Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (12 page)

Before I could decide one way or the other, Mark opened the door. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You made it. How was the traffic?’

‘Fine,’ I said nervously. ‘Lovely place.’

‘You haven’t seen it yet.’

‘No, but the step’s nice.’
Oh, for heaven’s sake, girl, if you can’t
say anything sensible just shut up.

‘Thank you,’ he said, smiling. He stood aside to let me in, and closed the door. And then he put his arms around me and kissed me, and the cold lump of worry that had been growing in the pit of my stomach quietly dissolved.

The more I found out about Mark, you see, the further out of my league he seemed. He was a proper, serious sportsman of the seen-once-in-a-generation type, whereas when I was small I was so clumsy that people kept anxiously testing my vision. He was idolised by half the country; I was idolised by Briar Coles, who, although sweet, was undeniably a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

But it was difficult to focus on these depressing truths while kissing him, so I stopped trying and concentrated on the matter at hand. Eventually we broke apart and he picked up my backpack. We went hand in hand up a staircase with sandstone treads and into a big open-plan living area. There was a kitchen in one corner – all stainless-steel appliances and granite bench tops and with a fridge that looked like the mainframe of a spaceship – and another flight of stairs led from the middle of the room up to a mezzanine floor where I assumed his bedroom must be. Beyond the stairs was a great black leather sofa, two black leather armchairs and a huge plasma-screen TV.

‘Crikey,’ I said.

‘I’m told that this place has all the warmth and charm of a lawyer’s waiting room,’ said Mark.

It did, too. The walls and flooring and kitchen cabinets were all beige, and the furnishings black. The only touch of colour was provided by two big canvases on the far wall, each one sporting a single red squiggle on a white background. I find it hard to be impressed by art that looks like it took longer to hang straight on the wall than it did to produce. However, those whose living rooms are a symphony of plum and orange are in no position to criticise anybody else’s interior design. And perhaps he loved it.

‘Have you had a good day?’ I asked.

‘It’s improving rapidly,’ he said. ‘Are you hungry?’

I shook my head.

‘Drink?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Anything else?’

I turned and put my arms around his neck. ‘This is good.’

He smiled, resting his forehead against mine. ‘Should we go to bed, then?’ he asked, apparently not feeling obliged to go red, stammer or otherwise act like an idiot. A novel approach, and vastly superior to mine.

‘Yes, please,’ I said.

He picked me up with no apparent effort – which was especially nice; it made me feel all delicate and waif-like – and carried me to the foot of the stairs.

‘Sexy,’ I remarked. ‘Very
Officer and a Gentleman
.’

‘Good, that’s what I was going for,’ he said, starting up the steps.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to put me down?’

‘Quite sure, thank you.’

‘Because it’d be a blow to fall down the stairs.’

He reached the top without mishap and set me down. ‘Helen?’

‘Yes?’

‘When I was imagining this, you talked a lot less.’

11

VERY, VERY CAUTIOUSLY, I SLID OUT FROM UNDER THE
covers. I retrieved my T-shirt and knickers from the floor, put them on and padded across the room to a set of French doors leading out onto a balcony. A great web of lights stretched away beneath my feet, and away to the right was an unbroken stretch of darkness that had to be the sea.

‘Okay?’ Mark asked.

I turned to see him watching me, propped up on his elbows.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Sorry I woke you.’

‘You didn’t,’ he said.

‘Lovely view.’

‘It’d be even better if you took your top off.’

‘Good line,’ I said admiringly. ‘Do you use it a lot?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Come here.’

I went back across the room to sit beside him on the edge of the bed. He reached up and brushed my cheek with the back of his index finger, and my throat tightened painfully.

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said. This was untrue, but I had a suspicion that it might be a bit early for, ‘You are entirely perfect and completely wonderful, and I think I love you.’

