The Art of Baking Blind

by Sarah Vaughan

  ‘He’ll be questioned about several road traffic offences and about the theft of the vehicle.’

  ‘The theft?’

  ‘Section 12 of the Theft Act 1968: taking without owner’s consent. A TWOC.’

  ‘Pardon?’ He is speaking a different language.

  ‘Sorry. That’s the acronym.’ He gives a chuckle, and she imagines him: a plump, little man, oozing self-importance. ‘What you might call joyriding.’

  ‘But it was my car. He didn’t steal it.’

  ‘We need to see if you could make a statement, Mrs Hammond.’

  ‘A statement?’

  ‘You are the victim of this crime, Mrs Hammond, and we need you to make a statement to see if you could press charges.’

  The unpleasant truth of what he is asking dawns on her. ‘You want me to make a statement against my child so that you can press charges against him?’

  ‘It would be helpful. Unless you gave permission?’

  She pauses. It is on the tip of her tongue to swear but she stops herself, aware that she is talking to a police officer. She forces herself to become emollient. ‘Well, of course, he can drive it whenever he likes.’

  ‘He hasn’t taken his test yet, has he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So if you have given him permission, you’re permitting him to drive without insurance and without a licence – themselves offences that place you in more trouble than him for taking it. I’d think carefully, madam, before you say that.’

  Frustration surges at this official little man who is now playing games.

  ‘I didn’t give him permission, no, of course I didn’t, Sergeant. But I’m not going to make a statement against him.’

  ‘Well, just think about it. There’s no need for you to come in to see him but we’d need to see you to consider bail, if that’s appropriate. We’ve tried your home – but you’re not in Winchester, is that right?’

  ‘I’m in Buckinghamshire, taking part in a baking competition.’ The explanation – and her presence there – seems suddenly ludicrous. ‘I’m leaving right now. I’m on my way.’

  ‘There’s no need to rush, Mrs Hammond. Please make sure you drive safely. He’s probably asleep in the cells.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ The retort is bitter.

  There is an uneasy silence.

  ‘I’ll come straight in.’

  She kills the call, aware he is speaking – telling her that officers will come to her house – but little caring for her abruptness or the foolishness of speaking like this to the police. She has past experience of them, and it wasn’t pleasant, or in any way beneficial.

  All that matters is that she gets to Jake – and quickly. She throws underwear into her leather holdall and pulls the doors of her wardrobe open, wresting free the shift dress she had planned to wear today. Fear propels her into activity. It suddenly occurs to her that the need to see Jake is stronger than the desire to gather up her things.

  She pulls on Pilates bottoms, her cashmere hoodie and ballet pumps. Then rips them off. She needs to look formidable even if her world is crumbling. On go the dress and a blazer. She will add high-heeled ankle boots when she finishes driving. She upends her hair and ties it into a high ponytail; thrusts rings on her fingers. Her hands shaking, she grabs make-up bag, jewellery pouch, iPod and handbag – leaving the rest of the room in disarray.

  It has taken her less than five minutes from ending the phone call to reaching her Porsche. During this time, she has tried to call Oliver, pressing callback when he fails to answer home, his mobile, or the pied-à-terre. He is supposed to be in Winchester so where the hell is he and why isn’t he answering?

  As she reverses across the gravel, tyres screeching, her phone rings. It’s Oliver.

  She brakes sharply, spraying gravel; kills the engine. ‘It’s about Jake. He’s been arrested for taking the Audi and crashing it. No one else is injured – neither’s he. But he’ll need a better solicitor than the duty one. Could you arrange that? I’m on my way.’

  She speaks in the way he understands: hard and factual, devoid of emotion.

  There is a pause.

  ‘I know. I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘He rang me.’

  ‘He rang you?’

  Her world shifts perceptibly.

  ‘He’s allowed one call.’

  ‘Why did he ring you?’

  She is struck by the injustice of it all.

