Meet Me at the Cupcake Café Page 6

  Helena felt bad too. Obviously she hated to see her friend sad – apart from anything else, it meant she didn’t have her best mate to go out and have a laugh with – but she was fundamentally a generous soul and understood Issy had to grieve for what she had lost. It was tough in the flat though; all through the miserable days of January and February, it was horrible coming home to a dark, unheated house, with Issy cloistered in her bedroom, refusing to change out of her pyjamas. The flat had always been such a haven, mostly because Issy made it so; made it comforting and warm and always with something to nibble or taste. After some harrowing days at work, all Helena wanted was to curl up on the sofa with a cup of tea and a slice of one of Issy’s experiments so they could have a good gossip. She missed it. So it was with selfish motives in mind too that she decided it couldn’t go on, and that Issy needed a stern dose of tough love.

  Tough love she could do, thought Helena, dabbing on moisturizer one morning. Real love, that wasn’t exactly falling into her lap right now, but she didn’t, she told herself firmly, have time to worry about it. Dressed in a plum velvet top that made her look, she felt, pleasingly gothic, she marched into the sitting room. Issy was sitting in the gloomy light, eating dry Crunchy Nut Cornflakes out of a bowl in her pig pyjamas.

  ‘Darling. You have to get out of the flat.’

  ‘This is my flat though.’

  ‘I mean it. You have to do something, otherwise you’ll turn into one of those shut-ins that sit in their bedrooms in their pyjamas weeping and eating beef curry.’

  Issy stuck out her bottom lip. ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Because you’ve put on two pounds in a week?’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’

  ‘I mean, why don’t you volunteer for a charity or something?’

  Issy gave her a hard stare.

  ‘How is this meant to make me feel better exactly?’

  ‘It’s not about making you feel better. It’s about being a friend to you right now; the kind of friend you need.’

  ‘A nasty one.’

  ‘The best you’re going to get, I’m afraid.’

  Helena glanced at the pink-striped see-through plastic bag beside Issy, filled with Smarties.

  ‘Have you been out? Did you go to the corner shop?’

  Issy shrugged, embarrassed.

  ‘You went to the corner shop in your pyjamas?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘But what if you’d bumped into John Cusack, hmm? What if John Cusack had been standing right there, thinking, I’m sick of all these Hollywood actresses, why can’t I find a real girl with real home values? Who can bake? Someone like her, only not wearing her pyjamas, because obviously that makes her a crazy person.’

  Issy swallowed. Behave like you might meet John Cusack at any minute was a prevailing mantra of Helena’s and had been since 1986, which was why she never went out without her hair and make-up done absolutely perfectly, dressed in her best. Issy knew better than to dispute it.

  Helena looked at her. ‘Graeme hasn’t called, I take it?’

  Of course, they both knew he hadn’t. It wasn’t just about the job. But for Issy, it hurt so much to own up to the truth. That actually what she had thought was love and real and something special might just, when all was said and done … might just have been a stupid office romance after all. It was awful, unbearable to think about. She was getting no sleep, next to no sleep. How could she have been so stupid? All that time, when she thought she was so professional, coming into work every day in her little dresses and cardigans and smart shoes, thinking she was keeping her private life so separate, thinking she was being so clever. When in fact everyone was sniggering because she was shagging the boss – and worse, it obviously wasn’t even a serious relationship. That thought made her bite her own fist in anguish. And that nobody even thought she was any good at her job, she was just some cheery idiot who could make cakes. Oh God, that was almost worse. Or just as bad. It was all bad. It was awful. There didn’t seem to be the least point in getting out of her pyjamas. Everything was shit, and that was the end of it.

  Helena reckoned there was patience, then there was submission.

  ‘Well, fuck ’im,’ she heard herself saying. ‘So what, your life is over now because your boss no longer requires personal services?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Issy quietly. It hadn’t been, had it? She tried to think of some moments of tenderness; some sweetness or kindness he’d done for her. Some flowers maybe, or a trip away. Annoyingly, in eight months, all that came to mind was him telling her not to come over one night, he was tired from work, or getting her to help him file his management reports (she’d been so pleased, she recalled, to be able to take some of the strain off him; exactly, she thought, why she’d make him a perfect wife. Oh God, what an idiot).

