Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (20 page)

‘Sexy,’ I remarked.

‘We can’t
all
go out with gorgeous All Black locks,’ she said. ‘Some of us have to make do with elves. Now, are you up to Birch Crescent today?’

‘I’ll try,’ I said bravely.

‘Job for you,’ Thomas said on Wednesday afternoon, looking up as I passed the front counter on my way in from restocking the drugs in the back of my ute. ‘John Somerville’s got a steer with woody tongue, and he’d like you to take another look at that chook while you’re there.’

I came around the counter to look at the day sheet. It was three forty-five now, which meant that even if I left right away I wouldn’t get to John’s until four twenty, and no call there ever took less than an hour. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got an appointment in Hamilton at half past five.’

‘Doing what?’ Thomas asked.

There were so many plausible lies I could have told him. I could have said I was going to visit the optician, or to look at a car, or even to have my hair done. But in the stress of the moment I managed only to go red and mutter, ‘Um, I – none of your business.’

‘Fine,’ said Thomas huffily. ‘
You
call John and change it, then. He asked for you.’

John wasn’t in, and he didn’t have an answer phone. ‘Richard?’ I said, running my colleague to ground in the lunch room, where he was tipping stale biscuit crumbs out of the tin into his cupped palm.

‘Mm?’ He shovelled the crumbs in, rolled them around in his mouth for a while, grimaced and swallowed them anyway. ‘Yuck.’

‘Could you do me a favour? John Somerville’s got a steer with woody tongue to look at, and I’ve got to be in Hamilton at five thirty.’

Richard looked at his watch. ‘Who’s on call?’ he asked. ‘Get them to do it.’

‘I am,’ I said, suddenly remembering. ‘Shit. Look, can you swap?’

‘I was on last night.’

‘Please? I’ll do your next two nights.’

‘I’m shattered,’ said Richard, who had spent the hours between one and three pm tending his virtual garden on Facebook.

‘
Please?
’

‘Oh, alright. You owe me.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much. While you’re there can you have just a quick look at Esmeralda’s bumblefoot for me?’

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said heavily, as if I’d asked him to give me a kidney.

‘Just get John to pick her up, and take a picture of the bad foot on your phone so I can see if it’s improving. Okay? Please?’

‘Anything else, Your Majesty?’ he said over his shoulder as he left the room.

I made it to the imaging centre at five twenty-eight, overshot the turn into the car park and hurried breathlessly through the front door at five thirty-three. ‘I’m Helen McNeil,’ I told the woman behind the counter. ‘I’ve got a five-thirty appointment.’

‘Take a seat,’ she said. ‘They’ll call you.’

I sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair so as not to put undue pressure on my bladder, and picked up a year-old copy of
Woman’s Day
. I had read an article on Jennifer Aniston’s baby bump (which looked less like a bump and more like a loose-ish chiffon blouse to me) and was flicking through the pictures of celebrities in haute couture gowns at the back when a very pretty Indian girl of about my age came down the hall and said, ‘Helen?’

She arranged me on the bed in a small dark room, minus my shorts and with a towel draped discreetly over my thighs. ‘Ready? The gel’s cold,’ she said cheerfully, squeezing ultrasound gel onto my bare stomach. ‘Right, let’s see what we’ve got.’ And she placed the head of her ultrasound machine firmly on my bladder.

I made a small involuntary squeak.

She took the probe away again. ‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’

‘Yes, but the lady on the phone said I needed a full bladder.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s full and then there’s dangerously close to bursting. Why don’t you go to the toilet next door and let some out, and we’ll try again?’ She wiped my stomach with a paper towel, and I slunk out of the room, holding up my towel with one hand.

‘Better?’ she asked when I reappeared.

‘Much,’ I said, climbing back onto the bed.

‘Good.’ She reapplied the gel with a generous hand, and dug the probe back into my abdomen. ‘Okay, the big black circle’s your bladder – fluid shows up as black on ultrasound – and there’s your baby.’

I had seen it already, a white comma inside a dark circle. I had expected a skeletal seahorse-shaped thing something like a calf in early gestation, on the grounds that we mammals all develop along similar lines, at least at the start, but it looked like an actual baby. It had a round head with a tiny nose, and it waved two arms with recognisable hands at the ends.

‘It – it looks like a baby,’ I said stupidly.

The technician was evidently a kind girl. Instead of asking just what I’d been expecting it to look like, she smiled and said, ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it? And all the organs are already nearly formed – liver and kidneys and everything. The baby’s even got a tiny tongue. In a couple of weeks it will be big enough to suck its thumb.’

The thought of that teeny little embryo sucking his or her thumb brought tears to my eyes. Of course, almost everything
did
bring tears to my eyes just at the moment – I had found a dead silvereye on the living room floor that morning, courtesy of Murray, and wept over the tiny corpse.

‘How old is it?’ I asked.

‘I’ll just do some measurements . . .’ She turned to her computer screen. ‘Right . . . so your due date is . . . the tenth of July. Lovely.’

I tried to smile back at her, but I don’t think it came out very well.

19

‘
WHAT
’
S THE MATTER WITH
 
YOU
?’
NICK ASKED, COMING
into the vet room the next afternoon to find me resting my cheek on the cool shiny cellophane wrapping of a drug company mailout.

‘Nothing,’ I said, lifting my head hastily up off my desk.

