‘You don’t sound okay. You sound exhausted.’
I felt a little warm glow inside – maternal sympathy is such a comforting thing. ‘Well, Hazel came over this evening and wailed for about an hour about the unfairness of a God that would let such a thing happen. That was enough to exhaust anyone.’
‘That stupid woman,’ my mother said.
I lay down on the chaise longue and looked up at the griffon, who stared haughtily out over my head. ‘And then there’s a new leak in the kitchen ceiling, and Amber was stunningly useless today even by her low standards, and one of the dogs went over to the neighbours’ place and dug a hole under their fence, and dinner burnt to a crisp while I was retrieving him.’ It had been one of those days where a thousand little insignificant things go wrong and you start to wonder if it’s payback for having sinned in a previous life.
‘Jo, love,’ said Mum, ‘you’re not going to be able to work full time and look after Rose indefinitely.’
‘She’s been talking to the district nurse and they think they can get her a bed in the hospital here once she can’t manage anymore, rather than going to the hospice in Hamilton. But she’d much rather be at home, and – and it won’t be forever.’
‘Hmm,’ Mum said. ‘And what is the lovely Hazel doing to help?’
I smiled. ‘She made a blancmange yesterday.’ Nasty, pale, washed-out quivery thing – it was enough to make someone in the best of health feel unwell, let alone a person dying of cancer. The dippy woman had also, for some inexplicable reason, presented her sister with a morbid little book of poems written by people dying of terminal illnesses. Aunty Rose had just smiled faintly, slid it down behind the sofa and continued with the third Twilight novel.
‘Josephine,’ she had said later when I brought her a cup of Milo in bed, ‘they’re not well written, the woman only appears to use about three adjectives and all the characters ever do is stare into each other’s eyes. And I read the damned things until two in the morning.’
‘WHAT ELSE DO you need?’ I asked, adjusting the tray table at Aunty Rose’s elbow so she wouldn’t have to stretch for it. ‘Cup of tea?’ I wasn’t at all sure that going out for the evening was a good idea.
‘For pity’s sake, Josephine, would you just go away?’ she said plaintively. ‘I could probably even stagger across the kitchen and make my own cup of tea, if the worst came to the worst.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
Aunty Rose straightened her startling purple turban. She looked like a dowager countess. ‘You’re going to want to watch yourself, sweet pea, or you’ll grow up into your mother.’ Seeing me open my mouth to protest she added, ‘I adore your mother, but I think one is enough. Go on, chicken, have fun.’
The last time I visited Clare she had sobbed gently into her coffee because Moira the pig was even then being converted to bacon, while an unsupervised Charlie cut Lucy’s hair and then tried to glue it back on in the next room. But this evening as I went up the back steps I heard only Sarah McLachlan assuring me earnestly that it simply wasn’t good enough.
Clare came to the door with her hair loose down her back, wearing long dangly earrings and eye makeup. ‘Guess what?’
‘What?’
‘We’re child-free,’ she announced gleefully. ‘Mum’s taken them all away for the night.’
‘When was the last time you had a night to yourselves?’ I asked.
‘Um . . . just before Charlie was born.’
‘How about I go away again so you can enjoy it all by yourselves then?’
‘No way,’ said Clare. ‘We’re going to have a proper grown-up dinner party with no tomato sauce. Come and have some wine.’
She had cleared the dining table and surrounding floor of toys (presumably with a shovel – there was a bright plastic mountain around the corner on the floor of the formal lounge).
‘Evening, Jo,’ said Brett, wandering down the hall with his hair still damp from the shower. ‘Can’t we turn off that revolting noise? It sounds like someone dying of stomach cancer.’
‘Brett!’ said his wife.
‘Well, it does – oh, shit, Jo, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘A few months ago he told Laura Kennedy she looked like Alice Cooper,’ said Clare.
Brett opened the fridge door and extracted a bottle of beer. ‘She does.’
Clare giggled. ‘She does, actually. She’s had her eyelids tattooed with permanent eyeliner. But you didn’t need to say it.’
‘You’d want to trust your tattooist,’ I said. ‘Imagine if they slipped.’
