‘Man, it’s so hot you could fry an egg on the pavement,’ said Claud.
‘I can’t believe you had to stir Buster up like that, Claud. Why couldn’t you just ignore him?’
‘Have you ever tried it, Sunny?’
‘Ignoring Buster? Yes, it’s amazingly simple, actually.’ ‘No, I mean seeing if an egg will actually fry on the pavement?’
‘Like I care, Claud! It’s too hot. Obviously the heat has scrambled your brain.’
‘Aw come on, Sunny, Buster’s harmless. Besides, it’s fun. He’s so easy to wind up. Got any eggs?’
‘There’s some in the shed fridge. I’m going to write a shopping list, because, in case you haven’t noticed, Claud, we’ve got work we have to do. You know . . . eight pizzas, one hundred and twenty bucks?’
‘Whoa! We’ve never hit the hundred dollar mark before,’ said Claud.
And I said, ‘We’re not going to make anything without ingredients.’
And Claud said, ‘You’ve got to take time to smell the roses too you know, Sunny.’
And I said, ‘Well you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch, Claud.’
And Claud said, ‘You’re right – chickens mean eggs, and do eggs actually fry on the pavement on a hot day, Sunny? I ask you. I’ll be back in a minute.’ And she sprung off the couch and ran out the back door.
I got out my new notebook and pens, because I’m a list-making sort of a person. Besides, when you’re feeling oh-so-lazy in the middle of a heat wave, list-making can really inspire you. I divided the page into two sections; one for things we had to get down in Carlisle Street, and the other for things we needed to pilfer from Mum’s garden.
Claud returned with the profit jar, which we hide up the back of the shed fridge. She also had the shopping buggy.
‘It’s like Mythbusters,’ she said.
‘What is?’
‘The egg. This will prove it once and for all. Hey, do we need more flour and yeast?’
‘Nup, we’ve still got plenty. Let’s get going.’
As I opened the front gate I saw Claud’s egg experiment. She’d cracked it open right in the middle of the path where anybody coming to our house would have to step over it. I gave her the eyebrow.
‘It was the best spot,’ said Claud. ‘It needs to get full sun. Have faith, Sunny, faith. I think it’s even starting to cook. Look, it’s sunny side up, just how you like it.’
I leant over the egg to examine the edges. So far, it wasn’t exactly frying, but I didn’t want to be the sort of person who would make up their mind about something before giving it a go, so I just steered the shopping buggy around the egg and we set off for Ripponlea station, plastering on sunscreen along the way.
I know I’m complaining about the weather a lot but it was extra-ordinary. I guess I didn’t think global warming was going to happen so quickly, even though Carl’s always talking about it. I once saw some polar bears on the tellie that had drowned because they had to swim and swim in search of their icy homes that had melted away. It not only made my throat ache, it made me straight-out cry and feel dead anxious about the future. I also remembered that I hadn’t eaten breakfast and I was feeling very hangry, which is what you feel when you’re so hungry it makes you slightly angry. (Hangry isn’t really my word, it’s one that Carl invented and lets me borrow.)
I tried to think of a situation that was worse than mine, because there always is one. After all, being a bit hot and hangry isn’t exactly the end of the world, even if global warming is going to destroy life as we know it. I mean, imagine what it must be like to live somewhere like Dubai where it’s about 44 degrees every day for months on end. Or imagine being a racehorse jockey who has to sit in saunas for hours and be hot and hangry on a daily basis just to stay super thin. Or imagine being the horse!
We walked down Carlisle Street to the deli and ate nearly a whole loaf of shiny plaited egg bread while we did our shopping. It was soft and baby-yellow-delicious and freshly baked on Fridays for Jewish families to share with dinner after the blessing. I know because Monica Steinberg is Jewish and she invited me to her house for Friday night dinner once. But that was before Friday nights became Pizza-A-Go-Girl’s main earner.
