Chocolate Cake for Breakfast

by Danielle Hawkins

  ‘Isn’t she?’ I pressed. If you’re going to be an insecure nagging girlfriend you might as well do it properly.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’

  I drummed my fingertips on the window ledge of the car, and then stopped because it hurt my poor chewed nail beds.

  ‘Why did you guys break up?’

  Mark rested his head back against the car seat. ‘Could you just not?’ he asked.

  I very, very nearly burst into tears. ‘Fine.’

  He was already in bed when I came out of the bathroom, lying on his back with one arm behind his head. I switched off the lights and skirted the end of the bed in the dim orange glow of the security light outside. The baby began to squirm as soon as I lay down, and taking Mark’s hand I pressed it to my stomach so he could feel it too.

  ‘Fuck!’ he said, jerking his arm back. ‘Be careful!’

  ‘I’m sorry!’

  He removed his good arm from behind his head and massaged the bad shoulder. ‘Please don’t do that.’

  ‘Sorry. I forgot. I wanted you to feel the baby kicking.’

  He sighed, sat up and laid his palm against my stomach. ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s stopped now.’

  He gave my stomach a quick rub, the kind you give a puppy to make up for growling at it. ‘Oh well, next time. ’Night, love.’

  26

  MARK WAS OUT FOR ANOTHER SIX WEEKS WHILE HIS shoulder healed. He spent the time getting faster and fitter, going to physio and answering all questions on the progress of his injury, from me or anyone else, with, ‘Good, thanks.’

  We talked on the phone every day or so and saw each other most weekends, but things felt fragile and uneasy. We didn’t discuss moving in together or life post-birth, and eventually I pulled myself together and started researching my local childcare options.

  I began to look pregnant, which was an improvement on merely looking thick around the middle, and at work everyone got used to the new status quo, moved on to fresher gossip and stopped breaking off their conversations when I came into the room.

  On a dull and windy Tuesday afternoon in early April I parked the ute behind the clinic and climbed stiffly out from behind the steering wheel. I peeled off a dirty pair of Nick’s overalls, having now grown out of my own, collected an armful of muddy ropes to put through the washing machine and let myself in through the back door.

  ‘How’d it go?’ Thomas asked, leaning back in his chair and yawning as I came into the shop.

  ‘Disaster,’ I said shortly. After forty minutes of grappling with a calving jack, assisted by an unwilling farmer who really wanted to be covering his maize stack instead, I had managed to get the cow’s dislocated hip back into its socket. This led to great satisfaction all round for about fifteen seconds, until I moved the cow’s leg and the hip fell straight back out again. ‘We got it in, but it wouldn’t stay there. The socket must have been smashed to bits.’

  ‘Oh, well, there’s a dog coming in,’ said Thomas. ‘And your grandmother called. She wants you to go round after work.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, rubbing my aching side. I must have pulled something while wrestling with that cow.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Maybe she’s been knitting you baby clothes.’

  Granny lived just down from the supermarket, in one of a line of orange-brick units surrounded entirely by asphalt. I left the ute on the side of the road and crossed this tarseal wasteland to knock on her living room door.

  ‘Come in!’ she called.

  I let myself into the cluttered gloom and pulled the door shut behind me. Granny’s living room was always overheated and under-lit. She kept the blinds closed to stop the carpet fading, and every flat surface sported a group of brass elephants or paua-shell ashtrays, a case of ornamental teaspoons or a doll with frilly Victorian petticoats and staring eyes.

  ‘Hi, Granny,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  Granny pulled her cardigan more tightly around her. ‘My back’s killing me and it’s been about seven years since my bowels worked properly,’ she said flatly.

  Well, that would depress anyone, I thought, wending my way around a small lacquered table to her armchair and bending to kiss her cheek. ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘Yes, alright. You’ll find biscuits in the big red tin in the pantry.’

  The big red tin contained half a packet of very whiskery ginger kisses. Watched from the top of the fridge by a sinister-looking rag doll and a crocheted chicken, I threw them out, made the tea and carried two mugs back into the living room. ‘Your biscuits were growing mould,’ I said, passing her a mug.

