Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (24 page)

‘Did you not think that it might have been worth letting me know they’ve been trying to have a baby for the last
four years
?’ I meant to speak with icy calm, but the calm slipped partway through and I finished on an indignant squeak.

His left eyebrow shot up, and for a moment he looked scarily like his brother. ‘To be honest, it didn’t occur to me that you’d feel you had to tell one of my friends you were pregnant, when you barely even know the woman.’

One of my friends.
None of our friends were mutual ones. ‘I
wouldn’t
have, if you’d bothered to tell her yourself! She asked me about Great Barrier, and said she knew a great cure for seasickness, and please would we come. What was I
supposed
to say?’

‘Look, it’s done now,’ he said. ‘Just forget about it.’

‘Why
didn’t
you tell them?’ I snapped. ‘Seeing as you’re so unconcerned about people’s opinions?’

‘Because they found out on Wednesday that their latest round of IVF had failed,’ said Mark acidly. ‘It really didn’t seem like a good time to say, “Oh, by the way, guys, my girlfriend’s pregnant.”’

‘In a way it’s not as bad as last time,’ Saskia had said, expertly fixing her eyeliner in a pocket mirror with the tip of her little finger. ‘We didn’t even get any fertilised eggs to implant, so at least we missed that horrible fortnight of waiting and hoping before your next period.’ And snapping the mirror shut she had smiled a bright, brittle smile that was rather more pitiful than tears would have been.

Now I looked down at my hands. ‘You’re right. It was a really bad time, and I feel completely shit about it.’

He sighed. ‘I should have told you.’

‘Mark,’ I said heavily.

‘What?’

‘Do you want to just call this whole thing off?’ It was almost a relief to say it; the wild swings from cautious optimism to flat despair were so exhausting.

‘
What?
’

‘Well, it’s not great, is it? I can’t do anything except cry and throw up, and you’ve got the World Cup and everything – you don’t need this as well.’ After all, it didn’t actually hurt that much. No doubt it would soon, but right now I wanted only to lie down somewhere dark and quiet and not to have to think about anything. I turned towards the steps.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘Upstairs, to get my stuff.’

‘Jesus, McNeil! Would you just hang on a minute?’

I stopped and turned slowly back to face him.

‘Please don’t do this,’ he said.

‘If – if we’re going to break up maybe we should just get it over with. It’ll be harder when the b-baby’s born . . .’

He came across the room and put his arms around me. ‘Helen. Stop it.’

It felt very, very nice to be held, and resting my head against his shoulder I closed my eyes. He must care a little bit, at least, or he would have let me go.

‘Can we just . . . see how things go for a while?’ said Mark quietly.

Seeing how things go comes about as naturally to me as pole dancing. I prefer the rush-in-guns-blazing-and-sort-this-thing-out-once-and-for-all approach. But I said, ‘Okay,’ into his shirt, and even managed not to ask how long he thought ‘for a bit’ would be.

22

CHRISTMAS THAT YEAR WAS ON A FRIDAY, AND WORK ON
the Wednesday was manic. Keri was on holiday already, somewhere up a mountain in the Southern Alps. Nick was at, of all things, a veterinary business management seminar in Hamilton, and Zoe went home at lunchtime with a headache. The rest of us spent the day running around in small circles, and at three, just as it looked like things were easing off, a woman brought in a comatose cat with a blocked bladder. It was the best day I’d had for weeks; I was far too busy to think about myself.

At twenty past five I vaccinated the last of a litter of seven puppies and poked the last worm pill down the last small throat. I shut down the computer in the consult room and went slowly out the front to find Thomas writing up tomorrow’s day sheet.

‘You’ve got to go to Peter Drummond’s,’ he said. ‘He’s got a horse that’s just gone through a fence and shredded its leg.’

I forgot all about the benefits of being too busy to think and stared at him in horror. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘You can go home.’

I went not home but to Dad and Em’s.

‘Hi, sweetie,’ Em said, meeting me at the door with a full washing basket on her hip and a slightly flustered expression.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘A bit better,’ I said. I still couldn’t imagine ever wanting a green vegetable or a cup of coffee to pass my lips again, but I hadn’t been sick all day. ‘What are you guys up to?’

‘We’re baking. Let’s go and see what’s happened while I was out at the washing line.’

‘Mum!’ Caitlin shouted down the hall. ‘Bel’s eating all the icing!’

We reached the kitchen in time to see Bel cram a huge spoonful of chocolate icing into her mouth. She eyed us over the spoon, apprehensive but unrepentant.

‘That’s disgusting,’ I said.

‘Now I haven’t got enough left for my muffins,’ said Caitlin. She had wrested the bowl away from her sister but, alas, only a meagre scraping of icing remained. ‘
And
Bel’s teeth will all go rotten.’

‘It will serve her right,’ Em said. ‘She’s a very naughty little girl. Helen, would you be up to making some more?’

As I put my bag down on the big butcher’s block in the middle of the kitchen it beeped at me. Rummaging through it for the phone I found the plastic turtle again, and pulled it out. ‘Guys, is this yours?’

‘Turty!’ Bel cried rapturously. ‘My baby turtle! I’ve missed her so much!’ And clutching the turtle to her chest she peppered it with chocolatey kisses.

