by Poppy Dolan
Is that a police siren?
I turn around. No, that’s Emmeline.
Jules and Seb are weighted down with overnight bags, changing bags, carrier bags, a sack of dirty washing (where has that even come from after one night?!) but still their strung-out snarly voices carry through the sedimentary layers of luggage.
‘You know that’s the one that makes her throw up!’ Jules’s shrill voice stirs an ache somewhere behind my left eyeball. ‘We can’t give her that formula and all I have is boozy breasts!’
‘I can’t manage every bloody thing, you know, and can you not speak to me like—’ Seb swallows his last huffing words as he catches sight of us. He runs a hand through the curls that had last night been neat and boyish, but which are now frizzed and mad-scientist-like. The Kat and Alfie scene pauses.
A half-teary Jules slings down her bags at the foot of the stairs. The wailing baby is the only thing still weighing on her, in a complicated buckled pouch at Jules’s front. She heads towards me, lips trembling. There’s mascara smudged under one eye and a patch of eczema flaring tomato red on her right cheekbone. She last looked this bad after our GCSE leavers’ party when she’d downed 20/20 and danced the Macarena for three solid hours. But back then all she’d had to do the next day was call in fake sick to her Saturday job at River Island, not support a whole other living being.
‘God, Ellie, I’m sorry. Please, totally ignore us. We’re just hung-over and we got no sleep whatsoever because someone bought the wrong formula. So when his daughter woke at four a.m. for a feed, I couldn’t give it to her, unless I want her to hurl like a demon. All I have is two boobs filled with champagne milk cocktail. We have to race back now to the supplies in the fridge at home just to feed her. But all the while this little madam will be shrieking her breakfast order. Just … just ignore us and forget all this. We’re a couple of idiots.’ I know she doesn’t really mean the ‘we’ part.
‘Of course, no worries,’ I reply, unable to take my eyes of the furious puce face that just last night I’d swayed gently, crooning ‘How Deep is Your Love’ and imagining myself as South London’s answer to Maria Von Trapp. She’s gone from cutesy Gretel to Klaus the Nazi turncoat in just eight hours.
‘Yes, these things happen. Can’t be helped.’ Pete shoots a sympathetic look in Seb’s direction. Seb accepts gratefully and steps up to the reception desk. ‘I’m going to be a rude arse and cut in. You really don’t want us loitering longer than necessary.’
I can’t think of a polite way to counter that for the sake of manners. Mostly because the human tea kettle strapped to Jules’s front is making it impossible to think beyond the nearest emergency exit. I’ve heard her grumble before, a few whimpers, but this full-pelt screaming is terrifying. This is my Vietnam.
‘You’ll come to dinner soon, won’t you?’ Jules clutches at my hand and shouts over the wall of sound. I see sick on her sleeve. ‘Come and we’ll drink wine again – though maybe not so much – and it will be fun. Please. Just like normal, like always. Nothing’s changed.’ She winces as the screaming from Emmie jumps up an octave. I feel for the local dogs.
‘Yes, of course. Really soon.’
Seb settles their bill and soon starts shuffling the noisy party of three out to their car.
‘Honestly,’ Jules turns over her shoulder, exhaustion and guilt leaving her face an uncooked pastry colour, ‘it’s not going to always be this bad. Just ignore us.’
But I can’t.
And I don’t think it’s just me. Pete and I drive home in silent shifts, blaming our stilted conversations on booze and late nights. But something else is sitting uneasy in our stomachs, and it isn’t that rubbish cake.
Chapter Nine
None in the Oven
Dear Internet,
Thanks for all those comments. I’m still working on how I feel about eggs and zygotes and things, but it has been really helpful to know how you all feel as I’m getting there. To CroydonStud96: thanks for the offer, but the ‘ingredients’ are not what’s the problem here. But how generous of you to even think of sharing yours.
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I get in a totally rubbish mood, I have to bake my way out of it. Last night, after a weirdly good AND weirdly bad weekend, I decided to beat the Monday blues by playing about with some coloured meringues. That will take my mind off it all, I thought. And it will wow the colleagues tomorrow (I work in an insanely competitive office full of bad-ass bakers. I’m not overstating – bring in apple strudel and it’s like you forgot to shower that morning. Rice Krispy cakes? P45, dear). I was aiming for patriotic with mini blue and red ones and some plain to remain white. Then I’d pile them up with cream and strawberries for our deadly dull Tuesday meeting.
