There's More to Life Than Cupcakes

by Poppy Dolan

  She shakes her head. ‘It’s surely only a matter of time. Wow, Pete must be freaking out about his bro, no wonder he’s got the weirdsies. Hey, is that the brother that I … you know, in the Wendy house at your reception?’

  ‘No that was one of the twins, remember? And then you got confused and squeezed the other twin’s bum later on.’

  She laughs as she stands up and brushes down her leopard leggings. ‘Or did I?’ She winks mischievously. ‘Naughty business should be done safely in Wendy houses, with proper protection, so none of this baby stuff happens and ruins your life.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  None in the Oven

  Lovely Internet people/spam bots/perverts,

  So today I found out how my bessie mate really feels about babies. I thought I had an inkling before, but now I have that inkling’s bigger scarier brother who was fed steroids from birth. She thinks they’re gross little time-sponges. She thinks they’re a death knell to all fun and excitement. She thinks they’re a massive mistake.

  I don’t agree, not entirely. I think babies are brilliant and gorgeous and generally important for helping mankind continue to exist. They do come covered in goo and they don’t exactly fit in with five hours of telly and three hours of self-manicures every night, but they are precious and sort of magical.

  But my friend is also precious and magical. And one of maybe four people in the world I pour my heart out to. So now I can add in the ‘Con’ column of motherhood ‘Best friend will desert me’ to come just under ‘Feet may swell and never return to normal. All current shoes made redundant. Purple wedges?!’

  So no baby, no husband OR have baby, have semi-lonely heart. That’s nice then.

  Aargghh, Internet, I am going all Claire Danes in Homeland again. Call that beardy bloke, stat!

  Sprogless x

  Comment

  You might lose friends, you might not, or you might make loads of new ones. Why are you letting your friends make decisions for you? It’s your body, your life. And no one (probably not even your husband) will be up with you doing those 3 a.m. feeds, so you have to know what YOU want.

  Comment

  A friend who’d be put off you like that is, I’m afraid to say, not a real friend.

  Comment

  But to be honest, having kid does suck the fun out of your social life. Babysitters only stay till eleven and that means a night out clubbing is a bit short and sweet … that is, if one of them doesn’t get a cough or a cold or chucks on your best top five minutes before you’re supposed to head out the door. Sad but true!

  Pete and I have sort of reached a truce. A few things helped the treaty coming together: I finally told him the truth about what his mum did to me with the linseeds (as well as politely reminding him I’m under quite a bit of work stress) and he further relaxed when his brother Rich called him and asked for life insurance advice, as he wanted to make proper plans ahead of the baby coming. He feels a bit more in control now, I think, and I’m not going to rock the boat when he’s only just put the co-captain’s hat back on. We have time, I think to myself every now and again, as I snip another grey hair at the root along my parting. We have all the time in the world to think about babies. There’s science, hormones, Madonna. Everything is possible. The only thing that’s impossible is making your own puff pastry.

  ‘If a pudding doesn’t have chocolate as the number one ingredient, I don’t think it’s even worth switching the oven on for.’ Hannah folds her arms across her ruby-red apron and peers down at the recipe on the counter. ‘Bakewell. Eurgh. It’s like bad school dinners again. And I have those every day of the sodding week.’

  I have the feeling it has been a bit of a bad day at school for Hannah. She chews the inside of her lip and huffily starts to measure out flour for the shortcrust pastry. To be honest, mine hasn’t been all that amazing; trying to act normally around all my foodie colleagues, when inside I want to yell, ‘Make the most of the sample bin! This might all be gone in six months!’ I also called in some graduates for the internship interviews at short notice. Luckily, most of them are still free and absurdly keen. Though the fact that they were so enthusiastic about working for free for four months made me feel like a Dickensian slave trader. But if there’s anywhere to shake off feelings of nasty corporate greed, it’s in baking class. Where only good old-fashioned cake greed is allowed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Joe chips in, ‘there’s something very comforting about a good wedge of Bakewell, with custard, on a chilly day like today.’ He nods towards the trees outside the window, pawing at the glass as the wind hassles them, as if desperate to come in and get warm by the ovens.

