‘OK.’
‘Where?’
‘What?’
‘Where do you live? I’ll need to know that if I’m collecting you.’
‘Of course.’ I gave him the address. ‘11 Flax-view Road.’
“OK, see you at ten?’
‘No, eleven.’
‘What? Oh I see. Clever.’
‘Ten’ll be fine.’
‘Great. Bye Andrea.’
‘Bye Chris. See you tomorrow,’ I said.
And my heart leapt within me at the thought of being out with Chris for the whole day, just the two of us, together.
An extract from Chris’s notebook
Dear Andrea,
When you said ‘Yes’ I could hardly believe it. That
night I talked Dad into lending me the car. To begin
with he wasn’t happy about it. He asked why I wanted
it. I told him I was going to take someone out. There was no point trying to disguise the fact that I wasn’t going to need the car just to drive myself around.
‘A girl?’ he asked me. So I said that it was. When he asked me who you were I didn’t want to tell him, because I didn’t think it was any of his business but he insisted, saying since it was his car he had a right to know.
So I told him that I’d met you in my classical studies class. I thought I would throw in the classics connection, as Dad also has a passion for it. It helped. He was mollified. I told him you were a keen student.
Of course I wasn’t one hundred percent certain on that point but as far as I knew it might have been true. I told him we might even do some homework together. That was also a true thought. I had the happy inspiration of taking my copy of The Bacchae, thinking we could read it together, maybe.
So that was that. He said I could take the car but that I’d have to have it back by six when he needed it and that I’d better introduce you to him. I said I would sometime but I’m sure he meant sooner rather than later. My Dad’s not what you call easy-going but he’s OK really.
Outed
‘What were you two talking about?’
I shrugged. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing my bum,’ said Becs. ‘That swine was
asking you out wasn’t he?’
‘So what if he was? It’s got nothing to do with you.’
‘Because it makes the rest of us insanely jealous,
that’s what.’
But for once Becs wasn’t sounding her usual brittle self. She sounded almost relieved. ‘It’s about time you started behaving normally,’ she said.
‘Normally?’
‘Like any other red-blooded girl.’
‘What!’
‘Good on ya,’ said Becs, quite fondly for her. ‘Go for it. Give him a good time. Have one yourself.’
She made me nearly want to cancel the date. The ‘daytime outing’.
Nearly. But not nearly enough to do so.
My young man
At ten the following morning on the dot, Chris drove up in his father’s car. I heard it, before I saw it, crunching up our metalled driveway.
‘Your young man’s here,’ my father called from outside where he was clearing weeds in front of the house.
Last night I’d told Mum and Dad what I was doing the following day. If they were surprised they didn’t show it. Just exhibited a suppressed curiosity. Pleased, possibly.
‘It’s been a fair while since . . . what’s-his-name,’ said Dad.
‘Robbie,’ I reminded him.
‘Robbie.’
‘He’s not my young man,’ I called back knowing Dad
couldn’t hear me anyway.
I sneaked a quick peak from a window. I don’t
know what I’d expected in the way of cars. For some reason I had imagined Chris’s father to be loaded with money and I’d been prepared for anything from
a flash crimson Ferrari to a yellow, yuppie VW. But Chris’s Dad’s car looked as if it could have been vintage material. It was sharp edged, not smooth; square, not streamlined. A real battler.
I ventured outside for a closer look. Dad was already chatting to Chris. They were talking about the car.
‘So how old would she be?’ Dad was asking.
‘About fifty years,’ said Chris.
‘In good nick,’ said Dad.
‘Well, we don’t use it much,’ Chris said. ‘Dad buses to work and I bike to school. The Austin’s more in the garage than on the road.’
‘Did you learn to drive in it?’
‘Yes. But I also had to drive the instructor’s car. Compared with hers our car felt like a shopping trolley without wheels.’
Dad laughed. Neither of them had noticed me yet.
‘Solid though,’ said Dad. ‘Built like a tank. She’s safer in some respects than most of today’s cars. Column change too I see.’
Chris nodded. ‘It’s easy once you’re used to it.’
‘Had one of those back home,’ said Dad. ‘Drove all through Ireland in her. By the time I got to the Ring of Kerry bits were starting to fall off but she managed to bring me home safely in the end.’
I was getting annoyed and not just because I was feeling ignored.
‘If it’s like a tank why do you call it a she?’ I joined in the conversation. ‘Tanks are male aren’t they?’
They both turned at the same time.
‘Hi,’ said Chris. A smile so big I couldn’t help but smile back. ‘You could have female tanks,’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ said Chris. ‘I’ve never thought of that before. Ancient Greek triremes had women’s names and they were boats of war, used as battering rams.’
‘Really?’ said Dad.
‘Well, at least one of them had a woman’s name,’ amended Chris. ‘There was a ship in the Athenian navy called Salaminias.’
‘And who was she before she got turned into the name of a ship?’ I asked.
‘It’s actually the name of a place,’ said Chris. ‘Where a famous battle was fought. The Battle of Salamis. The ship was named after it.’
‘So how did a men’s battle turn into a female ship?’
