Etiquette for a Dinner Party Page 2

  In the rear-view mirror Alan sees pieces of Jennifer’s mouth giggling, shoulders jerking in time to the laughter.

  ‘Well, why not, eh?’ he smiles at her through the mirror. ‘Why not?’ .

  ‘And so,’ Shirley will continue, once the tea has been poured and teabags dealt with, ‘we did go to a restaurant. Oh yes. But not the steakhouse. You wouldn’t read about it, where he took me.’

  She’ll wait for you to ask, so you should.

  ‘An Italian restaurant,’ she’ll reply, triumphant and hurt, as though it happened just last night. ‘What a disaster. There we were, surrounded by Italians, and they’re making one heck of a racket I can tell you. And there are noodles everywhere — no one using knives, as far as I could make out, no manners whatsoever — and there’s me, looking at a menu with God knows what on it.

  ‘I said to my Alan — I remember this, because I never usually blaspheme — I said, “What the hell is all this stuff?” — and he just looked at me, and smiled, and do you know what he said? Try something new. He said that if I didn’t like it he would eat it. But just try something, please Shirley.

  ‘I remember him saying that to me, him sitting there, all excited and squirming round like a kid. So I looked again, looked down at that menu. And I can remember this big feeling of panic coming over me, because I was looking for something — anything — that I knew. Like roast chicken, which I thought everyone ate on special occasions. Or steak and kidney. Even though I’m not that fond of kidney, I would have eaten it if I had to. Anything other than those tomato noodles, which would end up everywhere.

  ‘But there was nothing. No normal food at all on that Italian menu. Not even a normal English description of what the food was like. And in the end I looked up at Alan and I was trying not to cry and I said: “Why have you brought me here?”

  ‘ He wasn’t even looking at me. Oh no. Because the waiter had turned up and there he was kissing … yes, kissing … Alan. On his cheeks. One side. The other side. Then back to the first side. And I’m thinking: Oh my Lord. And then they started talking, just as if I didn’t even see what had gone on between them.’

  She might stop for a moment here, for a breath, or for some other reason that you are not sure about. You should pretend that it’s for a breath, for Shirley’s sake.

  ‘The chap was handsome, I do remember that, about the same age as Alan I think. Anyway, he’s got one hand on Alan’s shoulder and some fancy bottle of expensive wine in the other. And they’re looking at the label on it, talking about years and vintages and who knows what other rubbish. It was in Italian, all the writing, as if Alan would know what it meant.

  ‘My head was thumping by then, and I felt sick to the stomach. So I just got up and walked out. Past those big tables with arms waving everywhere and everyone shouting over the top of each other. Enough of this, I was thinking. I went outside and waited by the car. I was shaking and crying, and thinking to myself, Oh no, what have I got myself involved in, how do I get home?

  ‘But, you know, my Alan followed me out. I only waited a couple of minutes, and there he was. Standing next to me, his arm around me, helping me into the car. He made a choice, and that choice was me.’ .

  ‘I’m going to lunch too.’ They are passing through Royal Oak when Alan speaks. He cannot believe he has said it, that the words have been aired openly, so casually. ‘With an old friend too, as it happens.’

  ‘Oh? Whereabouts?’

  ‘Not far from Newmarket.’

  She is quiet, listening. Inviting him to trust her.

  ‘Yeah, well, once a month I have lunch with a bloke I’ve known for years. From before I got married. We meet up at this place that used to be a restaurant. The deal is, I pick up the food, and he brings the wine.’

  He is watching her closely now in the little mirror. Waiting to see what her mouth and eyes and shoulders are making of this.

  ‘Anyway. I get there and he’s always already set up a table, with a white cloth on it, and nice cutlery, and good glasses. Hard case, eh? And, you know, I actually think he might live in this place, or nearby, because along one wall he has this sort of little camping kitchen setup. So we cook the food I bring, if it needs cooking, and then we eat.’

  Alan is overwhelmed at how strange this all sounds now. But it is too late. It has been said.

  ‘That’s an amazing thing to happen,’ she says. ‘So what do you talk about over lunch? All sorts of stuff I guess …’

  ‘Yes, all sorts, really. But mostly food and wine.’

