The Second Chance Café in Carlton Square

by Lilly Bartlett

  This is a blow to Joseph, who likes picking up the cakes because Cleo smells of vanilla. ‘Couldn’t we bake them ourselves?’ he asks.

  ‘Can you bake?’

  ‘Pssh, no, but you must be able to. Or Lou.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Lou asks, sweet as you please.

  He shrugs. Can’t the boy see he’s walking face-first into a proverbial cricket bat? ‘Because you’re girls. You bake.’

  ‘Oh, will you piss off back to nineteen fifty?!’

  I put a steadying hand on Lou’s arm. ‘Forgive him, for he knows not what he says,’ I warn. ‘Joseph. Just because we’re girls, doesn’t mean we can bake, any more than you’d know how to do DIY just because you’re a boy. They’re skills that people learn, not innate abilities. You’ve got as much chance of being a baker as Lou or me.’

  ‘All right, then let me have a go. I’ll bake our cakes.’

  ‘You?’ Lou says, which does undermine her original point a bit.

  ‘Yes, why not?’ I say. ‘Look up a recipe, Joseph, and you can try. I’d suggest something easy to start with. Let me ring Mum. She’s got the tins and stuff we’ll need and you can take some cash from the till for the ingredients. Remember to get the receipt. I won’t be much help, though, just so you know. I definitely can’t bake.’ Visions of Kell and my disastrous wedding cake experiment pop into my head. Joseph can’t do any worse, and for the cost of a sack of flour and a bit of butter, it’s worth a try.

  These are temporary setbacks, I tell myself. All new businesses have trouble with suppliers, so we just need to pick ourselves up and find a solution. You never know, maybe Joseph will turn out to be Star Baker. At least we can work the Gaggia now, and we’ve got a steady stream of customers coming in every day. I still haven’t seen many of our neighbours in here, but Lou and Joseph are learning skills they’ll be able to take with them, and I’m really quite proud of that. That was the reason I opened the café in the first place.

  While Joseph tries to work the oven and Lou looks after the takeaway counter, I bring Mrs Ishtique some more tea. ‘How is Daniel?’ she asks.

  I haven’t got the heart to tell her that her curries don’t seem to be the miracle cure she hoped they’d be. So I say the usual. ‘He’s fine, thank you.’

  She holds my gaze, nodding slowly and squeezing my arm. ‘I was once fine with Mr Ishtiaque, a few years after we were married. When my mother-in-law was asking how I was, I was fine. My mother too, was always asking and always hearing I am fine. Even Mr Ishtiaque was asking sometimes and went away with fine. I was fine. Fine as this saree, Emma. I was fine like this saree.’ She holds the end of her flimsy scarf in front of her eyes and looks at me through it. ‘You could see through me. Nobody looked at me, but I am looking at you, Emma.’

  ‘Can you take a break?’ Samantha calls over a little later. She’s alone at the mums’ table.

  ‘For a minute,’ I say. ‘Everyone’s just topped up on drinks. How are you?’

  She juts her chin at the play area where her daughter is studying a picture book upside down. ‘Her highness is waking every two hours again.’

  ‘You get up with her?’ I mean instead of her husband.

  ‘Of course. He needs his sleep. More than I do, apparently.’ She rolls her eyes.

  I’d like to give her a solidarity eye roll, but Daniel does get up with the twins nearly as much as I do, or at least he did until lately. He still will, as long as I remind him with a knee to the back. ‘Things any better on the bedroom front?’ I ask instead of keeping to the mummy track. Sometimes I like to remind myself that the world doesn’t revolve around children, and that’s definitely something the old Emma would have asked.

  She gathers her chestnut hair into a loose bun on top of her head. Then she pulls a small vial from her bag. ‘I’m going to try this. Supposedly a few drops and he won’t be able to keep his hands off me. Yeah, well, we’ll see. I might need the extra-strength dose.’

  I know that sexual attraction isn’t just about looks, but Samantha’s husband can’t be completely immune to hers. She’s got the kind of tall slender figure that looks perfect in designer clothes – skinny jeans and sleek silk tops and beautifully soft-looking asymmetric jumpers with zips and buckles and things that would make me look as if I’m wearing seconds – which is what she usually wears when she’s not on her way to or from yoga.

