by Sue Watson
“But my sweet, you’ve hardly enough money to feed yourself. How can you possibly lay out money for ingredients?”
“I’ll try my credit card – it’s almost maxed but there should be enough to get some basics.”
“Look, ‘try’ isn’t good enough. You need to shop now. You need to bake now. I’ll loan you something so you can buy ingredients and make a start and stop yourself and Grace from starving. I could also drop the cake off for you, to save you rushing from there to the airport. Seb has a small van and so he’ll help me. But only if you promise to get the money for the ingredients back off her!”
“But Al, I couldn’t let you…”
“Oh sweetie, there’s no point in me having money sitting in the bank earning virtually no interest when you need it. I’ll arrange a transfer today.”
I hugged him and tried desperately to quell the lump in my throat. When things aren’t great, it’s friends like Al and Lizzie who get you through the tough days. As soon as Al left I trawled through some of my many cookery books to get an idea of quantities. I worked it out by taking a basic sponge-cake recipe and tripling it to make three tiers. That would give a little extra because the tiers would stack on top of each other and get smaller as the cake grew higher.
I collected Grace from school and we headed straight for the nearest supermarket. She pushed the trolley and announced the contents of each aisle like a town crier until we reached our destination. “Flour and Home Baking over here, Mum!” she screamed at the top of her voice and whizzed the cart around display stands on two wheels like it was an Olympic event. We filled the groaning trolley with kilos of butter, dozens of eggs, one and a half kilos of flour and tons of icing and caster sugar (courtesy of Grace, who started filling the trolley in the sugar aisle while I stopped to say hello to one of the mums from school. When I turned the corner to see a trolley heaving with various sugars and Grace struggling to get the thing moving, I gave up on quantities and just threw stuff in.)
Next, we caught the local Icing Emporium just before it closed. Here I took advice from Marjory, the owner, about quantities and types of icing like I knew what I was talking about. During this, I felt a surge of adrenalin – I was in control again, planning something, being creative. Kind of like being back at work, but in a good way. Grace and I saved the best bit until last and chose the ribbons and roses from all the myriad shades and textures the Icing Emporium had to offer. “Ooh Mum, Jessica will love these,” Grace said, waving a chunky little bride and groom decoration. “They are just sooo cool Mum – we have to get them.”
Marjory and I laughed; “I think I can throw those in free of charge, love,” she said. “I can’t sell them. No-one wants a fat bride!” Grace was delighted, but as we bid our farewells to Marjory I did wonder how I was going to break it to her that Mr and Mrs Chunky wouldn’t be adorning Jessica’s thirteenth birthday cake.
On our return home, we filled the kitchen and hall with crammed carrier bags and I dragged out the largest mixing bowl I had. I couldn’t wait to get started and immediately began adding all the ingredients slowly and carefully, incorporating as much air as I could to keep the mixture light and fluffy. I held the sieve high and white flour landed gradually like chiffon into the bowl. Grace smashed the rich, gooey, yellow eggs into the flour and as I began my folding, the symphony of sugar and flour and eggs just sang to me. I’m a Delia ‘all-in-one-sponge’ girl, so it all went into the bowl together and I mixed for England. God it was so good; pure therapy. This time, MJ’s head was back in the bowl being smashed with the eggs and Rachel’s face was being slowly folded into flour and butter with strong, definite movements coming from the elbow.
Grace and the bride and groom cake decorations were in attendance throughout and she proved to be invaluable when it came to licking the spoon and asking relentlessly, “Is it ready yet, Mum?”
Grace was just asking the question for the twentieth time as I finished mixing and to my horror realised I’d forgotten something vital. “Christ!” I exclaimed, my hand over my mouth.
“Mum, you’re not supposed to say…” started Grace, but I didn’t hear.
“Grace, I didn’t hire any cake tins,” I said shakily, “and none of mine are nearly big enough!”
I sat down, collapsing into the chair. It was 8.30pm and there was nowhere I could hire any from now – and even if I could it was Grace’s bedtime and I couldn’t leave her alone. I racked my brains. If I left the mixture in the fridge overnight the sponge would be flat and hard but I couldn’t cook it now as I didn’t have any tins the right size. I put my head in my hands, completely lost. I thought about buying ingredients and starting again the next day – but the cost aside, I knew I wouldn’t be able to bake and ice them in time.
