Christmas At The Cupcake Cafe Read online

  Before we start, I wanted to say a word about language. In my experience, learning another language is really bloody difficult, unless you’re one of those people who picks things up in two seconds flat, in which case I would say *bllergh* (that’s me poking my tongue out) to you because I am extremely jealous.

  Traditionally, too, when people in books are speaking a foreign language, it’s indicated in italics. I’ve chosen not to do that here. Basically, anyone Anna speaks to in Paris is speaking French back to her unless I’ve mentioned otherwise. To which you and I would think, cor, that’s AMAZING she learned such fantastic French so fast. Obviously she has lots of lessons with Claire, but if you’ve ever learnt another language you’ll know that you can be totally confident in a classroom then turn up in the country and everybody goes ‘wabbawabbawabbawabbaWAH?’ to you at, like, a million miles an hour, and you panic because you can’t understand a single word of it. That’s certainly what happened to me.

  So, anyway, you need to take it on trust that it’s exactly the same for Anna, but for purposes of not repeating myself endlessly and slowing down the story, I’ve taken out the millions and millions of times she says ‘What?’ or ‘Can you say that again please?’ or needs to check her dictionary.

  I do hope you enjoy it, and let me know how you get on with the recipes. And Bon Appetit!

  Very warmest wishes,

  Jenny

  Chapter One

  The really weird thing about it was that although I knew instantly that something was wrong – very very wrong, something sharp, something very serious, an insult to my entire body – I couldn’t stop laughing. Laughing hysterically.

  I was lying there covered, drenched, in spilled melted chocolate and I couldn’t stop giggling. There were other faces now, looking down at me, some I was sure I even recognised. They weren’t laughing. They all looked very serious in fact. This somehow struck me as even funnier and set me off again.

  From the periphery I heard someone say, ‘Pick them up!’ and someone else say, ‘No way! You pick them up! Gross!’ I heard Flynn, the new stockboy say, ‘I’ll dial 911,’ and someone else say, ‘Flynn, don’t be stupid, it’s 999, you’re not American,’ and someone else say ‘I think you can dial 911 now because there were so many idiots who kept dialling it,’ and then someone was taking out their phone and saying something about needing an ambulance, which I thought was hilarious as well, and then someone, who was definitely Del, our old grumpy janitor, saying, ‘Well, they’re probably going to want to throw this batch away then,’ and the idea that they might not throw away the enormous vat of chocolate but try to sell it instead when it had landed all over me actually was funny.

  After that, thank God, I don’t remember anything, although later, in hospital, a paramedic came over and said I was a total bloody nutter in the ambulance, and that he’d always been told that shock affected people in different ways, but mine was just about the differentest he’d ever seen. Then he saw my face and said, ‘Cheer up, love. You’ll laugh again.’ But at that point I wasn’t exactly sure I ever would.

  ‘Oh come off it, Debs, love, it’s only a couple of toes. It could have been a lot worse. What if it had been her nose?’

  That was my dad, talking to my mum. He liked to look on the bright side.

  ‘Well, they could have given her a new nose. She hates her nose anyway.’

  That was definitely my mum. She’s not quite as good as my dad at looking on the bright side. In fact, I could hear her sobbing, but somehow my body shied away from the light; I couldn’t open my eyes. I didn’t think it was a light; it felt like the sun or something. Maybe I was on holiday. I couldn’t be at home, the sun never bloody shines in Kidinsborough, my home town, which was voted worst town in England three years in a row before local political pressure got the ‘Worst Town’ television show taken off the air.

  My parents zoned out of earshot, just drifted off like someone retuning a radio. I had no idea if they were there, or if they ever had been. I knew I wasn’t moving, but inside I felt as though I was squirming and wriggling and trapped inside a body-shaped prison someone had buried me in. I could shout but no one could hear me. I tried to move but it wasn’t working. The dazzle would turn to black and back again to the sun and none of it made the faintest bit of sense to me as I dreamt – or lived – great big nightmares about toes and feet and parents who spontaneously disappear and whether this was what going crazy felt like and whether I’d actually dreamt my whole other life, the bit about being me, Anna Trent, thirty years old, taster in a chocolate factory.

