Short story: Trina and Cat, by Breton Dukes (again)

Newsroom

6 days ago

Trina and Cat met for the first time on Ponsonby Road in the 1990s where they both worked at an Italian restaurant. Trina rolled a hundred pizza bases before each service, then in the cramped kitchen, where the fuckwit chefs threw hot pans at her – they glided in like stingrays – she did the dishes. Cat started as a waitress, then took over from Arnold as bartender. For a brief period, after she fucked Jack, she was the maître d'. Trina slept with Arnold the night of his leaving drinks and four years later, when Cat was living and working in Rotorua as a guide on a zipline canopy tour, she had Arnold and his young family as clients. The youngest of his kids, because of his lack of weight, got stuck on the longest of the seven zip lines and Cat had to rappel out to bring him in. And that night, at an Irish bar, she bumped into Arnold again – this time he was alone – and after two shots of ouzo she drove him down to the lake front, let him snuggle her neck and gave him a handjob.
So, when Cat and Trina met again in the wine line at a concert at Dunedin's Regent Theatre in 2010 – Cat by then was married to Lachlan, Trina to Tim – they exchanged phone numbers, met for coffee at a café in St Clair and both fell apart laughing when they found that along with Dunedin and the restaurant, they also had Arnold and his dick stump between them. Also – incredible! – they were both pregnant, almost down to the week.
It appeared inevitable they would become friends, but on their fourth catch-up – lunch this time, the first meal they'd ever seen each other eat – Cat told Trina Lachlan had been promoted, they were moving to Ōtautahi.
'What about your midwife?' said Trina, 'What about us?'
Trina had never been good at making friends, and without telling Cat or Tim she'd put a lot of hope in the idea that the two of them were going to be mums together.
Cat shrugged sadly. There was nothing she could do. Then she leaned the laminated menu card against the small bowl crowded with sugar and fake sugar sachets. The truth was that she and Lachlan were not moving to Christchurch. Cat, that night, was filling Lachlan's car with as much of his nice stuff as it would fit and driving north. Auckland – what had made him think she could ever live with him in shit-hole Dunedin? No one knew – the closest she came to telling anyone was that lie she told Trina.
Trina, who ten years later was standing in line at the Westmere butcher when there was a knocking at the window behind her. Cat was there when she turned around, smiling, waving, standing with a boy who would have been exactly Steven's age.
Over iced lattes – high summer, the heat was awful – at a nearby café, Trina told Cat all about Steven. How he'd died. Gone into hospital with one thing, developed another, suffered for weeks on end – while everyone told her he'd come right, that he was young and would bounce back – and then died.
'But from the start, I knew, I knew he would die,' went Trina.
And in saying that, her body went way back in the seat, like it was a back flip she was about to do, and then all the way forward, and then covering her mouth, she sobbed, just once. The sound was terrible – loud as an old truck engine braking. Then, sitting back she smiled, looked at Edgar for a moment and then asked him to list the three things he liked most about the school holidays, which was when Cat excused herself and rang AJ – her bed mate and business partner, but not the man she lived with – who basically lived for the opportunity to sweep about the city saving the day, leaving Cat free to spend the day walking arm-in-arm around their old neighbourhoods with Trina, finishing up with a quick Chardonnay at a little restaurant in Grey Lynn which had both octopus and goat on the menu, neither of which Trina had ever tried before, and so it was agreed – my shout! said Cat – they'd meet back at the same place the next night at 7pm.
But, though Trina waited for more than forty-five minutes, Cat didn't show up. They hadn't swapped phone numbers either, so Trina left the restaurant, walking back to her motel unfed and utterly alone, as the sun continued its terrible role as ball of fire in the cloudless sky.
Six years later Cat got an email from Arnold. He'd left his wife after twenty-six years and was living alone in a renovated church in Eketahuna. He'd been thinking a lot about Cat, about how they'd 'connected' that night in Rotorua, also had she seen the news? Did she know about Trina, about the accident? Anyway, poor Trina, but if Cat was ever passing through the Wairarapa she should drop in. They could really finish what they'd started this time.
Cat, by then, had serious money. So having contacted her lawyer, and telling him to shut Arnold down in the most strident terms, she went online. Trina, it turned out, with nowhere else to go, was being cared for in a rest home in Mosgiel.
Later that same week, a late-model Volvo parked at the Sunny Ridge Rest home and a team of three got out, one of whom was the lawyer. A bearded man who loved weight training – his favourite exercise the now out of favour Military Press – who Cat had wrapped so thoroughly around her little finger, he actually pissed with fear/excitement when her name came up on his phone, who swiftly arranged for Trina's immediate transfer to Waiheke Island, where Cat kept a house that looked across Hauraki Gulf, where every morning for the rest of her life, Trina used a wooden pointer placed between her lips to choose the type of fruit she'd have juiced for her, where, every six months or so, Cat would appear, entering the room like a burglar, keenly aware of not waking her friend. But if Trina was awake, Cat would stay, sat there close, sharing key information about the different lives she'd led.
A note from ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias: I am not in the habit of republishing short stories and in fact this is the only time. 'Trina and Cat' appeared last Saturday. Not enough people read it. To condense a lifelong friendship between two women, set in Dunedin, Auckland, Rotorua, Eketauna, Mosgiel and Waiheke Island, in 1047 words without it reading like some kind of lame flash-fiction exercise but reading more like an epic drama of ordinary people with children and jobs and health problems, is a freakish achievement, something wonderful. Owen Marshall achieved something similar in his 2024 short story of the lifetimes of two South Island men who met each other five times, told in 1609 words, 'Broderick and Riley'.