Dinner at Rose's (15 page)

‘As in nine days ago?’

‘Yes, Jo, as in nine days ago.’ There it was again. Superior.

‘And how did it go?’ I asked sweetly.

‘Not bad – a couple of people looked interested.’

‘Graeme,’ I said, ‘this is a fascinating little story, but I happen to know you were wandering up and down some beach on a romantic getaway that Sunday.’ Thank you, Chrissie, for publicising every minute detail of your life on Facebook.

‘What are you talking about?’ he spluttered.

‘You must think I’m really, really stupid. But I’ve got to say I’m getting pretty bloody tired of subsidising your love nest. If you want the house you can damn well buy me out.’

‘I see,’ he said. ‘So you decided you’d just stop your half of the payments?’

‘No,’ I said angrily. ‘I didn’t. Although maybe if I
did
stop paying you’d stop sabotaging every offer anyone makes.’

‘You just make sure you put that money in tomorrow. I’ll get a lawyer if I have to, Jo. Don’t think I won’t.’

‘
Man
, you’re a prick,’ I said, and slammed the phone down.

‘That sounded like fun,’ Matt remarked. He had withdrawn tactfully to the sink and started to concoct a cup of Milo while this happy little conversation was taking place.

‘Yep,’ I said. I swiped my eyes crossly with the back of a hand – I would
not
cry over this anymore. They were mostly tears of rage, anyway.

‘Drink?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘How many sugars?’ he asked.

‘Three,’ I said firmly.

He smiled. ‘Does sugar help?’ he asked.

‘Of course. Didn’t you know that?’

‘I think it might be a girl thing. I’ve always preferred whisky.’

‘Tempting,’ I said, ‘but not worth it when you’ve got to go to work the next day.’ I sat down cross-legged on the chaise longue. ‘I think I’m going to have to go to Melbourne and kick him for a while, and I really don’t want to.’

‘Can’t you get a friend to do it for you? Or a lawyer?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘We were just going to halve everything rather than pay a lawyer thousands of dollars to do it for us, but I’d really like to get the house sold and he seems to have decided he doesn’t want to.’

‘So you can just keep on paying half the mortgage while he moves the next model in?’ said Matt. ‘What a guy.’

‘What
really
pisses me off is that he’ll be getting Chrissie to pay half his share of the mortgage. He’s insanely tight.’

‘Jo?’

‘Mm?’ I accepted the cup of exceedingly sweet Milo and took a sip.

‘Why on earth did you stay with this loser for five years?’

‘Stupid, probably,’ I said morosely. ‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s very charming when he wants to be . . .’

‘
And
he’s a doctor.’

‘Contrary to what you seem to think, I don’t go out with people because they’re doctors.’

‘The last couple have been.’

‘I’ve only ever
had
two boyfriends,’ I protested. Surely the nice boy in my physio class with whom I spent a few excruciating weeks about ten years ago didn’t count. ‘I’m not sure that’s a large enough sample size for you to be making these sweeping generalisations.’

‘Perhaps not.’ He yawned, stretching his arms above his head. ‘So what happened?’

‘Haven’t you heard the dread tale?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Only Mum’s version, and that probably bears more resemblance to
Days of Our Lives
than to anything else.’

I smiled. ‘Actually, it
was
all fairly dramatic. I got home from work early one day and found him and my best friend having wild sex in a chair.’

Matt laughed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to sound like an unsympathetic prat, but I’ve always wondered what happens in a situation like that.’

‘You mean, do you politely withdraw and wait for them to finish up, or start screaming and throwing things?’

‘That’s the one. Which did you do?’

‘I just stood there with my mouth open. Probably drooling in shock.’ I started to laugh a bit hysterically. ‘He saw me first, and he went purple, and she didn’t notice . . .’ I lost it completely and had to bury my face in a cushion until I recovered from a fit of the giggles. ‘I’ve never seen anyone look so stupid in my whole life.’

‘What a dickhead,’ said Matt.

‘Who? Me?’

‘No, you muppet. Him. You’re pretty great, you know.’

