Dinner at Rose's

by Danielle Hawkins

  ‘I think I’ll move out too. When you’re better I’ll look for something else.’

  The words ‘when you’re better’ hung between us like smoke from a snuffed candle – what if she wasn’t going to get better? Well, she just had to. I got up and divided the remaining dregs of wine in the bottle between our glasses.

  IT NEVER RAINS but it pours – especially when it comes to bad news. The next day I was in the consulting room when Amber called, ‘Jo! Phone!’

  I got up with some relief. I had been reviewing notes on acupuncture and just after lunch is not the ideal time for review; I tend to go to sleep on my book.

  ‘Who is it?’ I mouthed as I took the phone, but Amber merely shrugged and turned back to her computer screen. ‘Hello, Jo speaking.’

  ‘Jo, my angel,’ said a rather high-pitched and very camp male voice with an upper-crust British accent.

  ‘Stu!’ I cried delightedly. ‘Hello! How are you?’

  ‘Not bad at all. Now, I’m planning my little hop across the ditch. If I popped up for a night to see you do you think you could find me a spare floorboard and a crust of bread?’

  ‘I’m almost sure we could manage that,’ I said. ‘When?’

  ‘Last weekend in July. This conference goes from Tuesday till Friday – I thought on the Saturday I might hire a car and meander north to this dreary little hamlet you’re frequenting.’

  ‘Waimanu,’ I said haughtily, ‘is not a dreary hamlet. It’s a bustling epicentre of culture and excitement.’ Stu’s manner of speech is catching.

  ‘Oh good,’ he said. ‘I can hardly wait.’

  ‘Me neither. Thank you so much, Stu.’

  ‘How are you doing, angel?’ he asked. ‘You sound a bit flat.’

  ‘Aunty Rose had her mastectomy last week and the margins weren’t clear,’ I said gloomily. ‘She has to have another round of chemo, and the last lot nearly killed her.’

  ‘Cancer’s just a total bitch,’ said Stu. ‘I’m sorry, hon. I thought maybe you’d heard Graeme and Chrissie’s news . . .’

  Someone should expose the whole wedding industry. I swear things are three times more expensive if they’re for a wedding than if they’re just for a party. I’m thinking about starting a one-woman crusade.

  She’d changed her Facebook profile picture again. Today it was a close-up of an enormous glittering diamond ring and part of a hugely magnified hand. What a show-off. And how on earth had she managed to get him to fork out the thousands of dollars that ring had cost? Deciding abruptly that this was doing my mental health no good at all I moved the mouse and deleted Chrissie de Villiers from my Friends list.

  A tear trickled down my cheek and I left it there, rather enjoying the effect. Surely it’s reasonable to cry just a little bit when your ex-boyfriend cheated on you, he’s marrying the new one although he said loudly for years that marriage is just a snare and a delusion, your next appointment is with Bob bloody McIntosh, your favourite aunt is wasting away before your eyes, you’re working late and when you get home you’ve got a good couple of hours of household chores waiting for you and you have a nasty case of unrequited love.

  ‘Bob’s here,’ said Amber, putting her head around the door and looking at me with a complete lack of interest. ‘And the fax machine’s broken.’

  ‘Open it up,’ I said crisply, taking a savage swipe at my wet cheek with the back of one hand. ‘Take out the bit of jammed paper. Shut it again. And send Bob through.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Amber vaguely, and drifted out again.

  ‘Good afternoon, young Josie,’ said Bob, peeping coyly around the door. ‘I need you to work your magic on this bally vertebra of mine.’

  ‘Come on in,’ I told him, metaphorically stiffening my upper lip. Enough was enough. Today was going to be the day I finally put my foot down.

  I did put my foot down – quite hard, actually – but the man was utterly unsquashable. Like a human cockroach. He invited me to dinner, and then to lunch when I refused.

  ‘Bob,’ I said, ‘look, I’m very flattered, but it’s just not a starter.’

  ‘I’m sure your aunt would be pleased to see you getting out and about,’ he said imploringly.

  ‘I’m sure she would,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want to go out with you. I’m sorry to be rude, Bob, but I’m really not interested.’

