Jake's Long Shadow Read Online Free PDF

man’d put one of those on my finger.)
    Now, let me guess as to your occupation …
    All of a sudden I felt embarrassed. As if being a worker in a dye house somehow made me anything but at the right place. (Before that it was a potato-chip factory, standing on the line grabbing the chips with any blemishes , left the job ten kilos more than when I started. Walked out. My workmates said I shoulda gone for sexual harassment, but looking at my chip-inflated body in the mirror I couldn’t see how any employment disputes committee would believe anyone’d harass me. Even though my supervisor — effin’ big Samoan he was — felt I was his property, grabbing handfuls of me, pushing me into the locker room, covering my face with slobber, trying to get me to jack him off. Talk the way Islanders do: You ish nysh to me, Sharneeta. I love you.
    Yeah, right. What would a sex-starved coconut emotional illiterate know about loving a woman, even me?)
    I felt bad ’cos I hadn’t planned on getting a car, couldn’t afford it. Bad ’cos I didn’t know what to say to this man with a way about him that made me feel inferior, and talking about my weekly wage as if he knew every dollar I spent and swearing I could afford a car — easy. Without pain, lady. I promise you. 
    Which is why I drove away with a $7000 car and more happy than I’d ever been in my life. Radio on. Trying to find a station that played my kind of music so I could maybe sing along with a number or two. Found a station, Golden Hits they called it. Yeah.
    Sang my flippin’ heart out — if I knew the words or even the chorus. Drove round town all day, didn’t want the dream to stop. I had a whole four years to pay it off, only $59.00 a week. A $50 and $10 note, a buck change. Smoothie’d said I only had to cut my smoking down and I had half the car payments covered. Make myself available for overtime at work and that’d more than cover the other half. Didn’t mention petrol, insurance, registration , warrant of fitness, maintenance like tyres and parts needing replacing. At first I felt my life had taken a turn for the better right out of the blue.
    But at work I couldn’t get overtime. And my smoking crept back to what it was before the car. I tried eating less, but the car just drank more juice and the only good thing came outta that was I lost some weight from all those chips I’d ate all day long, out of boredom more than anything.
    Just managed to keep up the payments from my savings whilst taking five weeks to find another job. I shoulda gone onto the dole right away, everyone I know wouldn’t’ve hesitated. But for some reason I didn’t want to. Maybe pride. Maybe my weird nature.
    Next job paid less than Jones’ Crisps, and I was struggling. Yet I kept the payments up and another year passed. How, I don’t know. I do know that I virtually stopped drinking in that time.
    Then a couple of big bills came in, one for the phone when one of my useless cousins on my Maori side, Mum’s — though the white cousins on Dad’s side are just as bad — turned up. Stayed long enough to run up $700 of toll calls. Then disappeared, no thanks for the month’s free board and food (felt like paying a heavie a hundred bucks to get her face messed up). She used me. Telecom let me pay it off over a year, but something had to give from my living costs. Car payments were the only slack I had left, or so I thought.
    Struggled for several months, then couldn’t cope any longer, went to see Smoothie to talk about changing the arrangement. Only to meet another person, a stranger. Cold-eyed, kept sighing, looking away, I knew he wasn’t listening.
    Finally he said, Sharneeta, I sold you the car in good faith. Didn’t pull out a gun and force you to buy it. We discussed your job, your financialcircumstances, and I even went out of my way to help you on a personal