Chocolate Cake for Breakfast Read online

  I turned on the kitchen light and discovered that Murray had killed a sparrow while I was at work and plucked it all over the room. It was hard to believe so many feathers had fitted on one small bird. I picked up the little limp corpse, hurled it out across the dark lawn and turned to fetch the vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner cupboard was in the opposite direction to the fridge, and Murray yowled in protest.

  ‘Tough,’ I said. ‘You can wait. You should’ve eaten the sparrow.’

  The vacuum cleaner bag was full, and burst as I removed it from the machine. This was not entirely a surprise, since every time the vacuum cleaner had stopped sucking in the last five months I’d emptied the bag into the rubbish bin with the help of a fork, reflecting that I really must put vacuum cleaner bags on my shopping list.

  Ten minutes’ hard labour with a brush and shovel improved neither my temper nor Murray’s. I finally fed him, considered lighting the fire and decided showering was far more important.

  Leaving the outside door open I wrote, Come in. In shower. Beer in fridge on the back of last month’s power bill, left it on the edge of the kitchen table and ran down the hall.

  Having showered and dressed and dragged a brush through my hair, I wiped the bathroom mirror with the corner of a towel and looked critically at my reflection.

  The red eye was undeniably a drawback. It was a shame, because normally my eyes are my best feature, coffee-coloured with long dark lashes.

  My hair was better: long and dark and, thanks to thirty-six dollars worth of miracle serum from the hairdressers, even bordering on lustrous. I pulled a hank of it over the red eye, decided it just looked silly and tucked it back behind my ear.

  Round, pink cheeks – cute on a six-year-old but less so when you’re twenty-six. Freckles across nose, ditto. Skin otherwise good – family tradition states that Helen Has Lovely Skin. I’ve always suspected that family tradition states this mostly because I was quite overweight in my teens and my aunts wished to be encouraging. I made a face at myself in the mirror and went up the hall to find, surprisingly, not one but two men in my kitchen.

  ‘Hey, cuz,’ said Sam. ‘Bloody hell, what’d you do to your face?’

  ‘Hit it against a steer’s foot,’ I said. ‘Hi, Mark.’

  Mark was leaning against the table wearing a pair of faded jeans and a blue Adidas sweatshirt and looking far too tall, dark and handsome to trust as far as you could throw him. ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Have you guys met?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, we met on Saturday night while you were off playing with a cat,’ said Sam. ‘Hel, it’s freezing in here.’

  ‘I know. I’ll light the fire – I got home late.’

  He picked up a wodge of newspapers from the box beside the old-fashioned pot-belly stove. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘You clean your elbows.’

  I peered at the backs of my forearms. ‘Bugger.’

  ‘That’s our Helen,’ said Sam. ‘Washes once a month whether she needs to or not.’

  ‘Are you here for any particular reason?’ I enquired, running the dishcloth under the tap and scrubbing at the green stripes on the backs of my arms. Mark Tipene could never have laboured under the illusion that I was a model of wit and poise, but it did seem a shame to be making such a good job of coming across as a complete fool. Most people can at least manage to get clean while showering.

  ‘Just passing by,’ said Sam sunnily. ‘Is that an Audi R8 outside?’

  ‘It is,’ said Mark.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Sam, sighing a long and lustful sigh.

  Mark smiled. ‘I know. I love it very much.’

  ‘Where are the matches?’ Sam asked as he balled up sheets of newspaper.

  ‘In the wood box,’ I said, crossing the kitchen to toss the dishcloth through the laundry door. There was a newspaper-wrapped and most delectable-smelling parcel on the table beside a bottle of red wine. ‘Thank you, Mark; that smells great.’

  ‘It might pay to heat it up a bit,’ he said. ‘Have you been out wrestling with another steer?’

  I shook my head. ‘Just putting a heifer’s uterus back on the inside of the heifer. It was a nice easy one.’

  ‘What was its uterus doing on the outside?’

  ‘Sometimes when they push out the calf they keep pushing and the uterus comes out too, so you have to turn it back round the right way and tuck it back in.’

  ‘That sounds complicated,’ he said.

  ‘Not really.’ I perched on the edge of the table and pulled off one sock to demonstrate. ‘Imagine the sock’s a uterus, with a calf inside. So it’s attached at the vulva, and the rest of it’s just sort of flopping around inside the cow.’ I stuffed one hand into my sock and wiggled my fingers. ‘That’s the calf. Then the calf’s born –’ I withdrew my hand ‘– and if you’re unlucky he scratches the lining of the uterus on the way out and the cow keeps on straining. So the uterus comes out too, and it turns inside out as it comes because it’s attached at the vulva.’ I turned my sock inside out, holding the top still. ‘So you give the cow an epidural so she stops pushing, and stuff it all back in.’

  ‘What stops the cow pushing it all back out again?’ he asked.

  ‘Drugs,’ I said. ‘Oxytocin makes the uterus contract up –’ I balled up my sock in one hand to enhance my demonstration ‘– so it can’t flop out again. And some people sew the vulva shut, but I never bother.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr McNeil, for that fascinating obstetrical lecture,’ said Sam.

  ‘I liked it,’ Mark said mildly. ‘It was very informative.’

  ‘Thank you. So there, Sammy,’ I said.