  While I’m here, here are my top ten Taster in a Chocolate Factory jokes that I get at Faces, our local nightclub. It’s not very nice, but the rest are really much, much worse:

  Yes. I will give you some free samples.

  No, I’m not as fat as you clearly just expected me to be.

  Yes, it is exactly like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

  No, no one has ever done a poo in the chocolate vat.*

  No, it doesn’t actually make me more popular than a normal person as I am thirty, not seven.

  No, I don’t feel sick when confronted with chocolate. I absolutely adore it, but if it makes you feel better about your job to think that I am, feel free.

  Oh, that is so interesting that you have something even tastier than chocolate in your underpants, yawn. (NB: I would like to be brave enough to say that but I’m not that brave really. I normally just grimace and look at something else for a while. My best mate Cath soon takes care of them anyway. Or, occasionally, she kisses them).

  Yes, I will suggest your peanut/beer/vodka/jam-flavoured chocolate idea, but I doubt we’ll be as rich as you think.

  Yes, I can make actual real chocolate, although at Brader’s Family Chocolates they’re all processed automatically in a huge vat and I’m more of a supervisor really. I wish I did more complex work, but according to the bosses nobody wants their chocolates messed about with; they want them tasting exactly the same, and lasting a long time. So it’s quite a synthetic process.

  No, it’s not the best job in the world. But it’s mine and I like it. Or at least I did, until I ended up in here.

  And a rum and Coke, thanks for asking.

  ‘Anna.’

  A man was sitting on the end of my bed. I couldn’t focus on him. He knew my name but I didn’t know his. That seemed unfair.

  I tried to open my mouth. It was full of sand. Someone had put sand in my mouth. Why would anyone do that?

  ‘Anna?’

  The voice came again. It was definitely real, it was definitely connected to the shadow at the end of my bed.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  Well, of course I can hear you. You’re sitting on the end of my bed shouting at me, was what I wanted to say, but all that came out was a kind of dry croak.

  ‘That’s great, that’s great, very good. Would you like a drink of water?’

  I nodded. It seemed easiest.

  ‘Good, good. Don’t nod too much, you’ll dislodge the wires. NURSE!’

  I don’t know whether the nurse came or not, I was suddenly gone again. My last conscious thought was that I hoped she or he didn’t mind being yelled at by people who sat on other people’s beds, shouting.

  ‘Here she is.’

  It was the same voice, but how much later I couldn’t tell. The light seemed different. A sudden shock of pain travelled through me like a lightning bolt and I gasped.

  ‘There you go, she’s going to be great.’

  Dad.

  ‘Oh, I don’t like the look of this.’

  Mum.

  ‘Uhm … can I have that water?’ I asked, but it came out like, ‘Ca ha wa?’

  Thankfully someone spoke desert sand, because instantly a plastic cup was put to my lips. That small cup of tepid chalky tap water was the single best thing I had ever put in my mouth in my entire life, and that includes the first time I tasted a Creme Egg.

  I slurped it down and ask
ed for another, but someone said no, and that was that. Maybe I was in prison.

  ‘Can you open your eyes for us?’ came the commanding voice.

  ‘Course she can.’

