Dinner at Rose's

by Danielle Hawkins

  ‘Matt!’ I cried.

  ‘Hey, Jose.’ He grinned at me. ‘I’m flying out tomorrow morning – can you put me up for the night?’

  ‘Of course.’ I put my arms around his neck and hugged him. ‘Crikey. You’ve got all muscly.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, detaching himself to heave his pack onto one shoulder. Lucky he had got muscly, if he was planning to carry that thing any distance.

  I led the way down the hall. ‘You can leave your pack in my room. Where are you off to tomorrow?’

  ‘Scotland.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I got a scholarship for a rural exchange program. Six months on a sheep farm in Scotland, and then Scotty’s coming over and we’re going to cruise around Europe and the Middle East for a while.’ He dropped his pack just inside my bedroom door with a thud.

  ‘You and Scotty let loose in Europe,’ I said. ‘The mind boggles. Now, would you care for a cool beverage of some sort?’

  ‘That’s a bloody brilliant idea,’ said Matt gravely.

  I fetched us both a beer and we went outside to drink it in the pale winter sunshine. ‘Not that one!’ I said as he pulled up a grubby folding chair. ‘Someone peed on it last weekend.’

  ‘Why not wash it?’

  I shrugged. ‘It’ll rain eventually. Here.’ And I pushed an uncontaminated chair his way before perching on the porch railing.

  ‘Your standards have slipped,’ he noted.

  ‘I live with three slobs. I had to decide whether to clean up after them all the time and get bitter and twisted or turn into a slob myself and stay cheerful, so I went for slobby and cheerful.’

  ‘Very wise,’ said Matt.

  I looked at him surreptitiously over my bottle of Tui and decided he was looking quite disturbingly attractive these days.

  It was Friday, and some of Neil’s friends were having a flat-warming party that night. We moved from the porch to the untidy lounge when the sun vanished behind next-door’s high wooden fence, ordered Thai takeaways for tea and eventually walked down the road to the party.

  As I recall, it wasn’t much of a party. A large group of journalism students in op-shop suede coats and hand-painted Doc Martens had taken over the lounge, and another group were drinking yardies on the back lawn. Watching someone throw up into his yard glass and then attempt to continue drinking is only fun for a while, and the journalism students were playing peculiar Indonesian music very loudly on the stereo.

  Wandering through the kitchen sometime around midnight I discovered Matt leaning against the fridge and fending off an extremely drunk girl wearing a bright green polyester pinafore and brown tights. She looked like a tree.

  ‘Jo!’ he said, with just a hint of desperation in his voice. ‘Beer?’

  ‘I was actually thinking of heading home,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll come with you. Lovely to meet you.’ And putting down his can of Rheineck (by far the best thing to be done with a warm can of Rheineck) he fled ahead of me out the front door.

  ‘Do you really want to come, or were you just escaping?’ I asked.

  ‘I want to come. Besides, you shouldn’t walk around Auckland by yourself at night.’

  There was a bite to the air and we walked briskly. ‘It’s much nicer out here,’ I said, digging my hands into the pockets of my jeans to keep them warm.

  ‘Mm,’ he agreed absently. ‘Your flatmates are good sorts, Jose.’

  ‘They are, aren’t they?’

  ‘Neil seems like a nice bloke.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He is.’ And I added casually, just in case he might have thought I had any interest in Neil, ‘His girlfriend’s nice, too. She’s gone up north for the weekend to see her parents.’

  Matt said nothing in response to this, and we walked the next block in silence. As we went up the porch steps to the back door I fished in my pocket for the key, and fitting it into the lock said with a fairly pitiful attempt at nonchalance, ‘You can sleep on the couch or have half my bed, whichever you’d rather.’

  ‘Half your bed, please.’

  And as I turned the door handle he reached for my other hand and held it. He had big, rough hands, callused from spending the last week rehanging gates; Patrick King liked to use the periods between university holidays to make lists of little jobs for his son, to be started about five minutes after his arrival home.

