Chocolate Cake for Breakfast Read online

  ‘It – it looks like a baby,’ I said stupidly.

  The technician was evidently a kind girl. Instead of asking just what I’d been expecting it to look like, she smiled and said, ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it? And all the organs are already nearly formed – liver and kidneys and everything. The baby’s even got a tiny tongue. In a couple of weeks it will be big enough to suck its thumb.’

  The thought of that teeny little embryo sucking his or her thumb brought tears to my eyes. Of course, almost everything did bring tears to my eyes just at the moment – I had found a dead silvereye on the living room floor that morning, courtesy of Murray, and wept over the tiny corpse.

  ‘How old is it?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll just do some measurements . . .’ She turned to her computer screen. ‘Right . . . so your due date is . . . the tenth of July. Lovely.’

  I tried to smile back at her, but I don’t think it came out very well.

  19

  ‘WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?’ NICK ASKED, COMING into the vet room the next afternoon to find me resting my cheek on the cool shiny cellophane wrapping of a drug company mailout.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, lifting my head hastily up off my desk.

  ‘You look terrible,’ he said. ‘For heaven’s sake, go home and put yourself to bed.’

  I opened my mouth to demur, and then thought better of it and stood up. ‘Thanks.’

  Out the front, Thomas was on the phone and Anita was filling the pockets of her overalls with tubes of pink-eye ointment while Richard decorated tomorrow’s day sheet with a green highlighter. He finished adding some careful shading to the side of a column and looked critically at his artwork.

  ‘Oh,’ he said as I approached, ‘I had a look at that bird’s foot for you.’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Looked good to me. I didn’t take a picture, but the swelling’s gone right down and she’s not limping.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘John was bleating on about some other thing with a limp – a duck or something. I said I’d get you to ring him.’

  As I took my diary out from under my arm to write myself a note to call John tomorrow, the door to the consult room opened. Keri ushered out a vast woman wearing a white broderie anglaise tent and carrying a toddler, following in her wake with a small tabby cat in a cage. The woman surged up to the counter beside me.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Hi,’ said Sharon from the midwife’s waiting room. ‘You’ll have to walk, honey, Mummy can’t carry you and Pixie.’ She put down the little girl, who buried her face in her mother’s skirt and wailed.

  ‘If you have any problem with those tablets,’ said Keri, setting the cat cage on the counter and speaking up to be heard over the crying child, ‘just give us a ring and we’ll give him the long-acting injection.’

  ‘He just takes ’em out of my hand,’ Sharon said. ‘I’ve got a real way with animals.’ The toddler’s wails became more insistent and higher pitched, and Sharon patted her vaguely.

  ‘That’s great,’ shouted Keri. ‘Now, he should be much better by Saturday morning, so if he’s not bring him in to the morning clinic between nine and twelve.’

  Richard, who was on call this weekend and would thus be manning the Saturday clinic, bared his teeth at her over the client’s head.

  Happily, Sharon was fishing through her purse and missed this shining example of customer service. ‘What’s the damage?’ she asked, taking out her credit card.

  Keri came around the counter and looked it up on the computer. ‘Seventy-nine dollars sixty.’

  Handing over her card, Sharon wiped her damp forehead with the back of a pudgy forearm. ‘Warm, isn’t it?’ she said, and turning towards me added companionably, ‘It’ll be winter when you get to this stage, lucky girl.’

  I went rigid with horror. They might not have noticed, I thought feverishly. I’ll say I’ve never seen her before – they probably didn’t notice . . .

  Sharon winced and clapped a hand to her mouth. ‘Oops,’ she said.

  They would, however, have noticed that. As indeed they had: four heads had turned in unison towards me, like deer at a bird’s alarm call.

  ‘If, ah, if you could just enter your pin number?’ said Keri, wresting her eyes from my face to the customer’s. ‘Thank you. Would you like your receipt?’

  ‘No, I won’t bother.’ Sharon hefted her child up to sit on her hip, waved Keri away as she tried to pick up the cat cage and took it herself. ‘I can manage. See you.’

