Cupcake Couture

by Davies, Lauren

  Largely because I had always needed to be. It had been a case of provide for myself or starve.

  I stood up and swayed involuntarily.

  ‘I think I should go home.’

  ‘But we haven’t decided what you’re gonna be yet,’ Roxy pouted. ‘What’s your number one?’

  ‘I don’t know, they’re all a bit floaty.’

  ‘Howay, there’s nowt wrong with floaty, Chloe, that’s what dreams are. So which one?’

  ‘If I had to choose?’

  ‘Aye.’

  I sighed.

  ‘Well if you look, there’s only one left.’

  They peered at the list.

  ‘Posh cake designer,’ they said in unison, ‘as in designer of posh cakes and not posh designer of cakes.’

  ‘Yes, that was what I always wanted to be,’ I sighed, ‘before I grew up and realised you can’t always get what you want.’

  ‘Fuck that. Your cakes are lush. That’s what you’ll be.’ Roxy flicked her hands out by her shoulders as if she had solved the puzzle.

  Simple.

  If you lived in Roxy’s head.

  ‘Fine,’ I snapped. ‘Can I go home now?’

  ‘We’ll walk you.’

  Heidi jumped up and hurriedly collected our coats and bags, then looped her arm through mine and led me to the door of the pub as if I were an invalid. Roxy trailed behind us waving like the Queen, her Tiffany bracelet jingling on her wrist as she absorbed the adoring looks and compliments that followed her across the room.

  ‘Your pie!’ Vik screeched.

  He ran to the door, lovingly cradling a steaming hot pie in a napkin.

  ‘On the house,’ he grinned, bowing slightly.

  Honestly, it was no wonder Roxy seemed to have a permanent Ready Brek glow.

  We wandered arm in arm along Front Street past the spicy aromas of the curry house and the hard to resist salty smell of the fish and chip shop. It was dark and icy yet many of the girls who passed us on the pavement wore open toe shoes without tights and short skirts.

  ‘Do people really go out drinking on Tuesday nights?’ I marvelled.

  ‘Aye,’ said Roxy, ‘and just think, you can do it now.’

  ‘Great,’ I sighed.

  We crossed the road and headed under a brick archway between two wine bars that were packed to bursting with customers laughing, talking and shouting, which could either have been just loud talking or the makings of a bar brawl. I suddenly desperately wanted to be home in my flat away from reality, tucked up in my king-sized bed under my sumptuous down duvet. At least then I could close my eyes and forget everything that had happened. At least then I could dream my life was still the way it used to be. It was then that it hit me.

  ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do tomorrow? I’ve got nothing to do tomorrow.’

  We had reached the top of my street. My legs crumpled but my friends held me up and guided me towards the steps of my front door.

  ‘You can have a lovely lie in,’ said Heidi softly.

  ‘You can come shopping with me and Thierry,’ said Roxy.

  ‘Thanks but you two would come out in a rash if you went into Primark and I’m going to have to be sensible with money from now on. This is so depressing.’

  We stopped outside my building, a four-storey Victorian townhouse with a river view. I owned the first floor flat, which was accessible directly from the street up a small flight of steps worn by a century of comings and goings. I stared up at my lovely home.

  ‘What if I lose my flat? I can’t live in a hostel. I bet you can’t use hair straighteners in hostel dormitories.’

  It was an illogical worry but at the time it seemed to matter.

  Heidi searched in my bag for my keys. She pulled out the list while she was looking. Roxy took it off her and waved it in front of my eyes.

  ‘Tomorrow you’re going to take this list and start a new life. The world is yours for the taking, Chloe, pet.’

  I took the crumpled piece of paper from her and shoved it back in my bag. When she put it like that, all I felt was an overwhelming sense of fear.

  ‘But it’s a waste of time. What difference does it make if I harboured dreams of being a posh cake designer at the age of thirteen?’

  ‘Howay, Chloe, you make the best cakes I’ve ever tasted.’

  Heidi nodded her agreement and called from the top of the steps.

  ‘You do, Chloe, you make awesome cakes.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I sniffed.

