Chocolate Cake for Breakfast Read online

  Mid-July is a fairly quiet time of year in large-animal practice, and at twenty to five that afternoon four of the five vets were in the big office at the back of the building. Nick was busily writing reports – he seemed to spend almost all his waking hours doing paperwork, while making distressingly little headway. Anita had small children and finished work at three, but Keri, Richard and I were eating pick ’n’ mix lollies from the shop across the road and discussing Joe Watkins, the meanest farmer alive.

  Little Zoe the vet nurse pushed the door open and scurried in, face bright red with emotion. ‘Helen!’ she said. ‘Mark Tipene is asking for you at the front desk! The All Black!’

  I got to my feet, and Richard and Keri both followed suit. ‘You can’t come!’ I said, appalled.

  ‘Why not?’ Keri asked. ‘I need to talk to Thomas.’

  ‘I just want to see Mark Tipene,’ said Richard, who was at least honest. ‘Maybe he’ll autograph my gumboot.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Keri said, and the woman actually spat on her hanky and rubbed my cheek.

  I batted her hand away. ‘Stop that!’

  ‘You can’t go out there with cow shit on your face,’ she said. ‘Okay. Head up, shoulders back. Off you go.’

  Crimson with embarrassment and followed by a giggling entourage I went out into the shop. Mark Tipene was standing at the front counter, looking at a notice advertising kittens free to a good home and giving the impression that he had just strayed in from the set of a James Bond movie. His black eye had faded to a sickly green, streaked with red, but instead of spoiling his looks it made him look tough and a little bit dangerous. We had a picture of Mark Tipene without a shirt pinned up in the lunch room to lift our spirits on bad days (the boys had a corresponding picture of Rihanna wearing only a couple of bits of string), and it was frankly unbelievable to have the man himself wander in off the street.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, digging my hands into the pockets of my overalls in an attempt to appear relaxed. Somehow I doubt I pulled it off.

  ‘Hi.’ He smiled at me across the counter. ‘Nice red eye.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got kicked in the face by a steer.’

  ‘Ouch,’ he said. ‘What are you doing after work?’

  ‘Um, nothing much, I don’t think,’ I said stupidly.

  ‘You’re on call,’ said Thomas at my elbow, where he was pretending to work on an internet order to Masterpet but actually listening avidly.

  ‘There you go,’ I said. ‘I’m on call.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mark Tipene. ‘I was wondering if you could come and have a drink.’

  ‘Yeah, go on,’ said Richard, coming up to the counter beside me. ‘I’ll swap nights with you, so you don’t get interrupted.’ And the rotten lousy sod leered at me, right in front of one of our nation’s sporting heroes. I kicked him in the shin.

  ‘Ow!’ he said. ‘Sure you don’t want to reconsider, mate?’

  Mark smiled and shook his head. ‘What d’you reckon?’ he asked me.

  ‘Um,’ I said. ‘Okay. Um. Thanks.’ Gracious and articulate acceptance it was not.

  Richard clapped me encouragingly on the shoulder. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ said Keri. ‘Go on, Helen, it’s ten to five. I’ll shut down your computer for you.’

  ‘I – I’ll just go and take off my overalls,’ I muttered, and fled back into the vet room.

  ‘What on earth is the matter?’ my boss asked, glancing up from his docket book.

  ‘I’m going out for a drink with Mark Tipene,’ I said, feverishly shedding the overalls.

  Nick looked profoundly unimpressed by this momentous news. ‘I wouldn’t let it go to my head, if I were you,’ he said. ‘Did you book in Rex’s lepto vaccinations?’

  ‘Not yet. He wasn’t home when I rang.’

  ‘Follow it up tomorrow, will you? And you might like to turn your collar out the right way.’

  I did, took a couple of deep breaths for good measure and went back out.

  ‘Bye, kids,’ said Thomas. ‘Have fun.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Richard said. And as we reached the door, which he must have judged to be a safe distance, he called, ‘Be gentle with him, Helen.’

