Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (28 page)

‘What – “Here’s one I prepared earlier”?’

‘Exactly,’ said Em solemnly. ‘It was a premeditated act.’

25

‘
ARE YOU DOING ANYTHING THIS WEEKEND
?’
ALISON ASKED
the next day, vaulting lightly over a stile into the Broadview Wildlife Park. This optimistically named spot was a smallish paddock on the southern edge of town, home to three sheep, several roosters and one tatty peacock. However, it was reached by a flat, tree-lined road, which made it a far nicer summer destination than the sun-baked heights of Birch Crescent.

‘Going to the Blues–Chiefs game tomorrow night, and then on to someone’s engagement party,’ I replied, jumping down after her with a thud.

‘How glamorous.’

‘Except that none of my good clothes fit anymore. I’ll probably have to wear Nick’s overalls.’

‘Who knows? You might start a trend.’

‘Somehow I doubt it,’ I said morosely. ‘What are you guys doing this weekend?’

‘Having dinner with your grandmother.’

I looked at her in flat disbelief. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Well, there you go. And I thought Sam liked you.’

‘I think your grandmother’s hilarious,’ said Alison. ‘I do her diabetic checks. She always calls me “young lady”, and she never does anything I suggest.’

‘She’ll probably cook you tripe,’ I said.

‘We’re taking fish and chips.’

‘That’s no guarantee. There might be a tripe entree.’

‘What
is
tripe, anyway?’ she asked.

‘The stomach lining of a cow. You boil it for a week or so and serve it with onions.’

‘Yummy,’ said Alison.

At ten past seven on Friday evening I stood in Mark’s gleaming chrome bathroom, looking despairingly at my reflection.

‘Ready?’ he called from the bedroom.

‘No!’ I called back.

He looked around the bathroom door. ‘What’s up?’

‘I can’t go out like this,’ I said, turning to face him. ‘Look at me.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’

I looked down at the paisley wraparound skirt I had found in the back of my wardrobe the previous night. I’d tried it on with sandals and a long cream singlet and decided it was actually quite an elegant look, reminiscent of Gisele Bündchen. Now I could only assume I had been in some kind of pregnancy-induced hallucinogenic state. ‘I look like a whale wrapped in a curtain!’

‘You do not,’ he said.

‘I do too!’

‘Well, then, wear something else.’

‘Nothing else fits!’ I wailed.

Mark sighed. ‘Could we finish this conversation in the car? We’re late.’

I nodded sadly and went past him down the stairs. At the front door he turned me around with his good arm and kissed me. ‘Stop stressing, McNeil,’ he said. ‘You look beautiful.’

I put my arms up around his neck and hugged him tightly.

Saskia winced. ‘Not straight, Alan,’ she muttered.

Blue number four caught the lineout ball and lobbed it to the halfback. ‘Straight enough,’ said Mark. Then he winced in turn as a mob of red, black and gold players fell on the poor halfback like maddened wasps and turned the ball over.

‘Offside!’ Saskia barked, just before the whistle blew. ‘Good . . . Don’t waste it . . . Oh, for God’s sake! What a piss-poor excuse for a kick!’

‘Settle down, woman,’ Mark said. ‘It’s his first start, poor little sod.’

‘It’ll be his last if he can’t do better than that.’

Someone in the row behind us squealed, and I turned to see a woman with bright blue eye shadow waving frantically at the big screen above our heads.

The camera was of course centred on Mark, who glanced up for a moment, smiled in a friendly sort of way and turned back to Saskia. She looked up too, and waved. Wonderful ambassadors for New Zealand Rugby, the pair of them. I, however, spent my second and a half on national television staring in horror at my own reddening face.

As the coverage flicked back to the field, Mark looked at me and began to laugh. ‘It’s your fault,’ I told him, pressing the palms of my hands to burning cheeks. ‘You know what I’m like; you should have left me in the car.’

‘
I
once lost a Malteser down my front at an All Black game,’ Saskia said, ‘and the whole country got to watch me fish for it before I realised I was on TV.’

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Or are you just trying to make me feel better?’

‘Really,’ she said.

‘She loved it,’ said Mark. ‘Probably did it on purpose. Some people’ll do anything for fifteen minutes of fame.’

In the next twenty minutes we were treated to two opposition tries and a single penalty kick by the Blues, which missed. ‘Shit,’ said Mark as the half-time hooter blew.

‘It could be worse,’ Saskia said. ‘They could be winning without you.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ he said.

The second half was very tense, as the Blues clawed their way back into the game. But they never clawed their way into the lead, and in the end they lost by two points.

‘Crap,’ said Saskia, as the Chiefs fullback kicked the ball into touch, ending the game. She got to her feet and stretched. ‘Want to come with me, Helen, or wait for Tip to sign autographs?’

‘I’ll wait, but thank you.’

‘No, you’d better go,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll be a while.’

When we got to the bottom of the steps I stopped and looked back – Mark was posing for photos with a couple in their fifties at the end of our row of seats, and a queue was forming in the aisle.

‘We were having tea at a restaurant in Cook’s Beach a few weeks ago, and a woman came and sat beside him and put her hand on his thigh,’ I told Saskia. A fairly brazen move, I had felt, when he was dining with another woman at a table for two.

