Tiki woke me at six o’clock by which time it was already twenty degrees Celsius. We breakfasted by seven after which she washed the dishes. “Dad” arrived at ten minutes to nine and said that “Mum” would arrive later, unnecessarily adding that she was being troubled by her “piles”.
He and I cleaned out the post holes we had dug a fortnight ago and aligned the pipe posts in them. Our neighbour was occupied elsewhere and, therefore, couldn’t assist us. Another appeared at our rear fence and introduced himself. He seemed keen to have that fence replaced, as well.
“Dad” and I began to bolt the bottom rails into place. The timber for these measured three inches by two and came from a house of eighty years which had recently been demolished in Dapto. We paused only to witness a hornet drag a large spider along the ground near to one of the post holes. Although the temperature only reached twenty-two degrees, it felt warmer. Perhaps this was due to the degree of humidity?
Two short sun showers followed lunch. These forced us to seek shelter for the electric drills and I hoisted in the long black extension cord.
The pair of us affixed the top rails too! Doing this drained us of much of our energy, which meant that we felt quite exhausted by the time it came to the point where we began to mix the concrete that was intended to hold the ten posts firmly in place. We used a larry — which “Dad” assured me was more than one hundred years old — to mix the combination of soil and cement in “Dad’s wheelbarrow. He told the cheeky boy from next door that we mix little boys into cement when he wandered too close to the action.
“Mum” and Tiki had, this morning, bought two bags of cement at a store on the Prince’s Highway at Sutherland. Each had cost three dollars and twenty cents and weighed fifty kilogrammes.
Our next-door neighbour arrived home and declared, ” I’d rather have been doing what you’ve been doing than what I’ve been doing!”
I felt like retorting, “Oh yeah?”. But somehow found the self-control required to prevent me from doing so.
Perhaps it was my sheer exhaustion and not my self-control that prevented me from so doing, for towards the end I splashed the grey powder out of the wheelbarrow and on to “Dad’s feet. It even entered his shoes!
Tiki’s parents departed by ten minutes to seven and after she had cut my hair in the loungeroom, as I watched the news on Channel Two, I endulged in a long hot shower. We commenced to watch “The 7th Dawn”, a film that bears the copyright of 1964. Its cast includes William Holden, Susannah York and Capucine. However, we had seen it twice or even thrice and this, coupled with the fact that I felt so tired, meant that we were in bed by nine o’clock.