Chocolate Cake for Breakfast Read online

‘Not a thing. Maybe I’ll go and annoy Sam.’

  ‘When does Mark get back?’ she asked.

  ‘Twenty-two days, seven hours, and –’ I looked at my watch ‘– about nineteen minutes. Not that I’m counting or anything.’

  ‘That’s just the price you have to pay for being a Wag.’

  ‘Scrummy,’ I corrected. ‘Soccer players’ girlfriends are Wags; rugby players’ are scrummies.’

  Alison laughed. ‘What about the ugly ones?’ she asked.

  Sam’s reply, when I texted him regarding his plans for Friday evening, was brief and to the point. Busy.

  Keri had gone hiking and it’s a bit sad to spend two consecutive Friday nights at home alone watching Dirty Dancing on DVD, so after work I went to see Dad and Em. I found my father at the table with the paper spread before him and his glasses balanced on the very end of his nose.

  ‘Hullo, senior daughter,’ he said, leaning back in his chair and pushing his glasses back up. ‘What’s new?’

  I sat down on the edge of the table. ‘Almost nothing. Where are the girls?’

  ‘Emily has gone to the gym, and the small ones are in the bath.’

  ‘Any exciting new advances in the field of dentistry?’

  Dad scratched an ear in a thoughtful fashion. ‘I did remove most of last Sunday’s dinner from behind a woman’s plate this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Although I’m not sure you’d call that exciting.’

  ‘Did she not realise she was supposed to take it out and clean it?’

  ‘She’s losing the plot, poor old soul. I’ve spoken to her daughter and she’s going to keep an eye on things. How about you? Pushed back the frontiers of veterinary science in the last week?’

  ‘Well, I had a long talk with a woman who wants us to castrate her dog and implant a pair of silicone testicles,’ I said.

  ‘Can you get silicone testicles?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Yep. Wouldn’t have thought there’d be a huge market for them, myself, but apparently there is. And I’m treating John Somerville’s pet chicken for bumblefoot.’

  ‘Groundbreaking stuff,’ he said. ‘I see Mark’s in today’s paper.’

  ‘Is he?’

  Dad passed me the sports section. On the back page was a picture of the All Blacks at a training session; Mark, in tracksuit pants and padded jacket, was talking to one of the assistant coaches at the side of the field. ‘It says he’s hurt his shoulder and he’s out for tomorrow’s game.’

  ‘I talked to him this morning, and he said it was just a twinge,’ I said. He had sounded tired and annoyed, and it had been an unsatisfactory sort of conversation. From down the hall came a loud splash, followed by a shriek. ‘Want me to go and investigate?’

  November crawled by. Buttercups grew thick along the roadsides, and the snowball bush beside my porch steps was a vision of loveliness. At work the non-cycling cow calls slowed to a trickle and the lame bull calls increased sharply. Keri started the Ketosis Diet, losing both five kilograms and her sense of humour. Mark and Alan lunched with Prince William in Cardiff. I lunched with Lance’s mother at the Stockman’s Arms. Their lunch attracted considerably more media attention, but I think mine was more awkward.

  One Monday night, eight days before Mark was due home, I made myself a truly superb prawn stir-fry. I had two forkfuls before going off the whole idea of food. Which was odd, because I’m the sort of person who starts planning dinner as I finish lunch.

  The next morning I poured myself a glass of orange juice, sat down to peruse yesterday’s Broadview Broadcast, and then had to make a wild dash outside to throw up over the edge of the porch. I decided, tipping the rest of the glass sadly down the sink, that I must have caught one of those unpleasant twenty-four-hour bugs.

  On Thursday I vomited into the rubbish bin in the surgery halfway through a bitch spey, which impressed Zoe not one bit. And on Friday afternoon, wending my seedy way along Mohapi Road to see a sick bull, I decided enough was enough and pulled the ute off the road into a gateway. I opened my phone and texted Alison. Can u nick preg test from work? If buy one Aunty Deb will see. Aunty Deb – Sam’s mum – worked at the pharmacy, and not so much as a cough lolly could be obtained in Broadview without her guidance and support.

