Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (33 page)

‘He’s really smart!’ I cried. ‘I don’t know why you seem to think rugby players are all just a bunch of thugs! He’s well-read, and funny, and he can
always
see the best way to approach a problem. He’s the most logical person I’ve ever met. And those guys do business training, and personal development, and learn how to deal with the media and – and
heaps
of stuff! They don’t just practise chucking a ball around.’

Em’s response to this little tirade was most unsatisfactory; she merely unwrapped the serviette from around my knife and fork, passed them across the table and said soothingly, ‘Eat your eggs, sweetie, before they get cold.’

30

ON ANZAC DAY, FOR THE FIRST TIME DURING MY SIXTEEN
months’ occupancy of Rex’s cottage, I inched the stove out from the wall and looked behind it. It wasn’t good. Still, there are worse ways to spend a morning than exhuming a petrified mouse from behind the stove; Dad and Em, for example, were listening to Caitlin and twenty other children playing either ‘The Entertainer’ or ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ at a piano recital in the scout hall.

I fetched a pair of latex gloves from the back of the ute and clambered over the bench into the gap behind the stove. I had removed the mouse and was scrubbing drearily at the floor with a pot scourer when I heard a car pull in, and levered myself up to see who it was.

‘Hey, Nell,’ said Lance, putting his head around the door. ‘What’s new?’

‘Not a lot,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

‘Good. Just on my way back to Hamilton from Mum and Dad’s. You’ve got cobwebs in your hair.’

I ran a hand over my head to dislodge them. ‘Coffee?’

He nodded, came across the kitchen and filled the kettle, looking distastefully at the mouse. ‘Are you keeping that for a special occasion, or can I chuck it?’

‘Please chuck it. How are your parents?’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘They miss you.’

‘That’s nice of them. But what about your lawyer?’

‘Lawyer?’ he asked, opening the kitchen window and flinging the mouse out across the lawn.

‘Weren’t you seeing a lawyer?’

‘Only briefly. Tea?’

‘Coffee, please,’ I said.

‘Are you supposed to be drinking coffee?’

‘The midwife said it was fine.’

‘It’s just that Kate’s been steering clear of caffeine.’

‘Good on her,’ I said shortly. ‘I’m sure her baby will turn out much better than mine.’ I dropped my filthy scourer into an equally filthy basin of water and pushed it across the bench.

Lance picked up the basin and poured the water down the sink, maintaining a tactful silence.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘No, fair enough,’ he said. ‘It’s none of my business.’

That irritated me, either due to extreme prickliness on my part or because ‘It’s none of my business’ is another of those magic statements that doesn’t mean what it says. I climbed back over the kitchen bench as Murray sauntered in and wound himself around Lance’s ankles.

‘G’day, Murray,’ he said. ‘You’re getting fat, mate.’

‘He’s probably going out in sympathy,’ I said.

‘Those neutered-male cat biscuits from Royal Canin are good for weight loss.’

‘He’s on them.’

‘He should be on less of them, then. Try decreasing the amount you’re feeding him by a third.’

‘Yes, Lance,’ I snapped.

‘You’re in a lovely mood today, aren’t you?’ he remarked.

‘Sorry. It’s been a crappy couple of weeks.’

‘How come?’

‘Because Mark’s finally got sick of it all and left.’

‘That’s no good,’ said Lance.

The complete absence of surprise in his voice stung. Which seemed unfair, because you’d think that abject misery would at least ensure that nothing else anyone might say or do could hurt you. ‘Mm,’ I said.

He reached out and rubbed my shoulder. ‘Is he going to have anything to do with the baby?’

‘I don’t know. We’ve only got as far as screaming at each other.’

‘I imagine that having Mark Tipene screaming at you would be fairly scary,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Shit, he’s big.’

‘I think I was the one doing most of the screaming,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?’

Had Lance always been this annoying, I wondered, or was I just becoming crankier and less tolerant as I aged?

‘I was watching the highlights of his game yesterday,’ he said. ‘He smashed some poor innocent bloke’s knee to bits.’

