She sniffed. ‘And then if he has the ball he doesn’t throw it to anyone else, or kick it, or anything clever – he just charges straight into the biggest, hairiest thug he can find. I’m sorry, but I fail to see what’s so impressive about that.’
‘If I were you, I’d bring up those concerns with the All Black coaching panel,’ said Dad from the big armchair across the room.
‘Tim, don’t be patronising. Sweetie, is he at least going to pay you some sort of child support?’
‘I don’t want his money!’ I said.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Helen! It’s not for you, it’s for the baby.’
‘People raise babies on a lot less than I earn.’
‘That is not the point,’ she said. ‘Look, I’ll ring him if you like. You don’t have to talk to him yourself.’
I didn’t answer this straight away, being temporarily distracted by the tragedy of having lost the right to talk to Mark about anything except child support. Once we’d had long in-depth arguments about which series of Blackadder was the funniest, and whether icing a double chocolate muffin would improve it or push it over the edge.
‘What’s his number?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said hastily. ‘No, I’ll call him when he gets back from South Africa and sort it all out.’
Dad accompanied me out and walked around my car, peering at the tyres in the light of the security bulb at the corner of the garage. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Not bad.’
‘I had them checked last week.’
‘How very mature and responsible of you.’
‘Thank you,’ I said graciously. I’d had my tyres checked solely because my cousin Kevin had left a rude note on the windscreen while I was in the supermarket, saying three out of four of them were bald and if I didn’t do something about it he would come around and give me a good kicking, but I kept this detail to myself.
‘Did you go and have a look at that house of Kaye Upton’s?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’ Kaye’s rental property was a small wooden box with aluminium joinery, built up on poles on the south side of a hill. It had looked dank and charmless when viewed through the drizzle, but I was in no position to be picky. Besides, it suited my frame of mind.
‘Should I go and inspect it?’ Dad asked.
I shook my head. ‘No, it’s fine. It will do for now.’
Dad put an arm around me and gave me a quick squeeze. ‘Chin up, sausage,’ he said. ‘It’ll get better. Things do.’
The back door opened, and Em came down the steps holding my handbag. ‘You forgot this,’ she said. ‘Now, I just had a thought. How about we have a girls’ day out on Saturday? We’ll go to Hamilton and hit the shops, and then have a nice lunch.’
‘I’m not really in a shopping mood,’ I said.
‘Never mind; it will do you good.’
‘I need to do some packing.’
‘How much packing can you do when you’re not moving for another week? Anyway, Monday’s a holiday; you can pack then. Tim, you’ll look after the girls, won’t you?’
‘Yes, dear,’ said Dad.
‘Good. I’ll pick you up at nine, Helen.’
29
I CANNOT POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN A PLEASURE TO BE AROUND just then. It was really quite heroic of Em to spend a day with me of her own free will – I should have appreciated it, but I was far too busy being miserable to appreciate anything.
‘Yes,’ she said as I emerged from a changing room in a dark blue tunic thing with a scoop neck. ‘Just gorgeous. You can wear it over jeans, and it will be fabulous with tights and boots.’
I cast an apathetic glance at the mirror. ‘It’ll be too small in another month.’
‘Of course it won’t. If you wear your clothes so big that nobody can see your bump you’ll find you look fat instead of pregnant. I think you should buy it.’
‘Okay,’ I said. I was going to have to buy something if I didn’t want to spend the last three months of pregnancy in a large green sweatshirt with Broadview Dental Fun Run 2006 across the back.
‘Don’t get dressed again just yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring you a few other things to try.’
Having Em pass things into the cubicle and whisk them away again was quite a restful way to shop, and I tried on everything she brought me with unprecedented docility.
‘I like that colour on you, sweetie,’ she said, tweaking the hem of a long pink cardigan.
I screwed up my nose. ‘Em, I look like a prawn.’
‘Helen Olivia McNeil!’ she snapped, straightening up with a jerk. ‘If you put yourself down once more I will brain you with my handbag, so help me God!’
I stood and gaped at her in shock.
‘Just look at yourself!’ She pulled me around by one shoulder to face the mirror. ‘You are beautiful. I would kill for your hair and skin. And honestly, sweetie, brushing off every compliment starts to make you look very ungracious after a while. People get tired of constantly having to reassure you – if they didn’t mean it they wouldn’t have said it in the first place. It’s not pleasant to say something nice to someone and have it thrown right back in your face.’
‘Sorry,’ I whispered.
‘That’s alright,’ she said, tucking a strand of hair back behind my ear. ‘Now, you’ll take the cardigan? And the navy tunic, and the wide belt?’
I nodded. I would have nodded if she’d suggested I take the purple velour jumpsuit with the orange stripes.
‘Now, why don’t you leave that on?’
‘Okay.’
‘Wonderful. Let’s go and get some lunch.’
She swept through the Saturday morning crowd with her handbag dangling Hollywood-style from one wrist and me following meekly in her wake. Reaching a cafe with outside tables she smiled winsomely at a couple sitting over their coffee until they realised they had in fact finished, and sat down.
‘Well, that was a successful morning,’ she said. ‘What do you feel like to eat?’ She pushed the unfortunate couple’s cups to one side and passed a laminated menu card across the table.
