by Ted Dawe
Once the boys had got over their amusement (like how could anyone be scared of their semi-tame wolves?) we all followed Aunty Lorna up to the house. It was cold out of the cab and the grass was muddy and soft. So this was my hello to country life. It was a relief to get into that house, I can tell you.
But the strangeness of everything just kept on coming. I suppose, looking back on it now, it was in the house where it all got really weird. Their house isn’t like other houses. All the rooms are hexagons. Six equal sides. I knew that much from mathematics. The doors are hexagons too, so are the windows. Everything you can think of is six-sided. It’s like a giant piece of honeycomb. The six-sided table has a table cloth which is a patchwork job. It is full of thousands of little hexagons made from scraps of every garment ever owned. Bits of underpants jostled for attention next to a bit of a football jersey or maybe a bit of someone’s tweed sports coat. I figured that in this cloth was the history of every garment the family had ever owned. A sort of graveyard for old clothes.
But it didn’t stop there. The plates were hexagons, as were the glasses. My uncle and aunt must have cruised the shops for ages, hunting for anything six-sided. I must say this: there is a point where a hobby gets out of control and becomes an obsession. The six-sided thing was one of those. There are some places where they have had to give in and go with the flow. No six-sided toilet. Or beds. I remember wondering whether the wheels on the truck weren’t six-sided, it had been such a bumpy journey.
Soon after that Uncle Frank showed up. I heard him coming for a long time before I saw him. First there was this really loud chuff chuff of the tractor, then the noise of him in the yard calling the dogs, and finally the sound of him kicking his gumboots off in the porch.
I was sitting in the central hexagon playing a game that Iain and Jamie liked called Chinese chequers. Beating them too, I’m good at that sort of thing. At the same time I was stealing sneaky peeps through the glass doors into the kitchen where Aunty Lorna was getting the dinner ready. Uncle Frank came in and put his arms around her. It was a bit hard to take because Mum and Dad weren’t that affectionate … and here were adults acting a bit like teenagers.
Uncle Frank may be Dad’s younger brother but he didn’t look much like him. Shorter, leaner and bearded. A wild-eyed guy. Dad’s altogether bigger, especially around the tummy which has got steadily larger over the years. Later I found out that there are lots of similarities not only in how they look but also in some of the expressions they use. They both say, “Do you not?” which is like our family’s way of saying, “Mmm, so you don’t agree with me eh, are you sure that’s wise?”
Because Aunty Lorna had this singer blaring away on a CD player in the kitchen, I couldn’t hear what she and Frank were saying, but I was sure it was about me. After a moment or so Aunty Lorna broke clear of Uncle Frank’s arms and rescued some steaming pot from the stove top. Uncle Frank gave me a wave and then bent over and scooped up this huge old orange cat that was hanging around in the kitchen. He continued to talk with the cat tucked under his arm like a bagpipe. Every now and then he would turn towards me and point at me with its tail as he talked and did things in the kitchen.
I guess my gawping must have got a bit annoying because Iain and Jamie had to keep on nudging me to make my next move in our game of chequers. I didn’t know much about Uncle Frank because Dad never talked about his family much, but I remembered hearing that he was really smart. After my dad had cleared off, he won a scholarship at a fancy private boarding school. Dad claimed that Frank had got himself a first rate education. He used to sound a bit jealous, because he had left school at fifteen. A Mercedes Benz education for Frank, while Dad had to make do with a Lada one.
Eventually, Uncle Frank burst through into the central room, opening the glass doors with a bang.
“Ah! Another boy!” He yelled, “I like boys.” Then he paused for effect. “But I’ve never eaten a whole one.” He pulled a chair up in the gap between me and Iain and gave my hair a rough rub. Then he placed this giant cat in my lap as he settled down to roll a smoke.
I’m not used to animals, I guess he could tell. The cat went through this routine of kneading my thighs with its claws until it had found a comfortable position and then it sat staring at my face. I tried to keep really still in case he thought I was some species of mouse. I wasn’t taking any chances with that monster.
