I looked at it doubtfully – I hadn’t expected to have to request specifically that my coffee be made with hot water – and saw a reassuring wisp of steam. ‘Do you have boiling water on tap?’ I asked.
‘Yep. Cool, eh?’
‘Extremely cool,’ I said.
‘And the fridge makes its own ice.’
‘Far out, brussel sprout.’
‘I know. It’s pretty incredible,’ he said.
‘Do you have a robot to do your vacuuming, like on The Jetsons?’
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Sorry.’
‘Oh well, never mind. The tap’s still impressive.’
‘Thanks.’ He leant over and kissed me. ‘Good morning.’
‘Good morning.’
‘What do you want to do today?’
‘Whatever you like,’ I said dreamily. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘You’re really not the high-maintenance type, are you?’
‘I’m just lulling you into a false sense of security,’ I explained. ‘Then I’ll start demanding fur coats and Porsches.’
‘I see,’ said Mark.
He made me scrambled eggs the exact consistency of rubber for breakfast and rejected my offer to do the dishes. He left them piled in the sink instead, said he was exhausted from all that strenuous scrambling and that we’d better go and lie down to recover. So we did.
12
‘WHERE’S MURRAY THE CAT THIS WEEKEND?’ ASKED MARK that afternoon, covering a slice of bread with thick slabs of cheese.
‘Home alone,’ I said. ‘He’s not allowed back to the cattery; he screamed for the whole weekend the last time I left him there.’
‘Poor Murray.’
‘Poor Murray, my foot. He’s probably disembowelling a rabbit on the end of my bed as we speak.’ I was sitting cross-legged on a leather-topped chrome stool on the opposite side of the kitchen bench, eating yoghurt. ‘That looks revolting.’
‘No-one’s forcing you to eat it,’ he said, ladling mayonnaise onto his cheese with a tablespoon. He slapped a second piece of bread on top of the mess and mayonnaise oozed from the edges. Undeterred, he collected the drips with a finger and wiped them on the top slice.
‘Charming,’ I remarked.
‘Always.’
‘Mark,’ I said, ‘what do you want to do when you stop playing rugby?’
‘Finish my building apprenticeship, for a start,’ he said. ‘I got my carpentry certificate when I was twenty, but I’ve still got another four thousand hours to do under a master builder.’
‘Four thousand hours sounds like a lot.’
He took a large bite of sandwich, losing about quarter of a cup of mayonnaise from the far end in the process. ‘Bugger,’ he said. ‘Yeah, especially when you consider it’s taken me eight years to do the first four thousand.’
‘So if you keep playing for another eight years, you’ll be qualified when you retire.’
‘I won’t last another eight years. Four or five, maybe, if I’m lucky and I don’t have any major injuries.’
‘Do you mind?’ I asked.
‘Mind what?’
‘That – well, that it’s going to end.’
‘Yes and no,’ he said slowly. ‘You’re right, some guys find it pretty tough. When I started playing you didn’t get any support – once you retired you just had to piss off and get on with it. But now they really encourage you to do some sort of further education and plan for your retirement. And there are plenty of people who’ve been through it to talk to.’ He lifted the top of his sandwich and scooped the mayonnaise puddle back in with his tablespoon. ‘You have to try to remember how insanely lucky you are to spend ten years doing your favourite thing and getting paid for it.’
I got down off my stool and went around the counter, pulling his head down to kiss him.
‘What was that for?’ he asked, putting his arms around my waist.
‘Just because you’re awesome,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Except for your eating habits. They’re pretty nasty.’
Just then his iPhone buzzed on the counter beside him, and he removed an arm to pick it up. ‘You don’t want to go out for dinner tonight, do you?’ he asked.
I shook my head, having not the slightest desire to share him with anybody.
‘Good.’ He tapped the screen a couple of times and put the phone back on the bench.
‘Who was it?’
‘Alan. Jaeger. Friend of mine.’
‘Oh,’ I said. Alan Jaeger was the All Black captain.
Mark raised one eyebrow. ‘Want to go after all?’ he asked.