  ‘Your families too, I suppose?’ she asks.

  ‘No.’ Alan joins the start-stop shopping traffic of Newmarket Broadway. ‘Other things.’

  She wants to know more, he can see it in her startled expression, the beginnings of the smile on her face. But they have arrived outside her restaurant, and traffic is already queuing behind the taxi.

  ‘Here you go,’ he says. ‘You have a great lunch, Jennifer.’

  ‘You too.’ She collects her change from him, smiles, and is gone. .

  Black and white floor tiles make the space feel much bigger than the cosy trattoria ever was. The bright red concrete walls are bare, but there are ghostly squares of darker, blood-coloured paint where the Italian landscape paintings used to hang.

  Alan stands in the doorway, looking at each of the squares. He does this every time. He sees the old pictures. Venice. Rome. The crowded port of Brindisi. He blinks, and is surprised that the pictures are not there after all.

  He closes the door to the street behind him, then shuts his eyes. He draws in a breath. Garlic and marsala and pizza and smoke from pungent, unfiltered cigarettes. He breathes out, then in again. The smell is always gone on the second breath.

  Aberto is sitting in an old black leather armchair, reading the newspaper. The leather is cracked in many places and stretched at the seams, only just containing the stuffing. Behind the chair is a window that is nailed shut. There are no curtains and sunlight plays across the back of Aberto’s striped green shirt, over his wide shoulders to the pages of newsprint.

  The gas cooker is against the wall. Next to it, clean, shiny German knives lie side by side on the slab of grey marble. The slab sits on top of the little refrigerator. On the other side of the refrigerator, a stainless steel sink gleams in the bright light.

  In the middle of the room, a small table is set for two people. A white tablecloth, white dinner and side plates, two bulbous wine glasses, silver cutlery and a bottle of red wine in the centre. In the middle of each side plate, a red and white checked napkin.

  Alan looks at his old friend. The dark hair brushed back from his face; still curly, though streaked with silver. High forehead, widow’s peak, long nose. Aberto and Sylvie are twins — their likeness becomes more pronounced as the years pass.

  Aberto is snoozing, head fallen forward.

  ‘Wake up, old man,’ Alan calls out. ‘I’m hungry.’

  Aberto starts, looks up and sees Alan waving plastic bags and walking slowly towards the cooker. Long days in the taxi have slowed Alan down, stiffened his joints. Aberto lifts himself out of his chair, taking his time also to stretch old bones. The friends meet in the middle of the bare, warm room. They embrace, and kiss each other on both cheeks.

  ‘Who are you calling old man, old man?’ Aberto says. He holds Alan at arm’s length, looks him up and down, and smiles. ‘Too much roast beef since I last saw you, my friend.’

  Alan takes his morning’s purchases from the plastic bags, then sets two large, blackened pots of water down on the gas rings. He reaches up to a shelf, to a bag of salt, and drops a pinch into one pot, then the other. When the water starts to bubble, he turns up the heat and carefully lowers pasta into each pot. On the third gas ring, in a smaller pot, he heats the rich red sauce.

  ‘Don’t turn the fire up so high, it will burn.’ Aberto’s accent is still thick and rich. Like the sauce, Alan thinks. Red and rich, undiluted.

  ‘Don’t tell me how to cook
, I know how to cook,’ Alan says. He reduces the heat under the sauce pot.

  ‘Roast dinners maybe. Not pasta.’

  Aberto shuffles to the table, pulls back a chair, and eases his body down onto the seat. He pulls a pair of dark-framed reading glasses from the top pocket of his shirt and slips them on. Then he picks up the bottle of wine and gently tips it on its side, the better to read the label.

  ‘Let me tell you about this wine, my friend. This is a fine bottle of wine …’ .

  Much later, when he is driving home, Alan thinks about Aberto’s surname. How he can no longer remember what it is.

  He knew it in the early days, of course. Back then, they knew everything about each other. Where to find one another, day and night. Likes and dislikes, secrets, favourite places to go. But not so long ago — a year back, maybe two — he drew a blank on the name. The more he thought about it, the more elusive the word became. He waited for it to come back at an unexpected moment, as words do, but it has not happened.