  ‘Such a sense of duty,’ he murmured. ‘You’re a sweet girl, Josie.’

  ‘Bob!’ I said crossly.

  He motioned me to silence with a wave of his hand. I considered, for a second, lunging at him and biting it, but it looked none too clean. ‘Josie,’ he said kindly. ‘Josie, Josie. A little bird has told me your faith in men has taken a few knocks recently. You can rest assured I won’t rush you. I’ll just be here quietly waiting and hoping in the background until you feel ready for more than friendship.’

  I gave up. ‘Go away,’ I said tiredly. ‘Just go away.’

  I was beating my head gently against my desk when Cheryl, a baby capsule over one arm and an enormous nappy bag over the other, put her head around the door. ‘Oh, no,’ she said in alarm. ‘Don’t tell me it’s all got too much for you and you’re going to hand in your notice. I warn you I’ll burst into tears.’

  I sat up straight. ‘It’s Bob. He has just assured me he knows I’ve been badly hurt but he’s prepared to wait as long as it takes.’

  ‘You lucky girl,’ she said. ‘Have you got time for a cup of tea?’

  ‘Only if you let me cuddle Max,’ I said, and followed her out the back of the clinic to the tiny kitchen.

  ‘You can keep him,’ Max’s doting mother told me. ‘He screamed for two hours straight last night.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, looking at the baby. He had inserted one fat hand into his mouth up to the wrist and was chewing it – he looked plump and rosy and the picture of childish contentment.

  ‘Who would know?’ Cheryl said. ‘Just felt like it, I think.’

  Well, fair enough, I thought. Me too.

  Chapter 18

  THE FIRST SUNDAY in July was a perfect winter’s day – crisp and tangy with the air so clear you’d have sworn you could reach out and touch the ranges with their coat of shaggy dark bush. Mount Taranaki behind them was pure white and looked from this angle like a storybook mountain, an improbably perfect cone. I looked at the washing line with satisfaction – a whole row of clean white sheets gives you such a fulfilled and housewifely feeling – and, picking up the washing basket, turned back towards the house. Across the road Matt was putting up a fence in front of his cows and I waved as I crossed the gravel. He held up an electric fence standard in return.

  Aunty Rose, who had just begun round two of chemotherapy, was sitting in a deckchair wrapped in a blanket and wearing a bright orange woollen hat with a bobble on top.

  ‘Cute,’ I remarked, sitting down on the top step of the porch.

  ‘Thank you. I thought myself it was a fetching look.’

  It was, in fact, coupled with deathly pallor and great dark circles under the eyes, a horrific look, but we were both being very bright and positive today in the hope we’d fool each other.

  There was a soft grunting noise and Percy waddled around the side of the house. He paused at the bottom of the porch steps and looked up with his head on one side. ‘Come on up, dear boy,’ said Aunty Rose, and he trotted up the steps to sit beside her chair. ‘You’re a fine figure of a pig, aren’t you, Percy?’

  Percy sighed contentedly and turned his snout up to the sun.

  ‘He is indeed,’ I said. ‘Have you noticed he looks almost exactly like Ronnie Barker?’

  Aunty Rose looked at him critically. ‘So he does. Now there’s a compliment, Percy.’

  The pig laid his head in her lap and looked at her with concern as she reached for the basin beside her, took a couple of deep breaths and laid it aside again. It occurred to me that if this round of chemo didn’t work he was going to waste away and die of a broken heart, and I had to get up and we
ed the patch of garden around the steps to hide my face.

  ONCE THE SUN moved down behind the hill Aunty Rose got up stiffly from her deckchair and went inside to lie down. When I went to check on her a little later she was asleep. I wondered whether I should wake her for dinner and decided it would be unnecessarily cruel.

  At around six Matt let himself into the kitchen, a bottle of Monteith’s Winter Ale in each hand. ‘Beer?’ he asked, opening a drawer to hunt for the bottle opener.

  ‘Yes, please. That’s very upmarket stuff you’ve got there.’

  ‘I splashed out,’ he said solemnly. ‘Apparently the payout’s going to be good next season. How’s Rose?’

