Just Not Mine (14 page)

“They did, and I did,” Josie said. “They were helping me unload my new pot plants, out on the patio, and helping me put them into the pots, too. They offered very nicely, and I gave them a few nibbles, and
we’re all good.”

“
Well, thanks,” he said. “But next time, leave me a note,” he told the kids.

“If I had a phone,” Amelia said, “you could have texted.”

“If you had a phone,” Hugh countered, “you’d be texting your friends every few minutes, and I’d be hearing from your teachers that you’d been using it under your desk, and getting one of those shocking thousand-dollar phone bills. No. You’re twelve. A twelve-year-old doesn’t need a phone.”

“I’m nearly thirteen.”

“You’re twelve and a …” He calculated. “Half. You’re not nearly thirteen. No phone.”

“Fine,”
she muttered, looking mutinous, and Hugh sighed. He was right, he was almost sure of it, but being right didn’t seem to matter.

“Well,” Josie said, “you could give
me
your number, Hugh, and I could text you. I promise to keep it under control. I hardly ever even text my friends under the desk anymore.”

He laughed in spite of himself. “If you don’t mind giving me yours as well, that’d help. And then we’l
l be getting on, leaving you to your evening.”

They exchanged, and he felt better, though he’d never got a girl’s number quite this way.

“Josie,” Charlie said suddenly, “it’s you! Why are you on a horse?”

“Shh.” Amelia flapped a silencing hand at him, reached for the remote and turned the volume up on the telly, and Hugh saw a look he couldn’t interpret on Josie’s face as he turned and looked for himself.

“UK firm Bain Fantastique’s new ad campaign for its
Tropique
bodycare line took an unexpected turn today when a new billboard on the Northern Motorway featuring
Courtney Place’s
own Jocelyn Pae Ata contributed to two multi-vehicle accidents and a serious daylong traffic slowdown,” the voice of the male newsreader was saying.

He was saying it, but the camera wasn’t on him. It was Josie on that bloody horse on the screen, and if Hugh had wondered how he’d got distracted to the extent he had, well, there was the evidence right in front of him, because he was looking again, and he’d bet TVs all over New Zealand were having their volume turned up just now. He still didn’t understand why she’d be lying naked on a horse, but it was working for him, so he guessed the advertising people knew what they were doing.

But just now, he had other things to think about, because a police spokesman was on screen now. Must have been a slow news day, and Hugh was sweating a bit. “We’ve had damage to seven vehicles reported, and the sign’s caused a serious bottleneck,” he said. “We’ve also had a number of complaints from the public, which the relevant departments are looking into now, as to whether this is an appropriate image for a public motorway.”

“Two multivehicle accidents,” the female newsreader said dryly when the cameras were on the news desk again. “Would those drivers have happened to be male?”

“What was the advert for again?” her colleague laughed. “Can’t remember.”

“Our weather isn’t quite so exciting,” the woman said, looking at the camera again. “What do you have for us, Sharon?”

“A fine day tomorrow for most of the North Island,” the woman standing beside the giant weather map began.

“You can turn it off,” Josie said quietly, and Amelia pressed the button on the remote, and the TV went dark, and Hugh breathed a sigh of relief. He was out of the woods.

“Why did they take a picture of you without any clothes on riding a horse, Josie?” Charlie asked. “That doesn’t make sense. People don’t ride horses with no clothes on.”

“It was just for the advert,” she said. “It’s meant to look
… natural. There are some others too, in magazines and such. It’s all about being on the beach, in the rainforest, like that, because it’s for skin care, you see? So they show … skin,” she finished, and she didn’t look entirely at ease herself.

“They always show pretty girls in adverts,” Amelia explained to her brother. “They picked Josie because she’s so pretty. And the horse was pretty too, so that’s why they did it.”

“You did look pretty, Josie,” Charlie assured her. “I just never saw anybody riding a horse with no clothes on, that’s all. Or lying down on it either. Was it very comfortable? Weren’t you worried you would fall off?”

