Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (5 page)

He smiled and shrugged. ‘I’ve spent some pretty lousy evenings. Bet you it doesn’t even crack the top ten.’

4

THE PASSENGER SIDE OF THE BENCH SEAT IN MY WORK
ute was obscured beneath a pile of liver sampling forms and pregnancy testing pads. I swept the paperwork into a pile, shoved it down beside the driver’s door and threw the banana underneath (mislaid the week before) over my shoulder into Rex’s paddock.

‘Thank you,’ said Mark. ‘Hang on, we’ve forgotten the sauce!’ He put the parcel of barely warm fish and chips down on the seat, turned and ran back to the house.

We ate on the way, which improved my mental state quite a lot. Mark balled up the fish-and-chip paper as I turned into Joe’s tanker entrance and drove down a narrow bumpy track which wended its way between skeletons of dead farm machinery. It was a shame it was too dark to properly appreciate Joe’s fences – instead of bothering about all those pesky expensive posts and wires and insulators, he just strung lengths of baling twine from gorse bush to gorse bush.

We parked in front of the shed and climbed out. Three skinny dogs lunged, barking, against their chains, and Joe appeared from behind the vat and grunted.

‘Hi, Joe,’ I said. ‘What’ve you got?’

‘How the hell would I know? That’s why you’re here. Come on.’ A greeting which, although hardly warm and welcoming, pleased me. It’s so disappointing to describe someone in graphic detail as being a total prat and then have them make a liar of you by being perfectly charming.

We made our way through Joe’s cramped and grubby milk room and onto the yard, where a small thin heifer was standing miserably in the race. Two feet that looked about as big as hers were sticking out from her back end. I pulled on a long plastic rectal glove and poured a dollop of lube onto my palm. ‘Joe, this is Mark. Mark, Joe.’

‘Hi,’ said Mark, but our host had evidently exhausted his fund of chitchat and didn’t even bother to grunt again.

The calf was
not
alive, and hadn’t been for some time. Its head was bent so far around I couldn’t reach it at all, and it had arrived at that delightful stage where the gas of decomposition had accumulated under the skin and made the whole thing expand to entirely fill the cow’s pelvis. The amniotic fluid was long gone and the uterus was starting to clamp down around the calf. There are many, many types of tricky calving – uterine torsions, great big Hereford calves in small dairy heifers, cranky beef cows inadequately restrained in someone’s sheep yards half a mile from the nearest water, whole textbooks worth of weird foetal malpresentations – but for that sinking, well-
that’s
-this-evening-vanishing-down-the-toilet feeling, I personally think the fizzer calf is hard to beat.

I withdrew my arm and said to Joe, ‘The calf’s dead. I’ll need to cut off the head, for a start. And I don’t know if the shoulders will fit through even without the head.’

‘Better get on with it, then, hadn’t you?’ said Joe.

If I was a charitable person I might have wondered if he’d suffered a crushing blow in his youth to turn him against the whole human race. I’m not, so I merely thought,
I’m going to
charge out this call like a wounded bull, you arsehole.

‘Could you grab a couple of buckets of warm water?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got calves to feed,’ he said. ‘Your boyfriend can do it.’ And off he went.

There was a brief silence in the yard, broken by Mark scratching his nose and saying, ‘Wow.’

The only bucket in the milk room was half full of rotten milk, and I left the world’s best lock swilling it out while I went back to the ute to get my embryotome and wire, two five-litre containers of lube and a box of long gloves. Pressing a man who doesn’t even have a pair of gumboots into service as a rotten-calf midwife, I thought, has to be some kind of record dating low.

‘Right,’ I said when we reconvened at the cow’s side. ‘Epidural first, and then we’ll pump in about ten litres of lube – it’s as dry as a bone in there – and then I’ll get a wire round its neck and cut the head off. And if we’re really, really lucky we’ll be able to pull it out.’

‘What if we’re not really lucky?’

‘I keep chipping bits off the calf until it’s small enough to come out. Or until I tear a hole in the cow’s uterus.’