We parked our buggy in the last smidgen of shade outside the juice bar. Claud ordered a couple of smoothies, and I opened a new page of my notebook for a game of street poetry. It’s a game Mum invented, and we’ve got a street poem on our kitchen wall that she made in a market place in India. Claud and I have a whole book of poems we’ve been collecting. Street Poetry is kind of like bird watching, but far less boring. And it doesn’t actually involve birds. It’s more like word watching. It’s good when you don’t feel like talking because it’s all about listening and writing words down, one phrase at a time, from people passing by. You can only take one phrase from any one person, and you have to get as many as you can in three minutes. Then you arrange all the random phrases so they tell a story about where you are. Lately Claud and I have been practising haikus, which are short Japanese poems with very particular rules. They are all about descriptions of everyday ordinariness, and the seasons. Apparently, when you get really good at haikus they become philosophical, which is why we want to practise them.
I didn’t want to actually talk about any of the things that were weighing on my mind, mostly because it was just way too hot. I didn’t want to tell Claud how Mum and Carl were planning to blend us by force. And I didn’t want to explain how rude I felt for not thanking Granny Carmelene for her Christmas present because I promised Mum that I wouldn’t contact her; or how unfair it feels not be able to have a grandmother in the first place, especially one that seems nice; or about how when Lyall and Saskia move in, I’m not going to be an only child anymore; or how it’s not just the climate that’s changing but also everything in my whole life, even Claud herself; and about how I wanted to know why everything can’t just stay as it is. The only type of change I’m interested in is a cool change.
6 .
When we got home, Claud’s egg had actually cooked on the pavement. Well, the white part had anyway. The yolk was taking a bit longer. I ran to get Mum’s camera, in case we ever needed proof, and caught Mum smoking a cigarette in the shed. She quickly butted it out and pretended she was doing dishes.
This is the sort of behaviour that drove me to form Children Living with Hypocritical Parents Who Smoke. If you don’t know what a hypocrite is, just ask my mum.
‘Mum, it’s completely obvious,’ I said looking up at the smoke milling around the ceiling.
‘What’s going on with that egg, Sunny? I nearly stepped in it,’ she said, filling up the sink with water.
‘How could you want to breathe in smoke when it’s so hot?’
‘I’m not perfect, sweetheart. Nobody is.’
‘Yes you are, you’re a perfect hypocrite. How can you be a naturopath and smoke? It’s just plain wrong, Mum.’
She swung around and glared at me. ‘Don’t you dare tell anybody, Sunny. Besides, I told you I’m going to get hypnotised. I’m on a waiting list.’
‘You’ve been on a waiting list for practically my whole life.’
‘Don’t start, Sunny. It’s a dull argument,’ said Mum, pulling on rubber gloves.
‘Yeah right, Mum, like lung cancer isn’t dull and chemotherapy isn’t dull and sneaking around the side of the house to smoke isn’t dull and being a stinky addict isn’t dull and—’
‘Enough, Sunday! Surely you’ve got something better to do than to harass your mother? If you’re looking for a job there’s a pile of dishes here.’
‘Can I borrow your camera?’
‘It’s in my bag,’ said Mum, nodding towards the table. ‘And don’t you dare touch my cigarettes!’
I used to steal Mum’s cigarettes and break them in half. Sometimes I’d even pour water on them, ’cos once I found her smoking the broken bits I’d put in the bin. But I gave up on confiscation because she gets really angry and just
buys more and hides them. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a stash buried out in the garden. Maybe that’s what she’s really up to while pretending to be gardening at night?
I’m also totally over listening to all of Mum’s excuses, especially the bit about being brainwashed by the glamour ads in the seventies with supermodels on yachts or the Marlborough Man or some guy called Paul Hogan who said Anyhow, have a Winfield.
But this is the best bit: Mum told me that in the nineteen forties and fifties young people were expected to smoke and girls even had smoking lessons at school. They were taught things like how to light a cigarette and how to let someone else light it for you. Can you imagine? It makes me wonder what we might be learning nowadays in school that people are going to look back on and shake their heads and say Oh My God, they actually told kids that maths was important. What were they thinking?
But you’d have to agree, a smoking naturopath is about as wrong-town as you can get. Why is it taking her so long to get to hypnosis? I mean, I know a lot of people are scared of it because of all those stories you hear about hypnosis turning you into a chicken, but I think Mum’s just putting it off so that she can smoke for a bit longer. And I’m not buying this waiting list business. It just doesn’t wash, which is why I end up getting so angry and wanting to do radical things like the Greenpeace activists do.
