I went back downstairs feeling like a model sister, and made Dad and Em a cup of tea each to continue the theme.
‘Aren’t you going round to Sam’s to watch your boyfriend on TV?’ Dad asked.
‘No, I thought I’d hang out with you guys,’ I said. I hated missing Mark’s games – I had a furtive and irrational feeling that he was more likely to get hurt if I wasn’t watching – but sacrifices must be made to soothe a concerned parent.
‘We’re honoured,’ said the concerned parent drily, accepting his tea.
I handed the other mug to Em and sat down beside her on the couch. ‘Em?’
‘Mm?’
‘How long d’you reckon it’ll take him to come round?’
‘Your father? Not long, I wouldn’t think. Have a scorched almond, sweetie.’
I took one, and passed the box to my father. ‘Dad, Mark’s really nice. He’s kind to animals, he helps little old ladies across the road . . .’
‘Good on him,’ Dad said.
‘He gives money to lots of charities. And he gives me the peach Fruit Bursts even though they’re his favourite.’
‘Helen, you talk a lot of drivel,’ said Dad, but he was trying not to smile.
The climax of the antenatal weekend was the real-life birth DVD. It was just as Anita had described, and we watched in appalled silence as a dark purple baby emerged from between its mother’s hairy thighs. As the head crowned, one of the men bolted for the door of the scout hall and threw up.
Janet wrapped up with a few uplifting words on the joys of parenthood, we stacked our beanbags tidily in a corner and made our way thankfully out into the fresh air to say our goodbyes.
‘Thank you for coming to this thing with me,’ I said as we got into the car.
‘You’re welcome,’ Alison said. ‘It was a pleasure.’
‘That might be going a bit far.’
‘It was,’ she insisted. ‘Well, except for Hairy Mary at the end. When are you heading off?’
‘I’ve just got to pick up Murray and my bag, and say goodbye. Do you know if Sam’s home?’
‘He should be. You can drop me off there if you like.’
The kitchen bench and stovetop at Sam’s flat were entirely covered with dirty dishes, and the overflow was creeping across the table. A roasting dish was wedged across the sink, half full of scummy greyish water and with beads of congealed fat floating on top. Standards, it seemed, had fallen to a new low.
We found Sam in the lounge, perusing a tractor manual as thick as a phone book. ‘Hey,’ he said, looking up as we appeared in the doorway. ‘Learnt all there is to know about having babies?’
‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘Are you going to clean the kitchen, or just burn it down and start again?’
‘That’s up to Dylan. It’s his turn to sort it out.’ He stood up, stretched and yawned. ‘So you’re off to Auckland?’
‘Yep,’ I said. ‘Hey, guys, thanks for putting up with me the last few months.’
‘Yeah, it was really tough,’ said Sam. ‘Don’t be a dick, Hel.’
I went and kissed his cheek, and he hugged me. ‘He’s lucky to have you, okay?’ he said.
‘Thanks.’
‘I mean it. You’re great. I heard a guy in the supermarket the other day tell his mate that the hot pregnant vet fixed his dog.’
‘That may be the nicest compliment I’ve ever had,’ I said.
‘Believe it,’ said Alison sternly.
‘I will,’ I said, hugging her in turn. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome. Drive safe. See you soon.’
‘Do you want to watch Mamma Mia?’ Bel asked, flinging open the front door as I came up the path.
‘No thanks, munchkin,’ I said. ‘I need to get going.’ It was three o’clock already, which meant that even if I left this instant, and even if nobody else in the country happened to be using the Southern Motorway this afternoon, it would be after five by the time I got to Mark’s. Precious time that could have been spent with him had already been frittered away watching Hairy Mary give birth, and the thought of any further delay was, frankly, unbearable.
‘Get going to where?’ Bel asked.
‘Mark’s house.’
‘Can’t you go after we watch it?’
I bent and kissed the top of her head. ‘No.’
‘Please?’
I shook my head, and she burst into tears. ‘Helen won’t watch my movie with me,’ she wailed, preceding me into the kitchen.
‘Well, she doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to,’ said Dad, lifting his head from the newspaper crossword.
