Dinner at Rose's (23 page)

Aunty Rose smiled at me fondly. ‘Ungrateful wench,’ she murmured.

Chapter 21

‘H
OW ARE THE
goats?’ I tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder and bent to feed another log into the wood stove. Matt had been over while I was at work and stacked about half the wood pile inside the back door, which I suspected had taken up all of the time he might otherwise have used to have breakfast.

‘Fine, fine,’ said Mum dismissively. ‘Kidding like mad. How’s Rose?’

‘Not that great. Her back’s giving her quite a lot of trouble, and she’s still nauseous from the chemo. Although she pretends she feels fine so we won’t worry.’

‘You sound so tired, sweetheart,’ said Mum. ‘Are you bearing up alright?’

‘I’m okay,’ I said bravely, and then had the grace to feel ashamed of myself. It’s not
that
noble to produce the odd omelette for a woman who used to make you cat-shaped biscuits and who suffered through every one of your school plays.

‘You don’t sound okay. You sound exhausted.’

I felt a little warm glow inside – maternal sympathy is such a comforting thing. ‘Well, Hazel came over this evening and wailed for about an hour about the unfairness of a God that would let such a thing happen. That was enough to exhaust anyone.’

‘That
stupid
woman,’ my mother said.

I lay down on the chaise longue and looked up at the griffon, who stared haughtily out over my head. ‘And then there’s a new leak in the kitchen ceiling, and Amber was stunningly useless today even by her low standards, and one of the dogs went over to the neighbours’ place and dug a hole under their fence, and dinner burnt to a crisp while I was retrieving him.’ It had been one of those days where a thousand little insignificant things go wrong and you start to wonder if it’s payback for having sinned in a previous life.

‘Jo, love,’ said Mum, ‘you’re not going to be able to work full time and look after Rose indefinitely.’

‘She’s been talking to the district nurse and they think they can get her a bed in the hospital here once she can’t manage anymore, rather than going to the hospice in Hamilton. But she’d much rather be at home, and – and it won’t be forever.’

‘Hmm,’ Mum said. ‘And what is the lovely Hazel doing to help?’

I smiled. ‘She made a blancmange yesterday.’ Nasty, pale, washed-out quivery thing – it was enough to make someone in the best of health feel unwell, let alone a person dying of cancer. The dippy woman had also, for some inexplicable reason, presented her sister with a morbid little book of poems written by people dying of terminal illnesses. Aunty Rose had just smiled faintly, slid it down behind the sofa and continued with the third
Twilight
novel.

‘Josephine,’ she had said later when I brought her a cup of Milo in bed, ‘they’re
not
well written, the woman only appears to use about three adjectives and all the characters ever do is stare into each other’s eyes. And I read the damned things until two in the morning.’

‘
WHAT ELSE DO
you need?’ I asked, adjusting the tray table at Aunty Rose’s elbow so she wouldn’t have to stretch for it. ‘Cup of tea?’ I wasn’t at all sure that going out for the evening was a good idea.

‘For pity’s sake, Josephine, would you just go away?’ she said plaintively. ‘I could probably even stagger across the kitchen and make my own cup of tea, if the worst came to the worst.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

Aunty Rose straightened her startling purple turban. She looked like a dowager countess. ‘You’re going to want to watch yourself, sweet pea, or you’ll grow up into your mother.’ Seeing me open my mouth to protest she added, ‘I adore your mother, but I think one is enough. Go on, chicken, have fun.’

The last time I visited Clare she had sobbed gently into her coffee because Moira the pig was even then being converted to bacon, while an unsupervised Charlie cut Lucy’s hair and then tried to glue it back on in the next room. But this evening as I went up the back steps I heard only Sarah McLachlan assuring me earnestly that it simply wasn’t good enough.

Clare came to the door with her hair loose down her back, wearing long dangly earrings and eye makeup. ‘Guess what?’

‘What?’

‘We’re child-free,’ she announced gleefully. ‘Mum’s taken them all away for the night.’

‘When was the last time you had a night to yourselves?’ I asked.

‘Um . . . just before Charlie was born.’

‘How about I go away again so you can enjoy it all by yourselves then?’

‘No way,’ said Clare. ‘We’re going to have a proper grown-up dinner party with no tomato sauce. Come and have some wine.’

She had cleared the dining table and surrounding floor of toys (presumably with a shovel – there was a bright plastic mountain around the corner on the floor of the formal lounge).

‘Evening, Jo,’ said Brett, wandering down the hall with his hair still damp from the shower. ‘Can’t we turn off that revolting noise? It sounds like someone dying of stomach cancer.’

‘
Brett!
’ said his wife.

‘Well, it does – oh, shit, Jo, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘A few months ago he told Laura Kennedy she looked like Alice Cooper,’ said Clare.

Brett opened the fridge door and extracted a bottle of beer. ‘She does.’

Clare giggled. ‘She does, actually. She’s had her eyelids tattooed with permanent eyeliner. But you didn’t need to
say
it.’

‘You’d want to trust your tattooist,’ I said. ‘Imagine if they slipped.’

‘It wouldn’t be good, would it?’ She handed me an enormous glass of red wine, the approximate size of a potty. ‘How
is
Rose?’

