Charlie and Pearl (7 page)

CHARLIE

“Friends” she said.

“Sure” I told her, “I can do friends”.

I can also be patient.

When it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, as Frank Sinatra
or Dean Martin sang
once.
Or maybe it was Shakespeare?

PEARL

While I waited for him to finish
work
I walked down to the main wharf on the estuary. Kids were fishing with hand lines, buckets beside them filled with
little silver fish.

I remembered doing this with my cousins growing up. Summer afternoons, our
bare
feet dangling off the side, each with a custard square in a white paper bag, a treat from the local bakery paid for by Gran, who would sit on a nearby bench and watch us all carefully. None of us wanted to be the first to cave and eat theirs early, because eating yours first meant you then had to watch jealously while the others lingered over theirs on purpose later on.“Hmm yum” they would tease, licking the
gooey
custard off the inside of the paper. So we would try and time it to eat them all together.

We’d run
proudly
up to
G
ran every time we caught a fish, usually
a
sprat but if we were lucky a yellow eyed mullet or small John Dory. She would clap her hands
gleefully
and declare it the biggest fish she’d ever seen and then we’d go home and she’d
carefully
fillet it, no matter how small, then coat it in flour and fry it in butter and we would
sit outside on the grass and
eat it
with our
fingers
and it would still taste of the sea.
I don’t think to this day I’ve ever tasted anything as delicious.

Lost in the past I didn’t hear Charlie come up behind me
until he was right there,
so once again he gave me a fright and I screamed.

“Man, “I said as I tried to catch my breath again, “that’s becoming a bit of a habit of yours”

He just grinned

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yep, I’m starving”

We walked
across the village green,
back up to town and he steered me towards the
corner
Hotel/Pub. I hadn’t been there for years. I vaguely remembered a dark dingy place, with red stained carpet and a room at the back filled with pokie machines but was pleasantly surprised to find that sometime in the last
five
years it had had a makeover. The walls were a nice antique cream and hung all around were photos of local landmarks and people taken over the last 100 years. I love looking at old photos
,
e
specially of people. It’s the
mystery
that surround them
;
w
ho were they? What were they like? That couple, the man with the severe moustache and centre part and the woman with the bun and the dress buttoned up to her chin
.
Were they in love or was it more of a
n
arrangement? Did
she reach for him at night when she woke in the dark and needed comfort? I could spend hours in antique shops poring over old albums and wondering about the occupants. It saddened me that these were no longer in family possessions
.

When we
into the main dining area
someone called out “Charlie” and he led me over to a table where a
couple, around our age,
and what seemed like a
dozen
children (because they kept running around and around the table and it was hard to keep track of them), were sitting.
I recognised the girl from the Farmers Market, and felt relief that she was taken, and clearly not competition for Charlie’s affections. If she had been it was a competition in which I would have stood no chance. The
girl was gorgeous, long black hair to her waist, beautiful clear chocolate skin, lips like Angelina Jolie. She made me feel washed out beside her and very, very plain.

“s’up” nodded the guy, in that way kiwi guys do, a raise of the eyebrows and lift of the chin.

“
Hey bro
” said Charlie.

“You here for a feed?”

“Maybe, thought we’d start with a drink and see what happens”

“Wanna join us?”

“Um,” Charlie was stuck for words, he obviously wanted to say we were on a date but I’d made it clear this wasn’t a date so he was screwed for how to say it. “Nah,
it’s ok
,” he settled for, “sweet for offering, but, nah.”

“You going to introduce your friend Charlie?” the girl said.

“
Oh yeah, of course, sorry.
Rangi, Cushla, this is Pearl, she’s staying in town for a little while”.

“What a beautiful name” smiled Cushla. She had an open face, friendly. You can tell with some people right away can’t you, whether you’re going to like them or not. Especially girls. Some girls, when you meet them, they give off a vibe, maybe in the way they look you up and down, or smile at you in a way that doesn’t include the eyes and is clearly fake. I always trust my first impression, and my impression of Cushla was that she was a genuinely nice person.
Which cheered me, as i
t would be nice to maybe have a female friend in the area if I was going to stay here all winter
.

