Dinner at Rose's (8 page)

I WAS STILL
good and mad when I got back to the flat, and I stamped up the steps to the back door. The kitchen and sitting-room lights were still on – Andy really was rebelling to have gone out for the night without switching them off. But when I went into the kitchen he was still there, sitting at the table surrounded by empty beer bottles with his laptop in front of him. It was only nine-thirty, and the restaurant he’d booked for this evening (a terribly upmarket place attached to a boutique hunting lodge that mostly attracted overweight American businessmen who saw no shame in shooting old tame stags in a paddock) was a good forty-minute drive away.

‘Didn’t you go out for dinner after all?’ I asked. Aunty Rose would have approved of my choice of words – although pleasing Aunty Rose wasn’t high on my list of priorities just at that moment.

‘Nope,’ said Andy, then he tipped half a bottle of Speight’s down his throat, pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘How was your night?’

‘Crap.’

‘Beer?’ he asked on his way to the fridge, weaving slightly.

‘Why not?’ I said, taking the bottle he handed me and leaning back against the bench. ‘So, your night was crap too?’

‘Yep,’ said Andy. He twisted the cap off his beer bottle and took a grimly determined swig – the action of a man who wishes to get legless in the shortest possible space of time.

I looked at him thoughtfully, wondering whether or not to enquire further. He might like to tell someone about it, or he might be pissed off by a flatmate he barely knew poking her nose into his private affairs.
Ah, stuff it
, I thought. ‘What’s up?’

‘Bronwyn thinks we should take a break. What did she say? “It’s not you, it’s me.” And then: “I still love you, I’m just not
in
love with you.”’

‘Bugger,’ I said.

‘She could at least have said something original,’ said Andy morosely, downing the rest of his beer and squinting into the empty bottle in a slightly puzzled fashion, as though he couldn’t understand how it had reached that state.

‘A poor effort,’ I agreed. ‘You’re not writing her a drunken email, are you?’ Remembering in the morning that you’ve sent someone an ungrammatical tirade declaring your undying love or rubbishing their bedroom prowess (or possibly both) is very disheartening.

‘Nah, just updating my Facebook status.’ He sat down in front of his laptop again and resumed typing laboriously with his right index finger. ‘Single. There.’ He blinked owlishly at the screen.

I took a large mouthful of beer. ‘Want to see what
I
found on Facebook today?’ I asked.

‘Okay.’

‘Then shove over,’ I said and pulled up another kitchen chair beside him. ‘All done?’

‘Yeah.’

I logged out of his profile and into my own. ‘Now, where is it? Ah. Here.’ I scrolled down to find a comment posted yesterday by Chrissie de Villiers. The profile picture beside the comment showed Chrissie peeping coyly up through a screen of streaky blonde hair, all smoky eyeliner and sharply defined cheekbones.

Thanks so much for all the birthday wishes, everyone. Wonderful weekend, wonderful party, wonderful friends, wonderful man . . . Hangover not quite so wonderful. Hard to come back down to earth after being spoilt like that.

‘Read it?’ I asked.

‘Um, yeah,’ said Andy.

‘But wait, there’s more.’ I clicked on the new photos Chrissie had posted, in which happy, laughing people with glasses in hand squinted at the camera in the bright sunlight while leaning back in their chairs, wearing silly hats and becoming progressively more flushed of face and glazed of eye as the evening wore on.

‘Friends of yours?’ Andy was clearly wondering why I was inflicting pictures of drunken revellers on him in his darkest hour.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And that’s my house – well, mostly the bank’s house, but I pay half the mortgage. And those are all my friends, and that’s my ex-boyfriend, and
that’s
my ex–best friend snuggling up to him. And that was supposed to be a combined birthday party for both her and me, except that I came home from work not long ago and found them having sex in an armchair.’ My favourite armchair, too, just to add insult to injury.

‘That sucks,’ said Andy solemnly.

‘That’s what I thought,’ I said and logged out of Face-book with a vicious click of the mouse. ‘You know what?’

‘What?’

‘I think we need something more serious than beer. What’ve we got?’

Chapter 7

I
WOKE UP
horribly early the next morning to the sound of some sadistic bastard operating an electric hedge-trimmer just outside the window. I lay for a while hoping this prat would be struck by lightning or washed away in a bizarre flash flood. Neither happened, so I groaned and rolled out of bed.

My skull had shrunk so that my brain was in imminent danger of being squeezed out of my ears, my teeth seemed to be covered in wool and my tongue was far too big for my mouth. I staggered up the hall to the kitchen and gulped down about two litres of water before looking dully at the empty bottles strewn across the table. Andy and I had decided, I seemed to recall, that gin mixed with chocolate milk was delicious, and when we ran out of this gourmet concoction we had opened the coconut liqueur Andy had discovered in the recesses of the cupboard above the microwave.

On my way back from the bathroom I peeped around Andy’s door, just in case he was lying unconscious in a pool of vomit. The smell of his room made me recoil hastily; the fug of beer fumes laced with old sock was so thick you could have cut blocks out of it with a spade.

‘Are you alive?’ I called from the safety of the hall.

‘Unnghhh,’ came the answer.

‘Great stuff.’ I left the door wide open in the hope that he might get some fresher, oxygen-containing air and went back down the hall.

