Meet Me at the Cupcake Café Page 17

  ‘And if a woman had a babbie at home she could barely feed, or someone was a bit short of a coupon, or there were just too many mouths to feed – those Flahertys, I remember, they had a babbie a year and Patrick never could hold down a job. Well then, you’d slip them a bit extra. A loaf that didn’t turn out true, or a few buns a couple of days old. And word would get around. And sure, some folks turn up to see if they’ll be getting something for nothing. But some folks just turn up because you do right by them. And I tell you, every single Flaherty child – and there were gone thirteen of them, you had to stop counting about then. Well, every single Flaherty child, and their children when they all grew up and got jobs, and then their children came along and went to college and everything, and every single one of them got their bread from Randall’s for their whole lives. I could have run that bakery off of Flahertys alone. And that’s how it is in business. Some’ll rob you blind, some’ll kick you when you’re down, but you spread some good feeling and some warmth about and people like that. Aye.’

  Joe sat back, looking tired out.

  ‘Gramps,’ said Isabel, leaning over and kissing him square on the nose. ‘You’re brilliant.’

  The old man looked up with watery eyes.

  ‘What is it now? Who are you? Is that you, Marian?’

  ‘No, Gramps. It’s me. It’s Isabel.’

  ‘Isabel? My wee lass Isabel?’

  He peered closer.

  ‘What are you doing these days, my sweet?’

  Chapter Eleven

  A little taste of sunshine to take out into the world:

  Strawberry Meringue Cupcakes

  For 24 cupcakes

  250g unsalted butter, at room temperature

  250g caster sugar

  4 eggs

  250g self-raising flour

  4 tbsp milk (whole or semi-skimmed, not skimmed)

  6–8 tsp strawberry jam

  For the Swiss meringue buttercream

  8 egg whites

  500g caster sugar

  500g unsalted butter

  4 tsp vanilla extract

  8 tbsp seedless strawberry jam

  Preheat the oven to 190°C/fan oven 170°C/gas mark 5.

  Beat together the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs, flour and milk and beat until well combined and smooth. Spoon the mixture evenly into the 24 paper cases.

  Spoon a little jam on to each cake and, using a cocktail stick, swirl the jam into the batter.

  Bake for 15 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

  To make Swiss meringue buttercream

  Place the egg whites and sugar in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Stir pretty much constantly to prevent the egg from cooking. After five–ten minutes, when the sugar has dissolved, remove the bowl from the pan of simmering water and whisk until the meringue has puffed up and the mix is cool.

  Add the butter and vanilla to the meringue and whisk until the butter has been completely incorporated into it. At first it will look a disaster – it will collapse and look curdled but don’t worry! Stop when the mixture is smooth, light and fluffy.

  Beat the jam into the buttercream. If you want it pinker, add a little food colouring. Spoon the buttercream into a piping bag and swirl on to each cupcake. Finish off with some sugar sprinkles or decorations.

  Quarter the cakes and put the pieces into tiny cases with cocktail sticks poking out. Attempt to get passers-by to try them and be knocked out by your genius so they then come and spend lots of money at your shop and save you from bankruptcy.

  ‘Won, doo, free!’ Louis, hands carefully washed, was allowed to put the mini cupcakes into their special tin. There were considerably more than three, but that was as far as his counting went. Issy was in a whip of excitement that morning, making up free samples for everywhere she could think of.

  ‘We’re changing our whole strategy,’ she said to Pearl.

  ‘So instead of throwing our cupcakes away at the end of the day we’re throwing them at people instead?’ Pearl had said, but didn’t want to rain on Issy’s parade; a big surge of positivity couldn’t be a bad thing this early in the game. Issy had called up Zac and complimented his hairdo until he’d drawn her up a pretty flyer and she’d made copies at the all-night Liverpool Street Kall Kwik when she couldn’t sleep with excitement at 5am.

  Meet me at the Cupcake Café!

  Busy day? Stressful time?

