Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (11 page)

Lance nosed his way through the crowded petrol station forecourt, which was bristling with enormous four-wheel drives en route to the ski fields. ‘Fishing,’ he said sadly. ‘And golf.’

‘Lucky you,’ I said. Lance dislikes fishing, and he hates golf with a deep unswerving hatred. I don’t mind it, myself – I’m not much good at any sport requiring hand-eye coordination, but with golf at least you get a pleasant stroll between whacks at the ball.

‘Are you going to cover the groom in plastic wrap and shaving foam and tie him to a streetlamp?’ I asked.

‘Probably,’ he said gloomily. ‘What are you girls doing?’

‘We’re having cocktails and playing hen-party games and going out dancing.’ I feel about dancing the way Lance feels about golf. Perhaps we could swap: I’d join the stag do and he could be a hen.

‘I could have done without this, this weekend,’ he said.

I handed him a coffee. ‘Yeah. Me too.’

We were silent as we drank our coffee, and it was a good ten minutes later when he asked, ‘How’s work?’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I pulled triplets out of a cow yesterday. How about you?’

‘Not bad. Did my first tibial crest translocation this morning, and I’ve been plating lots of broken legs.’
I’ll see your triplets and
raise you a whole pile of orthopaedic surgeries.
He
always
trumped my work stories.

‘Excellent,’ I said, and there was another lull in the conversation while I gazed out the window at the passing silhouettes of pine trees against the evening sky, and thought bitter thoughts about wasting one of the few weekends in the foreseeable future that didn’t contain a rugby Test match at a hen’s party.

‘Hey, Nell?’

‘Mm?’ My cell phone beeped from my handbag, and I reached down to rummage for it.

‘I’ve, uh, met someone.’

‘A girl someone?’ I enquired.

‘Yeah.’

‘Good for you,’ I said, pulling two lip glosses, a box of tampons and a pocket torch without a battery from my bag before finally locating the phone. ‘What’s she like?’

‘She’s a lawyer.’

‘Most impressive,’ I said as I opened a text message from Mark.

Hows yr day going?

So so. You?
I replied.

‘It’s early days,’ said Lance. ‘But I wanted you to hear about it from me.’

‘Thank you. That’s very considerate,’ I said. ‘I’ve just met someone too.’

‘So you’ve bowed to the inevitable and hooked up with a dairy farmer?’

‘No, actually. A rugby player.’

The phone chirped again.

Not bad. Better if u were here.

‘A rugby player?’ he repeated.

‘Um, yes, Mark Tipene,’ I said, my toes curling unhappily because it sounded far too much like showing off.

Wish I was
, I wrote.

I needn’t have worried about the bragging, because Lance didn’t believe me. ‘Right,’ he said in the weary, patient voice that was just as infuriating after a gap of eight months as it had been when I encountered it every day.

‘You can check with Em if you like,’ I said. ‘She’s met him. She’s very concerned I’m not glamorous enough – she wants me to get acrylic nails and make an appointment with a personal shopper.’

‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly. But please don’t say anything. It’s at a fairly embryonic stage.’

‘Define “fairly embryonic”,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ I said vaguely, ‘we’ve been out for a drink, he’s come for tea, he helped me with a horrible rotten calving a few weeks ago . . .’

Lance digested this for a bit, decided I might in fact be telling the truth and said, ‘Be careful, won’t you, Nell? I wouldn’t want to see you hurt.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’d rather not see me hurt either.’

‘I don’t think those guys are known for their faithfulness.’

‘And you’re basing that on all the All Blacks you know?’ I asked, ever so slightly crisp.

‘No need to jump down my throat. They’re famous, they’ve got big disposable incomes, and everywhere they go there are hundreds of silly little tarts lining up to sleep with them. Just – be careful, that’s all.’

‘I will take your advice on board,’ I said solemnly.

Lance and I used to amuse ourselves by collecting phrases that mean the opposite of what they say. ‘I’ll certainly take that on board’ actually means ‘I’ve already made up my mind and nothing you can say will change it.’ As does: ‘I hear what you’re saying.’ And then there’s: ‘We really must catch up sometime,’ which can be translated as, ‘I will never make the slightest effort to get in touch with you.’

‘I don’t know why I’m wasting my breath,’ he said. ‘You’ve never listened to anything I’ve said in your life.’

‘I have too!’ I cried, stung.

‘When?’

I groped for an example and, luckily, found one. ‘I’ve never put my feet on the dashboard since you told me the airbag would ram my knees through my brain if I was in a crash.’

‘Huh,’ said Lance, sounding pleased. ‘Well, there you go.’

10

‘
CUTE PUPPY
,’
ALISON SAID, PUTTING HER HEAD AROUND
the door of the treatment room at ten past twelve on Tuesday afternoon.

‘It is now,’ I said darkly. ‘It was less cute when it was awake.’ Also considerably louder, and quite determined to draw blood.

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Broken ulna. The X-ray’s on the bench.’

Alison held the X-ray up to the light and squinted at it in a professional manner. ‘Is that
your
hand?’

‘Zoe’s gone home sick,’ I said defensively. ‘It’s hard taking X-rays by yourself.’ Making cameo appearances in your patients’ radiographs is not exactly consistent with best practice. ‘I’m sorry about our walk; you might as well go without me.’

Alison made a face. ‘It’s going to rain. I’ll stay and help you if you like.’

‘Thank you, you’re a true friend,’ I said, sticking a long strip of elastoplast down one side of the puppy’s foot. ‘Grab the end?’

Alison stuck the end of the tape obediently to her finger. ‘How was the hen’s weekend?’ she asked.