  I pressed send, dropped the phone back in the breast pocket of my overalls and sat with my forehead resting against the steering wheel, nauseous and panicking. I couldn’t be pregnant. It was unthinkable. It was just some random bug. The kind that makes your breasts tender and turns you right off the smell of coffee.

  The phone buzzed in my pocket, and I sat up to retrieve it.

  Of course. Come round after work.

  Thanks, I wrote, pulling out one-handed across the road. A van going the other way swept around the corner and swerved wildly to avoid the nose of the ute. I caught just a glimpse of the man driving it, white-faced and shouting abuse I fully deserved. Dropping the phone, I crept back onto the grass verge and shook like a leaf.

  Alison lived on the outskirts of Broadview in a picturesque but draughty villa, with an inoffensive vegan couple who wore Roman sandals all year round. I was on her front porch at five past five that evening, biting my fingernails and jittering.

  A small white car pulled into the villa’s driveway and Alison got out, looking slim and cool in her black three-quarter pants and blue medical centre scrub top. ‘Hey,’ she said.

  I came to rest and removed my left thumbnail from between my teeth. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Come on in.’

  I followed her through the house to the bathroom, where she dug in her purse and found a foil sachet. ‘I’ll get you a cup to pee in,’ she said, and disappeared down the hall.

  She was back in a moment with a china teacup. ‘Okay,’ she said, holding it out. ‘Nice mid-stream sample, please.’

  I took it silently and vanished into the loo.

  When I emerged she put out a hand for the cup. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘I do about ten of these a day.’

  My fingers tightened on the handle. ‘I won’t be,’ I said desperately. If I didn’t do the test it couldn’t come true. I had changed my mind – give me the agony of doubt over the crushing blow of confirmation any day. ‘I’m just being an idiot – imagining things . . .’

  Alison nodded and prised the cup gently from my hand.

  We stood together at the bathroom sink while she placed a few drops of urine in the well of the little plastic pregnancy test with a disposable pipette. ‘It’s five eleven now,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘We’ll give it five minutes, and look for two pink lines.’ But, even as she spoke, two fuzzy pink stripes coalesced and darkened in the test well.

  ‘Like those ones?’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh, hon,’ said Alison helplessly. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

  I sat, while she made it, on a wooden kitchen chair, looking unseeingly at the floor. ‘I never forget the pill,’ I said. ‘Never.’

  ‘Did you have diarrhoea at any stage?’ she asked, dunking a teabag. ‘Or a vomiting bug?’

  ‘No. Well, only this last week. And that seems to be an effect of pregnancy, not a cause.’

  ‘Have you been on antibiotics?’

  ‘No – oh, shit. Yes. A cat bit me, and I put myself on Vetamox.’ I had entirely forgotten the antibiotic clause.

  ‘When was that?’ she asked, setting the tea down on the table at my elbow.

  ‘I don’t know . . . Just before Mark went to England. Seventeenth of October.’

  She counted on her fingers. ‘So you’ll be – what? Seven weeks pregnant, give or take.’

  ‘No, he’s only been away five weeks.’

  ‘They measure pregnancy from your period,’ said Alison. ‘Even though you conceive at your next ovulation. That makes it forty weeks from your last period to giving birth.’

  ‘Ali, I can’t have a baby,’ I wailed. Mark and I had only been going out for a few months, and we saw each other once a week if we were lucky. I hadn’t met his family, I didn�
��t know his middle name – I didn’t even know if he had a middle name. His friends called him Tip, but I didn’t. He had only once said he loved me, and I don’t think you’re allowed to count it if it’s while you’re having sex. I’d been apprehensive about our future even before this catastrophe, because chances were he would decide before too long that his ideal woman would have cheekbones, good hand-eye coordination and the figure of a swimwear model. I started to cry hopelessly.

  Alison rubbed my shoulder in wordless sympathy. After a while I mopped my face on my shirt, tilted my head back and pressed the heels of my hands to hot, aching eyes.

  ‘When’s Mark back?’ she asked.

  ‘Tuesday.’ Oh, good God, I was going to have to tell him.