Only I’m looking at them now and they’re pale pink and light blue. I baked baby meringues. My mind had me subconsciously catering for my future baby shower. And then, because I’d started so I might as well finish, I started to faux-plan my baby shower menu. I love fancy party food. Mum’s goat’s cheese and butternut squash tarts, some mini chocolate mousses in cute vintage tea cups, maybe even a bit of steak tartare on posh crackers to tickle the guests.
But of course, no. Not when preggy, stupid arse. Nothing raw or unpasteurised or containing the dreaded booze or undercooked egg. Basically, NOTHING DELICIOUS.
Internet, I love food, I live for food. How can I go nine months without sushi? Tell me about cravings and the food you missed when you were up the duffer and what replaced the G&T in your life. Rewrite my menu, is what I’m saying. Because it’s looking scarily blank from here.
Sprogless x
Comment
I really missed wine, so I’d just have a glass. You don’t have to go crazy, just be sensible. To be honest, I was so busy puking my guts up most of the time food wasn’t really an issue. Maybe that will sort out your food problem?!
Comment
You can still bake when pregnant. And you can eat for two. Problem solved.
My colleagues are halfway impressed when I bring out the pastel meringue tower ahead of our Features meeting, but Clarissa in editorial asks whether they’re lavender flavoured and her nose almost twitches when I mutter no. One of the art team, in regulation thick black specs and drapey jumper, cracks one in half and pokes at its marshmallow core. My heart almost bursts up through my nose. ‘Hmmm.’ She nods. This is about a medium to good reaction from the art team. They like their brows to be unfurrowed, I think for aesthetic reasons, so nothing ever seems to get them that excited or that angry.
I’m sure in nearly every other office in the land my big pile of gently baked egg white and golden caster sugar would have got ‘ooooh’s and ‘aaaaah’s and ‘aren’t you clever?’s. But when you work for a food magazine, the baking bar is so high it’s interfering with air traffic. Sure, we are just a small magazine, but like the grungy musos flock to NME and the blow-dried stick insects hobble to Harpers, only the real food enthusiasts would give up financial security to work for Crumbs. It’s a small but niche operation started by Martin the Editorial Director, after he chose to leave the BBC magazine equivalent. Well, he maintains he left but rumour suggests that instead it was his expenses bill that forced him out – a rather bitter PA actually contests it was why BBC TV Centre had to be sold off, just to cover it. Whatever the truth, Martin does like to stride in and yell, ‘To know good food is to eat good food,’ and I’m all for that.
Not a day goes by that someone isn’t showing off their cheffiness by bringing in a passionfruit and lychee cheesecake with spun-sugar nest as decoration, or drizzling a lemon and poppy seed loaf before lunch. You’ve got to raise your game and your sponge in this office. And then you have to hit the gym. The ‘Crumb Bum’ is our subtle name for the extra ten pounds each new employee seems to gain around their bottom within their probation period. I think I’m still carrying a Crumb Chin but that could just be my dad’s jowly genes.
As the features meeting gets underway, my meringue tower only
half demolished and looking like the definition of pity-party catering, I open my iPad and prepare to make notes. This is actually a major faff as I then have to convert the notes to a Word file and email them to my office PC, but I desperately need all the cool points I can get in this dull scenario. Assembled are all the cool cats from editorial, design, features – sometimes even Martin will make a token appearance, wafting bespoke cologne and dropping patisserie crumbs that have hitched a lift on his silk tie. And then there’s me. From ad sales. I don’t write the recipes, or the articles about the newest culinary trend (usually the seventy-third article about the long-foretold death of the cupcake), I don’t shoot the pictures or style the food on set. I don’t choose the fonts, the layout, even the sodding paper quality. I sell the ads. I sell empty space to people to advertise food and booze and those squishy expensive silicone baking trays that I personally think are the new soda streams: big promise, rubbish delivery.
