Dinner at Rose's (16 page)

Kissing Matt had not a single thing in common with kissing the nice but undesirable Marcus. He tasted faintly of beer, he was lean and hard, and his mouth was hot against mine.

‘Jo,’ he said thickly after some time, pulling his mouth away.

‘Y-yeah?’

‘I’ve been wanting to do that all night.’

‘Do it some more,’ I said breathlessly, and pulled him down the hall into my bedroom.

‘Okay.’ And then some time later, ‘Hey . . .’

I removed my hand from the hard bulge in his jeans and blushed in the near-darkness. ‘Sorry.’

‘I like it,’ he said. ‘I
really
like it. But I have to go to Scotland tomorrow.’

‘Sorry,’ I muttered again. ‘You should be getting some sleep.’

He took me by the shoulders and shook me gently. ‘I couldn’t give a rat’s
arse
about sleep,’ he said. ‘But we might not see each other again for a couple of years.’

‘So why did you kiss me?’ I asked, made brave by half a dozen bottles of beer.

‘Couldn’t help it.’

‘That’s nice.’ I reached up and kissed him again.

‘God, Josie, you’re beautiful,’ he said shakily. And sighing as he lost his short battle to be noble and gentlemanly he slid his big warm hands up under my tight top.

This was absolutely nothing like letting a nice boy fumble with my breasts and grunt damply against my neck during a few mercifully brief encounters. That had been just sort of sticky and embarrassing, and I was never sure whether to try to gasp and writhe convincingly or just lie there and wait. I mostly decided on something between the two and ended up feeling both dispirited and like a horrible fraud.

Matt was in an entirely different league. He pushed me gently back on the bed and came down with me, peeling off my clothes between kisses and sliding a hand between my legs.

‘Matt . . .’ I whispered, arching up against him.

‘Okay?’

‘Yes – come here.’ I wrestled with his belt.

‘Hang on,’ he said against my mouth. ‘I’ll do it.’ Then, ‘Jose, if you don’t stop doing that I’m going to lose it completely.’

‘That was kind of the idea.’

He laughed, caught my hands in his and held them firmly, and put his mouth over my right breast.

‘
Matt!
’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘
God
, yes! Have you got any condoms?’

He let me go, tugged his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans and shed the rest of his clothes at close to the speed of light. I sat up to take the condom out of his hand and rip open the little foil packet, and he laughed as he reclaimed it and put it on. I pulled him down again, wrapping my legs around his waist and sparing just a fraction of a second to be deeply thankful I’d shaved them that morning. ‘Just slow
down
,’ he whispered.

‘Can’t. I mean, don’t want to.’

‘Fair enough,’ he muttered, and put his arms around me tightly. ‘Me neither.’

AFTERWARDS I LAY
flat on my back, looking at the zigzag crack in the ceiling and trying to breathe.

Matthew sat up and looked down at me. ‘Should we get under the covers?’ he suggested.

‘I would,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think I can move.’

‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’

‘Good.’ I pushed myself up on my elbows with some difficulty and he leant down to kiss me softly. ‘Matt?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Thank you.’

He kissed me again. ‘You’re welcome.’ He sighed.

‘
Bugger
having to go to Scotland.’ ‘When do you have to go?’

He looked at the face of my little fluorescent alarm clock. ‘In about seven hours.’ He pulled at the edge of the duvet and I wriggled aside to let him tug it out from under me. We curled up underneath it and I rested my forehead against his shoulder.

‘We have the worst timing on the planet,’ I said sadly.

He tightened his arm around me. ‘We have seven hours,’ he pointed out.

We spent them talking, cat-napping and using up the remaining three condoms in his wallet. Then we got up and I drove him to the airport, dropped him at International Departures (‘Don’t come in, Jose, it’ll just make it worse’) and went home. I had to take an exit I didn’t want off the motorway so that I could park up a side street and bawl my eyes out for half an hour without endangering myself or my fellow motorists. I seem to remember that I picked a street down which a constant stream of pedestrians passed within a foot of my car, but that I was too busy wallowing in misery to care.

MATT SPENT NEARLY
five years overseas. My sources (that is, Clare, whose brother was in London at the same time) informed me that he was partying extremely hard and working his way through a never-ending procession of girlfriends. He decided after a year or two that he’d better try to see a bit more of Europe than the inside of a pub and went travelling – he drove tractors in France and operated ski lifts in Switzerland and even somehow ended up running a motel on Corfu for a year.

