by Minnie Darke
‘I have a business,’ he said, mildly enough, though Evie detected a hint of defensiveness that made her think that she might have accidentally sounded a bit preachy.
‘What kind?’ she asked, hoping to make up for it.
‘Tech,’ he said, and took a sip of his cider. ‘I’m a computer geek.’
Of course, Evie thought. She could see who he was, and who he must have been at school – one of those gentle and almost-invisible boys, the sort who listened and asked questions, the ones she’d always liked so much better than the competitors, the charmers and the crowd-pleasing hot-heads.
‘What species?’ she asked.
‘Developer,’ he said. ‘A friend and I, we’re in business together. Sonder Digital.’
‘Sonder?’ she asked, clarifying.
‘Yes, it’s—’
‘From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I know. A word for that feeling you have when you realise that everybody in the world has a reality as amazingly complex as your own.’
His eyebrows shot up. ‘I think it’s a first that someone’s defined it for me.’
Evie, pleased, shrugged. ‘I like unusual words.’
‘Try me.’
‘Solivagant.’
Arie thought.
‘Nope. Don’t know it.’
‘It means to ramble alone.’
‘Nice word,’ he said, nodding.
One cider turned into two, which turned into Arie fetching the takeaway curry from his kitchen bench, reheating it and dividing it into two bowls. By the time they’d finished eating, they’d been talking for a couple of hours, but Arie had made no mention of Diana, although he’d said quite a bit about Richard, his friend and business partner, Richard’s wife and their son, Arie’s godson. Evie understood, though. She too was leaving things out; in the expurgated version she’d given him of her travels, she had mentioned nobody called Ben or Michael or Dave.
While they had been talking, a bank of ink-dark clouds moved in over the city. Soon, exploratory drops of rain were falling – big, fat drops that landed and spread on the warm bricks of the courtyard.
‘It’s going to bucket down,’ Arie said, peering up at the heavy sky.
‘You’re right,’ Evie said, knowing that – once again – they faced a moment of choice. But she had done her risk-taking for the day; she had been the one to turn the hose on him, and now it was going to have to be Arie’s turn. If he wanted to keep talking, she decided, then he would have to be the one to say, Let’s go inside.
‘What time is it?’ he asked, and a few more raindrops fell.
Evie rolled her wrist over to look at her slender, silver watch.
‘It’s almost five,’ she said.
Arie looked puzzled – an hour or more had passed since sunset, and he knew, and she knew that he knew, that five o’clock was long gone – but he didn’t press her for an explanation.
‘I should let you . . . get on with your evening,’ he said.
That was a phrase that Evie herself would never have used. On the telephone, she would never say, Well, I should let you go, because when people said those words to her, it wasn’t usually that they were being considerate of her, but looking for a polite way to tell her that they felt the conversation had already gone on for long enough. It was rare for Evie to feel that way. When she wanted to talk to someone, she could easily talk all through the night, but she knew that there had been men in her past who had found this aspect of her needy, or overly intense. It was something that she’d learned, over the years, to curb.
A spray of rain came with a gust of wind, and she and Arie got to their feet.
‘Thanks for your help with the car,’ she said.
‘And thank you. For the impromptu shower,’ he said.
She grinned. ‘Any time.’
Once he left, the rain began to fall in earnest. It fell all across the city, flushing the stuffiness out of the air, rinsing the heat off the roads and the buildings, and restoring parched grasses and wilting trees. Meanwhile, in Tavistock Row, Evie Greenlees sat cross-legged on the cushioned seat of the bay window watching the patterns change on the water-veined glass and listening to the sound of the rain, which was heavy and steady on the roof. On her lap, a diary was open. About this day she’d written many things, but the last of them was: He is nice. Very nice.
3.46. It was a sequence of numbers so familiar to Arie that he’d come to regard it almost as an old friend. He was also closely acquainted with 3.44 and 3.45, not to mention 3.47 and 3.48. But when he sat bolt upright in bed on that particular Sunday morning, it was 3.46 that was shining greenly back at him from the display on his bedside clock.
