50 Ways of Saying Fabulous Book 1 20th Anniversary Edition

by Graeme Aitken

  We drove the pup to the vet in Glenora. My mother kept peering into the back seat where I sat cradling the little puppy in my arms. She had whimpered furiously for the first quarter of an hour, then fallen into an ominous silence. All the way, my mother called me Billy. She was far too anxious to think of anything else to call me. ‘Is she still breathing, Billy?’ she’d ask, or she’d fret aloud, ‘What if I’ve killed her, Billy-Boy?’

  As it turned out the pup wasn’t badly hurt and was just suffering from shock. She’d only had her tail run over. My father was furious when he heard that we’d taken the pup all that way to the vet. ‘What a waste of time and money,’ he raged. ‘You should’ve wrung the silly thing’s neck if you thought it was badly hurt.’

  My mother and I shuddered. Both of us loathed the bru­tality that farm life sometimes demanded. Meanwhile Lou was boasting that she’d have done the deed if only she’d been there at the time. She was going through a bloodthirsty phase, fascinated by how easily life could be extinguished. Mostly her experiments were confined to trapping rabbits and possums for my father. I refused to take part, despite the allure of three dollars a skin, so the task had fallen to Lou or rather, she had volunteered for it.

  My father didn’t make the fuss we all expected when the bill came in from the vet. That happened a month later, and my mother was still calling me Billy-Boy like everyone else. Perhaps my father figured that a bill from the vet and the cost of the petrol going to Glenora was worth it for me to finally have a name that everyone was agreed upon. That’s how I carne to be known as Billy-Boy. Most people didn’t even know my real name. I preferred to keep it that way.

  No one called my sister by her proper name either. She was always Babe, being the baby of the family, four years younger than me. Her babyhood had been somewhat extended by the fact that she’d taken forever to grow hair. She’d had lots of it when she was first born, but it had all fallen out a couple of months later and didn’t grow back again until she was almost three years old. When it finally did, it was very fine and wispy. My mother was scared to comb it. Her hair was never cut and she tended to hide amongst it. Some days she seemed to be nothing but a haze of blonde. She threw terrible tantrums if my mother sug­gested a trim. She’d seen the photographs of herself bald. Lou had told her she looked like an alien.

  Babe was very shy around strangers. She always hid behind one of my parents whenever she was introduced to someone new and couldn’t even bring herself to say hello most of the time. She’d peek out at them, usually from between the gap in my father’s legs. Around family she was completely different, and jabbered away non-stop, as if making up for the time lost while the intimidating strangers were around.

  Lou was a profound influence upon Babe. She was always trying to ape whatever Lou did, though in her heart of hearts she didn’t much care for the things Lou was passionate about. But she idolised Lou. She wore jeans and old shirts of mine to be like Lou. She tried to squeeze her mass of curls into a ponytail like Lou. She even painted freckles over her nose with some varnish she found in the workshop to look more like her hero.

  Lou didn’t even notice. She regarded Babe as a nuisance, always slowing her down, keeping her from what she wanted to be doing. It was at my insistence that Lou would relent and allow Babe to tag after the two of us. She’d trail behind us plaintively calling for us to slow down and wait for her, rather like one of the uncertain newborn lambs bleating at its mother, who’d prefer to concentrate on eating grass.

  As much as Babe worshipped Lou, there was one thing she couldn’t resist and which damned her as ridiculous in Lou’s eyes. She loved to wear dresses. Most of Babe’s dresses were hand-me-downs from Lou and it was a dilemma for her that Lou scorned them so vehemently. She always agreed with Lou’s dismissive remarks but her face betrayed her pleasure whenever a new dress was given to her. Lou boasted that she’d never even worn most of them, so suc­cessful was she at avoiding her mother’s best efforts to get her into a frock. Babe tried to imitate Lou’s scowl if Lou happened to be around when she was wearing one of them. Somehow she just ended up looking smug.

