Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (8 page)

Nite miss you x

I didn’t actually jump up and down and squeal, but it was close.

6

SPRING IS BY FAR THE MOST INTERESTING TIME OF YEAR
in large-animal practice – the work is mostly emergency rather than routine, and almost all the really cool medical conditions of cows occur around calving. The only downside is that lots of them don’t occur during business hours.

It rained steadily all the first week in August and we were flat out at work. I enjoyed it; I was getting lots of good experience and it distracted me nicely from obsessing about Mark. Sitting around waiting for the boy you like to call does your mental state no good at all. Besides, it’s embarrassing.

The insides of my elbows were bruised purple from calving cows, which made me feel pleasantly stoic and hardworking. I did six breech calvings in a row, operated on a calf with a twisted stomach and spent Saturday night on Sam’s couch so as to watch the All Blacks play South Africa live at two thirty on Sunday morning. Sam’s couch was uncomfortable and his flatmates were highly amused, and I was thankful that the following week’s match against Australia was screening with a two-hour delay on poor people’s TV, so I could watch it at home.

Just before three the next Friday afternoon I was sitting on the edge of Thomas’s desk, drinking coffee and waiting for the next calving. We often had an early afternoon lull and then a run of calls around three thirty, once the dairy farmers had checked their calving mobs.

Anita came up the hall and vanished into the dispensary behind the front counter. ‘Who’s on call this weekend?’ she called.

‘Me,’ said Richard, who was leafing through the
Auto Trader
in a corner.

‘I’m on back-up,’ I added.

‘I’ve just induced six little heifers at Justin Smith’s, so you might spend a bit of time there this weekend pulling out calves.’

‘Thanks for that,’ said Richard sourly. ‘What are they in calf to?’

‘Angus,’ she said, reappearing with a box of thirty-mil syringes under one arm. ‘Justin’s already had two heifers down with pinched nerves, so we thought we’d better get the rest of the calves out before they grow any bigger.’

‘Yippee fucking skip,’ Richard said, closing his paper and stalking off to sulk in the lunch room.

Anita, who had three small children and a husband with two share-milking jobs, snorted. After work each day she picked up the kids, bathed them, fed them, supervised their homework, took them down to the cowshed while she examined that day’s accumulated sick cows, packed each of the kids a nourishing lunch for the next day and put them to bed so she could spend a relaxing evening with the farm accounts. She had almost no sympathy for anyone else who felt they were overworked and underappreciated.

The automatic doors at the front of the shop opened and Hamish Thompson came in out of the rain. ‘Afternoon, all,’ he said, kicking off his gumboots.

I slid to my feet and went up to the counter. ‘Hi, Hamish, how are things?’

‘Bloody wet.’

‘True. What can we do for you?’

‘Box of Clavulox and some milk let-down stuff for heifers,’ he said.

I turned towards the dispensary and found Anita already gathering the drugs. ‘Are you alright for syringes and needles, Hamish?’ she asked.

‘Yeah.’ He settled himself comfortably against the counter, crossing one ankle over the other and running a hand through his hair. He looked like Hollywood’s take on the rugged, virile man of the land, and I’d have bet a reasonable sum of money that he was hoping you’d think so. ‘Enjoyed your hot date the other night, did you, Helen?’

‘It was great,’ I said. ‘There’s something so romantic about cutting up a rotten calf.’ When talking to Hamish it was fatal to show the slightest sign of embarrassment. He was like a hyena, prowling around the edges of the conversation in search of an opening, and if you provided one he would attack without mercy.

‘So I heard,’ said Hamish. ‘Has he called you?’

‘None of your business,’ I said, although I smiled to take the edge off.

‘Just taking an interest,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to sign something?’

I pushed his docket and a pen across the counter.

‘
Has
he called?’ Thomas asked from his desk.

‘Of course he has,’ said Anita. ‘Look at her, she’s blushing like a schoolgirl.’

I hadn’t been, but my cheeks immediately began to grow warm. Blushes are such suggestible things.

‘So you reckon he really likes her, Hamish?’ Thomas asked.

‘Seemed pretty keen. No accounting for taste, I suppose.’ He signed his docket and handed it back to me, grinning.

‘But surely he could get any woman he wanted,’ said Thomas. ‘No offence, Helen.’

I had a fairly quiet Saturday: two calvings, a vomiting dog and three kittens with ringworm belonging to Fenella Martin. Ringworm is hardly an after-hours emergency, but what really annoyed me was spending half an hour of my life listening to Fenella explain that mating brothers to sisters and fathers to daughters is line-breeding and not inbreeding.

I got home from this happy outing just after eight and texted Mark:
Have fun out there and don’t get broken.

The reply, twenty minutes later, was,
Will do
.

Hmm. Succinct. Well, no doubt he was busy. Although of course he might be both busy and irritated at being sent inane messages by some girl he’d kissed on impulse a fortnight ago.