  ‘Well, whatever it was like,’ said Helena, ‘it’s been weeks and frankly you’ve done enough wallowing in your pit. It’s time to get out and claim the world again.’

  ‘I’m not sure the world wants me,’ said Issy.

  ‘Well, that is total bullshit and you know it,’ said Helena. ‘Do you want me to start again on my Poor Souls list?’

  Helena’s Poor Souls list was a record of terrible cases she saw in A&E – the genuinely neglected, the genuinely abandoned; the children who had never been loved, the youngsters who had never heard a kind word in their lives, leaving the NHS to pick up the pieces. It was unbearable to hear, and Helena only ever used it as an argument winner in really desperate cases. It was a cruel trick to play now.

  ‘No!’ said Issy. ‘No. Please. Anything but that. I can’t hear about the orphan with leukaemia one more time. Please don’t.’

  ‘I’m warning you,’ said Helena. ‘You count your blessings or else. And while you’re doing that, move your fat arse and go and do that redundancy course they promised to send you on. At least it’ll get you out of bed before noon.’

  ‘One, my arse is half the size of yours.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m in proportion,’ Helena explained patiently.

  ‘And two, I only sleep late because I can’t sleep at night.’

  ‘Because you sleep all day.’

  ‘No. Because I’m depressed.’

  ‘You’re not depressed. You’re slightly sad. Depressed is when you’re a new arrival in this country and someone confiscated your passport and forced you into prostitution, and—’

  ‘Lalalala!’ sang Issy. ‘Stop it, please. I’ll go, OK? I’ll go! I’ll go!’

  Four days, a haircut and some ironing later, Issy stood, back at her regular bus stop, feeling like an imposter. Linda was interested to see her; Issy hadn’t seen her before she left, and Linda had grown worried over the weeks, then thought that maybe she’d got a nice car or moved in with that sulky-looking man who picked her up from time to time. Something good anyway.

  ‘Did you go on a nice long holiday? Ooh, how lovely to get away in the winter, it is dreadful.’

  ‘No,’ said Issy sadly. ‘I got made redundant.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Linda. ‘Oh dear. I am very sorry to hear that, dear, very sorry. Still, you young folk; you’ll find something else in five minutes, won’t you?’

  Linda was proud of her chiropodist daughter. No chance of Leanne being out of work, as she often said, ‘as long as people have feet’. It took a lot to make Issy wish she’d been a chiropodist, but this was turning into one of those days.

  ‘I hope so,’ said Issy. ‘I hope so.’

  Her attention was distracted by someone behind her. She glanced round. It was the tall blonde lady again, at the deserted pink shop. She was trailing along behind the same slightly defeated-looking estate agent.

  ‘I’m just not sure the feng shui is going to work, Des,’ she was saying. ‘And when you’re trying to give people a holistic body experience, it’s really, really important, do you understand?’

  No it’s not, thought Issy mutinously, it’s important that you put your oven in the right damn plac
e so you can run the rest of the shop. She thought of Grampa Joe. She must get up to visit him, she really must. It was unforgivable having this time off and not making the effort.

  ‘Get the smell right, give ’em a smile, be where you can see them,’ he would say. ‘And give them the best damn cakes in Manchester, that’s important too.’

  She inched over yet again so she could hear what the woman was saying.

  ‘And twelve hundred a month,’ Issy heard. ‘It’s far too much. I’m going to be using the best-quality vegetables in town. People need raw vegetables, and they’re going to learn it from me.’

  The woman was wearing tight leather trousers. Her stomach was so flat it looked like she lived on thin air. Her face was a peculiar mix of very smooth skin and wrinkly bits, presumably where the Botox was wearing off.

  ‘Everything organic!’ she trilled. ‘People don’t want nasty chemicals in their bodies!’

