Sweet Treats

by Christine Miles

  Nina removed that batch from the front of the shop. When Old Tom came by after lunch, his eyes lit up. “Pink!” he said. “Proper pink coconut ice. Perfect!”

  Chapter 15

  c. 323BC, IRAQ: mourners preserve the body of Alexander the Great in honey for the journey to his final resting place in Egypt.

  Maudie was really too much, Nina thought as she sank into the bath, filled to the top with water as hot as she could stand. Her legs were killing her. Her shoulders were killing her. Her head was killing her. Who could ever imagine that making something as enticing as confectionery could blatantly be such hard work?

  And honestly, if Greg were to see her now, would he truly be thinking it the world’s greatest idea to make sweets? If he’d met Bryn, would he keep telling her what a marvellous place a small village was? And as for Maudie, generosity was a wonderful thing, but there was such a thing as too much generosity. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would be confidential with Maudie.

  Maudie had told her all there was to know about every inhabitant within a ten-mile radius. She had explained who owned which empty shop, when they had closed, and where they had gone. She regaled Nina with every sordid detail of the ailing campground until it seemed the campground was more a person than a location.

  Which brought Nina to another thought that made her sit bolt upright for several long moments before sliding again beneath the scented bubbles. She and Maudie and Bryn were meant to work together? Maudie hadn’t been speaking of the fete. She’d been speaking of the campground. She’d been enlisting her help to save the village.

  She wasn’t all that sure she wanted to save anything. She wanted to go to work during the day, go for a long walk along the beach during her lunch break, enjoy a spot of people-watching, read, eat, sleep, find herself again.

  She lay in silent contemplation – of her toes, of the food she was expected to eat, of the strange dynamics of the village, of the aching beauty of the sea.

  She was too wired up to go to sleep. She’d go for a run. Along the beach. In the dark. With bare feet.

  The moon was full, and the sky was heavy with stars. She could see the Milky Way, the Southern Cross, and Orion. Shells scraped against the soft parts of her feet. Occasionally she saw the darkened splodge of a jellyfish, waiting for the tide to come in and wash it on its way to another beach. A fish lay on the sand, its empty eye socket staring into the sky. Could a fish see the stars from their place in the sea?

  A shadow ahead, which Nina had thought to be a rock moved, and a little jet of adrenaline shot through her. This was not a rock; it was a person, and it looked to be a man.

  Nina slowed her pace and veered a little way towards the road. She wanted to be alone, not have to talk to strangers.

  She could see a man furiously digging out a hole with his bare hands. He had his back to her, facing out to sea, and didn’t see or hear her. But she heard him and she knew who he was.

  He was crying. Howling, more like. And between tossing savage fistfuls of sand, she heard Bryn’s words. “How. Can. Life. Go. On.”

  She’d trotted away from him, up to the road, sure that the sand shouted her presence at each step, but he still dug furiously when she turned back.

  She had to be sure he did not throw himself into the sea in his grief. When he rose, hurling one last handful of sand at the water, she slipped away, into the shadows and to her own mourning.

  It would be okay, she said. And she didn’t know if she spoke to herself or to Bryn.

  Chapter 16

  c. 100BC, CHINA: cooks sweeten food with maltose, a sugary juice they extract from sweet sorghum grass.

  “Gonna try again.” Bryn held a tacky bolt in place while Maudie smoothed glue onto its matching piece. He always hated this part, fearful that Maudie’s hand might slip and he’d wind up with a lump of metal permanently glued to his fingers.

  “Try what?”

  “Gotta talk to that woman in Sweet Treats,” Bryn said. “Can’t have friction between the three of us.”

  “Her name’s Nina,” Maudie said. “And I’d love a lump of Russian fudge.”

  “Wouldn’t hold your breath,” Bryn said. “Cream can wasn’t put out last night. Again. Probably be selling boiled lollies.”

  “She’ll have made something,” Maudie said.

  Bryn looked at his watch. Thirty minutes before the next bus filled with happy tourists stopped to relieve themselves from the bone-shattering experience of travel on these far-north roads. There was time.

  A child, stretched on tiptoe, stood ahead of him. Nina paid Bryn no mind. The child had her full attention. He fleetingly thought her apron swallowed her up but he’d forgotten the thought before he even finished thinking it.

  “Lots of pretty colours,” the child said.

  “What’s your favourite colour?” Nina asked, and her voice was gentle.

  “I like magenta,” the child said.

  “Magenta,” Nina said. “That’s a beautiful colour. It makes me think of other unusual colours, like paprika.”

  “And primrose, and mahogany, and evergreen,” the child said, very nearly dancing with excitement at finding a soulmate.

  “Can’t stand here all day,” Bryn interrupted, and immediately wished he’d held his tongue.

  “Sorry,” Nina said, looking at him briefly then returning her attention to the child.

