Chocolate Cake for Breakfast Read online

  ‘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.

  ‘Want some warm water?’ he asked.

  ‘No, cold’s better.’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  I scrubbed at an ear with my fingernails; there was a towel hanging up in one corner of the room, but it looked like it had been festering there unwashed for at least a decade. ‘The theory is that the warm water makes your pores open, and then the smell really gets in.’
r />   ‘I see. Do you have anything against soap, then?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Is there some?’

  He looked around the room. ‘Ah. No.’

  ‘Never mind; we can scrub properly at home.’

  I carried an armful of gear out to the ute and retrieved my docket book, bringing it back into the milk room and opening it on top of a plastic drum in one corner. Rotten calving, head back. Full foetotomy. Time on farm: two hours. And Joe could pay for both of them, the miserable old sod. Drugs used – but at this point Mark pulled his filthy T-shirt off over his head and I temporarily lost my train of thought. He was beautiful: sleek and muscled and perfectly proportioned.

  He looked up and caught me staring, and I felt my face get hot. This was a shame; those of us whose faces are round and rosy to start with are not improved by blushing. It makes us look far too much like peeled tomatoes.

  There was a tense, electric silence. One of those really meaningful silences when you realise suddenly that if you said just the right thing – or didn’t say anything – or smiled, or kissed the other person, or something, it could be absolutely perfect. But if you’re me, you’ll probably just cock it up instead.

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered, bending again to my docket book, and the moment vanished like mist in the sun.

  ‘What do you charge for something like this?’ Mark asked, running his T-shirt under the tap and beginning to scrub his arms with it. There was a tattoo on the inside of his right forearm, a pattern of thin interlocking whorls that snaked from wrist to elbow.

  ‘Hmm? Oh, four or five hundred dollars.’

  On the way back up the driveway we got a clear view through Joe’s living room window. He was lying back at his ease in an armchair in front of the TV, coffee mug in hand. I leant on the horn in the hope he’d jump and spill his coffee, but he never even glanced in the direction of the ute.

  During the ten-minute drive home the conversation touched on the weather, the Super Rugby schedule and the relative merits of Neutrogena foaming facial scrub and Jif in removing the smell of dead calf from your hands. I parked the ute between Mark’s beautiful car and my scruffy one and we climbed out into the frosty darkness.

  ‘Would you like to come in for a coffee?’ I asked, the blood rushing once more to my cheeks as it occurred to me that asking someone in for a coffee really just means, ‘Do please come in if you feel like sex.’ Hastily I added, ‘Or a shower.’ Awesome. That’s cleared it up nicely.

  ‘No, it’s getting late,’ said Mark. ‘I’ll let you get to bed.’

  ‘Um,’ I said for about the thirtieth time in our short acquaintance. Presumably refusing the coffee actually meant, ‘I don’t find you all that attractive.’ I wished I was better at this stuff; gaucheness might be charming in the heroine of an old-fashioned romantic novel, but in the real world it’s just a major turn-off. ‘Okay. Thank you for coming with me – I’d never have calved that cow by myself.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’ He reached out to straighten the ute’s aerial, bent after an unfortunate sliding-sideways-into-a-hedge incident the month before, and said abruptly, ‘Can I see you tomorrow?’

  I blinked at him in surprise. ‘After covering you in rotten calf?’

  ‘Yeah. If that’s okay by you.’

  ‘I – yes, of course it is. Who knows, you might even get to do another horrible calving.’

  ‘I can hardly wait,’ he said solemnly.

  ‘How come you’re allowed to wander around the countryside calving cows instead of concentrating on rugby?’ I asked.

  ‘They try to give the guys who played in the Super Rugby final a bit of a rest before the Tri Nations games.’

  ‘That’s nice of them,’ I said. ‘Would you like to come for tea, or will Hamish be upset that you’re not spending enough quality time with him?’

  ‘There’s only so much quality time a man can spend with Hamish before being forced to hit him over the head with something heavy.’

  I smiled; too much Hamish affected me in exactly the same way. ‘So why go and stay with him for a week?’

  ‘Oh, well, it’s nice to get out of Auckland. And he had a couple of big farm jobs he needed a hand with. Retagging the herd, and giving them all copper bullets.’ He pulled his ear sheepishly. ‘And then I met this really great girl on the weekend, and I wanted to see a bit more of her.’

  ‘I – I’m not that great,’ I stammered, and then gave myself a swift mental kick. There was just no need to take gaucheness to these new and previously unscaled heights. Or depths. ‘You know, it’s going to be really embarrassing if you were talking about someone else.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ said Mark, and closing the distance between us in two long strides he bent his head and kissed me.