By the way, in case you’re wondering what happened to the Tangent Police – I just sacked them. There was nobody down at headquarters at the time (typical), so I just stuck a post-it-note on the door. That should do it.
Anyway, Claud and I spent the rest of the afternoon wearing wet clothing to cool down, while doing prep (that’s chef talk for preparation) for Pizza-A-Go-Girl. It must have been about fifty degrees in the shed. We had everything stacked in square containers in the fridge ready to go, just like they do in real pizza shops. Then we made a quadruple batch of dough and left it to rise in a big metal bowl. Claud screwed up balls of newspaper and piled them onto the floor of the pizza oven dome, and I stacked a pointy pile of kindling on top, then some bigger pieces of wood, ready to light the fire. Mum came out to supervise while I held a match to a corner of newspaper at one edge of the pile. Flames whooshed up towards the metal flue, making a whirring hum as the fire took off.
‘I’ll build up the fire for you,’ said Mum, ‘if you want to go for another swim.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ I said, and we got on our bikes and headed for the beach.
7 .
Carl was out in the shed when we got home, but there was no sign of Lyall and Saskia or Mum and Willow.
‘They’re at the shops,’ said Carl, ‘getting some ice-cream for later.’
I felt happy and hurt at the same time. Happy at the thought of ice-cream, but hurt because Mum never bought it just for me, only when Lyall and Saskia came to visit. It’s as if I’m not good enough for ice-cream just on my own, or as if she cares more about impressing Lyall and Saskia than she does about impressing me. Any minute now she’ll be making bombe alaska for them, which I can tell you right now will be the moment I run away with one of those sticks over my shoulder and a spotted scarf tied around the end containing all my possessions. You know, like in Snoopy.
The oven was glowing with red embers and Carl asked whether he should put another couple of logs on. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Then we need to push the fire across to one side with the rake.’
I remembered the blending talk, and felt a bit hopeful ’cos surely Mum and Carl weren’t going to launch into a totally cringe-able discussion right when I’ve got a friend over? Still, I was feeling dead uncomfortable especially as I didn’t know whether Mum had told Carl that she’d told me, or whether Lyall and Saskia knew and what they thought about it. There was so much not-knowingness in the room I may as well have been in maths.
Willow ran into the shed, wagging her tail, followed by Lyall and Saskia and Mum, who had changed her outfit and had her boobs all squashed together and dished up in a push-up bra.
‘Hi. What’s the deal with the egg on the footpath?’ asked Lyall putting the ice cream in the freezer. ‘And is there anything, like, to drink?’
‘How about some, like, water, Lyall?’ mocked Carl. ‘And do you think you can say, like, a whole sentence, like, without, like, saying like every second word?’
‘Dad-duh! Don’t be so mean,’ said Saskia. ‘Hi, Sunny. Hi, Claud. What’s with the egg?’
‘It’s an experiment,’ said Claud. ‘We proved it was so hot today you could fry an egg on the pavement.’
‘Oh . . . Was that, like, um . . . I mean, was that an important experiment or anything?’ asked Saskia sheepishly.
And I said, ‘Why?’
And Lyall said, ‘Like, ’cos Willow just ate it.’
See? Siblings wreck your things, even if it is by accident. It reminded me of the time Walter let Claud’s entire family of sea monkeys die when she went away for a weekend. Imagine the damage Lyall and Saskia could do to business. That’s why, no matter how much Mum says I should be kind and let them join in, Lyall and Saskia will have to be kept well away from Pizza-A-Go-Girl.
Lyall and Saskia look nothing like one another but I know for a fact they both had the same parents and that neither of them was adopted. Lyall is long and bendy-looking and has a rubbery face, like Carl, which makes the things he says seem funnier. Saskia, on the other hand, is more sturdy-looking and usually dead serious. They both go to the local Catholic school, which is why Saskia is going to classes to learn how to marry Jesus and why she says grace in Italian.
