In Which Captain Slinky and Chief Engineer Pickle-Paw Travel a Long Way

11 July

“Imagine,” C.E.P said to me last night, lying in the single bed by the door[1] in the studio unit of the Tokaanu Oasis Motor Inn, “if our father had been a travelling salesman, and we had taken after him, and we spent all our time travelling around the North Island and sleeping in rooms like this.”

We lay there contemplating this thought for a while.

“What would we sell?” she asked.

“Ointment!” I shouted. “The red and the blue.”

“Yes,” she said, “ointment. The red and the blue. We would confer behind our folder, silently, then announce our unanimous verdict – in this particular case, we certainly recommend the red.”

“Goodnight, Mr Lomas,” I said.

“Goodnight,” she said, and put in her earplugs.

***

I drove the small blue car all the way from Island Bay to Tokaanu, stopping at Otaki for tea and at Taihape for seafood chowder (which appeared to have mated with a laksa a few generations back and had mitochondrial rice vermicelli slithering around the viscous orange fluid. Not recommended). Chief Engineer Pickle-Paw was demoted at Waiouru, (to Third Assistant Trainee Engineer), when it was revealed that she had left the map book at Taihape. There was no black ice on the Desert Road (that we saw), the car didn't skid, gear-changing was fine.

At Tokaanu, the maintenance man directed us towards unit 14. Small, cold, an electric blanket on one bed (snaffled by CEP). The sign above the bench said “Please do not cook fish or other odious foodstuffs in our rooms”.

The Oasis Motel has a mineral hot pool – a concrete rectangle with a sloping roof. It was just the right depth for me to sit comfortably with the hot water coming all the way up to my neck. Chief Engineer Pickle-Paw (status restored), rolled her towel into a bundle and drowned it to sit on and save herself.

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[1]    The lock taped open after an incident in which Pickle-Paw had placed a plaintive call to the maintenance man, saying, “we're locked in...”