I stayed outside till I got hungry. Mum opened her eyes when I came in, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything either but I made me a sandwich and gave her some dry toast, another spoonful of mashed potato and a cup of tea. I went to my room, crawled in under a mountain of blankets and listened to music. Noah didn’t show and neither did Dad until halfway through the afternoon. He walked into the house, yelled for both of us and when I came running from my room he was sitting at the kitchen table, his back to Mum and his face looking like one of her brass sculptures.
He was going to leave, I was sure and certain. I wanted to ask him. I wanted him to put me out of my misery, to tell me and let me get used to the whole putrid scenario: Minna and her faithless mother alone on Isolation Island. But no way would he tell me if he had to repeat it for Noah. Where the hell was Noah? Nowhere he was needed; so what was new?
It took him several minutes to make the epic journey from bedroom to kitchen. ‘What?’ he snarled.
I tottered from the doorway to the table. I couldn’t bring myself to sit down, I just held on to the back of a chair and stared at Dad, trying to see into his head. What had he decided? Why couldn’t he just come out with it?
He waited till Noah got his butt on to a chair, and then he waited some more.
For chrissake, Dad — open your mouth and speak. Hit me with it, let me get used to it. After all, what’s one more body blow?
He banged a closed fist on the table and eyeballed us, first me and then Noah. ‘We’re going to have to stay. At least for a while.’
I swear I went dizzy. I’d been so sure he was going to cut and run. I pulled the chair away from the table and collapsed on to it. ‘All of us? You too, Dad?’
He snapped at me. ‘Of course me too. I can’t leave the pair of you here with …’ He broke off and sucked in a huge breath. ‘We all have to stay until your mother is fit to travel.’
I was shaking and if something didn’t happen soon, I was going to cry. Something did happen. Dad stood up. ‘Come on kids — let’s see what we can do with that damned meat.’
It was funny. I started to laugh. Meat! Dad’s voice hit me like a slap. ‘Stop it, Min. This second.’
I gasped and hiccupped and I wasn’t laughing because tears were streaming down my face. I stopped. It took a huge effort, but I did it. Amazing what you can do when you know cameras are on you.
‘Good girl,’ Dad said. ‘Come on, let’s get the job done.’
I gulped a couple more times and picked up the camera. Dad halted at the door. ‘You too, Noah — come and lend a hand.’
‘Get stuffed,’ said Noah.
Dad went over and sat down beside him. ‘You’ll feel better if you do something.’
Noah snarled, but stood up — possibly because even he could detect the steel under Dad’s calm and patient. We trailed out to the freezer shed without saying anything to Mum. The chooks muttered as we passed. Noah and Dad ignored them.
Inside the shed, Dad opened the freezer and we stared at it with its shelves full of meat. Already the bacteria would be having a party in that little lot. I filmed it, Dad prodded it and Noah turned his back on it.
I sighed — in my mind I could see all those steaks, sausages, chops, burgers, roast chickens dripping with gravy, and even Mum’s chuck-it-all-together stews. Every single one of them a gone-burger. ‘What are we going to do with it all?’
Dad rubbed his head. ‘We could try drying some of it — the stuff we can cut into strips. Have to bury the rest I guess.’
Noah spoke. ‘I vote we have a roast tonight.’
Dad was chuffed. The alien speaks. He grinned at Noah. ‘Pick one, son. You can have your choice of chicken, pork, lamb or beef.’
‘Pork,’ said Noah. ‘With crackling.’
Dad scrabbled around in the shelves, tossing packages of soft, squidgy meat on to the floor. ‘Aha — pork!’ He handed it to me. ‘Here you are, Min. All ready for you to transform into succulent, tender meat and crackling.’
I shoved it right back at him. ‘Why me? I’ve done everything around here so far. You cook it. Or Noah. He hasn’t done a damned thing yet except yell and get high.’
Dad got all miffy. ‘Noah can cook when he’s recovered. And in the meantime it’s up to you.’
I folded my arms and glared at him. ‘Is that so? How d’you figure that one?’
He must’ve used up all his calm and patient because there sure wasn’t any hint of it now. ‘Don’t be dense, Min. You must see that I can’t be in the same room as your mother any more than is absolutely necessary.’ He amped up a glare of his own. ‘And I’ll thank you not to make things more difficult by encouraging her to stay in the living area.’
That was too much. ‘Don’t punish me for what she’s done! I’m the only one making sure she doesn’t die.’ He was so unfair. ‘I don’t see you getting her drinks or food. Why should I have to run backwards and forwards to that fridge that’s supposed to be a bedroom?’
I reached out and grabbed the nearest roast, checked that it wasn’t pork and waved it. ‘Lamb.’ I smiled the sweetest arrangement of stretched lips that I could manage and hit him with, ‘I think Mum will find this easier to digest than pork.’
He was not pleased but I stalked out and left them to it. Then I had to turn back and get the camera, which diluted the effect, but I did get to hear Dad snap at Noah to stop dreaming and get to work so on balance it was worth it.
Blissful days stretched ahead of me in a parade of endless hours.