‘It wouldn’t be good, would it?’ She handed me an enormous glass of red wine, the approximate size of a potty. ‘How is Rose?’
‘She’s amazing. She keeps thinking of things she wants to put in her will and writing them down on post-it notes, and she wants them to play “Another One Bites the Dust” at her funeral.’
‘She’s so cool,’ said Clare, pouring herself a glass of wine the same size as mine and thus emptying the bottle. I calculated that if I drank my half very slowly over the next few hours I might be able to drive home.
‘Who else is coming?’ I asked, seeing four places set.
‘Scotty,’ said Clare. ‘That’ll be him now.’ There was a distant roar, which grew nearer with alarming speed and gave the impression a jet fighter was about to land on the roof. ‘I wish he wouldn’t drive like that. He’ll stampede the alpacas.’
‘Good,’ Brett said. ‘Horrible bloody things. He’s not going to appreciate your stomach-cancer lady – sorry, Jo.’ He went down the hall to open the door.
‘Poor boy,’ said Clare tolerantly. ‘His vasectomy’s on Monday and he’s scared of needles.’
‘Clare,’ Scott called, ‘your music’s crap.’
‘Better than that German death metal,’ she retorted.
‘Are you a Rammstein man, Scotty?’ I asked as he came into view.
‘Damn straight. Are you a fan?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry. I prefer Sarah McLachlan.’
Scott turned to take off his leather bike jacket.
‘Scotty, what is that at the back of your head?’
He put up a hand to stroke the neatly plaited two-inch rat’s tail brushing the neck of his Def Leppard T-shirt. ‘Cool, eh?’
‘No,’ said Clare. ‘No, Scott, it isn’t.’
He grinned widely. ‘I’m growing it specially for my sister’s wedding. She’ll go nuts.’
‘Good stuff,’ I said. Scott’s sister Rebecca is a deeply painful snob, or at least she was ten years ago. ‘Has your mother seen it?’
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You’d have heard the screams. Hey, where are the sprogs?’
It was a nice dinner party. We had chicken breasts stuffed with ricotta and mushroom risotto followed by crème caramel, and then sat around the table eating after-dinner mints and solving the world’s problems.
Clare gulped the last of a large glass of port and shuddered slightly. ‘Sold your house yet, Jo?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Although apparently someone was interested.’
‘Think you’ll buy a house here?’ Scott asked. ‘The place next to mine’s for sale, and I wouldn’t mind having you as a neighbour. You couldn’t be worse than the ones there now.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That means so much. Is it the purple railway house or the concrete-block place with all the couches on the lawn?’
‘The concrete-block one.’
‘Who knows? Maybe I will. Except I’m not sure I could live so close to that rat’s tail.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Scotty, wounded. ‘It’s mint.’
‘I might grow one too,’ Brett mused.
‘If you do,’ said his loving wife, ‘you’re sleeping in the woodshed from then on.’
‘Then you wouldn’t need the vasectomy,’ I pointed out.
‘Well, true,’ he said. ‘It’d be much cheaper than the vasectomy, too.’
&
nbsp; ‘I’ll have you know,’ said Scott, ‘that this hairdo pulls chicks like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘You’re right,’ Clare said. ‘We wouldn’t believe.’
IT WAS AFTER eleven when Scotty and I got up to go.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘No kids. You’ll be spending the rest of the night having wild sex, then.’
‘That would just be a waste of good sleeping time,’ said Clare. ‘I haven’t had an unbroken night for three years.’
‘Bet you wake up every two hours all night,’ I said.
‘Thanks for that thought,’ she said. ‘Goodnight, guys, thanks for coming.’
I pulled on my tan suede leather boots that I love more than life itself and just don’t get to wear often enough in Waimanu. ‘Thank you for having us. It was great. Good luck, Brett.’
Scotty’s enormous motorbike was parked next to my car. ‘How’s young Matthew?’ he asked, tucking his helmet under his arm. ‘Haven’t seen him for a week or two.’
‘Miserable,’ I said. ‘But you know him; he doesn’t say much.’
‘Rose being sick is pretty rough on him.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And on Kim. The whole thing just sucks.’
‘It’s rough on you, too.’
