Chocolate Cake for Breakfast Read online

  ‘I will take your advice on board,’ I said solemnly.

  Lance and I used to amuse ourselves by collecting phrases that mean the opposite of what they say. ‘I’ll certainly take that on board’ actually means ‘I’ve already made up my mind and nothing you can say will change it.’ As does: ‘I hear what you’re saying.’ And then there’s: ‘We really must catch up sometime,’ which can be translated as, ‘I will never make the slightest effort to get in touch with you.’

  ‘I don’t know why I’m wasting my breath,’ he said. ‘You’ve never listened to anything I’ve said in your life.’

  ‘I have too!’ I cried, stung.

  ‘When?’

  I groped for an example and, luckily, found one. ‘I’ve never put my feet on the dashboard since you told me the airbag would ram my knees through my brain if I was in a crash.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Lance, sounding pleased. ‘Well, there you go.’

  10

  ‘CUTE PUPPY,’ ALISON SAID, PUTTING HER HEAD AROUND the door of the treatment room at ten past twelve on Tuesday afternoon.

  ‘It is now,’ I said darkly. ‘It was less cute when it was awake.’ Also considerably louder, and quite determined to draw blood.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Broken ulna. The X-ray’s on the bench.’

  Alison held the X-ray up to the light and squinted at it in a professional manner. ‘Is that your hand?’

  ‘Zoe’s gone home sick,’ I said defensively. ‘It’s hard taking X-rays by yourself.’ Making cameo appearances in your patients’ radiographs is not exactly consistent with best practice. ‘I’m sorry about our walk; you might as well go without me.’

  Alison made a face. ‘It’s going to rain. I’ll stay and help you if you like.’

  ‘Thank you, you’re a true friend,’ I said, sticking a long strip of elastoplast down one side of the puppy’s foot. ‘Grab the end?’

  Alison stuck the end of the tape obediently to her finger. ‘How was the hen’s weekend?’ she asked.

  ‘It was good. Nice to catch up with everyone.’ I applied a second tape stirrup to the other side of the foot and started to wind a cotton bandage up the puppy’s leg. ‘Although it was a bit of a shame that Mary-Anne threw up over the till at the restaurant.’ On reflection, plying with cocktails a girl who gets giggly on a glass of weak shandy may have been a mistake.

  ‘Classy,’ Alison remarked.

  ‘What did you get up to?’ I asked.

  ‘Not a whole lot. I saw your cousin at the pub.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Sam,’ she said, transferring both ends of elastoplast to the same hand and holding the end of my bandage down with the other. ‘Oh, and Lydia Naylor and Tracey Reynolds had a fight.’

  ‘What about?’ I asked.

  ‘Apparently Tracey found a whole lot of dodgy text messages on her boyfriend’s phone. So she tried to pull Lydia’s hair out by the roots.’

  ‘How exciting,’ I said, starting on a layer of cast padding.

  ‘Never a dull moment,’ Alison agreed. ‘I must say it makes a pleasant change to have the patient asleep when you’re putting on the cast. I had a little boy try to bite me last week.’

  ‘That’s why I prefer animals. If a dog does that you can jab it with a pole syringe full of ketamine through the bars of the cage. Have you got a finger spare to hold down another layer of bandage?’

  ‘Just as long as you don’t incorporate my hand into your cast,’ she said, trapping the end of the padding layer under her left little finger.

  ‘I’ll try not to.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I opened a packet of Scotchcast and dropped it into a jug of water. It’s such cool stuff – water activates the resin and it heats up and hardens in mere minutes. In fact, it usually hardens about thirty seconds before you really want it to, just to keep you on your toes.

  ‘So,’ Alison asked casually, ‘any more visits from random All Blacks?’

  ‘Not one,’ I said, squeezing out the roll of Scotchcast and beginning to wind it up the puppy’s leg. ‘But they’re all in Wellington for the week, so Broadview’s a bit out of the way.’