  We watched her waddle across the polished floor and out through the automatic doors, and my nausea was temporarily swept away by a wave of hot hate.

  ‘Helen?’ said Thomas.

  And here we go. ‘Yes, Thomas?’

  ‘Are you up the duff?’

  I considered denial for about half a second before deciding it was a complete waste of time. Also, I lacked the energy. ‘Yes,’ I said flatly.

  Thomas laughed.

  ‘Hah,’ said Anita with evident satisfaction. ‘Thought so.’

  Richard gave a long, low whistle, and Nick, coming down the hall from the back of the building, raised his brows in enquiry.

  ‘Helen’s pregnant,’ Thomas said gleefully.

  Nick opened and shut his mouth like a goldfish for quite some time. ‘Are you?’ he finally asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘When are you due?’

  ‘Tenth of July.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Nick. ‘So you’re not going to be calving many cows this year.’

  ‘We’ll have to get a locum,’ said Richard.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Nick in discouraging tones.

  ‘Oh, come on, we’ll be run off our feet. Every second weekend on call over calving?’

  ‘I worked every other weekend for nine years and it didn’t do me any irreparable damage, as far as I’m aware,’ said Nick.

  I closed my diary and picked it up, and Keri reached across the counter to touch my hand. ‘You okay?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Mm,’ I said, because if I’d attempted anything more I would have burst into tears. The Huggies pregnancy website had assured me that both weepiness and nausea would recede in the second trimester, and I was clinging to that hope.

  ‘Hey, Helen, you’ll be able to do one of those Woman’s Weekly photo shoots, with you and Mark and the baby,’ said Thomas. ‘They’d probably give you ten grand.’

  It was actually far easier to be teased than sympathised with. ‘Awesome,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Shit, I would. Ten grand is ten grand.’

  ‘Thomas, nobody would pay ten cents to see a picture of your offspring,’ said Keri.

  The phone started to ring, and Thomas skated backwards across the polished floor in his wheeled chair to pick it up. ‘Broadview Vets, Thomas speaking . . . Hi.’ There was a pause, and then he said, ‘Look, she’s in consult at the moment, but I’ll pass the message on, and she’ll give you a call back in about quarter of an hour. Thanks, John.’ He hung up and propelled himself rapidly back to where the action was.

  ‘Call John Somerville,’ he told me. ‘Right, what’d I miss?’

  In the end I was the last to leave work, after a forty-minute phone conversation with John Somerville about limping ducks. When, finally, I made it out to the ute, I rested my head on the hot steering wheel and cried. All that prevarication and micro-sipping of beer and wringing my hands about anyone finding out I was pregnant, and it was out. Just like that. And although they’d promised not to say a word, of course everyone would – they would tell just a handful of people apiece, in the very strictest of confidence, which meant three-quarters of Broadview would know by tomorrow lunchtime.

  From there it would be but a short step to the national news. Mark’s ingrown toenail had made the papers a couple of years ago, so presumably his unborn child would be at least equally newsworthy. I might well wake up tomorrow morning to find the lawn
covered in reporters and cameramen. (Besides nausea and exhaustion, pregnancy appeared to have granted me a new and special flair for exaggeration.)

  I spent a few minutes brooding on all the awful misfortunes that would, if there was any justice in the world, befall Fat Sharon. Then I sat up, wiped my eyes on the hem of my shirt and opened my phone to call Mark.

  His phone didn’t ring, which meant that either he’d turned it off or the battery had gone flat. ‘Hi,’ said his voice. ‘Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you.’

  ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Everyone at work knows. A horrible pregnant woman I met at the midwife’s came in and told them. I – I just thought you might want to tell your parents before they hear it on Radio Sport or something. I’m sorry.’

  I shut my phone and dropped it on the seat beside me. And then, just to set the seal on an already bad day, I went to tell Dad and Em.

  I was never the type of kid who got into trouble. I was a plump and anxious teenager, and I expect Dad was more worried that I might never leave home at all than that I was going to fall in with the wrong crowd and spend my weekends experimenting with sex and alcohol. Admittedly I did once crash his car, but he watched me do it. I had no experience with serious parental confessions.

