Chapter 9: Goodbyes

Mr and Mrs Reed were pleased to be home, and touched by our thoughtfulness in arranging for Uncle Frank and the twins to meet them and preparing a ‘Welcome Home’ lunch, but what they actually needed was a shower and a few hours sleep. Mrs Reed didn’t beat about the bush.

“We’re going to live in Colorado for a couple of years!”

Frank was the only one who seemed relatively unaffected by this announcement. The rest of us were like a shoal of stunned mullet for a few seconds, and then there was chorus of ‘whys’ and ‘whens’ and ‘what abouts’.

Boiled down, the story was simple. The woman who had financed the trip was proposing to set up an Institute of Family Law at ‘Youseebee’ in a place called Boulder. She was endowing a professorship and had offered Mrs Reed the job on a two-year contract at an eyewatering salary. There was a budget and discretion to employ staff, and it was understood that Mr Reed would be one of them. He would make more as his wife’s ‘peeyay’ in Boulder, than he did as a junior partner in Hopkins Davies

“Your Mum was my paralegal and gopher when we got together. I can be hers.”

The twins (understandably) were most immediately concerned about themselves. When will we go? Where will we live? Where will we go to school? Will we have to wear uniform? Will we be behind the other kids when we get to Colorado? What will we do with this house? Why can’t we stay here and visit you in the holidays? Can we join a country club with tennis courts?

Mr and Mrs Reed were too tired to cope with the barrage of questions. They left us to clean up and departed for bed, promising to have a proper family discussion later. The twins seemed pretty detached, and my goodbye smooch with Bronwyn was strangely flat. Frank wanted me to work, so we took Robyn over to drop her at her Aunt Emma’s. After the almost obligatory ‘cuppa’, we spent the rest of the afternoon ‘earning a quid’. We didn’t talk much about the bombshell the Reeds had dropped, but Frank reminded me about his earlier advice to consider my ‘boyfriend’ status as a temporary arrangement.

“You’ve been really lucky to have had the relationship with Bronwyn and the Reeds. Her parents are really nice people, and you and Bronwyn have learned a huge amount from each other.” He looked serious. “Learning about parting and saying goodbye probably isn’t as much fun as learning to eat pussy, but it’s just as important!”

“It’s not goodbye forever. They’re only going for two years!”

“You know they’re going, but you don’t know when they’re coming back. They might not come back at all!”

“It’s certainly goodbye in terms of a relationship, but we’ll try to make the best of the time we have left. That will include saying ‘goodbye’”

I wasn’t ready to consider the emotional implications of the news at that stage. The Reeds were going, that was clear, but obviously not just yet, and meanwhile we were having our first break from the steady pressure to keep up with tests and assignments.

The school year in NZ runs from February to December, so the summer holiday incorporates Xmas. Ever since I was a toddler, we had had a ‘Family Xmas’ with Frank and Grandma and Grandpa Kerr at their place, and from the time I had been old enough to go on the Railways Road Services bus on my own, I had always spent a couple of weeks with Grandma Henley and Uncle Bruce on the farm in the South Waikato hill country where Mum had grown up.

Lung cancer had killed Grandpa Henley in his late fifties about the time I was born, and Mum’s older brother had taken over the farm. He had never married, but no one ever talked about Robert, who had been his friend since they were teenagers, and worked with and for him, living in ‘shearer’s quarters’ adjacent to the farmhouse. As Uncle Frank would sometimes say - ‘See no evil!’ This summer, I didn’t really want to go, but Mum and Dad were insistent. Uncle Frank advised me to ‘suck it up’.

“You can toss yourself off three times a day.” He laughed. “You might even find a friendly sheep!”

“Fuck off! I remembered a joke that had circulated at school.

“So how do you know a sheep is friendly?” Frank looked puzzled,

“Easy – you don’t have to put their back legs down the front of your gumboots!”

“Jesus! I walked into that one!”