“It wasn’t comfortable at all,” Josie said. “It was dead
scratchy, and stinky as well. I don’t know what they were feeding him, the horse I mean, but a couple times, I’d be lying there and they’d be shooting, and suddenly …” She waved a hand in front of her face, a comical expression twisting her mouth, her eyes wide. “Phew. And I’d be trying to look like I was enjoying myself. Least they didn’t have me lying on a cow. Horse poo isn’t so bad. Cow, poo, though …” She made another face. “Or pigs. Now, if I’d been on a pig, that would
really
have been an acting job, because pigs smell.”

Charlie giggled. “You would’ve looked so silly, lying on a pig.”

“They wouldn’t have had her lie on a
pig,”
Amelia said impatiently. “A pig isn’t big enough.”

“Mmm,
I don’t know about that,” Josie said. “Pigs can get pretty big. I could probably fit. Think anybody’d pay for a picture of me lying on top of a pig, Hugh?”

She was teasing him, he realized. And flirting. She had never flirted before, but she was flirting now.

“I think they’d pay for a picture of you lying on top of anything,” he said, and he smiled into her brown eyes, saw them widen a bit at what she was seeing in his. But if she was going to flirt, he was going to flirt back. Partner be damned. If that Derek fella couldn’t be bothered to look after the woman of any man’s dreams, he’d better start looking for an Aussie girl instead, because Hugh wasn’t going to let a little thing like a partner stand in his way.

Amelia was talking again, though, and Hugh did his best to listen. “Of course they wouldn’t have her lie on a pig. Or a cow. A cow would just be
stupid,
unless it was meant to be funny
.
They did a horse because horses are sexy.”

“What do you know about what’s sexy?” Hugh protested.

She shot him a pitying look. “I’m practically a
teenager,
Hugh. Women know these things.”

“They do, eh.” Amelia knew what was sexy? Already? Geez. Another thing he was going to have to worry about. Aunt Cora couldn’t come home too soon for him.

“Girls like horses, and boys like dogs,” Amelia explained. “Everybody knows that. Because dogs are friendly, and horses are mysterious and powerful and sexy, and girls can ride them and be powerful too. That’s why there are so many books about girls and horses.”

Hugh was losing track of the conversation. That hadn’t been what he’d taken from the billboard, that girls liked horses, but if that skin care stuff was for women, he guessed the advert might be for women too, though he still had his doubts. “It is?”

She sighed with exasperation. “Well, duh. Pony club books?”

“Uh
… Are there pony club books?”

“Of course there are,” she said. “Heaps of them.”

“And
Misty of Chincoteague,”
Josie put in.
“National Velvet.”

“I don’t know those,” Amelia said doubtfully.

“Oh, you should read them,” Josie said. “They’re just wonderful. We can look at the library, if you like. I could show you.”

“But there are books about other animals.” Charlie was still pursuing the original topic. “Like dogs. There are loads of books about dogs.”

“For
boys,”
Amelia said impatiently. “Boys like dogs, and girls like horses. Like I
said.
Girls like cats, too,” she added as an afterthought. “There are cat books. Cats are sexy, too, I think, though you couldn’t lie on one, of course. Anything you can stroke, like a horse, or a cat,” she decided. “I think that’s what makes it sexy. And that’s pretty, of course.”

Yeh, pretty things you could stroke, that worked for Hugh.

“And goats,” Josie put in helpfully.
“Heidi.”

Goats?
Hugh was so confused.

“Animal books for girls,” Josie explained, seeing it. “Not sexy animals.” Ah.

“I haven’t read that either,” Amelia said.

“Oh!’ Charlie jumped. “Pigs! There
are
ones about pigs. Because
Babe.
Mum read us
Babe.”
His face clouded over. “I remember that. We were almost done when she …” He stopped.

“When she died,” Hugh said. The kids didn’t refer often to it anymore, but of course they thought about it. What should he do about that? What had Aunt Cora been doing about that? He didn’t even know.