I, too, had watched the highlights of that game. ‘Not on purpose!’ I cried.

‘What do you mean “not on purpose”? He lined him up from about twenty metres away!’

‘He
tackled
him! It’s a contact sport!’

‘Keep your hair on,’ said Lance. ‘Well, I hope he’s at least going to pay you some child support.’

‘I’m sure he will,’ I said wearily. Then, because if the subject wasn’t changed I was going to do a whole lot more screaming, I added, ‘Would you be able to give me a hand to take my bed apart?’

‘Why are you taking your bed apart?’

‘So I can get it through the door. I’m moving – my landlord wants this place for his son.’

Lance sighed. That bed had slats on a wooden box framework, and it was a pig of a thing to dismantle and put up again. ‘Got a spanner?’ he asked.

‘You can have your coffee first,’ I said. ‘I’ll even give you a biscuit.’

‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘Let’s just get it over with.’

We went up the hall and manhandled the mattress off the base of the bed to lean it against the wall. ‘I’ll undo the bolts if you’ll stop it falling on me,’ I said.

‘Nell, there’s no way you’ll fit under there.’ He plucked the spanner from my hand and slid under the bed to attack the first bolt. ‘You know, it’s poor form to ask a man to lie on someone else’s underpants.’ And a pair of grey cotton boxer shorts came flying out across the room.

‘Sorry,’ I said, bending to pick them up and straightening again with a little grunt. What are you supposed to do with your ex-boyfriend’s undies? Wash them and post them back? Burn them on their own little funeral pyre, as part of the quest for healing and closure? Keep them under your pillow to cuddle up to as you fall asleep? In the meantime I settled for putting them down on the windowsill.

‘Don’t mention it. Do you think they’d be worth anything on Trade Me?’

‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘It’d be hard to prove whose they were.’

‘DNA testing?’ Lance suggested, and I smiled despite myself.

There was a short silence while he wrestled with a bolt, and then he said, ‘How many times have I done this now?’

‘Um. Four, I think.’

‘Is that all?’

‘End of third year, end of fourth year, end of fifth year and before we went overseas.’

‘It just feels like more,’ he said. ‘Can you steady the end?’

I crouched down and held the corner of the bed’s frame. ‘Is that okay?’

‘Yeah, fine. You know, I reckon you’ve had a narrow escape. I was reading an article about early-onset arthritis in rugby players, and apparently the whole lot of them are cripples by the time they get to sixty. And they’re the ones who are sixty
now
; they played a hell of a lot less games forty years ago.’

‘But they patch them up a lot better these days,’ I pointed out.

‘There’s still not much you can do about having no cartilage left in any of your joints.’

‘They can replace knees and hips.’

‘Not shoulders. Or fingers. How many of them has he dislocated?’

‘I don’t know. A few.’

‘There you go. Those’ll all be buggered in another ten years. You would have ended up wiping his bum for him.’

‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ I muttered.

He passed me out a handful of bolts and shuffled along to the next corner. ‘You’re pathetic. And there’s another reason you should have been heading for the hills.’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Do you know what the All Blacks’ motto is?’

‘“Feed your backs”?’

‘Nope. It is – and I kid you not – “Subdue and penetrate”.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Google it then.’

‘Maybe it didn’t sound so dodgy a hundred years ago when they came up with it,’ I said weakly.

‘Of course it did. It’s not like human biology’s changed since then. Very shady people, rugby players. Can you move along a bit?’

Turning to drop the handful of bolts on the floor behind me I glimpsed two large bare feet crossed one over the other in the bedroom doorway. Mark was leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded, and as my startled gaze lifted to his face he looked at me with a mixture of uncertainty and amusement and love that nearly stopped my heart.

As I got shakily to my feet, Lance said, ‘Hold the thing steady, would you?’

Mark pushed himself away from the door and held his arms out, and I hurled myself across the room at him and clung like a limpet. He wrapped his arms hard around me, dropping his face into my hair.

‘Nell!’ said Lance, but I barely even heard his voice.

The baby, compressed in a feverish embrace, began to drum its heels against my abdominal wall in protest. Mark took half a step back and moved his hands to my stomach.

