Just for Fun

by Rosalind James

  “Oh. No. Unless . . . no. I wasn’t meaning to.”

  He sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

  “Goodnight, then.” She smiled at him. Too sweet. Too soft.

  He reached for her, kissed her on the cheek, wanting so much more. His lips brushed her skin once again, then he lost the battle and gave her a soft kiss on the lips, held her close for just a moment more before he released her reluctantly and stepped back. “Goodnight.”

  Another smile, and she turned and walked to her bedroom. He watched her go, saw the outline of her bra strap under the snug little shirt, the smooth lines of her bum under the tight, faded jeans. Either she wasn’t wearing anything under those, or it was a thong. Either way, it was making him ache. And he was going to bed alone.

  “What are we doing today?” Zack asked the next morning, when he and Graham were sitting at the scrubbed wood table with their bowls of Weet-Bix. “Are we going to the beach again? Or on the glass boat?”

  “I was thinking about the cave, up at Waipu,” Nic said. “See the glowworms, do a bit of exploring. What d’you reckon? Anybody scared of the dark?”

  “A cave?” Zack said. “Sweet as, huh, Graham?”

  “Yeh!” Graham agreed. “Cool!”

  “Is it safe?” Emma asked doubtfully. “And is your ankle up to it?”

  “Course. Long as we have torches. I’ve been there before,” Nic assured her. “More than once. I know the twists and turns of it. And I’ll wear my ankle brace, Mum. You coming to make sure of it, or would you rather stay here?”

  “I’d like to come,” Emma decided. “It sounds fun.”

  “You’re not scared of the dark, then, yourself,” Nic asked.

  “Nah. Mum’s just scared of spiders,” Zack told him.

  “Shh,” she said with a laugh. “Don’t tell Nic my guilty secrets.”

  “Spiders are good, though,” Graham piped up. “They kill flies. And they won’t hurt you. There aren’t any bad spiders in En Zed. Not like in Aussie. You don’t have to be scared, Emma.”

  “Thanks,” she smiled at him. “I know you’re right. But it isn’t rational, I’m afraid. It’s just that they’re so . . . crawly.” She shuddered. “It’s all those legs.”

  “She screams,” Zack told Nic with delight. “When she sees them. And then she gets out the glass cleaner, and she squirts them, and she really screams. And then she picks them up with a tissue and flushes them down the loo.”

  “I don’t scream,” Emma said, laughing but completely embarrassed now. “Unless they’re those really big black ones. Then I scream, I admit. But usually I just . . . make scared noises. Because I hate them.”

  “Like this,” Zack said, ever-helpful. “Ewww! Aahhhh! IHHH!”

  “You s’posed to pick them up and put them outside,” Graham told her as Emma succumbed to the giggles, seduced by Nic’s burst of laughter. “You get a piece of paper, and put it under them so they walk on it. Then you carry the paper outside and let them go, so they can catch flies!”

  “Ugh,” Emma shuddered, still laughing. “Ugh, ugh, ugh. They’d walk on my hand.”

  “Hardly ever,” Graham assured her. “And then you just brush them off.”

  “Please stop talking about this,” Emma moaned. “Let’s talk about caves instead. I’m not scared of caves.”

  “Right. Everybody ready?” Nic asked, coming into the lounge with his day pack. “Where are your gumboots?” he asked Emma.

  “Oh, I just wear my trainers,” she told him.

  “It’ll be wet in there,” he objected. “Muddy, too.”

  “So I’ll wash them, afterwards. It’ll be fine.”

  “Thought you were a citizen,” he said. “Didn’t they check that you had gumboots, when they vetted you? Isn’t that one of the rules? You have to know all the words to Aotearoa, own a pair of gummies, and be able to shell and eat a plate of prawns in under five minutes?”

  “I can do the rest of it, but I don’t have gumboots. Put the cuffs on me.” She held her wrists out, laughed up at him, and Nic was overcome by a flash of imagination that left him aroused and exasperated. This was ridiculous. He was a grown man, not a teenage boy.

  “Yeh, well, guess you’ll have to get muddy then,” he said, doing his best to stay cool. “Ready, boys?”

