Etiquette for a Dinner Party (3 page)

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.

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.

I wondered, in those early days, why Jack had never bothered to finish vet school. Once, just after he had calmed and treated some poor animal, I asked him.

He just said it wasn't for him, the whole university thing. You wouldn't believe what it was like, he said, unless you'd been there yourself. He said he couldn't handle the pressure of exams, everyone competing. And he was quite happy as a vet's assistant, even if he couldn't do everything.

I knew one thing for sure — Charlie Boyd was rapt to get him. Charlie was forever whinging how he couldn't get a vet to come and work in Tokoroa. He reckoned the vet school graduates got too much of a taste for the city life while they were at university, then they'd go soft and want to stay in town. Treating small animals, Charlie used to say: rats and hamsters and gerbils and other fucking rodents. When Jack applied for the job, Charlie was grateful. More than happy to do the big stuff on his own, let Jack do what he could manage. Charlie told me this himself. .

Velocity turned up on Jack's birthday.

It was about five in the evening; there was a northerly breeze blowing the stink from the mill away from the town. It was cold, but a big red sun was going down over the back of the pine forest. That's a sight worth staying outside for, no matter how cold it is.

Jack was sitting on our back steps, picking mud off his boots with a stick. I'd brought us out birthday beers and settled down on the steps with him.

Roly Smythe came up the driveway in his new red Rodeo truck. Roly is Jack's mate. He's farmed all his life next door. We've never got on, me and Roly. He's one of those guys who hates women because they steal a man's friends. Consequently, Roly is a bachelor and a lonely soul.

He slowed to a stop and the driver's window went down. 'Happy birthday, mate. Gotcha something,' he said to Jack.

'New truck. Thanks, Roly.' Jack raised his bottle. 'Come and have a beer.'

'Na, mate. Something else.' Roly jumped out of the truck and walked around to the back. He lifted a cane hamper, just a bit smaller than a washing basket, off the deck and carried it over to where we were sitting. He put it on the ground at Jack's feet.

'What's this?' said Jack.

'Open it, see for yourself.'

Jack lifted the latch and opened the lid. Sitting inside was a grey bird, slightly smaller than a seagull. It had iridescent green feathers around its neck — the colour you see inside paua shells sometimes. The wings had a frill of black feathers near the edges.

'What's the problem — is it injured?' Jack leaned forward and gently lifted the bird out of the box. He lifted one wing, then the other, checking them over for damage.

'Nup. It's a pigeon,' said Roly, grinning away. 'A racing pigeon. Thought you might enter it in the competitions, have a bit of fun with it.'

'Christ almighty. Where'd you get it?' The bird sat calmly in Jack's hands, black eye watching him.

'At the saleyards today. Old fella had it, said it was a great racing bird. Said his wife had got sick of the whole scene and he had to give the game up. He was giving her away, so I grabbed her for you.'

Roly smiled at me. Wanker.

'Cheers, mate. What the hell do you do with them?' Jack passed the bird to me. It crapped into my lap.

'Buggered if I know.' Roly went into the house, then came out with a beer in his hand. 'It's a girl, and her name's Velocity, the old guy said. He named her after the fastest pigeon to deliver mail between Auckland and Great Barrier Island, back whenever.'

'Shit, is that right?' Jack was impressed. He always liked to hear about animals' achievements.

'Yep. First ever pigeon airmail service in the world, apparently.'

'Jeez. Amazing, eh?' Jack stroked the pigeon's head again.

'Yeah, sure is.' Roly took a swig from the bottle, then clunked it against Jack's. 'Happy birthday,' he said.

Next morning Jack went off to the library for books on racing pigeons. He came back with a few, and a mountain of building materials on the back of his ute.

'The thing is, Sandy, these racing pigeons live in lofts.' He dropped the pile of books on the kitchen table and flicked open the top one. 'See, look at this. This is what I need to build.'

On one page there was a photo of a little house on stilts. It had chicken wire across the front, and inside were various pieces of miniature furniture — they looked like tiny chests of drawers — which turned out to be feeding and water equipment. On the opposite page were drawings showing how to construct this loft.

Jack settled into the task, which ended up taking most of the weekend. I went out and gave him a hand, passing nails and reading out measurements. I was sort of hoping we would get it all done on the Saturday, but it was obvious by about five o'clock that it would be a two-day job.

We ended up finishing late Sunday afternoon. We put water in the little container, and Jack mixed some concoction of feed for the bird. Peas, maize, oats, rice, barley; apparently you had to have the ratio just right to keep the bird healthy.

As he tipped this mixture into the feed container I lifted Velocity out of her hamper. 'There you go, girl,' I said. 'Welcome to your loft accommodation.' She tilted that head of hers to one side and, like lightning, nipped me on the wrist.