I looked at it without interest. ‘Whatever.’ And then meeting her eye I added hastily, ‘Eggs Benedict. How about you?’
‘I might try the Thai beef salad. I’ll go up and order, shall I?’
‘No, I’ll go.’
‘You will not,’ she said. ‘What would you like to drink?’
‘Water, please.’
‘Right,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘I won’t be long.’
In an attempt to really plumb the depths of woe, I passed the time she was gone in scrolling through the inbox of my phone to look for messages from Mark.
Ok
Will do
Yep
Oh, how depressingly succinct.
Late be there by 9 x
That one was two weeks old. So a fortnight ago I had been worthy of at least an x in passing.
Nite love x
Three weeks ago.
‘Oh, sweetie, I hate seeing you so unhappy,’ said Em, slipping back into the chair opposite mine and reaching across the table for my hand.
My throat tightened ominously. Having no wish to dissolve amid our fellow diners I pulled away and said, ‘Well, let’s face it, it was always going to end like this.’
‘Why?’ she demanded. She folded her arms and leant on the tabletop, thus increasing her cleavage exposure from excessive to borderline obscene.
‘Because getting pregnant when you’ve been together for about three minutes tends to put a bit of a dampener on a relationship!’
‘I’m sorry to break it to you, sweetie, but you’re hardly the first couple in the world to have to deal with an unplanned pregnancy.’
‘I know that.’
‘It’s been one of the leading reasons for marriage for hundreds of years. Thousands of years, probably.’
‘Except that these days you don’t get forced to the altar at shotgun-point.’
‘No,’ she said patiently.
‘But I don’t see why having a baby means your relationship is automatically doomed, either.’
I looked down at my hands. ‘I guess it just put too much pressure on everything. Mark wasn’t ready to do the whole settling-down-and-having-a-family thing. Not with me, anyway.’
‘Wasn’t he?’
‘Well, obviously not!’
‘Were you?’
‘Em, please don’t do this amateur psychology stuff on me,’ I said tiredly.
‘Did you want to settle down with him?’ she persisted.
‘Yes! Of course I did.’
‘Because, sweetie, sometimes it didn’t really look like it from where I was standing.’
I looked up sharply.
‘How do you think it might have made Mark feel that you’ve never expected him to be there for you?’
‘I –’ I said, and stopped.
‘You’ve been so determined to cope with this all by yourself. But it’s his baby too. Don’t you think he might have got the impression that you didn’t really want his input at all?’
‘I just – I didn’t want to pressure him! I didn’t want him staying just because he thought he should.’
‘I’ve always remembered the celebrant at my friend Eileen’s wedding saying that one of the most important things in marriage is for the woman to abandon herself to her husband,’ Em said. ‘Not to submit to him, or obey his every wish, but just to trust him completely with her heart. And don’t say you weren’t married, because the principle’s the same.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s a bit hard to abandon yourself to someone who hasn’t even bothered to introduce you to his parents.’
‘Hasn’t he?’
I shook my head. ‘His family’s not close like we are, but – but he took Tamara Healy to his mum’s in Australia for Christmas.’
‘Well, he spent this last Christmas with you.’
‘And it was a disaster. Em, he never wanted to be with me for good. He – he said that he wasn’t the one who fucked everything up.’
‘People say all sorts of things they don’t mean when they’re upset.’
‘He meant it. And it wasn’t just the fight – that was just the last straw. Things have been bad for months.’
She sighed. ‘Maybe it’s just as well. You’re very different people.’
Considering I’d just spent ten minutes trying to convince her that Mark and I had never had a snowflake’s chance in hell of staying together, it was unreasonable to feel as offended by this remark as I did.
‘You’re such a clever girl,’ she continued, smiling up at a young and spotty waiter as he placed a bowl of salad in front of her. ‘And he’s not at all academic, is he?’
‘He’s really smart!’ I cried. ‘I don’t know why you seem to think rugby players are all just a bunch of thugs! He’s well-read, and funny, and he can always see the best way to approach a problem. He’s the most logical person I’ve ever met. And those guys do business training, and personal development, and learn how to deal with the media and – and heaps of stuff! They don’t just practise chucking a ball around.’
Em’s response to this little tirade was most unsatisfactory; she merely unwrapped the serviette from around my knife and fork, passed them across the table and said soothingly, ‘Eat your eggs, sweetie, before they get cold.’
30
ON ANZAC DAY, FOR THE FIRST TIME DURING MY SIXTEEN months’ occupancy of Rex’s cottage, I inched the stove out from the wall and looked behind it. It wasn’t good. Still, there are worse ways to spend a morning than exhuming a petrified mouse from behind the stove; Dad and Em, for example, were listening to Caitlin and twenty other children playing either ‘The Entertainer’ or ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ at a piano recital in the scout hall.
I fetched a pair of latex gloves from the back of the ute and clambered over the bench into the gap behind the stove. I had removed the mouse and was scrubbing drearily at the floor with a pot scourer when I heard a car pull in, and levered myself up to see who it was.
‘Hey, Nell,’ said Lance, putting his head around the door. ‘What’s new?’