  ‘I suspect because you’re the victim so the custody officer wouldn’t permit contact.’ He sighs in exasperation. ‘Come on, Karen, this isn’t about which parent he calls. This is about getting him out of this shit.’

  She is surprised by the uncharacteristic display of emotion. Her husband is too controlled ever to swear.

  ‘Oliver?’

  ‘He’s looking at going to court, Karen. Did you know he was chased by traffic cops before he smashed into a parked car? That he was involved in what they call a “pursuit” and that he failed to stop? They’ll have it all on camera. And that’s quite apart from the fact he was driving on a provisional licence with no insurance. He’ll be going to court – and he’s looking at a possible custodial.’

  ‘Oh my God. What the fuck has he done? Why has he done this?’

  His voice is cold. ‘This isn’t the time for recriminations, or self-loathing. This is about trying to help him.’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’ She seeks to recover herself. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘London.’

  She waits for him to gulp an admission of guilt.

  ‘Livy was staying at Molly’s; Jake said he would be at home revising and so there seemed – and clearly this was the wrong decision – no need for me to come back and check. I stayed on in town to get more work done.’

  She lets her fury pervade the silence. Only fifty miles from home but he might as well be in a different continent.

  She is suddenly exhausted by their virtual separation; by her loneliness. How did this happen? For a moment, she wants to be absolved of responsibility: to be held, secure in his arms, feeling the rise and fall of his chest.

  Instead, she issues an order: ‘Please sort out a lawyer. I’m going straight to the station. I’ll see you at home.’

  * * *

  Later, it occurs to her that two members of her family could be charged with speeding offences as she circumnavigates London, her Porsche Cayenne eating up the lights of the M25.

  She is acutely aware of how fast she is driving as she zips along the outer lane, occasionally undercutting slower cars that have the temerity to cruise at eighty. At one point, a black Porsche Boxster flirts with her, tagging her in a game of car kiss chase, the blond boy racer grinning inanely.

  She pulls into the middle lane; kills her speed; lets him roar off in a display of exhaust and thwarted testosterone. Ahead of her, the traffic is building up, the Porsches and Mercs that owned the road before six now jostling with the Audi saloons and VW Golfs; the pimped-up 4×4s; the people-carrying taxis on their second airport trip of the day.

  Round and round they go. The orbital studded with cars. Embracing the capital, like lights encircling a Christmas tree.

  Pulling off on to the M3 southbound, the traffic becomes marginally quieter and she zooms up the outer lane, leaving a chain of lorries rumbling behind. The car cleaves through the South Downs, where rabbits bound on the verge and a fox, destined to be roadkill, narrowly escapes. She surges on, the speedometer at 90 mph now. Winchester sleeps and Southampton, when she finally reaches it, is only stirring: the suburbs closed up for the night, the streets empty bar a few early morning runners and disorientated clubbers. The world is carrying on as normal despite Jake being held in a police cell. It is obscene.

  She parks in the centre of the city, and crosses over to the police station: 7.37 a.m. on a beautiful late April Sunday. Around her, lovers are sleeping off the previous night’s drinking, curled around each other in bed. Her
seventeen-year-old, meanwhile, is having a harsh – perhaps overdue – dose of reality. She imagines him, stripped of his belt and shoes, denied his wallet and iPhone, experiencing a night in a cell deep in the bowels of the police station. His beautiful face will be crumpled, bravado giving way to tears. I didn’t cry, she thinks. Not even when he gripped my head.

  It is the smell that brings it home to her. The smell peculiar to institutions: a cloying odour of disinfectant and fear. It is a stench that takes her back to the toilets of her comprehensive, where petty extortion and small-time drug dealing were carried out in the small stalls, girls cowering against the metal toilet roll holders or slumped on the urine-stained black seats as their tormenters practised stealthy intimidation. And it takes her back to a memory she has tried to block from her mind for three decades: of herself, as a seventeen-year-old, held at Southend nick. I didn’t cry then. I just dealt with it later, in my usual way.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  The duty sergeant is surprised to see such a sophisticated woman enter the station so early in the morning. She is dressed as if for a night out: short dress, blazer, high-heeled ankle boots, and yet she seems focused: not noticeably drunk or disorientated.

