50 Ways of Saying Fabulous Book 1 20th Anniversary Edition (4 page)

My father wasn’t listening. He was so in awe of Dante. He was much bigger than Bruno. ‘Imagine the calves he’ll produce,’ he gasped.

But the problem was that Dante didn’t seem to like the Shorthorn cows he was expected to impregnate with his purebred Charolais semen. He showed no inclination to fulfil the task he was acquired for, preferring to exert his superior weight in fights with the other bulls instead. Trying to shift Dante away from the bulls and in with the cows was a real ordeal. It always ended up taking almost an entire day and usually several fences ended up getting wrecked in the process. These would then take hours the next day to repair. It required all seven dogs snapping at his hooves, my father belting him across his rump with an aluminium crook, and Lou and I shouting as loudly as we could and waving our arms about, to make Dante amble forward at all. And even with all that commotion, he wasn’t inclined to go particularly fast.

His favourite trick, once we’d managed to get him halfway to the mob of cows, was to turn around and take off back the way we’d just come. Back to the bull paddock, ignoring the dogs and charging straight through any fences that happened to be in his way. My father would swear and swear, as if it was some sort of incantation that might mag­ically bring Dante back again. Sometimes his swearing carried all the way to the house, and when we got home for lunch, my mother would reprimand my father for using such language in front of Lou and me.

No one called him Dante any more. He’d been called That Bloody Bull so many times by my father that the name had stuck. We all called him that, though we didn’t let my mother catch us. We always said it as if it was an aristocratic title, like we were saying Her Majesty the Queen. My father said it in a different tone altogether.

He began to despair of ever getting Dante to stay in with the cows. He blamed everything he could think of for Dante’s inertia. The trip on the ship from France. Mawera for being a strange new environment. He even wondered aloud one day if perhaps it was a curse for grazing the cows in the Field of Blood. He wouldn’t admit that he’d paid thousands of dollars for a dud bull, which is what Grampy insisted he had done. ‘Fussy French bugger,’ Grampy said to me one day. ‘I’d cut my losses if I was your father and send him to the works. He’d lose money but he’d get the last laugh on That Bloody Bull. You can’t be a farmer and let yourself be beaten by a brainless bull.’

But Dante was far from brainless. I admired how he seemed able to outwit my father. I wished I was as accomplished at getting my own way, and avoiding all the jobs my father was always finding for me. I remember one time, we spent all day trying to get Dante in with the cows. Finally, it was done and we wearily made our way home, shutting all the gates along the way. We’d taken him by a circuitous route in an attempt to confuse him, so that even if he did jump out from the mob of cows he could never find his way back to the other bulls. The bull paddock was next to the house. We were stopped at the final gate, about to drive up to the house, an hour overdue for dinner already, when my father glanced over to admire his bulls and noticed Dante standing there amongst them.

He’d beaten us back.

It was Grampy who suggested taking a steer along with Dante for company. He said it as a joke, but my father was desperate enough to try anything. ‘What’s a steer?’ I asked my father, as we trudged along behind an unusually cooperative Dante and the young steer.

‘It’s a bull who isn’t a bull anymore,’ replied my father.

I still didn’t understand. But Grampy’s joke worked. Dante trotted along quite happily with his new companion and for the first time was happy to stay in with the cows and even do his business on top of them. My father hated the fact that Grampy had been right, but he was so relieved that all the money he’d paid hadn’t been wasted, he had to give Grampy the credit due him. He rang him up and thanked him. Grampy acted like it was the most obvious thing in the world to do, but he confessed to Lou and me that he was astounded. ‘French cows are queer things,’ he warned us. ‘Steer clear of them. When you have the farm yourselves, get shot of those “Sharlaze” quick smart.’

I agreed with him, swearing to have nothing to do with Charolais when I grew up. I didn’t elaborate on the fact that I planned to have nothing to do with cows or sheep or
any­thing
remotely connected with farm life. Such ambitions were best kept secret.

Everyone called me Billy-Boy. It wasn’t short for William. It was just one of those nicknames that develops and sticks. I’d been christened after my mother’s father, though neither of my parents actually liked the name. My mother convinced my father that they ought to make the gesture. My grandfather wasn’t well at the time of my birth and had been in and out of hospital. My parents didn’t tell him what they were plan­ning. They wanted it to be a lovely surprise. As it turned out, he was whisked back into hospital and couldn’t attend the christening. If he had been there he would have protested.

After the christening, they brought me to visit Grandfather Pearce in the hospital, and announced that I was his namesake. He moaned when he heard the news. He moaned with such anguish that my father ran to summon a nurse. ‘How could you do such a thing?’ he lamented. ‘How could you inflict this poor baby with such a curse?’

‘We thought you’d be pleased,’ my mother said tersely.

‘The sentiment is admirable,’ said my grandfather, ‘but the name is a shocker.’

My grandfather’s name was Athol. It had been a source of mockery to him for most of his life. Throughout school, and even beyond, he was known as Arsehole. The other schoolboys pronounced it with a lisp. Aaaathhholl. That was his reluctant legacy to me. He died soon after that visit, and in her darker moments my mother fretted that she had finished him off with the unwelcome compliment.

My name became a misnomer. No one wanted to use it for fear of reminding my mother of her father’s fatal reaction. Everyone was at a loss as to what to call me. My second name wasn’t much of an alternative. Palmerston. This was the town where my parents had met and although it had great romantic significance for them, it didn’t readily abbreviate into a useable name for me.

It could have been worse. They were also thinking of McGregor in which case I would have been named after a meat pie.

My mother had thought my name sounded distinguished. It wounded her greatly that it could so readily be reduced to ‘arsehole’. She became sensitive about my name. People were always approaching her in the street, admiring me, cooing at me in my pram and naturally enquiring as to my name. At first my mother would defiantly tell them. But their polite responses were belied by their startled eyes and titter­ ing laughter when she moved away with the pram. My mother became embarrassed to pronounce the name. She began to mumble it which definitely didn’t help the situation. People didn’t like to ask her to repeat it, in case it confirmed what they thought they had heard. The whispering, the insin­uations, the criticism, all became too much for my mother. She began to invent new names for me. She’d say the first name that came into her head if anyone happened to ask her. She even began to call me by those names herself. One week I was Sam. The next I was John. The week after that Peter. Plain names. My mother had learnt her lesson.

Finally, my father took up the same initiative and started calling me Billy. It was the name he’d favoured from the beginning. My mother had objected, saying it reminded her of camping out and damper bread. Everyone else followed my father’s lead and the name stuck. My mother resisted until I was old enough to work her reluctance to my own advantage. When she called me to do a little job for her round the house, I’d refuse to answer, on the grounds that it wasn’t my name. I’d stay where I was, usually huddled in front of the television. When my mother came to find me, I’d shrug and pretend I hadn’t realised she was talking to me.

The first time she ever called me Billy was the day she had one of her disasters. Even though I was watching tele­vision at the time, I still heard the shriek of the truck’s brakes over the volume of the television. Then my mother’s frantic wail. ‘Billy, Billy, come quick, I’ve run over the puppy.’

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 knew 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.