“A fabulous vegetarian dish, a traditional staple in the Middle East and Europe.”
“Rwanda!” cried Mo, in desperation.
Louie took off flitting around the stage singing, “The Famous Flying Fairy,” in a falsetto.
“Gaza Strip,” accused Mo, hands on hips.
Music to “Hey Big Spender” came over the sound system and Louie wriggled her body at the audience. “What a nightclub!”
“I mean it, everything is funny, isn’t it? How many good jokes have our generation lost to political correctness? Like the one about the Irish abortion clinic—you know, the one that had a nine-month waiting list?”
The crowd laughed, and Louie continued. “We want to reclaim those jokes, reclaim the days when humour was innocent and we could say the word cripple—woops, did I say that?” She put a hand over her mouth. “I really meant physically challenged, of course. Like Mr. Wallis is follicly challenged, and Mrs. Lamont is, well, comically challenged.
“I hate all this political correctness. Don’t you? It’s so phony. I mean, since when, to get into a government department did you have to be a black, crippled lesbian? Woops! I should say, a physically challenged, alternatively sexually oriented, woman of colour?
“And what’s wrong with a few Irish jokes, or Catholic jokes, or Jewish jokes for that matter? What is it about Jewish jokes that so gets up their noses? Oops—did I say noses?”
It went on like that for a while, and the audience laughed more and more at Louie’s jokes, often spluttering at how awful they were. Willa smiled at first, but she started to go cold after a while. She wished she hadn’t torn up her politically correct card. Then she was angry with Louie. Didn’t she see that it wasn’t going back to a more innocent time—it was going back to a more bigoted time? Didn’t she see that Kevin used exactly the same jokes at Burger Giant, only they were against blondes, or women with big boobs, or just women in general? Willa shuffled her feet as Louie went on about how “Confucius say, No such thing as rape—woman with skirt up run faster than man with trousers down.” It was unbelievable that the audience were all laughing at that. Even Geena was howling. It stank. She’d liked Louie, but now she thought she was a real jerk.
Willa stood up and started to move out of her row. Louie was talking about Africa now, and saying something about how their stomachs looked pretty big to her. Geena looked surprised she was leaving so Willa gave her a little wave and kept going. To get to the exit she had to pass right in front of Louie, who was saying, “What’s the worst selling book in the history of the world? Huh?” Halfway through it, she caught Willa’s eye. Louie faltered in her words for a second, then continued. “The Rwandan cookbook’.” Willa didn’t smile. She had the feeling eyes were still on her however, and as she closed the door, she saw Louie glancing that way. Tough.
Willa shoved her hands in her pockets and stomped back to her form room. In one pocket she felt a piece of paper. Blue paper. Die,
bitch.
She screwed it up violently and fired it into a rubbish bin.
It was only fifteen minutes later that Willa noticed girls returning to the form room who had been at the Comedy Club. But they were talking quietly and intensely, and looked very serious, nothing like the audience she had left. She was puzzled, and although she tried to keep working on her maths equations, she was keeping an eye out for Geena.
Eventually she arrived, and made a beeline for Willa.
“You missed it. You missed the most amazing thing, Willa.”
“What?”
Behind her a group of girls followed. “You walked out, didn’t you?” asked one of them, Vika.
“Yeah, I did,” replied Willa, cautiously. She didn’t want to get into an argument about it.
“Wow. I didn’t even think about it.”
“It was spooky,” said another.
“What?
What
?” Willa demanded of Geena.
Geena sat down on a chair. “Not long after you left, Louie Angelo got really carried away, and the jokes started getting worse and worse. And just when everyone began to feel uncomfortable about them—”
“I was still laughing!” admitted one of the others.
“—these pictures started rolling on the big screen behind her. Really ugly things like the bodies of dead Jews at Auschwitz and stuff, and soldiers ransacking villages in Africa. It was gross.”
“And then,” jumped in Vika, “there was this awful silence, like not a word, except for Louie saying ‘A joke’s a joke, right?’ and this soundtrack started up, of us laughing. It was us, they must have been taping us laughing at Louie before, and it was revolting, these pictures and the sound of all our laughter. There was him of child prostitutes in Asia and all these mental patients left behind in war zones. I thought I was going to be sick.”