The way he always did when he woke with his heart beating too fast, Arie turned to the muted television at the foot of his bed, where the world of Doctor Who waited to take him in. This morning, the screen showed trees thickly clustered with pink blossoms. In the distance, through the gaps between the branches, was the Eiffel Tower.
Soon the image cut away to the top of the tower where the Fourth Doctor and his Time Lord companion, the sailor-hatted Romana, were taking in the view. Arie didn’t need to turn up the volume to know what they were saying to each other – he’d seen the episode more times than he could remember – and no words at all were necessary to spell out the chemistry between the actors. Back in the Paris springtime of 1979, Tom Baker and Lalla Ward had been in love.
Arie had been awake during enough early mornings to know that it was best only to hope, but not to expect, that he’d be able to get back to sleep. But this wasn’t one of his lucky days. After an hour of lying in bed with his eyes closed, trying to get comfortable first on one side, then the other, then flat on his back, he gave up, increased the volume on the television and watched Doctor Who until birdsong, and eventually dawn light, sifted into his room.
One small benefit of having close friends with very young children, Arie had discovered, was that they tended to be up and about almost as early as he was. When he set out on his recently rediscovered bike to Richard and Lenka’s house in the neighbouring suburb, the shadows on the grassy lawns were still long and cool, and the rolled-up Sunday papers only freshly scattered. Puddles of the previous night’s rain still remained.
‘Well, look who else couldn’t sleep!’ Lenka said, opening the door to Arie with Marek in her arms. The toddler, wearing nothing but a nappy and a singlet, was a writhing mass of plump, dimpled limbs and semi-masticated rusk, and he beamed at Arie with an unmitigated pleasure that Arie hoped one day to be able to return with sincerity.
As things stood, Arie was slightly terrified of Marek, with his raw desires and the speed at which he could transition from cheerful to inconsolable. Nevertheless, Arie bravely took his godson from Lenka’s arms and spoke to the child in the sensible, adult tones that he had promised himself he would always maintain. ‘Morning, Marek. Making decent progress on that rusk there, I see. How are the fangs coming along?’
Arie reached past the wriggling boy to kiss Lenka’s cheek.
‘Coffee’s made. I can get you breakfast too if you want, but I don’t think there’s anything very exciting.’
Arie followed Lenka into the kitchen, observing the havoc that a single child had wrought on a once-immaculate house. The place was now a maze of thigh-high safety gates, the sink was lined with sippy cups, and the floor was a carpet of wooden toys. On the fridge, crinkled sheets of paper were covered in primary swirls of finger-paint.
‘Richard’s gone back to bed,’ Lenka told Arie. ‘Nobody got much sleep around here last night, I can tell you.’
In her dressing gown, and wearing spectacles in place of her usual contact lenses, Lenka looked tired but not unhappily so. She took Marek back from Arie and set him down on the kitchen floor, giving him a set of brightly coloured measuring cups to play with before pouring Arie a cup of good, strong coffee.
‘You look like you have something on your mind,’ she said, as perceptive as ever.
Arie nodded. ‘That might be so.’
‘Well?’
‘I need you to tell me what to do.’
‘Go on.’
Arie took a gulp of his coffee. ‘I’ve forgotten how to ask a woman out. Actually, that’s a total lie. I don’t think I’ve ever known. With Diana . . . well, you know what she was like.’
Lenka made a sad smile. ‘Dear, dear Diana. I imagine that she would have decided what she wanted, and . . . poof! . . . your little mind would have been blown apart.’
‘That’s pretty much how it was.’
‘So, there’s someone in particular that you want to ask out?’
‘There is.’
‘Well, this is good, Arie. Isn’t it? Who is she?’
‘She’s staying next door.’
‘In the Airbnb?’
‘Yes.’
Lenka processed this information, and then something occurred to her. ‘Oh, I was going to get you breakfast. You want Weet-Bix? I think it’s that or Marek’s rice porridge. It’s a little bit Sunday in our cupboards.’