  Sam attempted a sneer. It didn’t really come off; he hasn’t got the right kind of face for sneering. ‘He’s just being polite. It’s part of the job description when you’re a sporting legend and a role model.’ He closed the door of the wood burner and stood up, dusting his hands on his thighs. ‘Right. Reckon you’ve got it all under control?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘Thanks for lighting the fire.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’ He looked at Mark. ‘Going to South Africa next week?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s the plan, at this stage.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that. The lineout looks a bit sad without you. Okay, chaps, have a nice evening,’ said Sam. He opened the kitchen door and let himself out, and we heard him whistling as he went down the porch steps.

  ‘Nice bloke,’ Mark said.

  ‘He is. He’s my favourite cousin.’ I opened the warming drawer of the oven and took out my roasting dish.

  ‘You’ve got quite a few relatives around here, haven’t you?’

  ‘They’re everywhere,’ I said. ‘The district is overrun. There are twelve McNeil families in the local phone book, I think – thirty-eight of us at Christmas lunch.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘I know. Sometimes I think I was insane to come back home.’

  ‘Home from where?’

  ‘London,’ I said.

  ‘Why did you?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I’d been away for two years by last December, and it was cold and dark by four in the afternoon, and I didn’t like my locum job much. I always wanted to be a large-animal vet, and I was sick of constipated gerbils. So when Nick – my boss at the clinic here – rang up and offered me a cow job, I quit and got the next plane home.’

  ‘I never did a proper OE,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been a bit sad about it.’

  ‘But you must have done some pretty cool things instead,’ I said, spreading the fish and chips over the bottom of the roasting dish and stealing a chip just to make sure it was up to standard.

  He reached over to take a handful. ‘Spending half your life in the gym, travelling all over the world but never having time to see any of it, never-ending press conferences and schmoozing with sponsors . . .’

  ‘Don’t you enjoy it?’ I asked, startled. Half the little boys in the country dream of growing up to be an All Black.

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sp; ‘Yeah, of course. I still can’t quite believe they pay me to play rugby. But I get a bit sick of the politics and the publicity stuff sometimes.’

  ‘I bet you do,’ I said fervently. ‘Is it always like last night when you go out?’

  He ate a chip in a thoughtful sort of way. ‘Well, I’ve never had someone deliver cat shit to the table before.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that was special.’

  ‘I was a bit disappointed that you didn’t rush it to the lab for further testing,’ he said. I had dropped both samples smartly into the rubbish bin around the corner from the pub, having checked to make sure Fenella couldn’t see me from inside.

  ‘What I really should have done is taken the lids off those jars and hidden them in Richard’s ute. I wish I’d thought of it at the time.’

  ‘Who’s Richard?’

  ‘The tall skinny vet with the dodgy-looking goatee.’ I opened the fridge door and looked inside. ‘What would you like to drink? I’ve got beer, if you don’t mind Waikato, or that very classy-looking wine you brought with you. Or milk.’

  ‘Beer, please. I don’t think milk would give the right impression.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ I said, passing him a bottle. ‘You could ask for a fairy drink and still make a better impression than me and my cat shit.’

  ‘What on earth is a fairy drink?’ he asked.

  ‘Hot water and milk and sugar. Like a cup of tea without the tea.’

  ‘It sounds revolting.’

  ‘It is,’ I said. ‘But my little sister likes them.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Five. Fairy drinks are acceptable when you’re five.’

  ‘That’s quite an age gap,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. My dad married again, and he and my stepmother have two girls. They’re great.’

  ‘Any other brothers and sisters?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You?’

  ‘One big brother.’

  ‘I always wanted a big brother.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’d want mine.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  He made a face. ‘Rob hates pretty much everyone.’

  ‘Including you?’

  ‘Especially me.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, I suppose it’s a bit depressing having a world-famous little brother.’

  ‘I’m not that famous,’ he said.

  ‘You are, too. Thomas googled you this afternoon – he’s the one at the front desk with all that surplus Adam’s apple.’

  Mark looked pained. ‘Don’t you people have anything better to do?’

  ‘Well, it’s a quiet time of year,’ I said. ‘Calving’s only just getting going, and we’ve finished most of the herd lepto vaccinations.’ Just then my cell phone, balanced on the kitchen windowsill, started to ring. I picked it up and looked at the screen – it was Pauline the after-hours lady, which seemed a bit unfair after two calls already this evening. But perhaps it was just a quick phone query. ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘You sound very chirpy,’ Pauline remarked. ‘I’ll fix that. Joe Watkins has a calving. Live calf. He asked for someone who knew what they were doing.’ I had never actually met Pauline face to face; she was merely a gruff cynical voice on the end of the phone. In my head she was pushing sixty, with curlers and fluffy slippers, a cigarette permanently attached to her lower lip.

  ‘Did you tell him he was getting me?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. He hung up.’

  ‘I can hardly wait,’ I said, but I was talking to the dial tone. Putting the phone down on the edge of the table with a peevish little thump, I pulled my sweatshirt over my head. ‘I’m really sorry, I’ve got to go and calve a cow.’

  Mark crossed my kitchen and turned off the oven. ‘Can I come?’ he asked.

  ‘It’ll be awful,’ I said glumly, picking up the overalls hanging over the back of a chair and starting to put them on. ‘The guy’s our nastiest farmer, and the cows always look like toast racks, and his shed’s disgusting.’

  ‘Would you rather I just went away and let you get on with it?’

  I pulled myself out of my trough of Watkins-induced gloom. ‘I’d love you to come,’ I said honestly. ‘I expect I’ll need the moral support. It’s just such a lousy way for you to spend your evening.’

  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.