‘She’s amazing. She keeps thinking of things she wants to put in her will and writing them down on post-it notes, and she wants them to play “Another One Bites the Dust” at her funeral.’

‘She’s so cool,’ said Clare, pouring herself a glass of wine the same size as mine and thus emptying the bottle. I calculated that if I drank my half very slowly over the next few hours I
might
be able to drive home.

‘Who else is coming?’ I asked, seeing four places set.

‘Scotty,’ said Clare. ‘That’ll be him now.’ There was a distant roar, which grew nearer with alarming speed and gave the impression a jet fighter was about to land on the roof. ‘I wish he wouldn’t drive like that. He’ll stampede the alpacas.’

‘Good,’ Brett said. ‘Horrible bloody things. He’s not going to appreciate your stomach-cancer lady – sorry, Jo.’ He went down the hall to open the door.

‘Poor boy,’ said Clare tolerantly. ‘His vasectomy’s on Monday and he’s scared of needles.’

‘Clare,’ Scott called, ‘your music’s crap.’

‘Better than that German death metal,’ she retorted.

‘Are you a Rammstein man, Scotty?’ I asked as he came into view.

‘Damn straight. Are you a fan?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry. I prefer Sarah McLachlan.’

Scott turned to take off his leather bike jacket.

‘Scotty,
what
is that at the back of your head?’

He put up a hand to stroke the neatly plaited two-inch rat’s tail brushing the neck of his Def Leppard T-shirt. ‘Cool, eh?’

‘No,’ said Clare. ‘No, Scott, it isn’t.’

He grinned widely. ‘I’m growing it specially for my sister’s wedding. She’ll go nuts.’

‘Good stuff,’ I said. Scott’s sister Rebecca is a deeply painful snob, or at least she was ten years ago. ‘Has your mother seen it?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You’d have heard the screams. Hey, where are the sprogs?’

It was a nice dinner party. We had chicken breasts stuffed with ricotta and mushroom risotto followed by crème caramel, and then sat around the table eating after-dinner mints and solving the world’s problems.

Clare gulped the last of a large glass of port and shuddered slightly. ‘Sold your house yet, Jo?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Although apparently someone was interested.’

‘Think you’ll buy a house here?’ Scott asked. ‘The place next to mine’s for sale, and I wouldn’t mind having you as a neighbour. You couldn’t be worse than the ones there now.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That means so much. Is it the purple railway house or the concrete-block place with all the couches on the lawn?’

‘The concrete-block one.’

‘Who knows? Maybe I will. Except I’m not sure I could live so close to that rat’s tail.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Scotty, wounded. ‘It’s
mint
.’

‘I might grow one too,’ Brett mused.

‘If you do,’ said his loving wife, ‘you’re sleeping in the woodshed from then on.’

‘Then you wouldn’t need the vasectomy,’ I pointed out.

‘Well, true,’ he said. ‘It’d be much cheaper than the vasectomy, too.’

‘I’ll have you know,’ said Scott, ‘that this hairdo pulls chicks like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘You’re right,’ Clare said. ‘We wouldn’t believe.’

IT WAS AFTER
eleven when Scotty and I got up to go.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘No kids. You’ll be spending the rest of the night having wild sex, then.’

‘That would just be a waste of good sleeping time,’ said Clare. ‘I haven’t had an unbroken night for three years.’

‘Bet you wake up every two hours all night,’ I said.

‘Thanks for that thought,’ she said. ‘Goodnight, guys, thanks for coming.’

I pulled on my tan suede leather boots that I love more than life itself and just don’t get to wear often enough in Waimanu. ‘Thank you for having us. It was great. Good luck, Brett.’

Scotty’s enormous motorbike was parked next to my car. ‘How’s young Matthew?’ he asked, tucking his helmet under his arm. ‘Haven’t seen him for a week or two.’

‘Miserable,’ I said. ‘But you know him; he doesn’t say much.’

‘Rose being sick is pretty rough on him.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And on Kim. The whole thing just sucks.’

‘It’s rough on you, too.’

‘But my dad didn’t die of the same thing a few years ago. I’ve still got two nice parents.’

Scotty grunted and played with the strap of his helmet. ‘Hey, Jo, want to go out for a drink or something, sometime?’

I expect there’s a way to say ‘thanks but no thanks’ graciously, without embarrassment or injury to anyone’s feelings. I’ve never found out what it is, but then I suppose I haven’t had enough practice. Unlike my ex-friend Chrissie I’ve never been troubled by men trying to pick me up every time I step out of my front door. In fact, she doesn’t even need to leave the house: the bloke who came to fix her phone line last year asked her out before he left. It was always a bit humbling being Chrissie’s friend, and it particularly pissed me off that with such a dizzying selection of men to choose from she had to take mine.

‘Thanks so much for asking,’ I said slowly, ‘but maybe not. I mean – that would be really nice, but just as mates.’

Scott sighed and then grinned at me. ‘It’s the rat’s tail, isn’t it?’

I grinned back. ‘’Fraid so.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to go out for a drink with anyone so shallow anyway,’ he said with dignity, putting on his helmet. ‘So the offer’s off the table.’

‘Fair enough.’ I opened the door of my car. ‘Hey, thank you. It’s a really big compliment.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Scotty, clambering onto his enormous bike. He started it, revved the engine loudly and roared off down the drive.