I really just wanted to crawl back into bed, but I had promised to go to the beach with Clare and her kids so I swallowed two Panadol and made myself a scrambled-egg sandwich instead. Scrambled-egg sandwiches on soft brown bread were Chrissie’s sure-fire hangover cure, and even though I wished Chrissie would develop some horrible, disfiguring face fungus, denying the effectiveness of the sandwich would have been childish. I put on my sunglasses and took my sandwich out to eat on the back step, ruing my stupidity. What kind of moron gets rotten drunk the night before accompanying three small children to the beach for the day?

Luckily, by the time Clare picked me up at nine I’d improved to the stage of mere mild seediness. Stopping in the driveway she leant on the horn, prompting a string of incoherent curses to issue from Andy’s room.

The three children were buckled into a row of car seats in the back, each one clutching a sandwich and looking sticky around the edges. ‘Aunty Jo!’ Charlie crowed.

‘Good morning, guys,’ I said cheerily.

Lucy threw her sandwich at me in response and then, realising she no longer had it to eat, began to roar.

It took us an hour to get to the beach, along a beautiful road that winds its way through the gorge, crossing and recrossing the Waimanu River. Unfortunately, Michael began to throw up about ten minutes into the trip. Clare had clearly anticipated this possibility and had thoughtfully covered him with a towel and given him a basin. It was my job to empty this basin as it was filled, and by the time we arrived I’d relapsed from mildly seedy to quite unwell.

‘Are you okay, Jo?’ Clare asked as she pulled a mountain buggy from the boot and unfolded it.

‘I’m not sure.’ I took a deep breath and turned to release a wildly struggling Charlie from his car seat.

It was a lovely beach with an empty sweep of fine black sand stretching from the river mouth down the coast to a jumble of boulders at the foot of a cliff. There were interesting rock pools and piles of driftwood, and the wet sand was silky beneath our bare feet. The boys immediately rushed knee-deep into the sea, but Lucy decided that sand was nearly as terrifying as water and huddled fearfully in her stroller, shrieking as the little waves came in to break with a soft hiss of foam.

Clare bent to fish through a bag of supplies slung under the stroller, found a little box of raisins and passed it to Lucy. She stopped sobbing and began to extract raisins from the box with the delicate precision of a brain surgeon, pushing them through a little gap between the seat and the frame of the mountain buggy.

‘Oh well, at least it’s keeping her busy,’ Clare said wearily.

‘What’s Brett up to today?’ I asked.

‘When we left he was looking up vasectomies on the internet.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘three’s a pretty good effort.’

‘Yeah.’

We wandered along the smooth firm black sand after the boys, who were chasing one another along the very edge of the breakers with exuberant cries. They looked the epitome of happy, healthy children enjoying themselves in the fresh air, not eating preservative-filled foods or watching mind-numbing TV programs. A sight to gladden the heart of any parent.

‘Michael filled the petrol tank of the lawnmower with paint yesterday,’ Clare said.

I laughed – I couldn’t help it. ‘Was that the deciding factor in the whole vasectomy decision?’

‘Not quite,’ said Clare, with a wicked smile. ‘The deciding factor, I believe, was finding that the Sky card was missing from the decoder last night when he wanted to watch the rugby.’ She added dreamily, ‘I found it this morning in the oven drawer.’

We paddled in the rock pools and counted hermit crabs (Michael was dissuaded with some difficulty from taking home a selection in his pocket) before setting out a picnic on the dry sand at the base of the dunes. A brisk, sand-laden breeze blew up just as we unwrapped the sandwiches, and Charlie managed to upend the chocolate cake icing-side down into the sand so that it was a somewhat gritty meal. Everyone got cold and tired and grizzly and wanted to be carried back up the beach in their wet togs. Lucy found a rotten puffer fish and clutched it lovingly to her chest, then threw a tantrum when we wouldn’t let her take it home in the car. But these were merely minor incidents in an otherwise excellent day’s outing.

We went to McDonald’s on the way home for chicken nuggets and chips (Lucy returned from the play area with suspiciously damp knickers but Clare and I are terrible people and we decided not to go searching for a puddle to clean up, on the grounds that child-friendly restaurants had to expect that kind of thing). It was nearly six when Clare dropped me back home and I let myself in the kitchen door to find Andy and two other blokes playing PlayStation with a half-empty crate of beer beside them.

‘Hey!’ said Andy, slurring his words just a bit. ‘Hey, Jo! Beer?’

‘Dear Lord, no,’ I said fervently. ‘How can you?’ Even ten years ago I wasn’t keen on serious drinking two nights in a row, and these days it would have nearly killed me.

‘Hair of the dog,’ he said airily. ‘Wade, Euan – this is Jo. She’s a cool chick.’

I spent the rest of the evening playing Gran Turismo with them as they worked their way through the crate, and it was the most enjoyable evening I’d spent in that flat yet. When the beer ran out around ten I offered to take the boys home – they declined, saying they would crash on the couch if they didn’t feel like walking. So I retired to bed, taking a selection of car keys with me and feeling extremely mature and responsible. Being called a wonderful influence had evidently gone to my head.

Sometime in the middle of the night a slurred beery voice informed me from much too close to my face that the couch wasn’t very comfortable and that the voice’s owner thought he would share my bed instead. By the time I’d struggled up to consciousness a skinny youth wearing far too few clothes had crawled into bed beside me; I promptly evicted him but I was more grateful than annoyed at this interruption to my night’s sleep. I’d been in the middle of an unpleasant dream in which Matt was explaining to me with condescending pity that it was no wonder Graeme had chosen Chrissie rather than me because she was so beautiful, and that if I ever wanted anyone to find me attractive I’d better start wearing lip gloss and tight moleskin trousers.

Chapter 8