  The child made her selection. She took the exact right money from her pocket. She promised Nina she’d be back again, when she next was given pocket money. “I’ll bring my paint colours next time,” she said, and she was gone.

  “I’ll be bringing your sugar tomorrow,” he said.

  “You?”

  “Me,” Bryn said. “Who else would it be?”

  “But…”

  “Miss Clapham ordered sugar, cocoa, coconut, cream, essences, food colouring in bulk before she went away. Delivery day is tomorrow.”

  “But…”

  “What?” Bryn said.

  “I don’t want to cook for the fete.” As soon as the words fell from Nina’s lips, she knew by the look on Bryn’s face she’d said the wrong thing.

  “Don’t cook then,” Bryn said. “Will I send the sugar back?”

  “No,” Nina said slowly. “No. I’ll use it up some other way.”

  *

  “Look, Bryn,” Maudie said. “We’re really quite terrible. She’s not Miss Clapham, you know.”

  Bryn rolled his eyes, and glanced across the street. “Can’t mess around,” he said. “We’ve got to make amends, backtrack on the stupid mistakes we’ve made already. Miss Clapham would be appalled.”

  “Miss Clapham should have stayed here,” Maudie said.

  “Well, she’s gone.” Bryn wasted no time on sympathy. “She’s gone, and Laud Mayor is sure to come tomorrow. Somehow we’ve got to look competent.”

  Maudie looked at him closely. “Are you saying we’re stupid?” she said.

  Bryn coloured. “Not exactly,” he said, “but you have to admit that Miss Clapham is the brains in this place. She’s the fire. And she’s the one who will stop the village being closed down by his lordship.”

  “She’d better come back then,” Maudie said. “Cos sure as eggs are eggs, neither you nor I have it in us to stand up to that man.”

  Bryn slapped the back of the café chair. “Before we can even dream of standing up to Laud Mayor,” he said, “we have to make friends with Nina over there.”

  “I’m friends with her.” Maudie wiped crumbs from a table into her hand. “I showed her how to make fudge. And I told her all about the village.”

  Bryn groaned.

  “She is a bit like Miss Clapham.” Maudie said. “I’m not sure how, but there’s something alike.”

  Bryn snorted. “Perhaps, then, she will have as much gumption as Miss Clapham. Perhaps we won’t have to do a thing. Would suit me down to the ground.”

  Maudie shook her head. “She can’t do it by herself,” she said. “She has abso
lutely no idea what Laud Mayor is like. I told her, but she wasn’t listening. I could tell.”

  Chapter 17

  c. AD50, ITALY: Romans relieve toothaches with eardrops made from olive oil and boiled earthworms.

  “Sometimes,” Miss Clapham said to her teapot, “I wonder if I’m stark raving mad.”

  She sat in silent contemplation, stacking sugar cubes onto the saucer, seeing how high she could build the sugar-tower before it collapsed.

  How like her life the sugar cubes were. She’d balanced cubes of work, cubes of leisure, cubes of friends and enemies, and hobbies and passions and now she’d realised the tower that was her life was unevenly stacked.

  It had become too heavy when she realised she not only balanced her own tower, but many other towers too. Mrs Potts’ tower, for one. And Bryn’s, who really needed to stop wallowing in his grief. And the foolish but lovable and generous Maudie. And even the egotistical Laud Mayor himself.

  So many towers, and only one of them truly hers.

  She would hand them back, every single last one of them. She took a swipe at the base of the sugar cube tower and watched it fall and smash into the saucer, onto the table, even to the floor.

  “I mustn’t cause that much damage,” she said. “There are too many people who will be hurt.”

  The voice in her head comforted her. “They’ll build their own towers. They’ll be stronger people for it. The community will be stronger for it. You can do it.”

  Chapter 18

  c. AD77, ITALY: Pliny the Elder advises his students to eat mint to stimulate their minds.

  Mrs Potts liked the pictures on the wall in Nina’s room best of all her collections. She’d moved them there one wet afternoon from their place in the lounge room for no other reason than that she felt like making a change.

  Now she regretted the decision. She could hardly sit on Nina’s bed enjoying each painting. Even though they were merely postcard prints of original oils, she always called them paintings. They were as close as she’d ever get to owning real art.

  Maybe if she whipped in and whipped out, she could nip one of the pictures without Nina noticing. The one she wanted was of a girl, a Bohemian girl with long wild hair, in a chunky boat, bits of skirt and sleeve dangling into the water. It was a dark picture – dark night, dark colours, dark suspicious characters lurking in the background, yet the girl herself was painted in near-white. Not that she looked happy. She looked to Mrs Potts like a good slap on the bottom would perk the girl up no end, make her grateful for the small blessings she had.

  Once she had the picture off the wall, studying it carefully, Mrs Potts re-thought the girl’s blessings. There was no evidence of anything in the picture that could be even drunkenly accepted as a blessing.

