‘You can come and live with us,’ Caitlin offered, looking up suddenly from her notebook. ‘I’ll help you look after your baby when I’m not at school.’
‘I want to look after the baby too,’ said Bel. ‘Can I, Helen?’ She squirmed around in my lap to throw her arms around my neck, kneeing me firmly in the stomach as she went.
‘Bel!’ I cried, doubling over. ‘Be careful!’
‘Go to your room,’ Em ordered. ‘Right this instant.’
Bel fled, sobbing, and I pushed myself up to follow her.
‘Leave her, she’s alright,’ said Em. ‘Helen, love, I really think you need to talk to Mark about what you’re going to do.’
‘I know. It’s just – he’s hurt his shoulder again, and he’s really stressed about it.’ At least, I assumed he was – he hadn’t said so, and I hadn’t pursued the subject. Asking people if they’re worried about their potentially career-ending injuries seems just a bit too much like prodding their open wounds to see if they hurt.
‘Well, why not put your name down at the day-care centre in town in the meantime?’ Em said. ‘Christine Marshall tells me there’s a waiting list of up to a year.’
‘Yeah, okay,’ I said without enthusiasm.
I got home just on dusk – a beautiful clear, pink dusk with one star out – and found Murray waiting on the deck.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Sorry I’m late again.’
Murray rose gracefully and wound himself around my ankles. Picking him up, I sat down on the top step and rubbed him behind the ears, and he began to purr in approval. Just then, low in my abdomen, something quivered. I sat very still, holding my breath. There it was again: a faint stirring sensation as the baby moved. Oh. Wow.
I thought, as I sat with one hand pressed to my stomach, watching the stars come out, that this really was a revoltingly sappy way to behave. Woman resents unborn child, child quickens, woman has epiphany and is suffused with tenderness for the innocent new life burgeoning within her. How corny. How unoriginal. How wet. But there you go.
Eventually I got up, fed Murray and fetched the lemon spaghetti from the fridge. I ate it cold, standing at the kitchen bench, and then washed the plate and went to get the phone.
‘Hello?’ Em said.
‘Hi. It’s me. I – I just wanted to say you don’t have to worry anymore. I’m going to be a good mother.’
‘Helen, sweetie, of course you are!’ she cried.
‘I know I’ve been acting like a dick, and I’m sorry.’
‘You have not been acting like a dick. Has she, Tim?’
‘No more so than usual, as far as I’m aware,’ came Dad’s voice.
‘Sweetie, you’re doing just fine,’ said Em. ‘When I was pregnant with Caitlin I spent the first two trimesters crying and eating potato-and-gravy from KFC. And she was planned.’
This information was surprisingly comforting. ‘Thanks, Em,’ I said. ‘Hey, what did Lachlan Johnson do?’
‘He rubbed poo in another child’s hair. His own poo. He brought it to school in a little container.’
‘What – “Here’s one I prepared earlier”?’
‘Exactly,’ said Em solemnly. ‘It was a premeditated act.’
25
‘ARE YOU DOING ANYTHING THIS WEEKEND?’ ALISON ASKED the next day, vaulting lightly over a stile into the Broadview Wildlife Park. This optimistically named spot was a smallish paddock on the southern edge of town, home to three sheep, several roosters and one tatty peacock. However, it was reached by a flat, tree-lined road, which made it a far nicer summer destination than the sun-baked heights of Birch Crescent.
‘Going to the Blues–Chiefs game tomorrow night, and then on to someone’s engagement party,’ I replied, jumping down after her with a thud.
‘How glamorous.’
‘Except that none of my good clothes fit anymore. I’ll probably have to wear Nick’s overalls.’
‘Who knows? You might start a trend.’
‘Somehow I doubt it,’ I said morosely. ‘What are you guys doing this weekend?’
‘Having dinner with your grandmother.’
I looked at her in flat disbelief. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Well, there you go. And I thought Sam liked you.’
‘I think your grandmother’s hilarious,’ said Alison. ‘I do her diabetic checks. She always calls me “young lady”, and she never does anything I suggest.’
