Dinner at Rose's (47 page)

WHILE MOST OF
the district applied themselves to club sandwiches and apple shortcake in the draughty Presbyterian church hall, I slipped away to look for Matt. I found him perched on the low brick wall bordering the neighbouring park. It was cold, with a brisk southerly wind stirring the new leaves of the oaks across the park and whisking the petals from a blossoming plum tree next door.

His cheeks were wet and he didn’t turn as I sat down beside him, but he put a hand out silently and took mine. We sat there for a while, looking at the vivid green of the oak trees and the two small boys kicking a soccer ball halfheartedly beneath them, before he said, ‘Déjà vu, huh?’

I squeezed his hand. ‘Yep.’ Last time we’d sat here like this was on an afternoon in February, four years earlier, and the oak leaves were the tired dusty green of late summer. And Matt had been pale and jet-lagged and wretched, and I’d wanted desperately to hug him, or say something sympathetic, or do
something
, but with a five-year gulf between us I couldn’t.

Kim came along the path behind us and sat down on his other side, tucking her skirt under her thighs. ‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Hey, Toad,’ said Matt.

‘How’s it going inside?’ I asked.

‘Great,’ she said bitterly. ‘Social event of the decade.’

Matt lifted his right arm with a little grunt of effort and put it round her shoulders.

‘Everyone says how wonderful she was,’ Kim continued. ‘Funny how none of them bothered to go and see her while she was alive and tell her to her face.’

‘That’s funerals for you.’

‘If one more person tells me that cancer’s a cruel, horrible way to die I’ll throw something at their head,’ she said savagely. ‘Do they think we didn’t notice?’

‘She didn’t,’ I said abruptly, having agonised for days before deciding that sharing this information wasn’t going to help anyone and I’d better keep my mouth shut. A wise decision, but unfortunately I’m completely crap at keeping my mouth shut.

‘Huh?’ Matt said.

‘She didn’t die of the cancer; she took every pill she could find and washed them down with forty-year-old port. She left a note.’

Both Kings turned to stare at me.

‘She said it wasn’t suicide,’ I continued. ‘It was just sparing us all any more deathbed scenes. And could I please remove the evidence, and she thoroughly enjoyed her life, and she loved us all very much. So I collected up the pill packets and the bottle and put them down the offal hole.’

There was a long frozen silence, broken at length by Kim. ‘Way to go, Aunty Rose,’ she said softly.

‘
WHAT WOULD YOU
like for dinner?’ Mum asked wearily, elbows on Aunty Rose’s big kitchen table and chin in her hands.

‘Not hungry,’ I said. ‘You?’

‘Not really. Eric?’

‘Hmm?’ Dad said absently, turning a page of his book.

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Do you want dinner now?’

Dad merely resettled his glasses on his nose, giving no sign whatsoever that he had heard a word she said.

‘Are you up to the bit where he deflowers her in the crow’s nest, Dad?’ I asked. As well as the obligatory enormous willy, that pirate was blessed with extreme suppleness and a head for heights.

My father reddened and thrust
Pirate’s Lady
down the back of the chaise longue. ‘Load of rubbish,’ he said. ‘Jo, be a good slave and put the kettle on, would you?’

I straightened from where I had been leaning against the stove and crossed the kitchen to fill the kettle. ‘Are you guys going home tomorrow?’

‘Yes,’ said Mum. ‘Our flight leaves at two-thirty.’ She rubbed at her eyes with her hands. ‘We’ve been thinking of selling the goat farm.’

‘And doing what?’ I asked, startled.

‘Dry stock, probably,’ said Dad. ‘The goats are a huge tie.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Fair enough.’ But I was a little puzzled, because my parents, when told (by me) that they should be out there seeing the world and spending my inheritance, have always said firmly that travel is not for them and that they like nothing more than staying at home. ‘Anywhere in particular?’

‘Somewhere up this way, we thought,’ said Mum casually. ‘We miss the district – most of our friends are here – and then we don’t want to be too far from the grandchildren.’

‘Grandchildren?’ I repeated faintly.

‘Yes please, dear.’ She stood up. ‘If you have a little girl you might like to call her Rose, don’t you think?’

‘But no pressure,’ Dad said. He put a hand down the back of the chaise longue and gave a fairly poor impression of surprise as he encountered a book. And then, with an even poorer impression of detached curiosity, he pushed his glasses back up his nose and reopened
Pirate’s Lady
.

Chapter 42

‘M
ATTHEW
PATRICK
!’

He jumped about a foot in the air, slopping colostrum down his gumboot. ‘Jesus, Jo!’ he said crossly.

‘What the
hell
do you think you’re doing?’

‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

‘Trying to pull out all your stitches, by the look of it.’