“You could get that too,” Josie suggested. “At the library. I’m not sure how hard it is, but Amelia could read it aloud, couldn’t she? Or Hugh could,” she said with a glance at him. “Even better. It isn’t right to leave a good book unfinished, or a good memory, either.”

“I’m not too good at reading aloud,” he began to say. But Josie was frowning a bit at him, giving her head an infinitesimal shake, so he changed it to, “but I could try. Course we could read it aloud.” She was smiling at him now, so that was obviously the right answer.

“But we’d better go have dinner,” Hugh said. “Looks like you two have done your best to clean out Josie’s fridge, but I’m starved. And we need to let Josie get on with her own dinner as well.”

“Maybe she could come eat with us,” Charlie said. “Can you, Josie? Because you said if somebody helped you, you should feed them, and you helped us.”

“Nah,” she said with a quick glance at Hugh. “You helped me, remember? With the pot plants?”

“Oh, I think it’s me in debt,” Hugh said. Again, not how he was used to getting his dinner dates, but he’d take her company any way he could get it. “Got a couple roast chickens, some vegies, that’s all, but if you don’t mind eating that, we’d like to have you come.”

“A feast,” she said. “Roast chicken? Sounds good to me.”

“Thanks very much for that,” Josie said after a dinner that they’d all fixed together, had eaten to the accompaniment of plenty of friendly chat at the kitchen table. Another point on
the Hugh as Undemanding-for-Now-Neighbor scoreboard, he hoped.

She got up
and carried her dishes across to the sink. “And I should be off.”

“If you could stay for a bit,” Hugh offered, because this was an opportunity he wasn’t going to let go by, “we could put these two on washing-up duty, and we could sit and have a glass of wine. I’m still getting over my traumatic experience, the kids gone missing. I may need a medical professional to sit with me and see that I recover properly.”

“Josie’s not really a medical professional,” Amelia told him. “That’s just her part.”

Hugh ignored her. “One glass of wine.” He held up his index finger for demonstration purposes. “One. In the lounge. Can I talk you into that much excess?”

“Maybe,” she said, and she was smiling. “One.”

“Good.” He was smiling like a fool himself as he jumped up and went for the fridge before she could change her mind. “White OK?”

“White’s awesome.”

“Washing-up, homework for tomorrow in the backpack, showers, bed,” he told the kids, grabbing a couple glasses. “Eight-thirty. I’ll be checking.”

“Holly’s bedtime is nine-thirty,” Amelia said, apparently deciding that this was the ideal moment to have this conversation.

“Wonderful,” he said. “Tell her I said congratulations.”

Josie was laughing when he set the bottle and glasses on the coffee table. “Good job,” she told him. “You’re sounding more natural at that every day.”

“You think?” He grinned at her, switched on the lamp on the end table, then turned the dimmers down on the overhead light. Low, but not too low. He gestured her to the couch, poured them each a glass, handed hers over and sat down in the easy chair at a right angle to her seat. Good distance, good nonverbal communication, he hoped.

“Yeh,” Josie said. “I can just hear Amelia complaining about it to Holly tomorrow. Exactly the way it should be. If you’re not infringing on their freedoms, failing to understand how mature they are now, you’re probably not doing it right.”

She leaned forward, touched her glass lightly to his with a murmured ‘Cheers,’ then settled back again, pulling her long, bare legs up under her. Her eyes smiled at him over the rim as she took a sip, and he blanked for a moment on what they’d been talking about.

“First time I’ve seen you drink anything,” he said. “Next thing we know, you’ll be letting your hair down. Feel free, by the way.”

She smiled again, but didn’t answer him directly. “And now you know why. And why I don’t drink beer, and don’t eat pizza.”

“Or potatoes, or mince, or bacon. Strictly low-kilojoule pursuits, wasn’t it?”

“Mmm. More points there, quoting my words back to me. Somebody’s been to Dating School.”

She really
was
flirting. “We aim to please,” he told her, and if he smiled at her a little more while he said it, let his gaze heat up a bit, well, nonverbal communication could work both ways.