  Lou was an only child, but she never lacked for company. She was six months younger than me, so naturally we spent a lot of time together. Uncle Arthur’s farm adjoined ours but it was still a couple of miles between our two houses. Once we were old enough to have bikes, this distance became insignificant and we were always over at one another’s places. Lou played upon the fact that she didn’t have any brothers and sisters to make Aunt Evelyn feel that it was important that she spend time with Babe and me. Poor Aunt Evelyn always hastily agreed. She couldn’t bear to be reminded of Lou’s lack of siblings. For there had been another baby after Lou, a boy who was stillborn, that no one ever talked about.

  Aunt Evelyn never made too much fuss about Lou spend­ing so much time at our place, though it meant she missed out on her piano practice, a loss Lou rejoiced in. She almost always came home with Babe and me after school and did my chores for me. At weekends, she came home with us on Friday and didn’t go home again until Sunday lunchtime. Aunt Evelyn always cooked a grand dinner on a Sunday, and Lou made sure that she didn’t miss out on that.

  Lou and I often discussed our circumstances and what a mix-up they seemed to be. We both envied each other’s situation. She longed to be her father’s helper on the farm and be entrusted with regular chores the way I was. I would’ve preferred to stay at home with Aunt Evelyn, testing her on her lines for her latest show, joining her in a duet on the piano, even helping her in the kitchen. Lou and I were like twins in our intimacy. The oddest, mismatched pair of twins possible.

  Lou was a confirmed tomboy. Aunt Evelyn knew it and didn’t like it. She wanted her daughter to look and behave the way she imagined girls should, the way she was brought up herself all those years ago in Christchurch. There was constant friction between them, usually over Lou’s appearance. Lou had the longest hair of anyone at school, halfway down her back. She hated it. Aunt Evelyn adored it and wouldn’t hear of her having it cut. ‘To even cut an inch off that hair would be like cutting into my flesh,’ Aunt Evelyn always said.

  So Lou stuffed her long red ponytail down the back of her skivvy and tried to pretend it wasn’t there. She reckoned she looked better that way and I agreed with her. It was simplest to agree with Lou. Secretly, I sympathised with Aunt Evelyn. I was crazy about long hair. Lou’s hair was almost like Laurie’s in ‘The Partridge Family’. Except it was red. Lou always wore her hair in a ponytail so that it looked short from face-on. Whenever Aunt Evelyn insisted she wear it loose, Lou looked terrible. Her perpetual scowl didn’t help. But somehow she just seemed overwhelmed with all that hair hanging round her face.

  She had a thin, angular face, a dusting of freckles across her nose, and brown eyes that were always narrowing into a suspicious grimace. She wasn’t one to smile much. She was usually too preoccupied giving her opinion or thinking of ways to avoid Aunt Evelyn and her latest plan, to have time to smile. People constantly mistook her for a boy and called her ‘sonny’, which delighted her. She encouraged them in their mistake. If they happened to notice her pony­ tail she’d grin at me and try to pass it off to them as a cow’s tail. A Shorthorn’s tail.

  Aunt Evelyn did not appreciate having her daughter mistaken for a boy. Her other strategy to feminise Lou was to force her into frocks as often as possible. Aunt Evelyn made all Lou’s frocks herself and insisted Lou wear them to school, though they were often too elaborate and formal for everyday wear. Aunt Evelyn and Lou used to have the most terrible fights over those frocks, so terrible that one frock actually got ripped from bodice to hemline in the heat of their argument. After that, Lou pretended to relent. She would set off to school in those fussy outfits with Aunt Evelyn proudly admiring her own handiwork from the veranda. Once Lou was out of sight of the house, hidden by the trees that lined the driveway, she changed into a skivvy and pair of pants and was transformed by the time the school bus arrived. No one ever k
new except me and Babe and we were sworn to secrecy.

  Aunt Evelyn boasted to the other mothers how neat and well behaved Lou was, and how she always came home from school with her dress just as perfect as when she had left that morning. She’d have been mortified if she ever learnt the truth; that Lou was wearing the same sloppy outfit for an entire week to school, which became more and more grass stained and dirt streaked as the week progressed.

