From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (36 page)
Read From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle Online
Authors: Kate de Goldi
My thanks to:
John Perham, for his fine family names and excellent company.
The High Street Stories website curators and contributors, whose stories and photographs are a record to be very grateful for.
The librarians at Wadestown Library, for space and friendly faces.
Rae Varcoe, for kindly talking me through some medical matters.
Barbara Larson, patient publisher, for her faith and support.
Emma Neale, for her fine ear and eye.
Jen Bornholdt, for encouragement and enthusiasm at a decisive moment.
Kate De Goldi writes fiction for all ages. Her books have won a number of awards, including the New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year Award and the Esther Glen Medal. Her novel
The 10 PM Question
has been translated into many languages and in 2011 won the Corine International Book Prize.
Clubs: A Lolly Leopold Story
Uncle Jack
Billy: A Lolly Leopold Story
The 10 PM Question
The ACB with Honora Lee
This is a work of fiction and all the characters and events are entirely the work of imagination.
LONGACRE
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Longacre is an imprint of the Penguin Random House group of companies, whose addresses can be found at
global.penguinrandomhouse.com
.
First published by Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Text copyright © Kate De Goldi, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Front cover design and all illustrations by Gregory O’Brien © Penguin Random House New Zealand
Back cover and spine design by Sam Bunny © Penguin Random House New Zealand
Text design by Bruce Foster © Penguin Random House New Zealand
Author photograph by Bruce Foster
The short extracts read to Ren’s class by Ms Temple (pp.
125
,
126
,
135
,
138
,
139
,
143
,
144
and
160
) are from
Milkweed
by Jerry Spinelli, published by Orchard Books, London, 2003.
The line of poetry Ren copies on p.
84
is from ‘Home’ by Jenny Bornholdt, published in
Waiting Shelter
, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1991.
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001 Environmental Management Systems Printer
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
ISBN 978-1-77553-576-8
eISBN 978-1-77553-577-5
‘A truly special book. Kate De Goldi’s dazzling writing will break your heart and make you wonder, marvel and laugh all at once. A gorgeous, deeply imagined story.’
—Agnes Nieuwenhuizen
‘… tender and laugh-out-loud funny. An inspired gem. What a joy!’
—Carol Beu, Women’s Bookshop
Kate De Goldi
Winner of the Book of the Year,
New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards, 2009
Runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction, 2009
Readers’ Choice Award, Montana NZ Book Awards, 2009
Finalist, LIANZA Children’s Book Awards, 2009
Winner of the Corine International Book Prize, 2011
Frankie Parsons is twelve going on old man: an apparently sensible, talented Year 8 with a drumbeat of worrying questions steadily gaining volume in his head:
Are the smoke alarm batteries flat?
Does the cat, and therefore the rest of the family, have worms?
Is the kidney-shaped spot on his chest actually a galloping cancer?
Most of the significant people in Frankie’s world – his father, his brother and sister, his great-aunts, his best friend Gigs – seem gloriously untroubled by worry. Only Ma takes seriously his catalogue of persistent anxieties; only Ma listens patiently to his 10 p.m. queries.
But of course, it is Ma who is the cause of the most worrying question of all, the one that Frankie can never bring himself to ask.
Then the new girl arrives at school and has questions of her own: relentless, unavoidable questions.
So begins the unravelling of Frankie Parsons’s carefully controlled world. So begins the painful business of fronting up to the unpalatable: the ultimate 10 p.m. question …
Kate De Goldi
Perry leaned into Gran and blew gently on her cheek.
‘Gran,’ she said. ‘Gran? Who am I?’
‘Well,’ said Gran, tartly, ‘if you don’t know I can’t help you.’
Who indeed is Perry? And who is Gran? Who are Doris, Beverley, Stephen, Loto, Audrey and the myriad others at Santa Lucia in the loop of the river?
There is much about all their lives that is puzzling and chaotic, but Perry has a plan. She is making an alphabet of everyone and everything at Santa Lucia. The alphabet is orderly after all, a beautiful, predictable pattern that everyone understands … Or do they?
‘Perry’s precocious, gregarious nature will win readers’ hearts … Clever, poignant and sweetly funny.’
—
Kirkus
‘… deserves a place in the pantheon of quiet, word-of-mouth classics.’
—
Publishers Weekly
