‘He’s a big boy,’ said Rose. ‘He can look after himself.’
Kim sighed. ‘But he’s stuffing everything up. Josie’ll meet someone else if he doesn’t stop mucking around.’
‘Just stop it, Kim!’ I said sharply. ‘You’re making everything uncomfortable and embarrassing, and – and Matt’s one of my best friends, and I’d like it to stay that way.’
‘Sorry,’ muttered Kim.
‘The trouble, Kimlet, is that you’re going about it in completely the wrong way,’ said Aunty Rose, opening the door of her car. ‘If you keep insisting that they were made for each other the silly twits will both just dig their toes in and refuse point blank to admit it, even though you’d think it would be perfectly obvious to anyone with half a brain.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ I said furiously, storming across the gravel to my car, throwing myself into the driver’s seat and shoving it into gear. This would have made for a much more dramatic exit if I hadn’t found third gear instead of first and promptly stalled.
I WAS STILL good and mad when I got back to the flat, and I stamped up the steps to the back door. The kitchen and sitting-room lights were still on – Andy really was rebelling to have gone out for the night without switching them off. But when I went into the kitchen he was still there, sitting at the table surrounded by empty beer bottles with his laptop in front of him. It was only nine-thirty, and the restaurant he’d booked for this evening (a terribly upmarket place attached to a boutique hunting lodge that mostly attracted overweight American businessmen who saw no shame in shooting old tame stags in a paddock) was a good forty-minute drive away.
‘Didn’t you go out for dinner after all?’ I asked. Aunty Rose would have approved of my choice of words – although pleasing Aunty Rose wasn’t high on my list of priorities just at that moment.
‘Nope,’ said Andy, then he tipped half a bottle of Speight’s down his throat, pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘How was your night?’
‘Crap.’
‘Beer?’ he asked on his way to the fridge, weaving slightly.
‘Why not?’ I said, taking the bottle he handed me and leaning back against the bench. ‘So, your night was crap too?’
‘Yep,’ said Andy. He twisted the cap off his beer bottle and took a grimly determined swig – the action of a man who wishes to get legless in the shortest possible space of time.
I looked at him thoughtfully, wondering whether or not to enquire further. He might like to tell someone about it, or he might be pissed off by a flatmate he barely knew poking her nose into his private affairs. Ah, stuff it, I thought. ‘What’s up?’
‘Bronwyn thinks we should take a break. What did she say? “It’s not you, it’s me.” And then: “I still love you, I’m just not in love with you.”’
‘Bugger,’ I said.
‘She could at least have said something original,’ said Andy morosely, downing the rest of his beer and squinting into the empty bottle in a slightly puzzled fashion, as though he couldn’t understand how it had reached that state.
‘A poor effort,’ I agreed. ‘You’re not writing her a drunken email, are you?’ Remembering in the morning that you’ve sent someone an ungrammatical tirade declaring your undying love or rubbishing their bedroom prowess (or possibly both) is very disheartening.
‘Nah, just updating my Facebook status.’ He sat down in front of his laptop again and resumed typing laboriously with his right index finger. ‘Single. There.’ He blinked owlishly at the screen.
I took a large mouthful of beer. ‘Want to see what I found on Facebook today?’ I asked.
‘Okay.’
‘Then shove over,’ I said and pulled up another kitchen chair beside him. ‘All done?’
‘Yeah.’
I logged out of his profile and into my own. ‘Now, where is it? Ah. Here.’ I scrolled down to find a comment posted yesterday by Chrissie de Villiers. The profile picture beside the comment showed Chrissie peeping coyly up through a screen of streaky blonde hair, all smoky eyeliner and sharply defined cheekbones.
Thanks so much for all the birthday wishes, everyone. Wonderful weekend, wonderful party, wonderful friends, wonderful man . . . Hangover not quite so wonderful. Hard to come back down to earth after being spoilt like that.
‘Read it?’ I asked.
‘Um, yeah,’ said Andy.
‘But wait, there’s more.’ I clicked on the new photos Chrissie had posted, in which happy, laughing people with glasses in hand squinted at the camera in the bright sunlight while leaning back in their chairs, wearing silly hats and becoming progressively more flushed of face and glazed of eye as the evening wore on.