  ‘She’s asleep,’ I told him. ‘Have you had tea?’

  ‘Dinner,’ he said reprovingly. ‘No. What’ve you got?’

  ‘Leftover macaroni cheese?’

  ‘Sounds better than what’s on offer at my house.’ He crossed the kitchen and handed me a frosted bottle. ‘Your car needs a wheel alignment, by the way.’

  I had borrowed his ute yesterday so as to move my bed from the flat to Rose’s and thus finally escape the spine-deforming horror of the kapok mattress in the Pink Room, lending him my car in return.

  Now I rolled to my feet – I had been stretched full-length on the chaise longue with the entertainment section of the Sunday paper. ‘I know. I’m just slack. You don’t feel a burning desire for vegetables, do you?’

  ‘You don’t have to eat vegetables on the weekend,’ said Matt.

  ‘Good.’ I removed the half-eaten dish of macaroni cheese from the fridge, slung it into the oven and turned it on.

  We talked a bit as we waited for dinner to heat, but mostly drank our beer and passed the big weekend crossword puzzle between us in silence. I was never quite sure, after he had left, how I felt about being alone with Matt – never quite sure whether the pleasure of his company outweighed the strain of trying not to wind strands of hair around my index finger and stare at him like a besotted teenager. But when he was there I generally decided that if friends was all I was going to get it was a hell of a lot better than nothing.

  I got up to check the temperature of the macaroni cheese, found it was still only lukewarm in the middle and, turning back to the crossword puzzle, saw Matt cautiously shrug the shoulder he had dislocated as he wrote in a word. ‘Four down is “eyrie”,’ he said.

  ‘Well done. How much trouble is that shoulder giving you?’

  ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘It’s my own fault. I decided to carry about three hundred standards up a hill this afternoon and I was too lazy to make two trips.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said suspiciously. ‘How long did you do your exercises for?’

  ‘I did exactly what you told me,’ he said, but he looked shifty.

  ‘Liar,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. According to an article I was reading last week only about twenty per cent of people do their exercises properly.’

  ‘I admit nothing,’ he said, and grinned at me. ‘It’s pretty good, really – it only worries me when I do something stupid.’

  ‘Take your shirt off,’ I said.

  He looked pained. ‘Must you, Jo?’

  ‘Come on, don’t be a baby. It’ll only take a minute to have a look at it, and you’re going to be unhappy if it’s still not right by calving.’

  Matt sighed but pulled off his jumper and T-shirt. The body underneath them was lean and wiry and indecently attractive. ‘Anything to stop you nagging, woman,’ he said.

  I pulled myself together – drooling on one’s patients is such an unprofessional look. ‘You’re just full of charm. Shrug your shoulders.’

  He did, and I scowled, mostly for effect.

  ‘What? It needs amputation at the neck?’

  ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘It’s going to wither and waste away. Probably go black too. Should I just cut it off now?’

  ‘Well,’ said Matt, ‘why not? The stump will have three weeks to heal before the cows start calving. What is wrong with it?’

  ‘It’s just not moving very freely.’ I took his upper arm in one hand and felt the joint with the other as I moved his arm around. ‘That’s pretty tender, isn’t it?’

  ‘Only if you go on prodding it,’ he said acidly.

  ‘If you can bear it, how about coming in and having some ultrasound?’ I suggested. ‘If you don’t want me to do it you can talk to the girls at the hospital.’

  ‘Of course I want you to do it. I’m just complaining because it makes me feel manly.’ He turned in his chair and smiled at me. ‘I’ll make an appointment.’

  From outside came a volley of barks.

  ‘It’s probably Kim,’ Matt said as he started to pull his shirt back over his head, but three seconds later the kitchen door was flung wide to reveal Cilla. She was wearing a white trench coat over her jeans and a little pink cashmere scarf around her neck; her cheeks were flushed and her eyes very bright. She looked ridiculously pretty.

  She paused on the doorstep with her chest rising and falling quickly, as though she’d been running.

  ‘Hello,’ said Matt. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘What am I doing here? Don’t you think that’s the question I should be asking you?’

