The Secret Cooking Club

by Laurel Remington

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘They wouldn’t let me include the caffeine pills, but we’re going to add a coffee sachet. You know, like a tea bag?’

  ‘Great. Didn’t you hear the ambulance?’

  ‘What ambulance? Anyway, I’ve still got to choose the jellybean colours. What do you think about pink?’

  ‘Pink’s good.’ Or Scarlett . . . I don’t add.

  ‘Brilliant. Pink it is. I’ll email them now.’ She starts for the door of her office.

  ‘Mrs Simpson had a fall,’ I say. ‘They took her to hospital.’

  ‘Who?’ She barely pauses.

  ‘The neighbour next door. The old lady.’

  ‘Oh, is that her name?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well . . . too bad.’ She gives a little shrug. ‘Oh, and Scarlett, would you mind getting Kelsie her tea? I’ve got to prepare for tonight’s online chat. It’s on “how to talk to your teenager”.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say through my teeth.

  ‘Thanks. Oh, and Scarlett . . .’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Thanks for being such a big help.’

  She closes the door and I stare for a moment at the ‘Mum Cave’ sign swinging on its hook. Part of me wants to fling open the door and demand that she ‘talk to her teenager’ for real. I’d tell her exactly how I feel, tell her exactly how bad my day has been thanks to her, and tell her exactly where she, her two hundred Boots stores, and her thousands of online followers can go. But to be honest, it’s just not worth it. Much better just to tick off my tasks one by one – dinner, homework, watching TV, shower – and just go to bed.

  And that’s exactly what I do. By the end of the evening, my anger has dulled and I start to feel numb. I collapse on to my bed more tired from doing nothing than if I’d run a marathon. And then I can’t sleep. I think about Mrs Simpson. It’s been a bad day for her – much worse than for me. I hope she’s OK. I close my eyes and try to think good thoughts for her, but my mind keeps wandering. And then, just as I’m finally starting to drift off, I’m jolted awake again by an ear-splitting screech.

  A NOISE IN THE NIGHT

  I sit bolt upright in the circle of light from my lamp. That sound: it was like someone – or something – being tortured. And it came from the other side of the wall that separates our house from Mrs Simpson’s. Panic floods through me. She must have come home from hospital and hurt herself again. Maybe this time she won’t be able to get to the phone. Maybe this time she’ll die and it will be my fault. And the headline of OLD WOMAN LEFT TO DIE AS GIRL IGNORES CRY FOR HELP will be in all the newspapers, not just on Mum’s blog.

  I swing out of bed and tiptoe into the hallway. My sister’s room is dark and I can hear her breathing. There’s a crack of light below Mum’s door and the sound of typing. For a second I think of knocking. But she’ll just tell me it’s nothing and send me back to bed.

  I sneak downstairs to the kitchen and grab a torch from the drawer by the sink. The door to the garden squeaks when I open it and, holding my breath, step outside. The moon is a perfect crescent and there are one or two stars twinkling among wispy clouds. I stand up on a bucket and peer over the fence. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. The back of Mrs Simpson’s house is dark.

  I go back into our house, tiptoe through the downstairs and out of the front door. Everything is silent in the road. A thin coat of dew has formed on the windscreens of the cars, the tiny droplets glittering in the moonlight. I go round the hedge that separates our house from Mrs Simpson’s. Her door is black and glossy with a brass letter box and knocker. As I lift my hand to knock I hear it again – the bone-chilling wail from inside.

  I forget all about knocking and wrench on the door handle. But it’s locked. My heart thunders as I flip on the torch. There’s an old flowerpot next to the door, and I check underneath it. Nothing. I look under the recycling bin and, finally, under the mat. A gold key glints in the circle of light. I mean – who actually leaves their key under the mat? I fumble with the key in the lock and push open the door.

  The house is dark and silent, and smells of dusty curtains and Imperial Leather soap. I flick the torch around the room, scared that I might see a body lying in a pool of blood. Instead, there’s some dark clunky furniture, a saggy three-piece suite, and lots of knick-knacks. The room says ‘old lady’. I shine the torch towards the door at the back of the room that must lead to the kitchen, and all of a sudden I’m the one who yelps.

  Eyes. Yellow and unfriendly. I’m so jumpy that it takes me a second to realize that it’s not a monster or a ghost, but a cat – pure black, with a white collar around its neck.