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘But it is kind of surreal to be invited out for tea with Alan Jaeger.’
The phone buzzed again and he looked down at it. ‘This one’s from his wife,’ he said, tilting the phone so I could read the message. Are you ashamed of her?
I smiled. ‘Are you?’
He didn’t reply, but showed me his answer before sending it. No. Of you.
‘That’s alright then,’ I said as his phone started to ring.
He turned it off.
The landline started to ring instead, and he sighed. ‘Might as well answer it,’ he said. ‘Or she’ll just come round with a loudspeaker.’ He plucked the phone off its charger at the end of the bench. ‘What?’ He listened for a moment and passed it to me.
I took it hesitantly. ‘Hello?’
‘Helen?’ a woman asked. ‘Hi, I’m Saskia. See you guys at seven, okay? Don’t bring anything. Oh, hang on a minute – do you like scallops?’
‘Uh, yes,’ I said.
‘Good.’ And she hung up.
‘Seven o’clock,’ I said helplessly. ‘We’re having scallops.’
The Jaegers lived in a mansion on the side of One Tree Hill. An actual mansion, with columns and gables and even a turret stuck on one side like a beret. It made Mark’s luxurious inner-city townhouse look modest, if not spartan.
We approached the mansion via a steep driveway, overhung with trees and ending in a broad sweep of tarmac at the front steps. As soon as Mark pulled up, a tiny woman with cropped blonde hair and a face like a pixie flung open the front door. ‘Hello!’ she said, bouncing up to kiss Mark’s cheek. ‘Come in, guys.’ She shepherded us down a wide panelled hall into an enormous kitchen.
Alan Jaeger, like Mark, was bigger in real life than he appeared on TV. He had a neck like a bull, two cauliflower ears and a magnificent monobrow, and he looked like a hired thug. He was standing at the stove with a tea towel slung over one shoulder, frowning down into a pot.
‘Hi,’ he said, turning and holding out a hand to me with the easy friendliness of a man who spends large chunks of his time chatting to strangers. ‘You must be Helen.’
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘You too. You’re a vet, Tip says?’
‘Yes,’ I said, trying to think of a suitable remark so as to uphold my end of the conversation. Lovely weather we’re having, isn’t it? You know, you’re the first hooker I’ve met? Don’t human doctors lance aural haematomas so your ears don’t turn into solid lumps of scar tissue? Best, I decided, to stick with remaining silent and being thought a fool.
‘Big or small animals?’ he asked.
‘Both,’ I said. ‘I’m lucky; more and more jobs are one or the other these days.’
‘That must be really interesting.’
‘Not compared to your job.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ he said.
‘Helen, what would you like to drink?’ Saskia asked. ‘Wine, beer, cider, juice, soft drink . . . ?’
‘Wine, please.’
‘Red or white?’
‘White.’
She opened the fridge. ‘Sav, chardonnay, pinot gris or riesling?’
‘Pinot gris, please,’ I said, slightly dazed by the number of options.
‘Mission Estate or Greywacke?’
‘Whichever’s closest.’
‘
They’re both equally close,’ she said inexorably.
‘Greywacke,’ I said, and accepted my glass feeling I had earned it.
‘Excellent choice,’ said Saskia, pouring one for herself. ‘Al, how long before dinner’s ready?’
‘About quarter of an hour.’
‘Would you like a tour of the house, Helen?’ she asked.
‘I’d love one,’ I said.
Mark crossed the kitchen and opened the fridge, extracting a carton of orange juice from the inside of the door without having to look for it. ‘Be nice,’ he told Saskia over his shoulder.
‘I’m always nice,’ she said haughtily. ‘Tip, don’t even think about drinking that straight out of the box.’
Glass in hand, she led me through an archway into a small crimson antechamber. ‘We’re in the process of renovating,’ she said. ‘We bought the house a year ago – nobody had done anything to it since about 1950. I’ve just finished the walls in here. Alan’s not sold on the colour.’
‘I think it looks great,’ I said.