  We went silently out the automatic doors and turned up the street. ‘I’m sorry about those idiots,’ I said at last. My friend Alison never feels these irresistible urges to fill uncomfortable pauses. She just smiles, and thus appears poised and slightly mysterious. I admire this approach greatly but am utterly unable to replicate it.

  ‘It’s fine. They seem nice.’

  ‘They are,’ I said, and there was another uncomfortable pause while I searched desperately for a nonchalant, witty remark. Sadly, the one I came up with was, ‘We’ve got a picture of you in the lunch room, with no shirt on.’

  ‘Right,’ said Mark blankly.

  I closed my eyes in anguish. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  He laughed. ‘Helen. Get a grip.’

  I opened my eyes again before I walked into a wall, which really would cement this Complete Birdbrain impression I was crafting with such loving care. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Right. Will do.’

  Your choices, if you want to go out for a drink in downtown Broadview, are fairly limited. There’s the Returned Servicemen’s Association, where the average age of the patrons is somewhere over eighty and you can get roast hogget (which really means very old cull ewe) and boiled mixed veg from five pm on Tuesdays for $12.95, or the Broadview Hotel, where the serious drinkers lurk and where, twenty-odd years ago, a man shot his straying wife at point-blank range with a shotgun. Sam claims that you can still see the bloodstain on the carpet in front of the bar, but my cousin never lets the truth get in the way of a good story. If you wandered in and asked for a glass of chardonnay they probably wouldn’t say ‘Piss off, you queer’ out loud, but you’d be in no doubt that they were thinking it.

  That leaves the Stockman’s Arms, just down the road from the vet clinic. Mark opened the door and followed me in out of the crisp July dusk, ducking to avoid the set of rusty harrows draped artistically around the doorframe. It was barely five and the place was almost empty.

  ‘What would you like to drink?’ he asked.

  ‘Um,’ I said. He was going to think I was incapable of starting a sentence with anything else. ‘Ginger beer, please.’ I was being quite enough of an idiot already without alcohol.

  ‘Grab a seat while I get the drinks,’ he said.

  I sank into a chair at a corner table and took deep slow breaths, as advised by the small rodent-like man who taught Beginner’s Yoga courses at the Broadview Community Centre. It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. It is better to remain silent . . . In yoga classes we were urged to use ‘I am a clear vessel filled with pure white light’ as our mantra, but I was adapting as the situation required.

  Mark pulled out the chair opposite mine and sat down, passing me a bottle of ginger beer. ‘How’s that eye feeling?’ he asked.

  I put up a hand and touched my sore cheekbone. ‘Not too bad. It looks worse than it is. How about yours?’

  ‘Oh, it’s fine.’

  ‘That’s good.’ I took a careful sip of ginger beer and put the bottle down, which filled up four seconds.

  He arranged three cardboard coasters in a nice straight line, using up another six.

  I examined the fingernails of my right hand, which had a greenish tinge and would have been improved by a few minutes’ work with a nailbrush. ‘It’s your turn to say something now,’ I said. Remaining silent was all very well in theory, but I couldn’t take the strain.

  ‘I’m trying to think of something worth saying.’

  ‘How’s that going?’

  ‘Badly. So, how did you manage to get kicked in the face?’

  ‘I was trying to unwind a bit of wire from around a steer’s leg
,’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t tie it up first?’

  ‘I did, but the man holding the leg rope got distracted by a passing wood pigeon and let go.’

  ‘Top bloke,’ he remarked.

  ‘John’s one of my very favourite farmers. Usually when you turn up you find he’s rescuing worms out of a puddle and the cow’s still out the back somewhere. And he has a pet chicken called Esmeralda.’

  ‘I had a pet chicken when I was about five,’ said Mark.

  ‘What was it called?’

  ‘Chicky.’

  ‘Good name,’ I said.

  ‘I know. Really original.’ He smiled at me across the table.

  ‘Were you a country kid, then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘My parents had a sheep farm out of Stratford.’

  ‘Had?’

  ‘Dad’s still there. Mum lives in Cairns now. Where did you grow up?’

  ‘About two blocks that way,’ I said, gesturing with my ginger beer bottle. ‘My dad’s a dentist in town.’