  The vial she hands me has a handwritten label that says Guarantee pleesure. ‘What is this? Is it safe?’

  She shrugs. ‘The women in the forum I’m on swear by it, and it hasn’t killed any of their husbands yet.’

  ‘It there a forum for…?’

  ‘Women who can’t get men to have sex with them? Dozens.’ She sighs. ‘Don’t uncork it. It smells of yak wee. I’ll have to hide it in pungent food.’

  ‘How do you know it’s not yak wee?’

  ‘I’ll try anything at this point just to get some kind of normal life back. Though I can hardly even remember what a normal life is. You might not be having sex, but at least you get to exercise your brain every day.’

  I shouldn’t laugh because she means it as a compliment. And I’m definitely not going to mention the quickie I ordered off the Express Menu after dinner at The Enterprise. It’ll only make her feel bad. Besides, it only half counts. ‘Samantha, I make coffee and tea all day.’

  ‘Don’t put yourself down. You’re running your own business.’ She leans in. ‘Tell me what it feels like. Go on. Let me live vicariously through you. Don’t leave anything out.’

  ‘Let’s see. I go home stressed every night and worry about everything that’s going wrong. I’ve got Barb, who hates me for some reason, trying to shut me down, and half the time I have no idea what I’m doing here. I’m supposed to be training Joseph and Lou, but I don’t know if I’m doing that right either. In a few months they’ll leave and I’ll have to find two new kids to replace them, and believe me, finding those two wasn’t easy in the first place.’

  ‘You lucky cow,’ she says. ‘It sounds wonderful.’

  ‘I’m not finished. That’s just the business side. Then there’s the constant worry that working is taking time away from the children and I’m missing something with them because I’m too busy or stressed or tired. You saw Grace take her own shirt off yesterday, right? Well, I didn’t because I was bringing the freelancers their cappuccinos. I missed my child’s milestone thanks to a few cups of hot foam.’

  ‘Cheer up. I bet you’ll be there when she gets her nappy off. That kid’s got stripper written all over her.’

  ‘You didn’t just call my child a stripper.’

  ‘Do you really think it’s a big deal in the scheme of things that you missed one bloody milestone? You get to see her nearly all the time, every day. If you hadn’t been serving hipster coffees, you could have been in the loo at home. Are you going to avoid the toilet in case you miss something?’

  She’s right. I sound ridiculous, at least about Grace’s shirt. I do mean the rest of it, though. ‘You really miss work?’ I ask.

  ‘You know I do.’

  ‘Then why not go back? You must have made enough as a consultant to hire a childminder for Dougie. And Amanda is old enough to be left with someone now.’ I say this even though just thinking about putting Oscar and Grace with a stranger makes me go cold. I’ve been so lucky with Mum and Dad and Auntie Rose. And the café. Samantha is right.

  ‘Ah, but you’ve answered your own question,’ she says. ‘What if I miss Amanda taking her shirt off for the first time?’ She sips her tepid tea. ‘Dougie’s a trooper, but he needs a lot of help. How can I trust anyone else? It’s hard enough to let him go to school. It’s the guilt, the GUILT. It gets us all in the end. If I stay home, I’m miserable. If I go to work, I’m selfish. Which is easier to live with? Damned if I know.’

  We both hear the plea for help from the play area. ‘Call of duty,’ she says. ‘Coming, Dougie. Hang on.’ In one graceful motion she sweeps through the gate, plucks h
er daughter from the mat and deposits her on her son’s lap. ‘Thanks, Jack, ta, Rose, hope they weren’t any trouble.’

  Auntie Rose beams. ‘No, they were lovely as always. Bye, Dougie, bye, Amanda. See you tomorrow?’

  Samantha’s son, Dougie, waves happily. ‘Thank you, Mr Liddell, Auntie Rose. See you tomorrow!’

  ‘Definitely see you tomorrow,’ Samantha says to me as she wheels her son’s chair through the play area gate. ‘Let’s get you changed before we go, okay?’ she says to him. ‘You’ve got tennis in an hour.’ Then to me, ‘Could you give me a hand with those?’ She nods at the pushchairs in front of the loo door. ‘Sorry to ask.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry! We really need to figure out a better system.’ It’s one thing to joke about Leo being able to push them out of the way in case of fire, but Samantha has to navigate Dougie’s wheelchair. That’s no laughing matter.

