Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (32 page)

‘Tomorrow night will be a tough game,’ said Sam, plucking his beer of choice from the fridge. ‘The Stormers haven’t lost all season. How does Mark feel about Reuben Scott starting?’ Reuben was the third lock in the Blues squad, a pleasant young man with a slight shortage of chin, but more than ample nose to make up for it.

‘Not all that thrilled. He hates the bench. Ali, would you like a beer?’

‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘Come and eat before it gets cold.’

‘Have you guys heard of any places to rent?’ I asked, tickling Murray between the ears on my way to the table.

‘Not that I can think of,’ said Alison. ‘Why, are you thinking of moving?’

‘I have to. Rex wants the cottage for his son and I’ve got to be out by the end of the month.’

‘Good,’ said Sam. ‘This place is grim.’

‘Not as grim as moving back in with Dad and Em.’

‘Why on earth don’t you get your act together and move in with Mark?’ Then he jumped, as people do when kicked under the table.

I tried to tell him why not, found that my throat had clamped shut and shook my head instead.

‘Oh, Helen,’ said Alison, leaping up to come around the table and hug me. ‘Oh
no
.’

‘Well, it’s not really a s-surprise – sorry . . .’

‘Arsehole,’ said Sam.

‘No he’s not,’ I gasped, lifting my head from Alison’s shoulder.

‘Yeah, he is,’ he said coolly. ‘Only arseholes leave their pregnant girlfriends.’

‘He tried. You c-can’t make yourself care about someone just because they’re having a baby.’

‘Well, if that’s how he feels I suppose you’re better off without him,’ said Sam, frowning.

And I came to the conclusion, lying in bed later in that state of desolate calm that you reach when you’ve temporarily cried yourself out, that he was right. There’s no point in just wishing indefinitely for someone to love you when they don’t – eventually you’ve got to give up and start building yourself a new life.

‘Well,’ said Em a few days later, putting her bottle of nail polish down on the coffee table and looking critically at her handiwork, ‘personally, I never thought he was much of a rugby player.’

Seeing as Em’s knowledge of rugby was probably somewhere on a par with Kim Kardashian’s, this was not a particularly damning condemnation.

‘He’s big and strong,’ she continued, ‘but all he does is run into people and try to rip the ball off them.’

‘Em, that’s pretty much the job description,’ I said. Rugby’s really fairly straightforward – the forwards try to pulverise each other, and then the backs skip lightly through the holes in the opposition’s defence to score the tries. Forwards
can
score tries, but it’s not their key role and they like to pretend it’s no big deal. A manly nod of acknowledgement once the ball is planted over the line is acceptable, but victory dances, like fancy hairstyles, are left to the backs.

She sniffed. ‘And then if
he
has the ball he doesn’t throw it to anyone else, or kick it, or anything clever – he just charges straight into the biggest, hairiest thug he can find. I’m sorry, but I fail to see what’s so impressive about that.’

‘If I were you, I’d bring up those concerns with the All Black coaching panel,’ said Dad from the big armchair across the room.

‘Tim, don’t be patronising. Sweetie, is he at least going to pay you some sort of child support?’

‘I don’t want his money!’ I said.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Helen! It’s not for you, it’s for the baby.’

‘People raise babies on a lot less than I earn.’

‘That is not the point,’ she said. ‘Look, I’ll ring him if you like. You don’t have to talk to him yourself.’

I didn’t answer this straight away, being temporarily distracted by the tragedy of having lost the right to talk to Mark about anything except child support. Once we’d had long in-depth arguments about which series of
Blackadder
was the funniest, and whether icing a double chocolate muffin would improve it or push it over the edge.

‘What’s his number?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said hastily. ‘No, I’ll call him when he gets back from South Africa and sort it all out.’

Dad accompanied me out and walked around my car, peering at the tyres in the light of the security bulb at the corner of the garage. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Not bad.’

‘I had them checked last week.’

‘How very mature and responsible of you.’