  Someone came whistling up the porch steps, and I got hastily to my feet. It’s probably a bit disconcerting to find a woman sobbing in your kitchen when you want to crack on with your lentil mousse, or whatever it was that Alison’s flatmates subsisted on. But, unexpectedly, my cousin Sam put his head around the kitchen door. He looked taken aback, and then concerned.

  ‘Hey!’ he said, putting down a bulging grocery bag on the bench. ‘Hel, what’s up?’

  Alison shook her head at him.

  So my two best friends were a couple, and they hadn’t told me. No wonder they were both busy all the time. That hurt, which surprised me, in a dull sort of way; I wouldn’t have thought I’d have the least scrap of emotion to spare from my own personal disaster.

  ‘You can tell him,’ I said. ‘’Night, guys.’

  ‘Helen, don’t go,’ said Alison.

  ‘No, I – I need to think. Thank you.’ I made for the door, and she barred my way.

  ‘Stop that. Sit back down. You’re not driving yourself home.’

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ I said tiredly. ‘Not drunk.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Sam.

  They were very kind. They tried hard to get me to stay, and Alison accompanied me anxiously to the ute. ‘Please stay,’ she said again. ‘I don’t think you should be by yourself.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ I was going to cry again; I could feel the tears building, relentless as a tidal wave, and was suddenly frantic to get away. Alison would be nothing but supportive. She would organise an appointment with a midwife or an abortion clinic or a king-sized block of Caramello chocolate or anything else I might want, and she wouldn’t judge me by so much as the flicker of an eyelid. But I thought hysterically that right now her tactful sympathy was more than I could bear.

  ‘Can I come over a bit later and stay the night?’ she asked.

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘No. I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘But I don’t think ruining your Friday night’s going to help.’

  ‘You are not ruining my Friday night. Don’t be an idiot.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, hugging her. ‘Honestly, I’d like to be by myself.’

  ‘I’ll ring you in the morning,’ she said. ‘It – it’ll be okay.’

  I nodded. It wouldn’t, but she couldn’t help that.

  16

  THAT WAS A TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE WEEKEND. I SPENT IT seesawing between blind panic and flat despair. I wrote lists of the options, screwed them up and wrote more lists. I chewed my nails down to the quick and cried myself sick – or, to be precise, sicker. Murray had no patience with this pathetic self-pitying behaviour, and left home to camp at a rabbit hole in Rex’s bull paddock until such time as I pulled myself together.

  Sam arrived on Saturday morning with three Crunchie bars and a cyclamen in a pot. I was almost certain Alison had sent him, and quite sure the flowers were her idea. She came just after lunch and sat beside me on my ugly plum couch, not talking much but exuding sympathy from every pore. They were both shining examples of all that friends should be, but when they drove up together on Sunday afternoon I hid in the spare-room wardrobe so they would think I’d gone for a walk.

  I didn’t want to have a baby. I wanted to be a good dairy vet, the one farmers wanted to see rather than the one they settled for if Nick or Anita was unavailable. I was signed up for an extension course in cattle nutrition in the new year and I wanted to get another calving season under my belt.

  Reproducing had not featured in my short- to medium-term career plans, and I was quite certain it hadn’t featured in Mark’s. Next year was the World Cup, and chances were it would be his last. Winning it was his whole focus and ambition. The last thing on earth he needed was some stupid girl – one who’d studied both pharmacology and reproductive physiology at university, for goodness’ sake, and so really should have been able to keep her eggs unfertilised – announcing that she was having his child.

  I thought hard about having an abortion. One quick visit to the nearest clinic, one minor surgical procedure, and voilà, crisis averted. You couldn’t really ask for a tidier solution to a problem than that. Except . . . except I was going on twenty-seven, and that’s old enough to act like a grown-up and deal with the consequences of your actions.

  I can’t do it, I thought miserably. I just can’t. I don’t want a baby – it’ll ruin everything – but that’s not a good enough reason. And I suppose I’ll like it when it’s born. I was feeling quite noble about this, in a dismal sort of way, when it dawned on me that I had no right to make the decision by myself. Mark deserved a say in the fate of his offspring, and I had not the least intention of giving him one. Which made me less of a brave, selfless, Joan-of-Arc type and more of an egotistical high-handed bitch. Crap.