‘They just changed the ending,’ said Chris. ‘Salaminias has a feminine ending.’
‘Like in Latin?’ said Dad, surprising me. But then I remembered he would have been an altar boy when they still said masses in Latin.
‘That’s it,’ said Chris. ‘And the Greek word for ‘ship’ is feminine too. Interesting isn’t it. But I don’t know the reason why.’
‘No it’s not interesting,’ I said. ‘And feminine isn’t the same as female. Whether they’ve got male names or female names, they’re all boys’ toys. Cars, tanks, Greek triremes.’
Well, I’ll leave you two to argue it out,’ said Dad abandoning the wheels for the weeds. ‘Going to make a day of it Andrea tells us. It’s going to be a
corker.’
I rolled my eyes. Dad’s attempts at sounding like a Kiwi bloke always sounded off-key.
‘I don’t actually know exactly what we’re doing yet or where we’re going,’ I said, turning to Chris.
‘I thought we might go up to the hills,’ he said.
‘If that’s OK with you?’
‘Good idea,’ said Dad.
‘Keep out of it,’ I said to him.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said.
‘And do what?’ I asked Chris.
‘Go for a walk. Buy a pizza on the way. Have a picnic.’
‘A walk?’
‘Yeah. You know. That thing people do with their legs.’
‘Really. I never knew that,’ I said. ‘I’ll grab my boots then.’ I went back inside.
Mum was already rummaging in the hall cupboard for them.
‘You’ve been eavesdropping!’ I said.
‘I couldn’t help overhear . . . yes I was,’ she admitted.
‘So what do you think?’
‘He’s what my mother would have called a personable young man,’ she said. ‘What I would have called dishy.’
>
‘Mum, looks mean nothing. You told me that once, remember?’
‘I do. And you’re quite right.’
‘But he is. And we’re going for a walk,’ I said.
‘Ah, how old-fashioned,’ said Mum.
‘Nice and old-fashioned,’ I said, reflectively. ‘ I think I’d rather do that than go to a party or a
nightclub, at least to begin with.’
‘You’re not quite old enough for nightclubs yet anyway,’ said Mum.
‘Oh Mum, you know how easily people our age can get in if we want to. That’s not the point. Chris isn’t all booze and . . .’
‘Yes I know,’ said Mum.
‘He’s different from the rest.’
Having found my boots Mum stood up and put one arm lightly around my shoulders.
‘Have a wonderful day Andrea,’ she told me.
Brown
Chris held the passenger door open for me and, putting my principles aside, I got in without complaint. The inside of the car seemed huge. As I felt myself vanishing into its well looked after upholstery I remember thinking that I’d just crossed a funny kind of border and got my passport stamped to enter a new country. What if it turned out that the countries ended up being hostile towards each other, I wondered.
It was a different world out there. From a distance the hills looked dry-dead and brown but up close they magnified into life and colour. The tussock shifted between golden-brown and tawny-gold. It resembled the colour and wildness of Chris’s hair.
On either side of the path, pushing through clumps of bracken fern, the dangerous broom had almost finished flowering, a lingering smell of honey still hanging in the warm breeze. Many of the prickly plants looked as if they had been sprayed with the gauze of funnel-web spiders, which had built their homes between their sharp spikes, safe from
predators.
As we started walking, crickets revved up in amongst the vegetation, while in the background the
city hummed too, distant and almost foreign, the white arc of the Events Centre briefly recognizable, cars smaller than beetles passing along in front of it on the elevated expressway. The University’s library
building stood up like a grey castle in an urban forest. But soon everything was engulfed by the female curve of the hills, even the distant mountains with their last light coating of snow, and we were alone on the brown back of the hill.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ I said after we’d been walking for a while, not saying much, just enjoying each other’s company and breathing in the sounds and the smells.
‘Hot,’ said Chris. Sweat beaded his forehead.
‘Baked hills,’ I said. ‘An unusual recipe.’
‘Do you go walking lots?’ he asked.
‘Used to. Haven’t for a while. Too many homework assignments these days. Mum and Dad belonged to a tramping club when I was small and we often went somewhere in the weekends.’
‘And I thought you were just a stay-at-home girl who’d enjoy the novelty of a nice walk on the hills,’ Chris said.
‘Ah, that’s what comes of making assumptions.’
‘And you don’t like people doing that, do you?’
‘No, I don’t,’ I said.
‘Just don’t show me up too much,’ Chris said.
‘What d’you mean?’
He stopped for a breather. ‘You’re obviously much fitter than I am,’ he said. ‘You’re not even puffing.’
‘Perhaps I’ve just got bigger lungs than you.’
When I said that Chris’s eyes couldn’t help but fall down to my chest. ‘Maybe,’ he said, turning away.
I felt embarrassed too. I was wearing a light, loose fitting shirt over a tight sporty singlet. It kept my breasts in place but, even so, I suddenly became very aware of them and everything else about me that
stood out.
I pointed to a grassy clearing ahead. ‘Look, there’s a bit of shade and a good place to sit. Let’s have a breather and a drink. I could manage some lunch, too.’