“It was brilliant,” said Geena, simply. “Just brilliant.”
Willa smiled down at her page. The maths equations smiled back.
p.
It was after school before she saw Louie again. Willa was in the library looking for some information on John McKenzie for her New Zealand history assignment. It was confusing changing schools halfway through the year—some topics she’d missed altogether, while others she was doing for the second time. And since she was repeating most of her sixth form subjects, there were some, like those in New Zealand Studies, that she was on for the third time. Ms. Rosen had given her a separate assignment to do, and to her surprise, Willa was enjoying it.
Louie came in with Mo and another prefect called Julie. Willa didn’t know why, but she watched Louie out of the corner of her eye, and wasn’t surprised to see her slip away from the others almost immediately.
“Hi.”
Willa looked up and feigned surprise. “Oh, hi.”
“That looks heavy,” Louie pointed to the
History oj New Zealand
Willa had picked out. “What’s it for?”
“History. John McKenzie and the breaking up of the Great Estates.”
“Uhuh. Umm, Willa, I know you were at the performance at lunchtime—” she began.
Willa didn’t help her out. It was cruel, letting her do this, but she wanted to hear what Louie would say.
“I noticed you walked out. Before the end.”
“The jokes stank.”
“Yeah, they were meant to!” she exclaimed. Louie grabbed a chair and sat beside Willa at the library table. “I mean, that wasn’t for real. It was like an experiment, you know, about the politics of humour. To get everyone laughing at awful stuff, and then we turned it on them. We had this him footage of concentration camps and child prostitutes—”
“And soldiers in Africa? Mental patients?” Willa decided to put her out of her misery.
“Yeah!” Louie’s face changed. “You knew.”
Willa looked at her. “So you just want to make sure I know that you’re not an ignorant bigot like everyone else who laughed at the jokes, eh.”
Louie’s face hushed. She was wearing a loose-necked sweater and Willa watched the pink spread up her neck and ears, against her dark hairline until her cheekbones were fiery red. It gave Willa a fright.
“I’m sorry. It was great what you did.” In horror Willa felt her own face begin to heat up. “But really, I could hardly have missed it. It was all anyone talked about all afternoon.”
Louie shrugged. “Well, anyway.” She picked at something invisible on the table. “For what it’s worth, I thought it was great that you had the guts to walk out. You were the only one.”
Willa squeezed the edge of the history book and ran the pages between her thumb and forefinger. It made a squirty, fluttery noise.
“I better let you get back to your history,” Louie said, pushing back her chair.
“Did you know Ms. Rosen is Jewish?” Willa asked her. Louie stopped, startled. “She was in the audience, apparently. We spent nearly all history period talking about it.”
“Really?”
“Uhuh. She said that’s what theatre is all about. Challenging ourselves, scaring us.” Willa smiled. “You’ve got another fan, I reckon.”
Louie made some really odd movements then and scratched her ankle or something. Willa could only see the back of her curly head and shoulders. Then she stood up abruptly, and looked all around Willa.
“Are you on tonight? At work?” she asked.
Willa shook her head. “Na, I’ve got fencing on Monday nights.”
Louie shuffled a bit longer then said, “Well, I’ll see you then,” and smiled quickly at the chair beside Willa. And she left.
Willa stared at the
History oj New Zealand
blindly. She likes me, she thought. She likes me. And something grabbed in her stomach.
She didn’t even know her last name. Willa. Willa who? And was she a sixth former or a seventh? She’d said she was repeating mostly sixth form subjects, but if she was a sixth, she should be wearing uniform like the rest. Willa had been wearing purple jeans, a long green jersey that fell almost to her knees and a coloured scarf tied into her hair. Louie had felt scruffy and unimaginative in a sweatshirt and plain blue Levis. She didn’t usually worry about clothes, but Willa had looked so chic. Louie thought about winding a scarf through her black woolly hair then laughed out loud at the image.
She pushed her bike further up the hill. Even a mountain bike had difficulty getting up Fulton Road, but the rest of the valley was flat for biking to school and it was a rush coming down. This morning, thinking of Willa’s comment about speed, Louie had flown down without brakes.