  ‘Oh, you scared me!’ I say. And a second later, I realize how stupid I’ve been. ‘It was you, wasn’t it, making all that racket?’

  The cat swishes its long, fluffy tail, still looking like some kind of demon in animal form. It takes a few steps towards me, holding its head haughtily in the air. My skin tickles as it rubs against my bare legs and starts to purr.

  ‘You’re lonely, is that it?’ I reach down and pick up the cat. It nestles into my arms, staring at me with big eyes that now seem more sad than frightening. ‘And hungry maybe?’

  The cat rubs its cheek against mine.

  I’ve never had a cat – or any kind of pet – but I instinctively snuggle it closer in my arms like some kind of lost, kindred spirit.

  ‘Those paramedics must have locked you out of the kitchen. Let’s see if we can find you some food.’

  The cat squirms in my arms and I put it down. It hurries over to a door that in our house leads to the dining room, and starts to meow. I open the door and switch on the light.

  What I see makes me gasp.

  ROSEMARY’S KITCHEN

  The kitchen is amazing – that’s the only word for it. It’s vast – with a high, beamed ceiling and a spotless floor. Every surface sparkles: shiny stainless steel, polished wood, mirror-black granite. Copper pots hang from a rack on the ceiling, and there’s an entire wall of cookbooks. In one corner is a giant cooker, next to a double-width fridge, and a glass cupboard filled with just about every kind of kitchen gadget. A wooden table takes up the entire back of the room, and there’s a fireplace big enough to stand up in. The whole thing seems like heaven for a cook – and anyone around to eat the food. I breathe in the heady smell of spices and fresh lemon and realize that I’m smiling. I can’t believe all this is here – just on the other side of the wall from the three rooms that make up our poky little kitchen, dining/junk room and the Mum Cave.

  The cat meanders over to an empty bowl next to the cooker. It looks at me with its big yellow eyes and begins to meow. Venturing inside, I go over to the fridge. A magnetic sign on the door says ‘Rosemary’s Kitchen’. Inside, it’s stocked with practically a whole supermarket’s worth of fresh food. I take out a carton of organic milk and an open tin of tuna-flavoured cat food. ‘I guess Mrs Simpson’s name must be Rosemary,’ I say, emptying the milk and cat food into bowls. ‘I didn’t know.’

  The cat swishes its tail disdainfully, and dives into the food. I continue looking around. I’m immediately drawn to the shelves of cookbooks – one whole shelf is dedicated to a series of books called Encyclopaedia of Herbs and Spices. The shelf at eye level has three different cookbooks by Mrs Beeton, plus a few big-name celebrity cookbooks: Delia Smith, Jamie Oliver, Mary Berry – but most of them look almost new. There are some well-used books by authors I don’t recognize, like Elizabeth David, Julia Child and Auguste Escoffier. But what interests me most is the top shelf. It has an assortment of very old-looking books in various colours, shapes and sizes. I grab one that catches my eye: Recipes passed down from Mother to Daughter. It’s got a drawing of a pretty 1950s mum on the cover, giving her apple-cheeked daughter some biscuits fresh out of the oven. Somehow I’m pretty sure it won’t have an entry for ‘frozen fish fingers and chips’ which is the only recipe that my mum’s ‘passed down’ to me.

  I put it back on the shelf. Behind m
e, the cat is purring and eating at the same time. I turn round and something on the kitchen worktop catches my eye. Propped open on a wooden bookstand is a notebook bound in tattered red cloth, the front marbled in red, green and blue. It must be really old. Curious to see what Mrs Simpson was cooking before her accident, I pick it up. The book feels oddly warm in my hands, like a fresh-baked loaf of bread. I open the cover. On the first page is a note; loopy letters handwritten in black ink:

  To my Little Cook – may you find the secret ingredient.

  I read the words aloud to the cat, wondering who the Little Cook was, and whether she – or he – found the secret ingredient. The cat swishes its tail, quite content with the food in its bowl.