  Of course, asking Aberto is out of the question — an embarrassing, ridiculous introduction of formality after so many years of friendship. But it bothers Alan greatly. It gnaws at the edges of the pleasure taken from the afternoon.

  As he turns up into the concrete driveway on Te Atatu Road, he visualises an event which must take place. The afternoon when he arrives at the old trattoria to find that it is locked up, Aberto absent.

  Or the afternoon when Aberto waits in vain for him. .

  Tonight Shirley has cooked roast mutton, potatoes, carrots and peas. She made the gravy from the roast fat — a skill she learned from her mother. She knows instant gravy would be easier, and half the mess besides, but the flavour is never the same when it comes out of a packet.

  Alan has two servings. His plate is empty. The stainless steel knife and fork — part of the set they bought at the Farmers’ Millennium Madness Sale in 1999 — sit side by side in the middle of the plate. And he says to Shirley: ‘That was beautiful thanks, love. Just the business.’

  Shirley has long given up hoping that one meal might last two nights. There is no such thing as leftovers in the Cooper household.

  Alan pushes his chair out from the dining table and tops up his glass from the bottle of ale on the kitchen bench. Then he stretches his stiff, cramped body and lumbers over to his La-Z-Boy chair in the lounge.

  And, just when Shirley has finished washing and drying and putting away in the kitchen and has flopped down in her own La-Z-Boy, just when that lovely Coronation Street music is winding up to the bit where the cat crawls across the rooftops, he says: ‘How about we open a can of peaches love?’

  She rolls her eyes, and looks at him side on, and thinks: Get it yourself, Mr Potato Head. Then she reverses her La-Z-Boy knobs and levers, and goes back into the kitchen.

  The pudding plates with a tartan pattern are for everyday use. Shirley takes two down from the cupboard and dishes up sweetened peaches from a can and Neapolitan ice cream. Alan likes the big band of chocolate, but she prefers the pastel strawberry. She has always thought you should be able to buy that particular flavour of strawberry separately, not just in Neapolitan ice cream. There is always a lot of vanilla left in the Coopers’ Neapolitan ice cream containers.

  VELOCITY

  I used to live with a man called Jack Duffy. We were good together, me and Jack, for a while. Now I guess you’d call him a traveller. He drives around the country in a ute with an old Lilliput caravan towing behind. It’s one of those little ones shaped like a white button mushroom. Reg 19BXY. That’s the caravan, not the ute.

  Jack’s got a road map of New Zealand in the glove box, and he draws a black line along each road he takes. Some roads have two lines on them, from when he’s backtracked. The silly bugger’s been doing this for ages and the map’s a smudgy mess — there aren’t many roads, major or minor, that Jack has not driven along.

  I see him from time to time, when he passes through Tirau. That’s where I ended up after things fell apart between us. I rented an empty building and set myself up a little secondhand shop. If you know Tirau at all, you’ll appreciate it’s become quite the little tourist Mecca of the south Waikato. So yeah, I’m settled, doing okay. Anyway, Jack calls in maybe two or three times a year, and it’s always good to see him. He never stays long, though, on account of being on the run from a bird. .

  We met in Tokoroa, just down the road from Tirau. Back then Tokoroa was a lively sort of a place. Lots of people came for a few months, earned big money at the mill, decided they liked it enough to stay. Monday to Thursday everyone generally got on with their business. Come Friday, the boys would come in from the bush and there’d be the usual suspects pissed and fighting down at the Trees Tavern. You didn’t have to drink there, though. There was the Toke Tavern, and the Timberlands if you felt like a change. I never did. I liked the old Toke Tavern.

  I’d lived in Tokoroa all my life. Dad was a bushman and Mum worked in the canteen at the mill. I’ve realised since I came to Tirau that outsiders actually looked down on Tokoroa, thought it was a rough sort of a place with nothing going for it. It amazes me that people saw it that way. To me it was just home, with a big mix of people who arrived all the time from God knows where — the islands, Europe some of them. Lots of Dutchies. Where they came from was no big deal; it didn’t have anything to do with the fighting. No matter what they turned up as, they ended up the same. Bushmen. Cutting down trees. Moving trees. Turning trees into paper. Turning paper into money — enough money to leave for somewhere else, or so they reckoned when they first arrived.

