Dunger (3 page)




 

There are no neighbours, the nearest town is Havelock and my phone battery is flat. I can't stand it. I really can't. But I don't know what to do.

Grandma says, “If you get desperate, you can use our phone. Mind you, it's a party line shared by three houses.”

There is hope. “How far away are they?”

“The nearest is the Hoffmeyers but they're going to the North Island during the week. Then there's Emily Adamson – no, she died and I heard her house was for sale. Maybe our phone won't be busy. But right now, you'd better get busy, my girl. The car has to be unpacked before dark.”

That's my job, wading through the long grass to the car and back to the cottage with boxes of food and clothes, the wet weeds around my legs full of creepy things I can't see. Dad talked about wasps in the Sounds. Suppose I tread on a wasps' nest? Those things can kill you.

“Put the boxes on the table!”

The inside of the bach isn't too bad, except it stinks. There's a wooden table with a pile of flax tablemats at one end, and a big pottery bowl where I'm supposed to put the fruit. The floor is made of bare boards that creak a bit, and the rugs look handmade. I guess that the blankets on the couch, patchwork and crochet, are also handmade, which sort of goes along with Dad's stories about the hippy era. Grandma lights candles and stands them along the table and bench. “Tomorrow I'll get the lanterns sorted,” she says, pointing to a couple of old-fashioned lanterns, the kind you see in movies, hanging from the ceiling. “Take a candle to help you see in the cupboards.”

When I open the first kitchen cupboard, I nearly drop the candle. The shelves are covered with mouse poo. I can't put food in there!

“What's wrong, girl?”

“Mice, Grandma. They're everywhere, thousands of droppings!” I shudder and so does the candle flame. “They smell bad!”

“Clean it, then,” she says.

I hold my breath as I take out all the cans and boxes in the cupboard – old, out-of-date food that has to be thrown away – then I get a hearth brush and sweep out the shelves. When I've finished, the cupboard still pongs like a mouse toilet. I'll have to scrub it clean. Grandma gives me a bucket and I turn on the kitchen tap. It rattles but nothing comes out.

“Well now, that's another job for the morning,” says Grandma. “Just leave the boxes of food on the table. Somewhere in the car there's drinking water, so we won't shrivel up in the night.”

“What about a shower?”

“Eh?”

“I really need a shower!”

“Have a swim,” she says, “but watch out for the sharks.”

I finish unpacking the car. Grandpa has opened the garage door and the ladder is now up against the side of the house. Will is up there, banging around on the iron roof and poking the handle of a rake down the chimney. It's quite dark now. He could miss his footing. With one day over and nine to go, it would be a real pain if he gets a broken leg. “You be careful!” I yell.

Grandpa comes into the kitchen to look at the black wood-stove. He opens a little door at the base of the chimney and straw pokes out. “Just as I thought, chock-a-block,” he says. “No way but to burn it out.”

He calls Will down the ladder, and gives him a kerosene-soaked rag and a box of matches. I stand below, with Grandma leaning on her stick, and we watch as Will climbs back up the ladder, pushes the rag down the chimney and drops a lit match. I expect an explosion, but it's just yellow flame, some sparks against the dark sky, and a crackling inside the bricks. In about five minutes the birds' nests have fallen down as ash in the stove, and Grandpa is saying, “Most effective, boyo,” which has my brother acting like he's just invented a cure for cancer.

Grandpa sets some paper and pine cones in the fire part of the stove. “Time for the F word. Chicken with potatoes and gravy. How does that sound?” He strikes a match, then says, “Oh dammit!” and blows it out. “We can't!” He looks at me and Will. “This stove heats the water and since there's no water, a fire will bust the pipes.”

“Another thing for the morning,” Grandma says.

The candlelit dinner is cold baked beans with bread, but that doesn't matter because I'm too tired to eat.

Grandma gives us sheets to make up the bunks in the spare room. “Will takes the top bunk. Melissa, you're on the bottom.”

But Will refuses to sleep in the same room as me, and in a childish tantrum, he takes his sheets out to the couch in the living room.

I borrow a word from Grandpa. “Good-oh.”




 


The birds wake me up. There must be millions of them, all chirping at once. I open the back door and smell a mix of wet grass and sea, better than the mouse-poo stink that fills the house. I had this idea that the long-drop toilet would be the stinkiest place, but it isn't, probably because it hasn't been used for four years. It is full of cobwebs, some of them across the hole. I think my pee might break them, but the webs just sag like old curtains, and I don't drown any spiders. The hole under the cobwebs is very deep. All I can see at the bottom is some old yellow newspaper, now wet.

When I come out, there's blue smoke by the garage. Grandpa is up. He's made a fire with wood in half a drum with a bit of reinforcing iron over the top to hold a pot of water. I look up at the chimney, remembering the mission so well accomplished last night.

Grandpa is already dressed. “Want a cup of coffee?”

“I'd rather have cocoa, if that's all right.”

He pours hot water into two mugs. It's coffee but it's made with condensed milk and tastes all right. I sit beside him on a log and look around at the place in morning light. Growing around the bach are eight macrocarpa trees, big, with lumpy trunks and sprawling branches, and beyond the car I can see some of the bay, the water a dark green colour with glints of light. In the other direction, behind the bach, there is a hill covered with native bush, mostly manuka, I think. I ask, “Is that where the water comes from?”