A great surge of heat rose from the soles of my feet to the tips of my ears. It must have been appallingly obvious; I may as well have waved a sign saying
I AM CURRENTLY
RECALLING EVERY DETAIL OF OUR NIGHT TOGETHER
. Repressing with some difficulty the urge to bury my face again I said hastily, ‘I think the worst thing is feeling like there’s no place for me in my own life anymore. For months I was telling Chrissie about how he was all grumpy and stressed out, and she was pouring me glasses of wine and being sympathetic and sleeping with him every time I turned my back. They’re apparently besotted with each other, and they’re living in
my
house and having all the people I thought were
my
friends over for drinks, and everyone thinks it’s all just wonderful. It’s like I never existed at all.’

‘People are just miserable cowards,’ said Matt, eyes fixed firmly on the floor. He too was looking a little warm around the ears. ‘They probably think it’s pretty crappy, but no-one has the balls to say anything. So they just rewrite history and decide you guys were never particularly good together and you’ve probably been wanting to leave and come home for years anyway.’

‘Only one person ever gave me a hug and said the pair of them deserved to be strung up,’ I said. That was Graeme’s English friend Stu from work, the campest gay man I have ever met and also one of the kindest people in the world. I wrinkled my nose. ‘Sorry. You shouldn’t look all nice and kind – it just encourages me to bore you to death.’

‘You’re not. And I asked.’

I smiled at him. ‘That’ll teach you.’

He smiled back. ‘Well, I’m sorry your life has fallen apart, but it’s very convenient that it happened when it did.’

‘That’s
very
consoling. Thank you so much.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m good like that.’

He let himself out and I threw myself down flat on the chaise longue.

So I wasn’t over Matt after all, I thought drearily. The only reason I had ever thought I might be was that I had forgotten, not having seen him for years on end, how great he was. And he was attached to a lip-glossed, pearl-earringed Farmer Barbie, and I was only his old mate Jo, a good stick but about as appealing as Shona at the Four Square who weighs a hundred kilos and has a mole with a long hair growing from the middle just below her right eye.
Crap
. I
hate
having to admit that my mother is right.

Matt and I never had one of those idyllic childhood friendships that gradually deepen into love. I suspect those friendships only exist in romantic novels, anyway. We played together at home but ignored one another at school, fed the calves and went eeling and swam in the creek and pestered Aunty Rose, and we used to fall out at least once a week. We developed periodic crushes on one another in our teens, although never at the same time, and by the end of high school had decided that we were probably quite good mates after all. And then when he was twenty and I was twenty-one we had a
spectacular
one-night stand, and he went to Scotland the next day, and with the exception of his father’s funeral we hadn’t managed to be in the same country at the same time since.

Chapter 14

The night before Matt went to Scotland

F
ROM MY BEDROOM
at the end of the hall I heard someone pounding on the door, followed by my flatmate Neil’s voice raised in complaint. ‘I’m coming, keep your hair on!’ Then, ‘Jo! Visitor!’

I marked my place in
Pathology of the Spine
with a pen, and rolled off my bed.

Neil had lost interest in the guest and vanished, leaving him standing in the hall with his enormous pack leaning against the wall beside him.

‘Matt!’ I cried.

‘Hey, Jose.’ He grinned at me. ‘I’m flying out tomorrow morning – can you put me up for the night?’

‘Of course.’ I put my arms around his neck and hugged him. ‘Crikey. You’ve got all muscly.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, detaching himself to heave his pack onto one shoulder. Lucky he
had
got muscly, if he was planning to carry that thing any distance.

I led the way down the hall. ‘You can leave your pack in my room. Where are you off to tomorrow?’

‘Scotland.’

‘
What?
’

‘I got a scholarship for a rural exchange program. Six months on a sheep farm in Scotland, and then Scotty’s coming over and we’re going to cruise around Europe and the Middle East for a while.’ He dropped his pack just inside my bedroom door with a thud.

‘You and Scotty let loose in Europe,’ I said. ‘The mind boggles. Now, would you care for a cool beverage of some sort?’

