Chocolate Cake for Breakfast

by Danielle Hawkins

He looked at me, startled, and my cheeks burnt in shame. Hurriedly I added, ‘But you’ve probably got an early start or something.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean yes, I want to.’

  ‘Okay, um, cool,’ I said, going abruptly from hot with embarrassment to cold with terror as I realised that, in fact, this was all moving way too fast for me. I didn’t really want him to stay; I wanted him to kiss me goodnight and go away. Then I would be free to lie awake half the night, reliving every second of the evening, overanalysing his every word and agonising about how much he really liked me. The lying-awake-and-obsessing stage is an important one in any new relationship – you’re not supposed to just skip it.

  But I must have done a reasonable impression of one of those uninhibited, self-confident girls who view sex as merely a pleasant form of exercise, because Mark put down his cake, pulled me closer and kissed me, sliding his hands warmly up my sides under my T-shirt. I lifted my arms obediently and he tugged the shirt off over my head.

  ‘You are so lovely,’ he said against my mouth.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered, and because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do in the circumstances (as well as because I had never been so attracted to anyone in my life), I twisted away from him and took his hand, pulling him up the hall to my bedroom.

  He sat down on the edge of my bed and looked at me, and with shaking hands I reached behind my back to undo the catch of my bra. I couldn’t; I was so nervous I had lost all feeling in my fingertips.

  ‘Here,’ he said softly, pulling me up between his knees and reaching around me to undo it himself. And then he sat me across his lap and kissed me with a single-minded concentration that completely changed my mind about this being a bad idea.

  Ten minutes or so later he sat up and said, ‘Crap, wallet’s in the car.’

  This remark seemed to have no relevance at all. ‘W-what?’ I asked unsteadily.

  ‘Condom.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’ve got some.’ Getting up I crossed the room and felt around in the bottom of my wardrobe until I found a plastic grocery bag, from which I extracted one of about twenty small cellophane-wrapped boxes.

  Mark was watching me in the dim light from the hall with a bemused expression on his face. ‘Did you get some kind of discount for buying in bulk?’ he asked.

  ‘What? No. No! Alison gave them to me – my friend – she’s a nurse – they’re for this weekend. I mean, not to use; they’re for the hen’s party. For some stupid party game. The medical centre had about a pallet of them, and they’re almost expired. Oh God, now you think I’m a crazed nymphomaniac.’

  Mark started to laugh. He lay down flat on his back and laughed harder than I had ever seen anyone laugh before, and after a while I climbed into bed beside him and pulled the covers up under my chin, so as not to freeze while waiting for him to finish.

  At last he pulled himself together and rolled over to put his arms around me. ‘I don’t think you’re a crazed nymphomaniac,’ he said. ‘I think you’re the most wonderful girl I’ve ever met.’

  I was woken in the morning by the persistent shriek of a blackbird in the copper beech outside my bedroom window, and lay for a few minutes with my eyes shut. Bed, which is one of my favourite places in any case, always becomes exponentially warmer and more comfortable as the time to leave it approaches. I rolled drowsily onto my back, encountered a large warm shoulder and went from barely conscious to fully alert in about half a nanosecond.

  I turned my head cautiously and looked at Mark, lying asleep on his stomach with one muscular brown arm curled around his head. Wow, I thought, then, Dear Lord, what have I done?

  With extreme stealth I inched my way out from under the duvet, collected an armful of clothes and tiptoed down the hall to the shower.

  I was making my lunch when he appeared in the kitchen doorway, dressed and with his hair sticking up in damp spikes.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

  When I was fourteen, or thereabouts, Dad sat me down and talked to me about sex. He started by saying it was a lot of fun, and I almost combusted in horrified embarrassment. He then went on to say that, in his opinion, it was a shame to get too hung up about the whole thing, and as long as people took the right precautions he couldn’t see any particular virtue in abstaining. This was unexpected, since television had led me to believe that fathers all over the world were united in their quest for daughterly celibacy.

