Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (29 page)

‘Helen. Hi.’

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Tip’s Helen? Nice to meet you!’

‘You too,’ I said.

She turned back to Alan. ‘Jules was talking about going up to Pakiri on Sunday for a surf,’ she said. ‘Tommo and Becs are up there all week. Would you guys be keen if the weather’s good?’

‘Better check with the boss,’ said Alan. ‘There was talk of sanding window frames or something.’

Tamara laughed. ‘You two are so cute.’

Alan was hailed just then by a small round man in a Danger Mouse T-shirt and turned away, leaving the radiant vision and me alone.

‘He’s such a lovely guy,’ she said.

‘He is,’ I agreed.

‘And Saskia’s great, isn’t she? Although every time she and I go out for a quiet drink we end up dancing on the tables in some dodgy bar in the CBD at two am.’

I smiled, though a small, cold, loser-ish feeling formed in the pit of my stomach. Saskia had never asked me out to dance on tables. And the fact that table-dancing is about the last thing I would ever want to be doing at two am – or at any other time – was no consolation at all.

‘You’re a vet, aren’t you?’ Tamara asked, and when I nodded said, ‘I couldn’t do your job. I’d just turn into a blubbering mess if I had to put an animal down.’

I fought down an impulse to reply with, ‘Oh, I
love
killing things. It’s a real high point of my job,’ and said instead, ‘You teach, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got thirty-one new entrance kids this year. Five of them don’t speak English.’

‘Crikey.’

‘I know,’ she said, laughing. ‘It’s craziness. But so rewarding. I love it. It’s not just a job, it’s a vocation. Do you feel like that too?’

I had spent that morning following Anita up and down the pit of a herringbone cowshed, rectally palpating any cows she couldn’t confirm pregnant with the scanner. And in the afternoon I’d cleaned the post-mortem room freezer and ferried a trailerload of frozen cows’ feet from last year’s lameness training workshop to the clinic’s offal hole. ‘Absolutely,’ I said.

‘Oh, there’s Tip,’ said Tamara, waving.

Mark was easy to spot, being the tallest person in the place by about four inches. He was on the other side of the room talking to a man with a shiny bald head, and he smiled as our eyes met.

‘Isn’t his shoulder just the
worst
luck?’ Tamara continued. ‘Just when he was getting on top of that wrist thing, too.’

‘Wrist thing?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Oh, he broke his scaphoid when we were in Cairns last Christmas, being an idiot on a skateboard. His mum was
so
cross with him. I thought she was going to send him to his room without any pudding. It was hilarious. Is she very excited about the baby?’

‘I – um – haven’t met her,’ I said hoarsely. Mark had never suggested that I meet either of his parents, and our most exotic holiday destination had been a weekend in the Coromandel in January, during which a strong easterly wind had turned the sea into a sort of pulverised-jellyfish soup.

‘She’s lovely,’ said Tamara, smiling at me kindly.

‘That’s good.’

‘And Tip’s great, isn’t he? He’ll be a brilliant dad.’

‘Tamara’s really beautiful,’ I said, as Mark pulled the car out onto the street just before midnight. Such a stereotypical insecure-girlfriend remark, but it slipped out before I could catch it.

There was blank silence from the driver’s seat.

‘Isn’t she?’ I pressed. If you’re going to be an insecure nagging girlfriend you might as well do it properly.

‘Yeah, I suppose so.’

I drummed my fingertips on the window ledge of the car, and then stopped because it hurt my poor chewed nail beds.

‘Why
did
you guys break up?’

Mark rested his head back against the car seat. ‘Could you just not?’ he asked.

I very, very nearly burst into tears. ‘Fine.’

He was already in bed when I came out of the bathroom, lying on his back with one arm behind his head. I switched off the lights and skirted the end of the bed in the dim orange glow of the security light outside. The baby began to squirm as soon as I lay down, and taking Mark’s hand I pressed it to my stomach so he could feel it too.

‘
Fuck!
’ he said, jerking his arm back. ‘Be careful!’

‘I’m sorry!’

He removed his good arm from behind his head and massaged the bad shoulder. ‘
Please
don’t do that.’

‘Sorry. I forgot. I wanted you to feel the baby kicking.’

He sighed, sat up and laid his palm against my stomach. ‘Where?’

‘It’s stopped now.’

He gave my stomach a quick rub, the kind you give a puppy to make up for growling at it. ‘Oh well, next time. ’Night, love.’

26

MARK WAS OUT FOR ANOTHER SIX WEEKS WHILE HIS
shoulder healed. He spent the time getting faster and fitter, going to physio and answering all questions on the progress of
his injury, from me or anyone else, with, ‘Good, thanks.’