She lowered her eyes and
took another sip. “Yeh, well, doesn’t take too many beers and bikkies to knock the naked billboards right out of the running, and that’s the contract that gave me the courage to buy the house at last. Pays heaps better than being Dr. Eva all year, shocking as that is. Although Dr. Eva has to watch the beers and bikkies too.”

“I’ve noticed she can’t seem to keep her clothes on,” he agreed. “The kids and I had a look,” he explained at her questioning glance. “And then I turned it off,” he hastened to add, because he had a feeling that otherwise, the points were going to be disappearing from the scoreboard. “You were right. Dr. Eva isn’t age-appropriate.”

“Mmm. She’s not. Good on ya for paying attention to that.”

“Yeh, trying. Like we said.”

“When is your aunt back?” she asked.

“About seven weeks
. We’re nearly halfway through, and not too bad, would you say?”

“I’d say not too bad at all.”

“You can probably tell, though,” he said, “that I’ve got a ways to go still. That thing about the reading … thanks for that. That would be good, you think, to read Charlie that book?”

“For Amelia too,” she said. “She’ll probably say she’s not interested. But do the reading in here, that’d be my suggestion.”

“Yeh? Why?”

“If you sit on the couch,” she explained, “right in the middle of it, then Charlie has to
sit close, on one side of you. And just that, just having an adult body next to his—he probably misses that. Sometimes having someone to touch is what we miss most, isn’t it? Especially for a kid like Charlie who’s lost both parents. He needs it more than anyone, and I’m guessing he doesn’t know how to ask for it.”

“You think?”
he asked, startled. “You can tell that?”

“Yeh. I do. I think he’s scared to touch you. He’s scared you wouldn’t want to, that you won’t think he’s tough enough for you.”

“That’s not true, though,” he said. “He’s eight. I know he’s eight.”

“Maybe you could show him it’s all right, then. If you don’t make a big deal of it, just sit where he’ll be touching you without having to try, that could do it. And then, once you start reading, my guess is, Amelia will come sit too. If you’re in the middle, she can sit on the other side, do you see? And then you’ve got them both close. Read that book,
Babe,
then read another one, and another. Dick King-Smith wrote heaps of them, I know, so that’d be easy, and natural.”

He could do that. “Should I be talking about their parents, too?” he asked. “I saw you did that, about their mum, about her kitchen.”

“Yeh. Do you really want to know what I think, though? Or is this just …” She waved her wine glass. “Chatting up? Making me believe you do?”

“I really do want to know. And, yeh,” he admitted, because he liked her so much, and he didn’t want to lie to her, “it’s probably chatting up, too. But I really want to know all the same.”

“Then here’s my wisdom,” she said. She laughed a little, then sobered, sat and thought a minute.

“One of the hardest things when somebody dies, I think,” she
said slowly, “is that people don’t mention them again, don’t ever say their names. It’s because they’re embarrassed, because they feel awkward, don’t want to show their own pain, maybe, whatever it is, but it can make you feel … it could make Charlie and Amelia feel like their parents aren’t just gone, they’re forgotten. That’s one of the worst things there is, to be forgotten, to have somebody we loved so much be forgotten. Our biggest fear, isn’t it? That we’ll die, and nobody will care? That we won’t have mattered? When people die, as long as they’re remembered, they’re not really gone, are they? But if nobody ever mentions them again, if nobody remembers … then they’re lost. And I think that’s how Charlie feels. That his parents are lost, and it doesn’t matter to anybody else, and nobody understands how it feels.”

“How do you know all this?” he asked, and he wasn’t flirting now.

“I’m an actor,” she said. “It’s my job to know how emotions feel, to read body language so I can convey that. And for me, I have to actually feel the emotions to convey them. Some actors don’t, but I do.”

“I didn’t think Dr. Eva had any tender emotions,” he said.

“I wasn’t always Dr. Eva, though. And I won’t be her forever. And on the loss thing,” she went on, “that’s being Maori, I guess. I think that’s one thing we do better than Pakeha. We keep our loved ones alive in our memories, in our thoughts, and when we say their names, when we honor them, that lets the other people who loved them keep them alive, too.”

