. Disco you’ve got charcoal up to your ears,’ I told him.
He wiped with his sleeve. ‘Hey, we didn’t get to the filthy part of our story. The truck driver agreed to bring us back but he dropped us off in Kaikorai Valley so we decided to walk up through this paddock.’
‘Full of gorse,’ I added.
‘Well, it was hard to tell in the dark.’
‘So when we found a creek we followed it.’
‘Followed it? That’s a bit tame. We wormed our way up it, beneath the gorse. It was a mud trench with a trickle of water. See?’ Disco tapped at the mud crusted on his trousers from the knees down. ‘Then we had to come through about three backyards to get to a road. That’s where Dek lost a piece of his trousers.’
‘A shred,’ I said. ‘I jumped up a fence so fast the dog’s teeth got stuck in the hem. He took a bit with him when I shook him off.’
Marti wagged her head. ‘Well, there was plenty going on here too. I couldn’t light the fire till just before you came because there were kids roaming through the trees. At least two gangs, about our age. I didn’t want them to find me but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve seen our fire already.’
‘I wonder who,’ I said. ‘Other kids hiding out?’
‘Maybe. We should find some others tomorrow, if we can, start talking about long-term survival.’ Marti peeled off her hoody. ‘Who wants a baked apple?’ She raked at the fire and rolled out three black balls.
‘Choice,’ said Disco. ‘Pudding matches dinner.’
‘Watch.’ Marti had a big rangiora leaf in each hand. She twisted her apple open and held her nose to the steaming white flesh.
‘How come it didn’t burst?’ I said, picking the black crust off mine.
‘Type of apple. Plus I pricked them first.’
For a few minutes everything was perfect: three friends, one of us a babe, three apples, a fire, the wind shushing through the trees overhead. Nibbling the flavour of summer out of a charcoal shell.
‘Oi, don’t spit on me.’ Disco touched his neck, smearing it with black.
‘I didn’t. It’s rain.’
Suddenly big clumsy drops were pelting the fire, sending up jets of steam, and we were scrambling to collect our things: bags, jackets, jerseys. Typical Dunedin.
‘Better put this out,’ I said.
We scooped up handfuls of leaves and dumped them on. We stomped and scattered the embers and stomped again until we’d cut loose the last tendrils of smoke.