16. One day

One day there was no more sheep to shear.

There were some left in a pen that had to be sorted out for the 7 o'clock truck the next morning. Some lambs were going to the Hamilton market to be auctioned. Some ewes in lamb were staying at the shed to be scanned.

In the evening in the green room Liyan was worrying about F-sharp in Auckland.

Elle, as for her, had had to bear Jim's sarcasms all day long. He seemed to take great pleasure in denigrating France and the French on any issue.

- "Maybe someone will steal her", Liyan was saying, "or else she will run away to find her oboe of the Philharmonia orchestra..."

- "I am sick of listening to these stupid stories..." Elle was saying.

- "But..." Liyan interrupted.

- "Do you know, Liyan, that volcano eruptions and earthquakes, air pollutin, skin cancer and the hole in the ozone layer, all that is because of the French!" Elle went on laughing, "Yes, it is!... Moruroa, Tokyo and Taupo stand in a triangle... ah! Liyan... a triangle!"

Liyan did not follow.

- "But it's true she could run away", the doll went on, "She told me she didn't want to be stuck in her box and she was sick of doing Gs and Fs and playing Green Sleeves."

- "She said that, did she?"

Elle thought it over.

She had adopted the flute because she wanted to be able to play music while travelling. It didn't take much room and it was easy to carry. She liked the sound of the flute but she was no virtuoso. Times and places where she could "work" her instrument proved to be rare. What should she do. Sell it again? Send it back to Motueka? Liyan would not stand being separated from F-sharp now. Elle promised herself to play her flute more often.

Very early the next day the lambs for Hamilton were loaded onto a big blue two storey truck. The dogs busied themselves to make the sheep get onto a wooden ramp built there to this effect. The driver of the smelly and bleeting truck counted the animals as they went into his truck one by one. The counting was more accurate this way. Their attempts of the day before in the sheep yard had never given the same figure.

At the Hamilton market's sheep yard that morning, the sheep pens overflowed.

The offical auctioneers were perched on a plank running as a patrol track above the pens. They were addressing a crowd of farmers in rubber boots, check shirts and leather hats. Some were wearing the brown oilskin coat in fashion in the area. It was a real oilskin you had to rubb with oil regularly in order to keep it waterproof. Elle had wanted to buy one. They were expensive and heavy. She had come out of the co-opshop without an oilskin but with a gate lock. A super simple and efficient system, she thought, which could be used one day perhaps in her native village in France.