Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (40 page)

‘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.

‘Now, if it’s not you, you can exchange it. There’s a card in there somewhere.’

Inside the bag was a tissue-wrapped mohair blanket, clear pale green and soft as a cloud. ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t have, but thank you so much.’

‘Look at that: it even goes with your cushions,’ said Saskia, smiling at me as she draped the blanket artistically over the back of the couch and rearranged my green shot-silk cushions against it.