Chapter 7
Taking a deep breath I followed Charlie down the stairs. As we went into the lounge room I held up my chin slightly, tightened my mouth and walked with exaggerated model-like steps over to the sofa. Looking from left to right I surveyed the room and sat with a flourish, my back straight and my head high.
“Oh good, Coco,” said Dad, putting his head up from the laptop on the coffee table. “You’ve come back. I was just about to show everyone the photographs of the farm on the website.”
Mum smiled at me, an encouraging sort of smile. “It really looks great, Coco,” she said. “You okay?”
This was unbelievable. Did they have no idea that when I ran out of the dining room screaming it was because I was definitely not okay? I don’t think Dad had even really noticed that I had been gone for half an hour or more.
I blinked at Mum a few times with a stern face, hoping that she would get the message that I was angry. I didn’t want to talk. I thought I’d just burst out crying which wouldn’t be dignified or stylish at all.
She opened her mouth to speak but just at that point Dad started to talk.
“So here it is,” he said, adjusting the screen so that we could all see.
Josh and Charlie were kneeling by the coffee table sticking their heads in close trying to see the photograph of a big green field. They looked like 10 year-olds. I stayed on my sofa, refusing to be keen.
“It’s a hundred acres, with a stream running right through. It backs on to national forest and it has quite a few different paddocks, and an olive grove and a piggery,” said Dad. He had a huge smile on his face, and I’ve never heard his voice so excited. He was whipping through the photographs like he couldn’t show them fast enough.
“Oh, it’s so beautiful,” said Mum. “Just look at all that land—and the view!”
“Are we going to get pigs?” asked Charlie. “I think they’re so cute.”
“I don’t know yet,” said Dad. “We will just have to take it slowly and see what we can do. There are no pigs in the shed at the moment.”
Pigs? I thought to myself. My mouth tightened. I’m never going in a pig shed. You can forget that!
“So where exactly is it?” said Josh. “What’s the nearest town?”
Dad fiddled around for a minute and brought up a map on the screen. “Here we are in Sydney.” He pointed to a large yellow spot. Then he moved his finger down ten centimetres.
“This is it here, approximately,” he said. “It’s about two hours south, just in from the coast. I guess the nearest town is probably Kangaroo Valley.
Kangaroo Valley? I thought to myself. My neck felt tight. That’s not even a town. It’s a postcard caption.
We visited Kangaroo Valley on our last family holiday. Well, I say visited, but I mean ‘stopped in’. It’s the tiniest little pit stop I’ve ever been through. If ever there was a town that was blink-and-you-miss-it, it’s Kangaroo Valley. It had a bakery. And a shop selling rocking horses. And I think that was it. Oh, wait, there was also a sign saying ‘World’s Best Pies’.
As if. I don’t even like pies. Could this be any worse?
Oh yes, it could.
“But it’s not in town,” said Dad. “It’s about 30 kilometres out. It’s down a fire trail. And apparently if it rains a lot the road gets cut off sometimes.”
“Awesome,” said Josh.
“That’s cool,” said Charlie.
Mum put her hand on Dad’s and held it like she was really pleased. No-one even looked at me.
Out of town? Down a fire trail? And the road gets cut off? My back got straighter and straighter. Could this be any worse at all?
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, it definitely could.
“Dad, where’s the house?” asked Charlie. “Is that the end of the photos? They don’t have any pictures of the house.”
Dad’s eyes lit up. He looked like a little boy about to open a long-awaited Christmas present.
“Well, this is the best bit. There is no house!”
We looked at him blankly.
“We’re going to build it ourselves!” he exulted, throwing his hands out wide as if he was inviting us all to the best party in the world.
“Oh my goodness!” said Charlie, but she was smiling.
“This is awesome!” yelled Josh.
“Oh, David,” said Mum. “This is your dream, isn’t it! You’ve always wanted to do this—and now you are!” She actually hugged him. They looked at each other with dewy eyes and then, urrrgh, they kissed on the lips. Spare me, Mum and Dad. That’s disgusting. Parents should not kiss.
“I said there were no pigs in the shed. So we can clean it out and live there,” Dad said, his words practically falling out of his mouth with excitement. I just about fell off my chair. But it didn’t seem to stop him talking. “It has power and water and we can set up a camp kitchen. And the house shouldn’t take too long to build if we all do it together. Maybe half a year?”
That was it. I’d had enough. Dad started burbling on about passive solar this and that, own vegie patch blah blah, yada yada, mud bricks, compost toilet, eco-friendly ra ra ra, completely self-sufficient. And from the looks of it, everyone else thought he wasn’t crazy. He’d obviously infected them with some greenie-wildlife-warrior virus that I was (thankfully) immune to. Or he’d turned into some sort of magician/cult leader/crazy man and they’d all been brainwashed. There was no other explanation.
I had to say something. I had to put a stop to this insanity.
Rather than tears and yelling and protests, which obviously hadn’t worked the first time, I decided to try to knock holes in his arguments.
“Dad,” I said. “It sounds lovely.” I stretched out the word laah-ve-ly as long as I could. “But really. I don’t think this is going to work. You want us all to live in a pig shed,” and here I shuddered for effect, “for six months while we all build a house out of mud. But the fact is, we...” and I gestured to Charlie, Josh and myself, “...need to go to school. We just won’t have time to help build a house, however environmentally-friendly and wonderful and all that stuff it is. Plus, if it does rain and the road does get cut off, we’ll have to miss days. And I know you think getting a good education is the best thing we can do to have a good start to our lives, right?”
I looked around with the warmest, friendliest expression on my face that I could muster. The image I wanted to send was of a girl who loved school so much that she couldn’t bear to miss even an hour.
“So, even though it’s a really great adventure,” and here I put on a super-smiley face and made my voice sensible and comforting, “I just don’t think it’s practical. Maybe we should just go for a holiday to a farm. That would be fun.”
“Come here Coco,” said Dad, still smiling. He patted the cushion of the sofa he was sitting on and made like he wanted to hug me. I cringed stiffly away.
“I have an even bigger surprise for all of you,” he said. “How would it be to take a year off school? We can home-school while we get the farm set up and the house built. It’ll be a huge education in heaps of ways. You guys can help build in the day time and then we’ll do catch up school lessons at night. We won’t have a TV or the internet for a while, so you won’t have anything else to do.”
I felt ill. My head was spinning and my heart was pounding. No TV? No internet? Home school? Was my dad insane? What had gotten into him? This couldn’t be real. Surely I wasn’t hearing this? No one was even listening! Dad had gone nuts and everyone else thought it was wonderful. What had happened to my family? How had normal Eastern Suburbs people suddenly been transformed into a bunch of crazy, mud-loving tree-huggers?
My happy face dissolved into a pout. I stood up, wobbling slightly on my legs which felt like jelly, opened my mouth and screamed like a baby.
Waaaaaaah.
Then I ran out of the room, still screaming, thundered up the stairs and slammed my door—again—behind me.
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br /> If they were going to go crazy, I could too.