‘Drink, sweetie?’ Em asked.
‘No, thanks.’
Caitlin, who was doing a jigsaw puzzle on the floor, looked up and said brightly, ‘Can we make fudge now?’
‘No.’
‘You said you’d make fudge with me! Weeks ago, and you never have!’
‘Caitlin,’ I said, ‘I have made biscuits and cupcakes and kites and read that dire Pony Club book –’
‘You said you’d make fudge.’
‘Well then, I lied,’ I said, and went upstairs for my bag.
Murray was asleep in the middle of the fold-out bed, visible only as a small bulge beneath the duvet. I scooped him up and dropped him into his carry cage, and he glared at me through the bars with fixed unblinking hatred. Both my sisters followed me into the room to stand one on either side of the door, drooping with sorrow and disappointment.
Ignoring the lot of them I stripped the bed and folded it away. Then I gathered up the bed linen, slung my bag across one shoulder and picked up Murray’s cage in the other hand. ‘Right, are you coming down to say goodbye?’
‘My arm is broken,’ Bel said, a tear trickling down each cheek.
‘Why aren’t you nice to me?’
Caitlin lifted great wet eyes to my face. ‘We don’t want you to go,’ she whispered.
Man, they were good. ‘Oh, munchkins,’ I said, putting everything back down and holding my arms out. Both girls ran at me and clung. ‘I’ll come back and see you really soon. And you’re going to come to Auckland to stay, remember?’
‘For the night?’ Bel asked, her voice muffled against my neck.
‘Yep. And we’ll go out for tea, and stay up late, and play on the flying fox in the park down the road.’
‘And make fudge?’ said Caitlin hopefully.
‘Yes.’
In a touching demonstration of family solidarity, all four of them accompanied me to the car. ‘Well,’ said Dad, lifting Murray’s cage into the passenger seat and closing the door, ‘be good. Have fun. Is that horrible animal going to make that noise all the way there?’
‘It doesn’t matter; I’ll just turn up the radio.’
‘Just as long as you don’t drive off the road.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised.
‘Good. Oh well, come back if it all turns pear-shaped.’
I hugged him. At least he’d said ‘if’, not ‘when’.
‘Tim! Of course it won’t!’ Em said, kissing me tenderly. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’ She stepped back and looked at me, and reached out to pull down the neckline of my top by an inch. ‘Better. Okay, sweetie, go knock him dead.’
37
MOVING IN WITH MARK WAS THE BEST THING I’D EVER done. He had the first two days free, thanks to the following weekend’s bye, and the weather was nasty enough to hibernate indoors with a clear conscience. We went to bed early and got up late and lived on cereal and pancakes, leaving the dishes in the sink. We did nothing even slightly productive. It was lovely.
‘We should have done this months ago,’ he said on Tuesday night, coming out of the bathroom and stretching himself out full length on the bed beside me.
I squirmed closer and rubbed my cheek against his shoulder. ‘Yep.’
We were silent for a little while, and then I said, ‘You know how in romantic movies they do those montage scenes of couples wandering around han
d in hand and staring into each other’s eyes and watching the sun set over the sea from the end of a wharf?’
‘Doesn’t sound like my kind of movie.’
‘But you know the kind I mean. They have pillow fights, and a pillow bursts and fills the room with feathers, and in the morning he wears his pyjama bottoms while she wears the top. And then they go to a market somewhere and he tries to juggle with tomatoes, and drops them on the ground.’
‘Definitely not my kind of movie.’
‘That’s what this feels like,’ I persisted. ‘Like the too-good-to-be-true Hollywood version instead of real life.’
‘It’ll wear off,’ said Mark comfortingly. ‘Give it a couple of weeks and I’ll be lying on the couch ignoring you while you nag me to take the rubbish out.’ And he rolled over and kissed me, sliding his hands up under my shirt.