  The image reminded her of Nina. Except she had a gut feeling that Nina did NOT need a slap. Nina looked like she’d lost something, as though she needed to find it, but knew without a doubt that the task was impossible.

  Mrs Potts was not given to long periods of contemplative thought. She felt a bit tired. She’d make a casserole with some of the older Brussels sprouts, and have a bit of a lie-down. The girl hadn’t seemed enamoured with the food, but if there was one thing Mrs Potts understood it was the need for a good wholesome meal at least once a day. Goodness knew the girl needed it. She would fade away before her very eyes, sweet shop or no!

  Chapter 19

  c. AD 100, GREECE: gum lovers chew beeswax mixed with sap from the mastic tree; ITALY: Romans munch on dates, stuffed with almonds and sometimes candied in honey.

  It was a rotten day all ’round, beginning with the evening before when Mrs Potts had proudly borne the brussel sprout casserole to the table and watched to make sure Nina ate every mouthful.

  She’d had vivid dreams about Greg – they were shopping for a new skateboard, he was to get a haircut, and there was a movie they wanted to see together. She held his hand, ruffled his hair, finished his ice cream. She woke, thinking him in his bedroom and her in her own, and when she realised she was alone, that she and Greg had not done all the things she’d been so certain of, her grief had been so great her heart seemed to stop with the pain of it.

  A busload full of irritable pensioners with a fierce driver, all wanting to be served instantly, and not one single crack of a smile from any of them had sapped her remaining energy by midday.

  “It’s the driver, you see, dear,” said the last woman, who was more kind than Nina could cope with. “He drives like a lunatic, cutting corners and tipping people out of their seats. Normally we’re a sing-along, drive-along group. We’re lovely people, truly.”

  Her kindness caused great tears to well into Nina’s eyes. She smiled a wobbly smile. “It’s okay,” she said. “Maybe there’s a full moon too.”

  “Maybe there is,” the woman said. “Or perhaps the foolish man didn’t take his medication this morning. Or perhaps he had a fight with his teenage son before leaving home. Or perhaps his mother is ill and he wants to be there and not here.”

  Nina tried to smile again. She had to get the woman out of the shop before she lost the plot completely.

  But the woman was too kind, and too well able to see Nina’s distress to leave her alone. “Come, sit down,” she said, taking Nina to the back of the shop where she promptly burst into tears so plentiful it seemed a great drought had broken.

  The woman looked around for a tissue and instead found a teatowel. “Blow,” she said, passing it to Nina, which made Nina laugh shakily before wiping her face with the corner of her apron.

  “It’s not just us, is it, dear?” the woman asked, and Nina found herself shaking her head. “Do you want to talk?”

  “Not really,” Nina said, and the woman patted her hand comfortingly.

  “Sometimes it’s good to talk. Puts things in perspective.”

  Perspective. That’s one thing that will never change no matter how much talking I do, Nina thought bitterly. Greg’s gone. I shouldn’t be doing the things Greg would love to do. I would give my life if it meant we changed places.

  She did blow her nose then. The woman poured water from the jug. “Nice little place you have here,” she said, and Nina wished she could tell her that Sweet Treats was not her place. Sweet Treats was Miss Clapham’s place, and Miss Clapham should be here.

  The bus sounded its horn and the woman pulled a face. “Back out to the arms of the devil himself I go,” she said.

  “Can I do anything?” Nina said.

  “I think we’ll be okay,” she said. “Hopefully the bus-sick ones haven’t eaten anything!”

  “Take some ginger,” Nina said. “It works for some people.”

  “You are a lovely girl.” The woman moved toward the door, turned back to Nina and sighed. “My name is Vonnie. I wish I could stay to help you.”

  A new waterfall of tears cascaded down Nina’s face. She waved to the woman, pressed her apron to her eyes, and turned the shop sign to ‘closed’.

  What am I doing here? she cried. What am I doing?

  *

  “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  Nina kept scrubbing the pot. Why did coconut always cling so? She’d rather wash toffee off the pots than the dregs of coconut ice.

  “You’ll want to sit down,” Maudie said.

  “I’ve got to keep going,” Nina said. “I’ll listen.”

  “I’ll sit down then,” Maudie said. “It’s been a long day.”

  “It’s not done yet,” Nina said.

  Behind Nina’s back, Maudie rolled her eyes. No one could ever compare Nina with Miss Clapham. What she’d give to have Miss Clapham return. She felt all on a limb, as though she was meant to single-handedly save the world and had no idea where to begin. She ran her fingers through a groove in the table, just for once considering her thoughts before she spoke them.

  “You know Laud Mayor is wanting our village to close.”

  Nina said nothing.

  “Laud Mayor has said we
have got until December 1. Miss Clapham says no-one can shut down a village, but Bryn says if the Mayor raises the rates high enough we’ll be forced to close down.”

  Nina refused to be drawn.

  “Laud Mayor hates us. We don’t know why.”