  Exhausted by this burst of conversation, we relapsed into silence and gulped thankfully at our drinks in preparation for the next round. Some people, I am told, actually enjoy this first-date mutual appraisal disguised as casual conversation, but I think I’d rather go to a preschool ukulele concert. Or a Brazilian waxing appointment. Or –

  My mental list of the world’s least enjoyable pastimes was brought up short by the bang of swinging doors and the clatter of harrows. Fenella Martin, trailing an acre or so of black crushed-velvet skirt, swept into the pub. There was a man with her but he was largely obscured by the billowing draperies. Fenella came right up to the edge of our table in a cloud of stale incense and said, ‘They told me you were here.’

  Those treacherous swine. ‘How’s Farrah?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s got diarrhoea,’ said Fenella. She was wearing a remarkably nasty crocheted magenta vest, which matched the magenta plastic rose nestling coyly behind her right ear.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘Is she still eating?’

  She didn’t answer, but bent and picked up a crocheted bag (also magenta – it’s nice to see a woman accessorising with such attention to detail). She burrowed through the bag and emerged with a peanut butter jar, an inch of sinister brown material in the bottom. ‘Look at this.’ She shook the jar and its contents slopped up the side. ‘That was this morning’s – and here’s one from yesterday . . .’ She rummaged through the bag again. ‘A bit runny, but not nearly so bad.’ She put both samples down in the middle of the table for me to examine at my leisure.

  ‘It could be the antibiotics,’ I said. ‘Is she still eating?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fenella admitted grudgingly.

  ‘Then it’s probably nothing to worry about. Or would you like to bring her in tomorrow for a check-up?’

  ‘I’d have to leave her,’ said Fenella. ‘I’m going to Auckland for the day.’

  ‘That’s fine. She can spend the day with us.’ I pushed the two jars towards the edge of the table.

  ‘You keep them,’ Fenella said with touching generosity.

  3

  ‘DID HE THINK IT WAS FUNNY?’ ALISON ASKED WHEN I described this debacle during our lunchtime walk the next day.

  ‘I think so, but they sat down at the next table, so we couldn’t laugh out loud,’ I said. ‘And then they figured out who Mark was and turned around to talk to him. And then all of Undershott’s Accounting came in and he had to pose for about seventeen photos. Are we going up Birch Crescent today?’

  ‘Absolutely – now you’re going to be a Wag you’ll have to pay extra attention to your figure.’ She turned purposefully up Broadview’s steepest street, ponytail swinging from the back of her Nike cap.

  ‘A what?’ I asked, labouring behind her as she bounded gazelle-like up the hill.

  ‘A Wag. You know – wives and girlfriends. They spend all their time shopping and making exercise DVDs. Did he ask for your number?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said. And in an attempt to act like a girl who couldn’t care less whether or not the handsome and charming All Black called I added brightly, ‘I suppose I could always get his number off Hamish. And then we could all go out together on a double date.’

  Alison shuddered. ‘If that dickhead calls me Head Nurse again I’ll . . . actually, I don’t know what I’ll do. But it won’t be good.’

  ‘What’s wrong with calling you Head Nurse? You are.’ Although there were only two nurses at the Broadview Medical Centre and the other one should really have been pensioned off ten years ago, so this title wasn’t quite as impressive as it sounded.

  ‘What do you call a nurse with dirty knees?’

  ‘Huh?’ I asked, puzzled by this seemingly random question.

  ‘Head nurse,’ said Alison patiently.

  ‘Oh-h. That’s actually kind of funny.’

  ‘The first five times, perhaps.’

  The cell phone in the pocket of my track pants began to ring, and I fished it out. ‘It’ll be Thomas with a calving,’ I said, not even bothering to look at the screen. ‘Hey, what’s up?’

  ‘Helen? Hi, it’s Mark here.’

  ‘Oh! Hi!’

  Alison looked at me questioningly.

  ‘I’m sorry to call you in your lunch break – the vet clinic gave me your mobile number.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said.

  ‘It’s probably against the Privacy Act or something.’

  ‘Thomas gives my number to all sorts of dodgy people.’ I thought about that little statement as it left my mouth. ‘I – I mean – not meaning that you are . . .’