‘Thank you,’ I said graciously. I’d had my tyres checked solely because my cousin Kevin had left a rude note on the windscreen while I was in the supermarket, saying three out of four of them were bald and if I didn’t do something about it he would come around and give me a good kicking, but I kept this detail to myself.

‘Did you go and have a look at that house of Kaye Upton’s?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’ Kaye’s rental property was a small wooden box with aluminium joinery, built up on poles on the south side of a hill. It had looked dank and charmless when viewed through the drizzle, but I was in no position to be picky. Besides, it suited my frame of mind.

‘Should I go and inspect it?’ Dad asked.

I shook my head. ‘No, it’s fine. It will do for now.’

Dad put an arm around me and gave me a quick squeeze. ‘Chin up, sausage,’ he said. ‘It’ll get better. Things do.’

The back door opened, and Em came down the steps holding my handbag. ‘You forgot this,’ she said. ‘Now, I just had a thought. How about we have a girls’ day out on Saturday? We’ll go to Hamilton and hit the shops, and then have a nice lunch.’

‘I’m not really in a shopping mood,’ I said.

‘Never mind; it will do you good.’

‘I need to do some packing.’

‘How much packing can you do when you’re not moving for another week? Anyway, Monday’s a holiday; you can pack then. Tim, you’ll look after the girls, won’t you?’

‘Yes, dear,’ said Dad.

‘Good. I’ll pick you up at nine, Helen.’

29

I CANNOT POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN A PLEASURE TO BE AROUND
just then. It was really quite heroic of Em to spend a day with me of her own free will – I should have appreciated it, but I was far too busy being miserable to appreciate anything.

‘Yes,’ she said as I emerged from a changing room in a dark blue tunic thing with a scoop neck. ‘Just gorgeous. You can wear it over jeans, and it will be fabulous with tights and boots.’

I cast an apathetic glance at the mirror. ‘It’ll be too small in another month.’

‘Of course it won’t. If you wear your clothes so big that nobody can see your bump you’ll find you look fat instead of pregnant. I think you should buy it.’

‘Okay,’ I said. I was going to have to buy
something
if I didn’t want to spend the last three months of pregnancy in a large green sweatshirt with
Broadview Dental Fun Run 2006
across the back.

‘Don’t get dressed again just yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring you a few other things to try.’

Having Em pass things into the cubicle and whisk them away again was quite a restful way to shop, and I tried on everything she brought me with unprecedented docility.

‘I like that colour on you, sweetie,’ she said, tweaking the hem of a long pink cardigan.

I screwed up my nose. ‘Em, I look like a prawn.’

‘Helen Olivia McNeil!’ she snapped, straightening up with a jerk. ‘If you put yourself down
once
more I will brain you with my handbag, so help me God!’

I stood and gaped at her in shock.

‘Just
look
at yourself!’ She pulled me around by one shoulder to face the mirror. ‘You are
beautiful
. I would
kill
for your hair and skin. And honestly, sweetie, brushing off every compliment starts to make you look very ungracious after a while. People get tired of constantly having to reassure you – if they didn’t mean it they wouldn’t have said it in the first place. It’s not pleasant to say something nice to someone and have it thrown right back in your face.’

‘Sorry,’ I whispered.

‘That’s alright,’ she said, tucking a strand of hair back behind my ear. ‘Now, you’ll take the cardigan? And the navy tunic, and the wide belt?’

I nodded. I would have nodded if she’d suggested I take the purple velour jumpsuit with the orange stripes.

‘Now, why don’t you leave that on?’

‘Okay.’

‘Wonderful. Let’s go and get some lunch.’

She swept through the Saturday morning crowd with her handbag dangling Hollywood-style from one wrist and me following meekly in her wake. Reaching a cafe with outside tables she smiled winsomely at a couple sitting over their coffee until they realised they had in fact finished, and sat down.