  ‘Hmmm.’ Hannah shakes her half-teaspoon of salt into the bowl like it’s bound for a particularly evil slug.

  I whisper while Joe heads off for an extra Pyrex, ‘You all right? It’s not like you to take it out on the ingredients.’

  ‘I’m fine, really. Just an exclusion to deal with at school and a fight with my other half this morning. But I’ll be right as rain in a moment. Sorry. How are things with you?’

  ‘Apart from my mother-in-law attacking me with a bag of seeds and my husband having a weird tantrum because his brother is expecting a baby, nothing. I can totally empathise with getting the cold shoulder. Men are odd. I think I get the handle on them – you think they are capable of expressing their feelings above a mollusc level and then they clamp up tighter than … well, a mollusc.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Joe suddenly appears back at the bench. ‘Is someone being shellfish?’ He cringes before we have a chance to.

  ‘Terrible dad joke!’ Hannah laughs.

  ‘No, just terrible bloke joke. I’m not a dad, not unless one of my exes has a nasty surprise for me. You’d have to hide me, Ellie, let me come and live in your broom cupboard.’ He grabs my arms lightly around the – unfortunately – fattest bit at the top. ‘Don’t let the baby mamas take me! I’m too hot to be a dad!’

  ‘Ha ha, whaaaa?’ I giggle and shake him off, conscious of how much loose flesh his fingers must have felt. ‘There’s no such thing as too hot to be a dad.’

  Joe mock-pouted. ‘So you’re saying I’m not hot?’

  ‘Huh? No, I’m …’ for some reason the giggles keep coming, ‘look, David Beckham is a dad, OK?’

  He turns to his work station and picks up a bag of plain flour. ‘Oh, I see. So you think I’m as hot as David Beckham.’ He looks at me as Hannah clears her throat.

  ‘Tarts!’ Mr Berry shouts from the front of the class.

  ‘Just one thing, ladies… and, er, gent,’ Mr Berry dutifully nods to Joe, our token bloke. ‘Not to alarm you, but next week there’ll be a film crew in our lesson. Part of a BBC documentary about the cultural reinvention of baking. They just want some background shots, so don’t worry about the close-ups, Mr Demille! Ha ha!’ His laughter hits the back wall of the classroom, and slithers down, alone. ‘Anyway, just to prepare you. And you might have to sign a few waivers, things like that. In the meantime, good baking!’

  Mr Berry had been cultivating this as a sign off, like he’s auditioning for his own baking show.

  ‘Fame at last!’ Joe nudges me in the ribs as he scoots out the door. Hannah rolls her eyes in return and I make a mental note to wash my hair before the next baking class.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It turns out my interview skills are less Alan Sugar and more Sugar Plum Fairy: I just can’t bear to grill these poor little sods. Like the first interviewee, Simon; I could see his suit trousers still had the impossible sharp creases of brand new M&S clothing. I need someone with a bit of gumption, some entrepreneurial spirit, good commercial nous. Not someone who trembles a little as they hand over their CV. I asked Simon the usual questions I’d always been asked in interviews: why he’d be a great candidate, why he wanted to work at Crumbs, what were his biggest strengths? He muttered and blushed at that one especially.

  Then I had Amina: too ambivalent. I couldn’t bring myself to
push her for anything beyond, ‘Yeah, I suppose, yeah’ as she responded to everything, giving more focus to picking her nails. I sounded too much like my GCSE French teacher when I tried: ‘Anything you could add there? Could you say a little more? Is the window female or male?’ So I waved her off with a jolly promise that she’d hear from me soon. She didn’t really look bothered.

  I did the same with Sweaty Mark and Suspiciously Vague Suzanne. Apparently she’d been travelling for fourteen months, but couldn’t really tell me where. She’s either just been kicked out of MI5 for something dark or kicked out of her parents’ house for watching Gilmore Girls and smoking dope all that time.

  It’s just as I’m giving up hope that Gina glides in. She’s smiling confidently, she’s holding herself well, she nods and laughs and seems to be listening in all the right places. She is the Interview Bot 3000. I love her.