“This is Neb the mighty … a shadow of his former self.”
“Ned?”
“No, Neb. Short for Nebuchadnezzar. Heard of him?”
I shook my head.
“We used to have him in our travelling days before this lot arrived.” He pointed to the boys scattered around the room. “I don’t think he has ever adjusted to his role as one of the many.”
My cousins and I carried on and finished the game while the cat eye-balled me and Uncle Frank watched. I was put off by all this and lost badly that time which cheered the other two up no end. Uncle Frank smiled but said nothing. After a while he moved over to where there was a fire smoking in the hearth. Using a piece of wood he gave it a few prods this way and that, causing a rain of sparks to pour up the chimney. Then he threw on some manuka logs and sat on the couch. He signalled for me to join him and the others seemed to melt away and made themselves scarce. I sensed there was a big talk coming.
“So what’s up with y’ dad, Sandy?”
It was one of those questions that was both easy and hard to answer. I was about to start when Aunty Lorna came through and sat down beside him. I paused, not sure how to begin, or even whether I should answer the question, and then something in me moved a little, and I started.
“Since Mum died he’s gone funny. I reckon he’s gone a bit mad. He used to be a sort of regular dad but now he’s all over the place.”
“What do you mean?” asked Aunty Lorna.
“Well …” it was a bit like telling tales, which I’ve never been into. “Well, he’s drinking a lot, and he goes out all the time, I don’t just mean late home from work but coming home and going out again, like he’s got no time for me. And we hardly ever talk any more and when we do it seems to always end up with shouting and arguing… I don’t know, everything’s gone wrong.”
“What about this stuff at school?” Uncle Frank stared straight into the fire as he asked the question.
I hadn’t talked about this to anyone much, I mean I had talked but I hadn’t told anyone anything, I kept it all to myself.
“Is it hard to talk about?” asked Aunty Lorna.
I stared at my knees and nodded. I felt this huge burning lump in my chest like a volcano and it took all my strength to keep it in.
“People … people don’t know me. People think I am just the same as before but that I don’t have a mother but I’m not. I’m not. I’m …” Then I stopped and everyone said nothing for a while.
“How are you different?” asked Aunty Lorna.
I peered around and noticed Iain doing stuff to the dinner in the kitchen and Jamie holding Wee Jock. I wondered what the twins were up to. Wished I was there. I glanced back at Aunty Lorna, she was waiting.
“I’m dangerous.”
No one said anything so I thought I better carry on. “I seem just like, you know, an ordinary boy but I’m like a bomb, I can explode at any minute and nothing can stop me when I go off.”
Uncle Frank put his arm over my shoulders and said, “Look at me, Look at Lorna. We look like any other ordinary people, but we’re not.”
They didn’t look like any other ordinary people actually but I didn’t say anything.
“Compared to your dad I’m a bit of a runt but I can be a bomb too.”
I doubted it, but I let him go on.
“You know that scar on your dad’s chin?”
I nodded. He had got that falling off his bike when he was a kid.
“I did that. I pushed him through a window. It wasn’t even him who made me angry.”
“That’s not how he tells it.”
“There are a few things you don’t know about your dad and one of those is he’s very loyal. Even though he got eight stitches in that chin he never told anybody how he really got it. Not even you, eh?”
I found it hard to believe.
“Your dad comes across like some thick-skinned car salesman, you know Ford this Holden that, blah, blah, blah, but underneath he’s very easily hurt.”
“Loyal and easily hurt, oh yeah.” I found all this talk about Dad a bit hard to take, especially now he had got rid of me.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” said Uncle Frank, “I wouldn’t have at your age either.”
Then Aunty Lorna had a go.
“When you love someone as much as your dad loved your mum, and they die, you lose your way. Stella was his tower of strength. He used to say she was the star he steered by.”