  Caitlin met me at the door, wearing pink Barbie swimming togs and pink water wings. ‘Can you swim with me?’ she asked.

  ‘Not today,’ I said, and she slumped.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘I’m not feeling very well. Sorry, munchkin.’

  ‘Do you want some Pamol?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said.

  ‘It’s strawberry flavour,’ she coaxed, ushering me tenderly up the hall. ‘Mum, Helen’s sick.’

  The rest of the family were in the kitchen. Bel was seated on the bench while Dad adjusted her swimming goggles, and Em turned from the open fridge with a bottle of wine in one hand.

  ‘Sick of what?’ she asked. ‘Would wine help?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Must be serious, then,’ said Dad.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Hi, Bel.’

  ‘Will you come swimming?’ she asked.

  ‘She can’t,’ said Caitlin. ‘She’s sick.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Bel hopefully. Annabel adores Pamol, both because it’s sweet and because taking medicine makes her feel important.

  ‘You are not.’

  ‘Are too!’

  ‘Into the pool with you both,’ ordered Dad.

  ‘But someone has to watch us,’ said Caitlin. ‘We can’t just swim by ourselves. We might drown.’

  ‘Yes, and you wouldn’t want that,’ said Bel, glaring through her goggles at each adult in turn to ensure we were suitably sobered by this hideous thought.

  ‘We would not,’ her mother agreed. ‘It would be terrible. We’ll watch you from the deck.’ She opened a cupboard, swept up a handful of wineglasses and followed the girls out through the French doors.

  ‘Everything alright?’ Dad asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said, dissolving once more into tears.

  He looked a little taken aback, but he put his arms around me and patted me on the back. ‘Come on, now,’ he said kindly. ‘Come and sit down and tell us what’s wrong.’

  Caitlin and Bel had launched themselves into the pool, and Em was pouring the wine at the big outdoor table on the deck above them. ‘Tim, here’s yours . . . Bel! Less splashing, please! Helen, you’ll have one, won’t you?’ She turned and saw my face. ‘What’s wrong, love?’

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ I said.

  Em dropped the wine bottle back onto the table with a thud. ‘Oh, sweetie.’

  Dad said nothing at all. He took off his glasses and began absently to polish the lenses on the hem of his nasty Hawaiian shirt, his invariable custom when at a loss. In the first year after Mum died, when he was trying to work and look after me and keep us both clean and fed and clothed, he nearly polished them away to nothing.

  ‘Nine weeks,’ I added. ‘I had a scan yesterday.’

  My stepmother came around the table and enfolded me in a warm, coconut-oil-scented hug. ‘Oh, sweetie,’ she said, and I laid my head on her shoulder and wept.

  For quite some time I cried while Em stroked my hair, and then something wet and cold pressed itself against my legs. On inspection it proved to be Bel, complete with goggles and Dora the Explorer flotation ring, and howling like a car alarm.

  ‘Annabel,’ said Dad. ‘Stop that, please.’

  ‘Is Helen going to die?’ she wailed.

  ‘Of course not!’ Em said.

  ‘Well, not imminently, as far as we know,’ corrected Dad. ‘But everyone dies eventually.’

  The wails increased in both volume and frequency. ‘I – don’t – want – to – die!’

  ‘Oh, well done, Tim,’ said his wife.

  ‘Bel, you womble,’ I said, crouching down level with her small crimson face. ‘I’m not going to die; I was just a bit sad. But I’m better now, see?’ I pulled a tattered ball of tissue from the pocket of my shorts and wiped my eyes.

  ‘Why were you sad?’ asked Caitlin, approaching across the deck.

  ‘I’m just not feeling very well. I’ve got a sore tummy.’

  ‘I don’t like it when you cry,’ said Bel, snivelling gently. ‘You’re a big girl. You’re not supposed to cry.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m not crying anymore.’

  ‘You need to have some Pamol,’ Caitlin said firmly, and trotted inside to get it, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind her.

  I sat down in an outdoor chair and Bel began to climb into my lap. ‘Hey,’ I protested, fending her off, ‘you’re all wet and cold.’