  I still cringe when I remember how I scoffed at her whinging about having to stay home from work just because she’d had a baby. Like nobody in the history of motherhood has ever had to juggle work and childcare. This was before I knew the real situation and before I had the twins, when my prejudices were as intact as my peritoneum. I hadn’t the faintest clue what it was like to look after a child, let alone one with the kind of health problems Dougie has.

  He was born with spinal muscular atrophy so he can’t stand or walk and needs round-the-clock care. Luckily he hasn’t got the breathing problems that some kids with the condition do. Well, I say luckily. It’s still pretty unlucky for poor Dougie, if you ask me, though he doesn’t let his wheelchair get in the way of being a seven-year-old boy. His social schedule is more packed than mine.

  It takes Joseph most of the day to bake something that looks like a cake, proving how deceiving looks can be. ‘Nice effort,’ I tell him, trying to swallow the oversweet, under-mixed brick of flour on my fork. ‘I couldn’t eat another bite.’

  ‘Not without vomming, we couldn’t,’ says Lou as I dig her in the ribs with my elbow. She flashes me a smile. ‘Sorry to tell you this, Joseph, but you’re no Mary Berry.’

  ‘I do appreciate you trying,’ I tell him, ‘but I think we’ll need another plan for the cakes.’

  ‘Go round to the caff and steal them?’ Lou suggests when Joseph goes out front to wait on a customer.

  ‘Another plan, Lou. I was thinking more along the lines of having someone else make them.’

  It’s a long shot, but I might know someone. Zane and I used to work together at the Vespa dealership, where he spent most of his time either complaining about our boss’s son, who never turned up for work, or reading paperbacks. Then, out of the blue, he quit to go to catering college and he did manage to come up with a wedding cake for us from his baking course. It was actually a gay pride rainbow cake with a huge wedge cut out of the back from when his tutor taste-tested it, but Kell fed some story to Daniel’s family about the missing piece being an East London tradition at weddings. We’ve lost touch over the last year, but he’s worth a try.

  ‘Since you mentioned stealing…’ I say to Lou, in possibly the most awkward attempt to introduce a topic in the history of conversation.

  ‘It was a joke. I wouldn’t really do it,’ she says. ‘You know that, right?’

  There’s no challenge in her question. Its uncertainty breaks my heart. ‘Lou, of course I know that. You’re not going to do anything to hurt me or the business. I’d trust you with… anything… the business, even my children. That’s why I’ve been wondering if it would be helpful to have a character witness for your court appearance. You know, someone who’ll tell them that you’re a good worker and a good person.’

  The more time I spend with Lou, the more I feel like she needs that. Presumably her mum would have stood up for her, but then she died. As if being an orphan isn’t hard enough. Lou’s got no one to fight her corner. ‘I’d be happy to do it.’

  To my surprise, she doesn’t flare up. She just shrugs. ‘It’s Youth Court. I can’t stop you if you want to be there, though you’ll need to get permission.’

  That’s about as close to a thank you as I’m probably going to get, because she quickly changes the subject. She won’t be happy that she’s let her defences down, even briefly.

  ‘Are you gonna use all the meat and cheese in the fridge before it goes off, do you think? The use-by date’s tomorrow.’ She asks this casually as she rotates the contents of the fridge like the Sandwich Whisperer taught us.

  ‘Probably not. The sandwiches aren’t selling nearly as well as the cakes.’

  ‘If it’s just gonna go off, would it be okay to take some?’

  I smile. ‘Midnight snacks?’ I tease.

  ‘It’s for the kids.’

  ‘Sure, it’s okay. Just leave a few slices for tomorrow in case we need it. What kids?’

  ‘The kids at home.’ Something about the way she says it warns me against asking anything more. Am I ever going to learn to stop asking so many questions? She never answers them.

  Only Leo is left when it’s time to lock up. ‘You’re later than usual today,’ I say, setting the chairs upside down on the tables so I can sweep the floor. ‘Do you have a lot of work on?’