  I flip through the notebook. There are loads of recipes written out in pen, with a few notes and crossings-out, but there are also pictures – some done in pencil and crayon, others cut out of magazines and old newspapers and glued to the page – of cakes, pies, bread, meat and other foods. There’s also a whole section of recipes based on nursery rhymes with little poems and stories like ‘Hansel and Gretel’ written out in fancy lettering. It must have taken so much time to collect and write out the recipes and all the little rhymes and illustrations – years maybe. How lucky the Little Cook must have been to have someone care so much. I don’t know anything about cooking, but as I hold the recipe book in my hands, I have a funny feeling that the book is special somehow.

  I close the notebook. The cat has finished its tuna and begins lapping up the milk like an after-dinner coffee. Then it carefully licks its whiskers. Swishing its tail, it walks haughtily out of the kitchen. I turn the light off and follow it to the front room. It leaps on to one of the threadbare chairs.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I say, somewhat huffily. ‘And I guess you’ll be expecting me to come back tomorrow to feed you again?’

  The cat curls up into a ball, snuggling its face into its wispy black tail. Its purrs grow slower, and soon it’s fast asleep.

  I move silently to the front door and shut off the torch so that no one will see me. I slip out of Mrs Simpson’s house, with the handwritten recipe book still tucked underneath my arm.

  THE LITTLE RECIPE BOOK

  I don’t really know why I took the notebook from Mrs Simpson’s kitchen. It’s not like I’m actually going to cook anything at home. I can picture Mum rubbing her hands with glee if I did: Help, my daughter is trying to poison me/burn down the house/make me throw up during my marketing meeting with Boots. I stick the recipe book under my pillow. Part of the reason I keep my room – according to one of Mum’s blog posts – ‘like a toxic waste dump’ is so that she won’t ever go in there.

  Downstairs the next morning, Mum is blustering around in the kitchen, taking two minutes out of her busy day to drink a cup of instant coffee.

  ‘So do you have any plans for the weekend, Scarlett?’ Mum says.

  ‘Um . . .’ My brain furiously calculates the probabilities of providing her with blog material, depending on whether I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I settle on: ‘Not really, but I’ve got some homework to do.’

  ‘Kelsie’s gone to a birthday party this morning and I’ve got a guest blog post to write. Can you go over to Stacie’s house?’

  ‘She’s visiting her grandma,’ I lie. Stacie was my best friend last year, before the whole Gretchen and Alison thing. Then Mum wrote a post called Psst . . . want to know a secret? My daughter’s best friend is really thick. And then, big surprise – Stacie stopped speaking to me and dropped me as a friend. Luckily, she goes to a private school so I don’t have to see her every day.

  ‘That’s nice.’ Mum puts down the coffee cup and digs around in the fridge. She takes out a piece of cold pizza and nibbles on it. ‘And how’s school – you doing any new clubs?’

  ‘No, Mum.’ I take a box of cereal from the top of the fridge and pour some into a bowl. Then I sit down and stare at it.

  Mum shakes her head and tsks. ‘I just don’t know what’s up with you, Scarlett. When I was your age, I had lots of friends. Plus I did swimming and netball and . . .’

  I stop listening. Mum’s already written a soppy blog post called I really was your age once . . . where she went on about the days before mobile phones, iPads and Snapchat, when she and her friends passed notes in class and gossiped about boys. That post alone got over three hundred and fifty sympathetic comments from her followers. She won’t write another one that’s too similar, so I’m off the hook.

  ‘Yeah, Mum, I know. But I’m sure Oxford University can live without me.’ I force myself to take a bite of the cereal. It tastes like soggy cardboard.

  Mum frowns. ‘Well, if you’re not doing anything, maybe you can pick up a few things for me at the shops.’

  ‘Sure, whatever.’ I take my bowl to the sink.

  ‘You didn’t eat any of that cereal.’ Mum’s eyes sharpen. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No.’ I pause for a second. ‘I’m just not hungry.’

  She cocks her head. ‘You’re not anorexic, are you?’

  ‘No, Mum. It’s just that the cereal’s a little stale.’

  ‘Oh.’ She tosses the pizza crust in the rubbish and puts the kettle back on to boil. When she’s not looking, I take the crust out of the bin and put it in the compost bucket instead.

  ‘OK, Scarlett, whatever you say.’ Mum glances at me over her shoulder. ‘But you’re a growing girl – almost a real teenager. You need to keep your blood sugar up.’ I can almost see the gears in her brain working overtime: Idea for new blog post = is my daughter anorexic – or just obstinate?

  ‘Whatever, Mum. I’ll have a snack later.’