I sit in on this meeting so that I can stay on top of what ingredients, locations, themes and styles we’ll be using in an edition in six months’ time so that I can then pitch to the relevant companies. Hopefully they’ll then write us a nice big juicy cheque and have a smiling woman in a pinny beam out from page five, holding something just perfectly baked in their Aga or revolutionary egg poacher. Being in this meeting for me is like sitting in front of a plinth showing off an amazing steak sandwich, chocolate milkshake and two whoopee pies. And then gagging me with seventeen layers of duct tape. I hear them talk about food I love, food I’d kill to try and test and sink my teeth into. But I can’t do that; that’s not my place. I once tried to recommend a really good artisan cheese company I’d come across at a food fair in my parents’ village one summer. But halfway through the sentence, pretty much at the moment I said ‘Buckinghamshire’, I realised the looks aimed my way were so cold I could have been mistaken for gazpacho. They were plainly thinking: who does the ad girl think she is?
And I suppose I’m still trying to work that out: this was hardly the job I’d wanted. I knew I wanted to do something businessy when I left university, just not what exactly. I knew I wanted to earn some good money, walk swiftly down a beige hallway and then call my friend from my corner office and say, ‘Guess where I am!’ OK, yes, I had watched Working Girl one or two or sixty-three times, but aspirations are not bad things. Also, they never tell you when you do a history degree that it’s only that impressive while you’re at uni. My flatmates would suck their breath in dramatically and say, ‘How can you do those long exams, writing all about the Corn Laws or the Cuban Missile Crisis for five hours at a time? God, I just couldn’t do that.’ After uni, people would say, ‘History? Oh how nice.’ And then a blank silence would follow.
This I found to my utter misery at the age of twenty-two, trying desperately to get any kind of job where I was in with a chance of playing footsie with a Harrison-alike and wearing kick-ass suits and saying ‘Shut this deal down!’ I was, admittedly, a bit of an idiot. So with no other irons in the fire, I took an ‘in’ from an old uni mate, who’d similarly struggled with a history degree and no transferable skills. I polished myself up and went for an interview at the same newspaper that had hired her for ad sales. I walked away with a job offer, completely in shock and already planning my capsule wardrobe. ‘Just for now,’ I told myself, ‘just to get my foot in the door somewhere and work out what I want to do.’ Of course, nearly ten years later, I’m still in ad sales. And it’s about as satisfying as a rice cake.
But I mustn’t slag it too much. Distinct advantages to having worked in ad sales: 1) I get the foodie samples that Editorial are too skinny to take and Design feel it’s too beneath their morals to pinch from the freebie bin. 2) I pretty much get to be my own boss as the whole department is me and only the ghostly promise of an intern to help. That promise has been dangled over me for a good few years now, so I’ve let it go. Martin is supposed to manage me but that’s quite hard to do when you’re carrying out a complete survey of all London’s macaroon sellers. He knows I get the job done so we give each other a respectful distance. Except when we fight over some nice bit of cake in the freebie bin. Mostly, more importantly, biggest bestest thing of all: 3) it’s where I met Pete.
When I was still working out in my first job that, yes, we really did sell blank spaces to people to fill with their own expensive, carefully crafted adverts, the newspaper had a bit of a tricky spell. Tricky in that anyone with half a brain and a modem could now get newspaper content for free, or pretty much drown in the London papers being thrust in your hand when you exited the Tube. No one was buying, so no advertisers were paying. And that left a horribly deep hole in the balance sheet.
What do you do when your balance sheet has a stinky black hole? In the absence of Spock in this here universe, you call a business accountant and they patch up that hole with funds. Funds snipped and scraped from the salary pot. And then the sad times happen. We watched the accountants take up residence in a glass-fronted office, guiltily drinking our crappy coffee as they tabled us and divided us with their little laptops and yellow notepads. I still have an odd shiver when I see canary-yellow, lined A4 in a progress meeting. Bleurgh. That glass-fronted office did give me a pretty good view of the tall and dark-haired suit looking guiltier than the rest, though, and I made tactical passes and volunteered for more tea runs than a Brownie hoping for her Entertaining badge. I confirmed it: he was hot. But he was also one of the axe men. What to do?
Two pints of organic cider made that decision for me and Pete and I snogged our way through the summer staff party, a cab ride and then an entire live set by an indie band in a Crouch End pub. He told me that I was never in any danger of losing my job – ad sales was the only slightly bankable department as it was, and I always seemed to be dashing from one meeting to another, never at my desk for more than five minutes. I snogged him again quickly before he used his big brain to work out the truth of the matter. And that was what kept drawing me to Pete – he was smart, and really kind. His mathsy brain had led him into big corporate accounting but one ‘unfortunate personal loss’ at a failing company he audited was like a thousand papercuts in the creases of his long, strong fingers. He was a geek with a heart, and I could dig it.