  Need five minutes of peace, quiet, and

  some heavenly cake and coffee?

  Then come on in and soothe your soul at 4

  Pear Tree Court, off Albion Road.

  Free cupcake and relaxation with every

  cup of coffee and this flyer.

  Then the menu was printed underneath.

  ‘Now, make sure you hand these out to everyone at the nursery,’ said Issy strictly.

  ‘Iss,’ said Louis.

  ‘Uh, yeah,’ said Pearl, wondering. The nursery hadn’t turned out at all like she’d expected. Although it was nominally a government-run scheme for young disadvantaged children – and she couldn’t deny it had beautiful facilities, clean, new toys and unripped books – it wasn’t, as she’d imagined, full of mothers like herself, struggling to get by and make a living, maybe on their own too. There were lots of yummy mummies, affluent women who double-parked and blocked the road in huge 4×4s, who all seemed to know each other and discussed interior decorators and hiring children’s party entertainers at full volume across the room.

  Their children weren’t dressed like Louis, who Pearl always thought looked smart in his little tracksuits and sparkling white trainers. These children wore old stripy Breton shirts and baggy knee-length shorts and had long hair, and looked like children from long ago. It couldn’t be practical, Pearl thought, considering how dirty kids got – those shirts would get holes in them in no time, they were only cotton, and think of the ironing. Mind you, these women didn’t really look like they did their own ironing. And Pearl couldn’t help but notice that when the party invitations came round, or the play-dates, Louis – who played beautifully with whoever was there; who shared his toys and cuddled the playleader, Jocelyn, every day; Louis at whom the other women directed pleasant but non-specific smiles and truisms of ‘Isn’t he adorable?’ – was never invited. Her gorgeous, beautiful, delightful son.

  And Pearl knew it wasn’t, as her younger self would have once loudly asserted, because of the colour of his skin. There were Chinese and Indian children; mixed race, African and every shade in between. All the little girls wore sprigged muslin tops and immaculate white linen trousers, with polka dot wellingtons when it rained outside, their hair long and lustrous or cut into little French bobs with a fringe. The little boys looked hardy and ruddy, used to running about and watching rugby with their dads – there was much talk of fathers and husbands at the nursery. There had been much less back on the estate in Lewisham.

  It was her, Pearl knew. Her clothes, her weight, her style, her voice. Rubbing off on Louis, her perfect boy. And now she had to go and hand out Issy’s sodding leaflets and her sodding free samples, like some kind of Big Issue seller, to all those immaculate women, just so she could confirm every single thing those women already thought about her. She stomped out rather crossly into the lightly drizzling spring morning.

  Issy had rather the easier task; she strolled down to her old bus stop, a large tin tucked under her arm, the drizzle not dampening her buoyant mood. Off to the bus stop. It felt almost like the old days.

  Sure enough, the line-up of familiar faces, peering round for the big red bus, was still there: the angry young man with the loud iPod; Mr Dandruff; the bag lady trundling by. And Linda, whose face was wreathed in smiles when she saw her.

  ‘Hello, dear! Have you got a job? You know, it’s a shame you never got into feet like my Leanne. I was thinking that.’

  ‘Well,’ said Issy, smiling, ‘I have done something. I’ve opened a little café … just up there!’

  Linda
turned round, and Issy enjoyed her astonishment.

  ‘Oh how lovely,’ Linda said. ‘Do you do bacon sandwiches?’

  ‘Nooo,’ said Issy, making a mental note that, if the business ever took off, they must look into serving up bloody bacon sandwiches if everyone wanted them so much. ‘We do coffee and cake.’

  ‘Like your hobby?’ said Linda.

  Issy bit her lip. She didn’t like her baking being referred to as a ‘hobby’, especially not now.

  ‘Well, they do say follow your passion,’ she said, smiling through gritted teeth. ‘Here! Have a cake. And a flyer.’

  ‘I will,’ said Linda. ‘Oh, Issy, I’m so pleased for you! And what about that nice young man of yours with the fancy car?’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Issy.