‘You don’t even like that turtle,’ said Caitlin. ‘You put it in Helen’s bag ages ago.’

‘I do,’ Bel said. ‘I
love
her.’ Upon which she opened a drawer, dropped the turtle in and shut the drawer again with a slam.

‘That’s a funny way to treat a turtle you love,’ I remarked.

‘She needs a sleep,’ said Bel firmly. ‘Helen, can I play with your phone?’

‘Only after you wash your hands.’ I found the phone in the depths of my handbag, opened it in the hope the message was from Mark, and learnt instead that Keri was wishing everybody a merry Christmas before she lost cell phone coverage for the next few days.

‘Did Laura ring you?’ Em asked.

‘Yes, last night.’ Aunty Laura had called to order bean salad as my contribution to Christmas lunch. Honestly,
bean salad
? You’re not supposed to have to eat stuff like that at Christmas time.

‘I thought we’d do cold ham and salads,’ she had said. ‘Nobody wants all that heavy stodge.’ Which saddened me deeply, because I’ve always felt that the roast potatoes and gravy and bread sauce are major highlights of the whole Christmas experience.

‘What are you taking?’ I asked.

‘Tabouleh,’ said Em.

‘What’s that?’ Caitlin asked.

‘Couscous and parsley and tomatoes and things.’

‘Gross.’

‘Yep,’ I said. ‘Where’s the icing sugar?’

‘It’s labelled
Rice
,’ Em said. ‘We broke the proper container. It’s nice that Mark is coming for Christmas, isn’t it?’

‘I hope so,’ I said, picking up the rice container in one hand and a tin of cocoa in the other.

‘Hope he’s coming, or hope it will be nice?’

‘Both.’

‘Has he said he might not make it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I’m sure he will.’

‘Sweetie,’ said Em gently, ‘he wouldn’t be coming if he didn’t care about you.’

I nodded. ‘Right, how much icing do we need, Caitlin?’

‘Enough for eight more muffins,’ she said.

Em rinsed the dishcloth under the tap and began to scrub chocolate icing off her youngest daughter. ‘Annabel, just how exactly did you manage to get icing on your eyelids?’

‘You’re hurting me!’ protested Bel from the depths of the cloth.

‘Well, it has to come off. Helen, love, try not to worry so much.’

‘I am trying,’ I said tightly, tipping icing sugar into a bowl.

‘Mark seems like such a nice boy,’ she said.

‘Boy? He’s only twelve years younger than you are.’

Em put down the dishcloth and looked critically at Bel’s face. ‘Well, there you go. Perhaps I’ll make a pass at him.’

‘I thought you liked older men,’ I said.

‘I could make an exception for that one. Does he give a decent foot rub?’

‘No idea,’ I said. Mark had never shown the slightest inclination to rub my feet. Should he have? Was it something all good boyfriends did? ‘Why?’

‘Christine Marshall’s husband massages her feet when she’s in the bath.’

‘
Neil Marshall?
’ Neil was loud and beery and, I would have thought, the complete antithesis of the Sensitive New Age Guy.

‘So she says,’ said Em.

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Your father
might
come into the bathroom while I was in the bath,’ she said pensively. ‘But only if I’d died in there several days ago and he’d started to notice a nasty smell.’

‘Cake?’ Mark offered through the open kitchen window.

It was eight pm on Christmas Eve and I was sitting on the top step of my tiny porch, idly watching the leaves of the poplars along the roadside dance and quiver in the evening light. ‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘But could you grab me a cracker while you’re up?’

‘I thought you were feeling better.’

I propped my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands. ‘Only sort of. You know, I’ve been fantasising for about the last fifteen years about how great it would be not to feel hungry, and now I’m not, and it
sucks
.’

He wandered outside and sat on the step beside me, passing me my cracker. ‘I bet it does.’

‘What sucks even more is that I can’t even tell myself that at least I’m getting thinner.’ After my shower that evening I had pulled on my favourite bottom-flattering jeans, only to find that they didn’t quite do up. Presumably this was due to my uterus now being the size of a grapefruit, and home to a lime-sized foetus. (Week Eleven on the Huggies website had a definite citrus theme.)

‘It probably doesn’t make you feel any better,’ Mark said, ‘but this is really good cake.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Nice of you to make it when you can’t eat any yourself.’

‘Consider it compensation for spending Christmas with my extended family,’ I said.

‘If it’s going to be that grim, why
are
we spending Christmas with your family?’

‘I’m not sure. Force of habit, maybe. If it’s too dire we’ll leave.’

Uncle Simon and Aunty Laura lived on the outskirts of town, in a large and pretentious brick house on top of a hill. We got there at half past eleven on Christmas morning and left the ute out on the roadside so as to avoid being parked in.

The driveway was lined with cars, and I had a spasm of that horror you get in dreams where you stand up to give a speech and realise you forgot to put your trousers on. I must have been mad to think of subjecting us both to the scrutiny of the extended family. ‘I could just drop off the bean salad and say I’ve got a call,’ I said.

‘Get a grip, McNeil,’ said Mark, taking the salad bowl as we started up the driveway.