  ‘Jake Hammond.’ She lowers her voice though there is no one around, certainly not the drunks she feared and remembered. ‘I believe you are holding him. He’s my son.’

  ‘Mrs Hammond? We spoke on the phone. Sergeant Tyler.’

  He looks surprised as he equates the woman in front of him with the near-hysterical, increasingly abrasive person he spoke to.

  ‘You made it here pretty quickly. But I told you not to come.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just wanted to see him as quickly as possible.’

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t do that, at the moment. You’re the victim, you see, so it’s not permitted until after we’ve interviewed you. And he’s seventeen. He doesn’t need you as his mother here.’

  ‘Of course he needs me as his mother. He needs me now more than at any other time.’

  ‘Sorry – I should have said he doesn’t need an appropriate adult. He doesn’t need a parent, or a guardian figure, in with him. We treat him as an adult in that respect.’

  ‘But he’s not an adult.’

  ‘In the eyes of the law, he is in that respect.’

  Tears well, infuriatingly. ‘He is not an adult. He’s my little boy.’

  * * *

  Later, she is more stoic when the road traffic officer, a callow young sergeant only recently out of the Police Staff College tries to extract a statement.

  It helps that she is on her own ground: in her capacious sitting room, with its polished oak parquet which the officer’s comedy black boots risk marking, and its sumptuous cream sofa on which he has lowered his tall frame.

  It also helps that Oliver is at her side. To all observers, they are a united couple, anxious for their child’s welfare but aware of the seriousness of his behaviour: the fact he has committed a crime.

  ‘I think we can just put it down to youthful high spirits.’ Oliver had sought to downplay the situation with a smoothness Karen associated with his professional life but rarely glimpsed.

  ‘With respect, sir. I think it’s a little more serious than that,’ Sergeant Knapton had begged to differ. ‘He was driving at 96 mph on the ring road and was in a pursuit situation.’

  ‘I think what my husband means, Sergeant,’ Karen had interposed with a smile at both men, as she had refilled the officer’s coffee cup, ‘is that Jake isn’t a “bad boy”. He’s never been in trouble with the police before and, as his headmaster will tell you, he’s an exemplary pupil.

  ‘I think what we both feel is that this was an ill-judged prank that went badly wrong. You can be assured we will be letting him know precisely what we think of his behaviour. But as for pressing charges: I don’t think we’re going to achieve anything by doing that, other than giving him a criminal record – and risking alienating him.’

  ‘My wife’s quite right,’ Oliver had added, with a smile at her. ‘Thank you, darling.

  ‘I think what we all need to consider, officer,’ he went on, ‘is that Jake is a high flyer. He’s applying to Durham and if we blight his copybook in this way, we will, quite literally, ruin him. So, we won’t be pressing charges, officer, and, though we recognise the severity of the driving offences, as our son, we will be supporting him.’

  He had given the smile of a rich man used to getting his own way.

  ‘Now about bail…’

  ‘That’s down to the discretion of the custody officer, sir. Not my job. But if you seem to be suggesting you would support him and wouldn’t aid him to abscond, and if it appears he’s unlikely to be a risk to himself…’

  ‘Jake? A suicide risk? The idea’s preposterous.’

  ‘… I can’t see why it wouldn’t be granted.’

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant.’ It is Karen. ‘So, can he come home now?’

  ‘He needs to be interviewed, first, madam.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ She had forgotten that. ‘Well, when he can, I’d like to come and collect him.’

  33

  Be sure to make time to bake specifically for your children, concocting fairy sandwiches and butterfly cakes just for them. A birthday cake for a special child is a memory they will cherish. Everyone wants to feel loved and to feel unique. And children feel this particularly strongly.

  It is a crestfallen Jake who greets her. The arrogance he has worn like a shield over recent months has been discarded revealing him to be more boy than man: soft-featured, vulnerable, scared.