Text messaging really is a lousy way to communicate with someone you don’t know very well. You miss out on all the important cues, like facial expression and tone of voice, and if you don’t hear back you’ve got no idea whether the other person hasn’t got their phone on them or just doesn’t have anything to say to you. It’s enough to make you develop a stomach ulcer.

I managed somehow to stay awake until the replay at eleven thirty. It wasn’t a very interesting game, at least for a rugby ignoramus; it was raining heavily in Brisbane and both teams spent most of their time kicking the ball from one end of the field to the other. The Wallabies won, and at one thirty, having heard nothing from Mark and unable to think of any comment he might possibly want to hear, I turned off the TV and went sadly to bed, to be woken at six with a calving.

7

MY FIRST ACT ON MONDAY MORNING WAS TO SMASH A
full glass bottle of the most expensive antibiotic we stocked. Nick put his head around the door of the dispensary, closed his eyes for a second and said tiredly, ‘Jesus, Helen.’

I knelt down to pick up the pieces, cutting my finger in the process. ‘You can charge it to my account.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a bloody martyr,’ he snapped.

Then I went to a calving north of town – a live Jersey calf with one front leg bent right back. I tried for half an hour to get the other leg, and then called for help.

Anita arrived in her briskest and most efficient mood, attached my calving jack to the leg that was coming the right way and winched the calf out without bothering about the other leg at all. ‘Alright?’ she said curtly, pulling the slimy little thing around for its mother to lick. ‘Think you’ll be able to manage that by yourself next time?’

‘Yes. Thanks, Anita.’

‘Don’t just stand there. Get yourself cleaned up. You’re late for those calf dehornings at Mulligan’s.’ And off she went, her ute screeching around the tanker loop and spraying water six feet in the air.

I had two cat speys and an abscess to lance back at the clinic, and when I went in after a seven-minute lunch break to get started the surgery was a tip. I looked at it tight-lipped for a moment and went to find Zoe, who should have been cleaning it but was instead on the phone in the vet room, winding strands of hair around her finger as she talked. Seeing me in the doorway she swivelled in her chair so her back was to me.

The blood of my Scottish ancestors, a warlike and disreputable lot whose favourite employment, I believe, was rustling English cattle from over the border, grew hot in my veins. ‘Zoe,’ I said. ‘Excuse me, please, we’ve got surgery.’

There was no response.

‘
Zoe!
’ I repeated crossly.

Zoe muttered something into the phone and slammed it down.

‘The surgery’s disgusting,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

‘I
have
had things to do,’ she said. ‘You could help, you know.’

‘Seeing as I’ve been doing nothing all morning while you slaved? Clean it up, please, while I pre-med the cats.’

‘Bitch,’ she said and, bursting into tears, ran out of the room.

I went wearily out to the front of the shop and leant on the counter beside Thomas. ‘
What
is her problem?’

‘Boyfriend trouble,’ said Thomas. ‘I’ll have a word with her.’

‘And in the meantime I’ll go and scrub the fucking surgery.’

Thomas raised his eyebrows. ‘Not like you to swear. Are you having boyfriend trouble too?’

‘No,’ I said shortly.

‘You can tell Uncle Thomas all about it, you know.’ He bent towards me, and a gust of Lynx Out of Africa made my eyes water. ‘Haven’t you heard from your All Black?’

‘I’ve just got really bad period pain,’ I said. This was untrue, but proved a highly effective way of horrifying Thomas and distracting him from his line of questioning.

At five twenty pm I turned down Rex’s tanker track, lined up the first pothole wrong and crashed with a brain-jarring thud into the second one. It seemed a fitting conclusion to a thoroughly crappy day, unbroken by any form of communication from Mark. He’d been back in the country for more than twenty-four hours, and surely if he’d had any interest in me at all he would have been in touch by now. I had read
He’s Just Not That Into You
one rainy weekend at my ex-boyfriend’s parents’ bach, and it was pretty obvious that he wasn’t. I wondered whether Thomas would mock or commiserate, and which would be harder to bear.

Monday was yoga night, but I was in no mood for being a vessel filled with clear white light. I would have a long, hot bath with a glass of wine and a Georgette Heyer novel instead, followed by poached eggs on toast and bed by eight o’clock.

That small self-righteous inner voice whose sole job it is to make you feel guilty piped up,
You should really go to yoga.

Oh, sod off
, I told it.

Turning in through my gate I nearly hit a sleek, dangerous-looking sports car parked in front of the garage. Now
that
was unexpected. Mark was sitting on the back doorstep with Murray on his lap, and suddenly, although three seconds ago the only good thing about today had been that it was nearly finished, life was a wonderful thing.

I turned off the ute, got out and shut the door.
Don’t say
um. Don’t you
dare
say um
. . . ‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ said Mark, tipping Murray lightly off his knee as he stood up. ‘Sorry to just turn up.’

‘You’re the first nice thing that’s happened all day,’ I said, going across the lawn towards him.

He put his arms around me and kissed me for quite a long time, and I realised that, contrary to all expectation, today was the best day of my life to date. ‘You still smell,’ he said when we broke apart.