The Reeds tried to have a ‘family Xmas’ as normal. I got included peripherally, and Bronwyn came to a meal at the grand-Kerr’s as my girlfriend and charmed them bigtime Then, things at the Reed’s got very busy. They were booked to leave in mid-February, a week after school started. Before then, they had to rent the house, finish up or refer on their clients, and sell the car. Then there was packing up their personal stuff and cramming it into the garage.

But I missed most of that. I was working with Uncle Bruce and Robert on the farm, putting up new fences to keep stock off some hillsides where the land was slipping away, and planting poplars in the raw clay that had been exposed. The work was a lot more physical than I was used to with Frank, but it was neat to be working with two guys who clearly knew one another really well and operated together like a well-oiled machine. I came back bulked up enough so Bronwyn noticed.

“Has your cock got bigger too?”

“Doubt it. Too tired to exercise it most of the time!”

“Let’s give it a workout!” We did.

We had a week before school started, and another week before the Reeds left. The twins were given the task of cleaning the place from top to bottom ready for the new tenants. It was a big house, and Robyn and I were roped in. That was strangely okay. We all worked hard and made the most of our opportunities to enjoy each other’s bodies in our ‘rest periods’. I had my first ever shower with a lover. The Reed’s bathroom had a shower over the tub, and even though the setup was actually too small for two people, Bronwyn and I sat in the tub under the rose and pleasured each other.

“Is your bottom sensitive?” Bronwyn’s question caught me by surprise, since in all our explorations together, we had never ventured back there. I knew my bum hole and the skin immediately around it was sensitive, since I had explored that area in the shower pretty regularly from the time I started pulling myself.

“Yup. But shit is loaded with nasty germs, so I only finger it in the shower.” I advanced my hand between Bronwyn’s legs and began to finger her perineum and inch ever closer to her rosebud “What about yours?”

“It’s different from my pussy. I don’t think I would ever want to have a cock in there, but a finger just a little way in is nice, specially when it’s lubed up with spit or my juice.”

I knew an ‘action cue’ when I heard one. For bums, a soapy lather seems to work ok as a lubricant, and we had a lot of quite energetic fun. The plastic curtain on the rail around above the tub kept at least some of the water off the enamel painted walls and linoleum covered wooden floor. Wringer mops Rule!

Neither of the twins was keen to discuss or even acknowledge the possibility that our separation might be permanent. Both of them held fast to the fact that their mother had been offered a ‘two-year contract’, and they expected to return to Auckland for years twelve and thirteen and the University courses that we all assumed would follow our High School studies. We all recognised that we would no longer be in boyfriend/girlfriend relationships and would be free to form relationships with others, and Bronwyn joked about me and Robyn getting together as soon as they were airborne.

“We’ll be ‘wheels up’ and you’ll be ‘pants down’!” I pushed it.

“A ‘knee trembler’ up against the perimeter fence ya reckon?” Robyn was thoughtful.

“It was hot when we were all in the big bed. We’ve been very lucky your parents have treated us like adults, but it won’t be so easy to get together and do sexy stuff when you’re gone.” She eyeballed me. “I really like you as a friend, and I get wet when I think about doing stuff with you, but I don’t think I want to be your girlfriend!”

Brian opened his mouth and put his foot straight in it. I’m not sure whether he was just a little bit shitty at the idea that I might be the one to ‘go all the way’ with Robyn, or whether it was anxiety about how he himself would find someone to ‘go all the way’ with in a new location with a new culture, but either way, as Frank would put it, he ‘led with his chin’.

“You get wet when you peel a cucumber!” Robyn took that as a putdown. She was clearly hurt and angry.

“Fuck you ya shithead!” She gave a half sob, and turned away to speak directly to Bronwyn. “It’s just like Emmy says –guys run around sticking their dicks into every hole in town and they’re studs! Any woman who fancies anyone except her lawfully wedded husband is a tart. A slag, a skank. A slut!” Her voice hardened. “Fuck it – it’s not fair!” Brian reached out to her, but Robyn pushed him away.