Tigers on the Beach Read online

  Back at The Ponderosa I check my reflection in the bathroom mirror, and see my big round face with no eyebrows. Do I really have a purple aura, and can Grandpa really see it? For a fraction of a second, I think I see a purple glow around my head.

  Of course, it might just be my imagination.

  I wonder if Samantha has an aura. I bet it’s a sexy one. I bet her last name is sexy too.

  The Ponderosa probably seems a strange name for the ten holiday cabins my family owns and runs. It’s named after a ranch in an ancient TV series called Bonanza, which my dad loved when he was a kid. Our surname is Cartwright, the same as the family in Bonanza. But the Cartwrights from Bonanza were in the cattle business. We are in the hospitality business. Xander calls it the hostility business. My parents, Xander and I live in cabin number one, the biggest. It has two bedrooms and is directly behind the front office, or the ‘reception area’ as Mum and Dad prefer to call it. Xander and I share a bedroom, which I hate doing. We also share a bathroom, which I hate even more. The nine other cabins are for holiday-makers.

  Nathan and Marika are our two helpers. Marika is young, good-looking and Greek. Nathan is university-educated, very serious and hopelessly in love with her. He is also in his mid-twenties, has a beard and is already going bald. Every morning, Nathan and I have to sweep up the little pellets of crap that the possums leave in the driveway at night. We call it possum duty.

  ‘Where do the possums go?’ I ask Nathan, as I sweep. ‘They run around at night growling. But where do they go during the day?’

  ‘They must have a nest nearby,’ Nathan says.

  ‘How can we get rid of them?’

  ‘You can’t. They’re protected.’

  ‘But what if we caught the possums in a cage and released them somewhere else? That’d be okay, wouldn’t it?’

  Nathan looks stern. ‘No. That’s against the law.’

  ‘But they sell possum traps at the store.’

  ‘They’re illegal. It’s cruel to relocate possums. They get upset if they’re separated from their families.’ The conversation no longer interests Nathan because he has seen Marika. ‘Oh god, look at Marika. Isn’t she the most beautiful thing you ever saw?’

  Nathan admires his Greek goddess, who is wheeling a basket full of damp towels on a squeaky trolley. I’m not so crazy about Marika. She never listens and only ever talks about herself.

  ‘Hi, Marika,’ I call.

  ‘I have an eye infection,’ says Marika.

  Nathan looks at her longingly, as if an eye infection is the most romantic thing anyone could have.

  ‘Have you seen the wild horses of Mongolia?’ Nathan asks me, when Marika has passed.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘They have dark-red coats and white muzzles. They are stunning creatures. But Marika . . . what can I say? She’s ten times as beautiful as a Mongolian horse. She’s more beautiful even than a jaguar. Or a snow leopard.’

  ‘Nathan, why don’t you tell Marika how you feel about her? Only don’t say anything about horses or big cats.’

  Nathan looks downcast. ‘She wouldn’t love me back. I’d be devastated.’

  ‘You’d get over it.’

  ‘Never. I’d move to Mongolia to be with the horses.’ Nathan has difficulty scraping some of the pellets from the driveway. It seems as if the possums have been eating epoxy resin.

  ‘I have three university degrees,’ Nathan says. ‘I shouldn’t be doing this. I should find a better job somewhere.’

  ‘Mum and Dad rely on you.’

  ‘Then they should pay me more.’ Nathan frowns as he chisels away.

  ‘Do you believe in auras?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t even know what they are,’ says Nathan.

  ‘My grandpa reckons that some living things give off a glow. He’s a naturalist, sort of like you.’

  ‘Well, he’s right. Some animals do glow. It’s called bioluminescence. There are fish, insects, toadstools –’

  ‘What about people?’

  ‘You’re asking me if people glow? In daylight?’

  ‘Grandpa says they do.’

  ‘With respect, Adam, he must be gaga.’

  ‘Is that like doolally?’

  ‘Gaga is more scientific.’

  I groan as I see Stanley Krongold walking up the driveway. He is the local real-estate agent and he keeps hassling my parents to sell The Ponderosa. He has grey hair dyed black. He also wears fake tan, so his head is orange. His eyes are small and shifty, his moustache pencil-thin. I pick up something and hide it in my hand. As Stanley approaches, I jump up and give him a smile.