  ‘Oh well, soon you’ll be able to give up your hobby, and you’ll be down in haberdashery to pick out some voile for your veil.’

  ‘Please pop in for a coffee some time,’ said Issy, trying to keep the smile on her face. ‘Would be lovely to see you.’

  ‘Well, yes, of course. For as long as you’re there,’ said Linda. ‘It’s great to have a hobby.’

  Issy managed not to roll her eyes but headed up the line, and as the bus arrived even the young man who never took his iPod out grabbed a cake and made a cheers at her. She popped her head inside the bus and offered a cake to the driver but he fiercely shook his head and Issy withdrew, slightly flattened.

  Well, she said to herself. We’ve got to start somewhere.

  Issy bit into a frankly heavenly cappuccino cake, where she’d whipped the icing so fine it was practically foam. It was exquisite. Or just a cake, she supposed.

  Hobby my bum, she said crossly to herself. She returned slowly to the shop, just in time to see two schoolkids charging out, each clutching two cakes in grubby paws.

  ‘Get out of it, you little bastards!’ she screamed, relieved at least that she had locked the till.

  The man from the ironmonger’s walked past, looking at her strangely.

  ‘Hello!’ said Issy, trying to get back her normal voice. He stopped.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. He had a slight accent Issy couldn’t place.

  ‘We’re the new shop,’ said Issy, somewhat redundantly. ‘Would you like a cake?’

  He was dressed fastidiously, she noticed, suit, a narrow tie, a topcoat, a scarf and even a homburg. The effect was very old-fashioned. She’d have expected him to be in brown overalls, if anything.

  He bowed his head over her cake tin and selected the most perfect of the cappuccino cakes, picking it up daintily between two fingers.

  ‘I’m Issy,’ she offered when he’d made his choice.

  ‘Delighted,’ said the man, and headed on back towards his shop, which, as always, had the shutters tightly closed. Peculiar.

  ‘I am undaunted,’ vowed Issy, even as Pearl returned from dropping off Louis, uncharacteristically bowed. She still had more than half the cakes in the tin. ‘Joshua isn’t allowed sugar,’ she reported, ‘and Tabitha has food intolerances. And Olly’s mother wanted to know that the flour was fair trade.’

  ‘Everything’s fair trade,’ said Issy, exasperated.

  ‘I told her that, but she said she was going to say no just to be on the safe side,’ said Pearl dully.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Issy. ‘We soldier on!’

  The following morning Issy headed up to Stoke Newington High Street, aiming to leave flyers and free samples in every shop. This wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Every little shop already had every spare centimetre of space taken up with flyers for yoga classes, baby gyms and massage, circus school, jazz concerts, tango lessons, home delivery organic vegetables, knitting circles, library events, local theatre shows and nature walks. The world seemed papered in flyers, thought Issy, and Zac’s beautiful, elegant designs seemed suddenly limp and colourless going up against neon oranges and bright yellows. The people in the little shops seemed listless and uninterested, although they accepted the cakes of course. Issy took the opportunity to study them. These were people, like her, who’d had a dream of running their own business and had gone for it. She wished they looked a little less exhausted and unhappy.

  About a third of the way down the street an angry-looking woman in a tie-dye T-shirt with messy hair came storming up to her with a bumptious look on her face.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded peremptorily.

  ‘I’m handing out samples for my new café,’ said Issy bravely, proffering the tin. ‘Would you like one?’

  The woman made a face. ‘Full of refined sugar and trans-fats, designed to turn us into obese TV slaves? Not bloody likely.’

  Issy had encountered lack of interest, but this was the first open hostility she’d faced over the café, she realized.

  ‘OK, never mind,’ she said, replacing the lid.

  ‘But you can’t just go handing stuff out,’ said the woman. ‘There’s other cafés on this street! We’ve been here a lot longer than you, so you just have to butt out of our way.’

  Issy turned round, and sure enough, at the doors of several coffee houses and tea shops people were standing and watching, their eyes hostile.