  Lou was always the organiser of games of schoolyard soccer and rugby at playtimes. She was as skilled as any of the boys and usually scored the most goals. Inevitably, she would be captain of one team and got to pick who she wanted on her side. She always picked me first, though I was one of the most inept players out of all the other kids at both games. She probably thought she was making me feel good. We both knew it was charity. I’d have been happier not to play at all. I preferred more sedate games like ‘four square’ or ‘echo-stop’. But at Mawera School there wasn’t much choice in that sort of thing. The school roll was always so tiny, fluctuating around twenty pupils, that to have a decent game of soccer or rugby, the entire school had to play. That was the way it was and everyone went along with whatever someone, usually Lou, had decided.

  Lou was the unacknowledged leader of the school, even though she was barely twelve years old, and there were several boys older than her who might have had more of a claim out of seniority or gender. But Lou led the way with the sheer force of her personality and no one liked to con­tradict her. She possessed a sharp tongue and if that failed, a quick pair of fists. She could pin just about anyone to the ground in a couple of seconds and demand they surrender. Bigger, older boys weren’t game to risk having their masculine pre-eminence shattered by Lou’s lithe strength.

  In addition to dominating the playground, Lou also ruled in the classroom. The teacher in Aunt Evelyn couldn’t resist educating Lou as soon as possible. She could read by the time she was four and had romped through the spelling levels and basic arithmetic before she even started school officially at age five. Aunt Evelyn demanded that Lou skip the primers and begin straight in at standard one, but the teacher resented his authority being usurped and refused. He informed Aunt Evelyn that pushing Lou too early could have ‘psychological ramifications’ later on. So Lou stayed put in primer one where the teacher insisted she relearn to write in the new cursive style, a cross between the old­ fashioned longhand (Aunt Evelyn’s favoured style) and printing. This caused terrible problems for Lou, as Aunt Evelyn would insist she do her homework in longhand, while the teacher would refuse to mark it unless it was in cursive. Lou had to do two copies of her homework for an entire year, until Aunt Evelyn finally conceded that they were ‘living in a modern world and change was inevitable’. Around the same time, she had Arthur buy one of the new colour televisions.

  Nevertheless, Aunt Evelyn endeavoured to keep Lou’s education advancing at home, which was another reason why Lou always wanted to come to our place, to avoid Aunt Evelyn and Shakespeare for Children. When it was inescap­able, Lou insisted that I join her. I never admitted around Lou to enjoying those ‘lectures’ as Aunt Evelyn termed them, but I did. I loved them. Aunt Evelyn always made her interpretations of Shakespeare entertaining. She would borrow costumes from the Glenora Musical Society, dress up in the role of Lady Macbeth or Ophelia, recite their most famous speeches and then analyse their relevance.

  The school teacher never dressed up. He wore his navy shorts and knee-high socks with a regularity that somehow suggested his authority was vested in them.

  Despite her love of the avant-garde, Aunt Evelyn was rigid in her view of how Shakespeare should be performed. She wouldn’t hear of allowing Lou to read the swashbuckling parts that she wanted to. And even though she told us herself that in Elizabethan times boys played the female roles, she wouldn’t hear of me doing the same in the 1970s. ‘It’s too disorienting,’ she insisted.

  In private, Lou and I played the parts we wanted to. We had our own secret place where we could do exactly as we pleased. We called it Dragonland. In fact, it was just a massive rock which from a distance looked like the head of a dragon. Or Lou said it did and Babe and I agreed. Dragonland was perched on a ridge, high above our farmhouse. It took a good hour and a half to toil up the hill to it, so we didn’t visit that often. Yet almost every day we’d glance up at it and wearily vow, as if it was located up the other end of New Zealand, that soon we’d make the expedition to Dra­gonland. This reluctance was heartfelt on my part. The walk always gave me a terrible stitch.

  Up close the rock didn’t look anything like a dragon, though we pretended that it was ten times more terrifying. Babe was too scared to venture too close. Lou had convinced her that the rock could actually turn into a dragon and she cried every time we set off there. ‘You might never come back,’ she wailed.

  When Lou did manage to talk me into making the trek to Dragonland, we’d enliven the journey by inventing some extraordinary circumstances for ourselves. I would usually be half-crippled or blind, rendered helpless by some cruel handicap, which meant I was reliant upon Lou’s strength and charity. I would stagger up the hill, quite convincingly, as I was usually puffed by the time we reached the first fence. Then I’d collapse in a heap, blaming the legs I lost to croc­odiles or the eyes wasted by scarlet fever for my lack of stamina. I adored these games. I would issue demands for sustenance or rest, which Lou as the chivalric hero was obliged to fulfil.