‘But my dad didn’t die of the same thing a few years ago. I’ve still got two nice parents.’
Scotty grunted and played with the strap of his helmet. ‘Hey, Jo, want to go out for a drink or something, sometime?’
I expect there’s a way to say ‘thanks but no thanks’ graciously, without embarrassment or injury to anyone’s feelings. I’ve never found out what it is, but then I suppose I haven’t had enough practice. Unlike my ex-friend Chrissie I’ve never been troubled by men trying to pick me up every time I step out of my front door. In fact, she doesn’t even need to leave the house: the bloke who came to fix her phone line last year asked her out before he left. It was always a bit humbling being Chrissie’s friend, and it particularly pissed me off that with such a dizzying selection of men to choose from she had to take mine.
‘Thanks so much for asking,’ I said slowly, ‘but maybe not. I mean – that would be really nice, but just as mates.’
Scott sighed and then grinned at me. ‘It’s the rat’s tail, isn’t it?’
I grinned back. ‘’Fraid so.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to go out for a drink with anyone so shallow anyway,’ he said with dignity, putting on his helmet. ‘So the offer’s off the table.’
‘Fair enough.’ I opened the door of my car. ‘Hey, thank you. It’s a really big compliment.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said Scotty, clambering onto his enormous bike. He started it, revved the engine loudly and roared off down the drive.
‘Jo!’ Clare hissed.
I turned and saw her leaning out of the bathroom window. ‘Yeah?’
‘Did he ask you out?’
Her face was alight with anticipation and I started to laugh helplessly. ‘Yes. Was this your idea?’
‘Maybe,’ said Clare, looking as inscrutable as a woman can look while hanging precariously out of a window with a toothbrush in one hand. ‘What’d you say?’
‘No thank you,’ I admitted, and winced as she pointed the toothbrush at me like a pistol.
‘Why, you ungrateful slapper?’
‘I – I don’t like Scotty in that way.’
‘Couldn’t you go out with him and just see? I wasn’t even slightly attracted to Brett at the start. I just thought he’d be good practice.’
‘Clare,’ called Brett from somewhere inside, ‘you’re a horrible trollop and I don’t know why I married you.’
‘Because you adore me,’ she said over her shoulder.
‘Ignore her, Jo, she’s pissed,’ Brett called. ‘Goodnight!’
‘Goodnight,’ I called back, and climbed into my car.
Before I could start it, Clare opened the back door and ran across the lawn in bare feet. She opened the passenger door and got into the car beside me. ‘Shit, it’s freezing out here,’ she said. ‘Now, Jo, you listen to Aunty Clare.’
‘Don’t want to,’ I said, laughing. She was still clutching her toothbrush and she was indeed just a little bit pissed.
‘It’s time you got back on the horse,’ she said. ‘I know you were with Graeme for a really long time and being cheated on is a massive kick in the teeth, but you’re not going to get over him until you put yourself out there and start seeing someone else.’
‘I am over him,’ I said. ‘Well, just about, anyway. I’m still pissed off, and it’s not great for your self-confidence when your boyfriend decides he prefers your best mate, but I don’t want him back.’
‘So what’s the problem? Maybe Scotty wouldn’t turn out to be the love of your life, but you don’t have to marry him. You could just hang out with him a bit and see. I reckon the whole sexual chemistry thing’s crap – it’s not always there from the start.’
‘I agree,’ I said.
‘And seriously, Jo, you don’t want to put it off for too long. Everyone else gets coupled up, and then you find you’re already in your mid-thirties and your fertility’s declining and the only single men left are gay or weird, and –’
‘Stop,’ I begged. ‘Please stop, or I’ll cry. I know all that – you try not to think about it because you’ll turn into a sad and desperate person, but it comes and gets you in the middle of the night.’
‘So go out for a drink with the man! He’s had a crush on you ever since high school, for Christ’s sake! I know he’s a bit scruffy round the edges and needs a shave and haircut, but he’s a sweetie, and he’s really good with kids.’ She gestured with her toothbrush for emphasis and nearly poked me in the eye.
‘Clare,’ I said, relieving her of the toothbrush and laying it on the dashboard, ‘just settle down. I can’t go out with Scotty for a drink – there’s someone else.’
