Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (2 page)

‘Hi, Briar,’ I said weakly, turning around. ‘How are you?’

‘Really good. Guess what?’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Dad’s getting Millie in foal to an Arab stallion over in the Hawke’s Bay!’

‘Wow,’ I said.

‘And he says I can school the foal all by myself.’

I had heard all about Briar’s father’s horse-training methods and quite a lot about Briar’s new western saddle when my cell phone buzzed in my jeans pocket. ‘Sorry, Briar, this’ll be a call . . . Hello?’

‘Helen? Fenella Martin’s got a cat needing a caesarean,’ said the after-hours lady, who never wasted time on small talk.

This was not, it seemed, my night. Fenella Martin bred Siamese cats and was the Client from Hell. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll see her at the clinic in five minutes.’ I shut the phone. ‘Sorry, Briar, I’ve got to go.’

Scanning the crowd for Sam or Alison to let them know I was leaving, I saw Mark Tipene still deep in conversation with Uncle Simon. It didn’t seem to be his night either.

Fenella, a particularly unpleasant woman in her fifties with long red straggly hair and long black straggly skirts, was dancing up and down on the doorstep when I reached the clinic. Breeders are often a bit eccentric, but Fenella was as mad as a hatter.

‘It’s Farrah,’ she said (all Fenella’s queens had names starting with F, just like their mummy). ‘It’s her first litter. She had two in my bed about four this morning, but nothing since then.’

In her bed. Lovely.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’ll open up while you get her out of the car.’

‘
You’ll
have to carry the cage,’ said Fenella. ‘My back’s playing up.’

Poor Farrah was only a kitten herself, undergrown and underfed. She lay on her side on the consult room table, panting. ‘Shh, baby,’ Fenella crooned. ‘Mummy’s here. Mummy won’t let anything bad happen to you.’

Seeing as Mummy had left the poor cat in second-stage labour for fourteen hours before bothering to bring her in I was underwhelmed by this statement. I inserted a gloved and lubed fingertip gingerly into the little cat’s vulva and met a nose, jammed tight against the pelvis. ‘I can feel the kitten’s head,’ I said, ‘but it’s huge and her pelvis is pretty narrow. I don’t think it’s going to come out that way.’

‘I
know
that,’ said Fenella. She fished a balled-up tissue out of her cleavage and blew her nose wetly. ‘Get on with it.’

Caesareans are usually quite fun, but this one wasn’t. Fenella insisted on being present right through the surgery and she questioned my every move.

‘Why are you putting her on fluids? Nick never puts my cats on fluids.’

‘Just to make sure her blood pressure doesn’t drop. And if I need to give her anything IV we’ve already got the vein.’

‘Well, I’m not paying extra just because you’re not up to speed.

Nick
doesn’t have to put my cats on fluids.’ The reason Nick didn’t put her cats on fluids was that she paid her account off at about five dollars a month, and he disliked spending money he knew he wasn’t going to get back.

Fenella adjusted her knickers and asked, ‘
Do
you know what you’re doing?’

It would have been nice to reply with, ‘Well, I’ve never done an operation before, but I’ve seen heaps on
Grey’s Anatomy
and I’m really keen to give one a crack,’ but the only time I manage witty repartee is in the privacy of my own bedroom, when I’m imagining how the conversation might have gone if only I was brave. ‘Yes,’ I said gravely, drawing anaesthetic into a syringe. 
‘I’ve done lots of caesareans. My last job was at a small-animal practice in England.’

‘I just adore my animals,’ said Fenella. ‘The cost doesn’t matter.’ The cost never matters to bad debtors, because they’ve got no intention of paying anyway.

There was only one kitten left in the uterus, wedged so tightly into the pelvic inlet it was quite hard to retrieve. I handed it to Fenella, who wrapped it tenderly in a towel and rubbed it. This didn’t help the kitten, which was well and truly dead, but it helped me quite a lot. I managed to suture the uterus and the muscle layer before she looked up again, and thus only had to endure comments like ‘You should be using thicker thread than that’ and ‘Those stitches are too close together’ while I stitched up the skin.

2

‘
OOH LOOK
,’
SAID JOHN SOMERVILLE HAPPILY
. ‘
A WOOD
pigeon. There he goes.’ He turned his head to watch it, slackening his hold on the leg rope, and the steer attached to the other end of the rope kicked me in the face.

It was a good, solid kick, and it sent me sprawling backwards into the mud. There was a sharp stabbing pain in my front teeth and something warm trickled across my cheek – I suspected it was blood, and reached up to touch it. It was.

John looked at me in mild surprise. ‘Are you alright, my dear?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said a trifle shortly, exploring my teeth with the tip of my tongue. They were all still in the right place, and I pushed myself up to sit. ‘I think we’ll sedate him, John.’

He sighed and adjusted his towelling hat. ‘If you must,’ he said.

The steer in the race tried to kick me again as I sidled up to inject him – an impressive, double-barrelled kick. You don’t often meet such hostility in cattle. (Horses, now, are different, and shouldn’t in my opinion be trusted for a second. I was soured early in life by the small and evil Shetland pony my parents borrowed for me from the neighbours, which specialised in pulling children off its back with its teeth.) I gave him a fairly hefty dose of sedative, and eventually he grew sleepy enough to let me tie his leg back up and unwind the wire that was cutting into his fetlock.