  Barefoot and beltless, he seems diminished, his six foot two-inch frame bent over.

  ‘All right, Mum?’ His greeting is hesitant. The ironic ‘Ma’ is missing. He bows his head, shame at his behaviour and at the incipient tears engulfing him.

  She goes to put her arms round him.

  ‘Whatcha doing?’ He looks, briefly, mortified then surrenders.

  ‘All right, my darling. It’s all all right.’

  His long, lanky frame in her arms, she realises she has not held him like this for at least four years – since he was twelve or thirteen. Latterly, if he has touched her it has been momentary, a clutch given ironically when fooling around with his friends, or a brief squeeze, his body held away from her, bestowed under sufferance.

  He draws away, aware he is being appraised by the inspector who has made quite clear his contempt for him.

  ‘That’s not to say Dad and I aren’t bloody furious.’ She says this partly for the officer’s benefit and partly for her son’s. She doesn’t want them to think he is a rich kid whose misdemeanours will be paid for by Mummy and Daddy – however true this is. Hours later, she will curse him when she becomes embroiled with the insurance firm and finds herself explaining that her car was taken and written off but that the police are not treating it as theft of a vehicle. The threat of the insurance claim not being met hangs heavy and, in the privacy of her shower, she rails against his privilege. But, for now, there are no recriminations. She feels nothing but relief.

  She goes through the necessary paperwork with Jake and the custody officer. Can she vouchsafe for him not absconding? It doesn’t appear that he is liable to harm himself or to intimidate her, and he has shown that all-important remorse, and so he is bailed until the juvenile court hearing in two weeks.

  Jake signs for his belongings, handed over in a labelled plastic bag. His wallet and iPhone; socks, belt and house keys, pitiful in the plastic. The car keys are signed for by Karen, the weighty key fob thrust deep in her handbag, out of sight, out of harm’s way.

  ‘You know that your car’s not roadworthy now, madam.’

  ‘I am aware of that, yes.’

  ‘You’ll need to contact the garage.’

  They go through the practicalities; mind-numbing, exhausting, necessary, while, by her side, Jake is eaten up with shame.

  By the time they reach the car, across the street from the
police station, Jake is crying properly: silent sobs that rack his body, and which, in a rush of irritation, she imagines are put on for effect.

  She is silent, unlocking the Porsche, opening the passenger door for him, getting in on her side. It is only when both doors are closed, and she is assured of privacy, that she can trust herself to talk to him.

  ‘So?’ Her tone is cold. Anger submerges relief – not just at him writing off the car but at him putting her through all this.

  He blurts out a sob. His eyes are red-rimmed and puffy now, his top lip doused in snot and tears.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, blow your nose.’ She hands him a neat tissue from a packet, then another. He sniffs gratefully, tries a watery smile. It is as if, she thinks, looking at him more dispassionately, he is a five-year-old again.

  ‘Why did you do it, Jake? How could you be so stupid, so irresponsible? You could have got yourself killed – or killed someone else. Christ, you could be facing charges of death by dangerous driving.’

  He gives another sob but when he looks at her, there is anger and incomprehension in his eyes to match hers.

  ‘Why do you think I did it?’

  ‘I’ve no bloody idea. Because it seemed like fun? You weren’t drunk. Were you high? My God…’

  ‘No, nothing like that. Honest. The police did a blood test.’

  ‘Well, why then? To get at me?’

  ‘Yes.’ He is crying properly now.

  ‘Yes?’ She is dumbfounded. ‘Yes?’ Her voice escalates.

  ‘Do you really not know?’

  ‘No.’ Though of course she knows and her fear is now a certainty.

  His voice comes out in a rush. ‘Because of Jamie.’

  ‘What about Jamie?’ She feels winded.

  ‘He boasted about it…’

  She wants to retch. The response is physiological not merely psychological. She opens the car door, leans out; waits, breathing in the crisp early morning air until she has calmed herself, averted a catastrophe. You’re fooling no one, Ma. You’re fooling no one.