  ‘And we’re a co-operative,’ said the woman. ‘We all work together in partnership. Everything is wholesome and everything is fair trade. We’re not poisoning children. And that’s what the community wants around here. So you can just back off.’

  Issy felt herself shaking with upset and rage. Who was this horrible bloody woman with her horrible long grey greasy hair and ugly spectacles and hideous T-shirt?

  ‘I think there’s room for everyone,’ she managed, her voice shaking.

  ‘Well there’s not,’ said the woman, who’d obviously spent a lifetime standing up and shouting at gatherings and, as far as Issy could tell, was thoroughly enjoying this. ‘We were here first. We’re helping communities in Africa, you’re not doing anyone the least bit of good. Nobody wants you. So just piss off, OK? Or at least the next time ask before you come up trying to steal people’s livelihoods.’

  Someone in a doorway muttered, ‘Hear, hear,’ loud enough so that Issy caught it. She stumbled off, half blinded with tears, conscious of the eyes of the other café owners on her back – wearing that silly floral dress, they must think her a completely stupid priss. Hardly knowing where she was going, just that she couldn’t turn back through that crowd – feeling she could never ever walk that street again – she headed straight to the main road where she could lose herself in the mass of humanity, of all colours and types, thronging the Dalston Road, where no one would notice a crying woman in a vintage dress.

  Austin was fighting his way to the pound shop to see if they had something good for Darny to wear to a fancy-dress party – he’d like to buy him that Spiderman costume with the muscles he really wanted, but when he’d paid for after-school care plus the mortgage his parents had thoughtlessly not paid off before they died, plus the day-to-day living expenses, plus the late fees on all the bills he always meant to move on to direct debit but never seemed to manage, there was precious little left, and there seemed no point in buying anything pricey as Darny rarely came home without huge rents in filthy clothing. (He had horrified a putative girlfriend of Austin’s a few years ago by answering the question, ‘What do you like doing?’ with ‘Fighting!’ Then he had jumped on her and pummelled her to show exactly what he meant. Austin hadn’t seen much of Julia after that.) As he’d nearly made it across the road he saw Isabel Randall standing by the Wait sign but not crossing.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. Issy looked up at him, blinking back tears. She couldn’t help it, she was glad to see a friendly face. But she didn’t trust herself to speak, in case she suddenly broke down.

  ‘Hello,’ Austin said again, worried she hadn’t recognized him. Issy swallowed hard and reminded herself that crying in front of her bank manager was possibly the worst look imaginable.

  ‘Um. Er. Hello,’ she managed finally, trying not to trumpet a huge w
all of snot at him.

  Austin was used to being taller than everyone around him and having to make a real effort to peer down and check out people’s faces, and he didn’t like to look as if he were staring. On the other hand, she sounded really weird. He looked into her face. Her eyes were shiny and her nose was red. In Darny, that was rarely a good sign.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said. Issy wished he didn’t sound so kind. He was going to set her off again. Austin could see quite a lot of restraining going on. He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Would you like to get a coffee somewhere?’

  He cursed the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. To Issy’s credit she managed not to actually burst into tears, but one lone drop did trickle slowly and obviously all the way down her cheek.

  ‘No, no, no, of course you wouldn’t … of course not. Um.’

  For want of anywhere better to go, they ended up in a horrible pub, full of morning drinkers. Issy ordered a green tea and dredged the scum off the top with a spoon, and Austin looked around nervously then ordered a Fanta.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Issy several times. But then, somehow – and she was sure she would regret this – she ended up telling him the whole thing. He was just so easy to talk to. Austin winced.

  ‘And now I’m telling you,’ concluded Issy, worried she was going to start crying again, ‘you’re going to think I’m totally rubbish and too wimpy for business and you’re going to think I’ll fail, and you know, it might fail. If they all gang up on me … it’ll be like the mafia, Austin! I’ll have to pay protection money, and they’ll come round and put a horse’s head in my oven!’