  ‘Oh, Pete, I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

  Oddly, it was slightly to spite my mother’s lack of ambition for me in the eye-opening department that really made me try. I flickered and, suddenly, hazing into view was the shape sitting on the end of my bed I’d been aware of before – I wished he’d stop that – and two shapes that were as familiar as my own hands. I could see my mother’s reddish hair that she col oured at home even though my best mate Cath had offered to do it down at the salon for next to nothing, but my mother thought that was extravagant and that Cath was loose (that last bit was true, though that had nothing to do with how good she was at hair. Which, admittedly, wasn’t very), so now my mum had this kind of odd, henna-like fringe round the top of her forehead where she hadn’t wiped the dye off properly. And my dad was in his best shirt, which really made me worry. He didn’t dress like that for anything but weddings and funerals and I was pretty much a hundred per cent sure I wasn’t getting married, unless Chris had suddenly regenerated into a completely different physical and personality type, which was unlikely.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, feeling as I did so a rush as though the desert sands were retreating, that the division between what was real and what was a writhing ball of confusion and pain was retreating, that Anna was back, that the skin I was wearing was mine after all.

  ‘Darling!’

  My mum burst into tears. My dad, not prone to huge outbursts of affection, gently squeezed my hand – the hand, I noticed, that didn’t have a big tube going into it. My other hand did have one. It was the grossest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

  ‘Ugh, gah,’ I said. ‘What’s this? It’s disgusting.’

  The figure at the end of my bed smiled in a rather patronising way.

  ‘I think you’d find things a lot more disgusting if it wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘It’s giving you painkillers and medication.’

  ‘Well, can I have some more?’ I said. The lightning-sharp pain flashed through me again, from the toes of my left foot upwards.

  I suddenly became aware of other tubes on me, some going in and out of places I didn’t really want to discuss in front of my dad. I went quiet. I felt really really weird.

  ‘Is your head spinning?’ said the bedsitter. ‘That’s quite normal.’

  My mum was still sniffing.

  ‘It’s all right, Mum.’

  What she said next chilled me to the bone.

  ‘It’s not all right, love. It’s not all right at all.’

  Over the next few days – I seemed to fall asleep on and off at completely random moments. The bedsitter is Dr Ed – yes, really, that’s how he referred to himself. Yeah, all right I know he was a doctor and everything, tra la la, but you can be Ed or you can be Dr Smith or something. Anything else is just showing off, like you’re a doctor on telly or something.

  I think Dr Ed would have loved to have been a doctor on the telly, looking at people who’ve got two bumholes and things. He was always very smartly turned out and did things like sit on the end of the bed, which other doctors didn’t do, and look you in the eye, as if he was making a huge effort to be with you as a person. I actually already knew I was a person. I think I preferred the snotty consultant who came round once a week, barely looked at me and asked his medical students embarrassing questions.

  Anyway, Dr Ed shouldn’t have been so chummy because it was kind of his fault that I was even there. I had slipped at the factory – everyone had got very excited wondering if there was some health and safety rule that hadn’t been followed and we were all about to become millionaires, but actually it turned out to be completely my fault. It was an unusually warm spring day and I’d decided to try out my new shoes, which turned out to be hilariously inapproriate for the factory floor and I’d skidded and, in a total freak, hit a vat ladder and upended the entire thing. The ladder joist had sliced straight through the fourth toe of my right foot.

  Someone had packed the toe in ice and brought it to the hospital – they would be getting a big bunch of flowers from me when I found out who had done that, I vowed – but before they had a chance to sew it back on I’d contracted one of those disgusting hospital diseases and it had nearly killed me, and now it was too late.

  ‘A bug tried to eat me?’ I asked Dr Ed.

  ‘Well, yes, that’s about right,’ he said, smiling to show overtly white teeth that he must have got whitened somewhere. Maybe he just liked to practise for going on television. ‘Not a big bug like a spider, Anna.’

  ‘Spiders aren’t bugs,’ I said crossly.

  ‘Ha! No.’ He flicked his hair. ‘Well, these things are very very tiny, so small you couldn’t see a thousand of them even if they were sitting right here on my finger!’

  Perhaps there was something misprinted on my medical notes that said instead of being nearly thirty-one I was in fact eight.

  ‘I don’t care what size they are,’ I said. ‘They make me feel like total crap.’

  ‘And that’s why we’re fighting them with every weapon we have!’ said Dr Ed, like he was Spiderman or something. I didn’t mention that if everyone had cleaned up with every brush they had, I probably wouldn’t have caught it in the first place.