  Alison rolled her eyes, and I turned my back on her.

  He laughed, which was kind of him. ‘You wouldn’t be free to go out for dinner tonight, would you?’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m on call.’

  ‘What about tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m on call for the weekend too.’

  Alison, having walked around to stand in front of me again, slumped despairingly onto the pavement and struck her forehead with the heel of her hand. An elderly gentleman hoeing his veggie garden across the street leant his hoe against the fence and started anxiously towards her.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Mark. ‘Another time, maybe.’

  ‘My dear, are you alright?’ the elderly gentleman called.

  ‘Fine,’ said Alison hastily, standing back up. ‘Just fine.’

  ‘Um,’ I said, ‘look, d’you want to come to my place for tea? I might have to go and calve a cow or something in the middle of it, that’s all.’

  ‘That’d be great,’ he said. ‘I’ll grab fish and chips.’

  ‘Dog waiting for you in the kennels,’ said Thomas when I got back to the clinic.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘You’re the vet.’

  ‘You’re so sweet and helpful,’ I said.

  Thomas waggled his eyebrows at me. He had evidently been squeezing a spot on his nose, which did nothing to enhance his looks. ‘And Max Tarrant rang wanting his blood results.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re back yet, but I’ll have a look.’

  ‘Hey, Helen, check this out,’ he ordered, and I veered obediently around behind the counter to look at his computer screen. With the aid of Google he had summoned up a long list of websites. Mark Tipene Wikipedia. Mark Tipene All Blacks. Mark Tipene images. Mark Tipene articles. Mark Tipene’s official Facebook site. Mark Tipene YouTube clips . . .

  ‘Here you go,’ he said, moving the mouse to enlarge a shirtless photo of a mud-streaked, olive-skinned god, chest muscles rippling, rugby ball in one big hand and a look of grim determination on his face. Very nice, if tall, dark and muscle-bound is your thing. It never had been my thing – I liked ’em lean and blond and surfy. But still, very nice. ‘Did he get hold of you?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘None of your business.’r />
  ‘You know,’ Thomas said, ‘I could always book in Hohepa’s herd leptos at milking. Morning milking. Cups on at four.’

  ‘That’s blackmail!’ I said. Michael Hohepa milked fourteen hundred cows and was legendarily grumpy.

  Thomas shrugged. ‘So?’

  ‘Do your worst,’ I said. ‘If I start giving in to blackmail now it’ll just be the start of a slippery slope.’ And with that I put my nose in the air, pulled my shoulders back, and swept off towards the vet room. Unfortunately I tripped over the cord of Thomas’s fan heater as I went, which rather spoilt the effect.

  Thomas sniggered as he turned back to his computer. ‘Would you look at this?’ he said reverently, and I did before I could help myself. ‘Here’s a few of his girlfriends. Underwear model Nicole Rakovich – that one’s only dated the thirteenth of April this year. And before that Tamara Healy . . . She plays netball, doesn’t she?’

  ‘She’s the captain of the Silver Ferns,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the one. Shit, you wouldn’t kick her out of bed, would you? Legs up to her armpits. And that blonde girl who used to do the weather report, and . . .’

  I turned and fled, wondering why on earth the man did want to see me again.

  I got home at six forty-five, having been detained by a sneezing rat just on closing time and then a heifer with a prolapsed uterus at half past five. It was dark and the house was freezing. Murray the ginger cat met me at the kitchen door and wound himself insistently around my ankles.

  Murray and I lived in a poky farm cottage ten kilometres west of Broadview. It was just the two of us; after six months of sharing a two-bedroom flat in central London with three other people, I’d got home quite desperate for solitude.

  The place was carpeted throughout in orange nylon, which clashed horribly with everything else. An enormous and nasty conifer blocked most of the afternoon sun, the windows rattled when the tanker went past and my landlord only graded his tanker track (which was also my driveway) when the dairy company threatened to stop picking up his milk. But these were very minor flaws. When I bought food it stayed in the fridge until I wanted to eat it, and nobody ever came home drunk in the early hours of the morning to play house music at about a million decibels on the other side of the bedroom wall.