Dinner at Rose's

by Danielle Hawkins

  ‘Thanks,’ said Matt, somewhat sourly. ‘You didn’t bring me a change of clothes, by any chance?’

  ‘Never even occurred to me. I’d better go and get you a wheelchair; it’s a fair distance to the car.’

  ‘I can walk,’ he said. ‘I’m alright once I’m up. It’s just getting there that’s the problem.’

  I helped him to his feet and picked up his bag, and we began to make our way slowly across the room. ‘Your mum and I played paper-scissors-rock to decide who’d get to come and pick you up,’ I told him. ‘Best of three. It went to the wire.’

  ‘I’m honoured,’ said Matt.

  ‘I lost.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ he said. ‘It hurts.’

  ‘No, I did lose, but then the vicar rang wanting to go over the music for tomorrow. So I was allowed to come after all.’

  ‘Ah.’

  We progressed in silence through the doors and along a corridor, hugging the wall as official-looking people bustled past.

  ‘I don’t really believe she’s dead,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Me neither. I think of something I want to tell her a dozen times a day, and each time it comes as a shock that I can’t.’ We were passed by an obese woman with a walker and a moon-boot, which was a little discouraging. Wheelchair?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Matt with dignity. ‘I’m coming along nicely.’

  ‘So’s Christmas,’ I murmured.

  ‘Oh, shut up. I thought women were supposed to be gentle and nurturing.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ I said sympathetically. ‘You must just have got a dud one.’

  Matt sighed. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. He reached for my hand, and I slid my fingers down between his.

  ‘Can you remember the accident?’ I asked.

  ‘Most of it, I think. The ambulance ride – God, that’s a lousy way to travel – and poor Cilla trying to get me out from under the bike.’

  ‘Hmph,’ I said.

  ‘Hmph?’

  ‘Poor Cilla? She made quite a good job of flattening you.’

  Matt smiled tiredly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘fair enough, I suppose. I haven’t treated her very well.’ He stopped and leant against the wall. ‘Might need that wheelchair after all, Jose.’

  ‘ERIC!’ CALLED MUM. ‘Eric, where are you?’ She rammed a final bobby pin into the knot of hair at the nape of her neck and frowned at it critically in the bathroom mirror. ‘Where is the man? We need to go. Josie, are you ready?’

  I was, and having winkled Dad out of the bedroom, undone and retied his tie and removed a rogue stain from the lapel of his only jacket, we departed for the church.

  It was a huge funeral. The Presbyterian church was crammed full, with people shoulder to shoulder all round the walls and another thirty on the steps outside.

  Matt gave the eulogy (as requested by his aunt), white-faced and with great dark smudges under his eyes. His shaky progress to and from the podium, coupled with that careless lock of hair tumbling Byronically across his brow, gave a beautifully dramatic effect. Aunty Rose would have loved it. I could almost hear her appreciative murmur, ‘Simply dripping with pathos, isn’t it, Josephine? Marvellous stuff.’

  We didn’t, after all, sing ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ as the coffin was carried out; Hazel and the vicar had settled instead on the more traditional ‘How Great Thou Art’. And Aunty Rose’s old adversary the mayor was pressed into service as a coffin bearer to replace Matt.

  Rose Adele Thornton, born in Bath, England, died in Waimanu, New Zealand, a mere fifty-three years later. Adept and compassionate nurse, fervent advocate of animal welfare, champion of correct diction and tireless crusader against the misuse of apostrophes. Experimental chef, peerless aunt, brave sufferer and true friend. She had the grace and courage to thoroughly enjoy a life which denied her everything she most wanted. The bravest woman I ever knew.

  WHILE MOST OF the district applied themselves to club sandwiches and apple shortcake in the draughty Presbyterian church hall, I slipped away to look for Matt. I found him perched on the low brick wall bordering the neighbouring park. It was cold, with a brisk southerly wind stirring the new leaves of the oaks across the park and whisking the petals from a blossoming plum tree next door.