  ‘Although,’ he’d added, ‘it’s not really a great idea to sleep with someone you don’t know. Sex is –’ he paused, and I waited apprehensively to hear what my father thought sex was ‘– pretty intimate.’ I breathed again; that could have been a lot worse. ‘It’s worth taking the time to get to know the other person first. Tends to save a lot of unhappiness and regret later on.’

  It occurred to me now that I really should have taken my father’s advice. When you’ve gone to sleep in someone’s arms, waking up all the way back at awkward acquaintances is truly awful.

  ‘Hi,’ I said nervously. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘God, yes.’

  ‘How d’you have it?’ I asked, spreading Vegemite to the very edges of the bread with unprecedented care and precision.

  ‘Just milk, please.’

  I put down my knife and turned to open the fridge door. ‘What would you like for breakfast?’ I asked. ‘Muesli? Or toast, or eggs . . .’ Or of course the poor bloke might want nothing more than to escape, thus avoiding half an hour of excruciating morning-after conversation across the breakfast table. ‘Or you might rather just get going.’

  ‘Can I have chocolate cake?’ he asked.

  I managed to look at him then, and he smiled at me. ‘Of course you can,’ I said, smiling back.

  Mark crossed the kitchen and began to unwrap the cake on the bench. ‘You’re allowed cake for breakfast on special occasions,’ he said.

  The sun was coming up, warming a handful of little wispy clouds on the horizon to pink, and in the conifer outside the kitchen window a few hundred sparrows shouted joyfully. I knew just how they felt.

  ‘What are you doing tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, I – oh. Crap. I’m on call. And at this time of year I’ll probably have to go out and calve a cow. What about tomorrow?’

  Mark shook his head. ‘I have to speak at a charity dinner thing.’

  ‘Impressive,’ I said.

  He made a face and, reaching out, hooked a finger through a belt loop on my jeans and pulled me towards him.

  ‘Th-Thursday?’ I asked shakily.

  ‘No good. Dinner with sponsors. And then you’ve got that hen’s party on the weekend.’

  ‘Sunday night, then.’

  ‘That’s a hell of a long way away.’

  It was. Practically aeons. I covered his hand with mine. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ll come back down tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure? It’s such a long way to come to see someone who might be calving a cow.’

  He stroked my knuckles with the side of his thumb. ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘If you’re too tired and you don’t feel like a two-hour drive, I won’t be offended,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll feel like it,’ said Mark.

  I laughed, and he kissed me. I was late for work, and Mark must have been really late for training.

  9

  ‘OH, IT’S YOU,’ SAID MRS DOBSON-HUGHES WITH A MARKED lack of enthusiasm, as I ushered her into the consult room.

  I was surprised by this, seeing as a few weeks before I’d been the only vet in the practice who was allowed to express her horrible dog’s anal glands. ‘It is,’ I agreed. ‘What can I do for you today?’

  ‘There’s a lump on Pierre’s side,’ she informed me. ‘It wasn’t there last week – I would have noticed.’

  ‘Right. I’ll just bring up his history . . . He was in here not long ago, wasn’t he, with sore eyes?’ I looked at Richard’s notes, which read: Runn
y eyes. Chlorsig. For Richard that was actually pretty detailed – I had recently found an entry of his saying merely, Flat. The Vet Council kept sending us bulletins stressing the importance of careful record-keeping, but he had yet to take their advice on board.

  ‘The other vet – such a professional young man – said I brought him in in the nick of time,’ said Mrs Dobson-Hughes. ‘Pierre’s eyes were so inflamed that it could have gone either way.’

  ‘My goodness,’ I murmured. ‘And Richard prescribed you some ointment?’

  ‘He did. A very strong antibiotic. I was hoping to see him today and show him how Pierre’s eyes have cleared. I did just what he told me.’

  ‘Well, his eyes look great,’ I said. ‘Well done.’

  ‘We got there in the end,’ she said. ‘I sat up all night with him, but I don’t begrudge a moment of it.’

  Today the horrible Pierre had a sebaceous cyst on his side. I squeezed out a blob of greyish waxy stuff but Mrs Dobson-Hughes wasn’t even slightly impressed. Evidently my bedside manner was nothing compared to Richard’s.