“
Should they be hanging onto the past, though?” he asked.

“That’s not it
,” she said, sounding absolutely sure. “Grieving isn’t hanging on. It’s letting yourself do what you need to do in order to move into the future. Letting yourself feel the pain and the loss so you can go on and live again. Because the loss and the pain are still there whether you acknowledge them or not, aren’t they? If you bottle them so tightly that even you can never see them, that doesn’t make them go away. It just means it’ll never stop hurting, like a wound that’s got infected.”

“Ouch.”

She laughed, breaking the somber mood. “Yeh. Not the best metaphor, I guess, but that’s how it feels, isn’t it?”

“You think that’s how it feels for Charlie? For Amelia?”

“I’m guessing,” she said. “How does it feel for you?”

“For me?”

“Yeh. You lost your dad, too, right? Can’t have been easy.”

“I was an adult, though.”

“Does that make it easy?”

“Well, none of it was easy,” he admit
ted. “But there was a lot to do at the time, so I just got on with it, I suppose.”

“Mmm,” she said, and took another sip of wine. “Because you weren’t living here, obviously.”

“No. I was living in Wellington, always, playing for the Hurricanes. Hardly here at all, ever. I wasn’t even in En Zed when it happened. I was all the way over in Perth, playing the Western Force. I found out after the match, in the sheds.”

It had been a tough loss, a defensive implosion by the Hurricanes against the Force. There’d be some honest talk to come, it had been clear, but at the time, it had been a quiet group stripping down, getting the tape off, showering. Until the two police officers had walked into the room, and then it had gone even quieter.

They’d had a word to the coach, then they were walking through the room with every eye on them, every man praying they wouldn’t stop in front of him. Every one of them no doubt running through his recent actions, hoping they weren’t there for him.

And they’d stopped in front of Hugh.

“Hugh Latimer?” the elder one asked, his face deadly serious.

“Yeh,” he said, his mind a whirl, his mouth dry.

“Got some bad news, I’m afraid. We’ve just heard from the Auckland Police. They’ve asked us to come find you.”

Auckland. But he lived in Wellington. And he hadn’t done anything wrong in Auckland. He hadn’t done anything wrong in Wellington, for that matter, but when you were a sportsman, that sometimes didn’t
make any difference.

Some girl. Shit.
Some accusation he wasn’t going to be able to defend himself against, some casual thing she’d decided wasn’t going to be casual after all.
Shit. Shit.

“There’s been an accident,” the man said now, and Hugh stopped swearing inside, because he was past fear.

“What … what kind of accident?”

“Your father and
…” The man looked at his pad. “Stepmother, I guess. A road accident. Hit by another car, a drink driver, by the sound of it.”

“It’s bad?” Hugh managed to ask. He wished he were dressed, that he wasn’t sitting on a bench in his underwear.

“I’m sorry,” the man said, and paused. “I’m afraid they’re both gone. They were clipped on the motorway, went under the back of a truck. They didn’t have a chance. It would have been instantaneous. I’m very sorry.”

Hugh tried to stand up, but his legs wouldn’t hold him. The room had gone dead quiet, he realized in some distant corner of his brain.

“The kids,” he managed to say. “Amelia and Charlie. Were they with them?”

“No,” the man said. “No kids. I didn’t hear anything about that.”

“Who’s …” Hugh felt his body threatening to shake with the relief of it, tried to ignore it, tried to think. “Who’s looking after the kids?”

“I don’t know,” the man said.

“Then
find out,”
Hugh said. His voice was rising, and he was furious.
“Find out.”

“Calm down,” the man said.

“No. I won’t calm down. Find out who’s looking after those kids.” He was up now, pulling on his warmups. “Make sure somebody is. And then ring me and tell me, so I can find them when I get there.”

All he’d been able to think about on the plane was that last text from his dad. The one he hadn’t answered.

Best of luck tonight. Can’t watch this one, but I’ll catch it later.