‘Friends of yours?’ Andy was clearly wondering why I was inflicting pictures of drunken revellers on him in his darkest hour.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And that’s my house – well, mostly the bank’s house, but I pay half the mortgage. And those are all my friends, and that’s my ex-boyfriend, and that’s my ex–best friend snuggling up to him. And that was supposed to be a combined birthday party for both her and me, except that I came home from work not long ago and found them having sex in an armchair.’ My favourite armchair, too, just to add insult to injury.
‘That sucks,’ said Andy solemnly.
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said and logged out of Face-book with a vicious click of the mouse. ‘You know what?’
‘What?’
‘I think we need something more serious than beer. What’ve we got?’
Chapter 7
I WOKE UP horribly early the next morning to the sound of some sadistic bastard operating an electric hedge-trimmer just outside the window. I lay for a while hoping this prat would be struck by lightning or washed away in a bizarre flash flood. Neither happened, so I groaned and rolled out of bed.
My skull had shrunk so that my brain was in imminent danger of being squeezed out of my ears, my teeth seemed to be covered in wool and my tongue was far too big for my mouth. I staggered up the hall to the kitchen and gulped down about two litres of water before looking dully at the empty bottles strewn across the table. Andy and I had decided, I seemed to recall, that gin mixed with chocolate milk was delicious, and when we ran out of this gourmet concoction we had opened the coconut liqueur Andy had discovered in the recesses of the cupboard above the microwave.
On my way back from the bathroom I peeped around Andy’s door, just in case he was lying unconscious in a pool of vomit. The smell of his room made me recoil hastily; the fug of beer fumes laced with old sock was so thick you could have cut blocks out of it with a spade.
‘Are you alive?’ I called from the safety of the hall.
‘Unnghhh,’ came the answer.
‘Great stuff.’ I left the door wide open in the hope that he might get some fresher, oxygen-containing air and went back down the hall.
I really just wanted to crawl back into bed, but I had promised to go to the beach with Clare and her kids so I swallowed two Panadol and made myself a scrambled-egg sandwich instead. Scrambled-egg sandwiches on soft brown bread were Chrissie’s sure-fire hangover cure, and even though I wished Chrissie would develop some horrible, disfiguring face fungus, denying the effectiveness of the sandwich would have been childish. I put on my sunglasses and took my sandwich out to eat on the back step, ruing my stupidity. What kind of moron gets rotten drunk the night before accompanying three small children to the beach for the day?
Luckily, by the time Clare picked me up at nine I’d improved to the stage of mere mild seediness. Stopping in the driveway she leant on the horn, prompting a string of incoherent curses to issue from Andy’s room.
The three children were buckled into a row of car seats in the back, each one clutching a sandwich and looking sticky around the edges. ‘Aunty Jo!’ Charlie crowed.
‘Good morning, guys,’ I said cheerily.
Lucy threw her sandwich at me in response and then, realising she no longer had it to eat, began to roar.
It took us an hour to get to the beach, along a beautiful road that winds its way through the gorge, crossing and recrossing the Waimanu River. Unfortunately, Michael began to throw up about ten minutes into the trip. Clare had clearly anticipated this possibility and had thoughtfully covered him with a towel and given him a basin. It was my job to empty this basin as it was filled, and by the time we arrived I’d relapsed from mildly seedy to quite unwell.
‘Are you okay, Jo?’ Clare asked as she pulled a mountain buggy from the boot and unfolded it.
‘I’m not sure.’ I took a deep breath and turned to release a wildly struggling Charlie from his car seat.
It was a lovely beach with an empty sweep of fine black sand stretching from the river mouth down the coast to a jumble of boulders at the foot of a cliff. There were interesting rock pools and piles of driftwood, and the wet sand was silky beneath our bare feet. The boys immediately rushed knee-deep into the sea, but Lucy decided that sand was nearly as terrifying as water and huddled fearfully in her stroller, shrieking as the little waves came in to break with a soft hiss of foam.