  His cheeks were wet and he didn’t turn as I sat down beside him, but he put a hand out silently and took mine. We sat there for a while, looking at the vivid green of the oak trees and the two small boys kicking a soccer ball halfheartedly beneath them, before he said, ‘Déjà vu, huh?’

  I squeezed his hand. ‘Yep.’ Last time we’d sat here like this was on an afternoon in February, four years earlier, and the oak leaves were the tired dusty green of late summer. And Matt had been pale and jet-lagged and wretched, and I’d wanted desperately to hug him, or say something sympathetic, or do something, but with a five-year gulf between us I couldn’t.

  Kim came along the path behind us and sat down on his other side, tucking her skirt under her thighs. ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, Toad,’ said Matt.

  ‘How’s it going inside?’ I asked.

  ‘Great,’ she said bitterly. ‘Social event of the decade.’

  Matt lifted his right arm with a little grunt of effort and put it round her shoulders.

  ‘Everyone says how wonderful she was,’ Kim continued. ‘Funny how none of them bothered to go and see her while she was alive and tell her to her face.’

  ‘That’s funerals for you.’

  ‘If one more person tells me that cancer’s a cruel, horrible way to die I’ll throw something at their head,’ she said savagely. ‘Do they think we didn’t notice?’

  ‘She didn’t,’ I said abruptly, having agonised for days before deciding that sharing this information wasn’t going to help anyone and I’d better keep my mouth shut. A wise decision, but unfortunately I’m completely crap at keeping my mouth shut.

  ‘Huh?’ Matt said.

  ‘She didn’t die of the cancer; she took every pill she could find and washed them down with forty-year-old port. She left a note.’

  Both Kings turned to stare at me.

  ‘She said it wasn’t suicide,’ I continued. ‘It was just sparing us all any more deathbed scenes. And could I please remove the evidence, and she thoroughly enjoyed her life, and she loved us all very much. So I collected up the pill packets and the bottle and put them down the offal hole.’

  There was a long frozen silence, broken at length by Kim. ‘Way to go, Aunty Rose,’ she said softly.

  ‘WHAT WOULD YOU like for dinner?’ Mum asked wearily, elbows on Aunty Rose’s big kitchen table and chin in her hands.

  ‘Not hungry,’ I said. ‘You?’

  ‘Not really. Eric?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Dad said absently, turning a page of his book.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Do you want dinner now?’

  Dad merely resettled his glasses on his nose, giving no sign whatsoever that he had heard a word she said.

  ‘Are you up to the bit where he deflowers her in the crow’s nest, Dad?’ I asked. As well as the obligatory enormous willy, that pirate was blessed with extreme suppleness and a head for heights.

  My father reddened and thrust Pirate’s Lady down the back of the chaise longue. ‘Load of rubbish,’ he said. ‘Jo, be a good slave and put the kettle on, would you?’

  I straightened from where I had been leaning against the stove and crossed the kitchen to fill the kettle. ‘Are you guys going home tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mum. ‘Our flight leaves at two-thirty.’ She rubbed at her eyes with her hands. ‘We’ve been thinking of selling the goat farm.’

  ‘And doing what?’ I asked, startled.

  ‘Dry stock, probably,’ said Dad. ‘The goats are a huge tie.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Fair enough.’ But I was a little puzzled, because my parents, when told (by me) that they should be out there seeing the world and spending my inheritance, have always said f
irmly that travel is not for them and that they like nothing more than staying at home. ‘Anywhere in particular?’

  ‘Somewhere up this way, we thought,’ said Mum casually. ‘We miss the district – most of our friends are here – and then we don’t want to be too far from the grandchildren.’

  ‘Grandchildren?’ I repeated faintly.

  ‘Yes please, dear.’ She stood up. ‘If you have a little girl you might like to call her Rose, don’t you think?’

  ‘But no pressure,’ Dad said. He put a hand down the back of the chaise longue and gave a fairly poor impression of surprise as he encountered a book. And then, with an even poorer impression of detached curiosity, he pushed his glasses back up his nose and reopened Pirate’s Lady.