  I tried and tried to concoct scenarios where Mark might forgive me and stay around. Surely it wasn’t impossible that we would make it work; we were adults, after all, not poor terrified sixteen-year-olds. And anyway, sometimes even terrified sixteen-year-olds stay together and live happily ever after. My mother’s cousin did – she ‘got herself in trouble’ (such an unfair way to put it, when she obviously had help) and was sent off to stay with distant relatives ‘until she was decent again’. And the boy who’d helped her into the trouble tracked her down and arrived at the nursing home with a bunch of flowers, and they were married and went on to have another four children. As a matter of fact, they were still living happily in Temuka, growing heirloom fruit trees and playing golf.

  We were good together, Mark and I. We laughed at the same things; I enjoyed baking, he enjoyed eating things I baked – there was a shared interest right there, and they say shared interests are vital. But I knew perfectly well that in all likelihood this would be the end of us. A baby is too big and too serious a thing for a fragile new relationship.

  He called on Sunday night, New Zealand time, which was Sunday morning for him in London. I had finished my latest crying jag half an hour previously, for which I was drearily grateful.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Good.’ It had never been worse, but good’s a relatively easy word to get out without your voice giving you away. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Oh, alright. Shoulder’s a bit sore.’

  ‘Did you hurt it again?’ I asked.

  ‘Fell on it. It’ll be right; it’s got plenty of time to heal.’

  ‘I only heard the game on the radio,’ I said. I didn’t have Sky TV and wasn’t currently fit company for anyone who did. ‘They didn’t say you were hurt. Have you had an X-ray?’

  ‘No, not yet. They’ll check it out properly when we get home. You’ll be up on Tuesday night?’

  Tuesday was marked on the calendar with red felt pen and I had booked annual leave for the Wednesday almost two months ago, but I said feebly, ‘I was wondering if it’d be better to come on Wednesday, and let you have a sleep first.’ Jet lag, I thought, could only make our impending conversation worse.

  ‘I can sleep on the plane,’ said Mark. ‘Please come. Or do you want me to come down?’

  ‘No! No, I’ll come up after work.’

  ‘You alright, McNeil?’ he asked.

  I bit my lip hard, and managed, ‘Yeah. Miss you.
’

  ‘You too. Only two more days.’

  Never had I greeted Monday morning with such relief. If I’d spent any longer alone with my thoughts I would have gone mad. At work I had to hold myself together and act like a professional, which meant I was forced to take a break from my new and all-absorbing pastimes of crying and throwing up. (Sometimes, just for variation, I’d been doing the two together, but I really wouldn’t recommend it. It makes breathing almost impossible, and you tend to end up with spew coming out your nose, which is not only disgusting but very painful.)

  Thomas informed me that my eyes looked like piss-holes in the snow, but he didn’t feel any urge to find out why, and nobody else noticed anything wrong as far as I could tell.

  At half past four on Tuesday afternoon, Nick turned from his computer screen, raised his eyebrows at me and said, ‘What are you doing here? Isn’t your boyfriend back in the country?’

  ‘I’m going up after work,’ I said.

  ‘Go on, then, bugger off. You can tell him that tackle just before half-time in that Welsh Test was poetry in motion, by the way.’

  ‘I will,’ I said, standing up. ‘Thanks, Nick.’

  ‘Blatant favouritism,’ Richard complained. ‘Just because she’s shagging an All Black.’

  ‘When you’re shagging an All Black you can leave early too,’ said Nick, turning back to his computer screen. ‘And in the meantime you can stop pissing around on Trade Me and go wash your ute.’

  It was just on seven when I parked in the street outside Mark’s place, and late sunlight slanted golden through the wrought-iron fence bordering his driveway. I got out of the car and went slowly down the drive, counting the tall spiked dividers between sections of fence. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen – oh shit, oh shit – twenty, twenty-one . . .

  His door opened and he came out, wearing one of his elderly faded T-shirts and a pair of board shorts with holes in the knees. ‘Hi,’ he said, and smiled with such obvious pleasure that I ran the last twenty metres and threw myself at him headlong.