He moved over to make room for me and I slid under the covers beside him. There was a short silence, and he ran his hand up my leg from knee to hip. ‘I thought you didn’t like these,’ he said, tracing the lacy hem of the scarlet knickers.

‘Oh, well, I thought you might.’

‘I do. Please pass on my thanks to your stepmother.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I think not.’

‘Spoilsport.’

‘You could always tell her yourself.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said serenely. ‘I will.’

I kicked him.

‘Stop that,’ he ordered, rolling over and pinning my legs with his.

‘You’re so hot,’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ said Mark, smiling. ‘I work out.’

‘I meant your body temperature, you weenie.’ I lifted my head off the pillow to kiss his nose, which was nice and handy.

‘What’s your dad like?’ he asked.

I was a little startled by this abrupt change of subject. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he’s about six foot seven, a fundamentalist Christian, collects guns, very protective of his daughters . . . Ow!’

‘We’ll try that again, shall we?’

‘Biting people is
not
cool,’ I said sternly.

‘Toughen up, McNeil, it didn’t even break the skin.’

‘I can see the headlines now.
Innocent Girl Bitten by Crazed
All Black. Wound Turns Septic. Major Surgery Required . . .
’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Amputation at the neck.’

‘The ultimate solution.’

‘So,’ he repeated patiently, ‘what’s your dad like?’

‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘Big and kind and a little bit slow – I mean, not stupid, but he’s always running late and you can’t hurry him up. What’s
your
dad like?’

‘Big and fierce,’ said Mark.

‘Is he proud of you?’

He grimaced. ‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘And your mother?’

He rolled back onto his side and pulled me up against him. ‘She still cuts out every article that says something positive about me and sticks it in a scrapbook.’

‘That’s really nice,’ I said. ‘Your parents have split up, haven’t they?’

‘About ten years ago.’

‘Have either of them married again?’

‘Dad has. His new wife’s an interesting woman.’

‘Really interesting, or is that a polite way of saying she’s a hideous bitch?’

‘Hideous bitch,’ said Mark without the slightest hesitation.

‘A proper evil stepmother then,’ I said.

‘That’s right. Not like yours.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘mine is pretty cool.’

‘How old were you when she came on the scene?’ he asked.

‘Fourteen. Poor Em – imagine finding that your new man comes as a package deal with a fat angry teenager.’

‘I struggle to picture you fat and angry.’

‘That’s very kind, but I was,’ I said. At fourteen I was
appalled
that my father thought he could replace Mum with some blonde bimbo who put her makeup on with a trowel and dressed like Erin Brockovich. And it took me a long time to figure out that if I wanted to lose weight I was going to have to do something a bit more proactive than tying a jumper around my waist to make my bottom look smaller. (It didn’t.)

‘What kind of hideous bitch is your stepmother?’ I asked. The hideous bitch comes in so many variations: there’s the brittle, lacquered type with the artificial laugh and the vicious one-liners, or the belligerent type who takes everything as a personal insult, or – But Mark sat up and looked down at me. ‘I’m not going to lie here and talk about stepmothers,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ve got better things to do.’

I laughed. ‘What, like me?’

‘That’s the one,’ he said.

The morning was dull and grey, with sharp angry squalls of rain hurling themselves at the windows. Lovely weather, I reflected, drifting into Mark’s space-age chrome bathroom for a shower. And it was a gorgeous shower – completely different from mine, which was like having someone piddle on your head.

Mark wasn’t in bed when I came out, and I wandered back across the room to look out the French doors at the sprawl of roofs and trees below, with the harbour beyond stretching to the horizon.

‘Coffee?’ he called from downstairs.

I went and looked down from the low wall overlooking the kitchen. ‘Yes, please.’

‘Real coffee, or instant?’

‘Instant’s good,’ I said, and went downstairs to see him reach down two mugs from a shelf in his beige and steel kitchen.

‘Milk?’ he asked, spooning instant coffee from a metal canister.

‘Yes, please.’

