Rose finally leaned forward and lowered her coffee-cup onto the table. She stared at Matt with a dumbfounded expression.
‘I’m so sorry, luv,’ she said. ‘You don’t deserve all the heartache this journey must have caused you.’
‘Thanks Rose, still here I am back at home, safe and sound. My favourite landlady and my loyal friend.’ Matt stroked Meridian’s lovely little head and thought perhaps he should go away more often. Meridian practically never settled down on his knees, but right now, there was no moving him from his perch, dribbling and purring in Matt’s lap.
‘And you got to meet your father and half-sister, so even though you’ve lost some, you’ve won some too, right?’
‘Sure.’ Matt smiled. Typical of Rose to see the best in every situation. ‘I met a girl too.’
‘Aimee?’
‘How’d you know?’
‘Every time you mentioned her, your face lit up.’
Matt was embarrassed to be so transparent. He had only mentioned Aimee as a companion on his search. The romance had been left out. So had the betrayal. Now he explained the whole situation to Rose.
‘Sounds to me like love, Matt. You shouldn’t let go of a chance for love like that. Give it some thought.’
‘I know you’re right, Rose. As soon as I get through this journal and sort out a few changes at work, I’ll get in touch with her.’
‘Then get to work,’ Rose said, standing up to take the empty cups to the sink, where she rinsed them before placing them carefully in the dishwasher.
Matt sighed. ‘Just as soon as I get this lump off my knee, I want to put the stuff on the memory stick through some translation software. See what exactly it is I’ve found here.’
‘I thought that automatic translations were supposed to be shoddy and hopeless.’ Rose teased Matt, reminding him of the French websites that were machine-translated into English, which he always laughed at. They had often chuckled over some of the lost meanings, or odd new ones, together.
‘Oh, they are. But it’ll take a few days for the full human translation to be completed. A trusted colleague from the European languages department is already on it. I just want to get a bit of a preview, as it were. I’m sure I can at least make sense out of what the software will offer me.’
‘Back in a sec.’
Rose took off out of the room. Matt had no idea where she had gone. Less than a minute later she reappeared and proudly put a shiny new laptop in front of Matt on the table.
‘I took your laptop to the repair guy. He said it was beyond help, so I thought I’d treat you to a new one. Everything’s been copied over.’
Matt looked up at Rose full of love. This woman managed to single-handedly renew his trust in mankind. She made him feel like gold every time he saw her. He had no idea what he would do without her in his life and hoped they would be friends, family, for years to come.
‘You shouldn’t have, Rose, you can’t afford it!’
‘Rubbish, your rent for the last month paid for that. I figured, if this little muppet won’t let you get to the computer, I’d get the computer to you.’
Matt smiled and lifted the lid of the curvy Asus computer and pressed the power button. He barely heard a thing as it sprang to life and Windows 7 greeted him. Retrieving the memory stick from his satchel, which thankfully was right next to him, he placed it in a USB socket and loaded Google’s translation tool up on his screen. He copied one journal entry at a time into the text box, and marvelled at the English, albeit imperfect, which greeted him at the click of a button.
‘I’m gonna put some dinner on. I figured you would be hungry, so I got us some stewing beef,’ Rose said, as she walked over to the kitchen bench and clanged stuff around.
Matt continued quietly scanning the entries through the first half of the journal. He had already had this part summarised to him by Julia, so there was nothing new or shocking, but it was nevertheless a riveting read. The journal continued in the same manner most of the way through toward the end. The translation wasn’t the best but it was readable. Only once had Matt thought something was seriously wrong with it, when the journal seemed to spring wildly over a section about the North Island. But then Matt remembered the missing pages. Odd, but not critical. Glancing at his watch as he heard Rose say something about dishing up in a few minutes, Matt realised he had been reading the journal for over two hours.
‘I just have a few pages to go,’ Matt said. ‘It’s great stuff. The Spanish definitely discovered New Zealand before we did. They co-existed with the Maori and all.’
Matt copied the last entries across to the Google translator and read through them. He was very close to the end when it happened. The words flew out of the page at him and nearly threw him off his chair. He must have jumped, because Meridian leaped off his knee like he had been shocked with a cattle-prod. The words on the screen rendered Matt utterly speechless.