Why We All Nodded and Whacked Our Tails On the Floor, What We Bought for Lunch, Why We Were All Crook, and Why the Little Ones Were Revolting.
We fed the chooks, milked the house cows, made sure there was plenty of kindling chopped for the morning, swept out the kitchen, damp-dusted all the shelves and cupboards – not forgetting the skirting board and the ledges over the doors, washed the windows and rubbed them with screwed-up newspaper till they sparkled, and we even held our noses with one hand and scrubbed the dunny seat with the other – to save Aunt Effie and cheer her up.
We got our own tea, washed and dried and put the dishes and knives and forks away, scrubbed the pots and pans with sandsoap and, just then, somebody called: “Daisy-Mabel-Johnny-Flossie-Lynda-Stan-Howard-Marge-Stuart-Peter-Marie-Colleen-Alwyn-Bryce-Jack-Ann-Jazz-Beck-Jane-Isaac-David-Victor-Casey-Lizzie-Jared-Jessie!”
“She didn’t go to Institute at all!” We tore up the stairs, and leapt on to the foot of Aunt Effie’s enormous bed.
“Are you going to show us the treasure?” asked Jessie.
Aunt Effie gulped. “I cannot tell a lie,” she said.
“You’ve given it away!”
“As if I would do such a thing! I said I cannot tell a lie. Remember the day the Body Snatchers dragged you to school and sold you to Mr Jones? Well, that morning, the Prime Minister flew up from Wellington in her Zeppelin, and dropped in for a cuppa.”
“I said I heard her Zeppelin,” Bryce reminded us. “But none of you believed me.”
“You gave the Prime Minister our treasure!” said Jessie.
“I did nothing of the sort!”
“What was the lie you were going to tell us?”
Aunt Effie looked nervously at Jessie and said, “I’ve already told you I can’t say it.
“Now!” she said, briskly. “The Prime Minister said she needed money to buy votes to win the next elections, so I let her borrow the treasure and the six billion gold dollars at ten per cent interest! She put it into her Zeppelin and flew back to Wellington.”
“What’s ten per cent interest?” Jessie asked.
“Each year, she has to pay us back ten dollars for every hundred dollars she borrowed. That’s ten per cent interest. And, when we want it, she has to pay us back all the treasure and our gold dollars.”
“But she’ll just spend it gambling! You know she will!”
“She can’t. She gave it all to her Minister of Finance, who invented a way of making gold grow.”
“Alchemy,” said Daisy who likes to think she knows everything. “It means turning lead into gold.” She nodded, pleased with herself.
“Skite!” we all hissed.
“Not alchemy,” said Aunt Effie. “The other way round. It’s called monetarism, and it’s a way of turning gold into lead.”
“What’s the use of that?”
“Having turned all the treasure and gold dollars into lead, the Minister of Finance is now busy using alchemy to turn the lead back into gold. By the time he’s finished, he reckons it’ll be worth twice as much; so the Prime Minister will have enough money to buy every vote in the country, and she’ll win the next election. And we’ll get back our treasure and gold dollars with all the interest.”
Aunt Effie tried to smile and appear convincing, but Jessie stared at her till she blushed and turned away. She looked so guilty, we didn’t say anything more, but she could see that we were all very disappointed in her.
“Where are you going?”
We didn’t say anything. We slipped off her bed. We didn’t even bother to jump, and the Bugaboo didn’t shout or try to grab our ankles with his bony fingers.
“Come back,” Aunt Effie called weakly, “and I’ll tell you another story.”
Downstairs, we sat around the enormous table, and looked at each other.
“We’re broke,” said Peter.
“We’ll have to go back to school and get an education,” said Marie, “so we can get jobs.”
“Education didn’t do Aunt Effie much good,” said Jessie.
“True,” we all nodded.
“Fortunately, some of us used our heads,” Jazz said, “and took care to spread our investments. I think that’s what the Minister of Finance calls it.” Jazz always made his pocket money go further than anybody else, so we listened to him. He pulled a bag of marbles out of his pocket, and we heard them click.
“Huh!” said Alwyn. “An old bagful of marbles won’t buy us a single pie.”
