Hamish and Kate Read online

  Hamish and Kate

  Mark Macpherson

  Published: 2011

  Tag(s): "At the end of the world" romance literary

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Prologue

  Her name is a beautifully proportioned stream of syllables, it is perfect. I don’t remember ever speaking her full name out loud and once I was in love with her, I held the sequence of sounds that is her name in too much reverence to utter them. I simply called her Kate.

  Part 2

  Chapter 1

  Euan arrived breathless before the front door of his friend’s house. Liam’s wife opened the door in response to frantic knocking.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. Her hand remained on the door handle as she blocked the entrance. ‘You’ve taken your time.’ She moved aside to allow Euan into the hallway. She shut the door slowly and turned to face the anxious young man.

  ‘Have they been here long?’ he asked.

  She watched him and then slowly announced, ‘They haven’t arrived yet.’

  She smiled at the shudder of relief that passed though Euan’s body. She brushed her dead-straight dark hair away from her thin face and then pointed Euan into the house with a little dance of her fingers as if sweeping him before her. She followed him into the lounge. Euan fussed as he tried to decide where to sit. His choice would determine where he was when he greeted Clare for the first time. Liam’s wife watched his indecision like she was an older sister, benevolent but who would also enjoy the sport of his embarrassment.

  Euan was a plain looking New Zealander. He was not ugly but he was a young man who could be called handsome on the rare occasions he dressed well and a buoyant mood hijacked his features. He had asked his friend Liam to arrange a dinner so that he could meet Clare, a long haired blonde from upstate New York, studying in New Zealand on a scholarship.

  Euan had delayed arriving too early at Liam’s house by distracting himself with busy but meaningless work. He had been too successful and had forgotten about the dinner until he was late. As Euan anxiously stood in the lounge room, his whole body fidgeting, his worry about being late was replaced by the concern of embarrassment before Clare and the other invited guests.

  ‘You haven’t met this girl yet, have you?’ Liam’s wife asked.

  ‘No.’ Euan did not look at her, his eyes flicked from an armchair to a couch to the hard backed chair next to a writing table. Two of the options would declare that he was waiting expectantly, the other that he had been surprised by the guests and would, reluctantly, accept the invitation to stay.

  ‘Liam said she’s an exchange student, only here for a year or two,’ she said. ‘I guess a long term relationship is not uppermost in your mind?’ She smiled sarcastically.

  Euan gave up deciding on a place to sit and his body slumped with disappointment at his indecisiveness. He looked at Liam’s wife.

  ‘I hope there aren’t expectations about all this,’ he said. Euan ignored the insinuation of only a sexual interest in Clare.

  ‘You don’t want an audience? It’s the price you pay if you don’t want just the two of you,’ she said.

  ‘As long as you and Liam don’t act like an audience,’ Euan said. ‘And expect a good performance.’ His nervousness made him combative.

  Liam’s wife watched him shuffle nervously in the middle of the room.

  ‘Just be normal, that’s all,’ she said and smiled. Euan heard compassion in her advice. ‘I’ll go and tell Liam you’re here.’ She left.

  Liam and his wife’s rented house was cramped and dingy. Their furniture was made of dark wood with stern patterned, old fashioned coverings. Euan was reminded of oppressive, forced, childhood visits to his grandmother’s home. Liam’s windows were covered in heavy curtains, like the stifling ones at his grandmother’s, that could close out a mid-summer day, turning beach weather into midnight. Euan stood in the centre of the room and waited as waves of anxiety rippled through his body. When the doorbell sounded Liam put his head in through the opened door.

  ‘Time to be impressive. You ready?’ Liam asked. Euan’s face creased. Liam laughed as he left.

  Euan thought of possible opening gambits. He decided they were all inadequate and by elimination he was left with a standing, silent and stationary strategy. At least, he thought, he would not destroy the evening in the first minute. He frowned at his feet and paced half a step in one direction and then the other.

  People spend their lives dreaming and planning their great moments but prefer as the time draws close to defer until their plans are better prepared. Euan regretted asking Liam to organise a dinner to meet Clare as he heard voices in the hallway. He knew, with no doubt, that he would look stupid.

  Three guests entered the room. They were preceded by Liam like they were prospective purchasers led by a real estate agent. Euan was the embarrassed owner who had not had time to flee. He lifted his face as the group entered the room and was genuinely startled by their presence as if he never really expected that moment to arrive.

  ‘Here he is,’ Liam flourished. ‘The waiting physicist.’ Liam laughed. He enjoyed the sport of Euan’s discomfort.

  Euan was introduced to the guests. The other two were a couple. Euan had already met Hamish, a big-boned, large-nosed, red-haired post-graduate geology student and he had seen Kate on campus but she had not noticed Euan. Clare’s greeting was initially distracted. She had not been warned that there would be a potential partner for her and she was annoyed with Hamish and Kate, but she immediately absolved Euan of blame when she registered his shock. She thought he was as surprised as she was.

  Euan’s first, close-up impression of Clare was physical, overwhelming and involuntary. She had pinned her long hair back, on one side only, with a silver and aqua-blue clip. It was subtle and beautiful. With one visual movement her blue eyes and blond hair were joined. She smiled at Euan with genuine joy as if they shared a common difficulty.