‘He doesn’t like being squished,’ I whispered.

‘Sorry.’

‘
I
like it.’

‘Good,’ he said, and kissed me.

From somewhere far, far away came a muffled shout. Mark pulled his mouth away from mine and went across the room to lift the collapsed bed frame off poor Lance, who didn’t, it seemed, like being squished any more than the baby did. He crawled out of the wreckage and scrambled to his feet, looking both angry and embarrassed.

‘Are you okay?’ Mark asked him.

‘Fine.’

The tumult of joy receded a little – only a little, but enough to let in a touch of remorse. Being rescued from underneath a bed by a man six inches taller and forty kilograms heavier than you are can’t be good for a chap’s self-respect.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Just dandy,’ said Lance.

‘Mark, Lance,’ I said. ‘Lance, Mark.’

‘Hi,’ said Mark with an almost complete lack of enthusiasm.

‘Hi.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said humbly.

‘It’s fine,’ said Lance, massaging his elbow. ‘It looks like you’re all sorted here – I’ll be off.’

I caught up with him at the kitchen door. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome. You can just call the kid after me or something.’

‘I’ll take that on board,’ I said. ‘And, hey, cool sideburns.’

‘You reckon?’ asked Mark, coming to the door behind me as Lance turned his car.

I waved and shut the door. ‘Reckon what?’

‘That his sideburns are cool. I thought they made him look like a total dick.’

‘Total dick’ was a bit harsh – Lance’s sideburns were really no worse than mildly silly. With an old-fashioned cravat around his neck he would have made a lovely Regency dandy. ‘I was just trying to say something nice,’ I said. ‘It seemed the least I could do, after dropping a bed on him.’

‘Ah,’ said Mark. ‘Right.’

There were tired creases at the corners of his eyes, and the knuckles of his right hand were grazed and swollen. He looked tough and sexy and grown-up. ‘Is your shoulder okay?’ I asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘What happened to your hand?’

‘Stomped on in a ruck.’

‘Is it very sore?’

‘It’s alright. It’ll just mean the arthritis sets in a bit quicker, I suppose. A few less years of being able to wipe my own bum.’

I smiled. ‘How long were you there before I saw you?’

‘K-Y man was just going to put my boxers on Trade Me.’

‘Poor Lance. He’ll probably never get over it.’

‘Good,’ said Mark grimly.

‘He was only trying to make me feel better.’

‘He wasn’t. He was trying to weasel his way back into your knickers.’

‘Of course he wasn’t,’ I said.

‘I know weaselling when I see it.’

‘Well, I suppose you’ve done plenty of it yourself over the years.’

‘Almost none,’ he said haughtily.

‘Liar,’ I said, and hugged him.

He hugged me back, dropping his chin onto the top of my head. ‘I love you.’

And only five minutes before, the years were stretching grey and bleak before me, to be spent watching Mark’s expressions on his child’s face and furtively tracking his love life via the internet. ‘Same,’ I whispered.

His arms tightened. ‘Well, that’s a good start,’ he said, and taking half a step backwards he picked me up.

‘Mark, don’t! You’ll hurt your shoulder.’

‘It’s fine.’ He carried me across the kitchen and up the hall.

I kissed his ear. ‘My bed’s all in pieces.’

He stopped in my bedroom doorway and let me slide to my feet. ‘I’m pretty confident we’ll figure something out,’ he said.

31

MY ROOM WAS HOT AND STILL, AND THROUGH THE OPEN
window came the soft tearing sound of Rex’s big white-faced steer pulling up grass on the other side of the fence. Mark was asleep in a broad stripe of sunlight, lying on his side with his arm heavy across my chest. The skin under his eyes looked grey and papery with exhaustion. Normally his ability to sleep anywhere, at any time, was legendary, but perhaps he too had spent the nights of the last fortnight staring at the ceiling.

It was very warm, especially underneath a large hot arm. I began to edge out from underneath it, and Mark stirred, frowning, and pulled me closer. I smiled to myself, threaded my fingers down between his and closed my eyes.