‘That’s a bloody brilliant idea,’ said Matt gravely.

I fetched us both a beer and we went outside to drink it in the pale winter sunshine. ‘Not that one!’ I said as he pulled up a grubby folding chair. ‘Someone peed on it last weekend.’

‘Why not wash it?’

I shrugged. ‘It’ll rain eventually. Here.’ And I pushed an uncontaminated chair his way before perching on the porch railing.

‘Your standards have slipped,’ he noted.

‘I live with three slobs. I had to decide whether to clean up after them all the time and get bitter and twisted or turn into a slob myself and stay cheerful, so I went for slobby and cheerful.’

‘Very wise,’ said Matt.

I looked at him surreptitiously over my bottle of Tui and decided he was looking quite disturbingly attractive these days.

It was Friday, and some of Neil’s friends were having a flat-warming party that night. We moved from the porch to the untidy lounge when the sun vanished behind next-door’s high wooden fence, ordered Thai takeaways for tea and eventually walked down the road to the party.

As I recall, it wasn’t much of a party. A large group of journalism students in op-shop suede coats and hand-painted Doc Martens had taken over the lounge, and another group were drinking yardies on the back lawn. Watching someone throw up into his yard glass and then attempt to continue drinking is only fun for a while, and the journalism students were playing peculiar Indonesian music very loudly on the stereo.

Wandering through the kitchen sometime around midnight I discovered Matt leaning against the fridge and fending off an extremely drunk girl wearing a bright green polyester pinafore and brown tights. She looked like a tree.

‘Jo!’ he said, with just a hint of desperation in his voice. ‘Beer?’

‘I was actually thinking of heading home,’ I said.

‘I’ll come with you. Lovely to meet you.’ And putting down his can of Rheineck (by far the best thing to be done with a warm can of Rheineck) he fled ahead of me out the front door.

‘Do you really want to come, or were you just escaping?’ I asked.

‘I want to come. Besides, you shouldn’t walk around Auckland by yourself at night.’

There was a bite to the air and we walked briskly. ‘It’s much nicer out here,’ I said, digging my hands into the pockets of my jeans to keep them warm.

‘Mm,’ he agreed absently. ‘Your flatmates are good sorts, Jose.’

‘They are, aren’t they?’

‘Neil seems like a nice bloke.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He is.’ And I added casually, just in case he might have thought I had any interest in Neil, ‘His girlfriend’s nice, too. She’s gone up north for the weekend to see her parents.’

Matt said nothing in response to this, and we walked the next block in silence. As we went up the porch steps to the back door I fished in my pocket for the key, and fitting it into the lock said with a fairly pitiful attempt at nonchalance, ‘You can sleep on the couch or have half my bed, whichever you’d rather.’

‘Half your bed, please.’

And as I turned the door handle he reached for my other hand and held it. He had big, rough hands, callused from spending the last week rehanging gates; Patrick King liked to use the periods between university holidays to make lists of little jobs for his son, to be started about five minutes after his arrival home.

Be cool
, I told myself fiercely,
he’s your friend, that’s all
. ‘Do you want a coffee or something?’

‘No, thank you,’ he said, shutting the door behind us. And by the sickly orange light of a streetlight shining through the window in the hall he took my face in his hands and kissed me.

Oh, thank God
, I thought.
It’s not just me
. I slid my arms around him and kissed him back.

My romantic experience, by the age of twenty-one, had consisted of kissing Tane Jones in the car park outside the Waimanu High School ball at age sixteen (followed closely by throwing up on his feet, having consumed an indecent amount of extremely nasty vodka mixed with even nastier orange cordial) and one awful month spent going out with a very nice boy in my class whom I didn’t fancy in the least. Having observed the relationships and hook-ups of my flatmates and friends I had begun to think that there was something wrong with me – considering that I wasn’t avoiding sex on any moral grounds, surely I should have been having some of it. I went out twice a week and encountered
packs
of boys my own age, and if I still couldn’t find anyone to sleep with I was obviously well on the way to a lonely and eccentric spinsterhood.