‘Did you hear that, dear?’ Saskia called. ‘Helen thinks it looks great.’
‘That’s wonderful, my petal,’ Alan called back.
‘Sarcastic prat,’ she said, smiling.
We turned right into a big bare room papered in sickly olive-green. ‘The formal lounge,’ said Saskia. ‘Isn’t it awful? Alan doesn’t know it yet, but we’re going to start stripping the walls tomorrow.’
A door in the far wall led back into the hallway; crossing it, Saskia opened a heavy door, switching on a light to reveal a bathroom that could have belonged to a fairy princess. It had a full-length window curtained in shimmering gauzy stuff like a golden cobweb, and a vast claw-footed bath. The walls were cream and the floor was covered in tiny iridescent tiles, gold and green and turquoise.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ I said, awed.
‘Thanks. But if I’d known what little bastards those tiles were going to be to lay I’d never have started.’
‘You did all this yourself?’ I asked.
‘Yep. It gives me something to do in the evenings when Alan’s away.’
‘I guess that’s quite a lot of the time.’
‘It sure is,’ she said, running her fingers through her cropped hair. ‘The Tri Nations games start a fortnight after the Super Rugby season ends, and this year the All Blacks have fourteen Test matches scheduled. And they’re all weekend games rather than mid-week. There’s just never a break. And of course next year’s the World Cup, so everything will be condensed even more to fit that in. And if that wasn’t enough, Argentina’s joining the Tri Nations, which will mean even more games, and they want to play tests in Japan for extra revenue, and –’ She broke off, shaking her head. ‘If you’ve got any sense you’ll drop Tip like a hot potato and find yourself someone you might actually get to see from time to time.’ She smiled and ushered me back out into the passage. ‘You won’t, of course, but you can’t say you weren’t warned. Right, come and tell me if you think the curtains in our bedroom were a terrible mistake.’
Dinner began with the scallops, wrapped in bacon and dipped in aioli. They tasted wonderful, and so did the lamb curry that followed them.
‘More?’ Alan asked me, spoon poised over the dish.
I shook my head. ‘I wish I could. I think that was the best thing I’ve ever eaten. May I have the recipe?’
He grimaced and scratched his chin. ‘Now you’re asking.
I don’t really do recipes; I just throw things in until it tastes about right.’
‘Or doesn’t, as the case may be,’ said Saskia. ‘He made some very strange pumpkin soup last night. Tip, have you heard that Jimmy Dalton’s snapped his Achilles again?’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Mark, holding out his plate for more curry.
‘When did he do that?’
‘Yesterday, at training. Jimmy used to play for the Blues, Helen. He’s been in England for the last couple of years.’
‘He must have only just come back from his last injury,’ Mark said.
‘Mm,’ said Saskia. ‘This weekend was supposed to be his first game.’
‘How long will he be out?’ I asked.
‘Permanently,’ said Alan, and there was a brief, depressed hush around the table.
‘How are you going?’ Mark asked as he nosed his car out onto the street. It was raining again, and the tyres hissed on the wet tarmac.
‘Good,’ I said, sinking back against the soft leather seat with some relief. The Jaegers were delightful people, welcoming, unpretentious, funny . . . Still, being inspected by your new boyfriend’s oldest friends is undeniably stressful. ‘They’re lovely. How long have you guys known each other?’
‘Ten years, give or take,’ Mark said. ‘Alan and I made the Blues development squad together.’
‘And Saskia?’
‘About the same.’ He looked at me sideways and added, ‘I brought her home from the pub one night, and for some obscure reason she decided my flatmate was a better bet than I was.’
I gave a surprised choke of laughter. ‘Really?’
‘Hard to believe, I know.’
‘Almost impossible,’ I said honestly.
‘Well, I called her Sasha. And then I threw up on her shoes.’
‘Sasha’s pretty close to Saskia!’ I said, quite indignant on his behalf.
‘Yeah, but I think they were her favourite shoes.’
‘Did you mind very much?’
‘I expect it was good for me,’ he said. ‘I was a cocky little shit.’