  “Yeh!” Zack said enthusiastically.

  “Let’s go, then.” But as they were walking down the steps to the car, with the boys running ahead, he called them back.

  “Why are you walking like that?” he asked Zack. “Something wrong? A blister? Let’s get that sorted, before we go.”

  “Nah,” Zack said, embarrassed. He glanced at his mother, then hastily away. “My gummies feel funny, that’s all.”

  “Hang on.” Nic reached down to feel his foot in the boot, then glanced sharply up at Emma. “His toes are curling under,” he told her. “These are too small for him.”

  “What?” She knelt down, felt Zack’s toes. Nic was right, she realized. “Oh, sweetie. Why didn’t you tell me you needed new boots?”

  Zack glanced uncomfortably at Graham, dropped his eyes. “I didn’t want to say,” he muttered. “Because.”

  “Because why?” Emma asked.

  “Because you said,” he told her reluctantly. “That we’re not s’posed to spend money. Because of the car. You said, Mum!”

  “Oh, baby.” She went to hug him, but he squirmed away. “Mum,” he said, scarlet with embarrassment. “Don’t.”

  “Can we go now?” he pleaded to Nic. “I can walk.”

  “Yeh,” Nic said, unsmiling. “We’ll go by way of Warkworth. With a stop for gumboots.”

  The trip was a success despite its inauspicious start, to Emma’s relief. Nic had insisted on buying her a pair of gumboots as well, when they’d reached the shop. She’d picked out an inexpensive black version of the knee-high rubber boots, but he’d seen her longing glance and had asked the salesman to bring out the floral ones with pink edging.

  “I love them,” she said when she’d slipped them on, stood admiring herself in the mirror. “I don’t need them, though. Black is OK.”

  “Whyever would I buy you black boots, now that I’ve seen you in those?” Nic asked. “If anyone was ever meant to wear gumboots with flowers on—which I’d have doubted, before—it’s you.”

  “We’ll take them,” he told the young salesman. “And the others, the kids’ ones, as well.” Zack had insisted on black boots rather than anything more colorful. “You have black,” he’d told Nic. “I want ones like yours.” Then had looked down, shy again.

  Theirs was the only car in the Waipu Caves carpark, and the boys were delighted to find horses pastured in the paddock that also served, in typical New Zealand fashion, as the start of the walking track and cave entrance. After a pause for petting and carrot-feeding—taking care of most of the vegetable content in the lunch Emma had packed so carefully—they made their way to the sign marking the cave entrance.

  “Why didn’t I know this was here?” Emma asked, switching on her torch to enter the cavern.

  “Because you needed somebody to show you,” Nic said smugly. “And here he is.”

  “Are you sure you know the way, though?” she asked with concern as they penetrated more deeply, leaving the light at the entrance behind. She was glad for the gumboots with their ridged soles. They were skirting a running stream now, its banks muddy and slippery.

  “Dead sure,” he said. “Look at this, fellas,” he told the boys, playing his torch over a large formation hanging down from the ceiling. “D’you know what this is?”

  “It’s a stalactite. Or a stalagmite,” Emma said when the boys confessed ignorance. “I can never remember.”

  “Stalactite. ‘The mites go up, the tights come down,’” he quoted. “That’s how to remember.”

  “Ew,” she said. “Nasty imagery. But effective.”

  “Shut off the torches, now,” he directed them. “And you’ll see something.”

  �
�Glowworms!” Graham said, looking at the pinpricks of light overhead. “Like at Waitomo!”

  “Been there, have you?” Nic asked.

  “I haven’t,” Zack said.

  “We’ll have to take you, then, another time,” Nic told him. “But there’re heaps of glowworms right here, for us to find ourselves. First, though, we have to make it through this tricky bit. Torches on. And if you come along in back, Emma, we’ll just keep them between us. I can help them over, if they need a bit of a hand.”

  It was tricky, Emma found, wading through the water, climbing up and down through rocky passages and edging around corners. Some of the boulder-scrambling was too much for the boys, and Nic did have to reach down and give them a hoist over. She was glad he seemed to know where they were going, because her sense of direction was soon thoroughly confused by the twists and turns in the dark.