‘Settle down, woman, I’m not stupid.’

I climbed off the bike and picked up the twenty-litre bucket at his feet. ‘Exactly what part of “Just wait here a minute while I shut the cows away” did you not understand?’

‘I was being careful,’ he argued.

I scowled at him. ‘You nearly bled to death a week ago. You could rupture your liver or something, you idiot.’

‘Just because you used to go out with a doctor,’ said Matt, ‘you seem to think you’re some sort of medical expert.’ He stepped out of his left gumboot, tipped out the milk and put it back on with a grimace of distaste.

‘I think most people would agree that lifting heavy buckets a week after major abdominal surgery probably isn’t the best plan,’ I pointed out.

Realising that he was on shaky ground, he altered his line of attack. ‘You sound like your mother.’ His tone of voice was exactly the same as the one in which, twenty years ago, he used to tell me that I had girl germs.

‘Take that back,’ I said indignantly. I poured the milk he hadn’t tipped down his gumboot into the feeder hanging on the gate, put the bucket down and climbed into the pen to prevent the moronic white-faced calf that liked to butt the feeder from sloshing most of it out again. Kevin the relief milker was attending his niece’s wedding today, which meant I was farming while Matt supervised. This would have been more enjoyable if only he would have refrained from climbing fences, lifting sacks of calf meal and otherwise contravening the doctor’s orders. And if he had refrained from pointing out (kindly, because he’s quite fond of me, but it was still painful) the many areas in which my dairy-farming practices failed to meet his high standards.

Matt sighed, and scuffed the gravel moodily with the toe of his gumboot. ‘This is doing my head in,’ he said.

I clamped the white-faced calf between my knees and managed
not
to tell him that he wasn’t the only one. I once met a little saying – probably in one of those books of potted wisdom you find in waiting rooms – which said that the key to a successful relationship is to leave half a dozen things a day unsaid. So true.

‘Have you sorted out where you want Kevin to put the cows next week?’ I asked. I pushed a teat into the calf’s mouth and he spat it out as if it was poisonous. I was starting to wish it was.

‘Yep.’

‘Put all the calving information into the computer?’

‘Yep.’ He leant over the gate and scratched the nearest calf between the ears.

‘Just one more week,’ I said encouragingly. My calf took two sucks, let the teat go and pushed his neighbour off too. ‘You revolting animal. You could always resort to housework, if all else failed.’

Matt smiled. ‘Shit, it’s not
that
bad,’ he said. ‘Oh, alright. I’ll go and do something about tea.’

I smiled back. ‘Dinner.’

‘Dinner.’ He stretched across the feeder and kissed me. ‘Wash the teats out with hot water, okay?’

He went slowly across the tanker loop to the ute, slightly stooped and with one hand holding his sore ribs. I had a small epiphany as I watched him go; even though he’d been pushed into living the life his family wanted him to rather than the one he’d chosen for himself, he had ended up just exactly where he was meant to be. But my soulful musings were interrupted by the little white-faced calf, who chose that moment to bunt me firmly from behind and nearly pitch me into the feeder.

‘
PLEASE TELL ME
you’re kidding,’ said Matt, looking up from the
Dairy Exporter
as I came into the Pink Room that night.

‘Not at all. Stylish yet functional – why don’t you order another one for yourself, and then we can match?’ I pushed the eared hood of the onesie back off my head and climbed into bed beside him.

‘Great,’ he said sourly. ‘Let’s get matching Gore-Tex jackets and backpacks too, and walk up hills with those gay ski-pole things.’

‘Mum and Dad have matching Gore-Tex jackets,’ I remarked. ‘They found them in a bargain bin at Kathmandu.’

‘Awesome,’ said Matt.

I wriggled out of the onesie, which I had only put on to get a reaction, and pulled the covers up under my chin. Matt tossed his magazine onto the floor and reached out with a little grunt to turn off the bedside light, plunging the room into velvety darkness.

‘Hey, Jose?’ he asked.

‘Mm?’

‘D’you still reckon it would be unbearable to be called Jo King?’

For some time I merely lay on my back and gulped. ‘I reckon,’ I managed at last, ‘that I could probably learn to live with it.’

Matt gave a little sigh of satisfaction. ‘Bloody marvellous,’ he said. Followed, as I rolled over and hugged him enthusiastically, by, ‘
Ow!
’

Epilogue

I
N THE END
I did have to go to Melbourne and jump up and down before Graeme would buy me out of the house. We spent a very long afternoon sitting one on either side of the kitchen counter with a pile of bank statements between us, and by the end of it only the knowledge that if he didn’t pay me something I’d have to spend the next five years without a roof stopped me from just giving him the lot.