  Chapter 42

  ‘MATTHEW PATRICK!’

  He jumped about a foot in the air, slopping colostrum down his gumboot. ‘Jesus, Jo!’ he said crossly.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

  ‘Trying to pull out all your stitches, by the look of it.’

  ‘Settle down, woman, I’m not stupid.’

  I climbed off the bike and picked up the twenty-litre bucket at his feet. ‘Exactly what part of “Just wait here a minute while I shut the cows away” did you not understand?’

  ‘I was being careful,’ he argued.

  I scowled at him. ‘You nearly bled to death a week ago. You could rupture your liver or something, you idiot.’

  ‘Just because you used to go out with a doctor,’ said Matt, ‘you seem to think you’re some sort of medical expert.’ He stepped out of his left gumboot, tipped out the milk and put it back on with a grimace of distaste.

  ‘I think most people would agree that lifting heavy buckets a week after major abdominal surgery probably isn’t the best plan,’ I pointed out.

  Realising that he was on shaky ground, he altered his line of attack. ‘You sound like your mother.’ His tone of voice was exactly the same as the one in which, twenty years ago, he used to tell me that I had girl germs.

  ‘Take that back,’ I said indignantly. I poured the milk he hadn’t tipped down his gumboot into the feeder hanging on the gate, put the bucket down and climbed into the pen to prevent the moronic white-faced calf that liked to butt the feeder from sloshing most of it out again. Kevin the relief milker was attending his niece’s wedding today, which meant I was farming while Matt supervised. This would have been more enjoyable if only he would have refrained from climbing fences, lifting sacks of calf meal and otherwise contravening the doctor’s orders. And if he had refrained from pointing out (kindly, because he’s quite fond of me, but it was still painful) the many areas in which my dairy-farming practices failed to meet his high standards.

  Matt sighed, and scuffed the gravel moodily with the toe of his gumboot. ‘This is doing my head in,’ he said.

  I clamped the white-faced calf between my knees and managed not to tell him that he wasn’t the only one. I once met a little saying – probably in one of those books of potted wisdom you find in waiting rooms – which said that the key to a successful relationship is to leave half a dozen things a day unsaid. So true.

  ‘Have you sorted out where you want Kevin to put the cows next week?’ I asked. I pushed a teat into the calf’s mouth and he spat it out as if it was poisonous. I was starting to wish it was.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Put all the calving information into the computer?’

  ‘Yep.’ He leant over the gate and scratched the nearest calf between the ears.

  ‘Just one more week,’ I said encouragingly. My calf took two sucks, let the teat go and pushed his neighbour off too. ‘You revolting animal. You could always resort to housework, if all else failed.’

  Matt smiled. ‘Shit, it’s not that bad,’ he said. ‘Oh, alright. I’ll go and do something about tea.’

  I smiled back. ‘Dinner.’

  ‘Dinner.’ He stretched across the feeder and kissed me. ‘Wash the teats out with hot water, okay?’

  He went slowly across the tanker loop to the ute, slightly stooped and with one hand holding his sore ribs. I had a small epiphany as I watched him go; even though he’d been pushed into living the life his family wanted him to rather than the one he’d chosen for himself, he had ended up just exactly where he was meant to be. But my soulful musings were interrupted by the little white-faced calf, who chose that moment to bunt me firmly from behind and nearly pitch me into the feeder.

  ‘PLEASE TELL ME you’re kidding,’ said Matt, looking up from the Dairy Exporter as I came into the Pink Room that night.

  ‘Not at all. Stylish yet functional – why don’t you order another one for yourself, and then we can match?’ I pushed the eared hood of the onesie back off my head and climbed into bed beside him.

  ‘Great,’ he said sourly. ‘Let’s get matching Gore-Tex jackets and backpacks too, and walk up hills with those gay ski-pole things.’

  ‘Mum and Dad have matching Gore-Tex jackets,’ I remarked. ‘They found them in a bargain bin at Kathmandu.’

  ‘Awesome,’ said Matt.