  ‘Just as well, probably,’ she said. ‘That little dark snip of a nurse doesn’t like me eating anything I might actually enjoy. And I shouldn’t think you’d need to be putting on any more weight.’

  I sat down on the edge of the sofa and took a small resentful sip of tea.

  ‘When’s this baby due again?’ she asked.

  ‘July,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that – another three months?’ She looked at me over the rim of her mug. ‘Is that boyfriend of yours still on the scene?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Planning on moving in with him, are you?’

  I kept my eyes firmly on an African violet in a brown macramé-sheathed pot. Who, pray tell, would choose to spend their free time knotting a pot jacket out of hairy brown string? And why? ‘No.’

  ‘So – what? You raise the child, and he can pop in if and when it suits him?’

  I bit my lip. Never have I known anyone else with Granny’s aptitude for finding and prodding a person’s very tenderest spots.

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  ‘Something like that,’ I said.

  ‘What kind of stable home is that for a child?’

  ‘Granny, I’m doing my best!’

  ‘I dare say,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Seeing as you’re here, you might as well take a look at Tibby for me. She’s gone off her food.’

  Tibby (or ‘the old witch’s familiar’ if you were talking to Em, who disliked being referred to as ‘Timothy’s trophy wife’; I did once point out that ‘Timothy’s trophy wife’ was a step up from ‘Timothy’s fancy piece’, but for some reason this failed to placate her) was curled on the spare-room bed in a patch of late afternoon sunlight. She was a small cat with dusty black fur and an uncertain temper, and she opened her eyes and glared at me as I sat down beside her.

  I ran a soothing hand down her back and felt every vertebra, which was not a good start. I opened her mouth – quite a bit of tartar on her back teeth but only mild gingivitis. Mucous membrane colour reasonable. Eyes okay. Lymph nodes not enlarged. No nasty lumps in the abdomen. I took a pinch of skin between finger and thumb, and it stayed tented. At least ten percent dehydrated, then. Tibby batted my hand irritably with a paw to let me know her patience was wearing thin.

  ‘Granny,’ I said, going back into the living room, ‘have you noticed her drinking?’

  ‘She drinks like a fish,’ said Granny. ‘She’s always at her bowl. She drinks the water in the bottom of the shower, too.’

  Oh. Crap.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘I think her kidneys might be packing up,’ I said. ‘I’d like to take a blood test and make sure.’

  ‘And how much is that going to set me back?’ Granny asked.

  ‘Actually, maybe I can tell from a urine sample. Hang on.’ I let myself out and hurried across the asphalt to get a small needle and syringe from the back of the ute, then returned to the living room. ‘I’ll just see if I can get a sample by popping a needle into her bladder through her side. She’ll hardly even feel it.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ said Granny.

  Tibby had curled herself back up into a tight black ball of fur, and was unimpressed at being disturbed again. She tried to scratch my wrist with a back foot when I felt for her bladder, but the thing was the size of a ping-pong ball and I hit it easily enough. The urine I pulled back into my syringe w
as very, very pale yellow, and capping the needle I went slowly back into the living room.

  ‘She’s got kidney failure,’ I said, sidling between a glass-fronted cabinet and an ottoman and holding out the syringe for Granny’s inspection. ‘She’s very dehydrated, but her urine’s really dilute. It should be dark orange and it’s like water. Her kidneys aren’t doing their job.’

  ‘What can you do about it?’

  ‘Well, we can give her fluids and something to stop her feeling sick, and there are tablets you can give to increase the blood flow through the kidneys and make the best of the kidney function she’s got left, but it will keep getting worse. The treatment might give her a few more months.’

  ‘And if we don’t treat her?’

  ‘Weeks,’ I said. ‘Maybe. But it’s a pretty miserable way to go. She’ll be feeling really sick because her kidneys aren’t getting rid of all the toxins they’re supposed to. That’s why she’s not eating.’

  ‘So she’s suffering,’ said Granny.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you put her to sleep?’