  In these games, Lou usually went by the name of John and nothing pleased her more than hearing herself addressed as such. It was the name of her brother, the blue baby. That was how I’d overheard my mother describe him. ‘Evelyn’s blue baby. He was born with a hole right through his little heart. She only caught a glimpse of his wretched little body before they took it away, but the memory still chills her through.’

  I was fascinated by the notion of a baby being born blue. So fascinated that I persuaded Babe to paint her favourite doll with the pale blue paint that had been leftover from when the kitchen was redecorated. Babe was keen on the idea initially. However, once I had painstakingly completed my handiwork and held the doll up for her to admire, she burst into tears. Inevitably, my parents found out and my father took me outside behind the wash-house and disciplined me with the dog collar. I had to give Babe all my pocket money for three months to pay for a new doll. My mother burnt the desecrated doll. She realised what it was supposed to be.

  I never let on to Lou that I knew why she called herself John. From instinct, I was sure that she would’ve denied any association. As for my own name, I was always Judy.

  The thing about Dragonland was that it took so long to get there, that we were usually bored with our game by the time we actually arrived. We had fun on the way, encountering fleeing lower life forms (startled rabbits), powerful intergalactic force-fields (sagging fences) and mysterious signs of alien life (sheep droppings). But there wasn’t any­thing to equal these wonders once we got to Dragonland. It was just a rock and we were too tired to pretend it was anything else.

  The only thing at all fearsome about the dragon close-up was its mouth. This was a cave near the base of the rock. It was very dark inside that cave, so dark you couldn’t actually see where it ended. Even Lou, who was generally so fearless, had never had the courage to venture right back to touch the rear wall. We used to terrify ourselves making up stories about the dragon’s mouth. Lou claimed that there was no back wall to the cave, that it went deep down into the earth with something unspeakable, inconceivable at its very end.

  One day we were huddled in there and Lou began to iden­tify the dragon’s teeth and then its tonsils. Staring into that unfathomable blackness, her voice hissing in my ear, I began to believe that I could see them too. Suddenly, she rolled backward screaming, swearing that she was being eaten alive by the dragon and begging me to save her. In that dark silent cave it seemed all too plausible. I leapt forward into the sanctuary of daylight, screaming, thoroughly terrified. I think Lou even frighte
ned herself in the process of teasing me. She’d rolled back further than she’d ever dared go before and when she emerged from the cave, having realised I wasn’t going to venture back to rescue her, she looked pale and devoid of her usual boisterous swagger.

  By tacit agreement we avoided the dragon’s mouth after that day. Instead we’d clamber up onto the head of the dragon, and sit there, getting our breath back after the long walk. We always looked to see if the Field of Blood was greener than the rest of the paddocks around it. Sometimes we were certain it was. Lou liked to survey the farm and brag about the changes she’d make if it was hers. Her comments shattered our make-believe world. It was impos­sible to continue when she so crudely injected reality into our situation. Inevitably she’d spy my father doing something in one of the paddocks and become impatient to join him. She’d leap up, convinced he couldn’t manage without her and insist we go down and help. It was the last thing I’d want to do, volunteer to help my father. ‘You go,’ I’d say, and she would, dashing down the hill, like a young deer, leaping over snow tussocks and the great Scotch thistles that grew so tall around Dragonland.

  It wasn’t any fun up there on my own. After a while I’d trudge back down the hill, trying my best to sustain the magical circumstances of our ascent. But it was never the same. We never let on how dull Dragonland was in reality. Instead, we did our best to create a mystique about the place. We talked about it on the school bus so that the other kids heard us, slipping it into our conversation in a seemingly nonchalant manner. ‘Oh, I can’t do that,’ I’d say, ‘I’m going to Dragonland after school.’

  It sounded exotic and mysterious. Its allure was fuelled by the fact that we refused to take anyone else along with us. We both knew any visitors would scoff when they saw it for themselves. It didn’t take long for Arch to get sick of our mysterious comments. ‘That’s no dragon. That’s just a dumb old rock.’