“Now she’s gone he’s a rudderless boat,” said Uncle Frank, picking up on this boat thing. “He’s adrift all right, in a terrible storm, but he will come through it, I know that. It is just going to take time.”
Somehow all this “Dad the sailor man” just didn’t do it for me.
“That’s why he sent you to us,” said Aunty Lorna, guessing what I was thinking. “He needs some clear time to find himself again.”
“We believe,” said Uncle Frank rolling yet another smoke, “and these are not my ideas, that the roads of excess lead to the palace of wisdom.”
I looked at him with a ‘what the hell’s that about?’ look on my face.
“That what seems like stupidity or folly to other people can eventually lead to a higher understanding.”
“Well it doesn’t look like that to me,” I said in a cold voice. “It looks like he wants to get drunk, to go out, and to keep as far as he can away from me.”
Aunty Lorna grasped my arm. “The key, Sandy, is ‘looks like.’” She said the words slowly, and with emphasis. “When you get older, you see things differently, you get a bigger picture.”
Then it was Uncle Frank again with more of the same. After a while I tuned out and it was just words floating over me. I said nothing … just nodded my head. I guess if you’ve got a brother then you should stick up for him. But I didn’t believe it. None of it.
I really wasn’t interested in talking about Dad. To be honest, I was pleased to be away from him. This might sound a bit harsh but I reckon I was part of that ‘old path’ and he had wandered a long way from it, leaving me high and dry. One thing that disappointed me about my uncle and aunt was that they may have had their own take on things, the six-sided thing and all that, but they were just the same as everyone else in one way; they took the adult’s side over the kid’s.
It was time to change the subject.
“Did you build this house, Uncle Frank?” I knew the answer but it is easy to get adults off the track.
“Yep, me and Lorna. It’s a work in progress. It’ll never be finished. At the moment there are seven rooms in the main part, six hexagonal rooms built off a central hexagon.”
This was where we were sitting.
“As well as this there are a couple of other rooms sticking out the back. Add-ons. That’s where you boys will be sleeping.”
“How many more to go?”
“Who knows? I’ve added a room here and there as the posse arrived.”
I looked at Wee Jock who was crawling past me with a slipper in his mouth. It didn’t look like he would be the last. Something really agricultural about this family.
Aunty Lorna scooped him up and went back out to check on what the boys were doing.
“Come over to the window,” said Uncle Frank and we walked through a room that was full of books to where we could see another room nearer the trees. Even in the thick darkness I could tell that it was six-sided. It had a veranda all the way around the outside and there was a path of hexagonal paving stones leading to it from the house.
“What’s that thing?”
“It’s our meeting house. We call it the Palace of Wisdom.”
“What do you do there?”
“We are the centre of a group here in Taranaki. People who believe things that are a bit different from everyone else. In the weekends, sometimes during the week, people meet there to talk things through, sing, discuss the teachings.”
“What teachings?”
He turned to me just as the twins came through to call us to dinner. He paused for a moment, as if he was unsure whether to go on.
“We explore the ideas of the immortal William Blake: Poet, Artist, Philosopher. But that’s enough for now, there is only so much a small head can take in and I believe that yours is at the point of overflowing.”
He was right. It had been a huge day, I felt like I had been awake for a week. We all wandered back to the table where Iain and Jamie had saved me a seat between them. I was halfway through dinner before I realised something. This was the first time I had eaten with anyone other than my father since my mother died. This was so different. So noisy, so full on. After tea I helped the others clear everything away and do the washing up. Another first for me. There was no dishwasher but being with these other four made it fun. By the time I discovered that there was no computer, no Play-Station, not even a TV, I had lost my ability to be surprised. I accepted it as if it was a done deal. We were living out here in the country just like the pioneers did.
Well, almost.
After dinner Aunty Lorna had dug out the photo album and was keen to show me a few pics of the old days. There were lots of shots of their old house truck. Uncle Frank must have been going through his photography period. There was even a shot of me standing next to it at our Auckland house. Then I remembered, it was the last time I had seen them. They only had the two older boys at that stage.