‘That’s the way,’ he said. ‘Look on the bright side.’

I crouched down to get the local anaesthetic out of a Barbie lunchbox (donated by my sister Caitlin, who’d received two for her last birthday). ‘Well, she’s not very big, and her uterus isn’t in great shape. She’s been trying to calve for about three days, poor girl. And she’ll probably sit down, and that’ll give us even less room than we’ve got now.’

She did sit down, but she very considerately waited until I’d placed the wire around the calf’s neck. I threaded the ends of the wire down the barrels of my embryotome (which is just a fancy name for two tubes of steel, bolted side by side, that protect the inside of the cow while you’re sawing off your chosen bit of calf with piano wire) and screwed the handles on to the free ends of wire. ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, ‘but I need you to do the sawing while I hold everything in place. You’ll probably get dirty.’

‘I expect I’ll cope,’ said Mark, crouching down and taking a handle in each hand. ‘Say when.’

I felt again to make sure my wire was in the right place, and took a firm grip on the embryotome. ‘When.’

Mark pulled one handle smoothly towards him, and then the other.

‘Just slow strokes for a start, then a bit quicker once the wire’s bitten in . . . Far out! Stop!’

He stopped sawing. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘You’ve done it,’ I said, pulling the embryotome out of the cow. ‘You’re through. That’s amazing.’ If only I’d had him the week before, when my assistant was a frail elderly man with a colostomy bag.

‘Stop it,’ said Mark. ‘You’ll make me blush. What now?’

‘Now I need that evil-looking hook in the bucket to grab the neck stump with, and we’ll pull out the head. Actually, to be honest, I say “we” but I really just mean you.’

He stood up and rummaged through my calving bucket. ‘Well, no point in keeping a dog and barking yourself. This one?’

‘No, no,’ I said pityingly. ‘The
really
evil-looking hook.
That’s
just a finger knife.’

‘This gear looks like you found it in a medieval torture chamber,’ he said. ‘This one, then.’

‘That’s the one. Cheers.’ After some effort I clamped it around a vertebra, and passed the end of the attached rope to my assistant. ‘Pull, please.’

Having calved the head, we had only nine-tenths of the calf to go. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘More lube. You can never have too much lube.’

Mark sniggered.

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘I didn’t say a word!’ he protested.

I put down the lube container and picked up the calving jack. ‘It was a very suggestive laugh. Now we’ll hook this up and I’ll get you to do the pulling while I stand here at the front and pretend to be doing something important.’
Please, please, let it
come out without me having to cut off a leg.

Even with an All Black on the end of the calving jack, however, the calf didn’t come. I had to cut off a front leg, and then lie on the concrete behind the heifer to work my fingers between the calf’s ribs and pull out handfuls of decomposing internal organs. The smell was appalling.

‘Are you doing that for any reason other than to see if you can make me throw up?’ Mark asked.

I dropped something which may once have been a liver onto the ground beside me with an unpleasant wet splat. ‘I’m trying to deflate the thing a bit. I
did
tell you it’d be the world’s lousiest evening.’

‘Nope,’ he said, ‘it still doesn’t crack the top ten.’

‘What would?’

‘Losing the last World Cup was up there. And the World Cup before that.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Of course. Right, let’s hook up the calving jack again.’

We did, and pulled, and the calf broke in half behind the ribs. I very nearly rested my cheek on the heifer’s rump and wept. ‘Can I have the evil hook again? And we’d better put in some more lube.’

‘You’re doing well,’ he said gently.

‘I’m not,’ I said, and if my voice wasn’t a wail I’m sure it was heading that way. ‘The thing’s got a bum the size of a bus, and I have to try and get a wire round and split the pelvis, and even if I can do it we’ve still got to get the back legs out.’

‘And if we can’t?’

‘I’ll have to put the heifer down. I’m not leaving her for Joe to shoot; I did that with a cow that had a broken leg a few months ago, and Keri saw her lurching round in a paddock a week later.’

‘Is it worth carrying on?’ he asked.