  I simply say, ‘So tell me a bit about yourself,’ and she gives me all the gumption, entrepreneurial spirit and commercial nous I can swallow: when she was a fifteen-year-old and her gran’s nursing home was in disrepair, she organised all the old dears to knit and crochet doilies, which she then raffled off to make money for the home. Sure, that didn’t fix the roof, but when the council pressed for the home’s closure she started a letter-writing campaign and it’s now shipshape, all thanks to her persistence. There’s a definite spark behind her green eyes.

  I am so impressed by Gina that I am almost scared. What was I doing when I was fifteen? I think the limits of my generosity back then only stretched so far as sharing my strawberry laces with my brother and giving him the remote after Blossom had finished.

  I’m also sort of in love with her hair: she has thick, softly waving hair in a Pre-Raphaelite red. A Days of Thunder Nicole Kidman ‘do. Her hair makes me feel like I can immediately trust her. Plus – and admittedly, more importantly – she is as sharp as a tack, as demonstrated by the fact she’s now asking me questions:

  ‘What are the greatest challenges the magazine industry faces right now?’

  ‘Is there a chance this internship could turn into something permanent?’

  ‘Do you have parking spaces for bikes?’

  This girl is the business. And I doubt I’ll find anyone better a) for free and b) within the next week so we actually have a chance of saving Crumbs. ‘When can you start?’

  Her eyes brighten to a shiny leaf-green. ‘Tomorrow!’

  As we shake hands to seal the deal, I have a flashback from my Working Girl obsessive days. But no way am I being Sigourney Weaver. It really will be a two-way street and no bitchy boyfriend stealing while on crutches. I could be good at this management stuff. If Crumbs does survive, I am absolutely going to cash in my chips with Martin for that overdue pay rise.

  Back at home, I’m ready to hang up my manager’s coat and put on my jogging bottoms of laziness. I am seriously ready for dinner.

  ‘Italian? Or Greek?’ My mouth salivates at the thought of crumbly grilled feta over a juicy slice of lamb in a nice crispy pitta. But then again, a rustic pizza with cherry tomatoes and anchovies …

  ‘Ells? What kind of holiday should we go for next year? I fancy somewhere really hot, like uncomfortably hot, where you need an eleven a.m. beer just to stay alive.’ Pete brings his laptop over to the sofa and I pause my fourth episode of 30 Rock like any good wife should. ‘Here, like this.’ He clicks on a package holiday to Santorini, a little Greek island. It looks impossibly perfect, like it’s been Photoshopped into clean and brilliant and unnaturally bright colours. Pete himself is being impossibly perfectly jubilant tonight. I think he’s trying to make up for the week’s past grumpiness, and in return I have stopped referring to Marie as ‘your flipping bonkers mother’. OK, I hadn’t always used ‘flipping’. But we are in a good place again. Things are rosy and somewhere deep inside I finally unclench an anxious muscle. One that had been wound up with worries about work, my husband and my ovaries.

  ‘Ooooh, that looks amazing. And it says here that you can eat fresh squid, from the net to the plate in under an hour. Wow. I like the sound of that. But it’s still November, Petey, why are we planning our summer hols now?’

  ‘Well, we could go over Easter,’ he says quickly. ‘Just a really nice holiday before … just a really nice holiday to think about through the winter months. And you know how my teeth pop when I’ve got a killer tan.’ I’ve never told Pete this, but his Paris Hilton impression creeps me out. Anyway, while he’s planning holidays he isn’t planning our offspring and dropping hints like crazy. He must have mentioned his colleague’s twin babies at least twice a week since they were born a month or so ago. Maybe that would be normal for a woman (gross generalisations notwithstanding) but Pete usually fills me in on his friends’ and family’s life developments in short, Tweet-like updates, light on words, light on detail: ‘My brother’s got a new job. My boss is getting a divorce. The next-door flat was raided by police #WTF.’ When I rushed home to tell him Jules and Seb were engaged, he just shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, Seb texted me yesterday.’ My teeth had left red indentations on my fist. But recently he’s ‘Brian’s twins do this’, ‘Brian’s twins sleep through the night now’, ‘Brian says it’s the best thing that EVER happened to him’. He’s like the Big Brother commentator and they are the mini housemates. I can’t tell him that the baby narration is hardly helping me – hearing how other people have taken to babymaking like fertile ducks to water only adds more pressure to my messed-up head – because his eyes get that lovely happy twinkle when he’s chatting on and on. If I could just switch that twinkle to our holiday, it would give me a bit more time to get my head round baby-related business, maybe.