‘Well, that was a successful morning,’ she said. ‘What do you feel like to eat?’ She pushed the unfortunate couple’s cups to one side and passed a laminated menu card across the table.

I looked at it without interest. ‘Whatever.’ And then meeting her eye I added hastily, ‘Eggs Benedict. How about you?’

‘I might try the Thai beef salad. I’ll go up and order, shall I?’

‘No, I’ll go.’

‘You will not,’ she said. ‘What would you like to drink?’

‘Water, please.’

‘Right,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘I won’t be long.’

In an attempt to really plumb the depths of woe, I passed the time she was gone in scrolling through the inbox of my phone to look for messages from Mark.

Ok

Will do

Yep

Oh, how depressingly succinct.

Late be there by 9 x

That one was two weeks old. So a fortnight ago I had been worthy of at least an x in passing.

Nite love x

Three weeks ago.

‘Oh, sweetie, I hate seeing you so unhappy,’ said Em, slipping back into the chair opposite mine and reaching across the table for my hand.

My throat tightened ominously. Having no wish to dissolve amid our fellow diners I pulled away and said, ‘Well, let’s face it, it was always going to end like this.’

‘Why?’ she demanded. She folded her arms and leant on the tabletop, thus increasing her cleavage exposure from excessive to borderline obscene.

‘Because getting pregnant when you’ve been together for about three minutes tends to put a bit of a dampener on a relationship!’

‘I’m sorry to break it to you, sweetie, but you’re hardly the first couple in the world to have to deal with an unplanned pregnancy.’

‘I know that.’

‘It’s been one of the leading reasons for marriage for hundreds of years.
Thousands
of years, probably.’

‘Except that these days you don’t get forced to the altar at shotgun-point.’

‘No,’ she said patiently. ‘But I don’t see why having a baby means your relationship is automatically doomed, either.’

I looked down at my hands. ‘I guess it just put too much pressure on everything. Mark wasn’t ready to do the whole settling-down-and-having-a-family thing. Not with me, anyway.’

‘Wasn’t he?’

‘Well, obviously not!’

‘Were
you
?’

‘Em, please don’t do this amateur psychology stuff on me,’ I said tiredly.

‘Did you want to settle down with him?’ she persisted.

‘Yes! Of course I did.’

‘Because, sweetie, sometimes it didn’t really look like it from where I was standing.’

I looked up sharply.

‘How do you think it might have made Mark feel that you’ve never expected him to be there for you?’

‘I –’ I said, and stopped.

‘You’ve been so determined to cope with this all by yourself. But it’s his baby too. Don’t you think he might have got the impression that you didn’t really want his input at all?’

‘I just – I didn’t want to pressure him! I didn’t want him staying just because he thought he should.’

‘I’ve always remembered the celebrant at my friend Eileen’s wedding saying that one of the most important things in marriage is for the woman to
abandon
herself to her husband,’ Em said. ‘Not to submit to him, or obey his every wish, but just to trust him completely with her heart. And don’t say you weren’t married, because the principle’s the same.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s a bit hard to abandon yourself to someone who hasn’t even bothered to introduce you to his parents.’

‘
Hasn’t
he?’

I shook my head. ‘His family’s not close like we are, but – but he took Tamara Healy to his mum’s in Australia for Christmas.’

‘Well, he spent this last Christmas with you.’

‘And it was a disaster. Em, he never wanted to be with me for good. He – he said that he wasn’t the one who fucked everything up.’

‘People say all sorts of things they don’t mean when they’re upset.’

‘He meant it. And it wasn’t just the fight – that was just the last straw. Things have been bad for months.’

She sighed. ‘Maybe it’s just as well. You’re very different people.’

Considering I’d just spent ten minutes trying to convince her that Mark and I had never had a snowflake’s chance in hell of staying together, it was unreasonable to feel as offended by this remark as I did.

‘You’re such a clever girl,’ she continued, smiling up at a young and spotty waiter as he placed a bowl of salad in front of her. ‘And he’s not at all academic, is he?’