I pushed a wisp of hair back off my face with a dirty glove, which was an ill-considered move. ‘Yeah. I’ll put the hook around a vertebra and get you to pull it all a bit closer. Poor little heifer.’

After another ten minutes I pulled my left arm out of my patient and said unhappily, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t reach, and my arms aren’t working anymore. Could you try? If you can’t reach either I’ll put her down.’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said.

I got stiffly to my feet. ‘I’m so sorry. You’ll get filthy.’

‘So I’ll wash,’ he said serenely, pulling a long glove out of the box. ‘Tell me what to do.’

On impulse I reached up and kissed his cheek, which in hindsight would have been a nicer gesture if my face had been clean. ‘Drop the introducer over behind the tail, and then pick it up from underneath. You’ll need to worm your arm forward as far as you can and push the thing over, then pull your arm out and reach in again underneath. I’ll give you my calving gown.’

He shook his head. ‘It won’t fit me,’ he said, unzipping his sweatshirt and hanging it over a rail. He held out his hand for the introducer.

‘You’ll want some lube,’ I said, pouring it liberally over his gloved arm.

‘Because you can never have too much lube.’ He knelt behind the heifer and felt his way into the birth canal. The heifer stared dully ahead with a look of exhausted bovine long-suffering.

‘If you follow the rope in you’ll find that evil hook clamped around a vertebra. And you should be able to feel the hair on the calf’s back, and if you keep going back you’ll feel a tail.’

He closed his eyes, frowning. ‘It’s enormous.’

‘It’s all blown up with gas. What can you feel?’

‘The end of your rope and the hook . . . some bone . . .’

‘Cool. So go forward from there, over the calf.’

There was a pause, and I bit my lip hard to stop myself from asking what he could feel now. Watching someone else calve a cow is a bit like watching them fumble with a knot; it leaves you twitching to elbow them aside and have a go yourself.

‘I think I can feel the tail,’ he said at last.

‘Awesome. So push the introducer down between the calf’s legs, if you can. And then the trick is not to pull it back out with you when you bring your arm back.’

‘Mm,’ he said. Then, ‘Hah! Got it!’

‘You
legend
!’

‘Thank you,’ he said, smiling at me. He had a particularly nice smile, swift and warm and infectious. You wouldn’t think it would be possible to spend a wonderful evening dismembering a rotten calf for Horrible Joe Watkins, and yet here we were. It was the best night I’d had for months.

Half an hour later the last haunch of rotten calf slithered onto the concrete, and Mark bent to unhook it from the calving jack. I swept my arm around the heifer’s cervix, pulled it out again and began to strip off my gloves. ‘Well, what d’you know? We didn’t rip a big hole in her uterus.’

‘So she’ll be okay?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I’ll fill her up with penicillin and anti-inflammatories, and we’ll see if she’ll stand up. I wonder where Joe is?’

Mark shrugged. ‘Who cares? What should I do with the bits? It looks like the scene of a chainsaw massacre.’

‘Leave them,’ I said firmly. ‘It can be his first job in the morning.’

‘Very good,’ said Mark, and picking up my calving jack he vanished towards the milk room.

I chose a cocktail of nice expensive drugs for my patient, seeing as Joe wasn’t there to refuse pain relief on her behalf. Then I opened the gate in front of her and she struggled gallantly to her feet. Cows really are amazing. I let her out into the paddock beside the shed and went back into the milk room to see Mark scrubbing my embryotome with hot water and an ancient brush that had lost half its bristles. It is often said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and it is equally true (although less well known) that the way to a vet’s heart is through cleaning her gear.

‘How’s the patient?’ he asked.

‘Up and eating,’ I said, peeling off my calving gown. ‘Thank you so much.’

‘You’re welcome. It was fun.’

‘Really?’

‘Yep.’ He laid down the embryotome and held out a hand for the gown.

‘It’s okay, I can do it.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ he said, twitching it out of my hand in a very managing fashion.

I reached up to touch my hair. It felt crunchy, which is always a bad sign. Cupping my hands under the running water I started to wash my face.