  ‘Hello, Mr Krongold,’ I say. ‘You’re looking very orange today.’

  ‘Good morning, Adam,’ he says.

  I hold out my hand and Stanley, looking surprised, shakes it. Then he frowns and looks at his hand.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve been cleaning up after the possums,’ I say.

  Stanley Krongold forces himself to be cheerful again. ‘No harm done,’ he says. ‘Those possums can be devils, can’t they?’

  ‘Do you have them at your place too, Mr Krongold?’

  ‘I’m always cleaning up their droppings. Only I don’t use my bare hands.’

  Mum spies Mr Krongold and wanders over from the office.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Krongold,’ Mum says.

  ‘Hello, Georgia,’ says Stanley, brightly. ‘I thought you might be interested. The local fire brigade is having a cake stall to raise money this Saturday.’

  ‘That is interesting,’ says Mum.

  ‘They do a lot of good, the firefighters.’

  In order to impress Mum, Stanley Krongold is putting on a fake posh accent. He makes ‘firefighters’ sound like ‘far-farters’.

  ‘They do,’ says Mum, ‘particularly when it comes to farting far.’

  I love my mum.

  Stanley looks surprised to be so crudely mimicked. He adjusts his tie. ‘They had to go to Joyce Kelly’s place last week. She was making a cake for the stall and she set fire to her kitchen. Strange how things work out.’

  ‘It is strange.’

  Stanley looks around, tapping his foot. ‘I wonder if you’ve given further thought to what we discussed?’

  ‘The cake stall? I’d be useless. I make bloody awful cakes.’

  ‘I meant selling your property.’

  ‘We don’t want to sell our property,’ says Mum.

  ‘I can understand that. It’s a beautiful property. But my customer in Singapore wants it very badly and he’ll pay twice what it’s worth. Do you want to know how much he’ll pay?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well over a million dollars. That’s a lot of money. What do you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you saying yes, you’ll sell?’

  ‘No. I’m saying yes, a million dollars is a lot of money.’

  ‘So that’s definitely no, you won’t sell?’

  ‘Yes. It’s definitely no.’

  ‘I could possibly make him go even higher.’

  ‘Mr Krongold, who is this mysterious customer?’

  Mr Krongold scratches his moustache. ‘He’s a businessman . . . in Macau.’

  ‘I thought you said he was in Singapore,’ says Mum.

  ‘He was. Now he’s in Macau. He moves around quite a bit.’

  Stanley Krongold’s lies are as effortless to him as breathing.

  ‘Mr Krongold, we will let you know if we intend to sell,’ says Mum.

  ‘Thank you, Georgia.’ He flashes chemically bleached teeth that don’t suit an orange man. ‘And do please call me Stanley.’

  He remains for a moment longer, looking at his hand, perhaps waiting for Mum to call him Stanley.

  ‘You don’t have a tissue, do you?’ he finally asks.

  Mum looks at the mess in his palm. ‘Good heavens,’ says Mum. ‘Did a possum go to the toilet in your hand?’

  Mr Krongold doesn’t answer.

  Mum fetches a tissue and Mr Kr
ongold wipes away the mess.

  ‘I shook hands with Adam,’ says Mr Krongold. ‘His hands were dirty but he obviously didn’t realise.’

  ‘Adam, I hope you apologised,’ Mum calls to me. I look up. ‘I did.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ says Mr Krongold. ‘It really doesn’t matter. Well, good day.’

  He smiles and goes. We all know perfectly well that there is no mysterious customer. The person who desperately wants to buy The Ponderosa is, of course, Stanley Krongold himself. He wants to build a luxurious resort for the wealthy tourists that he is sure will one day come.

  ‘That was childish, Adam,’ says Mum. I am a picture of innocence. ‘What?’

  ‘Holding possum poo when you shook hands with Mr Krongold.’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  I shrug.

  ‘Well done,’ says Mum. ‘Now please wash your hands. You are in the hospitality business, after all.’