“What are you going to do, Mum?” asked Grace, worried.
“I don’t know Grace. I just don’t know” I said tearfully. We sat in silence at the table for what seemed like ages, as I put off what I knew had to be done. Eventually, I couldn’t delay it any more; I picked up the phone.
“Mum, what are you doing?” said Grace.
“Calling Anne. I’ll have to tell her I can’t make the cakes after all,” I said shakily. Grace bit her lip as I dialled the number.
“Mum, wait!” Grace shouted suddenly, hopping up to sit on the kitchen table and waving her hands in my face: “I have an idea!”
“Grace, get off there. You’ll get flour all over your bum,” I warned, not really listening.
“But Mum, listen to my idea. Why don’t you just make millions and billions of little cakes and make a fairy-cake mountain like the ones in your magazines?” she said. My mouth dropped open. Just then, someone answered and said “Hello?” on the end of the line.
“Sorry, wrong number,” I said in a fake posh voice and hung up quickly. I scooped Grace up off the table and hugged her.
“Grace! You are a genius! That’s exactly what we should do. Well done!” I said and covered her with kisses.
And so, at midnight as my brilliant daughter slept (with the bride and groom cake decorations on her pillow) I put the last batch of what seemed like a million fairy cakes into the oven. Thanks to my addiction to baking, MJ et al were safe from murder and I had a lifetime’s supply of fairy-cake cases. My plan was to bake all the cakes that night, then decorate them the next day in pink or green icing, tie ribbons round them and stack them high and tight on a tiered cake stand, like one big cake.
By 9pm the next night the cake mountain was just about complete. There had been a few hairy moments, like when I’d set the timer wrongly and nearly burned an oven-full. I also realised when I started icing that I’d need to make extra cakes because it wasn’t as easy to apply as I’d thought. The icing also drank up so much icing sugar – thank goodness Grace put what I’d imagined would be far too many bags in the trolley at the supermarket. I also had to hire a huge, tiered cake stand which involved another mad dash to Icing Emporium once I had dropped Grace off in the morning. But after lots of lip biting, sweating and holding my breath, it had all worked out and the cakes looked beautiful. Before I finally got round to packing for my holiday, I positioned the last tiny pink rose and tied palest green gingham ribbon round the final fairy cake. I arranged them on the stand and marvelled at the 4ft-high tower of pistachio-green and rose-pink fairy cakes, dressed in matching gingham ribbons. Against the odds, it was now all ready for Al to collect in the morning and deliver in time for the party. Lightly positioning a pretty little pastel pink and green cake on the top tier of the stand, I felt exhausted and elated.
Grace wandered in looking for food and was completely mesmerised by the sight of them.
“Well done Mummy,” she said, which made me feel suddenly weepy and actually proud of myself.
“Well done you,” I said. “What a brilliant idea to turn a disaster into a mountain.”
I thought about how much Grace and I had pulled together since Tom left. She seemed to have developed a strength and empathy that
was impressive for her tender age. As painful as it had all been, Grace had certainly grown up and – fingers crossed – I thought I might be starting to do the same.
19 - Social Paralysis in an Incomprehensible Universe – or ‘Holiday’
We arrived in Ibiza the following evening. As the coach roared to a shuddering stop in our resort I thought what fresh hell is this? How can a place that looks and sounds so beautiful, calm and restful in the brochure be so different in the flesh? When I’d mentioned to Tanya, one of the younger and trendier school mums (she Twitters and has her own page on Facebook), that I was off to Ibiza she raised her eyebrows.
“I love the Med and I can’t wait to relax and eat tapas at little cafes and watch the world go by,” I announced outside the school gate.
Tanya’s response had been a little disconcerting; “Oh you’ll have a great time. But you won’t be sitting in cafés. It’s a party island and trust me, you’ll want to partay!”