  ‘I could give her fluids, and an injection to make her feel better,’ I offered. ‘Then you could think about it for a couple of days and see how much she improves with treatment. You don’t have to decide today.’

  ‘I have decided,’ she said. ‘Put her to sleep now.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Can you do it or can’t you?’ she snapped.

  I nodded and went out to the ute.

  ‘Should I bring her out to you, so you can say goodbye?’ I asked, re-entering Granny’s stuffy little living room with pentobarb, stethoscope, syringe and needles.

  ‘No, leave her be,’ she said. She pushed herself slowly and painfully to her feet and shuffled out into the hall. ‘Come along, girl!’

  I followed her into the spare room and found her stroking Tibby’s small black head with the side of a crooked finger. She pulled her hand back and turned to face me. ‘Alright. Go on.’

  ‘Would you like me to take her away and bury her?’ I asked. ‘Or you could have her cremated.’ It always feels so insensitive to ask, but it’s worse asking over the body of someone’s pet.

  ‘What nonsense,’ said Granny. ‘Cremating a cat.’ She sniffed and went past me out of the room.

  I pulled up five mil of pentobarb, stroked Tibby softly between the ears and, rather than trying to get a vein by myself, gave the injection through her side into the liver. She flinched as I put the needle in but went limp almost at once, and by the time I put the stethoscope to her chest there was no heartbeat. I fetched a towel from the cupboard in the hall and wrapped the small body to carry it back into the living room.

  ‘Very much obliged to you,’ Granny said crisply. ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Granny,’ I said.

  ‘Here.’ She held out a plastic bag, knotted firmly at the top. ‘Off you go. Don’t open it now.’

  I looked at her doubtfully as I took the bag. ‘I’ll make you another cup of tea.’

  ‘I don’t want another cup of tea.’

  ‘What are you having for dinner?’

  ‘I’m quite capable of getting my own dinner, thank you!’

  ‘I know you are,’ I said. ‘But there’s no reason someone else can’t peel you a potato from time to time.’

  ‘No, thank you. Goodnight.’

  Back in the ute I tried to unpick the knot in the bag, gave up and tore it open instead. Inside was a tiny knitted vest and hat made of fine, soft cream wool. The knitter had dropped a fair number of stitches, due perhaps to a combination of arthritic hands and working in a carpet-sparing gloom, and as I held up the vest, a hole in the front unravelled a little further. I refolded it carefully, laid it on the seat beside the towel-swathed Tibby and got back out of the ute.

  ‘Forget something?’ Granny asked sharply as I opened the door yet again.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, bending to hug her. ‘Thank you for the clothes. They’re lovely.’

  ‘I thought I told you not to open that,’ said Granny. But her cheek was wet against mine, and she caught my hand fleetingly in hers. ‘Yes, alright. Go on, now.’

  It was after six when I got home, and nearly dark. A couple of hundred sparrows were settling down for the night in the big conifer, chattering at the tops of their small shrill voices. I crossed the lawn wearily and fetched a spade from the carport, so as to bury Tibby under the copper beech rather than slipping her into the post-mortem freezer at work.

  I had just cut out a square of turf when a car started up at my landlord’s house, a hundred metres up the road. It turned left at the bottom of their driveway and then left again up the tanker track beside my cottage. I expected it to go past on the way to the cowshed for milk, but it came in through my gate and stopped. Spade in hand, I crossed the lawn towards it.

  Rex got out of the car, stiffly because he needed a new hip, and then jumped backwards as I approached. ‘Christ,’ he said, steadying himself with a hand on the bonnet. ‘You gave me a shock! What are you doing? Burying the body?’

  ‘Um, yes,’ I said.

  He roared with laughter. ‘Only joking, my dear. How are you keeping?’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  ‘Good to hear it,’ he said. ‘You’re looking well. I’m glad I’ve caught you, as a matter of fact; I’ve been wanting a word.’