  Apart from their foreheads, thought Issy. She wondered why she had taken such a dislike to this woman. Why should she care that the woman was going to have a silly raw juice café in her little shop? She meant, Issy corrected herself, the little shop. The little hidden shop, in the little secret square that never seemed as loved and cared for as it should be. Of course, she knew, knew completely that having a shop that was hard to find and tucked away was far from ideal. Very.

  Something struck her. She was used to working in commercial property where space went for fifty or sixty pounds a square foot. She eyed up the shop. Plus there was a basement, the sign said, which doubled the space straight away. Issy did some quick calculations in her head. That made it about fourteen pounds a square foot. OK, obviously this was in a London suburb, and not entirely a posh one at that. But still, twelve hundred a month – say eleven hundred if the woman was right and could negotiate a discount, which in this market she should be able to. If she could take out a six-month lease on that to do … well, to do something. To bake, maybe. Now she didn’t have an office to offload her experiments on, her freezer was filling up and she was running out of storage. Just last night, a particularly fine peanut butter and Nutella cookie recipe she’d invented had overflowed her very last Cath Kidston cookie tin. She’d had to eat her way out.

  Issy closed her eyes as the bus came round the corner. That was ridiculous. There were millions of things involved in working with food, not just taking on a rent. There was health and safety, and food hygiene, and inspections and hairnets and rubber gloves and standards and employment law and it was completely impossible, and stupid, and she didn’t even want to work in a café.

  Linda nodded over to the woman standing outside the shop, who was pontificating loudly on the benefits of beetroot.

  ‘I don’t know what she’s going on about,’ she said as they boarded the 73 together. ‘All I ever want in the morning is a nice cup of coffee.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Issy.

  The redundancy course, although it wasn’t called that, any more than it was called the ‘spat-out old losers club’, was held in a long conference room in a nondescript building off Oxford Street in full view of the Topshop flagship store at Oxford Circus. Issy thought this was very unfair in the scheme of things, a tantalizing glimpse of a life now out of reach.

  There were about a dozen people in the room, from the bullish and sulky-looking, who gave the impression they’d been sent on this course as a kind of detention, to the utterly terrified, to one man who was digging in his briefcase and smoothing down his tie in a manner that made Issy suspect that he hadn’t told his family he’d been made redundant and was still pretending to go to work every day. She half grimaced around at everyone. Nobody made a friendly face back. Life was always easier, reflected Issy, when you were carrying a large Tupperware full of cakes. Everyone was happy to see you then.

  A woman in her fifties with a tired, impatient face arrived on the button of 9.30, launching into her spiel so briskly that it rapidly became clear that the only people overworked in the current climate were redundancy resettlement trainers.

  ‘Now, starting your positive new life,’ she announced, ‘the first thing you must do is treat job-hunting as a job in itself.’

  ‘Even shittier than the one you’ve just been ousted from,’ said one of the young men with a belligerent sneer. The trainer ignored him.

  ‘Firstly, you have to make your CV stand out from the two million CVs circulating at any one time.’

  The trainer spread her lips in what Issy supposed was meant to be a smile.

  ‘And that’s not an exaggeration. That is the approximate number of CVs being submitted for available vacancies at any given time.’

  ‘Well, I’m feeling empowered already,’ muttered the girl sitting next to Issy. Issy glanced at her. She was glamorous and perhaps slightly overdressed – with jet-black ringlets, bright red lipstick and a fuchsia mohair jumper that totally failed to conceal massive bosoms underneath. Issy wondered if she’d get on with Helena.

  ‘So how do you make yours stand out? Anyone?’

  One of the older men raised his hand.

  ‘Is it acceptable to lie about your age?’

  The trainer shook her head severely.

  ‘It is never, under any circumstances, permitted to lie on your CV.’

  The girl next to Issy put her hand up immediately.

  ‘But that’s just stupid. Everyone lies on their CV. And everyone assumes that everyone else lies on their CV. So if you don’t lie on your CV, they’ll assume you have so that you’re in fact even worse than you’ve just said you are, plus if they find out you haven’t told a single lie on your CV they’ll assume you’re a bit stupid. So it’s a bad idea.’