I wasn’t quite sure what she meant and, trying to sound young and laid-back, said I was happy to go to a few ‘partays’ while I was there. She continued to enthuse about the place, reassuring me that I’d have a ‘really cool’ time. I should have cancelled then and I really should have gone home when hundreds of eighteen-year olds in hipster jeans, cowboy hats and boob-tubes with ‘The Best F*ck You’ll Ever Have’ emblazoned across their chests, appeared at our checkin desk (and that was just the reps). And I sooo should have got off that plane when Lizzie and I asked for a G&T, a bag of dry-roasted peanuts and a Kit-Kat and everyone else ordered Tequila slammers, flavoured condoms and staggered to and from the toilet in twos. However, it was only when the girl in front on the coach ride to our resort offered me some ‘bubble’ and told me to ‘chill’ that it finally hit me: I was in trouble.
So at 2am we pulled into the beachside village that was to be my parallel universe for the next seven days. What the brochure had described as a ‘lively’ resort was in fact ‘Planet Party’ and it wasn’t like any ‘partay’ I’d ever been to. As soon as the coach stopped everyone – including Lizzie – leapt off, stripped, threw their pants into the sea and chased after them, splashing and screaming. I declined. I was too old and my pants were too big but I didn’t want to be an old frump so over Lizzie’s shrieks of delight from the spray, I shouted, “I’ll chill in our den and crash the travel kettle for something hot,” but she didn’t hear me. In the dark I could see her clamber onto a young man’s back and as she rode him hard through the black, moonlit water, I knew in my heart it was only a matter of time before she was pissed and naked on a dancefloor covered in foam.
Trying to convince myself that everything would be OK I struggled with my old-lady suitcase, now abandoned by Pedro the coach driver on the side of the road.
Once on terra firma and dragging my pink wheelie behind me, handfuls of tickets were suddenly thrust in my face. I looked up to see that the perpetrator was a bronzed girl with long, sun-streaked hair, incredibly tight denim cut-offs, a butterfly tattoo and too many bangles, with a whistle round her neck. She smiled and enquired in a husky, educated, very Home-Counties voice; “Amnesia?”
“I wish,” I answered, thinking perhaps she’d been sent by Pissair, or whoever bloody Lizzie booked this nightmare with, to look after older travellers suffering from confusion brought on by early dementia.
“Amnesia is fabulous,” she continued.
“Well, I suppose it depends from which perspective you…”
“It has an ice-cannon,” she added, like this would clarify everything.
“That’s nice dear,” I answered, in my mother’s voice. This must be how Mum felt most of the time: socially paralysed in an incomprehensible universe.
“There are three or four parties every night,” the girl assured me, introducing herself as Cressida.
She then opened the zip of my handbag and pushed yet more flyers in, while hurling names and places at me like bullets.
“There are loads of parties happening, Pure Pacha is Fridays with Sander Kleinenberg and Trentemøller, Tong also has Timo Maas, Luciano and Dubfire.”
“What?”
When I was her age, a party was a Malibu and pineapple, crescent moon-shaped nibbles and George Michael crooning in the background. To Cressida a party was probably crystal-meth, poppers and Babyshambles throwing up in the toilet.
I walked on, now very worried about what lay ahead. Gone were the days of a glass of Cinzano and a quick dance round your handbag. Party nights in Ibiza apparently involved ice cannons, amnesia, whistles and foam. I wanted flight times and the next plane home.
Having mounted a million steps and teetered around the edge of the pool, my suitcase wheels veering dangerously close to the water, I landed at our apartment. After a little tussle with the key in the lock I was in and relieved to see that the room was basic but clean. Two neat beds stood side by side, covered in matching rust-coloured blankets. A plain dressing-table and mirror were opposite (where I spotted an overlarge, overage blonde plugging in the travel kettle). I looked at myself; I felt so old and wanted to call Tom. Despite her initial nocturnal frolics in the sea, I was even starting to wonder if Lizzie would survive seven days and nights in this hedonistic heaven of suntanned bodies and impenetrable Veejays.
