I climbed the porch steps. Misers, I wrote, as quickly as I could, then shoved the cap back onto the pen and sprinted across the street. I hid behind a large oak and waited for Sheryl, who had taken a carton of eggs from her bag and was hurling them at the door, one by one. Six eggs broke and dripped down the wood. Pieces of shell lay on the doorstep like the fragments of somebody's mind. After egging the miser's door, Sheryl ran to join me. We crouched there, two rioting spirits hiding behind a tree. Peering out through the leaves, we could see the word that I had written. My handwriting was terrible at the best of times. Sheryl said that the 's' looked almost like a 'y'.
          We didn't quit. The deaf man had been an unfortunate start, we reasoned. The evening would pick up. We did a number of streets. But the people who could hear us properly weren't much better then the deaf man. Nobody seemed to know what Halloween was; they weren't used to spooks knocking on their doors to make demands and they were unequipped to deal with it. They didn't even fake being scared. They were  confused, mystified, and pissed off when we interrupted their evening. It took the wind out of our sails to explain the nature of our expedition. 

     After working most of the neighbourhood we totaled up our

bounty. We had gleaned two small chocolate bars, a packet of wine gums and a can of peaches with the label peeling off. This wasn't the reception we had anticipated. I'd pictured the neighbours coming to the door with generous handfuls of sweets, maybe a cake, possibly a pavlova. That's what would have happened in America Were we being punished just because New Zealanders were too clueless to figure out what was going on? Nobody had even

                                                                                      

Halloween in the Antipodes     11

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