  At age twelve, or thereabouts, I had spent quite a bit of time envisaging that magical first kiss from the handsome stranger. I would be looking my best, obviously, gowned in cornflower blue and slender as a reed. The setting varied from an orchard white with blossom, to a candlelit ballroom, to a lonely shore where little waves broke hissing against the shells. (It’s probably unnecessary to say that my idol, at twelve, was Anne of Green Gables.)

  I hadn’t planned to be dressed in khaki overalls and have one red eye. Neither had my imagined perfect kiss involved the handsome stranger saying conversationally, when at length he let me go, ‘You smell terrible.’

  I laughed. ‘Well, so do you.’

  ‘True,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to wash before tomorrow. What should I bring?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ll ring you if I get called out, but if you make it here before me there’s a key to the back door on a nail at the top left-hand side of the doorframe.’

  ‘Thank you. It seems a bit rough that you’re on call two weekends in a row.’

  ‘It’s usually only one in five,’ I told him. ‘And two in five over spring. But I swapped weekends, because I’ve got to go to Taupo in a few weeks’ time.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mark. ‘I thought perhaps being on call was a handy excuse when some dodgy bloke asks you out and you don’t want to go.’

  I shook my head, and he pulled me back up against him.

  5

  ‘SO, HOW WAS YOUR EVENING WITH MARK TIPENE?’ ALISON asked the next day as we marched along the road past Broadview Nissan. A salesman paused in the act of polishing a car bonnet to admire Alison’s pert lycra-clad bottom, then realised she’d noticed and began to polish with renewed vigour.

  ‘It was really nice,’ I said. ‘Which is surprising, since we spent it doing a disgusting rotten calving for Joe Watkins.’

  ‘How romantic.’

  ‘It was. Especially the bit where Mark got to put his arm into the cow up to the shoulder, when he had no overalls or gumboots.’

  ‘Where was Joe?’ she asked.

  ‘Inside watching TV,’ I said. ‘Horrible old coot.’

  ‘I’m not actually telling you this because it would be a breach of client confidentiality, but he comes into the medical centre every couple of months for an injection and he’s got a tattoo of a topless girl on his bum.’

  ‘Is it a nice tattoo?’

  ‘No,’ she said decidedly. ‘Very tasteless.’

  As opposed to all those really tasteful tattoos of topless girls that you see around the place. I had a hopeful thought. ‘Is the injection for some fatal disease?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Alison. ‘But it is a painful injection, if that makes you feel better.’

  ‘It does. Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome. So, are you seeing your All Black again tonight?’

  ‘No.’ I aimed a kick at a pebble, and missed. After two years of junior soccer, during which my parents spent their Saturday mornings watching me pick buttercups in my corner of the field, I was allowed to go to singing lessons instead. ‘He was going to come for tea, but he rang this morning and said the guy who was supposed to be playing number four tomorrow had just fallen off his motorbike and dislocated hi
s thumb, so he’s gone to Dunedin to play rugby instead.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Alison.

  We strode on past Alcot’s Farm Machinery, waving to Sam, who was deep in conversation with a farmer in front of an enormous self-unloading trailer.

  ‘He kissed me goodnight,’ I said to my feet.

  ‘Did he?’ Alison is a most satisfactory friend; when you make some momentous announcement you can be quite confident she’ll treat your news with the attention you feel it deserves. She never responds with, ‘Cool. Hey, guess who I saw this morning?’

  ‘How was it?’ she asked.

  ‘Lovely,’ I said. Thrilling. Perfect, in fact, smell notwithstanding. Anything less like kissing the previous model – which was pleasant and familiar and about as exhilarating as a bowl of rice pudding – would have been difficult to imagine. ‘I got the impression he’s had quite a lot of practice.’

  ‘I expect he has. When are you going to see him again?’

  ‘Goodness only knows,’ I said sadly. ‘He’s flying out for South Africa on Tuesday, and then they’re playing Australia again on the way home the next weekend, and the weekend after that I’ve got to go to Mary-Anne’s hen’s weekend.’ It was all very depressing.

  ‘Oh,’ said Alison, sounding discouraged. Then, rallying gamely, she offered, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if that was quite a good thing. If he makes an effort to keep in touch you’ll know he really likes you.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t I’ll know the only reason he wanted to see me was that it was better than hanging out with Hamish.’

  On leaving work that night I turned left instead of right at Broadview’s only set of traffic lights, and went to visit my family. I parked the ute behind my stepmother’s car and let myself in through the garage. As I rounded the corner of the hall towards the kitchen there was a piercing shriek and Em roared, ‘Annabel! Stop that at once!’

  ‘Caitlin’s got my pink blanket!’ Annabel wailed.

  ‘She wasn’t even using it!’ Caitlin cried. ‘She only wants it because I need it for my hospital!’

  ‘Hey, munchkins,’ I said, arriving at the scene. Caitlin had climbed with the blanket to the top of a bookcase, while Bel protested beneath her.