  Be cool, I told myself fiercely, he’s your friend, that’s all. ‘Do you want a coffee or something?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said, shutting the door behind us. And by the sickly orange light of a streetlight shining through the window in the hall he took my face in his hands and kissed me.

  Oh, thank God, I thought. It’s not just me. I slid my arms around him and kissed him back.

  My romantic experience, by the age of twenty-one, had consisted of kissing Tane Jones in the car park outside the Waimanu High School ball at age sixteen (followed closely by throwing up on his feet, having consumed an indecent amount of extremely nasty vodka mixed with even nastier orange cordial) and one awful month spent going out with a very nice boy in my class whom I didn’t fancy in the least. Having observed the relationships and hook-ups of my flatmates and friends I had begun to think that there was something wrong with me – considering that I wasn’t avoiding sex on any moral grounds, surely I should have been having some of it. I went out twice a week and encountered packs of boys my own age, and if I still couldn’t find anyone to sleep with I was obviously well on the way to a lonely and eccentric spinsterhood.

  Kissing Matt had not a single thing in common with kissing the nice but undesirable Marcus. He tasted faintly of beer, he was lean and hard, and his mouth was hot against mine.

  ‘Jo,’ he said thickly after some time, pulling his mouth away.

  ‘Y-yeah?’

  ‘I’ve been wanting to do that all night.’

  ‘Do it some more,’ I said breathlessly, and pulled him down the hall into my bedroom.

  ‘Okay.’ And then some time later, ‘Hey . . .’

  I removed my hand from the hard bulge in his jeans and blushed in the near-darkness. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I like it,’ he said. ‘I really like it. But I have to go to Scotland tomorrow.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered again. ‘You should be getting some sleep.’

  He took me by the shoulders and shook me gently. ‘I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about sleep,’ he said. ‘But we might not see each other again for a couple of years.’

  ‘So why did you kiss me?’ I asked, made brave by half a dozen bottles of beer.

  ‘Couldn’t help it.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ I reached up and kissed him again.

  ‘God, Josie, you’re beautiful,’ he said shakily. And sighing as he lost his short battle to be noble and gentlemanly he slid his big warm hands up under my tight top.

  This was absolutely nothing like letting a nice boy fumble with my breasts and grunt damply against my neck during a few mercifully brief encounters. That had been just sort of sticky and embarrassing, and I was never sure whether to try to gasp and writhe convincingly or just lie there and wait. I mostly decided on something between the two and ended up feeling both dispirited and like a horrible fraud.

  Matt was in an entirely different league. He pushed me gently back on the bed and came down with me, peeling off my clothes between kisses and sliding a hand between my legs.

  ‘Matt . . .’ I whispered, arching up against him.

  ‘Okay?’

  ‘Yes – come here.’ I wrestled with his belt.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said against my mouth. ‘I’ll do it.’ Then, ‘Jose, if you don’t stop doing that I’m going to lose it completely.’

  ‘That was kind of the idea.’

  He laughed, caught my hands in his and held them firmly, and put his mouth over my right breast.

  ‘Matt!’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘God, yes! Have you got any condoms?’

&
nbsp; He let me go, tugged his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans and shed the rest of his clothes at close to the speed of light. I sat up to take the condom out of his hand and rip open the little foil packet, and he laughed as he reclaimed it and put it on. I pulled him down again, wrapping my legs around his waist and sparing just a fraction of a second to be deeply thankful I’d shaved them that morning. ‘Just slow down,’ he whispered.

  ‘Can’t. I mean, don’t want to.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he muttered, and put his arms around me tightly. ‘Me neither.’

  AFTERWARDS I LAY flat on my back, looking at the zigzag crack in the ceiling and trying to breathe.

  Matthew sat up and looked down at me. ‘Should we get under the covers?’ he suggested.

  ‘I would,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think I can move.’

  ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’

  ‘Good.’ I pushed myself up on my elbows with some difficulty and he leant down to kiss me softly. ‘Matt?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He kissed me again. ‘You’re welcome.’ He sighed.

  ‘Bugger having to go to Scotland.’ ‘When do you have to go?’