  It was suddenly clear that the flush was due to emotion and not exercise, and that the girl was on the verge of hysteria.

  ‘Hey,’ Matt said feebly. ‘Settle down, would you?’

  How on earth, I wondered, had the man got to nearly thirty years old without realising that telling one’s girlfriend to settle down is almost as bad as telling her she’s put on a bit of weight?

  I turned away to busy myself at the sink, and Cilla said sharply, ‘And you don’t need to stand there grinning, bitch.’

  I spun around to look at her, startled – it’s normally only in soap operas that people actually say things like that. Most of us, when in the middle of these dramatic situations, are curbed by convention and can’t actually bring ourselves to be nasty to casual acquaintances.

  ‘What the hell is your problem?’ Matt demanded, heaping fuel upon the flames of his girlfriend’s wrath. Honestly, his lack of tact was staggering.

  ‘How could you do this to me, Matthew?’ Cilla asked, going abruptly from belligerent to tearful. ‘With her?’

  Well, that was hardly flattering. You’d have thought I was pushing sixty with a club foot and personal hygiene issues.

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said, bewildered, and Cilla burst into tears.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, seeing as Matt showed no signs of imminent speech, ‘I was just checking his dislocated shoulder, Cilla.’

  ‘All night?’ she spat at me, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  ‘Huh?’ Matt asked.

  ‘Y-your ute was here all last night,’ she wept. ‘I’m not stupid.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘I lent it to Jo so she could go and pick up her gear from her flat in town.’

  ‘But you n-never answered your phone . . .’

  ‘You knew I was watching the rugby at Scott’s,’ he said. He was looking embarrassed and annoyed rather than conciliatory – Matt the Sensitive New Age Guy would rather have his teeth pulled than discuss relationship stuff in public.

  Cilla snivelled gently. ‘You didn’t answer your mobile either.’

  ‘Left it on the tractor when I fed out yesterday.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said in a very small voice. ‘S-sorry.’ She came across the kitchen and rested a little pink cheek on the top of his head.

  Matt patted her on the back in a half-ashamed fashion that reminded me of my father’s approach to female emotion, and stood up. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll just go and see if Rose is awake, and then we’ll head off.’

  ‘Okay,’ Cilla whispered.

  Left alone with her there appeared to be no possible subject for conversation. I sat down at the table and pulled the crossword puzzle towards me, and after a minute or so of dense un
comfortable silence she murmured, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said coolly. The ‘With her’ still rankled.

  ‘It’s just – he spends so much time here, and you know each other so well . . .’

  ‘We’re just friends,’ I said. ‘Probably more like brother and sister than anything else. We fought like cats and dogs when we were kids.’

  Matt reappeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘Rose is still asleep,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Bye,’ said Cilla sweetly to me.

  He followed her across the kitchen, pausing at the door to pull on his work boots. ‘’Night, Jose,’ he said.

  I could hear the crunch of their feet across the gravel and Cilla’s voice asking with professional-sounding interest, ‘How was the quality of those last couple of silage bales? I thought they looked a bit wet.’

  I got the macaroni cheese out of the oven, spooned some into a bowl and sat down at the table to let it go cold again while I tortured myself with pointless recollections.

  Pointless recollections

  We were lying facing one another on our sides, not talking, and my eyes had drifted closed. I was nearly asleep when Matt reached out and stroked the hair back off my face to tuck it very gently behind my ear, and I opened my eyes and looked at him in the muted orange glow of the streetlight outside the window.

  ‘Sorry,’ he murmured.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Waking you up.’

  ‘You didn’t. Anyway, sleeping’s a waste.’

  He smiled crookedly. ‘Jo, my friend, I have a feeling you’re going to be hard to get over.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked, ridiculously pleased.

  ‘Oh, hell yes,’ he said, sliding a hand down my back and pulling me up against him.

  ‘So are you.’ I could feel him breathing in and out and his skin was very warm against mine. ‘This may not have been the smartest idea.’

  He sighed. ‘No.’

  There was a longish pause, and then I said slowly, ‘Maybe it’s best you’re going away. It would be so awful to have it turn to custard.’