  ‘What are they doing in Wellington?’

  ‘Training, visiting schools, kissing babies, making old ladies cups of tea – that kind of thing. Just bend that leg a tiny bit at the elbow? Cheers.’

  ‘When’s he getting back?’

  ‘Friday. D’you reckon I’ve got enough padding around the top there?’

  ‘Heaps,’ she said. ‘Stop trying to change the subject. Are you going to see him this weekend?’

  I nodded. ‘I’m going up to Auckland on Friday night.’

  ‘Wow. You really are going to be a Wag.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ I said. ‘You might jinx it.’

  Thomas opened the door of the treatment room. ‘Are you nearly done?’ he asked me. ‘Nick’s been held up at Hollis’s, so you’ll have to go and see the sick cow at Ian Weber’s.’

  ‘Ian doesn’t like me,’ I protested.

  ‘He doesn’t like anyone. What makes you think you’re special?’ said Thomas, withdrawing and shutting the door behind him.

  I sighed. ‘It’s so depressing going to Weber’s. He never believes a word I say.’

  ‘If Mark Tipene liked me I wouldn’t give a toss about whether or not Ian Weber did,’ said Alison, which I thought was an excellent point.

  I got back to work at ten to five on Friday afternoon, having just spent an hour and a half making a hole in the side of a cow, draining twenty litres of nasty brown fluid from her caecum and sewing her up again. I climbed out of the ute feeling extremely pleased with myself, went in through the back door to wash my surgery kit and ran smack into Richard.

  ‘Where the fuck did you put the blood transfusion bags?’ he demanded.

  This happy welcome removed just a bit of the gloss from my afternoon. ‘In the box with Blood Transfusion Bags written on the side, on the top shelf in the drug cupboard,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Dog with rat-bait poisoning. Nick’s supposed to be on call, and he’s way the hell up the valley doing a calving.’

  ‘Have we got a dog to use as a donor?’ I asked.

  ‘That thing of Keri’s.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, crossing the treatment room to open the small-animal drug cupboard and standing up on tiptoe to swat down the box. ‘Whose dog is it?’

  ‘Harvey’s. Some fancy bloody heading dog.’

  ‘Oh no. Not Nancy?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know,’ snapped Richard.

  ‘I’m not on call either!’ I snapped back.

  It was six o’clock by the time we’d taken blood from Keri’s labrador and run it into Don Harvey’s favourite, dog-trial-champion heading bitch. And six thirty once I had written out her vitamin K dosing instructions for Nick, whose small-animal medicine is fairly rusty. And five past seven, with my good mood well and truly gone, by the time I got home, showered, and threw a random assortment of clothes into a bag. Tearing back up the hall I located my cell phone in the pocket of the dirty overalls I had just flung into the washing machine and rang Mark.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hi. I’m so sorry – I’m running really late. I got stuck at work.’

  I held the phone between chin and shoulder and tipped a great mound of cat biscuits into Murray’s dish. ‘I’m just leaving now.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That’s a bugger.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said unhappily.

  ‘I just meant it’s a bugger for you to have a long day and then a two-hour drive. Would you like me to come down instead?’

  ‘No, I’m all organised. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.’

  I had no trouble at all finding my way to Mark’s house in Mount Eden, which was right at the end of a cul-de-sac. Actually, my navigation skills would have been a considerable surprise to my boss, who firmly believes I have no sense of direction, and tha
t when I got lost in my first weeks back in Broadview it had nothing to do with him sending me to farms via trees that had fallen down ten years ago and streams invisible from the road.

  I parked my elderly green Corona on the street, pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt against the drizzle and ran down a long and poorly lit driveway with a high brick wall on one side and an ornate wrought-iron fence on the other. Mark’s place was the first in a row of semi-detached townhouses, each front door approached by two shallow tiled steps and flanked by a pair of cypresses in big terracotta pots. It all looked terribly expensive and Tuscan. I thought of my weatherboard farm cottage with its peeling paint and ill-fitting windows and briefly considered turning around and running away.