  ‘I just want to give you a cuddle,’ she said plaintively, putting on her starving-orphan-all-alone-in-the-world face. I was moved less to remorse than to admiration – pulling off that expression with dimples and a round rosy face like a Renaissance cherub was impressive.

  ‘I’ll cuddle you when you’re dry,’ I told her.

  ‘If you don’t want to swim, Annabel, you’d better have a bath and get into your pyjamas,’ said Dad.

  Faced with this dire threat, Bel scampered back across the deck and into the pool, where she lay crocodile-style at the shallow end by the steps, submerged up to her nose.

  ‘Here you go, Helen,’ said Caitlin, coming back out of the house armed with a medicine bottle and a tablespoon.

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said.

  ‘It won’t hurt you,’ Em said. ‘Paracetamol’s completely safe.’

  ‘It’s good for you,’ said Caitlin sternly, putting her spoon down on the table to wrestle with the child-proof cap of the bottle.

  ‘Caitlin, I swear if you make me drink that revolting stuff I’ll throw up.’

  ‘But then how are you going to get better?’ she asked, in the sort of voice used for reasoning with the very young or the very dim.

  ‘I think I’ll be better soon if I just sit here quietly,’ I said.

  ‘Go and get back in the pool, sweetie,’ said Em. ‘It was kind of you to think of it.’

  Caitlin sighed and went, leaving behind a dense uncomfortable silence. When I couldn’t bear it any longer I said, ‘Your glasses are probably pretty clean by now, Dad.’

  ‘What? Oh, yes.’ He stopped polishing and settled them back on his nose. ‘So they are.’

  ‘Are you going to say anything else?’ I asked, flippant with shame and unhappiness. ‘Or is that it?’

  Dad looked at me gravely across the table. ‘Just what do you expect me to say, Helen?’

  ‘I don’t know. I sort of hoped you knew how this conversation was supposed to go.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘’Fraid not.’ And the silence seeped back to surround us again.

  Em took a sip from her wineglass and set it carefully back down. ‘Have you told Mark?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. I told him last week, when he got back from England.’

  ‘How did he take it?’r />
  ‘He was lovely,’ I said to my hands. ‘He’s being so nice. Far nicer than I deserve.’

  ‘It does take two,’ said Dad drily.

  ‘But it’s my fault. I stuffed up the pill.’

  Em smiled at me very kindly. ‘These things happen.’

  ‘I didn’t think they’d happen to me!’ Smart career women aren’t supposed to get themselves knocked up – it’s the sort of thing that happens to silly teenage girls who fear that telling their silly teenage boyfriends to wear a condom will brand them as losers. I mopped my eyes again with the wad of tissue and said miserably, ‘People will think I did it on purpose – that I thought I’d get my fifteen minutes of fame by having Mark Tipene’s baby.’

  ‘Of course they won’t!’ Em said.

  ‘I think you’ve got enough actual problems without inventing extra things to worry about,’ said Dad.

  This was no doubt true, but not even slightly comforting.

  ‘So, when is this baby due?’

  ‘The tenth of July,’ I said.

  ‘A winter baby,’ said Em. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Nice,’ I repeated scathingly. ‘Really?’ She was only trying to be kind, but I was tired and sick and teetering on the brink of hysteria, and it seemed a stunningly inane comment.

  Em and Dad exchanged a long look but said nothing, and I shoved back my chair and stood up.

  ‘Helen,’ said Dad gently. ‘Sit down.’

  I shook my head. I was going to cry again, and when Caitlin tried to dose me with Pamol I would almost certainly shout at her, and then I’d have that to feel bad about on top of all the rest. I rushed into the house, tripped over Bel’s toy stroller and banged my hip hard against the edge of the table.

  ‘Hey,’ said Dad behind me. ‘Come on, love. Hang on a minute.’

  I shook my head again, crying too hard to speak, and he gathered me up against him and hugged me.

  ‘Shh,’ he said. ‘It’ll be alright.’ There was a short pause while he searched for some uplifting comment, and then he said tentatively, ‘I’m sure it will be a very nice baby.’

  ‘I d-don’t want a baby!’