  After cleaning my hands I wander into the reception area. The messy family in cabin number seven has checked out. I want to know if they have written anything in the visitors’ book, about how welcoming and friendly we all are at The Ponderosa. Marika and I have cleaned out their cabin every morning for the last four days. Drunken monkeys would be tidier. But there are no new entries in the visitors’ book. We have worked so hard to please them, but they haven’t written a thing. A few pages back, one kind person has written, ‘Staff helpful, very clean facilities’. A kid has written, ‘Greek lady has nice boobies’. At least, I assume it’s a kid. It might be Nathan – although a man with three university degrees should be able to come up with something better than ‘Greek lady has nice boobies’. On the office wall is a poster. It’s a picture of chimpanzees, grinning and showing their teeth. Beneath them is a caption:

  YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE. BUT IT HELPS.

  That night, I’m at the computer, building a website for The Ponderosa. I’ve been doing it for ages. I’ll need to be good with a computer if I’m going to work in movie special effects, which is what I want to do if my career as a stand-up comedian doesn’t pan out.

  ‘I can recite pi to one hundred decimal places,’ says Xander, lying the wrong way round on his bed, with his feet on the pillow.

  ‘I don’t care,’ I say.

  ‘3.141592653589793238,’ says Xander.

  ‘Shut up.’ I’m irritated because Grandpa’s email hasn’t arrived.

  ‘4626433832,’ says Xander.

  ‘If you don’t shut up I will murder you.’

  ‘And I will murder you.’

  I say nothing, but continue to build the website. My computer thinks it is a better speller than I am, and it keeps ‘correcting’ words that I mistype. This is why the splash page says, ‘Come to The Ponderosa for a woeful holiday.’ I meant to type ‘wonderful’ but my computer isn’t smart enough to realise.

  ‘Good night,’ Xander says, turning himself round the right way.

  ‘Good night,’ I say.

  ‘I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to my beetles,’ says Xander.

  Xander collects beetles and keeps them in shoeboxes; another reason why I don’t like sharing a bedroom with him. Xander soon falls asleep and at last there is peace.

  As I build the website, an email arrives with an electronic ping. It’s from Grandpa. The subject line is:

  NOT SUITABLE FOR ADULTS.

  I open it to find that Grandpa has sent me a short story and not the funniest joke in the world.

  A man is on the front porch of his house, working on his motorbike. The motorbike slips into gear, runs over him then smashes through the front door of the house and ends up in the living room. The man’s wife takes him to hospital. Meanwhile, the wife’s mother, who is staying in the house, remains behind and tries to tidy up the mess. When she sees that there is petrol on the floor, she mops it up with paper towel then throws the towels in the toilet. The man isn’t badly hurt, so they send him home from the hospital. Depressed about his smashed-up motorbike, the man lights a cigarette then goes to the toilet. He throws his lighted match into the bowl when he sits down. Ten seconds later there is an explosion and the man has to go to hospital again.

  It’s not so much a joke as an urban myth. It probably isn’t a true story. But it’s a good story. I laugh loudly enough to wake up Xander. He demands to know what’s so funny, so I tell him. And because my delivery is perfect, we fall about laughing. We laugh so hard it hurts. Then Mum appears in the doorway and I know we are in trouble for laughing too loudly. But she doesn’t look angry. She seems small and pale. She says that something terrible has happened and could we please stop laughing. We’re delirious by this stage and it’s hard not to keep laughing about the man whose toilet exploded.

  Dad joins Mum in the doorway. He also looks pale. We stop laughing and Dad delivers the tragic news. Grandpa has died of a heart attack.

  Xander cries and the four of us hug.

  I can’t believe it. Just a few hours ago, Grandpa was laughing and telling jokes. I feel bad for laughing so hard at his last email, but it’s probably what he would have wanted. Why did it take so long to arrive? Did it get lost in cyberspace, or did it have a very long way to travel?

  That was a month ago. Every time I hear a good joke I think of Grandpa. Sometimes, when my computer pings, I get excited because I think it might be a joke from Grandpa, as if he could send me something from beyond the grave. I also keep seeing people in public who look like him. It’s weird. I’d never noticed so many Grandpa look-alikes before.

