Rain May and Captain Daniel Read Free Page B

sometimes, but mostly she worries.’
    â€˜She’s a counsellor?’
    â€˜No, I just call her that. She’s empathetic, like Counsellor Troy from Star Trek.
    â€˜What is all this Star Trek stuff? What are you talking about?’
    â€˜Television show,’ he said patiently. ‘Mr Spock. Movies, too. Haven’t you ever heard of it?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Pity. So what do you do?’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜I mean, do you play chess, collect stamps, go bushwalking, play basketball, or do you just muck around?’
    Daniel’s question made me feel as though I should do something wonderfully original to impress him, although I wasn’t sure why.
    â€˜I write fridge poetry,’ I said, suddenly inspired, ‘and I should really be unpacking.’
    â€˜Fridge poetry?’
    â€˜You know, it’s what everyone’s doing in America these days.’
    It was Daniel’s turn to sound unsure.
    â€˜Do you just write it on the fridge?’ he said. ‘You mean with textas?’
    â€˜No, stupid, you get a kit of magnetic words.’
    â€˜So you stick the words up on the fridge and they make poems?’
    â€˜Yeah.’
    â€˜Can I come over and have a go?’
    â€˜Well, maybe later, maybe when we’re unpacked. Probably tomorrow?’
    â€˜Hey, that’d be neat. Thanks.’
    â€˜I’d better go now,’ I said. ‘We have loads and loads of stuff to unpack.’
    â€˜Yeah. Counsellor Diana said that moving was really tough. She was going to bring your mum over some soup because she said you’d never get that big old slow combustion stove working and what if you didn’t have a microwave, but Dad said city people might think that a little strange. What will you have for dinner, though, that’s what I want to know.’
    â€˜Pizza, Mum said.’
    â€˜From where?’
    â€˜We’ll get it delivered,’ I said. ‘That’s what we did at home if Maggie worked late.’
    â€˜You can’t get it delivered here,’ Daniel said. ‘Where would it come from?’
    â€˜Well the pizza place, stupid, I mean where else?’
    â€˜There isn’t a pizza place in town,’ Daniel said, ‘so stupid yourself.’
    â€˜No pizza place?’
    â€˜Nup. Closed down. They went to Queensland.’
    â€˜You’re joking?’ I said. ‘That is so horrible. No pizza place. I knew we shouldn’t have moved. I just knew it. I’d better tell Mum.’
    â€˜See you tomorrow,’ Daniel called out as I trudged up to the house, but I was too discouraged to do more than just give him a tiny wave without even turning around.
    â€˜There’s no pizza place,’ I said to Mum. ‘Maggie, we’re going to starve.’
    â€˜We don’t eat that much pizza, Rain.’
    â€˜Tonight, though, we’ll have absolutely nothing to eat. The woman next door, the doctor’s wife? She was going to bring over soup but Daniel’s father said we’d think that was strange so we haven’t even got that.’
    â€˜Who is Daniel?’
    â€˜Their son. He’s eleven and a half and phenomenally bright.’
    â€˜Phenomenally bright?’
    â€˜That’s what he said. Mum, what are we going to do about dinner?’
    â€˜We’ll go down to the supermarket and get something — baked beans. I don’t know, Rain. How’s your room? Can we concentrate on what needs to be done, please?’
    In the end we didn’t even make it to the supermarket. It closed at 5.00 pm on weekends. We nearly didn’t make it to the fish and chip shop. It closed at 7.30 pm and we got there a minute before. The chips were soggy.
    â€˜Disgusting,’ I said, ‘absolutely inedible.’ But I ate them anyway, because there wasn’t anything else.
    â€˜Who would have thought the supermarket would close so early?’ Maggie said.