  ‘Easter.’ Pete runs a large hand over his chin. ‘Easter’s good because we won’t be doing long-haul when—’ He stops his mouth just in time but his eyes still roam to my stomach area.

  Oh. I see. He’s thinking of fitting in a last holiday before I get knocked up. Something twinges in me, and I feel like a marionette he’s pulling in uncomfortable directions. But then again how can I be cross at him for wanting something so natural, something you might say he’s entitled to? A chasm of confusion opens up, and I do the easy thing. Again. I say nothing. I put it off for the millionth time.

  ‘And nothing too flash, I suppose, because we’ve got to stay on course for the house deposit.’ He shuts the laptop solemnly and takes my hand in his. ‘But there’s something we’ve been putting off, something that can’t wait.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘I’ve been waiting so long for this! Come on in guys.’

  Jules stands there in the warmly lit hallway, a bloody lovely waft of garlic and rosemary enveloping her, and us, as she springs forward for hugs and hellos. She takes my cardboard box with a giddy smile. ‘What’s this? Please tell me you’ve done a Nigella again. I love your sexy smirks and homemade delicacies.’

  ‘It’s those chocolate and peanut butter cookies – the stuff of dreams.’ Pete loops his scarf over the coat rack.

  ‘Well, psssht,’ I shake my head with a flush, ‘not really. But I think I managed to whip them out before they got too hard.’

  ‘Oooer! Now you’re definitely doing a Nigella.’ Jules leads us through into the living room, which in turn leads into the kitchen/diner. The carpets are a lovely buttery yellow and the walls a lighter shade of the same tone. It means all the clashing colours of family life – primary-bright teething rings, the muddy brown of leather brogues, the cherry red of a charging notebook computer – somehow come together in a calming lullaby.

  Pete had been right the other night, pushing me to make a date for dinner round at Jules’s place. I had been putting it off, I’ll admit, because Jules was the one person I knew who’d stayed stone-cold sensible and pretty much foxy after having a baby. If I had any more evidence that even she couldn’t cope with the babied life, I would triple-lock my chastity belt for life. It made me a crappy friend, but I’d been sort of avoidin
g her for the sake of any future Peter Jnrs.

  ‘Is Emmie asleep?’ I ask, suppressing the slight hope in my voice.

  Jules rolls her eyes. ‘For now. Give her an hour though, and she’ll soon have us waltzing to her tune. Seb is on call tonight, though, so I have promised myself I will revolve only around this Prosecco bottle. Though even just saying that makes me want to sprint up those stairs and check if she’s breathing. Aaargh.’ She stuffs a Dorito in her mouth, as if that will keep her rooted to the kitchen lino.

  Seb jogs softly down the stairs. ‘Hey guys. How are you? She’s sleeping like a perfectly normal log,’ he reassures Jules, as he squeezes her shoulder affectionately. ‘Is Josh here yet?’ As I blink in confusion, he barrels on, ‘I’m not sure you ever met my cousin at uni, Pete. He’s having a tough time, I didn’t want him to be on his own this weekend. And maybe you and Ellie could size him up, see if he’d be right for any of your mates?’

  With a frown, Jules quickly chimes in, ‘No, babe, it’s too soon. Josh needs time. Let’s not talk about it with him, OK?’

  And as the doorbell rings, Pete and I have no frigging idea what we weren’t supposed to talk about.

  ‘So now she wants the skis. I mean, fine, she can have them. But deep down she and I both know she hates skiing and she only wants them so she can deny me of one of my few pleasures. She’s got my money and my kids, for God’s sake!’ The twelfth litre of red wine sloshes down Josh’s neck.

  ‘Oh-ho-kay,’ Seb starts collecting the plates, shiny with the remnants of a very good gravy. Even in the fug of Josh’s divorce melancholy, I could appreciate how well Seb had slow-cooked that lamb.

  Josh’s eyes swivel to Pete. ‘How long have you two been married?’ It’s asked like an accusation, as if our married life had somehow drowned out his own.