When he went back to work I pottered around being domestic, which made a delightful change from working full-time and skimming resentfully over the housework on the weekends. I rearranged the kitchen and made us fiddly, time-consuming things to eat, just because I could. In the mornings I walked up Mount Eden, and in the afternoons I assured Em over the phone that my nails were growing back, that I would nevertheless think about a set of acrylics and that I couldn’t be happier. And then Mark would get home from training or meetings or PR appointments, and life would be entirely perfect.
Murray approved wholeheartedly of his new munchkin-free home, although I fear the Siamese next door was less than thrilled.
‘Should we go and look at baby stuff tomorrow?’ I asked on Friday night, dropping my book off the edge of the couch and rubbing my side as the baby began his evening exercise routine.
‘Yeah, why not,’ said Mark. He rearranged me more comfortably against him. ‘What’s that child doing? Star jumps?’
‘Backflips, I think. Pushing off from my liver.’
He smiled and tickled a small foot through my abdominal wall. ‘Stop it, you. I guess we’ll have to think about names at some point.’
‘Have you got anything in mind?’ I asked.
‘Not really. You?’
‘I quite like Julie, for a girl.’
‘There was a Julie in my biology class,’ he said. ‘Sat just in front of me. She used to wind up her hair and stick a pencil through it. She was pretty hot.’
‘Right. So not Julie.’
‘You could do that,’ he said, gathering my hair up and twisting it into a clumsy knot.
It was very nice, but I was distracted by Tamara Healy. She was skipping across the TV screen on the far wall, dressed in a skimpy white bikini and looking exceptionally sun-kissed and gorgeous. ‘Hey, is that your ad?’ I asked, sitting up straight.
Mark dropped my hair and reached for the remote. ‘No,’ he said.
I wrested it from his grasp as he jogged up the beach behind Tamara, a Greek god in board shorts. Obviously not his own board shorts: they were neither ripped nor faded. ‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘But why wasn’t it on TV in summer? Wouldn’t that be a better time of year to advertise ice cream?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe they couldn’t get the slot they wanted. You see that?’
‘Mm,’ I said, watching him rise from the surf and shake his head vigorously so that water droplets flew shining from his dark hair.
‘They made me do that take about seventy times. I think it damaged my brain.’
Tamara took a long, suggestive lick of her ice cream, smiled dazzlingly up at him and snatched it back, laughing, as he made a grab for it. What marvellous on-screen chemistry. The producers must have been thrilled.
‘Mark, why did you guys break up?’ I asked.
He looked at me in a slightly pained sort of way, and then sighed and said, ‘Same reason most people break up, I guess. Not enough in common. Come on, surely you’re not still worried about Tam.’
‘I’m not, it’s just . . . you do have lots in common. You both play professional sport, you’ve got heaps of mutual friends . . .’
‘She liked the idea of going out with an All Black,’ he said slowly. ‘She likes going to parties and being seen by the right people, and that stuff does my head in. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
When I came downstairs the next morning the sky outside was flat and grey, and he was standing at the kitchen bench digging chocolate slice out of my sponge-roll tin with the bread knife. ‘Want some?’ he asked.
I kissed his shoulder in passing and opened the fridge door to get out the yoghurt. ‘No, thanks. What would Donna say if she saw you?’ Donna was the Blues’ dietician, a charming woman with burgundy hair and a passion for big-game fishing.
‘Very little,’ said Mark, offering a bit of icing to Murray, who was sitting on a bar stool with an expectant look on his face.
‘So she’s quite happy about you starting your day with chocolate slice?’
‘I don’t on game days,’ he said.
‘Oh well, that’s alright then.’ I put the yoghurt down on the bench and reached over to stroke Murray, who ignored me and kept his eyes fixed adoringly on the provider of chocolate icing.
‘I used to worry about all that shit,’ Mark said. ‘Counting calories and protein-carb ratios. Back in the days when I used to read tactical manuals in bed.’
‘Why’d you stop?’ I asked.
‘It takes over your life. After a year or two I figured out that it works best for me if I go hard at training and then come home and think about other things, and don’t worry too much about what I eat. Within reason, anyway.’
‘Work-life balance,’ I said, nodding wisely.
‘That’s the one.’
‘I guess that’s why you’re still doing it after eleven years.’