Clare bent to fish through a bag of supplies slung under the stroller, found a little box of raisins and passed it to Lucy. She stopped sobbing and began to extract raisins from the box with the delicate precision of a brain surgeon, pushing them through a little gap between the seat and the frame of the mountain buggy.
‘Oh well, at least it’s keeping her busy,’ Clare said wearily.
‘What’s Brett up to today?’ I asked.
‘When we left he was looking up vasectomies on the internet.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘three’s a pretty good effort.’
‘Yeah.’
We wandered along the smooth firm black sand after the boys, who were chasing one another along the very edge of the breakers with exuberant cries. They looked the epitome of happy, healthy children enjoying themselves in the fresh air, not eating preservative-filled foods or watching mind-numbing TV programs. A sight to gladden the heart of any parent.
‘Michael filled the petrol tank of the lawnmower with paint yesterday,’ Clare said.
I laughed – I couldn’t help it. ‘Was that the deciding factor in the whole vasectomy decision?’
‘Not quite,’ said Clare, with a wicked smile. ‘The deciding factor, I believe, was finding that the Sky card was missing from the decoder last night when he wanted to watch the rugby.’ She added dreamily, ‘I found it this morning in the oven drawer.’
We paddled in the rock pools and counted hermit crabs (Michael was dissuaded with some difficulty from taking home a selection in his pocket) before setting out a picnic on the dry sand at the base of the dunes. A brisk, sand-laden breeze blew up just as we unwrapped the sandwiches, and Charlie managed to upend the chocolate cake icing-side down into the sand so that it was a somewhat gritty meal. Everyone got cold and tired and grizzly and wanted to be carried back up the beach in their wet togs. Lucy found a rotten puffer fish and clutched it lovingly to her chest, then threw a tantrum when we wouldn’t let her take it home in the car. But these were merely minor incidents in an otherwise excellent day’s outing.
We went to McDonald’s on the way home for chicken nuggets and chips (Lucy returned from the play area with suspiciously damp knickers but Clare and I are terrible people and we decided not to go searching for a puddle to clean up, on the grounds that child-friendly restaurants had to expect that kind of thing). It was nearly six when Clare dropped me back home and I let myself in the kitchen door to find Andy and two other blokes playing PlayStation with a half-empty crate of beer beside them.
‘Hey!’ said Andy, slurring his words just a bit. ‘Hey, Jo! Beer?’
‘Dear Lord, no,’ I said fervently. ‘How can you?’ Even ten years ago I wasn’t keen on serious drinking two nights in a row, and these days it would have nearly killed me.
‘Hair of the dog,’ he said airily. ‘Wade, Euan – this is Jo. She’s a cool chick.’
I spent the rest of the evening playing Gran Turismo with them as they worked their way through the crate, and it was the most enjoyable evening I’d spent in that flat yet. When the beer ran out around ten I offered to take the boys home – they declined, saying they would crash on the couch if they didn’t feel like walking. So I retired to bed, taking a selection of car keys with me and feeling extremely mature and responsible. Being called a wonderful influence had evidently gone to my head.
Sometime in the middle of the night a slurred beery voice informed me from much too close to my face that the couch wasn’t very comfortable and that the voice’s owner thought he would share my bed instead. By the time I’d struggled up to consciousness a skinny youth wearing far too few clothes had crawled into bed beside me; I promptly evicted him but I was more grateful than annoyed at this interruption to my night’s sleep. I’d been in the middle of an unpleasant dream in which Matt was explaining to me with condescending pity that it was no wonder Graeme had chosen Chrissie rather than me because she was so beautiful, and that if I ever wanted anyone to find me attractive I’d better start wearing lip gloss and tight moleskin trousers.
Chapter 8
‘IS JO ANYWHERE handy?’ came a familiar voice from reception.
It was a drizzly Wednesday morning in early May and I was catching up on some paperwork.
‘I’m afraid she’s tied up right now,’ said Amber primly. ‘If you’d like to leave your number I’ll ask her to call you when she’s got a –’
Before she could finish I jumped up from my desk and opened the door of the consulting room. ‘Hey, Matt, wait.’
Matt turned at the sound of my voice. ‘I can call you later if you’re busy,’ he said.