We kept our relationship (code word for furious, non-stop, ‘What time of day is it even?’ shagging) pretty damn quiet to start with. Pete thought that a good idea because my colleagues might think I’d kept my job through unfair advantage. I knew it was essential to me surviving intact, without having ‘TRAITOR SCUM’ scraped into my forehead with a compass by one of the weather-beaten desk editors. After a year or so more, I moved on to another newspaper (hadn’t quite yet done that thing of sorting out what I wanted to do with my life. It was on my ‘Life Laundry’ list, after ‘Tidy underwear drawer’ and ‘ISA?!?’) but then just as I was about to give in, swallow half a bottle of Scotch and call the Teacher Training Agency, Pete spotted an ad for the job at Crumbs – I think he has a secret spreadsheet somewhere that plots my life development like a Microsoft God, but he won’t show me – and I found my foodie spiritual home. Pete has even managed to move into an area of auditing that isn’t so much like liquid nitrogen to the soul – he shows big companies how they could save vaults-full of moolah by being more ethically and environmentally conscious, then advises them on putting the much-needed plans into place. He cleverly came up with the idea in his big beautiful bonce and now runs it as a new department in his firm. And I married him! Good work, me.
But though I’m proud of being in charge of my own tiny team and achieving all my targets and doing the right things to the right margins at Crumbs, I’m feeling about as fulfilled as chocolate eclair without any cream. I am surrounded by the thing I love – food, glorious food – but I’m frustratingly far from it too. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, ‘Well maybe I should just get knocked up, to have something meaningful to do.’ And then I have to stride off to the disabled loo cubicle that has its own mirror. I stare ha
rd at myself and mutter things like, ‘Feminism. Power. Hilary Clinton. Trousers. Bah!’ Another tick on the ‘not yet’ list: must stop seeing babies as very convenient career break.
But as much as I know that you shouldn’t have a baby for the wrong reasons, I have no idea how to recognise the right ones.
Chapter Ten
‘You and I have cause for a little drinkie.’ Martin is standing over my desk, grinning and pulling at his cuffs. It’s been twenty minutes since the deadly dull features meeting and my brain has just about woken up. There’s a strange mistiness behind his eyes which I don’t think is brandy-based this time.
A drinkie? Odd. It’s way past my birthday now. It’s not time for my appraisal. And usually when Martin has some good goss or company news, he calls everyone round a table of shortbread and dishes it out in one communal blast. That way the toasting fizz goes on expenses.
But I’m not one to look a drink horse in the mouth, so I grab my coat. It’s 3.45 p.m. The day is pretty much over anyway. I’d hit a wall trying to puzzle out who would want to buy ad space next to our six-page examination of insects as the protein source of tomorrow. A pet shop? Someone who makes bug spray?
Safely ensconced at Martin’s club, I am making myself comfortable on a squeaky leather bench while my boss examines the cocktail menu. God knows why: he could recite it back to front and in Cantonese by now, most likely. Martin comes to this chi-chi dark little bar so regularly that we often run final cover proofs over here for his sign-off. Odds are, he’ll be there toying with a Whisky Sour and musing out loud on the best pancetta region of Italy.
Something both fluttery and squidgy is jiggling about in my tummy. What is he about to say? He’s ordered us a bottle of champagne, so we’re clearly celebrating. Am I being promoted? Pay rise, heaven forbid? Am I finally getting a New York work trip to do foodie networking stateside? I have wanted better American business connections for so long, to go after the big food conglomerates. Plus, admittedly selfishly, there are so many places I want to visit again: Katz’s Deli, Barneys, Serendipity for a frozen hot chocolate. The weekend I spent in the Big Apple was no way long enough to cram in a properly big, juicy bite. Maybe I could Inception the features team into thinking they should do a travel piece on the latest New York food crazes – cupcakes baked in mugs at the moment, apparently – and then I could make a legitimate plea to sell some space to travel companies. We could run an off-the-page offer for a discount at the Magnolia Bakery and it would be just plain rude not to check it out first …