  Euan thought vagina.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Yes, as I said, I have a scholarship to do a Masters but then I have to go back home again,’ Clare said to Euan.

  Euan had been flustered by his unexpected vision and had not listened as Clare had been introduced. He asked a question to which Clare had already provided the answer. Liam touched Euan on the back as if in commiseration at his failure with Clare at the outset of the evening. However, Euan’s distraction matched Clare’s, for different reasons, and his initial nervousness endeared him to her.

  ‘Yes,’ Clare added. ‘Going home will be sad, because I’ve made good friends already but, I miss my family. Still, that’s not for awhile. Not until I pass, that is. Maybe the end of next year.’

  ‘She’ll pass,’ Hamish interrupted. He eyed Euan and Liam as if to challenge them to disagree. ‘I’ll make sure of that. She’s got a great subject for her thesis and her supervisor doesn’t muck around. She’ll be finished before she knows it.’ He sounded assertive and confident in Clare’s defence.

  Clare was, also, studying geology and Hamish thought she needed his protection against slack academic supervisors and predatory New Zealand males. Hamish wondered if Euan was one of those males and had arranged the evening to capture Clare but Euan’s obvious surprise decided Hamish against that.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Clare said with diffidence.

  Clare half-smiled at Hamish’s quick defence. She looked down at Euan’s feet to hide her embarrassment and her annoyance with Hamish. She had recently become Kate’s friend, through knowing Hamish in the geology department, but was unable, as yet, to ask her to stem Hamish’s over-protectiveness.

  Clare watched Euan’s feet shuffle nervously, as if they were trying to dodge her gaze. She smiled as if his feet were an
entertainment. She decided that she liked him.

  ‘Why don’t you all sit down,’ Liam’s wife said when she came into the room and had been introduced. The group had not moved from the middle of the lounge room. ‘Liam will get you something to drink and I’ll go back and check on dinner.’

  ‘Do you need help?’ Clare asked.

  ‘No, but thanks for asking,’ Liam’s wife said and looked pointedly at Euan as if she had expected the offer of assistance to come from him.

  Euan was quick to sit on the wooden chair next to the writing table, he did not want to sit next to Clare, not yet. He preferred to keep a safe distance. His vision had unsettled him. Liam gossiped with Hamish about the University, and the two women and Euan listened until Liam’s wife re-entered the lounge room. Her face scowled when she saw that Liam had done nothing about drinks.

  ‘All right then,’ she sighed as she accepted domestic responsibility for the evening. ‘We can just start dinner if you like,’ she said with resignation.

  Clare and Euan sat opposite each other at the dining table. Clare became comfortable with Euan the longer she talked and Euan became comfortable with Clare the longer he listened. He had dismissed his sexual image and was eager to hear her stories of American family and college life. He thought she was nice but he quickly decided that she was no Beatrice. That settled him and lightened his mood. He was young enough that his goal remained a relationship with the perfect, idealised woman. However, meeting that woman would be too daunting outside dreams. He thought of Clare’s insignificant faults and that put him at ease.

  That April day had been warm and it usually takes one last cold-front of Antarctic air, usually in April, to extinguish the memory of summer. During the meal the windows rattled as the wind came out of nowhere. Branches brushed against the outside of the house. It started raining heavily. The last vestige of summer was shrugged off and the path to winter begun. The last warm day was over and the days of cold winds, bare branches and snow on the mountains had arrived.

  The conversation was overrun by the sound of bad weather. Euan smiled, revelling in being sheltered and secure inside the dining room like he was surviving an outside hostility.

  ‘That must be the change,’ Liam’s wife said.

  ‘Where do you go skiing?’ Clare asked Euan.

  He told her he had never been.

  Clare was surprised, she wondered how someone so close to such a treasure, as the New Zealand ski-fields, had reached adulthood without skiing. She construed Euan’s disinclination as a sign of seriousness, which she positively added to his diffidence. She decided that she had a new goal, to change Euan into the man she wanted. He was close, she thought, although she knew little about him. What was required was a little loosening up and some exposure to activities she assumed he would enjoy.

  ‘The University has its own lodge, right on the mountain,’ Clare said. ‘Kate has told me how good it is. I can’t wait until there’s snow. The three of us have booked every Wednesday and Thursday from the last week in May.’ She paused as an actor does. ‘Why don’t you come with us? When there’s enough snow.’

  Euan did not know where her request came from. He assumed she wasn’t asking for immediate sex, that a larger group of people would be involved and that she was simply being friendly. However, he thought, she had asked and he could not for the life of him see how that was not positive.

  Euan, for the first time, cut into the chicken dish Liam’s wife had prepared as Clare made her surprising request. The meal was cooked in a ginger sauce and Euan thought, fleetingly, of the ginger plants that grew outside his rented home. He lived in a one-room apartment that was underneath a two-storey family home. Through floor to ceiling windows he overlooked an overgrown, private backyard garden. The family, who lived overhead, never frequented the garden. He assumed they were afraid of embarrassment by the bubble-like view of his life, worried about discovering him masturbating or with a woman or, prosaically, that they did not wish to intrude on his privacy. The family’s existence was unimportant to Euan and in the evenings, when they walked overhead, there was a drumbeat of footsteps that signalled normal lives Euan ignored.