‘She’ll probably cook you tripe,’ I said.
‘We’re taking fish and chips.’
‘That’s no guarantee. There might be a tripe entree.’
‘What is tripe, anyway?’ she asked.
‘The stomach lining of a cow. You boil it for a week or so and serve it with onions.’
‘Yummy,’ said Alison.
At ten past seven on Friday evening I stood in Mark’s gleaming chrome bathroom, looking despairingly at my reflection.
‘Ready?’ he called from the bedroom.
‘No!’ I called back.
He looked around the bathroom door. ‘What’s up?’
‘I can’t go out like this,’ I said, turning to face him. ‘Look at me.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
I looked down at the paisley wraparound skirt I had found in the back of my wardrobe the previous night. I’d tried it on with sandals and a long cream singlet and decided it was actually quite an elegant look, reminiscent of Gisele Bündchen. Now I could only assume I had been in some kind of pregnancy-induced hallucinogenic state. ‘I look like a whale wrapped in a curtain!’
‘You do not,’ he said.
‘I do too!’
‘Well, then, wear something else.’
‘Nothing else fits!’ I wailed.
Mark sighed. ‘Could we finish this conversation in the car? We’re late.’
I nodded sadly and went past him down the stairs. At the front door he turned me around with his good arm and kissed me. ‘Stop stressing, McNeil,’ he said. ‘You look beautiful.’
I put my arms up around his neck and hugged him tightly.
Saskia winced. ‘Not straight, Alan,’ she muttered.
Blue number four caught the lineout ball and lobbed it to the halfback. ‘Straight enough,’ said Mark. Then he winced in turn as a mob of red, black and gold players fell on the poor halfback like maddened wasps and turned the ball over.
‘Offside!’ Saskia barked, just before the whistle blew. ‘Good . . . Don’t waste it . . . Oh, for God’s sake! What a piss-poor excuse for a kick!’
‘Settle down, woman,’ Mark said. ‘It’s his first start, poor little sod.’
‘It’ll be his last if he can’t do better than that.’
Someone in the row behind us squealed, and I turned to see a woman with bright blue eye shadow waving frantically at the big screen above our heads.
The camera was of course centred on Mark, who glanced up for a moment, smiled in a friendly sort of way and turned back to Saskia. She looked up too, and waved. Wonderful ambassadors for New Zealand Rugby, the pair of them. I, however, spent my second and a half on national television staring in horror at my own reddening face.
As the coverage flicked back to the field, Mark looked at me and began to laugh. ‘It’s your fault,’ I told him, pressing the palms of my hands to burning cheeks. ‘You know what I’m like; you should have left me in the car.’
‘I once lost a Malteser down my front at an All Black game,’ Saskia said, ‘and the whole country got to watch me fish for it before I realised I was on TV.’
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Or are you just trying to make me feel better?’
‘Really,’ she said.
‘She loved it,’ said Mark. ‘Probably did it on purpose. Some people’ll do anything for fifteen minutes of fame.’
In the next twenty minutes we were treated to two opposition tries and a single penalty kick by the Blues, which missed. ‘Shit,’ said Mark as the half-time hoote
r blew.
‘It could be worse,’ Saskia said. ‘They could be winning without you.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ he said.
The second half was very tense, as the Blues clawed their way back into the game. But they never clawed their way into the lead, and in the end they lost by two points.
‘Crap,’ said Saskia, as the Chiefs fullback kicked the ball into touch, ending the game. She got to her feet and stretched. ‘Want to come with me, Helen, or wait for Tip to sign autographs?’
‘I’ll wait, but thank you.’
‘No, you’d better go,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll be a while.’
When we got to the bottom of the steps I stopped and looked back – Mark was posing for photos with a couple in their fifties at the end of our row of seats, and a queue was forming in the aisle.
‘We were having tea at a restaurant in Cook’s Beach a few weeks ago, and a woman came and sat beside him and put her hand on his thigh,’ I told Saskia. A fairly brazen move, I had felt, when he was dining with another woman at a table for two.
‘Classy,’ she said.
‘She didn’t even look like she was drunk.’
