Part 3 (1/2)

'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 hara.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 a I just sacked them. There was n.o.body 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 b.a.l.l.s 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.

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 b.o.o.bs 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-GoGirl.

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 bendylooking and has a rubbery face, like Carl, which makes the things he says seem funnier. Saskia, on the other hand, is more st.u.r.dy-looking and usually dead serious. They both go to the local Catholic school, which is why Saskia is going to cla.s.ses 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 a anything a 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 combination 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-s.h.i.+rts 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.

Claud and I locked our bikes outside Quinny's apartment block on Marine Parade. I had the pizzas tied to my pack rack with ockie straps, which I think is short for octopus because of the way they stretch outand latch on to things. It was twenty-five minutes past eight so we were almost perfectly on time, which is important in a business like ours and important for me because, as I may have mentioned, I'm an on-time person. A swarm of leathery bikers sped past on low-riders with big handlebars. Then a convoy of bogans in hotted-up Commodores roared by. We could hear Kylie Minogue playing very loudly from a balcony.

I was thinking about the peach and white-chocolate pizza that I was going to make when I got home . . . with ice cream on top. (That's if Mum had stopped Lyall and Saskia eating it all while we were gone.) Claud pressed the buzzer of number 77.

'Yo!' It was Uncle Quinny through the intercom. 'I'll send Buster down a Buster! Get down there would ya,' he yelled. 'How much do we owe yers?'