We talked on the phone every day or so and saw each other most weekends, but things felt fragile and uneasy. We didn’t discuss moving in together or life post-birth, and eventually I pulled myself together and started researching my local childcare options.

I began to look pregnant, which was an improvement on merely looking thick around the middle, and at work everyone got used to the new status quo, moved on to fresher gossip and stopped breaking off their conversations when I came into the room.

On a dull and windy Tuesday afternoon in early April I parked the ute behind the clinic and climbed stiffly out from behind the steering wheel. I peeled off a dirty pair of Nick’s overalls, having now grown out of my own, collected an armful of muddy ropes to put through the washing machine and let myself in through the back door.

‘How’d it go?’ Thomas asked, leaning back in his chair and yawning as I came into the shop.

‘Disaster,’ I said shortly. After forty minutes of grappling with a calving jack, assisted by an unwilling farmer who really wanted to be covering his maize stack instead, I had managed to get the cow’s dislocated hip back into its socket. This led to great satisfaction all round for about fifteen seconds, until I moved the cow’s leg and the hip fell straight back out again. ‘We got it in, but it wouldn’t stay there. The socket must have been smashed to bits.’

‘Oh, well, there’s a dog coming in,’ said Thomas. ‘And your grandmother called. She wants you to go round after work.’

‘Why?’ I asked, rubbing my aching side. I must have pulled something while wrestling with that cow.

‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Maybe she’s been knitting you baby clothes.’

Granny lived just down from the supermarket, in one of a line of orange-brick units surrounded entirely by asphalt. I left the ute on the side of the road and crossed this tarseal wasteland to knock on her living room door.

‘Come in!’ she called.

I let myself into the cluttered gloom and pulled the door shut behind me. Granny’s living room was always overheated and under-lit. She kept the blinds closed to stop the carpet fading, and every flat surface sported a group of brass elephants or paua-shell ashtrays, a case of ornamental teaspoons or a doll with frilly Victorian petticoats and staring eyes.

‘Hi, Granny,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

Granny pulled her cardigan more tightly around her. ‘My back’s killing me and it’s been about seven years since my bowels worked properly,’ she said flatly.

Well, that would depress anyone, I thought, wending my way around a small lacquered table to her armchair and bending to kiss her cheek. ‘Cup of tea?’

‘Yes, alright. You’ll find biscuits in the big red tin in the pantry.’

The big red tin contained half a packet of very whiskery ginger kisses. Watched from the top of the fridge by a sinister-looking rag doll and a crocheted chicken, I threw them out, made the tea and carried two mugs back into the living room. ‘Your biscuits were growing mould,’ I said, passing her a mug.

‘Just as well, probably,’ she said. ‘That little dark snip of a nurse doesn’t like me eating anything I might actually enjoy. And I shouldn’t think
you’d
 need to be putting on any more weight.’

I sat down on the edge of the sofa and took a small resentful sip of tea.

‘When’s this baby due again?’ she asked.

‘July,’ I said.

‘What’s that – another three months?’ She looked at me over the rim of her mug. ‘Is that boyfriend of yours still on the scene?’

‘Yes.’

‘Planning on moving in with him, are you?’

I kept my eyes firmly on an African violet in a brown macramé-sheathed pot. Who, pray tell, would choose to spend their free time knotting a pot jacket out of hairy brown string? And
why
? ‘No.’

‘So – what? You raise the child, and he can pop in if and when it suits him?’

I bit my lip. Never have I known anyone else with Granny’s aptitude for finding and prodding a person’s very tenderest spots.

‘Well?’ she asked.

‘Something like that,’ I said.

‘What kind of stable home is that for a child?’

‘Granny, I’m doing my best!’

‘I dare say,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Seeing as you’re here, you might as well take a look at Tibby for me. She’s gone off her food.’

Tibby (or ‘the old witch’s familiar’ if you were talking to Em, who disliked being referred to as ‘Timothy’s trophy wife’; I did once point out that ‘Timothy’s trophy wife’ was a step up from ‘Timothy’s fancy piece’, but for some reason this failed to placate her) was curled on the spare-room bed in a patch of late afternoon sunlight. She was a small cat with dusty black fur and an uncertain temper, and she opened her eyes and glared at me as I sat down beside her.

I ran a soothing hand down her back and felt every vertebra, which was not a good start. I opened her mouth – quite a bit of tartar on her back teeth but only mild gingivitis. Mucous membrane colour reasonable. Eyes okay. Lymph nodes not enlarged. No nasty lumps in the abdomen. I took a pinch of skin between finger and thumb, and it stayed tented. At least ten percent dehydrated, then. Tibby batted my hand irritably with a paw to let me know her patience was wearing thin.