  “Are you sure you’ve got this right?” she asked him nervously as he directed them to a right at a junction of passages, developing an uncomfortable mental image of the four of them, lost and cold in the deserted cavern. “Should we have brought string, or something?”

  His voice echoed back to her. “Nah. Don’t need string. I know where we are. Another turn or two, and you’ll really see something.”

  Five minutes on, and she realized what he meant. They dropped down out of a passage to find themselves in a huge underground space with a level floor. They shone their torches around at the carved, twisted rock surfaces, the spectacular stalac-‘tites,’ Emma reminded herself, hanging down from the ceiling.

  “And here’s the real show,” Nic told them. “Let me give you a bit of a boost, and you’ll see what I mean.”

  He lifted the boys up onto a large, flat rock formation, like a king-sized bed in the middle of the room, then offered Emma a hand up.

  “Now, lie on your backs,” he instructed. “Torches off. And enjoy.”

  It was a full glowworm panorama, Emma found with delight. For all the world like a night sky, the distances deceptive here in the dark. They lay in silence, resting after the effort of climbing through the tunnels. Lying next to Zack on the hard stone, listening to the stream, its sound magnified a hundredfold by the echoing rock passages, looking up at the hundreds of little glowworm stars, Emma realized that she was, at this moment, absolutely, perfectly happy.

  Chapter 24

  The journey out was slower, a bit more difficult. The boys were getting tired now, requiring more help to clamber over the boulders in the dark. They remained enthusiastic, though, to Emma’s relief, encouraged by Nic’s good humor. And when they were once again blinking in the daylight outside the cave entrance, the horses grazing peacefully in the paddock beyond, she had to laugh.

  “I’ve never seen anything so muddy,” she told them both. “How did you manage to get mud all the way up to your necks?”

  “That’s why there’s a shower over here,” Nic told her, leading the way to the toilets which did, Emma saw, feature an outdoor shower on one side. “And why I had you bring them dry clothes.”

  “I don’t have to take a shower, do I?” Zack asked dubiously. “It’s going to be cold.”

  “Not a real shower,” Nic assured him. “But you do have to get some of that mud off. Drop your gear, and we’ll get to it. Sooner you’re clean, sooner we can eat.”

  Emma ran for the bag of clean clothes and the big towel, tossed them to Nic in deference to Graham’s modesty, then went into the ladies’ toilet herself to change and clean up. It was such a relief to have somebody else taking charge, not to have to look after Zack before she could think about herself. She could hear Nic joking with the boys, their squeals as he scrubbed their muddy arms, necks, and faces in the freezing water. She waited until she could tell by the conversation outside that they were finished, then popped her head out.

  “Everybody decent? Safe for girls?” she asked.

  “Good as gold,” Nic told her. He was scrubbing his own arms and hands under the tap now, rinsing the worst of the mud off his gumboots, and she went to join him.

  “It’s freezing, Mum!” Zack said happily.

  “Brr,” she shivered. “It is.” She reached for the towel, dried herself off, handed it to Nic. “Thanks,” she told him.

  “For what?”

  “For taking care of them.”

  “No worries. Hoping you did a proper job on that picnic, though. Because you’ve got three hungry men here.”

  The boys were quiet on the twisting road home, the winter dusk falling early, the interior of the ute warm and cozy. Thank goodness Nic had thought to warn her, and Emma had been able to give Zack a carsickness tablet. Both boys were nearly asleep by the time Nic pulled into the bach’s driveway, but rallied themselves enough to climb into the big shower together and scrub down the rest of the way under Nic’s direction. Emma could hear him in there, washing hair and issuing instructions. She caught the high-pitched sound of their excited responses as she threw muddy gear into the washing machine in the laundry alcove nearby.

  “Have them put on their pajamas, when they’re done,” she called in to Nic. “I’ll fix them a quick tea in a bit. Early bedtime tonight, after all that.”

  He did as she asked, then settled the boys in front of the big TV to play a racecar videogame, to Emma’s disgust. “It’s not good for them,” she complained. “Those games are addictive.”

  “I don’t think it’ll warp their characters too much,” he said. “It’s not every day. Just a bit of fun, on holiday.”