So he had minded. ‘I bet you weren’t,’ I said, putting my hand on his knee for a second.
‘Of course I was,’ said Mark. ‘I was eighteen years old, I’d just left home and I was making more money than I knew what to do with. I thought I was God’s gift.’
I felt a sudden twinge of pity for that eighteen-year-old boy, with too much money and fame and no life experience to put it all into perspective. Getting from cocky little shit to national role model must have involved some pretty painful lessons.
Mark parked his car among a selection of other expensive European vehicles in the communal basement car park, and we went up a flight of concrete steps and out through a locked door with a six-digit combination. This place, it seemed, had been designed for the type of people who carry only a laptop and a bottle of pinot noir in from their cars, and have their groceries delivered.
‘Did you have a good time tonight?’ he asked, reaching for my hand as we rounded the corner of the building.
‘It was really nice,’ I said. ‘Nearly as good as staying at home. Was it Saskia who said your house looks like a lawyer’s waiting room?’
He unlocked his front door. ‘Who else? Cup of tea?’
‘Yes, please.’ We went upstairs, and I reached down two mugs while he crossed the kitchen to press a button on his answer phone, where a red light was blinking.
‘Dad here,’ said a gruff voice. ‘Give me a ring when you’ve got a minute, eh?’
The machine beeped, and immediately a girl’s voice continued, ‘Hey, Tip, I don’t know what I’ve done with the earphones for my MP3 player. Are they at your place, by any chance? Just flick me a text if you find them. Thanks, love.’ There was a kissing noise, and then another beep.
‘Mark, it’s Becky. Call me, okay?’ This voice was soft and husky, as though its owner had either been crying or smoked forty cigarettes a day. The machine beeped again, announced ‘End of messages’ in a jovial masculine tone and fell silent.
There was a brief, charged pause. ‘Those ones there?’ I asked, nodding towards the fruit bowl on the bench where, nestled between an apple and a wizened kiwifruit, lay a set of earphones.
‘Guess so,’ Mark said slowly. ‘They’ve been there for months.’
There was another, even tenser pause.
‘Who’s Becky?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he said. ‘Helen –’
‘Who’s Becky?’ I snapped
.
‘She’s nobody. Just a girl I hooked up with once. Before I met you.’
‘Does she know she’s nobody?’
‘She’s not nobody,’ he said unhappily. ‘She’s just not my type.’
‘So did you sit her down and tell her that, or did you say “I’ll call you” and then never did?’
‘Of course I told her,’ said Mark. ‘I said she was a lovely girl but I wasn’t after a relationship at the moment. Or words to that effect.’
‘Might have been nice to tell her that before you slept with her,’ I observed, cold as an Arctic winter.
He tilted his head back wearily. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know. But we’d just won the final, and I was drunk – and then the next week I went to see Hamish, and he dragged me off to that thing at the fire station, and I met you.’
I wanted badly to believe him. Scarily badly – it was up there with the way I used to wish that today would be the day I’d open the back door and find Mum in the kitchen, having been forced to fake her own death in order to carry out a top-secret mission for MI5.
‘The other message is from my ex-girlfriend. We’re still mates, but that’s it.’ He picked up the earphones and put them down again. ‘They really have been lying around for months.’
I nodded, a swift jerky nod like a puppet, and got two teabags out of the box on the bench.
‘Please believe me.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
He looked at me for a few seconds, then came and put his arms around me.
I rested my head against his chest. He was big and warm and solid, and he smelt nice. That’s a particularly dumb reason to trust someone. ‘If you were the kind of scumbag who has three or four girls on the go at once,’ I said at last, ‘you probably wouldn’t check your answer phone in front of one of them. Not unless you were really stupid. And you’re not.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, and I felt him relax.
‘But,’ I added into his shirt, ‘if you break my heart I’m going to be really pissed off.’
13
EXPERIMENTALLY, I FLEXED THE KNUCKLE A CAT HAD bitten that morning. It was stiff and sore, and I made a mental note to swing by the clinic on the way home and start myself on antibiotics.
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