‘Could you give him a long-acting antibiotic?’ John asked, tearing his attention very briefly from a cluster of white puffy clouds drifting across the afternoon sky. ‘I might not manage to get him in again.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course. And an anti-inflammatory, and then we’ll just have to keep a bit of an eye on it and hope the blood supply to his foot hasn’t been too badly damaged. I’ll give you a ring in a few days to see how it’s going.’

‘How kind,’ he murmured. ‘How very kind.’ He picked up my drug box without fastening the lid, and syringes, needles and bottles of penicillin showered down around his feet.

‘What happened this time?’ Thomas asked. When you first met Thomas you just got the impression of bad skin and more Adam’s apple than any one person could possibly need, but he manned the front desk of the Broadview Veterinary Centre (Your Partners in Animal Health Since 1967) with military efficiency.

‘Kicked by a steer,’ I said, jumping up to perch on the desk beside him. ‘Pretty cool, eh?’ A blood vessel in my right eye had burst, and the white of the eye was now bright red.

‘You look kind of evil.’

‘Imagine if it was both eyes. People might think I was a vampire.’

‘I read one of those books,’ said Thomas. ‘It’s the coloured bit of the eye that’s red. And aren’t vampires supposed to be incredibly beautiful?’

‘Are you saying I’m not?’

‘It might help if you washed the cow shit off your ear, for a start.’ He pulled the accident book out from under the counter and shoved it towards me.

Mid-July is a fairly quiet time of year in large-animal practice, and at twenty to five that afternoon four of the five vets were in the big office at the back of the building. Nick was busily writing reports – he seemed to spend almost all his waking hours doing paperwork, while making distressingly little headway. Anita had small children and finished work at three, but Keri, Richard and I were eating pick ’n’ mix lollies from the shop across the road and discussing Joe Watkins, the meanest farmer alive.

Little Zoe the vet nurse pushed the door open and scurried in, face bright red with emotion. ‘Helen!’ she said. ‘
Mark Tipene
is asking for you at the front desk! The All Black!’

I got to my feet, and Richard and Keri both followed suit. ‘You can’t
come
!’ I said, appalled.

‘Why not?’ Keri asked. ‘I need to talk to Thomas.’

‘I just want to see Mark Tipene,’ said Richard, who was at least honest. ‘Maybe he’ll autograph my gumboot.’

‘Hang on,’ Keri said, and the woman actually spat on her hanky and rubbed my cheek.

I batted her hand away. ‘Stop that!’

‘You can’t go out there with cow shit on your face,’ she said. ‘Okay. Head up, shoulders back. Off you go.’

Crimson with embarrassment and followed by a giggling entourage I went out into the shop. Mark Tipene was standing at the front counter, looking at a notice advertising kittens free to a good home and giving the impression that he had just strayed in from the set of a James Bond movie. His black eye had faded to a sickly green, streaked with red, but instead of spoiling his looks it made him look tough and a little bit dangerous. We had a picture of Mark Tipene without a shirt pinned up in the lunch room to lift our spirits on bad days (the boys had a corresponding picture of Rihanna wearing only a couple of bits of string), and it was frankly unbelievable to have the man himself wander in off the street.

‘Hi,’ I said, digging my hands into the pockets of my overalls in an attempt to appear relaxed. Somehow I doubt I pulled it off.

‘Hi.’ He smiled at me across the counter. ‘Nice red eye.’

‘Thank you.’

‘What happened?’

‘I got kicked in the face by a steer.’

‘Ouch,’ he said. ‘What are you doing after work?’

‘Um, nothing much, I don’t think,’ I said stupidly.

‘You’re on call,’ said Thomas at my elbow, where he was pretending to work on an internet order to Masterpet but actually listening avidly.

‘There you go,’ I said. ‘I’m on call.’

‘Oh,’ said Mark Tipene. ‘I was wondering if you could come and have a drink.’

‘Yeah, go on,’ said Richard, coming up to the counter beside me. ‘I’ll swap nights with you, so you don’t get interrupted.’ And the rotten lousy sod leered at me, right in front of one of our nation’s sporting heroes. I kicked him in the shin.

‘Ow!’ he said. ‘Sure you don’t want to reconsider, mate?’

Mark smiled and shook his head. ‘What d’you reckon?’ he asked me.

‘Um,’ I said. ‘Okay. Um. Thanks.’ Gracious and articulate acceptance it was not.

Richard clapped me encouragingly on the shoulder. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’

‘Leave her alone,’ said Keri. ‘Go on, Helen, it’s ten to five. I’ll shut down your computer for you.’

‘I – I’ll just go and take off my overalls,’ I muttered, and fled back into the vet room.

‘What on earth is the matter?’ my boss asked, glancing up from his docket book.

‘I’m going out for a drink with
Mark Tipene
,’ I said, feverishly shedding the overalls.

Nick looked profoundly unimpressed by this momentous news. ‘I wouldn’t let it go to my head, if I were you,’ he said. ‘Did you book in Rex’s lepto vaccinations?’

‘Not yet. He wasn’t home when I rang.’

‘Follow it up tomorrow, will you? And you might like to turn your collar out the right way.’

I did, took a couple of deep breaths for good measure and went back out.