  “Why do you even have that thing?” she asked. “Do you play it? That’s hard for me to imagine.”

  “Not much, though I’ve been known to take a turn driving a racecar. If Graham weren’t here, you’d probably see me having a go with Zack. And sometimes a mate will borrow the bach, or one of my rellies, with kids. Just one of those things that’s nice to have. Holiday things,” he added firmly. “Indulgences. You can go home again, read the Great Works to him, discuss art history. Playing a videogame for an hour isn’t going to lower his IQ, I promise. Just a bit of blokey fun.”

  “Anyway,” he went on more seriously, “I want to talk to you. Come outside with me, will you?” He grabbed his hoodie from the rack, tossed her jumper to her, and opened the ranch sliders off the lounge. Led her out onto the wooden deck that wrapped around half the house, around to the back where steps led to the garden, and the darkness beyond that was the sea.

  “Sit down,” he told her. “Because we need to have a chat about money.”

  “Why do I feel like I’m in the headmaster’s office?” she asked, looking at him in the faint illumination cast by a single outdoor bulb. “I think I’d prefer to stand, if you’re going to yell at me about Zack’s gumboots. I didn’t know he’d outgrown them, or I’d have bought him new ones. We had a bit of car trouble last month, and things were tight, that’s all. And why do you get to criticize how I’m taking care of him, anyway? Or how I’m budgeting? I appreciate your buying him new ones, but that still doesn’t give you the right.”

  “Wait, what? I’m not criticizing you. I’m just saying, money shouldn’t be tight now. Because I know you got that first maintenance payment, beginning of the month. No need for him to worry about telling you his boots are too small. And time to think about looking for a new place, too.”

  “With one payment? That let me pay off the card, after that car trouble. And gave me some peace of mind,” she admitted. “And I told you. I’d have bought him new boots, if I’d known. That was last month, that I was worried. But it’s way too early to think about shifting house.”

  “I don’t like you living in that dodgy place, though. You or Zack. With spiders,” he reminded her.

  “I don’t think spiders confine their activities to cheap flats. And Zack’s settled at school. If we moved, he’d end up someplace new, and that’s way too much change. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with my flat. All right, it’s not flash. And it isn’t tidy, but that’s not the flat’s fault. I have
Mrs. Harrison there, and that’s massive. Not just that she’s willing to watch Zack from time to time, but that I know she’s there in an emergency, and so does Zack.”

  “But you should be someplace better,” he said in frustration. “I’m . . . I’m embarrassed to have you both there. To have people know you’re there. To have you living like that, while I’m . . . while I’m where I am.”

  “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way. But you must see, that’s not my problem. I have to do what’s right for us. And anyway, you’ve paid me once. Once. I’d be stupid to assume my life’s all roses now, and get in over my head. The deposit alone, and the payment to the realtor—that’s a month’s rent. Which I don’t have. And then the moving expenses, and the higher rent . . .” She made a helpless gesture. “I told you, money’s not my best thing. But at least I’ve learned, now, to think first. To recognize when something’s beyond my means.”

  “And I told you,” he said impatiently. “Oliver’s working on that lump sum. And I can help, in the meantime.”

  “I’m not spending that! Come on, Nic. That’d be beyond irresponsible. That’d be crazy. That’s Zack’s insurance! I mean to put it aside for him. For his education. And for an emergency, in case something happens to me. I have life insurance if the worst happens, but what if I got sick, or in an accident? I lie awake nights, worrying about that.”

  “He’d have me, wouldn’t he? There’s no reason for you to lie awake at all. And I’m not planning on putting all my money in gold mines, you know. It’ll be there, when it’s time for Uni. And so will I.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “I hope you will. But I know maintenance ends at eighteen. And I have to be sure. He’s my responsibility. I’m all he has.”

  “Nah, you’re not.” He could feel his blood pressure rising, the frustration mounting. Why wouldn’t she see? Why’d she have to be so bloody obstinate? “You’re not all he has. He has me. Legally now as well. And I’m not going anywhere. Why can’t you wrap your little mind around that?”

  “Don’t call me stupid,” she warned him, her posture becoming rigid. “Don’t you dare! I am not stupid!”