“Thanks” I smiled back at her gratefully. Friendliness is underrated it really is. A little smile from someone, a kind word, can change your mood completely.

Charlie and I found our own table. We ordered food; a beef burger and fries for him, a seafood medley for me. I love seafood, well, most seafood. I can’t eat anything with tentacles or eyes, so whitebait fritters and baby octopuses are off the menu. But I love all fish a
nd shellfish. My Gran makes the best
paua fritters,
famous and craved at neighbourhood barbeques.
The thick black meat is
minced up through an old
metal
hand mincer that
she
attach
es
to the bench like a vice. My cousins and I used to
scrap
over whose turn it was to help her, one to push the paua through the top and the other to hold the bowl underneath and pull the mince out the spout as Gran turned the
handle.
Being the
youngest
I seldom won through legit
imate
means, relying instead on
a few tears and a wobbly lip to get my way.

Tonight I’m served a huge platter; mussels, crayfish, salmon bites,
calamari
rings, battered fish, rock oysters, all with a lemon wedge and a handful of token coleslaw on the side
;
a couple of spoonfuls of red cabbage and some grated carrot
, a splash of dressing
.

We’ve never understood why they do that, Charlie and I agree, because no one ever eats it.
I don’t trust that it’s not just recycled from the last diner who didn’t eat it
and left it on their plate
I tell him and he
laughs
and tells me that’s the exact same reason he never eats
it either.

We also agree that generally the Battered fish and chip meal at any restaurant or pub is a rip off, because you pay twenty, thirty bucks for a couple of pieces of battered fish and
a few soggy
chips that if you just walked down the road
to the local fish ‘n’ chip shop
you could pay five for.

I wash
my meal
down with a glass of the house red, and then another, and maybe another couple after that. Charlie drinks beer by the handle.

We laugh, a lot. Turns out we have a similar sense of humour.

He tells more stupid chicken jokes and I tell him some corny vampire ones.

(Where did the vampire open his savings account? At the Blood bank. What does a baby Bat say before going to bed? Turn on the dark
-
I’m afraid of the light
!
Why doesn’t anyone like Count Dracula? He’s a pain in the neck)

He’s into the whole, ‘Twilight’ hype,
I just don’t get it
. I mean, Robert Patti
n
son is
a good looking, I will admit
, but I gave up halfway through the first book when I got sick of reading about every single little thing Bella did in her day – and then she brushed her teeth, and then she put her pyjamas on, and then she brushed her hair, and then she went to the toilet, and then she moisturised her p
retty little pale hands – yawn.

I feel so relaxed in front of him I undo the top button on my jeans after the meal leaves me
physically
groaning I’m so full. He
is
impressed I could eat it all.

I pass on desert though, but then obviously watch longingly while he eats his strawberry sundae so he lets me have a few mouthfuls.
“You look like a begging Labrador” he laughs.

Somewhere after desert one or both of us decide to try one of the shots off the shot menu, delightfully named ‘quick fuck’, a potent mix of Baileys, Kahlua and Midori, which we declare “
hmm!
delicious!” and order another round.

We challenge some locals, a man named Dave (whose name is Joe) and his friend Fatty (who is a little man, smaller than Posh spice on her most bloated day) to a game of pool, and if it wasn’t for the fact they’d been in the pub since knockoff time so were streaks ahead of us in terms of being pissed, they would have wasted us because I kept hitting the white ball off the table and Charlie kept sinking the wrong balls altogether.

All in all a delightful night. Just what the doctor ordered.

Oh, and although I wake up in Charlie’s bed, he’s not in here with me. Like a true gentleman when it became clear that neither of us were capable of driving, he called his mum who came and got us and lent me a nighty and whose toilet I fear I have been violently sick into at least twice.

Ugh
.

CHARLIE

Man
, can she pack it away.

I was impressed that
she ordered the seafood platter in the first place.
I
certainly
didn’t think she’d eat it all. I figured I’d be left to clean it up but no, she ate it all down to the last crumb, licking her finger and wiping it around the rim of the plate
and savouring the crumbs with an ecstatic expression on her face
.