Saskia grinned. ‘That’s just an occupational hazard of hanging out with Tip in public. I remember once when he and Alan were flatting together we got home from the pub and counted fourteen phone numbers written on Tip’s arm.’
‘Did he copy them all down and work his way through the list?’ I asked.
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ she said, evading a pack of blue-clad teenagers who were making their way up the steps against the tide of people leaving the stadium. ‘But he was only about nineteen, and nineteen-year-old boys aren’t usually known for their taste and discrimination.’
‘What was he like back then? He told me he was a cocky little shit.’
‘When I met him I thought he was an arrogant dickhead. And then I got to know him a bit better, and figured out that he was actually just a scared kid.’
‘Scared of what?’ I asked.
Saskia shrugged. ‘Failure. Getting kicked off the team.’
‘But he was really good, wasn’t he?’
‘He was amazing. He was an All Black three years before Alan was. But when you get told your whole life that you’re useless, you start to believe it.’
‘Saskia!’ called a cheerful-looking Samoan woman from the top of the steps, forcing me to abandon this fascinating line of questioning.
‘Hey, Maria!’ Saskia called back. ‘Helen, this is Maria Mamoe, Aleki’s wife. Helen’s Tip’s partner, Maria.’ Aleki Mamoe was the Blues’ starting openside flanker. A top bloke, Mark said, who always played in his lucky boxer shorts. I liked the thought of one hundred and twenty kilograms of muscle-bound rugby player needing to wear his lucky undies on the field. ‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Maria. ‘Pretty crap game, eh? I’m going to kick that man’s bum when he gets home. He gave away two penalties.’
Mark’s friends’ engagement party was being held at a bar in Newmarket, and it was nearly ten when Saskia and I got there. We were met at the door by the wall of noise you get when a couple of hundred people are screaming at the tops of their lungs over a live band in a space about twenty metres square.
It was very hot inside, and Saskia was immediately drawn into a circle of people. She introduced me to the man on my right and we roared pleasantries at one another.
‘Sorry? What was your –? Oh, hi, Greg. Oh, Craig. Sorry. Nice to meet you. I’m Helen. Helen . . . Never mind.’
Almost any remark sounds completely inane after you’ve repeated it three times at the top of your voice. After a while I stopped trying and settled for nodding and smiling. And a while after that I realised my smile had become fixed and my nod was turning into a nervous tic, and slunk off to the toilets to regroup.
Putting my bag down on the edge of the bathroom sink, I rummaged through it in search of a hairbrush. A pen . . . Bel’s turtle, mysteriously returned . . . a box of Tampax – now that was ironic . . . a cheque book for an account I had closed a year ago . . . It was just possible that, one of these days, it mightn’t hurt to have a cleanout.
Behind me a toilet flushed, and I glanced up at the mirror to see a startlingly beautiful blonde girl emerge from a cubicle. She wore a little black dress with a halter neck – a sleek, clinging, sophisticated dress, unmarred by the merest wrinkle of knicker line – and her hair fell in glossy waves over her slim brown shoulders. I’m sure I would have been a trifle dispirited by the contrast between this radiant vision and myself in any case, but I recognised her, and I almost crumpled into the sink.
Of course I had known that Tamara Healy was a pretty girl. I had seen her playing netball on TV, lithe and blonde and coordinated and no doubt all sorts of other good things I wasn’t. But done up for a party she wasn’t just pretty, she was stunning.
Our eyes met in the mirror, and she smiled. She had a chipped front tooth, and the effect was oddly endearing. It seemed unfair that the woman’s only visible flaw should actually enhance her good looks. ‘Hot out there, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Um, yes,’ I whispered. ‘Very.’
Once she’d gone I hunted through my bag with renewed fervour and found not only my hairbrush but a tube of Lash Defying mascara. I brushed my hair until it shone, put on two coats of mascara and pulled the neck of my singlet down an inch, on the grounds that if cleavage is your distinguishing feature you might as well show it off. Then I picked up my bag and swept out of the toilets.
