I force out a small smile but my insides are aching with love and pain for Harry so it’s a bit difficult to look too excited.
‘I can’t go,’ I say. ‘How can I leave Harry? I just can’t go.’
Mum’s smile fades, but then she nods and takes my hand.
‘Never mind, love,’ she says. ‘It was great to be praised by the judges in that way. You should be proud.’
We chat on about the competition a bit, but underneath I feel anything but proud.
I made my sweet, kind, boyfriend rush up to London to rescue me and then he got run over.
How can I ever feel proud of myself again?
Chapter Sixteen
When I get out of hospital I rest at home for a couple of days.
Trish comes to the house and shows me and Mum how to hook a tube to my gastrostomy so that I can be given night feeds of extra calories while I’m asleep. At first I can’t sleep because I swear I can feel the liquid going into me. The tube feed always has to be switched off at four in the morning and flushed through and disconnected, and the tubes from the oxygen canister feel uncomfortable as well, so I guess that’s it for ever getting a decent night’s sleep again. But I get used to the gastrostomy quite fast, so I don’t feel quite as depressed about that, at least. Even after two days I weigh a bit more on the scales, so I’m really pleased, and so is Mum, but this horrid sadness drags me down every waking moment of the day.
I go back to school and Gemma makes sure that I don’t get over-tired and she tells anybody who says anything nasty about me to back off and for once they do. Everybody knows about Harry. He was one of the most popular boys in his year, so I get a fair few people coming up to me and asking how he’s doing.
I always tell them the same thing: ‘He’s alive, which is the main thing.’
But he hasn’t come out of the coma.
I go out every lunch break and sit with Gemma under the old oak tree where I used to sit with Harry and sometimes we chat and at other times I’m silent and don’t feel much like talking and she’s fine with that. I feel guilty for feeling resentful of her health. She’s a good friend – the best. And she’s always there for me. So I tell her how I’m feeling and she nods and holds my hand.
And then.
***
I’m back working in Karim’s shop.
He’s agreed to start paying me my wages in money. Every time I think about baking (which let’s face it, used to be pretty much 24/7), I get a big pang of sadness and anxiety in the pit of my stomach and I picture Harry’s pale face on the hospital pillow and I know that it’s all my fault he’s there.
So I stop baking.
I stop reading cookery books and watching cookery programmes. I empty out all my ingredients cupboards at home and chuck a lot of it away.
Mum watches me with a sad look in her eye but doesn’t dare speak. I’m on a short fuse, what with the worry about Harry and the plunge in my own health.
I no longer fill my basket with flour, eggs and sugar in Karim’s shop. He counts out the notes at the end of the day and puts them into my hand with a sad look in his eyes.
‘It’s no good, Little Girl Who Bakes not baking,’ he says. ‘No good at all.’
‘You’re just saying that because it costs you more to pay me money,’ I say with a sad smile, but he’s not having any of it and goes back to the cash till shaking his head and making a noise which sounds like ‘I, I, I’ so I pocket the money and head towards home. Not sure what I’m going to do with my wages yet. Maybe I’ll have to go clothes shopping with Gemma more often.
When I get in after my third day back at the shop, Mum’s right on me the second I open the front door.
‘Hospital rang,’ she says, all out of breath. She shoves a coat in my direction and grabs her keys from the hall table. ‘We’ve got to get there. Now.’
***
Mum won’t say anything on the way. She drives quite fast and I swear she makes a speed camera flash but she just mutters a rude word, pulls a face and carries on at the same speed.
‘He’s not – he’s not…’ I say, unable to get the words out. I look at Mum’s face. She doesn’t look as if anybody has died. Then again it’s sometimes hard to tell with Mum.
‘Oh – no,’ she says. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.’
We pull into the hospital car park and Mum grabs my hand and almost pulls me at a run towards the entrance foyer and then remembers that I find it kind of hard to breathe and I’ve just got out of hospital myself, so she slows down to a pounding walk.
I’m still really panting and coughing by the time we get up to the fifth floor.
Mum propels me past a smiling nurse and a smiling consultant in a white coat. Another smiling nurse comes out of Harry’s room and almost claps her hands when she sees me. Everybody seems to have gone into slow motion for some reason. I have time to notice the gold filling in her front tooth when she smiles and the white name badge with black lettering on her blue uniform.
Harry’s parents leap up when they see me come in. They’re both smiling too. His mother looks about twenty years younger and quite pretty.
‘Oh, Amelie,’ she says. ‘He’s woken up! Quick – come and see.’