We were both carrying small daypacks. We’d stopped for a pizza and Chris had stuffed the pizza box into his pack.
‘Good idea,’ he said.
Our picnic spot was sheltered from the hot north-westerly wind by a hedge of broom. We could see the steep track up which we’d walked, its compacted, rocky surface and grassy fringes winding down to the outer suburbs of the city, a million miles away. The pizza, when we opened the box, had slopped around and we had to scoop up the various toppings with our fingers, which we licked clean.
‘Now we’re sitting ducks for food poisoning,’ I said. ‘Food first cooling and then reheating in a back pack.’
‘I’m sure we’ll come through,’ said Chris. ‘It was vegetarian after all.’
We sipped from our water bottles, assessing each other all over again. I couldn’t know what Chris was thinking but I was pondering the mystery of how we had ended up here together, two people who had met such a short time ago yet who seemed so suited to one another.
Life was strange, passing strange, as a character in a play by Shakespeare once said.
As if programmed I leaned over and Chris leaned
over and we kissed each other, pizza mouth to pizza mouth, while the hills and the sky and the earth paused in their perpetual motion as they waited for us to catch them up.
An extract from Chris’s notebook
I remember those first warm, passionate kisses on the hillside with a thrill that makes me wish we had been able to take it further, right there and then. But that would have been too much of a presumptuous risk. It would have been too soon. Andrea’s not that sort of girl. I’m not that sort of guy. Instead we read The Bacchae. If she was surprised that I brought it with me, she didn’t let on. We snuggled up on the grass and read the play, the whole thing, together. It took us about an hour and a half and then we carried on walking.
Great play. We both enjoyed it. I guess you can interpret it many ways but the way I see it, it’s all about the absurd excesses of religious belief. It was Euripides’ last play and I think he wrote it to get back at those Greeks who let their lives be ruled by obedience to their gods. Be rational, he’s telling them, or you’ll end up being destroyed like the characters in the play, chopped to pieces the way Pentheus was by the women of Thebes.
It was a tough but necessary lesson. After all, if the Greeks had listened to the astronomer Aristarchus, many years before Euripides, then we wouldn’t have needed Galileo to tell us that the earth went round the sun and not the other way round. But no, poor old
Aristarchus got up the noses of the non-existent gods
and his revolutionary theory went to earth with him. Tragic really.
Andrea didn’t say what she thought of the play
but I could see she was impressed by it.
How far is too far?
We could have carried on but after a while I pulled back. It was a public track so anyone might suddenly
have appeared. Then Chris reached into his pack and took out a copy of the play Ms Shapiro had suggested we begin reading. I was surprised but tried not to show it, in case he got the impression that I thought bringing it with him was a little over the top even for a self-confessed classics geek.
Turned out to be a good idea. It meant we got a major bit of reading out of the way in more pleasant than usual circumstances while Chris was able to explain who was who and what was where and what he thought it all meant. Classic geeks have their uses.
Reading the play brought us to the topic of religion, a bit of a dangerous one in the sense that I felt edgy about discussing it with Chris, in fact with anybody these days, but it was as good a time as any to open up to each other where we were coming from.
I was a bit thrown by what I read, though.
The references to the priests of Dionysus. They were women.
‘So, that’s what I think the play’s all about,’ said Chris. ‘The death of religion.’
‘Is it only that?’
I said.
‘No,’ Chris acknowledged. ‘But that’s its main point.’
I pondered. ‘Euripides is saying that the new
religion Dionysus wants to introduce is fanatical but at the same time the old religion is rigid and unaccommodating.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But isn’t that going too far, being too black and white about it?’ I said, remembering Mum’s comment some years ago when I tried arguing that I could be a murderer in good conscience.
‘How far is too far?’ Chris asked. ‘Religion’s
about black and white. There are no shades of grey when it comes to religious beliefs. It’s all one thing or another. That’s why there’ve been so many wars fought in the name of religion. That’s why people are still being blown up, shot at, persecuted today.’
‘That’s true, sometimes,’ I said, thinking Dad’s Northern Ireland was a classic example.
‘So that’s why I asked . . .’ Chris hesitated. ‘That’s why I asked the other day if you were a Catholic,’ he said.
‘Because you were sacred I was a religious fanatic and might try to blow you up, shoot you and persecute you?’ I said. I couldn’t help being sarcastic. ‘Get real man.’
‘That wasn’t the reason,’ he said. ‘It’s because if you were, I needed to think if it would be a good thing to, you know, get involved.’
‘That was pretty calculating,’ I said, after a few moments’ silence. ‘You told me it wouldn’t have mattered.’
‘No it wouldn’t have. At least, I don’t think it would.’
‘For all I knew you might have been a serial rapist,’ I said. ‘Maybe I should have asked if you were.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Chris. ‘It does sound calculating.’
‘It is.’
‘I guess I just didn’t want to take a risk and have it all come unstuck afterwards.’
‘Why would it?’
‘Well, you know, Catholics have to toe the party line. They’re not supposed to go out with anyone unless it’s another Catholic . . .
‘What a load of bullshit,’ I said. ‘One or two
things have changed since the Middle Ages, you know.’
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