At 43, she’d clearly decided to have some ‘me-time’ and who could blame her? At the tender age of twenty-two she fell in love with a married man. Of course, he’d promised to leave his wife and of course she’d believed him. Then, when she became pregnant, of course she had expected him to marry her. He didn’t. Instead, he dumped her and she had to struggle on alone. Her son Marcus had recently gained his degree and found a job in the City. He was making a fortune and probably sleeping with hundreds of girls so with her ‘baby’ now making his own way, Lizzie was determined to make up for her twenties and thirties; I just hoped she wasn’t planning to cover both decades that week. In her own words, Lizzie was ‘young, free and single’ and, unlike me, she had the time and the money to apply body cream, and have regular hair and beauty sessions. As she was constantly reminding me: ‘I’m out there, girlfriend’.
I stared at my reflection in the small mirror. I realised that if I wanted to begin life after Tom, I needed to think more like Lizzie. I was just warming to this idea when I opened up my suitcase and took out a pair of enormous M&S linen trousers. Gigantic floral tops followed and it was clear that I was in serious danger of looking like Veejay Dubfire’s grandma. As I placed a million pairs of dangly earrings on the dressing table, glancing at a ham-like upper arm and blaming myself for not losing twenty pounds, Lizzie appeared. Like a tsunami she burst through the door, wet through, laughing loudly and screaming obscenities at her new found buddies.
“Sorry babe,” she laughed as she fell over my hand-luggage and staggered like Dick Emery across the tiled floor. “I just had to feel that seawater on my skin. Get that kettle on babe, am gaggin’ for a cuppa.” She slipped off her shoes and as she towelled herself dry in the bathroom shouted enthusiastically; “Ooh, I spotted a couple of what you might call ‘older gents’ in the bar as I came up, and when I say older I’m thinking twenty-something as opposed to nineteen!” and she roared with laughter.
“What happened to ‘relaxing in cafés and watching the world go by’?” I half-joked, but she was singing away and slipping into her baby-doll in the bathroom, oblivious to my pain.
“The brochure described our resort as ‘famous for its old town, cobbled streets, tasty local sausage and fine linen’.” I called through, adding dried milk in big blobs to the swirling tea.
She laughed; “Sweetie, it is a bit younger than I thought but on the plus side, it’s just full of young men. Babes, it’s Cougar Town out there!” I drank my tea in silence. So, Lizzie had already discovered what the brochure referred to as ‘tasty local sausage’ and it was only the first night.
When we woke that first morning to the distant-yet-insistent beat of ‘Veejay Bobbi’ I stood on the steaming, concrete
balcony and surveyed the scene. It was incredibly warm already and not yet ten. By the pool, a few late-night revellers had abandoned themselves to the sun-loungers and were sleeping off last night’s orgasms on the beach and long hard screws against the wall (and no, I don’t mean the cocktails).
As I sipped yet more comforting hot tea I heard Lizzie singing and rummaging around in the room. She was so used to travelling with work, she never bothered to unpack and by the end of the week her suitcase would look like an explosion in a dress shop, but as she pointed out, “a designer dress shop, darling.” Anyway, from the already-detonated suitcase Lizzie had extracted a really stylish lime-green tankini which she was now sporting on the balcony with a matching silk sarong and a golden layer of ‘Fake Bake’. “Lizzie, you look gorgeous,” I said, almost as green as her outfit with best-friend envy.
“I have a turquoise set too,” she said. “You can borrow it if you like. It would go great with your blonde hair.” I looked at Lizzie’s full, curvy shape, chin-length auburn bob and (despite years of Merlot and Marlboros) perfect skin, and smiled; she was so kind.
“I couldn’t possibly look as lovely as you Lizzie. I’d never get those lycra shorts over my bum. I’ll stick to my big black upholstered costume, thanks.”
Lizzie put down her cup and saucer and grabbed my wrist, gently but firmly dragging me inside the room. “Madam,” she said, in a mock-stern voice. “You and I are the same size and I have to say you’re looking a little skinnier since that cheating bastard husband of yours did the dirty. There’s nothing better than a bit of marital trouble to make those pounds melt away.” She plucked the turquoise beach set from her exploded case and handed it to me. “Just try it on.”
I was sorely tempted. I’d only ever worn a big black bathing costume and black sarong on holiday. I’d once bought a pink sarong to try and liven up the black when we went to Majorca but Tom said it was ‘too young’ and that I didn’t want to look like ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, so I’d pushed it to the back of the wardrobe forever.