You've Got to Be Kidding by Todd Alexander

Author:Todd Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Nine

Waz n Shirl

I was giving a talk at Cessnock library to promote the Helga book. It was lovely and comforting to speak to a local audience, where many people (they later told me) shared similar experiences to Jeff and me. It also felt nice to laugh in the face of our joint struggles against the land, running a small business and various industries.

At the end of the talk I opened the floor up to questions. A six-year-old hand shot straight into the air.

‘I want to know what animals you’re going to get next,’ the little girl said.

‘Hmm . . . I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘We are only going to get rescue animals from now on, so I guess it depends what animals need our help the most.’

She seemed totally dissatisfied with my response, but another hand shot up in the air before I had the chance to elaborate.

‘What about sheep?’ a lady asked. She was about seventy and in the audience with her daughter and granddaughter, all of whom had read and loved the book, she told me.

‘Funny you should ask that,’ I said and went on to tell the story of Alfie and how incredibly close we’d come to saving him.

‘Well I have two sheep you can have,’ she said.

‘No, no . . . we are only rescuing animals from now on. Those who need a good home,’ I explained.

‘Well these need rescuing; I can sell them to you,’ she persisted.

‘Oh okay . . . so they need rescuing and you make money off them. Sounds like a win-win for you,’ I said a little dismissively.

After the talk, the lady gave me her card and said I should call if ever I wanted the sheep. ‘They’re twins,’ she explained, ‘and very, very small. They’re too small for us to use for meat and nobody wants to buy them unless we separate them, and I just can’t do that to them.’

‘Okay, I’ll think about it,’ I lied. This certainly wasn’t part of the plan. But then why had fate made us miss out on Alfie?

Mum, Dad and Millie (who were also at the talk) came to dinner with us and I started making jokes about the sheep and how this woman wanted money for two perfectly good animals who probably had a nice little home with her.

‘Sounds to me like they’re going to end up on someone’s Sunday dinner table,’ Dad said.

‘Oh, don’t say that,’ I pleaded as my vegan meal arrived.

‘To me, she sounded pretty desperate to find them a home,’ Jeff added unhelpfully.

‘Should we?’ I asked him.

‘What do you think? You know you can’t help yourself!’

So I texted the woman, We will take the sheep. How much do you want for them?

Whether she knew it or not, the price she quoted was actually less than what we would have paid to save Alfie from the RSPCA.

If the ram isn’t desexed can you please ask your husband to band him for me? I said in a later text, after we’d established how this was all going to work.

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