‘Classy,’ she said.

‘She didn’t even look like she was drunk.’

Saskia grinned. ‘That’s just an occupational hazard of hanging out with Tip in public. I remember once when he and Alan were flatting together we got home from the pub and counted fourteen phone numbers written on Tip’s arm.’

‘Did he copy them all down and work his way through the list?’ I asked.

‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ she said, evading a pack of blue-clad teenagers who were making their way up the steps against the tide of people leaving the stadium. ‘But he was only about nineteen, and nineteen-year-old boys aren’t usually known for their taste and discrimination.’

‘What was he like back then? He told me he was a cocky little shit.’

‘When I met him I thought he was an arrogant dickhead. And then I got to know him a bit better, and figured out that he was actually just a scared kid.’

‘Scared of what?’ I asked.

Saskia shrugged. ‘Failure. Getting kicked off the team.’

‘But he was really good, wasn’t he?’

‘He was amazing. He was an All Black three years before Alan was. But when you get told your whole life that you’re useless, you start to believe it.’

‘Saskia!’ called a cheerful-looking Samoan woman from the top of the steps, forcing me to abandon this fascinating line of questioning.

‘Hey, Maria!’ Saskia called back. ‘Helen, this is Maria Mamoe, Aleki’s wife. Helen’s Tip’s partner, Maria.’ Aleki Mamoe was the Blues’ starting openside flanker. A top bloke, Mark said, who always played in his lucky boxer shorts. I liked the thought of one hundred and twenty kilograms of muscle-bound rugby player needing to wear his lucky undies on the field. ‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Nice to meet you,’ said Maria. ‘Pretty crap game, eh? I’m going to kick that man’s bum when he gets home. He gave away two penalties.’

Mark’s friends’ engagement party was being held at a bar in Newmarket, and it was nearly ten when Saskia and I got there. We were met at the door by the wall of noise you get when a couple of hundred people are screaming at the tops of their lungs over a live band in a space about twenty metres square.

It was very hot inside, and Saskia was immediately drawn into a circle of people. She introduced me to the man on my right and we roared pleasantries at one another.

‘Sorry? What was your –? Oh, hi, Greg. Oh,
Craig
. Sorry. Nice to meet you. I’m Helen.
Helen
. . . Never mind.’

Almost any remark sounds completely inane after you’ve repeated it three times at the top of your voice. After a while I stopped trying and settled for nodding and smiling. And a while after that I realised my smile had become fixed and my nod was turning into a nervous tic, and slunk off to the toilets to regroup.

Putting my bag down on the edge of the bathroom sink, I rummaged through it in search of a hairbrush. A pen . . . Bel’s turtle, mysteriously returned . . . a box of Tampax – now that was ironic . . . a cheque book for an account I had closed a year ago . . . It was just possible that, one of these days, it mightn’t hurt to have a cleanout.

Behind me a toilet flushed, and I glanced up at the mirror to see a startlingly beautiful blonde girl emerge from a cubicle. She wore a little black dress with a halter neck – a sleek, clinging, sophisticated dress, unmarred by the merest wrinkle of knicker line – and her hair fell in glossy waves over her slim brown shoulders. I’m sure I would have been a trifle dispirited by the contrast between this radiant vision and myself in any case, but I recognised her, and I almost crumpled into the sink.

Of course I had known that Tamara Healy was a pretty girl. I had seen her playing netball on TV, lithe and blonde and coordinated and no doubt all sorts of other good things I wasn’t. But done up for a party she wasn’t just pretty, she was stunning.

Our eyes met in the mirror, and she smiled. She had a chipped front tooth, and the effect was oddly endearing. It seemed unfair that the woman’s only visible flaw should actually enhance her good looks. ‘Hot out there, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Um, yes,’ I whispered. ‘Very.’

Once she’d gone I hunted through my bag with renewed fervour and found not only my hairbrush but a tube of Lash Defying mascara. I brushed my hair until it shone, put on two coats of mascara and pulled the neck of my singlet down an inch, on the grounds that if cleavage is your distinguishing feature you might as well show it off. Then I picked up my bag and swept out of the toilets.

The band was taking a break, which decreased the noise level from deafening to merely loud. I was standing on the outskirts of the crowd, looking at a dense wall of shoulder blades and planning my route, when Alan Jaeger came in through the door to my left. He had the pink, scrubbed look of someone not long out of the shower and an angry red graze on his forehead.

‘Hi, Helen,’ he said, stopping beside me. ‘How are you?’

‘Very good. Hey, you were really great out there tonight.’

‘Thanks.’

‘The scrum looked awesome,’ I said.

‘Pity nothing else did. Drink?’

‘Not for me, thanks, but they’re handing out champagne over there,’ I said, pointing towards the far end of the bar.

Alan made a face. ‘Good on them.’

‘Alan,’ said the breathtaking Tamara Healy, appearing from behind a pillar. ‘Tough luck tonight. I hear you were legendary, as usual.’ She leant in to kiss his cheek.

‘Thanks,’ said Alan.

Straightening, she turned to me. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Tamara.’