I’m already in tears.
Adam vacates his chair for me and I sit down and find myself staring straight into Harry’s deep brown eyes.
‘Hi,’ I croak. I turn away and cough for a moment. Mum offers a bowl but I shake my head and turn back to Harry. He blinks at me and a slow smile spreads over his face. He’s still wired up to machines and tubes, but this time his grip on my hand is strong and warm.
‘He won’t be able to say much,’ warns his mother. ‘But he’s back with us. That’s what counts.’
She blows her nose and rests her cheek on Adam’s shoulder. I can hear my own mother sniffling behind me.
‘Cup…’ says Harry, or at least something that sounds like that. ‘Cup…’
He reaches up with his right hand and removes the oxygen mask from his face.
I frown and bend right down so that my head is near his mouth.
‘Try it again,’ I say. ‘I’m listening.’
Harry summons up all his strength.
‘Cupcakes,’ he says.
‘What did he say?’ says his mother. ‘I swear he just said “cupcakes”! But that can’t be right.’
I laugh through my tears.
‘Yeah, it is,’ I say. ‘My chocolate cupcakes. They’re kind of like his favourites?’
‘Oh,’ says his mother, relaxing. ‘That’s OK then. For a moment there I thought he’d lost his mind in the accident.’
Later on they go out and leave me alone with Harry. He goes to sleep, but it’s kind of nice listening to him breathe and knowing that he’s going to wake up again. The doctors say that his recovery is going to take a long, long time and that he might have to learn how to walk all over again, but at least he’s heading in the right direction now.
***
On the way home I’m quiet, chewing it all over in my head.
‘I might do that competition after all,’ I say from the passenger seat, where I’m eating a Mars Bar and a packet of crisps. ‘I think that Harry would want me to do it.’
‘You’re right there,’ says Mum. ‘But I’m coming with you this time, Amelie. No more running away to London and giving me a heart attack.’
I turn to look at my mum. I see her tired face and the lines underneath her eyes that have come from worrying about and caring for me every single day of my CF life. I realise something else, too. She’s scared. One day she’s going to have to face losing me for good and she’s scared.
‘I’m really sorry, Mum,’ I say. ‘I shouldn’t have put my own stupid obsession ahead of how you’re feeling. I promise I won’t let it happen again.’
Mum laughs.
‘You’re a teenager!’ she says. ‘Of course it will happen again.’
***
When I get home I log
onto my blog for the first time in a while.
Loads of people have caught on to what I was planning to do and have wished me good luck for the competition. Part of me wants to give a spoon-by-spoon account of the competition and what I cooked and how it turned out, but that seems a bit insensitive given that my boyfriend is in hospital and my parents are going to have to learn to trust me all over again. So instead I write a short paragraph explaining that I went to the competition, but my boyfriend was in an accident. Then I write this:
Thanks for all your nice posts and recipes. There seem to be a load of big hurdles ahead of me. I’ve got loads of schoolwork to catch up on for exams next year. Anyway, Harry’s going to take a very long time to get better. The doctors say that he will be in a wheelchair and have to miss a lot of school. I reckon he’ll get really down now he can’t play sports any longer. He’s spent years being my support system and now I’m going to have to learn to be his. It seems kind of ironic that he’s now going to be sick too and I’ll have to take care of him. I get the feeling that this is going to take a lot more than just a box of cakes. And behind all this is the threat of my lung transplant. I could be waiting for years, or I could get a call any day now. Nobody really knows. And even if I did get new lungs, the doctors have warned me that my body might reject them and I’d be back to square one. And while I’m waiting to get the new lungs I could go downhill fast and end up in hospital for good. I might even die if my lung function drops any further.
I screw up my face against all these scary thoughts. I wish for about the millionth time that I could just be a normal teenager worrying about exams and spots and boys. I don’t know how I’m going to cope with life now that I’ve removed my great passion of baking from it. I’ve just realised that apart from Harry, baking was the only thing which really helped me cope with my CF. I reckon I was maybe a bit hasty throwing out all my ingredients. A future without Flour Power looms ahead of me, looking bleak and boring and kind of – uncooked.
I look back at the screen and type some more.
But maybe I need to cook myself past the semi-finals of Best Teen Baker if I want to achieve my life’s ambition of getting to the final and maybe even winning. After all, I live to bake. If I stop baking, I might stop living. And please carry on sending your recipes. I might ask to borrow them for my best-selling book of the future, The Amelie Day Book of Baking.
I snap the computer shut.