  Before I could decide one way or the other, Mark opened the door. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You made it. How was the traffic?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said nervously. ‘Lovely place.’

  ‘You haven’t seen it yet.’

  ‘No, but the step’s nice.’ Oh, for heaven’s sake, girl, if you can’t say anything sensible just shut up.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, smiling. He stood aside to let me in, and closed the door. And then he put his arms around me and kissed me, and the cold lump of worry that had been growing in the pit of my stomach quietly dissolved.

  The more I found out about Mark, you see, the further out of my league he seemed. He was a proper, serious sportsman of the seen-once-in-a-generation type, whereas when I was small I was so clumsy that people kept anxiously testing my vision. He was idolised by half the country; I was idolised by Briar Coles, who, although sweet, was undeniably a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

  But it was difficult to focus on these depressing truths while kissing him, so I stopped trying and concentrated on the matter at hand. Eventually we broke apart and he picked up my backpack. We went hand in hand up a staircase with sandstone treads and into a big open-plan living area. There was a kitchen in one corner – all stainless-steel appliances and granite bench tops and with a fridge that looked like the mainframe of a spaceship – and another flight of stairs led from the middle of the room up to a mezzanine floor where I assumed his bedroom must be. Beyond the stairs was a great black leather sofa, two black leather armchairs and a huge plasma-screen TV.

  ‘Crikey,’ I said.

  ‘I’m told that this place has all the warmth and charm of a lawyer’s waiting room,’ said Mark.

  It did, too. The walls and flooring and kitchen cabinets were all beige, and the furnishings black. The only touch of colour was provided by two big canvases on the far wall, each one sporting a single red squiggle on a white background. I find it hard to be impressed by art that looks like it took longer to hang straight on the wall than it did to produce. However, those whose living rooms are a symphony of plum and orange are in no position to criticise anybody else’s interior design. And perhaps he loved it.

  ‘Have you had a good day?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s improving rapidly,’ he said. ‘Are you hungry?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  I turned and put my arms around his neck. ‘This is good.’

  He smiled, resting his forehead against mine. ‘Should we go to bed, then?’ he asked, apparently not feeling obliged to go red, stammer or otherwise act like an idiot. A novel approach, and vastly superior to mine.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said.

  He picked me up with no apparent effort – which was especially nice; it made me feel all delicate and waif-like – and carried me to the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Sexy,’ I remarked. ‘Very Officer and a Gentleman.’

  ‘Good, that’s what I was going for,’ he said, starting up the steps.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to put me down?’

  ‘Quite sure, thank you.’

  ‘Because it’d be a blow to fall down the stairs.’

  He reached the top without mishap and set me down. ‘Helen?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When I was imagining this, you talked a lot less.’

  11

  VERY, VERY CAUTIOUSLY, I SLID OUT FROM UNDER THE covers. I retrieved my T-shirt and knickers from the floor, put them on and padded across the room to a set of French doors leading out onto a balcony. A great web of lights stretched away beneath my feet, and away to the right was an unbroken stretch of darkness that had to be the sea.

  ‘Okay?’ Mark asked.

  I turned to see him watching me, propped up on his elbows.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Sorry I woke you.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ he said.

  ‘Lovely view.’

  ‘It’d be even better if you took your top off.’

  ‘Good line,’ I said admiringly. ‘Do you use it a lot?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Come here.’

  I went back across the room to sit beside him on the edge of the bed. He reached up and brushed my cheek with the back of his index finger, and my throat tightened painfully.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. This was untrue, but I had a suspicion that it might be a bit early for, ‘You are entirely perfect and completely wonderful, and I think I love you.’

  He moved over to make room for me and I slid under the covers beside him. There was a short silence, and he ran his hand up my leg from knee to hip. ‘I thought you didn’t like these,’ he said, tracing the lacy hem of the scarlet knickers.