  ‘Em rang,’ said Thomas, as the automatic doors closed behind Pierre and Mrs Dobson-Hughes. It was quite fascinating watching them walk from behind; they had identical waddles. ‘She said you were to call her back urgently.’

  Em answered the phone on the second ring. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘It’s me. What’s up?’

  ‘That was Mark Tipene in your kitchen last night, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Mark Tipene! The All Black!’

  ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘Did you find him on the Weetbix box?’

  But she was not to be diverted. ‘And just how, pray, do you know Mark Tipene?’

  I sat down cross-legged on the bench in the lunch room. ‘I fell over his feet at a party a few weeks ago. His cousin’s share-milking just out of town, and he was down here visiting. And then he came in to work and asked me out.’

  My stepmother was temporarily stricken dumb, but I heard the sounds of laboured breathing down the phone.

  ‘Em,’ I said gently, ‘you sound like a stalker.’

  ‘You’re seeing Mark Tipene,’ she repeated.

  ‘Um. Yes. I think so,’ I said, looking across the lunch room at his picture and smiling wonderingly to myself.

  ‘Sweetie, he’s gorgeous.’

  ‘I know.’ His eyes looked brown but on closer inspection they were actually hazel, with gold flecks. And his back was all ropes of muscle that tightened and shifted under the skin as he moved. And he was coming back this evening . . . I pulled myself back to the present with some difficulty.

  ‘Look, Em, I’ve got to go. There are about four cats waiting out the back.’

  ‘Sweetie,’ she said, ‘why don’t you do something about your nails? A set of acrylics? Maureen at Body Bliss does such a lovely job. My treat.’

  ‘I don’t think acrylic nails would be a starter in calving season. Think of the poor cows I’d shred.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Em. ‘Well, how about your hair?’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s very pretty. But what about some foils? I was thinking that a lovely warm caramel would be beautiful on you.’

  ‘Mm, maybe,’ I said. ‘Talk to you soon.’ And I hung up, a little deflated by these suggestions on getting me up to standard.

  ‘Mrs Dobson-Hughes sends you her love,’ I told Richard that afternoon, coming into the office to find him looking at cars on Trade Me. ‘She says no-one has ever understood Pierre the way you do.’

  Richard looked momentarily surprised, and then began to laugh.

  ‘Why did she have to sit up all night with a dog with runny eyes?’ I asked.

  ‘I told her that if she didn’t put the drops in hourly he could lose his sight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just to see if she would. Dog only had a bit of allergic conjunctivitis.’

  ‘You rotten bastard,’ I said admiringly.

  ‘It’s my mate Paul’s technique. He had some old witch tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about when he said her cat had a flea allergy, so he got her to bathe it in iodine every morning for a week.’ He double-clicked on a picture of a red Holden Commodore. ‘I can’t believe she actually did it. That’s completely made my day.’

  ‘You might live to regret it,’ I said. ‘Now she’ll tell all her friends about you and you’ll have a whole coven of crazy ladies wanting you to look after their snappy little lap dogs.’

  The weekend’s hen’s party was a two-day event, involving a number of university friends. I had, before the advent of a large, sexy All Black lock, been looking forward to it, but as I headed for Taupo on Friday evening I was feeling decidedly unenthusiastic about the whole thing.

  I drove down with my ex-boyfriend Lance, who worked these days in a small-animal practice in Hamilton. He was going to the stag’s night.

  The two of us had been in the same year at vet school. We’d lived together at university, worked at different branches of the same practice after graduation and then went overseas. We’d spent two years alternately backpacking around Europe and doing short-term locums to save up for the next trip. And by the end of all that we were sick to death of one another, and we went our separate ways with mutual relief.

  It had been a civilised and remarkably painless break-up. I got custody of Murray, and Lance kept our shared laptop. I didn’t have to stifle the urge to call him at two am from random nightclub toilets and beg him to take me back, and I hardly ever woke desolate in the watches of the night to contemplate my impending lonely old age, death, and consumption by Alsatians. This had troubled me rather more than Lance’s absence did, because if you can leave fairly cheerfully after six years together it obviously wasn’t much of a relationship, and in that case what on earth was the point of spending six years in it?