‘Weet-Bix is fine, but only if you’ve got enough milk. I can eat later.’
‘No, no – we have milk.’
Arie watched her do the particular dance of her kitchen – box from the pantry, bowl from the cupboard, spoon from the drawer, all the while stepping around Marek on the floor. ‘So, she’s travelling, then?’ Lenka asked.
‘Which is ideal, I think.’
‘How many Weet-Bix do you want? Two, three, four?’
‘Three.’
Lenka put the cereal in the bowl, then looked at Arie, her brow furrowed. ‘Why is it ideal that she’s travelling? I don’t follow.’
‘Well, it’s kind of safe, don’t you think?’ Arie said. ‘We could go out to dinner, talk. I could just be this normal . . . person.’
‘What do you mean by “normal”?’
‘I mean that for five minutes I could be somebody other than the miserable guy who lost his girlfriend in a plane crash.’
Lenka raised her eyebrows as she contemplated this. ‘You are thinking you can go out to dinner with this woman and not tell her about Diana?’
‘There wouldn’t be any need, would there?’
‘I see. You’re thinking there is no need, because you will have one date with her and then she’ll be gone?’
‘I thought you’d be pleased I was, you know . . . taking a chance.’
Lenka gave him a penetrating look. ‘Do you think any woman wants to go on a date with someone who regards her as a skill-building exercise?’
‘It’s not like that,’ Arie protested.
‘It’s not?’
‘No. I like her. I really like her. I mean, I hardly know her yet, but she seems—’
‘Why?’ Lenka challenged. ‘Why do you really like her?’
So Arie told her about the guitar music, and the parcel delivery, and the way she’d asked him to borrow a hose and then drenched him with it. ‘She’s funny, and thoughtful. She has this really expressive face, too. I reckon she’d be dreadful at poker. I don’t know . . . she’s just . . . perfectly herself somehow,’ he concluded.
Lenka smiled proudly. ‘You do like her,’ she diagnosed. ‘But if this is so, why wouldn’t you give it a proper chance?’
‘Oh, come on, Lenka. This would be my first date . . . since. The law of averages says that—’
‘How long is she staying for?’
‘About a week, I think.’
Lenka pulled a thinking face, then went to the fridge, got out the milk and poured it onto his cereal. ‘I think you should keep your mind open. Keep your heart open. I do not think it is wise to go into such things any other way. And, by the way, I am not expecting you for dinner this Wednesday, am I?’
Wednesday was Diana’s birthday.
‘No, that’s right, I’ll be out at Belinda’s,’ he said. For the second time inside a week, he thought.
On Diana’s birthday last year and the year before, he and Belinda had laid flowers beneath the empty drawer in the memorial wall, then gone back to her house to drink weak tea while listening to music. He imagined it would be the same this year. He’d ask if she needed anything done around the house, and then he would drive home with a freshly bruised heart.
Again, with the accent, and in the serious-mother voice, Lenka said, ‘You have not asked me yet, about the wardrobe.’
‘That’s true,’ Arie said distractedly. ‘This week . . . there’s Diana’s birthday. And I have to take Friday off too, to drive up for Heidi’s wedding. Maybe it’s a bad idea to ask Evie out this week. Maybe this is the wrong week.’
‘Evie? That’s her name?’
‘Yes.’
‘But next week she will be gone, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then it will have to be this week,’ Lenka said, as if this were now firmly decided.
‘But how do I do it? What do I even say?’
‘You say – would you like to have dinner with me?’
‘That’s it?’
‘Yes, Arie. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.’
‘Would you like to have dinner with me? That’s all I have to say?’
‘Correct.’ Lenka set his breakfast in front of him, and Arie looked down to see that the Weet-Bix in the bowl had been cut with the edge of a spoon into tiny chunks, the way you might prepare it for a toddler.
‘I know I’m a bit remedial in some areas,’ Arie said. ‘But I think I can manage breakfast cereal.’
Lenka peered into the bowl, and then laughed.
‘Oh, shit,’ she said. ‘I really am tired.’