  ‘And weren’t you just moaning to me yesterday about the state of Shirley’s cakes in the village?’ said Roxy.

  I shrugged. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  ‘I know you’ve had a knock,’ Roxy carried on, ‘but I don’t see anything on this list about being a stiff suit working with fuckwits in a recruitment company with men who wear comedy ties and women who look like the men.’

  ‘I grew up.’

  ‘Shame,’ she said. ‘Dreams don’t stop coming true at the age of thirty you know, Chloe, we just stop believing they can.’

  Heidi, who had unlocked the front door, stared at Roxy, as did I.

  ‘Fuck me,’ she whistled, lighting a cigarette, ‘now I’ve gone all Jeremy Kyle. Shoot me now.’

  We laughed.

  ‘Shoot me first,’ I said as they led me up the steps.

  After I assured them I would not have a supper of Paracetamol washed down with sherry, they turned to leave.

  ‘You’ll be fine, Chloe, I know it,’ said Heidi softly. ‘You’ll find another fantastic job.’

  ‘And if all else fails,’ Roxy laughed, waving her crystal-embellished mobile phone, ‘I’ve got most of the Newcastle squad’s numbers in here, pet. I can get you a platinum shag at the touch of a button!’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  40g unsalted butter, softened

  I’d like to say I woke up full of inspiration and drive. That I jumped out of bed and raced around like one of those wind up, cymbal-clashing monkeys without the need for my usual two cups of caffeine. That the day couldn’t come fast enough and that, emboldened by my friends’ support, I left the house and hit my new world like an earthquake, shaking it to the core and letting everyone know that Chloe Baker was ready for a new challenge, a new focus, a new life, and that I had all the motivation and energy required to succeed. I’d like to say that but, largely due to our ill-advised level of alcohol consumption, coupled with the tonne of chocolate spread on toast I had miserably wolfed down in the subsequent subdued loneliness of my flat, I didn’t awake until midday. My eyes were glued together with dried tears, congealed mascara and sleepy dust and the Sandman appeared to have deposited a bucket of sand in my mouth. The only sign of a cymbal-clashing monkey was the one whizzing around inside my head. The world might have been ‘mine for the taking’ but I had no desire to take it.

  Over the next couple of days, I settled into stage one of my natural response to redundancy, which was to wallow alone in my flat. I was not proud of the fact but, with my job gone, I felt as if I were mourning the loss of a close friend; a friend who had given me direction and fulfilment and who had now left me isolated and floundering. As agony aunt Denise said on This Morning’s Thursday edition (which I had just glanced at for a brief moment… between 10.30 and 12.30… followed by Loose Women and a bit of news before May The Best House Win) grief is recognised as having five stages. Stage one is denial, which had clearly been the day Roxy found me dressed for work the day after I had been fired. Stage two is anger, stage three is bargaining, stage four is depression and stage five is acceptance. Well, I hadn’t had the energy to be angry yet and I hadn’t spoken to a living soul since Tuesday night, other than on the phone to Roxy and Heidi, so bargaining was out of the window. Depression, however, depression was the stage I was embracing with open arms. So either I had bypassed stages two and three and I would very soon be rolling smoothly on to stage five, or my grief was bouncing randomly through Denise’s stages like a game of hopscotch w
ith the numbers chalked up out of sequence. Which left me with the fear that I would never reach the end of the sequence and I would be stuck in Denise’s stages of grief like a Tour de France cyclist who couldn’t keep up with the rest of the peloton, couldn’t read a map and was left pedalling solitarily around France never knowing whether the race had finished or not. Should I call Denise and ask her? Or should I return to stage one and follow them in order by summoning up the required anger or should I… fuck it, what did Denise know anyway? It wasn’t like she had been made redundant was it, the smug cow.