“What's that?”

“The water.” I point. “Is the stream up there?”

“Yep.”

I say to him, “I fixed the chimney. Maybe I can solve the water problem, too.”

He doesn't answer, but just sits staring at the hill and slurping his coffee. I wonder if he has ever thought about getting a hearing aid. He takes his time. When he has sucked the last drop from his mug, he stands, rubbing his knees. “Put your gumboots on,” he says. “We'd better see to the water.”

Going up the hill is hard work, even for me. The path is overgrown with scrub that gets thicker, and Grandpa has to stop every few steps to get his breath. We come to a place where we can't go on – the bush is far too dense. I turn and look back. The sun is still behind the hill and the bay is green, dark in the shadows. Everything smells wet, as though the tide has come over it during the night. Grandpa points sideways with his stick and says, “Better go up the stream.” For once he's not shouting. It's more of a gaspy whisper. But at least he knows where the stream is, not far to our left, through some trees and down a bit of a bank. He digs his stick into the dry earth and leans on it, then he waves his free hand at me.

“Come on, you silly beggar!”

I realise he wants me to hold his hand and guide him down the slope, and I wonder how difficult it would be for him to say please. But I do it, and somehow get him to the water. It's not a big stream, about half a metre across, clear water running over stones with some tufts of moss and ferns at the edges. Near the edge, as far as I can see in either direction, is a black pipe, presumably the one that feeds water to the tank by the house.

I keep hold of Grandpa as we walk uphill through the water. It is shallow but the stones are slippery. Sometimes he grabs me so hard that I nearly fall over. Just as I think this is going to take the entire day, we see the end of the pipe up ahead. It is high and dry. The plastic bottle tied on the end is pointing downhill.

“It must have been a wild pig!” I shout. “It's pulled the pipe out of the stream.”

“Nope. Rain.” He holds his side and coughs the words. “Flood washes. Pipe out. Always.” He takes a few breaths. “Always happens.”

I pick up the end of the pipe. The bottle looks like a big detergent container and it has holes punched in it. I suppose that's for a filter. There's brown sediment in the bottom of the plastic.

Grandpa sits on the bank giving instructions while I take the bottle off the pipe and wash it. Then I have to pick up the pipe and whack it against the stones to dislodge any sediment that might have got through.

“If there's a blockage, it's up the top end,” he says.

By now the sun is shining in bright patches through the bush and I'm starving. My arms are tired, scratched red with branches. I tie the bottle back on the hose end of the pipe, and Grandpa shows me where to scrape stones away so that the bottle is lying in a deep pool. He is very particular. I have to find larger stones to place on either side, then a big flat stone as a bridge to prevent the bottle from washing out.

When I've finished, he puts his hand on my shoulder. I think he's going to say something but he is just steadying himself in preparation for the climb back up the bank.

It takes just as long to get down the hill. I'm sure half the day has gone but it's only nine o'clock. Grandpa takes me to a tap on a post by the garage.

“This is the lowest outlet,” he says, turning it on.

No water comes out. Not a drop! All that effort for nothing!

“Listen, boyo.”

I hear a noise like a gurgling stomach.

Grandpa grins. “We're clearing the air lock. Wait!”

More gurgling noise and then comes a spurt of brown water.

Another spurt! Another! It gushes out of the pipe like a pulse, as though it is part of the hill's great artery system, and then, finally, it steadies as a clear flow.

Grandpa turns the tap off. “Anything happening to the tank?”

I listen. There is a sound like water dropping into a bucket. “It's filling!”

“Good-oh,” says Grandpa. “I smell breakfast.”

Grandma has been cooking pancakes in a frying pan on the outdoor fire. She has smothered them with sugar, butter and lemon juice, and there is a stack waiting for Grandpa and me, on the table.

“We've had ours. They're delicious,” says Lissy. Then she sees my arms. “You've scratched yourself.”

I shrug, my mouth full of food.

“You should have worn long sleeves,” she says.

She sounds like Mother-of-the-hundred-eyes. “It's nothing,” I tell her.

The water is running into the tank and the pipes to the house are now alive with it. Lissy turns on the tap at the sink and after a few spouts of brown, she gets clean water. I want to tell her, “You can thank me for that, Sis. I'm a first-class plumber.”

She comes to the end of the table and looks at one of the boxes of food. “Grandma? Hey, Grandma? This bag of flour hasn't been opened.”

Grandma is washing her spectacles under the tap and doesn't hear her.

“Grandma, what flour did you use?”

Carefully, Grandma wipes her glasses on a tea towel. “You don't waste good flour.”

“Did you make pancakes with the flour out of the cupboard?” Melissa screams. “It had mouse poo in it!”

Grandma puts her glasses back on. “I put it through the sifter,” she says.

Melissa is hysterical, and I don't blame her. Even Grandpa stops eating. He says, “That might have sifted out the hard stuff, but what about the pee?” He pushes his plate away. “Mice carry bubonic plague, I'll have you know.”

“You're wrong,” Grandma shouts. “Bubonic plague is rats!”

I've had two pancakes and I feel sick. Very sick. Lissy is sitting on the couch, crying. “I want to go home!” she wails.

I rummage in my suitcase and get out a handful of milkshake lollies.

“What's that?” Lissy asks.

“Antibiotics,” I tell her, and I drop some in her lap.