I was nowhere near as adventurous. I thought I’d work for a year or two and then explore the world, going on some sort of voyage of self-discovery in the process, but I never got there. I finished my physiotherapy degree and spent a year’s internship at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland, where I fell heavily for a sandy-haired anaesthetist, and I only made it as far as private practice in Greenlane.

Matt and I used to ring each other sporadically, but I didn’t see him again until his father’s funeral. He stayed home after that to run the farm, and about a month later I moved to Melbourne with boyfriend number two.

We’d never spoken of that night in all the years since; presumably it had meant so little to Matt he’d all but forgotten it. But I hadn’t.

Chapter 15

‘G
OOD AFTERNOON, MISS
Donnelly,’ said Bob with his special brand of slightly ponderous gallantry. He was a nice man, but even had I been able to overlook the halitosis, and even if I wasn’t currently restraining myself from dreamily practising ‘J.M. King’ signatures around the margins of newspaper crossword puzzles, he was so pedantic that I’d have had to hit him over the head with a pot after a week of his company.

‘Hi, Bob,’ I said, gathering up bits of paper and stuffing them into my shoulder bag in a pointedly hurried fashion. ‘I’m running a bit late.’

‘I brought you a few recipes.’ He pulled a wodge of those glossy, tear-off Food-in-a-Minute recipes you can get at the supermarket from his back pocket and handed them to me proudly. ‘You said you needed some meal ideas.’

Ah, yes. The last time he had popped in I was ushering out Mrs Clarke, chatting idly about food that somebody who is nauseous and miserable from chemo might find tempting. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, trying to sound suitably grateful. ‘That’s very thoughtful. Look, I’ve got to head –’

But he waved me to silence with an imperious gesture. ‘Just one moment of your valuable time, my dear.’ Behind him Amber was sniggering gently at her computer keyboard in a distinctly unhelpful way. ‘There’s a wine and cheese do at the Workingman’s Club this Friday. Don’t you think that sounds like a bit of alright?’

‘I can’t go out in the evenings at the moment,’ I said.

‘That’s right, your dear honorary aunt. But surely a couple of hours of rest and relaxation would do you nothing but good.’

‘I couldn’t leave her,’ I said firmly. ‘I just wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself. Thank you so much for the invitation, Bob, but I really do have to run.’

‘I think it's marvellous,’ he murmured, beaming at me fondly. ‘A young woman like yourself with such a delightfully old-fashioned sense of duty.’ No doubt he was envisaging me cheerfully wiping his bottom in another twenty years or so. What a truly revolting image.

‘Amber, you can lock up, can’t you?’ I said. ‘See you, Bob – thank you again . . .’ And I bolted from the building like a startled rabbit.

Safely in my car I rested my head for a moment against the steering wheel. This was getting ridiculous I couldn’t just keep using Rose as an excuse. Perhaps I would have to make a flip chart, complete with graphs and professional-looking red arrows, comparing my likelihood of ever going
anywhere
with poor Bob with the chance of hell freezing over. Somebody tapped on the driver’s window and I looked up wildly. Right, that was it, I was going to lose it and start shouting at the man – but it was Kim, dressed in her school uniform with her satchel over one shoulder. I wound down the window.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Escaping from Bob McIntosh.’

‘Right. Can I have a lift home?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Did you have detention again?’

‘No,’ said Kim, sounding offended. ‘Guitar practice.’

‘Since when do you play the guitar?’

She trotted around the front of the car and hopped in beside me. ‘Two weeks. I can do three chords now. Jonno’s in a band and I’m going to be back-up singer and guitarist.’

‘Awesome,’ I said solemnly.

‘
HOW DID IT GO
?’ I asked, letting myself in the kitchen door a couple of days later to find Aunty Rose beating eggs in a china mixing bowl. She was wearing a fetching little green satin cap with a spray of artificial cherries sewn onto one side, one of a boxful of hats and wigs given to her by Mary-Anne Morris at the chemist’s. Mary-Anne had lost her own hair in a battle with cancer a few years before.

‘Well, the rotten thing has shrunk, anyway,’ she said. ‘So they’re going to whip it out next week.’ Her check-up appointment had been that morning, and she’d stubbornly resisted all offers to drive her, claiming that Matt and I were just looking for an excuse not to do any work and she couldn’t condone that sort of thing.

‘Good. They’ll hit it with a bit more chemo after that, won’t they?’

‘Yes, but not such nasty drugs this time.’

‘So you won’t start puking your guts out again?’ I put the grocery bags I was holding on the kitchen table and began to unpack them.

‘Josephine, you use these expressions solely to annoy me, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted, and grinned at her.

‘I did hope that was the case. No, the nausea should be much better.’

‘Just think of all the wine you’ll be able to drink.’