Jazz tipped the marbles on to the table, and picked up the biggest, the size of a bantam’s egg. He spat on it, rubbed it, and it dazzled till we had to close our eyes. “I filled a pillowslip with diamonds and hid them, just in case Aunt Effie gave away the treasure,” Jazz said. “The smallest diamond, I put in the vice and hit with the sledgehammer till it chipped.”
He licked the tip of his finger and picked up a tiny chip that flashed among his marbles: white, blue, red, then white again. “Just this one little chip is so valuable, it will buy us more pies than we can eat for the rest of our lives.”
“Clever Jazz!” we all yelled. “Hooray for old Jazz!”
“You say pois, not pies,” the little ones told him. “Alwyn told us. And he taught us how to do a poi dance.”
“We need new rulers, too!” said Victor who had already set fire to his, rubbing it on his desk.
“And a bottle of lemonade to have with our poi,” said Casey.
“And a bottle of Old Puckeroo for Aunt Effie,” said Lizzie.
“Yes, a bottle of Old Puckeroo for Aunt Effie!” Jared said.
“After what she did?”
“Aunt Effie was naughty,” said Jared. “But she is our Aunt.”
“Our Great-Aunt,” said Lizzie.
“Other kids have got mums and dads and uncles and aunts and grannies and granddads, but we’ve got Aunt Effie,” said Marie. “She’s all we have.”
“I know what,” said Jessie.
“What?” we all demanded.
“I reckon we buy her a bottle of Old Puckeroo, but we only give it to her if she behaves herself.”
“Only if she behaves herself!” we all said. “And she’s got to promise never to give any of our money to the Prime Minister ever again.”
“Never ever again!” said the little ones, and Caligula, Nero, Brutus, Kaiser, Genghis, and Boris, Aunt Effie’s six enormous pig dogs, nodded and whacked their tails on the floor.
“And we’re never going to get caught out by her crying,” said the little ones. “Never again!”
“Never again!’ we all said.
“Never again,” said Caligula, Nero, Brutus, Kaiser, Genghis, and Boris. And we all nodded and whacked our tails on the floor.
Aunt Effie slid down the banisters first thing next morning, did thirty single-handed press-ups, snorted and shadow-boxed for ten minutes, then belted the tripe out of the punchball she kept in the kitchen.
We lay in our bunks and watched, not feeling all that friendly. We got up slowly, put on our school uniforms – Daisy had ironed hers – and squabbled over breakfast.
“I’ve made you some lovely wet red tomato sandwiches for your lunch!” Aunt Effie said, wrapping them in newspaper and popping them into our school bags.
We were so disappointed in her, we didn’t think to say thank you, and we didn’t tell her about what Jazz had hidden in his pocket. As we were going out the door, Jessie turned around and said, “And you’re not to go letting the Prime Minister inside the door while we’re away!”
Aunt Effie threw her pinny over her head and pretended to cry, but we could see they were just dry crocodile tears this time. She didn’t fool any of us.
At the first corner down the road, the Smith kids were waiting behind the hedge. They threw mud at us, for laughing at their nuggeted toenails, but we biffed wet red tomato sandwiches at them. When the Body Snatchers came shouting and waving their butterfly nets, we threw the rest of our sandwiches at them, and they ran for their lives.
At lunchtime, Jazz bought us each a dozen pies from Mrs Besant’s, and a crate of soft drinks from Mrs Doleman’s, and paid with the tiny chip off the smallest diamond. There was so much change, it filled our school bags.
The little ones ate till they were crook, so we had to give them a hand to finish their soft drinks. Then we all threw up.
On the way home, we gave some pies and soft drinks to the Bogeyman, the Boggle, and the Boggart, and they all threw up, too. Which showed it must have been something in the pies, Marie said.
The rest of the pies and soft drinks, we gave to Aunt Effie’s six enormous pig dogs, but they didn’t throw up. “Are there any more?” asked Caligula, Nero, Brutus, Kaiser, Genghis, and Boris.
“We saw Caligula be sick once,” said Lizzie, “and when he finished, he lapped it all up again.”
“We don’t talk about such things,” said Daisy, and the rest of us rolled our eyes and gasped at Lizzie, “Oooh! How revolting! Did you just stand there and watch him? Oooh!”