  He looked at the face of my little fluorescent alarm clock. ‘In about seven hours.’ He pulled at the edge of the duvet and I wriggled aside to let him tug it out from under me. We curled up underneath it and I rested my forehead against his shoulder.

  ‘We have the worst timing on the planet,’ I said sadly.

  He tightened his arm around me. ‘We have seven hours,’ he pointed out.

  We spent them talking, cat-napping and using up the remaining three condoms in his wallet. Then we got up and I drove him to the airport, dropped him at International Departures (‘Don’t come in, Jose, it’ll just make it worse’) and went home. I had to take an exit I didn’t want off the motorway so that I could park up a side street and bawl my eyes out for half an hour without endangering myself or my fellow motorists. I seem to remember that I picked a street down which a constant stream of pedestrians passed within a foot of my car, but that I was too busy wallowing in misery to care.

  MATT SPENT NEARLY five years overseas. My sources (that is, Clare, whose brother was in London at the same time) informed me that he was partying extremely hard and working his way through a never-ending procession of girlfriends. He decided after a year or two that he’d better try to see a bit more of Europe than the inside of a pub and went travelling – he drove tractors in France and operated ski lifts in Switzerland and even somehow ended up running a motel on Corfu for a year.

  I was nowhere near as adventurous. I thought I’d work for a year or two and then explore the world, going on some sort of voyage of self-discovery in the process, but I never got there. I finished my physiotherapy degree and spent a year’s internship at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland, where I fell heavily for a sandy-haired anaesthetist, and I only made it as far as private practice in Greenlane.

  Matt and I used to ring each other sporadically, but I didn’t see him again until his father’s funeral. He stayed home after that to run the farm, and about a month later I moved to Melbourne with boyfriend number two.

  We’d never spoken of that night in all the years since; presumably it had meant so little to Matt he’d all but forgotten it. But I hadn’t.

  Chapter 15

  ‘GOOD AFTERNOON, MISS Donnelly,’ said Bob with his special brand of slightly ponderous gallantry. He was a nice man, but even had I been able to overlook the halitosis, and even if I wasn’t currently restraining myself from dreamily practising ‘J.M. King’ signatures around the margins of newspaper crossword puzzles, he was so pedantic that I’d have had to hit him over the head with a pot after a week of his company.

  ‘Hi, Bob,’ I said, gathering up bits of paper and stuffing them into my shoulder bag in a pointedly hurried fashion. ‘I’m running a bit late.’

  ‘I brought you a few recipes.’ He pulled a wodge of those glossy, tear-off Food-in-a-Minute recipes you can get at the supermarket from his back pocket and handed them to me proudly. ‘You said you needed some meal ideas.’

  Ah, yes. The last time he had popped in I was ushering out Mrs Clarke, chatting idly about food that somebody who is nauseous and miserable from chemo might find tempting. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, trying to sound suitably grateful. ‘That’s very thoughtful. Look, I’ve got to head –’

  But he waved me to silence with an imperious gesture. ‘Just one moment of your valuable time, my dear.’ Behind him Amber was sniggering gently at her computer keyboard in a distinctly unhelpful way. ‘There’s a wine and cheese do at the Workingman’s Club this Friday. Don’t you think that sounds like a bit of alright?’

  ‘I can’t go out in the evenings at the moment,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right, your dear honorary aunt. But surely a couple of hours of rest and relaxation would do you nothing but good.’

  ‘I couldn’t leave her,’ I said firmly. ‘I just wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself. Thank you so much for the invitation, Bob, but I really do have to run.’

  ‘I think it's marvellous,’ he murmured, beaming at me fondly. ‘A young woman like yourself with such a delightfully old-fashioned sense of duty.’ No doubt he was envisaging me cheerfully wiping his bottom in another twenty years or so. What a truly revolting image.

  ‘Amber, you can lock up, can’t you?’ I said. ‘See you, Bob – thank you again . . .’ And I bolted from the building like a startled rabbit.