Mum and Carl were working on the crossword Mum had started that morning. I just wanted to make our pizzas and get out of there, in case the blending talk actually happened and Mum and Carl asked us all about how we feel, which, you’ve got to admit, would be dead cringe-able. When people ask me about my feelings, I just go numb and red and forget how to make words or feel anything at all.
And then, right when Claud and I were dividing up the pizza dough into neat lines of small floury balls, right when Lyall and Saskia were arguing about who was going to help, and right when Mum had just got the answer for eighteen across, Carl blurted out:
‘Well, isn’t this something? Why don’t we do this all the time?’
And Saskia said, ‘What? Make pizzas?’
And Carl said, ‘Did you hear the one about the blind skunk?’
And Lyall said, ‘Daaad-duh, we’ve heard that one, like, a thousand times-suh.’
And Claud said, ‘I haven’t.’
And Carl said, ‘It fell in love with a fart.’
And Saskia said, ‘Daaaaad-duh! That joke is so lame!’ and punched him hard in the arm and rolled her eyes.
But I laughed and laughed, even though it was pretty daggy, and so did Mum and Claud because we hadn’t heard it before.
And then Mum came out with, ‘We’ve been thinking—’
And Carl put his arm around Mum and took over like it was something they’d prepared earlier and said, ‘We’ve been thinking, and I’m sorry Claud because this doesn’t really concern you, but—’
And then, without even looking up from the crossword, Mum said, ‘We thought it might be nice if we all moved in together . . . here. What do you think?’
Everybody stopped in their tracks, as if the music had just gone off in a game of Statues. I held my breath, hoping someone else would say something – anything – to break the silence and allow my lungs to work again.
Then Mum said, ‘Six down. Earthenware. Ten letters. It’s terracotta.’
And Carl said, ‘Nice one darl, how about a vodka tonic?’
I slid the Larkin’s second pizza off the peel (that’s the professional term for those pizza-oven shovels) and into the box, where Claud cut it into quarters with the wheelie pizza cutter. The Larkins are vegetarians and live over the road. They were having one pizza with broccoli, fennel, garlic, chilli and lemon, and one with onion, buffalo mozzarella, rosemary, thyme and cherry tomatoes, which is a combinatio
n that Claud and I saw in a book about Naples, where pizzas were invented. Claud did the delivery while I got started on the order for the Ferdinands who live next door.
The Reverend Ferdinand and his wife, Josephine, were more adventurous than they sounded. They always left the order up to us, and the stranger the combinations the happier they were. I guess being a Reverend and living such a pure and polite life, the mystery of a Friday night pizza was the one way they could really break out. Mrs Wolverine round in Scott Street was having a pizza with pancetta, spinach, pine nuts, ricotta, garlic and nutmeg. Then there was Uncle Quinny’s plain old hot-salami and olives and Buster’s Hawaiian, which was our last delivery before we could come home to count our profits and do our book-work.
You know, sliding a pizza off the end of a pizza peel into a wood-fired oven is all about wrist-action, a bit like frisbee. If you flick too hard it can slide too far towards the fire, and if the shovel isn’t floured enough the dough sticks to the peel while all the topping flies off and ends up sizzling on the oven floor. It’s all about the perfect amount of flour on the peel, and the perfect type of wrist action. Getting it right makes you feel dead powerful. I imagined our pizza business really taking off. Every Friday night we’d make hundreds of pizzas and have Pizza-A-Go-Girl T-shirts and our own delivery guy who could take Carl’s Vespa, or ride a bicycle if he wasn’t old enough. And there’d be people to wash up and chop and take orders while Claud and I worked the oven, thought of exciting new combinations and counted all the money. I have to say, though, that because there’s only one pizza peel and Pizza-A-Go-Girl is ultimately my invention, the shovelling job would still be mine. I know that thinking about having a worldwide business possibly makes me a capitalist, but when you’re an inventor and an entrepreneur it’s sometimes hard to have ideas that don’t make money. I mean, wait until Street Poetry takes off. Besides, I’m going to be the sort of capitalist that shares a lot of money around in ways that make the world better, like finding new homes for polar bears.
Sunny Side Up Page 4