It wasn’t an afternoon to cherish in the memory. Dad and Noah carted in a basket of roasts and steak. They sat at the table and sliced them into strips.
‘Lend a hand, Min,’ Dad said, busily ignoring Mum on the sofa.
I smiled at him through clenched teeth. ‘I don’t touch raw meat. It’s one of my unbreakable rules.’ One that I would have to break when I cooked the lamb but I intended to get around that by handling it with gloves.
He took a deep breath and treated me to a fair dose of calm and patient. ‘Look, Min — we’re in this together. Cooperation is the name of the game.’
‘Cooking is cooperating,’ I said.
His teeth looked pretty clenched too, but he didn’t yell or say anything at all actually.
So Day Three wandered on by. I made a late lunch with salad veg I found in the fridge.
Dad said, ‘Great, Min. How about making some mince patties to go with it?’
‘Good idea, Dad. The stove’s all yours.’ Write household drudge on my forehead, why don’t you?
Stalemate.
Noah ignored the salad and cooked more bacon which he slapped between slices of bread. He didn’t wash the pan.
Mum turned greener at the prospect of lettuce, she’d gone off spud but she did manage a bit of the leftover chicken stuff. I, using my own initiative, retrieved another chicken carcass from the freezer-that-wasn’t and made a new brew for her. As I walked past the chooks carrying a thawed body of one of their sisters I yelled ‘Sorry chooks! Don’t look.’
They ran up to me, clucking in a very friendly way. I stopped and scritched Izzie on her head. ‘I’ll come back and pull out the hugest weed for you,’ I promised.
Oh great — Minna Hargreaves; chicken conversationalist. This, no doubt, is what extreme isolation can do to a girl. But I kept my promise and they went mad over the leaves, the dirt, the roots and the odd snail. I watched them for a while and then an equation filtered through my brain: chooks equal eggs.
‘You realise,’ I told Izzie, ‘that if I go into your yard I’ll get my beautiful new boots all icky?’
I held out the shiny black boot for her inspection but she didn’t seem that fussed. I let myself in through a door in the netting. Where did chooks lay eggs? The door to their coop was about half as high as it needed to be for humans and the inside was full of perches but I fought through to the nesting boxes against the wall. Yay! Eggs! Nine of them all snuggled up together in two of the four boxes. I made another discovery — the boxes had lids that opened into the freezer shed.
‘Collecting your eggs is going to be a breeze, chooks,’ I told them as I backed out. I felt like a thief, taking their potential babies. I bent and patted Bizzie. ‘But they’re not really going to be babies. Didn’t your mother ever tell you about roosters?’
I let myself out of the coop and leaned my head against the wire. ‘Yes, you poor ignorant chooks — it takes a mummy and a daddy to make babies. Any old daddy, actually.’
The rest of the day was — different. I’d never seen either Dad or Noah ever in their lives pegging washing on a clothesline and I’d never imagined I’d see both of them slaving away with a box of meat, pegging it strip by strip up there to wave in the breeze. But it made excellent television. Dad hammed it up (ha ha, although there was no ham, only pork). He was all bright and happy, but Noah wasn’t. He pegged one gory strip to every six Dad managed to get on the line.
I left them with a pan shot of the entire length of the line which stretched from a tree on the fence line to the verandah of the house.
‘What are the odds on that little experiment working?’ I asked the camera. I did another shot of Dad and Noah slaving away. ‘You wouldn’t put your last cent on it, is what I reckon.’
I sat on the verandah and watched them. Why was Dad bothering? How long would we have to be here? Another week? Two? We’d be out of here before we’d even noticed we’d turned into tree-hugging vegos.
And then what would happen? We had no house to go back to until the year was up.
We. Us. Our. What were those dinky little words called? I shrugged. Who cared? I looked at Dad — first time he’d done stuff with us for god knows how long, not that it was prime stuff, except where the prime beef strips were concerned.
Oh god, concentrate, Minna!
But I couldn’t. Didn’t want to think of Life After Island because one thing was for sure and certain — Dad wouldn’t be part of it.
I hated my mother — hated her with a burning, fierce, passionate hate.
No wonder Dad wouldn’t talk to her.
Then I started to laugh. I focused the camera and called out, ‘The birds are a friendly lot here, don’t you reckon?’ I zoomed in on the kingfisher feasting on a strip of meat, then the two blackbirds and a couple of others I didn’t know the names of.
Dad spun around, and groaned. He flapped his arms a few times but that didn’t bother the birds. He eyed them for a moment or two and his brain whirred so fast it’s a wonder they didn’t hear it. Then he rushed into the house, came back with a newspaper and three of my magazines.
‘Hey! What are you doing with those?’ I yelled.
He grinned at me. ‘There are times, Min, when we all have to make sacrifices.’ He sacrificed my magazines by ripping them up, page by double page. Then he put the pages over the meat and clipped them in place with more pegs. ‘Come on, Noah. Lend a hand here.’
The hand Noah lent wasn’t the most enthusiastic or busy hand in the world.
If I was a blessing-counter I guess I could count the odd one or two: Dad was still here; Mum might be okay to fly tomorrow; I had chooks to talk to.
See why I’m not a blessing-counter?