  Oh, there was the anger. Damn it, she was right…

  My flat had always been my sanctuary. After a busy working week, I relished waking up on Saturday morning knowing that I had two days to potter around the five rooms that made up my very own personal space in the world, rearranging things, cleaning, renovating, baking, lolling (an underrated verb if you ask me) on the sofa reading a book or a magazine while dunking biscuits in tea, putting on music and singing into anything vaguely resembling a microphone safe in the knowledge that Victorians were sensible enough to build thick walls and having Roxy and Heidi over for girly nights that often turned into a sleepover and a hungover girly breakfast. I loved my flat, which was why it terrified me that after a little over forty-eight hours spent in its confines, I was beginning to understand the term ‘bouncing off the walls’.

  I had never had a secure home as a child. I had a family unit, yes, if you call two artist parents who could barely look after themselves never mind their only child, a ‘unit’. If a unit was a shiny red, rectangular shaped Lego block then we were a slightly chipped and paint-splattered rhombus. We just about held it together but we didn’t quite tessellate with the rest of the world.

  Jango (don’t ask) and Jemima Baker met at art school while running naked, painted blue through the streets of Glasgow for an assignment. It was love at first sight, apparently, which I found hard to believe. Naked in Britain’s coldest country would have done little for a man’s attributes and there are few women in the world who could carry the blue makeup look, but it was their romantic story not mine.

  After Glasgow, Jango and Jemima moved first to Spain, then to Chicago and back to London as ‘struggling artists’ where they forgot about contraception long enough to conceive me. They even admitted they liked the idea of having a child but that as a baby I was more of a hindrance than a help to their careers. Sorry.

  We lived in countless shared rented properties, artist communities and squats for the first eleven years of my life, where I had more ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’ than any Irish Catholic. These random faces, some of whom I vaguely remembered, babysat me when my parents were ‘working’ (a term I use lightly) or too high to remember I existed. I didn’t go to school until I was six, somehow being the child who had slipped through the net. When eventually one ‘auntie’ did register me at the local primary and dropped me at the gate for my first day (without the jazzy lunchbox favoured by the other kids and with odd wellies) I remember feeling as if I had been dropped at the gates of Heaven. I mean that in a positive way. There were other children my age, there were things to play with and subjects to learn. There were complete books that hadn’t been torn apart to create a collage. There were even responsible adults who cared whether I wore a coat when it was snowing. At that time, school was my paradise where I would have stayed all night and all weekend if I could have. Not that my parents would have minded but I found the teachers wanted to go home at some point. I loved the timetable and the rules, I relished the routine. The only thing I resisted with fervour was the art class. It always surprised me how two people who claimed to have art in their souls seemed to detest every piece of work that was not their own. Whether it was a desire for art to be excellent or whether it was simple jealousy, my parents criticised until they were blue in the face (not literally this time). I inherited their creative genes and every art teacher spotted a natural talent in me, but at home, every work I ever produced was shot down in flames until my creativity was stifled and finally suffocated. Believe me, even Jackson Pollock would have struggled to make it onto our fridge. I took refuge instead in cookery classes and, in particular, cake baking, into which I threw all my natural creative juices in an effort to ensure I did not end up a struggling artist. As I got older, the kitchen at home became my domain because my parents couldn’t be bothered with normal fads like cooking and eating as a family, so they rarely frequented it. Left alone, I started to experiment with recipes.

  Of course, I moved schools more than most supply teachers but at each new destination I begged my mum or an auntie to enrol me as soon as possible and off I would trot in my uniform (of sorts) to my own version of Heaven. Some of the angels in ‘Heaven’ were total bitches but I learned to stand up for myself. No-one else was going to.

  The moving finally stopped when, out of the blue, my dad inherited a gallery in Newcastle, left to him by a gay artist friend who had no family. The gallery even came with a small house, which became my first real home until I was old enough to flat share with Roxy and Heidi. Finally, at the age of twelve, I found a school and the sanctuary of true friendship. As my confidence grew, so did my academic achievements. I was a good student but not being able to afford university without digging the inevitable trough of debt, I eventually gravitated towards a solid career path (or so I had thought) with no brush skills required.