The band was taking a break, which decreased the noise level from deafening to merely loud. I was standing on the outskirts of the crowd, looking at a dense wall of shoulder blades and planning my route, when Alan Jaeger came in through the door to my left. He had the pink, scrubbed look of someone not long out of the shower and an angry red graze on his forehead.
‘Hi, Helen,’ he said, stopping beside me. ‘How are you?’
‘Very good. Hey, you were really great out there tonight.’
‘Thanks.’
‘The scrum looked awesome,’ I said.
‘Pity nothing else did. Drink?’
‘Not for me, thanks, but they’re handing out champagne over there,’ I said, pointing towards the far end of the bar.
Alan made a face. ‘Good on them.’
‘Alan,’ said the breathtaking Tamara Healy, appearing from behind a pillar. ‘Tough luck tonight. I hear you were legendary, as usual.’ She leant in to kiss his cheek.
‘Thanks,’ said Alan.
Straightening, she turned to me. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Tamara.’
‘Helen. Hi.’
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Tip’s Helen? Nice to meet you!’
‘You too,’ I said.
She turned back to Alan. ‘Jules was talking about going up to Pakiri on Sunday for a surf,’ she said. ‘Tommo and Becs are up there all week. Would you guys be keen if the weather’s good?’
‘Better check with the boss,’ said Alan. ‘There was talk of sanding window frames or something.’
Tamara laughed. ‘You two are so cute.’
Alan was hailed just then by a small round man in a Danger Mouse T-shirt and turned away, leaving the radiant vision and me alone.
‘He’s such a lovely guy,’ she said.
‘He is,’ I agreed.
‘And Saskia’s great, isn’t she? Although every time she and I go out for a quiet drink we end up dancing on the tables in some dodgy bar in the CBD at two am.’
I smiled, though a small, cold, loser-ish feeling formed in the pit of my stomach. Saskia had never asked me out to dance on tables. And the fact that table-dancing is about the last thing I would ever want to be doing at two am – or at any other time – was no consolation at all.
‘You’re a vet, aren’t you?’ Tamara asked, and when I nodded said, ‘I couldn’t do your job. I’d just turn into a blubbering mess if I had to put an animal down.’
I fought down an impulse to
reply with, ‘Oh, I love killing things. It’s a real high point of my job,’ and said instead, ‘You teach, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, I’ve got thirty-one new entrance kids this year. Five of them don’t speak English.’
‘Crikey.’
‘I know,’ she said, laughing. ‘It’s craziness. But so rewarding. I love it. It’s not just a job, it’s a vocation. Do you feel like that too?’
I had spent that morning following Anita up and down the pit of a herringbone cowshed, rectally palpating any cows she couldn’t confirm pregnant with the scanner. And in the afternoon I’d cleaned the post-mortem room freezer and ferried a trailerload of frozen cows’ feet from last year’s lameness training workshop to the clinic’s offal hole. ‘Absolutely,’ I said.
‘Oh, there’s Tip,’ said Tamara, waving.
Mark was easy to spot, being the tallest person in the place by about four inches. He was on the other side of the room talking to a man with a shiny bald head, and he smiled as our eyes met.
‘Isn’t his shoulder just the worst luck?’ Tamara continued. ‘Just when he was getting on top of that wrist thing, too.’
‘Wrist thing?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Oh, he broke his scaphoid when we were in Cairns last Christmas, being an idiot on a skateboard. His mum was so cross with him. I thought she was going to send him to his room without any pudding. It was hilarious. Is she very excited about the baby?’
‘I – um – haven’t met her,’ I said hoarsely. Mark had never suggested that I meet either of his parents, and our most exotic holiday destination had been a weekend in the Coromandel in January, during which a strong easterly wind had turned the sea into a sort of pulverised-jellyfish soup.
‘She’s lovely,’ said Tamara, smiling at me kindly.
‘That’s good.’
‘And Tip’s great, isn’t he? He’ll be a brilliant dad.’
‘Tamara’s really beautiful,’ I said, as Mark pulled the car out onto the street just before midnight. Such a stereotypical insecure-girlfriend remark, but it slipped out before I could catch it.
There was blank silence from the driver’s seat.
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