Generation A Read Free

over and awaiting his morning treat. “Right. So why are you telling me this?”
    “Well, I believe you still believe in things.”
    “What do you mean, things ?”
    “God. Life after death. That sort of thing.”
    “ That sort of thing? ” My sketchy belief system wasn’t something to haggle about at this time of day, and my brain was racing ass over tit trying to figure out the significance of a call like this.
    I opened the window and threw Timbo an arrowroot biscuit. “So, Mum, what did you believe in before you stopped believing in things?” In the background the Braun was beginning to hiss, and I was glad that the absent bees hadn’t wiped out the planet’s coffee crop.
    “Not much, really. But we’ve decided to make it official.”
    “This is pretty strange, Mum.”
    “No stranger than that afternoon you announced you were becoming a vegetarian.”
    “I was thirteen. It was either that or an eating disorder.”
    “Beliefs are beliefs.”
    “Crikey dick , Mum, but you don’t believe in anything. You just said so. And I’m going to have to ask you a rude question, but are you on drugs?”
    “Sam! No. We’re only taking Solon. It’s safe.”
    “Solon? That stuff that makes time pass quicker?”
    “No. Solon is a lovely drug and it makes my head feel calm.”
    “Okay. It’s still a drug.”
    My mother sighed, which was my cue to say something duti ful and reassuring, my role in the family as first-born. So I said, “It was thoughtful of you to call me and tell me properly.”
    “Thank you, dear. I don’t know how your brothers will take it.”
    “They won’t care. They don’t think about this kind of stuff.”
    “You’re right.”
    Thing is, my brothers are two fuckwits, and lately they’d been taxing my good will by hitting me up for loans and asking me to glue them back together after their never-ending streams of failed relationships with the North Island’s daggiest women. I poured myself a coffee and cut it with hot tap water. “So how do you think this is going to affect your life?”
    “Probably not much. We’re not going to proselytize—if people we know still choose to believe in something, we keep our mouths shut.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it.”
    “Right.”
    We hung up and I looked at my laptop clock. Making an Earth sandwich would take my mind off it all. I finished my coffee, showered, dressed and grabbed my asthma inhaler, and soon I was on my way to visit –40.4083°, 176.3204°.
    The road eastward out of Palmy was empty.
    And my conversation with Mum got me thinking about parents and how they feed your belief systems. I mean, whatever your parents do, good or bad, it allows you to do the same thing with no feelings of guilt. Dad steals cars? Go for it. Mum goes to church every Sunday? You better go too. So, when your parents decide they don’t believe in anything, you can’t rebel against them, because that’d just be rebelling against nothing. It puts you in a state of moral free float. If you copy them and believe in nothing yourself, then it’s the same thing: copying nothing equals zero. You’re buggered either way.
    I wound around the rolling hills. What did I believe in? I’d had five different boyfriends in my twenty-six years, and the boot of each of their vehicles bore a different variation of the Christian fish. Coincidence?
    First off, there was the tousle-haired Kevin, the catalogue model, who had an agape fish on his Honda. Kevin always seemed to have a religious reason for avoiding reality, most memorably not picking me up after work so he could shoot hoops with a Christian men’s group. Relationship breaker. Then there was Miles, the Deadhead atheist, whose fish had DARWIN embedded in its interior. After him came Hal, whose silver fish was followed by the words “ AND CHIPS .” After Hal was Ray, who was a total wanker—I don’t know what I was thinking when I was with him. Everyone has a Ray somewhere in his or her past. Ray’s