  I go up to my room and take out the little recipe book from underneath my pillow. I open it and reread the inscription inside the cover: To my Little Cook – may you find the secret ingredient.

  I wonder what it was like for the Little Cook – a daughter or son, I assume – to spend time with their mum learning how to bake and cook wonderful things. One thing’s for sure, I can’t imagine my mum ever doing something like that with me.

  I flip through the nursery rhyme section of the notebook, smiling at the recipes for pies, bread and gingerbread, and the little rhymes about ‘The Cat and the Fiddle’, and ‘Goosey, Goosey Gander’. There are a few recipes for basic things: ‘Humpty Dumpty’s Perfect Eggs’; and ‘Yankee Doodle’s Four-cheese Macaroni’. There’s also an ‘ABC of Spices’, most of which I’ve never heard of. But lots of the ingredients make my mouth water: buttercream, ginger, golden syrup, cocoa and caster sugar. Best of all are the cinnamon scones. There’s a picture done in pen and coloured in with crayon of little fluffy triangles steaming hot in a basket with a red and white gingham cloth. My stomach rumbles just thinking about them. If I could try just one recipe, it would be that.

  But I can’t try any of the recipes. Not here at home where Mum would know about it.

  So I’ll have to find another way.

  THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

  The street is quiet as I slip out of the front door. I walk up the weedy stone path to Mrs Simpson’s house. I tell myself that it’s not really breaking and entering when there’s an old lady in the hospital and a cat that needs feeding. And a recipe book that needs returning. It’s a no-brainer really. And if, by some chance, Mrs Simpson is already home from hospital, I’ll tell her I came over to look after the cat.

  No one answers when I knock on the door. The key is still under the mat. With a quick glance around to make sure no one’s watching, I let myself into Mrs Simpson’s house.

  The first thing I see are those two yellow eyes again, shining like twin moons. The cat meows impatiently like it’s been waiting for me and I’m late. ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘You still here by yourself?’ The cat swishes its tail. It gets to its feet and leads the way to the kitchen.

  I get down to business – scoping out where everything is so that I can get on with my plan. Just being here again has made up my mind. I’ve found a special little recipe book and the
perfect kitchen just on the other side of the wall. And now . . .

  I’m going to cook something.

  One by one I open the cupboards. It’s like exploring a supermarket baking aisle. There are dozens of little jars and tins of herbs and spices. There are bags of flour: stoneground, buckwheat, spelt, malted wheatgrain; and sugars: demerara, caster, icing, muscovado – who knew there were so many different kinds? Even though everything is labelled, it’s still kind of overwhelming. The cat rubs against my leg and stands in front of one of the cupboards.

  ‘OK, OK, I get it. You’re hungry again.’ I open the cupboard and find a large supply of cat food. I dig around some more until I find a tin-opener in a drawer, along with a complete set of baking utensils and electric appliances, most of which I’ve no idea what to do with, and some of which look like scary dentist instruments.

  Once the cat has its head contentedly in its bowl, I take out the little recipe book and set it on the bookstand. It practically falls open to the recipe for cinnamon scones. I read over the instructions: mixing everything together, then rolling out the dough and cutting out little triangle shapes that are to be dusted with more cinnamon and sugar. Then they’re supposed to rise and become all fluffy in the oven. It sounds straight-forward enough, but suddenly I start to feel nervous.

  What business do I have breaking and entering, and using Mrs Simpson’s things? And worse, what makes me think that I can possibly bake anything? I’ve never really tried before, except once. I wanted to surprise Mum with a cake for her birthday so I bought a mix at the corner shop. It turned out that I didn’t have enough eggs, and the butter was as hard as a rock. The mixture ended up all powdery and lumpy. Then I left it in the oven too long, and it came out charred and practically on fire. I threw it in the bin before Mum even knew I’d tried.

  I take a deep breath – I’m here now so I may as well have a go. Most of the ingredients I need – flour, butter, baking powder, salt – are already set out on the worktop, along with a jar of Ceylon cinnamon. Strange that I didn’t notice them last night. It’s almost like Mrs Simpson had been getting ready to bake scones. It makes me feel a bit creepy – almost like she’s here with me in the kitchen, looking over my shoulder, making sure I do it right. I peek quickly behind me. There’s no one there.