  There was a lot of nodding from round the table. The trainer ploughed on regardless.

  ‘So, you need to stand out. Some people like to use raised fonts, or even write their CVs in rhyme to give them that extra edge.’

  Issy raised her hand.

  ‘Can I just say that I’ve been hiring staff for years and I hated gimmicky CVs, I always threw them in the bin. Whereas if I got one with no spelling mistakes, I’d interview them immediately. Hardly ever happened though.’

  ‘Did you assume they were lying on them?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Well, I’d mentally downgrade all their A-level results and their degree class and I wouldn’t press them too much on their love of independent film,’ said Issy. ‘So, yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘There you go,’ said the girl. The trainer had gone pink and tight-lipped.

  ‘Well, you can talk all you like,’ said the trainer. ‘But it’s still all of you who are sitting here.’

  At lunchtime Issy and the ringleted girl fled. ‘That was the most hideous thing ever,’ said the girl, whose name was Pearl. ‘It was actually worse than getting the boot.’

  Issy smiled gratefully. ‘I know.’ She looked around. ‘Where are you going for lunch? I was thinking Patisserie Valerie.’

  Patisserie Valerie was a long-established fancy-cakes-andtea chain in London, which was always crowded and always a delight. They had a new vanilla icing she’d heard about that she was anxious to try. The girl looked a bit uncomfortable, and Issy immediately remembered how pricey it was.

  ‘Uh, my treat,’ she added quickly. ‘My redundancy payment is not bad, thank goodness.’

  Pearl smiled, and wondered if she could make the sandwiches in her bag last till later. ‘OK!’ she said. She had always wanted to try the shop, with its fantastical-looking wedding cakes with icing spun out of impossibly small sugar roses and dramatically iced risers in the window, but it always seemed crowded and busy and hard to squeeze into, which made it the kind of place she normally avoided.

  Ensconced in a tiny wooden booth, with black-clad French waitresses manoeuvring tarte au citron and millefeuille expertly over their heads, they swapped horror stories. Pearl had been the receptionist at a building firm where things had got gradually worse and worse. She hadn’t even been paid for the last two months
and, seeing as she was raising a baby single-handed, things were getting slightly desperate.

  ‘I thought this might help,’ she said. ‘My Restart sent me here. But it’s just rubbish, isn’t it?’

  Issy nodded. ‘I think so.’

  Nonetheless, Pearl stood up boldly and squeezed her way over to the manager of the shop.

  ‘Excuse me, do you have any vacancies?’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ said the man, charmingly. ‘No. Plus, you see, we are a small shop.’

  He indicated the tiny tables, all pressed very close together. The lithe waitresses were hopping in among them. Pearl, frankly, wouldn’t have a chance.

  ‘You know, I am very sorry.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘You’re absolutely right. I am too fat to work in a cake shop. And I’d make them feel so guilty they’d order the salad.’

  Completely unbowed, she returned to Issy, who had spent the previous three minutes blushing hideously on Pearl’s behalf.

  ‘That’s exactly what the budget airline said. I’m not allowed to be wider than the aisle.’

  ‘You’re not wider than an aircraft aisle!’

  ‘I will be on the new planes they’re bringing in. Everyone has to stand up in them, packed in like cattle. They put a belt round your neck and attach you to the wall.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ said Issy.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Pearl. ‘Trust me. As soon as the belts stop decapitating the crash test dummies, you’ll be standing all the way to Malaga. On one leg if you forget to print out your boarding pass before you get to the airport.’

  ‘Well, I’m never having a holiday ever again, so that scarcely matters,’ said Issy. Then she realized she was using a ludicrously self-pitying tone in front of someone who rented a flat that she shared with her baby and, it seemed, her mother, and changed the subject.

  ‘Shall we get back?’

  Pearl sighed. ‘Well, it’s either that or a shopping spree down Bond Street and a quick stop into Tiffany’s.’