‘Not a lot,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘Good. Just on my way back to Hamilton from Mum and Dad’s. You’ve got cobwebs in your hair.’
I ran a hand over my head to dislodge them. ‘Coffee?’
He nodded, came across the kitchen and filled the kettle, looking distastefully at the mouse. ‘Are you keeping that for a special occasion, or can I chuck it?’
‘Please chuck it. How are your parents?’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘They miss you.’
‘That’s nice of them. But what about your lawyer?’
‘Lawyer?’ he asked, opening the kitchen window and flinging the mouse out across the lawn.
‘Weren’t you seeing a lawyer?’
‘Only briefly. Tea?’
‘Coffee, please,’ I said.
‘Are you supposed to be drinking coffee?’
‘The midwife said it was fine.’
‘It’s just that Kate’s been steering clear of caffeine.’
‘Good on her,’ I said shortly. ‘I’m sure her baby will turn out much better than mine.’ I dropped my filthy scourer into an equally filthy basin of water and pushed it across the bench.
Lance picked up the basin and poured the water down the sink, maintaining a tactful silence.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘No, fair enough,’ he said. ‘It’s none of my business.’
That irritated me, either due to extreme prickliness on my part or because ‘It’s none of my business’ is another of those magic statements that doesn’t mean what it says. I climbed back over the kitchen bench as Murray sauntered in and wound himself around Lance’s ankles.
‘G’day, Murray,’ he said. ‘You’re getting fat, mate.’
‘He’s probably going out in sympathy,’ I said.
‘Those neutered-male cat biscuits from Royal Canin are good for weight loss.’
‘He’s on them.’
‘He should be on less of them, then. Try decreasing the amount you’re feeding him by a third.’
‘Yes, Lance,’ I snapped.
‘You’re in a lovely mood today, aren’t you?’ he remarked.
‘Sorry. It’s been a crappy couple of weeks.’
‘How come?’
‘Because Mark’s finally got sick of it all and left.’
‘That’s no good,’ said Lance.
The complete absence of surprise in his voice stung. Which seemed unfair, because you’d think that abject misery would at least ensure that nothing else anyone might say or do could hurt you. ‘Mm,’ I said.
He reached out and rubbed my shoulder. ‘Is he going to have anything to do with the baby?’
‘I don’t know. We’ve only got as far as screaming at each other.’
‘I imagine that having Mark Tipene screaming at you would be fairly scary,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Shit, he’s big.’
‘I think I was the one doing most of the screaming,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?’
Had Lance always been this annoying, I wondered, or was I just becoming crankier and less tolerant as I aged?
‘I was watching the highlights of his game yesterday,’ he said. ‘He smashed some poor innocent bloke’s knee to bits.’
I, too, had watched the highlights of that game. ‘Not on purpose!’ I cried.
‘What do you mean “not on purpose”? He lined him up from about twenty metres away!’
‘He tackled him! It’s a contact sport!’
‘Keep your hair on,’ said Lance. ‘Well, I hope he’s at least going to pay you some child support.’
‘I’m sure he will,’ I said wearily. Then, because if the subject wasn’t changed I was going to do a whole lot more screaming, I added, ‘Would you be able to give me a hand to take my bed apart?’
‘Why are you taking your bed apart?’
Lance sighed. That bed had slats on a wooden box framework, and it was a pig of a thing to dismantle and put up again. ‘Got a spanner?’ he asked.
‘You can have your coffee first,’ I said. ‘I’ll even give you a biscuit.’
‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘Let’s just get it over with.’
We went up the hall and manhandled the mattress off the base of the bed to lean it against the wall. ‘I’ll undo the bolts if you’ll stop it falling on me,’ I said.
‘Nell, there’s no way you’ll fit under there.’ He plucked the spanner from my hand and slid under the bed to attack the first bolt. ‘You know, it’s poor form to ask a man to lie on someone else’s underpants.’ And a pair of grey cotton boxer shorts came flying out across the room.
‘Sorry,’ I said, bending to pick them up and straightening again with a little grunt. What are you supposed to do with your ex-boyfriend’s undies? Wash them and post them back? Burn them on their own little funeral pyre, as part of the quest for healing and closure? Keep them under your pillow to cuddle up to as you fall asleep? In the meantime I settled for putting them down on the windowsill.
‘Don’t mention it. Do you think they’d be worth anything on Trade Me?’
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘It’d be hard to prove whose they were.’
‘DNA testing?’ Lance suggested, and I smiled despite myself.
There was a short silence while he wrestled with a bolt, and then he said, ‘How many times have I done this now?’
‘Um. Four, I think.’
‘Is that all?’
‘End of third year, end of fourth year, end of fifth year and before we went overseas.’
‘It just feels like more,’ he said. ‘Can you steady the end?’
I crouched down and held the corner of the bed’s frame. ‘Is that okay?’
‘Yeah, fine. You know, I reckon you’ve had a narrow escape. I was reading an article about early-onset arthritis in rugby players, and apparently the whole lot of them are cripples by the time they get to sixty. And they’re the ones who are sixty now; they played a hell of a lot less games forty years ago.’
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