What was it Willa went to on Monday nights—fencing? Louie guessed Willa wasn’t the type to spend her spare time stringing number eight wire along farm posts, which meant it must be the other type of fencing. Swords and things. Weren’t they on horses? It seemed very romantic and medieval.
Whoso pulleth out this sword from this stone and anvil is the true-born king of all Britain.
Somehow Louie had the feeling that Willa wouldn’t be a royalist either. It was intriguing.
There was something else Willa had said to Louie that stayed in her mind. Something that she was saving up for when she got to the top of the hill. Louie strode faster, pumping her legs and leaning heavily on the handlebars. The top of the rise was a favourite place, where the road bent towards the new housing. Before that bend you could look down across the dark gully of bush to the hills on the far side. When it was quiet and Louie’s breathing eased, she could hear the birdsong rise from the bush and float up to where she stood. There was mist hanging about the bush, and despite the occasional flutter of wings it seemed still and primeval. The furthest away hills had a purplish look today, their edges fading in the pale winter light. Louie sucked in the frosty air and felt it caustic in her throat and lungs, then blew out a slow funnel of white breath.
“You’ve got another fan I reckon,” Willa had said.
Another
fan. Did that mean that Willa was the first? Louie let a smile spread on her lips as the call of a tui pierced the air and everything—the bush, the gully, the hills, the blue dome of the sky—seemed to stand still.
p.
Antonio Angelo ran a travel agency in town, imaginatively named Angelo Travel. In business dealings its owner was known as Tony, a man’s man who drove a hard bargain, a fair dinkum Kiwi despite his rather poofy surname; when dealing with women or exhorting the beauty of Europe he became Antonio, complete with hand gestures and the edge of an Italian accent. This combined effect made Angelo’s the most popular travel agency in town for people who liked to talk with intelligent cosmopolitan men and get a good deal at the end of the day. Louie often met her father in town at the agency and watched him in action, greeting people at the door and ushering them to a seat with his impeccable manners, then telling them how terribly sorry he was not to be able to attend to them personally today, but that his marvellously capable right hand woman would look after them admirably and of course he would ensure they got the very best package going and how is your delightful daughter Mrs. Dennison he saw her in
La Boheme
and he could honestly say that he had never seen Mimi played with such feeling, what a voice and how proud they must be.
In fact, Tony Angelo had been born and bred in New Zealand and never visited Italy until he was twenty-eight. But his love for his parents’ homeland was genuine and he and his wife Susi had made numerous trips back since that first one. Susi, like Tony, was from Invercargill, and was determined to show the world, or at least Dunedin, that Invercargill girls could be as cultured and cosmopolitan as any. The Angelos’ house in Garden Village was a statement in architecture, a corrugated iron and glass masterpiece designed for them by a prominent architect, and decorated by Susi according to all the latest trends, complete with stainless steel kitchen and exposed plumbing. This feat didn’t mark an end to the interior decorating magazines scattered through the house however. Susi lived in fear of deconstruction going out of fashion.
Louie liked the new house, which she nicknamed the Metal Petal because of the rounded shape of the corrugated iron design. But she missed her childhood home with its well—walls. The new house was so open, with the living areas divided only by wide steel pillars, and huge windows capturing the view across the valley. Susi talked a lot about the house’s flow—it has extraordinary flow, she’d say—but Louie felt like she might flow right out the window one day and her mother would simply glance up from her magazine and say, “Look at that. What flow.” To combat this irrational fear Louie would move around the house following her outstretched arm like a sleepwalking ballerina saying, “I’m flowing, I’m flowing, I can’t stop…”
Louie left her bike in the garage and headed for the kitchen. She found a bag of nacho chips and dip in the fridge and settled down in front of the telly. Since Nic had left home it was much quieter round the place, but Louie could hear Marietta playing upstairs on her computer. She grinned. Her mother adored Italian names. Nic had been named after Tony’s father Niccolo, she had been named after his grandmother Luisa, but Susi had really gone overboard with her youngest daughter. Marietta loathed her name so much that she had gone for days at a time not answering her family if they used it. She’d been Mary for a while, but hated that now; then she was Marie, but that didn’t last a year; now she was insisting that everyone call her Ettie, which Susi refused to do. Marietta had gone off to sulk over the computer for most of the weekend, and Louie guessed she was still punishing them.