He added milk, filled both mugs from a tap in the corner of the sink and passed one over.

I looked at it doubtfully – I hadn’t expected to have to request specifically that my coffee be made with hot water – and saw a reassuring wisp of steam. ‘Do you have boiling water on tap?’ I asked.

‘Yep. Cool, eh?’

‘Extremely cool,’ I said.

‘
And
the fridge makes its own ice.’

‘Far out, brussel sprout.’

‘I know. It’s pretty incredible,’ he said.

‘Do you have a robot to do your vacuuming, like on
The
Jetsons
?’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Sorry.’

‘Oh well, never mind. The tap’s still impressive.’

‘Thanks.’ He leant over and kissed me. ‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning.’

‘What do you want to do today?’

‘Whatever you like,’ I said dreamily. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘You’re really not the high-maintenance type, are you?’

‘I’m just lulling you into a false sense of security,’ I explained. ‘Then I’ll start demanding fur coats and Porsches.’

‘I see,’ said Mark.

He made me scrambled eggs the exact consistency of rubber for breakfast and rejected my offer to do the dishes. He left them piled in the sink instead, said he was exhausted from all that strenuous scrambling and that we’d better go and lie down to recover. So we did.

12

‘
WHERE
’
S MURRAY THE CAT THIS WEEKEND
?’
ASKED MARK
that afternoon, covering a slice of bread with thick slabs of cheese.

‘Home alone,’ I said. ‘He’s not allowed back to the cattery; he screamed for the whole weekend the last time I left him there.’

‘Poor Murray.’

‘Poor Murray, my foot. He’s probably disembowelling a rabbit on the end of my bed as we speak.’ I was sitting cross-legged on a leather-topped chrome stool on the opposite side of the kitchen bench, eating yoghurt. ‘That looks revolting.’

‘No-one’s forcing you to eat it,’ he said, ladling mayonnaise onto his cheese with a tablespoon. He slapped a second piece of bread on top of the mess and mayonnaise oozed from the edges. Undeterred, he collected the drips with a finger and wiped them on the top slice.

‘Charming,’ I remarked.

‘Always.’

‘Mark,’ I said, ‘what do you want to do when you stop playing rugby?’

‘Finish my building apprenticeship, for a start,’ he said. ‘I got my carpentry certificate when I was twenty, but I’ve still got another four thousand hours to do under a master builder.’

‘Four thousand hours sounds like a lot.’

He took a large bite of sandwich, losing about quarter of a cup of mayonnaise from the far end in the process. ‘Bugger,’ he said. ‘Yeah, especially when you consider it’s taken me eight years to do the first four thousand.’

‘So if you keep playing for another eight years, you’ll be qualified when you retire.’

‘I won’t last another eight years. Four or five, maybe, if I’m lucky and I don’t have any major injuries.’

‘Do you mind?’ I asked.

‘Mind what?’

‘That – well, that it’s going to end.’

‘Yes and no,’ he said slowly. ‘You’re right, some guys find it pretty tough. When I started playing you didn’t get any support – once you retired you just had to piss off and get on with it. But now they really encourage you to do some sort of further education and plan for your retirement. And there are plenty of people who’ve been through it to talk to.’ He lifted the top of his sandwich and scooped the mayonnaise puddle back in with his tablespoon. ‘You have to try to remember how insanely lucky you are to spend ten years doing your favourite thing and getting paid for it.’

I got down off my stool and went around the counter, pulling his head down to kiss him.

‘What was that for?’ he asked, putting his arms around my waist.

‘Just because you’re awesome,’ I said.

‘Thank you.’

‘Except for your eating habits. They’re pretty nasty.’

Just then his iPhone buzzed on the counter beside him, and he removed an arm to pick it up. ‘You don’t want to go out for dinner tonight, do you?’ he asked.

I shook my head, having not the slightest desire to share him with anybody.

‘Good.’ He tapped the screen a couple of times and put the phone back on the bench.