  The plan of his one-roomed apartment, minus a separate bathroom, was rectangular with the windows on the long side. Against the wall, opposite the floor to ceiling windows, was a couch that pulled out to become a bed. In the early mornings, when he slept, he often had the rising sun in his eyes. It probed inside his room to prod him awake, to interrupt when his dreams were driven by his almost conscious mind. Those dreams were, mostly, of women and he was always disturbed before any particular woman’s face was clearly defined. The woman, or women since he did not know if his dreams were of the same one, was slightly blurred but he knew she was perfect, except for one small, inconsequential blemish that would prove her humanness. The searchlight of the rising sun washed his dreams in red, fading the form of the unknown woman as the light filtered through his eyelids.

  In dreams he would never admit to, he would stand before that almost-perfect woman and shield her from the arrows of attackers. He would die a noble and painless death but, after his death, he would accept her gratitude for his ultimate sacrifice. He would steer the dream and her gratitude to include sexual favours. The consummation of gratitude that would force a resurrection would be interrupted by the morning sun. Euan would roll over and try to continue the story telling but the conscious act of rolling over would wake him enough for life outside his dreams to intrude, like water fills a sinking ship.

  Euan cut off a bite-sized piece of the chicken and saw some of the colour of the morning sun through his eyelids. The meat as opaque white on the outside but pale and uncooked on the inside. He knew people ate raw fish and that some liked their beef rare but Euan was unsure if uncooked chicken was safe to eat. It oozed. The heat from the oven had barely reached the middle. What to do? His thoughts raced in a frenzy. If he was alone with Liam and his wife the chicken would have gone back to the kitchen. No questions asked. However, he was with three people he didn’t know. Euan was unsure if Liam’s wife would be demonstrably upset if her dinner was criticised having received no help. He had arrived late and had been ungrateful. She had prepared a meal to help him meet Clare. The uncooked chicken would be partly, maybe mostly, Euan’s fault. Should he eat the chicken anyway? He could hide the rawness by covering it in sauce. What if he ate the chicken and then someone else’s chicken was also uncooked? Would he look foolish? He could plead that he did not notice. However it was obvious that his chicken was uncooked if undisguised. Euan over-reacted. He raced forward through an imagined lifetime of loss caused by a single inappropriate response. What if Clare was the dream girl whose features he could never see clearly? Hindsight is what he wanted. Too many lifelines depended on his single moment of decision. He was not confident enough to bluff his way through an embarrassment. He was certain that Clare would withdraw her offer to take him skiing. He thought a mistake would be fatal. His clumsiness over an under-cooked chicken would end everything with Clare before it started. The chicken piece stared at him with its unblinking, pale, seeping eye, goading him to make the wrong decision. It was infused with the ghosts of failure as it tempted him to make a choice.

  Euan genuinely believed he was on the cusp of a major life choice, that once made would lead his life in one of two opposite directions. He did not know that lives are lived out of simple choices that are of little consequence when made, and can only be judged in retrospect. Should he eat the chicken or not? He remembered similar circumstances but each had occurred when he was not responsible for his actions. He was a child, he was with relatives and there was food he did not like or was unaccustomed to eating. His behaviour could be explained by a parent and he was allowed the leniency of childhood. Familial patriotism excuses excesses. However, Euan was supposed to be grown up. Decisions were his own and with that freedom came the possibility of failure. Euan wanted the dinner with Clare to be the beginning of something important bu
t the specifics forgotten.

  He masked his indecision and embarrassment and ate the chicken. He told Clare he would love to try skiing.

  Chapter 3

  Euan did not sleep well that night. He fussed and analysed the outcomes that would lead to embarrassment, if he asked Clare to go out with him. He worried that he had misconstrued her interest and attention and that she was, really, only being friendly in a situation she had no option of quitting. In the early hours of the morning, as he tossed and turned in bed, he decided he could not bluntly invite Clare out and risk the embarrassment of refusal. Euan convinced himself that Clare’s interest was imagined. His own warm feeling of safety and friendship must have been caused by the sound of the heavy rain. Those feelings could not have been reciprocated. He re-played the evening in his mind, sifting information from inconsequential moments. Were his feelings the whole script? He did not know but, as he lay in his bed, he thought they might have been. His realisation did not help him sleep, as he continued to wonder if he should risk embarrassment after all.

  An hour before dawn he decided to do something about his sleeplessness. He resolved, for the sake of his own peace of mind, to call her that day and ask her to join him for something small and unimportant, like a quick coffee in the cafeteria, or to meet at a lunchtime concert. If she refused him, then she was the one who was reading too much into his, friendship-only, request and he would indignantly tell her so. It was then only a simple case of avoiding the area of the University near the Geology department for a few weeks. He could do that. He could avoid the main cafeteria as well. He could go elsewhere for lunch. He could restrict his visits to the main library and use only the Physics library. It would be easy. He let himself sleep, having set up a face saving strategy after an embarrassing defeat.