WHEN EVIE OPENED the door to Arie, and they exchanged greetings, she noticed that he looked more brushed and combed than usual. For once his shirt was tucked in all around his middle.
‘So, I was thinking,’ he said, squinting a little, as if whatever came next might hurt. ‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’
‘I’d love to.’
She could see in his expression that he’d not expected it to be so easy.
‘O . . . kay. Great,’ he said. ‘Which night?’
‘I’m free any night this week,’ she said.
‘I can’t do Wednesday,’ he said. ‘Or Friday.’
She thought through the options. That left tonight, tomorrow, or Thursday. Thursday seemed too far away, but Evie didn’t quite have the guts to say, How about tonight? Right now? So she picked the middle path.
‘Tomorrow night?’ she suggested.
‘Great. I’ll pick you up at . . . seven?’
Now that this was settled, Arie seemed to need to leave right away. Perhaps to breathe out, which Evie was fairly sure he had not done properly the whole time he’d been standing at her door.
The restaurant, built on a curve in the narrow river that snaked through the suburbs, was called Chopsticks, and at Lenka’s suggestion, Arie had reserved a table for two on the back deck. In the twilight, the lightly rippled surface of the water shone in shades of indigo and rose gold, and on the table, a citrus-scented candle burned, supposedly keeping the mosquitoes at bay.
From the outside, it probably appeared all so very simple: a man in his mid-thirties, out for dinner with a pretty woman, who was – he guessed – in her late twenties. She was beautiful, in a simple black scoop-necked top and a pair of black pants that emphasised her narrow waist. Her silver hoop earrings were very fine, but large in circumference, so that their curves followed the edges of her bobbed hair. She wore more make-up than he’d seen her wear before, but it was mostly concentrated around her eyes. He couldn’t say that he really understood eyeshadow, but whatever she’d done, it had made her blue-green eyes look larger and even more intense.
Arie wondered what the people sitting around them would see, observing the pair of them. They were not touching; there was no casual clasping of hands on the table, and no meeting of feet underneath it, so they probably didn’t come across as an established couple. Probably, they loo
ked like exactly what they were: two people out on a first date, on best behaviour, slightly nervy and very solicitous of each other. They were engaged in a conversation that moved about like a skittish foal – tentatively coming in close, then shying away. Piece by careful piece, they were getting to know each other.
‘So, is Evie your full name, or short for something?’
‘Neither,’ she said, taking a sip of her white wine.
‘Then it’s . . . long? For Eve.’
‘Yes. And what about Arie? It’s not exactly a common name. Not here, anyway.’
‘My mother’s Dutch,’ he explained.
‘Ah. That would explain the smidge of an accent you have.’
‘Accent? I have an accent?’
He already understood that Evie was someone who watched and noticed, but he was just now coming to understand how closely she had been watching and noticing him.
‘It’s subtle,’ she said, ‘but it’s there.’
‘Mum would be pleased to hear that. She’s quite Dutch, although she only gets really Dutch around Christmas time.’
‘I’m guessing . . . oliebollen?’ Evie asked.
‘That’s New Year, but yes. My sisters all make them, too. Turns out I didn’t get the gene.’
‘How many sisters do you have?’
‘Two older, one younger. The youngest one’s getting married this weekend.’
‘Is that . . .’ she began, and then kept going, ‘. . . another thing you didn’t get the gene for?’
Arie knew she was testing, but only gently.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I . . . got close to married. Once. But it wasn’t to be. You? Ever married?’
Evie shook her head, the thin silver of her earrings catching the candlelight. ‘I’ve never even been to a wedding.’
‘What? Never?’
‘Nope.’
‘Do you have siblings?’
‘In one sense, yes, I have heaps of them. In another, I’m an only child.’
‘You’re going to have to explain that,’ Arie said.
‘I have two older half-sisters, Jacinta and Stella. They’re my mother’s daughters, but not my father’s. Then I came along, but I was only a baby when my parents split up. Dad remarried pretty quickly, and courtesy of him I have another four half-sisters, including a set of twins.’