‘What?’ she demanded. ‘You’re seeing someone and you didn’t even tell me? What kind of a friend do you call yourself?’
‘I’m not seeing anyone,’ I said tiredly. ‘I’ve just got a – a stupid crush on Matt, and until I talk myself out of it I can’t really go out with his best friend.’
‘Huh,’ said Clare. ‘Matt King. I thought you were immune.’
I gave a miserable little hiccup of laughter. ‘If you ever tell anyone I swear I’ll hunt you down and dismember you with a teaspoon.’
She made a face. ‘Messy.’
‘I mean it.’
‘I can tell,’ said Clare. ‘You’re looking very fierce. So why don’t you do something about it?’
‘Because he’s going out with Farmer Barbie.’
‘You should just tell him. What’ve you got to lose?’
‘I can’t tell him,’ I said. ‘He’s not interested.’
‘How do you know?’ Clare asked.
‘Because he’s going out with Farmer Barbie,’ I repeated.
She dismissed this with a wave of her hand. ‘Yeah, but probably only because he hasn’t got around to cutting her loose. He’s not the most organised of blokes.’
‘If you liked someone else you’d get around to it, wouldn’t you?’
Clare shrugged and, picking up her toothbrush, pointed it at me again. ‘If you don’t ask you’ll never know.’
I began to get cross. ‘Oh, come on. Even if I decided I needed that extra little bit of rejection, how could I stay at Aunty Rose’s and see him every day? His aunt’s dying and he’s got two hundred cows to calve all by himself and his mother’s entirely useless and who knows what Kim’ll do next – the last thing the poor man needs is me telling him he’s the love of my life.’
‘Hmm,’ said Clare. ‘Crap. You have a point.’
‘I know.’ I leant across and impulsively kissed her cheek. ‘Now, go inside and sleep it off.’
Chapter 22
‘HELO, JOSIE. HOW lovely to see you again. I don’t suppose you remember me?’
I smiled.
‘Of course I do. Hello, Mrs Titoi.’ Bonnie Titoi was a plump, charming Maori lady who lived in town; Aunty Rose had nursed her at the births of at least three of her children. I dropped my bag on the kitchen table and crossed the room to kiss Rose’s cheek and give her today’s mail. Aunty Rose was the only person I knew who received actual handwritten letters rather than just bills and announcements from Time magazine that she had just won a sumptuous, personalised gift.
‘Did you bring the paper in, sweet pea?’
I shook my head. ‘Never saw it. I thought someone must have brought it up.’
‘I think David aims for the ditch on purpose,’ she said. ‘Ah well, never mind.’
‘I’ll go down and have a look for it in a moment,’ I said. ‘Percy can come with me for the walk. How are you, Mrs Titoi?’
‘Very well, thank you, my dear. Hasn’t she grown up pretty, Rose?’
‘She’s not too bad, I suppose,’ said Aunty Rose.
I ran myself a glass of water, and perched on the edge of the kitchen table to drink it. I had spent half an hour this afternoon with Dallas Taipa’s feet, and another half-hour trying hard to explain to Keith Taylor that if he didn’t stop taking his newly reconstructed shoulder out on the quad bike he would stuff it up irrevocably. I was fairly sure he wasn’t going to listen to me, and that he was going to regret that for the next thirty or so years.
‘Josie, sweetheart,’ said Bonnie.
‘Mm?’
‘Please get off that table – it’s tapu. We don’t put our bottoms where we put our food, hmm?’
I slid to my feet. ‘Sorry. Aunty Rose, I’ll just go and get the paper.’
‘You mustn’t be offended, sweetheart.’
‘Of course not,’ I murmured, although privately I reflected that after all it wasn’t Mrs Titoi’s table. And my bottom hygiene is excellent, thank you very much.
Outside on the porch I took one of Aunty Rose’s ancient oilskin coats from its peg and slid it on cautiously in case wetas were hiding in the sleeves. It’s so disconcerting when a large spiky insect crawls out across the tender skin just behind your ear. Calling up my retinue of dogs and pig I went down through the orchard to the mailbox.
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