  ‘Oh, well, I thought you might.’

  ‘I do. Please pass on my thanks to your stepmother.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I think not.’

  ‘Spoilsport.’

  ‘You could always tell her yourself.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said serenely. ‘I will.’

  I kicked him.

  ‘Stop that,’ he ordered, rolling over and pinning my legs with his.

  ‘You’re so hot,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Mark, smiling. ‘I work out.’

  ‘I meant your body temperature, you weenie.’ I lifted my head off the pillow to kiss his nose, which was nice and handy.

  ‘What’s your dad like?’ he asked.

  I was a little startled by this abrupt change of subject. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he’s about six foot seven, a fundamentalist Christian, collects guns, very protective of his daughters . . . Ow!’

  ‘We’ll try that again, shall we?’

  ‘Biting people is not cool,’ I said sternly.

  ‘Toughen up, McNeil, it didn’t even break the skin.’

  ‘I can see the headlines now. Innocent Girl Bitten by Crazed All Black. Wound Turns Septic. Major Surgery Required . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Amputation at the neck.’

  ‘The ultimate solution.’

  ‘So,’ he repeated patiently, ‘what’s your dad like?’

  ‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘Big and kind and a little bit slow – I mean, not stupid, but he’s always running late and you can’t hurry him up. What’s your dad like?’

  ‘Big and fierce,’ said Mark.

  ‘Is he proud of you?’

  He grimaced. ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  He rolled back onto his side and pulled me up against him. ‘She still cuts out every article that says something positive about me and sticks it in a scrapbook.’

  ‘That’s really nice,’ I said. ‘Your parents have split up, haven’t they?’

  ‘About ten years ago.’

  ‘Have either of them married again?’

  ‘Dad has. His new wife’s an interesting woman.’

  ‘Really interesting, or is that a polite way of saying she’s a hideous bitch?’

  ‘Hideous bitch,’ said Mark without the slightest hesitation.

  ‘A proper evil stepmother then,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. Not like yours.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘mine is pretty cool.’


  ‘How old were you when she came on the scene?’ he asked.

  ‘Fourteen. Poor Em – imagine finding that your new man comes as a package deal with a fat angry teenager.’

  ‘I struggle to picture you fat and angry.’

  ‘That’s very kind, but I was,’ I said. At fourteen I was appalled that my father thought he could replace Mum with some blonde bimbo who put her makeup on with a trowel and dressed like Erin Brockovich. And it took me a long time to figure out that if I wanted to lose weight I was going to have to do something a bit more proactive than tying a jumper around my waist to make my bottom look smaller. (It didn’t.)

  ‘What kind of hideous bitch is your stepmother?’ I asked. The hideous bitch comes in so many variations: there’s the brittle, lacquered type with the artificial laugh and the vicious one-liners, or the belligerent type who takes everything as a personal insult, or – But Mark sat up and looked down at me. ‘I’m not going to lie here and talk about stepmothers,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ve got better things to do.’

  I laughed. ‘What, like me?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ he said.

  The morning was dull and grey, with sharp angry squalls of rain hurling themselves at the windows. Lovely weather, I reflected, drifting into Mark’s space-age chrome bathroom for a shower. And it was a gorgeous shower – completely different from mine, which was like having someone piddle on your head.

  Mark wasn’t in bed when I came out, and I wandered back across the room to look out the French doors at the sprawl of roofs and trees below, with the harbour beyond stretching to the horizon.

  ‘Coffee?’ he called from downstairs.

  I went and looked down from the low wall overlooking the kitchen. ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Real coffee, or instant?’

  ‘Instant’s good,’ I said, and went downstairs to see him reach down two mugs from a shelf in his beige and steel kitchen.

  ‘Milk?’ he asked, spooning instant coffee from a metal canister.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  He added milk, filled both mugs from a tap in the corner of the sink and passed one over.