  My website for The Ponderosa is nearly finished. I wish Grandpa could see it. I wonder if there’s wi-fi in the afterlife. I’m sure Grandpa would like the site. Dad says that there will come a time when Grandpa’s death will be easier to bear, but it hasn’t happened yet. I dream about him a lot. They’re good dreams, and not as way-out as my dreams normally are. Often we’re just sitting on the landing of Grandma and Grandpa’s big house on The Escarpment. Grandpa and I used to spend a lot of time there. It was the best place in the world for talking things over and solving problems, not that I ever had many.

  Even though we’re sad inside, we try to look cheerful for the guests who stay at The Ponderosa. That’s our job, after all. Dad says that a good cure for sadness is to keep busy. Now that the school year is over, I’m working extra hard at The Ponderosa. Most mornings, before our workday starts, Dad and I jog along the beach. Xander refuses to join us and calls us crazy. I don’t mind. Knowing Xander, he’d probably jog into the sea by accident.

  ‘You’re quiet this morning,’ Dad says, as we finish a half-hour jog. ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  I’m actually thinking about girls, ones with long red hair. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. I look out at a calm sea from which amazing girls refuse to emerge. It isn’t quite six o’clock and the sun has just risen. Herring Island, surrounded by its dangerous reef, is golden. There are no amazing girls on Herring Island. There can’t be. It’s surrounded by a reef so treacherous that it eats boats.

  Apart from the gentle lapping of waves, the only sound is the call of the arkle-arkle birds. I don’t know their real name. Grandpa would have known.

  ‘We’d better get back,’ says Dad. ‘The guests will be waking up.’

  I’m panting and sweaty. It’s probably just as well that there are no amazing girls around. I don’t look my best. I take off my T-shirt and look down at my wobbly belly. Is it just puppy fat? (This is a strange expression. I can’t remember seeing any puppies that are fat.) Will I ever get a sixpack like all the guys in Hollywood? Do they really have sixpacks or are they added later with computer graphics? I don’t want a job in Hollywood if all I end up doing is adding sixpacks to the cast of films like Twilight.

  Something glints in the sand. I stop to pick up the object and turn it over in my hand. It’s a blank rifle cartridge. We often find cartridges on the beach. They
are fired from the yacht club rifle to start the races. But this cartridge has not been fired. By some miracle, it’s landed here, filled with gunpowder.

  ‘Now that is very interesting,’ says Dad. He takes it from me and puts it in the pocket of his shorts. ‘Very interesting indeed.’

  When we get to The Ponderosa, Dad says he wants to show me something scientific. He leads me to the back of our property, past the cabins, to the fence where the Barnetts’ farm starts. Using his pocketknife, Dad opens the cartridge and shows me the black gunpowder packed inside. He lays a piece of tar paper on the ground and empties the powder onto it, so that it makes a narrow trail about a metre long.

  ‘Gunpowder is a compound of sulphur, potassium nitrate and charcoal,’ Dad explains. He likes science. ‘The Chinese invented it for fireworks, not weapons.’

  Then Dad takes out a box of matches.

  ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ I ask.

  ‘This is science, Adam. And I’m teaching you something. That’s always good.’

  ‘But if you light the gunpowder, won’t it blow up?’

  Dad smiles knowingly. ‘It won’t explode. That’s the scientific thing. It will make gas. What makes the explosion is the gas blowing apart whatever contains it, like a hand-grenade or a firecracker. It will burn brightly, like a fuse, but that’s all. It’s something I remember from school.’

  I trust my father. After all, he’s a smart guy to own and run a business. And he’s been on the planet for thirty years longer than I have. He must have learned a few things. When he tells me that the gunpowder won’t explode, I believe him.

  Dad sets it alight.

  There is an explosion.

  It isn’t just a little puff. It’s a very large puff with a loud bang. For a moment I think I’ve been blinded. But the smoke clears and we notice a horrible smell in the air, which we realise is the odour of our cooked hair. Dad’s face is bright red. I presume mine is too. Dad’s eyebrows have gone completely, along with the front part of his hair.