Etiquette for a Dinner Party Read Online Free

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