‘Partly,’ he said. ‘And partly I’ve been lucky, and I haven’t irrevocably munted myself.’
‘Irrevocably munted,’ I repeated. ‘Nice phrase.’
Seeing as Mark’s car was short on boot space we took mine baby shopping. We went to an enormous Baby Factory on the North Shore, where we were inundated by attentive shop assistants. They showed us cots and car seats, strollers and high chairs, leak-proof cloth-nappy systems made out of space-age microfibre and tiny Merino sleeping bags until I felt quite dazed and bewildered. I’d thought I was fairly well qualified to look after a baby. I once reared a litter of puppies from birth, and they all survived. Feed them, keep them warm and dry, don’t drop them from a height and Bob’s your uncle. But judging from all this apparently vital equipment, human babies were a lot trickier.
‘This one?’ Mark asked me, nodding towards a sturdy-looking wooden cot with removable sides.
‘That model has been very popular,’ said one of our entourage of assistants.
A woman approached and said diffidently, ‘Excuse me, I’m just looking for those little absorbent pads that go in your bra when you’re breastfeeding.’
‘Supermarket,’ said an assistant.
‘I’m after the ones you can wash and use again.’
‘Over there.’ The assistant waved a dismissive hand towards the back of the shop, and the poor customer wandered sadly away. Now, had Mark expressed an interest in breast pads, the whole lot of them would have rushed him to the appropriate aisle and fitted them lovingly to his chest.
‘We might just browse on our own for a bit,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much.’
The entourage withdrew a couple of metres, in a slow and reluctant manner.
‘You don’t think we should look somewhere else, to compare?’
‘A cot’s a cot, isn’t it?’ said Mark. ‘And this one looks fine.’
‘How would we know? We’re rank amateurs.’
‘It’s not rocket science, surely,’ he said, picking up a laminated list of safety features that hung from the side of the cot and passing it to me. ‘It’s not like if you haven’t done your homework you might end up with the amazing patented baby-crushing model.’
I smiled. ‘Well, true. Let
’s take it.’
He picked up a boxed one, and a bevy of assistants rushed forward again to relieve him of it. ‘We’ll just take this to the counter for you while you keep looking,’ said one.
‘Thanks,’ said Mark. ‘What now? Car seat?’
After some debate we chose the only one in the shop that we thought we might be able to figure out how to strap a baby into. Then two sets of flannelette cot sheets, three tiny woollen singlets, a packet of soft muslin face cloths printed with ducklings and – in a moment of heady inspiration – a two-metre square set of canvas drawers on a wooden frame that would serve as baby-clothes storage and front-of-cot screening at one fell swoop.
‘I don’t think we’ll get anything else in the car,’ I said, eyeing the box the miracle drawers came in.
‘Right,’ said Mark. ‘Good. We’ll call it a day, shall we?’
When the doorbell chimed late that afternoon we were all in bed. Mark was reading A History of the Arab Peoples, but Murray and I were merely dozing. We were all three entirely happy, and at the sound of the bell Mark swore and I groaned.
Transferring an armful of limp cat from his lap to the foot of the bed, he rolled to his feet and began to get dressed. He pulled his shirt on inside out and back to front, and went downstairs. I was slower, due to turning my clothes the right way out before climbing into them, and reached the kitchen to see him talking to Alan and Saskia in the front doorway.
‘Hi!’ Saskia said as I appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘How are you?’
‘Good. Great. Have you guys got time to come in?’
‘This unsociable bastard just told us to piss off,’ said Alan.
‘Mark!’
‘I did not,’ he said. ‘I just said that you were asleep.’
‘We’ll have a coffee, since we’ve woken you up anyway,’ Saskia said, coming in past him and running upstairs. She pecked my cheek and handed me a trendy hessian carrier bag. ‘Here. A little house-warming present.’
Being civil to your friend’s girlfriend is basic good manners, but going out of your way to welcome someone who’s a constant painful reminder of everything you most want and haven’t got takes niceness to whole new heights. ‘Oh, Saskia, thank you,’ I said.
Chocolate Cake for Breakfast Page 27