  Safely in my car I rested my head for a moment against the steering wheel. This was getting ridiculous I couldn’t just keep using Rose as an excuse. Perhaps I would have to make a flip chart, complete with graphs and professional-looking red arrows, comparing my likelihood of ever going anywhere with poor Bob with the chance of hell freezing over. Somebody tapped on the driver’s window and I looked up wildly. Right, that was it, I was going to lose it and start shouting at the man – but it was Kim, dressed in her school uniform with her satchel over one shoulder. I wound down the window.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Escaping from Bob McIntosh.’

  ‘Right. Can I have a lift home?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Did you have detention again?’

  ‘No,’ said Kim, sounding offended. ‘Guitar practice.’

  ‘Since when do you play the guitar?’

  She trotted around the front of the car and hopped in beside me. ‘Two weeks. I can do three chords now. Jonno’s in a band and I’m going to be back-up singer and guitarist.’

  ‘Awesome,’ I said solemnly.

  ‘HOW DID IT GO?’ I asked, letting myself in the kitchen door a couple of days later to find Aunty Rose beating eggs in a china mixing bowl. She was wearing a fetching little green satin cap with a spray of artificial cherries sewn onto one side, one of a boxful of hats and wigs given to her by Mary-Anne Morris at the chemist’s. Mary-Anne had lost her own hair in a battle with cancer a few years before.

  ‘Well, the rotten thing has shrunk, anyway,’ she said. ‘So they’re going to whip it out next week.’ Her check-up appointment had been that morning, and she’d stubbornly resisted all offers to drive her, claiming that Matt and I were just looking for an excuse not to do any work and she couldn’t condone that sort of thing.

  ‘Good. They’ll hit it with a bit more chemo after that, won’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but not such nasty drugs this time.’

  ‘So you won’t start puking your guts out again?’ I put the grocery bags I was holding on the kitchen table and began to unpack them.

  ‘Josephine, you use these expressions solely to annoy me, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, and grinned at her.

  ‘I did hope that was the case. No, the nausea should be much better.’

  ‘Just think of all the wine you’ll be able to drink.’

  She sighed happily. ‘I know.’

  Outside the
dogs began to bark, and Aunty Rose peered out the window. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Kim, with a face like thunder. Honestly, that child is as good as a soap opera.’

  Kim flounced in, shutting the door with what came perilously close to a slam. She was taking her new role of rock chick very seriously; today she wore Doc Marten boots, shiny black tights and a very short tartan skirt. You could barely see its hem peeping out from underneath a worn black T-shirt that I thought I recognised as one of Matt’s – it was far too big for her and had SEPULTURA written across the front, the words wreathed in flames and topped by a leering skull.

  ‘Nice outfit,’ I said appreciatively. Teasing Kim was one of my very favourite hobbies.

  ‘Hi, Aunty Rose,’ she said, ignoring me and kissing her aunt’s lined cheek. I was looking forward to seeing Rose fatten up a bit. Losing so much weight had aged her horribly and fifty-three is much too young to look old and drawn.

  ‘Hello, my love,’ said Aunty Rose. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Sucked,’ Kim said, perching on the edge of the kitchen table and swinging her booted feet.

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘Hey, Jo, chuck me an apple?’ I did, and she bit into it with relish. ‘Those dicks at school are so far up their own bums you wouldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Kim Amanda King!’ said Aunty Rose sharply. ‘That sort of language just implies you’re too stupid to speak proper English. If you were stupid I wouldn’t mind, but you’re not.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Kim muttered.

  ‘Which dicks at school?’ I asked. ‘That is, which people have provoked your displeasure?’

  ‘Dean and deputy principal. And they are di– . . . idiots.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Aunty Rose asked with some misgiving.

  ‘There was a cigarette in my bag.’

  ‘Oh, Kim, don’t start smoking,’ Aunty Rose said. ‘If only because of the expense, let alone that insignificant little statistic of smoking killing one person in two.’

  ‘I won’t, I won’t,’ said Kim. ‘But honestly, what a fuss over nothing. Mum’s having hysterics, and I’ve got to go and be hassled by the disciplinary committee.’