  At the time I met Jack I was a postie. It wasn’t a career or anything; the whole career thing doesn’t do much for me. But I was keen on netball and I needed a job that kept me fit and allowed time for training. So being a postie suited me down to the ground. I had the option of doing the round on a little motorbike the Post Office gave me, but I never used it; I either ran or rode my mountain bike. The job was all over by lunchtime, which meant I could go to the gym or netball training.

  I had a dog, Lucy. A Lab something something bitser. I got her from the pound when she was a pup. Lovely dog. She’d come with me on the postie run and add twenty minutes onto the job because of all the attention she got. Anyway. She needed attention for some complaint so I took her to the vet clinic.

  Jack worked there. Not as a vet, but a vet’s assistant. Meaning he could tend to the little problems, like whatever it was that Lucy had, but not surgery and stuff. Well, nature took its course. Lucy came right and Jack and I went out a few times, had a laugh, ended up getting together. We rented a little two-bedroom weatherboard house and a couple of paddocks at the northern end of town: enough space for the recovering sick animals Jack would bring home from the clinic.

  The thing that struck me about Jack was his amazing kindness to all living creatures. I mean, you just had to look at him to see that he was a kind man. He was tall and gangly and he had this sort of lovely pathetic aspect to him, like Hugh Grant at his most useless, if you know what I mean. Except Jack’s hair was blond and frizzy, and it looked like a toilet brush when it got away on him. He wore little round silver-rimmed glasses, which sort of added to the pathetic impression, and he had these brown eyes that were huge on account of the magnifying of the glasses. They stared straight at you, like an innocent trusting animal does. So I suppose actually he didn’t look like Hugh Grant at all, but overall it was a Hugh Grant sort of effect.

  The funny thing was, because he was so kind and pathetic looking, everyone liked him. Even the thugs left him alone. A few times I remember we’d be at the pub and Jack would blunder on in — you know, tip someone’s jug over accidentally or bump someone’s cue when they were playing pool. And I’d think Shit, here we go, but whoever it was would just look at Jack and sort of sigh and say, Doesn’t matter, mate, don’t worry about it. Half the time they wouldn’t even let him pay for another jug. Honestly. I don’t know how he got away with it. But he did.

 
You should have seen Jack with sick animals. It was a thing to watch. He was just so gentle — cared for sick creatures like he was a mother with a baby. I saw it immediately, that first time I took Lucy in. She was whining and snarling, and I lifted her up onto the vet’s table and Jack just quietly touched her, felt around her body, and talked to her in this low voice he uses when he’s trying to calm something down. Old Lucy just lay there, stopped growling, almost like he’d hypnotised her. She let him prod and poke and stick a thermometer up her arse and everything, not a whimper.

  It ended up to be nothing serious — I think she’d eaten something dodgy and Jack just gave her some medicine to cancel out whatever was disagreeing with her. He didn’t have to call in the proper vet. She was as right as rain the next day, and as a matter of fact she lived to a ripe old age.

  But it was something to see, how he handled her that first time. It was hot, actually — I mean really sexy to see the power he had in his hands when he was with sick animals. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it was almost like he was a lover, a strong, powerful lover, and the animals gave themselves over to him completely, knowing that he would work magic.

  I’d see it over and over again, as I spent more time with him. Didn’t seem to matter what the animal was. Dogs, cats, horses, the lot. They’d calm right down. I used to think that he had some sort of connection with them, some extra sense that most humans don’t have.

  So, yeah. A hell of a lot of animals ended up in our front paddocks, recovering from illnesses of some kind or another. I’d be cycling or jogging home from doing the delivery and hello, there’d be another one there.

  Jesus, you should have seen some of them. Goats with those funny bucket things around their heads to stop them getting at their wounds. Horses and ponies with bandaged legs. Dogs all shaven and stitched in the big open-run kennels Jack had bought. I’d be laughing away, shouting out Welcome to these animals. They’d stay there a few days, then Charlie Boyd (that’s the vet) would arrive out with the truck and the horse float and pick them up and take them away.