  And anyway, oh Lord, I just felt so rough. I didn’t feel like eating or drinking anything like water (Dad brought me some marshmallows and Mum practically whacked him because she was a hundred per cent certain they’d get trapped in my throat and I’d totally die right there in front of him) and I slept a lot. When I wasn’t sleeping I didn’t feel well enough to watch telly or read or speak to people or anything. I had a lot of messages on Facebook, according to my phone, which someone – Cath I was guessing – had plugged in beside my bed, but I wasn’t really fussed about reading any of them.

  I felt different, as if I’d woken up foreign, or in a strange land where nobody spoke my language – not Mum, not Dad, not my friends. They didn’t speak the language of strange hazy days where nothing made much sense, they weren’t constantly aching, or dealing with the idea of moving even just an arm across the bed being too difficult to contemplate. The country of the sick seemed a very different place, where you were fed and moved and everyone spoke to you like a child and you were always, always hot.

  I was dozing off again, when I heard a noise. Something familiar, I was sure of it, but I couldn’t tell from when. I was at school. School figured a lot in my fever dreams. I had hated it. Mum had always said she wasn’t academic so I wouldn’t be either, and that had pretty much sealed the deal, which in retrospect seemed absolutely stupid. So for ages when I hallucinated my old teachers’ faces in front of me, I didn’t take it too seriously. Then one day I woke up very early, when the hospital was still cool, and as quiet as it ever got, which wasn’t very, and I turned my head carefully to the side, and there, not a dream or a hallucination, was Mrs Shawcourt, my old French teacher, gazing at me calmly.

  I blinked in case she would go away. She didn’t.

  It was a small four-bed side ward I’d been put on, a few days or a couple of weeks ago – it was hard to tell precisely – which seemed a bit strange; either I was infectious or I wasn’t, surely. The other two beds were empty, and over the days that followed, had a fairly speedy turnover of extremely old ladies who didn’t seem to do much but cry.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I know you, don’t I?’

  I suddenly felt a flush, like I hadn’t done my homework.

  I had never done my homework. Cath and I used to bunk off – French, it was totally useless, who could possibly need that? – and go sit round the back field where the teachers couldn’t see you and speak with fake Mancunian accents about how crap Kidinsborough was and how we were going to leave the first chance we got.

  ‘Anna Trent.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I had yo
u for two years.’

  I peered at her more closely. She’d always stood out in the school. She was by far the best dressed teacher, most of them were a right bunch of slobs. She used to wear these really nicely fitted dresses that made her look a bit different, you could tell she hadn’t got them down at Matalan. She’d had blonde hair then—

  I realised with a bit of a shock that she didn’t have any hair at all. She was very thin, but then she always had been thin, but now she was really really thin.

  I said the stupidest thing I could think of; in my defence, I really wasn’t well.

  ‘Are you sick then?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Shawcourt. ‘I’m on holiday.’

  There was a pause, then I grinned. I remembered that, actually, she was a really good teacher.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about your toes,’ she said briskly.

  I glanced down at the bandage covering my right foot.

  ‘Ah, they’ll be all right, just had a bit of a fall,’ I said. Then I saw her face. And I realised that all the time people had been talking about my fever and my illness and my accident, nobody had thought to tell me the truth.

  It couldn’t be though. I could feel them.

  I stared at her, and she unblinkingly held my gaze.

  ‘I can feel them,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t believe nobody told you,’ she said. ‘Bloody hospitals. My darling, I heard them discuss it.’

  I stared at the bandage again. I wanted to be sick. Then I was sick in a big cardboard bedpan, which they left a supply of by the side of my bed, for every time I wanted to be sick.

  Dr Ed came by later and sat on my bed. I scowled at him.

  ‘Now …’ he checked his notes, ‘… Anna. I’m sorry you weren’t aware of the full gravity of the situation.’