  ‘Tons,’ he says. ‘And the presentation was this morning, so I’m behind on everything else.’

  ‘That’s right, I’m sorry I forgot!’ I shake my head. ‘I was busy with CakeGate this morning. I hope the presentation went well.’

  He nods. ‘We got the account. I heard about the cakes. Sorry.’

  ‘We’re also missing our coffee delivery. I don’t want to sound paranoid and blame Barb, but given everything else…’ Pablo isn’t answering his phone again, so I don’t know if it’s an admin error or something more sinister. At least we can get coffee from the market if we need to. Cleo’s cakes are harder to replace.

  ‘You probably haven’t had time to start reading that book?’ Leo asks. His eyes are slightly too big from the strong prescription in his glasses. That, coupled with the way his hairy chin juts out, makes him look really keen to know the answer.

  ‘Actually, I did start it last night. For about five minutes before I fell asleep.’

  ‘That would probably make the author sad to hear,’ he points out. ‘But you must be dead on your feet by the time you go to bed. Running a business and a house and looking after your children. Most people complain about one job. You’ve got three. Somehow women find incredible energy reserves, not just for everything you have to do, but everything you have to think.’

  ‘I think, therefore I am exhausted,’ I say.

  ‘Said Descartes’ wife,’ quips Leo.

  How different he is now that I know him. I hardly even see the tweedy hipster who stole my electricity. Leo is a very nice person. I look forward to seeing him every morning. ‘It does seem like an interesting book,’ I tell him. ‘It’s just a lot of information to take in. I used to be able to juggle more than one class, even working full-time. Now I can’t seem to remember a shopping list. My brain’s turned to porridge since having the twins. What I need is an idiot’s guide to philosophy.’

  ‘One idiot, at your service.’ He does a formal bow in his chair, making me laugh. ‘Sometimes remembering one key thing about each philosopher helps trigger the rest of their ideas. Take Socrates, for example. Or Socrates with a question mark, as I think of him, because he wanted people to question their problems and views and come up with their own solutions.’

  ‘So he didn’t actually have any answers himself? I could do that. In fact, I’ll probably try it on the twins when they start asking why about everything.’

  ‘They’ll be students of Socrates and not even know it,’ he says.

  ‘Socrates, question mark. Got it. Go on, give me another.’

  I should be getting home to start the tea. I check my phone, mentally sifting through the freezer for a quick meal to throw together for Daniel and me.

  Leo notices. ‘Sorry, am I holding you up?’

 
‘No, not at all.’ But it’s sweet of him to notice. ‘The children are happy enough here and they don’t need feeding for another hour. Their meal is easy to fix. It’s just steamed veg and some chicken.’ And fish fingers for the grown-ups. That’ll do for us.

  I’ve got no idea how much of what Leo tells me will stick in my brain, but it turns out to be the nicest chat I’ve had in a long time. Though I do have to push away the little niggle of guilt about enjoying myself.

  ‘You should be a teacher, you know,’ I tell him. ‘You’re really good at this.’

  He shrugs. ‘I just really enjoy talking to someone who’s smart and engaging.’

  ‘You probably need to go meet your friends.’ It’s yellow tweed Wednesday.

  His smile is really quite fetching. ‘I see them all the time. Getting to hit it off so naturally with a person is rare.’

  I know what he means. It’s about as rare as feeling like someone actually understands me.

  Chapter 16

  ‘Late day at the café?’ Daniel asks when I get home. He’s clearly pleased with his rhyme.

  ‘Long day,’ I tell him. Leo did eventually go meet his friends who, he said, love their craft beer too much to ever leave the pub early. Part of me wished he’d asked me along, though it would probably be irresponsible to drag my toddlers into a bar with strangers just so mummy could keep talking to the nice bloke.

  Again, there’s that pang of guilt. Why, though? Why shouldn’t I make a new friend when we enjoy each other’s company and have things in common? Just because he happens to be a man? It’s the twenty-first century.

  ‘I’m making supper,’ Daniel says. ‘It should be ready in a few minutes and I didn’t use any spice, so the children can eat it too. Saves us a step.’

  I gaze at Daniel with my mouth open, like he’s just found the solution for world hunger. ‘What have I done?’ he asks.