‘You look terrible,’ he said. ‘For heaven’s sake, go home and put yourself to bed.’

I opened my mouth to demur, and then thought better of it and stood up. ‘Thanks.’

Out the front, Thomas was on the phone and Anita was filling the pockets of her overalls with tubes of pink-eye ointment while Richard decorated tomorrow’s day sheet with a green highlighter. He finished adding some careful shading to the side of a column and looked critically at his artwork.

‘Oh,’ he said as I approached, ‘I had a look at that bird’s foot for you.’

‘How was it?’

‘Looked good to me. I didn’t take a picture, but the swelling’s gone right down and she’s not limping.’

‘Cool,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘John was bleating on about some other thing with a limp – a duck or something. I said I’d get you to ring him.’

As I took my diary out from under my arm to write myself a note to call John tomorrow, the door to the consult room opened. Keri ushered out a vast woman wearing a white broderie anglaise tent and carrying a toddler, following in her wake with a small tabby cat in a cage. The woman surged up to the counter beside me.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ said Sharon from the midwife’s waiting room. ‘You’ll have to walk, honey, Mummy can’t carry you and Pixie.’ She put down the little girl, who buried her face in her mother’s skirt and wailed.

‘If you have any problem with those tablets,’ said Keri, setting the cat cage on the counter and speaking up to be heard over the crying child, ‘just give us a ring and we’ll give him the long-acting injection.’

‘He just takes ’em out of my hand,’ Sharon said. ‘I’ve got a real way with animals.’ The toddler’s wails became more insistent and higher pitched, and Sharon patted her vaguely.

‘That’s great,’ shouted Keri. ‘Now, he should be much better by Saturday morning, so if he’s not bring him in to the morning clinic between nine and twelve.’

Richard, who was on call this weekend and would thus be manning the Saturday clinic, bared his teeth at her over the client’s head.

Happily, Sharon was fishing through her purse and missed this shining example of customer service. ‘What’s the damage?’ she asked, taking out her credit card.

Keri came around the counter and looked it up on the computer. ‘Seventy-nine dollars sixty.’

Handing over her card, Sharon wiped her damp forehead with the back of a pudgy forearm. ‘Warm, isn’t it?’ she said, and turning towards me added companionably, ‘It’ll be winter when you get to this stage, lucky girl.’

I went rigid with horror.
They might not have noticed
, I thought feverishly.
I’ll say I’ve never seen her before – they
probably didn’t notice . . .

Sharon winced and clapped a hand to her mouth. ‘Oops,’ she said.

They would, however, have noticed
that
. As indeed they had: four heads had turned in unison towards me, like deer at a bird’s alarm call.

‘If, ah, if you could just enter your pin number?’ said Keri, wresting her eyes from my face to the customer’s. ‘Thank you. Would you like your receipt?’

‘No, I won’t bother.’ Sharon hefted her child up to sit on her hip, waved Keri away as she tried to pick up the cat cage and took it herself. ‘I can manage. See you.’

We watched her waddle across the polished floor and out through the automatic doors, and my nausea was temporarily swept away by a wave of hot hate.

‘Helen?’ said Thomas.

And here we go.
‘Yes, Thomas?’

‘Are you up the duff?’

I considered denial for about half a second before deciding it was a complete waste of time. Also, I lacked the energy. ‘Yes,’ I said flatly.

Thomas laughed.

‘Hah,’ said Anita with evident satisfaction. ‘Thought so.’

Richard gave a long, low whistle, and Nick, coming down the hall from the back of the building, raised his brows in enquiry.

‘Helen’s pregnant,’ Thomas said gleefully.

Nick opened and shut his mouth like a goldfish for quite some time. ‘
Are
you?’ he finally asked.

I nodded.

‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘When are you due?’

‘Tenth of July.’

‘Hmm,’ said Nick. ‘So you’re not going to be calving many cows this year.’

‘We’ll have to get a locum,’ said Richard.

‘We’ll see,’ said Nick in discouraging tones.

‘Oh, come on, we’ll be run off our feet. Every second weekend on call over calving?’

‘I worked every other weekend for nine years and it didn’t do me any irreparable damage, as far as I’m aware,’ said Nick.

I closed my diary and picked it up, and Keri reached across the counter to touch my hand. ‘You okay?’ she asked softly.

‘Mm,’ I said, because if I’d attempted anything more I would have burst into tears. The Huggies pregnancy website had assured me that both weepiness and nausea would recede in the second trimester, and I was clinging to that hope.

‘Hey, Helen, you’ll be able to do one of those
Woman’s Weekly
photo shoots, with you and Mark and the baby,’ said Thomas. ‘They’d probably give you ten grand.’

It was actually far easier to be teased than sympathised with. ‘Awesome,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Shit, I would. Ten grand is ten grand.’

‘Thomas, nobody would pay ten
cents
to see a picture of your offspring,’ said Keri.

The phone started to ring, and Thomas skated backwards across the polished floor in his wheeled chair to pick it up. ‘Broadview Vets, Thomas speaking . . . Hi.’ There was a pause, and then he said, ‘Look, she’s in consult at the moment, but I’ll pass the message on, and she’ll give you a call back in about quarter of an hour. Thanks, John.’ He hung up and propelled himself rapidly back to where the action was.

‘Call John Somerville,’ he told me. ‘Right, what’d I miss?’