‘I’m not.’
‘But you said –’ Amber began.
‘I said if Bob came in I was busy,’ I reminded her.
‘You’ve got to ring the hospital,’ she informed me smugly. ‘So you are busy.’
‘True,’ I said. ‘But I reckon I can probably talk to Matt for a minute or two if that’s okay with you – I’ll take it off my lunch break.’
‘You don’t have one today. I booked in Mrs O’Connor. Her hip’s been really bothering her and she can’t wait till tomorrow.’
‘That was kind of you,’ Matt noted.
‘Thank you,’ said Amber.
I repressed a sigh – I would have fitted in Mrs O’Connor too, no doubt, but Amber was depressingly generous with my time. ‘Come in for a minute,’ I said to Matt and led him into the consulting room.
‘Have you talked to Rose in the last day or two?’ he asked. her comments on my love life. ‘What’s up?’
‘She’s got cancer.’
I stood quite still and stared at him in horror. ‘Wh-what kind of cancer?’ I croaked at last.
‘Breast,’ he said. ‘Hey, Jo, don’t panic. Rose reckons it’s an easy one to kill off. It’s not fatal or anything, and they’re getting right onto it – she’s starting chemo next week.’
Chemo next week. It must be real, then. ‘Bloody hell,’ I said blankly.
‘Yeah.’ He reached out and touched my shoulder very lightly. ‘It’ll be okay. It’s not like Dad’s. She hasn’t waited until she’s nearly dead before going to see someone about it.’ Patrick King died of bowel cancer that had metastasised everywhere before he thought perhaps he should talk to a doctor about why he’d lost twenty kilograms in six months and was passing blood when he went to the toilet.
I put my arms around Matt and hugged him. ‘Aunty Rose would never let a mere detail like breast cancer interfere with her life.’
He hugged me back, resting his chin briefly on the top of my head before letting me go. ‘That’s what she reckons,’ he said. ‘Right, you’d better get back to work or you’ll be in trouble.’
I followed him out to reception, where Amber was chatting over the counter to Bob McIntosh.
‘Sucks to be you,’ said Matt very quietly, grinning with a most unfeeling lack of sympathy as he went out
the door.
THAT EVENING AFTER work (which I left late, Amber having obligingly squeezed in another two appointments after five) I went to see Rose. She was pruning the roses in a truly breathtaking pair of tartan dungarees as, with Percy trotting before me, I made my way towards her across the lawn.
‘How am I to diet that pig?’ she wanted to know, straightening up and waving her secateurs at me in greeting. ‘He gorges on windfall apples and walnuts, and it breaks his heart if I shut him up.’
‘Perhaps you could put him on an exercise program,’ I suggested, leaning forward to kiss her cheek. She smelt of Ponds face cream and Chanel No. 5, as she had ever since I could remember.
‘I s’pose he and I could jog together,’ she agreed, tweaking my collar straight. ‘So I take it I’m forgiven for my tactless remarks?’
I hugged her tightly. ‘You’re a horrible woman, you know. Now, what’s the story with this cancer?’
Aunty Rose made a face. ‘Doesn’t good news travel fast?’ she murmured. ‘A mere nothing, my dear. I shall have it blasted with chemicals and if there’s anything left they’ll whip it out with a scalpel, and that will be that. I wonder if they’d be willing to do a tummy tuck at the same time? Some kind of two-for-the-price-of-one deal?’
‘How long’ve you known?’ I asked, refusing to be distracted.
‘Oh, goodness, only a week or so. I went up to Wai-kato and they stuck needles into my armpits, among other things. Honestly, Josephine, they leave no orifice unprobed, it’s all terribly undignified – and now they’ve decided to add insult to injury by giving me a course of nasty toxic medications that will no doubt have all sorts of unpleasant side effects.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Very sadistic people, oncologists.’
‘And when is your first appointment?’
‘Next Tuesday.’
‘Can I take you?’ I asked.
‘Too late. Matthew is going to be my chauffeur.’ She bent down and gathered an armful of spiky rose branches. ‘Let’s toss these over the fence and go and have some wine, shall we?’
Dinner at Rose's Page 5
