Page 45 of Delicious

Feeding The Grump

Jax Calder

ChapterOne

David

I’m fairly sure that when I’m on my deathbed, I’ll still be cursing Benji Gange’s name.

“Fucking Benji Gange,” I say to my brother on the phone I’m holding one-handed while I try to repair the ancient water trough’s third leak this month.

“What’s he done this time?” My brother Lance sounds a combination of amused and exasperated, like he’s watching a rerun of a show where he already knows the ending.

“He’s only gone and painted his gate to the Boundary Ridge paddock.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“He’s painted it purple,” I say.

And not just any purple. This purple is so bright it could probably guide lost sheep home in the dark.

“It’s on his land,” Lance says mildly.

“But I’m the one who has to look at it! It’s a bloody fence, not an art exhibition.”

I can too easily imagine the smug smile on Benji’s face as he wielded his paintbrush like Michelangelo redecorating the Sistine Chapel. He’ll have known what my reaction would be.

I’m fairly sure that’s why he did it. My hands clench just thinking about that.

“I’m going to have to go over to his place and talk to him about it,” I say.

“Of course you are,” Lance says.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing.”

“I know your nothings. Come on, spit it out.”

“It’s just that everything the guy does seems to wind you up. You’ve been like that from the moment he took over his uncle’s farm. Stuff you normally wouldn’t care about suddenly becomes a capital offense when Benji’s involved.”

He’s right.

Would I care so much if Bruce and Louise McMillian, my neighbors on the other side, had done the same thing?

But hell would freeze over before Bruce would ever paint a gate that garish purple, so the question is redundant.

Lance is right that something about Benji Gange has rubbed me the wrong way from the first moment I met him.

After his bachelor uncle passed away, rumors flew around the district that his nephew from Auckland had inherited the farm.

I vaguely remember Benji as a kid visiting during the summer holidays, trailing after his uncle like an imprinted duckling, but he was five years younger than me, so I hadn’t paid much attention to him.

But when he turned up in his city-slicker clothes, his light-brown hair styled with some sort of product that made it shine like a newly polished pickup truck on show day, I’d definitely paid attention.

Mainly to scoff.

The guy would last two months farming if he was lucky.

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