  I began mentally to frame a polite rejection, on Mark’s behalf, to the impending invitation to speak at this year’s pre-calving do at the club. But I needn’t have bothered, because Rex said instead, ‘You’ve been an excellent tenant, Helen. No trouble with the rent, no old mattresses on the lawn . . .’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, since some response seemed to be expected.

  ‘You’re welcome. I expect you’ll be off up to Auckland as soon as you stop work?’

  I felt the blood rush to my cheeks, and was grateful it was too dark for him to see it. ‘No, I –’

  ‘The thing is,’ he continued, ‘Daniel’s coming home on the first of June. He and his wife have a little one now, and he wants to have a go at managing the farm. So I’m afraid we’re going to need your house.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said blankly. ‘Right. When do you want me out?’

  ‘Well, officially we need to give you six weeks’ notice in writing,’ said Rex, scuffing at the grass with the toe of his gumboot. ‘But we’d really like to get the builders in and tidy the place up a bit – put in some insulation, that kind of thing . . . So if you were happy to be out by – oh, I don’t know, the end of the month?’

  27

  ‘WHAT?’ EM YELPED.

  I moved the phone further from my ear. ‘He was very apologetic,’ I said.

  ‘He can’t do that! That’s only two weeks’ notice!’

  ‘Nearly three.’

  ‘He hasn’t got a leg to stand on, legally.’

  ‘Well, I said it would be fine.’

  ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me?’ she said. ‘Honestly, sweetie, you’ve got to start sticking up for yourself. You need –’

  But I missed just what it was that Em thought I needed, because Zoe put her head around the lunch room door and said, ‘Nick wants you in his office.’

  I nodded and, seeing as Em seemed to have paused for breath at the other end of the line, said, ‘I know. Look, sorry, I’ve got to go. Talk to you later, okay?’

  ‘Come for tea.’

  ‘I can’t. Mark’s coming down. He’s going to South Africa tomorrow.’

  Dropping off the portable phone en route, I went down the hall to the tiny, filing-cabinet-lined room that was officially Nick’s office and that he used mostly for storing things which didn’t work but that he couldn’t bring himself to throw away.

  ‘Come on in and have a seat,’ he said as I appeared in the doorway.

  I made my way around an elderly photocopier and a bent calving jack to sit down. A
small heel pushed hard against my abdominal wall from the inside, withdrew when I pressed back, and kicked me in the liver instead.

  ‘I’ve just had Andre van der Pasch in,’ Nick said. ‘He had a few concerns about that cow you saw yesterday.’

  ‘What concerns?’ I said, forgetting all about my ill-behaved foetus and stiffening in my chair.

  Nick, who loathes confrontation, drew squiggles on the edge of a teat-spray flyer and looked unhappy. ‘Just a couple of queries about the amount of time you spent there. He feels it would have been better if you’d called in someone more experienced earlier rather than struggling on yourself.’

  ‘But I didn’t need anyone else! I knew what was wrong with her – the head of the femur was stuck under the wing of the ilium. It took us a while to get it out, and then we got it into the socket, and then it fell out again and I realised the whole joint must be smashed. Nick, I honestly think you’d have done exactly the same thing.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any problem with your decision to put the cow down,’ said Nick carefully. ‘Andre just feels that he’s a busy man, with a lot of things on his plate, and spending an hour and a half messing around with a cow that was never going to be a starter wasn’t a good use of his time. Perhaps we just need to be a bit more aware that our clients have businesses to run, and that our input is only a small part of their overall operations.’

  ‘But I –’ I started, and then stopped abruptly because the tears were building behind my eyes and crying is a crappy, crappy way of dealing with constructive criticism.

  ‘Helen, I don’t think for a minute that you did anything wrong. Your clinical skills are excellent, you’re thorough and sensible, you do a really good job of explaining to clients what you’re doing and why, but –’

  Ah, the dreaded ‘but’. I once went to a marketing seminar at which the presenter explained that when you insert a ‘but’ into a sentence it magically turns everything that went before it into bullshit. It’s true, too – just try it. ‘Of course your bottom doesn’t look big in that, but . . .’ Or, ‘I really like your mother, but . . .’ See?