  ‘So,’ I asked, holding two paper cups of coffee between my knees while I did up my seatbelt, ‘what are you boys doing this weekend?’

  Lance nosed his way through the crowded petrol station forecourt, which was bristling with enormous four-wheel drives en route to the ski fields. ‘Fishing,’ he said sadly. ‘And golf.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ I said. Lance dislikes fishing, and he hates golf with a deep unswerving hatred. I don’t mind it, myself – I’m not much good at any sport requiring hand-eye coordination, but with golf at least you get a pleasant stroll between whacks at the ball.

  ‘Are you going to cover the groom in plastic wrap and shaving foam and tie him to a streetlamp?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably,’ he said gloomily. ‘What are you girls doing?’

  ‘We’re having cocktails and playing hen-party games and going out dancing.’ I feel about dancing the way Lance feels about golf. Perhaps we could swap: I’d join the stag do and he could be a hen.

  ‘I could have done without this, this weekend,’ he said.

  I handed him a coffee. ‘Yeah. Me too.’

  We were silent as we drank our coffee, and it was a good ten minutes later when he asked, ‘How’s work?’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I pulled triplets out of a cow yesterday. How about you?’

  ‘Not bad. Did my first tibial crest translocation this morning, and I’ve been plating lots of broken legs.’ I’ll see your triplets and raise you a whole pile of orthopaedic surgeries. He always trumped my work stories.

  ‘Excellent,’ I said, and there was another lull in the conversation while I gazed out the window at the passing silhouettes of pine trees against the evening sky, and thought bitter thoughts about wasting one of the few weekends in the foreseeable future that didn’t contain a rugby Test match at a hen’s party.

  ‘Hey, Nell?’

  ‘Mm?’ My cell phone beeped from my handbag, and I reached down to rummage for it.

  ‘I’ve, uh, met someone.’

  ‘A girl someone?’ I enquired.

  ‘Yeah.’

&nbs
p; ‘Good for you,’ I said, pulling two lip glosses, a box of tampons and a pocket torch without a battery from my bag before finally locating the phone. ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘She’s a lawyer.’

  ‘Most impressive,’ I said as I opened a text message from Mark.

  Hows yr day going?

  So so. You? I replied.

  ‘It’s early days,’ said Lance. ‘But I wanted you to hear about it from me.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s very considerate,’ I said. ‘I’ve just met someone too.’

  ‘So you’ve bowed to the inevitable and hooked up with a dairy farmer?’

  ‘No, actually. A rugby player.’

  The phone chirped again.

  Not bad. Better if u were here.

  ‘A rugby player?’ he repeated.

  ‘Um, yes, Mark Tipene,’ I said, my toes curling unhappily because it sounded far too much like showing off.

  Wish I was, I wrote.

  I needn’t have worried about the bragging, because Lance didn’t believe me. ‘Right,’ he said in the weary, patient voice that was just as infuriating after a gap of eight months as it had been when I encountered it every day.

  ‘You can check with Em if you like,’ I said. ‘She’s met him. She’s very concerned I’m not glamorous enough – she wants me to get acrylic nails and make an appointment with a personal shopper.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly. But please don’t say anything. It’s at a fairly embryonic stage.’

  ‘Define “fairly embryonic”,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ I said vaguely, ‘we’ve been out for a drink, he’s come for tea, he helped me with a horrible rotten calving a few weeks ago . . .’

  Lance digested this for a bit, decided I might in fact be telling the truth and said, ‘Be careful, won’t you, Nell? I wouldn’t want to see you hurt.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’d rather not see me hurt either.’

  ‘I don’t think those guys are known for their faithfulness.’

  ‘And you’re basing that on all the All Blacks you know?’ I asked, ever so slightly crisp.

  ‘No need to jump down my throat. They’re famous, they’ve got big disposable incomes, and everywhere they go there are hundreds of silly little tarts lining up to sleep with them. Just – be careful, that’s all.’