‘It was good. Nice to catch up with everyone.’ I applied a second tape stirrup to the other side of the foot and started to wind a cotton bandage up the puppy’s leg. ‘Although it was a bit of a shame that Mary-Anne threw up over the till at the restaurant.’ On reflection, plying with cocktails a girl who gets giggly on a glass of weak shandy may have been a mistake.

‘Classy,’ Alison remarked.

‘What did you get up to?’ I asked.

‘Not a whole lot. I saw your cousin at the pub.’

‘Which one?’

‘Sam,’ she said, transferring both ends of elastoplast to the same hand and holding the end of my bandage down with the other. ‘Oh, and Lydia Naylor and Tracey Reynolds had a fight.’

‘What about?’ I asked.

‘Apparently Tracey found a whole lot of dodgy text messages on her boyfriend’s phone. So she tried to pull Lydia’s hair out by the roots.’

‘How exciting,’ I said, starting on a layer of cast padding.

‘Never a dull moment,’ Alison agreed. ‘I must say it makes a pleasant change to have the patient asleep when you’re putting on the cast. I had a little boy try to bite me last week.’

‘That’s why I prefer animals. If a dog does that you can jab it with a pole syringe full of ketamine through the bars of the cage. Have you got a finger spare to hold down another layer of bandage?’

‘Just as long as you don’t incorporate my hand into your cast,’ she said, trapping the end of the padding layer under her left little finger.

‘I’ll try not to.’

‘Thank you.’

I opened a packet of Scotchcast and dropped it into a jug of water. It’s such cool stuff – water activates the resin and it heats up and hardens in mere minutes. In fact, it usually hardens about thirty seconds before you really want it to, just to keep you on your toes.

‘So,’ Alison asked casually, ‘any more visits from random All Blacks?’

‘Not one,’ I said, squeezing out the roll of Scotchcast and beginning to wind it up the puppy’s leg. ‘But they’re all in Wellington for the week, so Broadview’s a bit out of the way.’

‘What are they doing in Wellington?’

‘Training, visiting schools, kissing babies, making old ladies cups of tea – that kind of thing. Just bend that leg a tiny bit at the elbow? Cheers.’

‘When’s he getting back?’

‘Friday. D’you reckon I’ve got enough padding around the top there?’

‘Heaps,’ she said. ‘Stop trying to change the subject. Are you going to see him this weekend?’

I nodded. ‘I’m going up to Auckland on Friday night.’

‘Wow. You really
are
going to be a Wag.’

‘Please don’t,’ I said. ‘You might jinx it.’

Thomas opened the door of the treatment room. ‘Are you nearly done?’ he asked me. ‘Nick’s been held up at Hollis’s, so you’ll have to go and see the sick cow at Ian Weber’s.’

‘Ian doesn’t like me,’ I protested.

‘He doesn’t like anyone. What makes you think
you’re
special?’ said Thomas, withdrawing and shutting the door behind him.

I sighed. ‘It’s so depressing going to Weber’s. He never believes a word I say.’

‘If Mark Tipene liked me I wouldn’t give a toss about whether or not Ian Weber did,’ said Alison, which I thought was an excellent point.

I got back to work at ten to five on Friday afternoon, having just spent an hour and a half making a hole in the side of a cow, draining twenty litres of nasty brown fluid from her caecum and sewing her up again. I climbed out of the ute feeling extremely pleased with myself, went in through the back door to wash my surgery kit and ran smack into Richard.

‘Where the fuck did you put the blood transfusion bags?’ he demanded.

This happy welcome removed just a bit of the gloss from my afternoon. ‘In the box with
Blood Transfusion Bags
written on the side, on the top shelf in the drug cupboard,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’

‘Dog with rat-bait poisoning. Nick’s supposed to be on call, and he’s way the hell up the valley doing a calving.’

‘Have we got a dog to use as a donor?’ I asked.

‘That thing of Keri’s.’

‘Okay,’ I said, crossing the treatment room to open the small-animal drug cupboard and standing up on tiptoe to swat down the box. ‘Whose dog is it?’

‘Harvey’s. Some fancy bloody heading dog.’

‘Oh no. Not Nancy?’

‘I don’t fucking know,’ snapped Richard.

‘I’m not on call either!’ I snapped back.

It was six o’clock by the time we’d taken blood from Keri’s labrador and run it into Don Harvey’s favourite, dog-trial-champion heading bitch. And six thirty once I had written out her vitamin K dosing instructions for Nick, whose small-animal medicine is fairly rusty. And five past seven, with my good mood well and truly gone, by the time I got home, showered, and threw a random assortment of clothes into a bag. Tearing back up the hall I located my cell phone in the pocket of the dirty overalls I had just flung into the washing machine and rang Mark.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi. I’m so sorry – I’m running really late. I got stuck at work.’

I held the phone between chin and shoulder and tipped a great mound of cat biscuits into Murray’s dish. ‘I’m just leaving now.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That’s a bugger.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said unhappily.

‘I just meant it’s a bugger for you to have a long day and then a two-hour drive. Would you like me to come down instead?’

‘No, I’m all organised. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.’

I had no trouble at all finding my way to Mark’s house in Mount Eden, which was right at the end of a cul-de-sac. Actually, my navigation skills would have been a considerable surprise to my boss, who firmly believes I have no sense of direction, and that when I got lost in my first weeks back in Broadview it had nothing to do with him sending me to farms via trees that had fallen down ten years ago and streams invisible from the road.

I parked my elderly green Corona on the street, pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt against the drizzle and ran down a long and poorly lit driveway with a high brick wall on one side and an ornate wrought-iron fence on the other. Mark’s place was the first in a row of semi-detached townhouses, each front door approached by two shallow tiled steps and flanked by a pair of cypresses in big terracotta pots. It all looked terribly expensive and Tuscan. I thought of my weatherboard farm cottage with its peeling paint and ill-fitting windows and briefly considered turning around and running away.