A vision of Harry floats in front of my eyes.
‘Mum,’ I say, going downstairs. ‘Can you give me a lift to Karim’s shop?’
Mum’s sitting over the newspaper downstairs. She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. Her skin looks dry and tired and her eyes are like slits from lack of sleep.
‘What do you want to buy?’ she says. ‘We’ve got loads of food in the kitchen.’
I roll my eyes and give her an impatient smile.
‘I’ve got to do Harry’s cupcakes,’ I say. ‘I need chocolate, eggs, flour and butter, like NOW.’
My mother’s face lights up and sparkles in the late afternoon sun.
She grabs the car keys and we head outside.
Harry’s Favourite Chocolate Heart Cupcakes
To make 12 of these gorgeous chocolatey treats, you will need:
200g (7oz) self-raising flour
225g (8oz) caster sugar
25g (10z) cocoa powder
100g (3 ½ oz) margarine/butter
2 medium eggs
5 tablespoons of evaporated milk or normal milk
5 tablespoons of water
To decorate:
A family-sized bar of milk chocolate
A small ball of ready-to-roll fondant icing and scarlet food colouring, or chocolate buttons, sprinkles, Jelly Tots or Smarties
Preheat the oven to 180°C/360°F/gas mark 4. Although I call these ‘cupcakes’ if you make them in muffin tins they turn out bigger, which can’t be bad! Put 12 muffin cases into the tin and set aside for later.
Put the margarine/butter into a bowl with the caster sugar and cream these together with a wooden spoon until smooth. Then beat in the eggs, one at a time. Sieve the flour and then add to this mix, beating in until you have a smooth mixture. Then add your cocoa powder (you can add a bit more than 25g (1oz) if you like a stronger chocolate flavour, but I find that this amount is usually about right).
Add in 5 tablespoons of normal milk (if you like your cakes light and springy) or instead, you could use 5 tablespoons of evaporated milk (this gives a much creamier, moister texture, which I think is better). Then finally, add 5 tablespoons of water and beat the mixture until you have a lovely rich, brown chocolate mix.
Spoon the mixture into your prepared muffin tins so that each case is about three quarters filled (the mixture might make more than 12). Slide the tray into the middle of your heated oven and bake for about 20 minutes or until risen and firm.
You can either ice the cakes with icing sugar and water mixed together (and any food colouring you might like to add), or you can do what I like best – melt a family-sized bar of milk chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water, then brush the chocolate all over the top of each little cake.
Harry is very fussy about cupcakes. I once put a red fondant icing heart on one of his cakes and ever since then he kind of expects it. If you like getting your hands covered in food colouring and making a squidgy mess on the worktop, then you could add some drops of scarlet food colouring to a small ball of ready-to-roll fondant icing. Roll it in your hands until you’ve got a ball of pinkish dough, roll it out with a rolling pin and then use a tiny heart-shaped cutter to cut out a pink heart. But be warned, your hands will look like something out of a horror film afterwards.
Or if you actually don’t want to spend hours messing around with hearts, a much easier way to top off the milk chocolate on your cakes is to buy some chocolate buttons or similar and just stick one on top of each cake. Or you could get chocolate sprinkles, or Jelly Tots, or Smarties, or nearly anything you fancy putting on top.
These need to be kept in an airtight tin after they’ve cooled down. But in our house, they never last that long!
Author’s note
The Baking Life of Amelie Day is a work of fiction based upon my own particular research. It is important to note that Cystic Fibrosis affects different people in different ways. I wrote this book after watching a television documentary about CF. It followed a group of young people who were waiting for life-saving lung transplants and I was touched by the daily struggles they had just to stay alive.
Cystic Fibrosis is a life-shortening genetic condition which slowly destroys the lungs and digestive system, and there’s currently no cure. Only half of sufferers live to celebrate their 40th birthday.
To find out more about Cystic Fibrosis you can contact the Cystic Fibrosis Trust at
www.cysticfibrosis.org.uk
or call the CF Trust helpline on
0300 373 1000.
You may also like to follow the blog of Victoria Tremlett who lives with CF at
www.tor-pastthepointofnoreturn.blogspot.co.uk
Some of my research was aided by Oliver Jackson, who lives with CF, and I’d like to thank him for his input.
About the author
Vanessa is the award-winning author of several young adult novels including Zelah Green (Egmont, 2009), which won the Manchester Children’s Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Waterstones Prize 2009, and The Haunting of Tabitha Grey (Egmont, 2012), a contemporary ghost story with a shocking twist.
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