  I wriggled out of the onesie, which I had only put on to get a reaction, and pulled the covers up under my chin. Matt tossed his magazine onto the floor and reached out with a little grunt to turn off the bedside light, plunging the room into velvety darkness.

  ‘Hey, Jose?’ he asked.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘D’you still reckon it would be unbearable to be called Jo King?’

  For some time I merely lay on my back and gulped. ‘I reckon,’ I managed at last, ‘that I could probably learn to live with it.’

  Matt gave a little sigh of satisfaction. ‘Bloody marvellous,’ he said. Followed, as I rolled over and hugged him enthusiastically, by, ‘Ow!’

  Epilogue

  IN THE END I did have to go to Melbourne and jump up and down before Graeme would buy me out of the house. We spent a very long afternoon sitting one on either side of the kitchen counter with a pile of bank statements between us, and by the end of it only the knowledge that if he didn’t pay me something I’d have to spend the next five years without a roof stopped me from just giving him the lot.

  The one bright spot in this encounter was when Graeme slid his bare foot up my shin under the counter, and I got to use the what-the-hell-do-you-think-you’re-doing-you-sleazy-little-philanderer look I had worked up during the drive to the airport in hope of just such a moment. I must have nailed it, because he went a dirty puce colour and accused me of taking the remote-control garage-door opener with me when I left. (I didn’t, but I would have if I’d thought of it.)

  Kim is studying Media Arts at Waikato University. On reflection Otago, while it had the benefit of being a long way away from her mother, was also a long way away from Andy. Last time she came home her hair was bright crimson. However, she points out that she has yet to pierce her nipples, fail her exams or fall pregnant, so it could be much worse.

  Hazel has given up on Reiki and started a pottery course at the high school. For my birthday I got an earthenware ashtray. It was going to be a coffee cup, but she hasn’t mastered cups yet. We use it to hold the pig-scratching fork.

  Stu is going out with a Scandinavian personal trainer called Bjorn. Apparently he’s not all that bright, but he looks like a Norse god and helps little old ladies across the street and is hung like a stallion. The mind boggles.

  Brett and Clare’s fourth baby is due any day. Clare is resigned; she says she’s forgotten what a good night’s sleep is like anyway so it won’t make any difference. Brett says that if one more person claps him on the back and says, ‘Haven’t you figured out what causes that yet?’ he will fly into a berserker rage. He will also beat Scott to a pulp if he dares make one more joke about the irony of impregnating your wife the day before your vasectomy.

  Scotty is still looking for the girl of his dreams. However, he has cut off his rat’s tail, which can only increase hi
s chances.

  I hear that Cilla is going out with a nice young sheep farmer from the coast. She waves to Matt on the road, but when she and I meet she mostly pretends not to have seen me.

  Matt and I live in Aunty Rose’s house. We’ve got a new roof and a new shower, and one of these days we might even be able to afford insulation. It would be much more sensible to flatten the place and start again, but we couldn’t do it. And even if we could have brought ourselves to do it, just think of the possible psychological damage to Percy and the dogs.

  Sometimes I am sure I catch a whiff of Aunty Rose’s perfume, or see just a flicker of crimson satin as her dressing-gown whisks around a corner. And she must have been responsible for me coming home at Labour Weekend with two tiny, feeble courgette seedlings from Mitre 10. We’ve been getting about twenty-seven bloody courgettes a day for the last three months and Matt threatens divorce if I ever make another courgette quiche. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean it.

  Acknowledgements

  THANK YOU VERY, very much to Louise Thurtell and Ali Lavau for being the kindest, most constructive publisher and editor anybody could ever ask for.

  Thank you to Kelly Forster for wanting to read, and then liking, my writing. Giving a friend your manuscript is even worse than bringing your new boyfriend home for parental inspection, and if she hadn’t been so encouraging I’m sure I would never have got any further.

  And most of all thank you to Jarrod for being so nice about me spending any spare time bent over the laptop, and for managing the first fifty pages and quite enjoying them even if there weren’t any battle scenes.

  Table of Contents

  COVER PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8