  The day I took the plunge to buy my own property was the turning point in my life. I would never forget the Estate Agent leading me across the polished, slightly uneven original wooden floorboards of the renovated lounge and peeling back the original wooden shutters masking a huge bay window overlooking the mouth of the River Tyne. It was not a sunny day. A golden glow did not flood into the room; this was Newcastle after all, but as I perched on the window seat and gazed at the view, a warmth wrapped itself around me like one of Heidi’s hugs. At a stretch I could afford this flat. Every inch of it from the window seat scattered with cushions and the huge windows to the iron fireplaces and the stunning wooden kitchen with a breakfast bar and a Belfast sink. I even loved its imperfections; floors that sloped towards the North, the subsidence crack in the Master bedroom and the creaky bathroom door that didn’t fully open because of yet another wonky floorboard that had been trodden on by Victorian heels.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ I heard myself say and the Estate Agent’s eyes flashed with pound signs that I had been paying for ever since.

  I had lovingly filled the flat with my possessions, crammed the floor-to-ceiling bookcases in the lounge with paperbacks and trimmed the view with fairy lights (the prerogative of every single girl). I had finally found my safe haven. Which, as I said, was why I was terrified that after a little over forty-eight hours spent in its confines, I was beginning to dislike it.

  ‘I’m going stir crazy, Roxy,’ I moaned, cradling the phone between my shoulder and my ear while I attempted to paint my toenails, ‘I’m just not used to doing nothing with my time and I’ve never realised how many ticking clocks I have. Even the oven clock is doing my head in and that’s digital. I swear I’m going mad.’

  ‘Howay man, Chloe, you’ve really got to work on your leisure management skills. You’ve not even been there a whole week yet.’

  ‘Exactly. How am I going to survive the boredom week in, week out? You might come round and find me dead one day. I may drop dead of boredom. You have still got the spare key haven’t you?’

  I pressed my face against the cold glass of the window.

  ‘You’re not gonna die, pet. Just think of it as a holiday.’

  ‘I don’t like holidays.’

  ‘You are the only freak I know who hates holidays.’

  ‘Come and keep me company, Roxy,’ I whined.

  There was a shuffling at the other end of the phone and then a strained sound as if a cat was being strangled.

  ‘Roxy, are you alright?’

  Silence.

  ‘Roxy?’

  ‘
Sorry, Chloe, I’ve been chucking my guts up since yesterday. In fact they haven’t been the same since Vik’s fucking rank cheese and potato pie. I should have known. It was like a Scholl sandal with used corn pads in it.’

  I retched.

  ‘I’ll give him a piece of my mind next time I see him, I tell you. Not that I’m ever going back to that shithole. It’s fair to say I’ve outgrown it and outclassed it.’

  ‘I’m sure Vik will be disappointed, he would happily take any piece of you, Roxy, be it mind or body.’

  I held the phone away from my ear. Either she was sandblasting her interior walls or she was being sick again.

  ‘I’ll call you later!’ I shouted and hung up.

  I called Heidi instead.

  ‘Hello, pet,’ she said in a whisper, ‘are you OK?’

  ‘I’m losing it, Heidi. Daytime TV just goes round and round in an endless loop of the misguided being encouraged to air their grievances in return for lie detector and DNA tests, the design challenged being forced to turn their semidetached in Maidenhead into something resembling a French brothel by an excitably flamboyant designer, and celebrity chefs creating £1.50 masterpiece dishes out of a cabbage and two pork chops that they would then sell for £35 in their flashy restaurants. The more I watch, the more I feel myself being drawn into their world. I found myself talking to an imaginary audience of green peppers and red tomatoes while making a sandwich for lunch and I’ve already sanded one dining room chair and applied appliqué roses, which means I’ll have to do the other three now. But it was when I found myself calling Jeremy Kyle to apply for tickets that I realised I have to get a grip.’

  ‘Chloe, you didn’t!’

  ‘No. Well yes but I’m not going on the show.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  There were whispered exchanges at the other end.

  ‘Chloe, look, I’m really sorry pet, but I’m at work and I’m dealing with a client with behavioural problems right now. Why don’t you look into getting a different job? Use your time wisely.’

  ‘Get a different job? Heidi, have you not heard there’s a global crisis?’