“The four of us were living in Mackthuselah at that stage, Sandy.”
“Mackthuselah?”
“That’s what we call the housetruck,” said Iain. “Methuselah was the oldest man in the Bible and the truck’s a Mack. Dad loves that sort of thing.”
“Dad reckons it’s the oldest Mack in Taranaki,” Jamie added.
“Oldest in New Zealand,” said Iain.
“Whatever.”
“Anyway,” continued Aunty Lorna, “when I got pregnant with the twins, Frank and I both knew it was the end of the trail. We managed with the two boys but we knew our limits. Four boys was two too many for that sort of life.”
“So then it was living here on the farm?” I asked.
“After a couple of false starts we found our way here. It was very hard settling down in Normalsville after the gypsy life.” She touched her head scarf, as though she was checking that it was still there.
“Where’s that taken?” I asked. “It doesn’t look like New Zealand.”
“It’s not,” said Uncle Frank, looking over my shoulder. “At that stage we were living in Sydney, in a place called Double Bay. You heard of it?”
I shook my head. “It looks flash.”
“In Sydney they used to say that you had to earn double pay to live in Double Bay,” said Aunty Lorna.
“Yeah. I was a computer programmer, writing algorithms and building short cuts into operating systems. There was a time when I was almost famous for finding a way to trim back 1.3 seconds off the start-up time of an IBM computer.” He laughed as if he thought it was no big deal. “Yeah, champagne all round. Not quite on the same level as a cure for cancer but it sure paid well.”
“Were you working with computers too, Aunty Lorna?”
“No,” she said with a laugh. “I was designing dress material. That paid pretty well too. Yeah, you could say we were rolling in it.”
I had visions of the two of them burrowing into mountains of money like Scrooge McDuck.
“The easy life eh, Dad?” said Iain, who I guess had heard this story many times before.
“There’s no such thing as an easy life. It was a full life though, lots of fun for a while.” He stopped and looked a bi
t troubled. There was a point that he didn’t want to go beyond. I could tell, because that was what my life was like. I couldn’t talk in any direction for very far without screeching to a halt. My brain was full of “road closed” signs.
Although it was only about 9 o’clock everyone began to prepare for bed. I mean everyone: Uncle Frank and Aunty Lorna too. Never in my whole life have I heard of adults going to bed that early. I guess because they seemed to live a life with so few modern inventions, there was nothing else to do. I had been keeping pretty late hours for the past few months but this had been a long day and strangely enough I felt ready to hit the sack (or “hit the hay” as they say in the country).
The boys showed me the evening routines. It was a bit like being in the army. Washing. Cleaning teeth. Putting out clothes for the morning. I went along with it; I was trying my best to be normal.
That night I slept in Jamie and Iain’s room. There was no bed for me so they top and tailed and I had the other bed. They both spent a lot of time complaining about who had the stinkiest feet. Evidently gumboots are real bad for foot stink. I felt guilty for a bit, I didn’t like the thought of them having to do that because of me. I wouldn’t do it for them.
So that was my first night. I lay in Iain’s bed looking at the slit of star-filled sky through the gap in the curtains. Yes, they were a funny lot but they were a family and it was good to be amongst other people again. Since Dad had stepped up the ‘social life’, I knew I had spent too much time on my own brooding. Couldn’t help it, as soon as things got quiet all this stuff would sneak into in my head, and I would go over it and over it and over it. It was like a car stuck in the mud; the wheels were spinning but I wasn’t getting anywhere. It began with my mum, but from that came Dad. And with Dad came Dad’s crimes, and before long there I was, a hot ball of anger. Once I used to be regarded as good fun. I would crack jokes all the time. People thought I was funny. But not any more. I had become a bit of an angry dude. People had got a bit scared of me. When I realised this it made me even angrier. I don’t know how that worked but I knew something had gone off course and now even I was a little scared of myself. Scared of what I might do.
