I was a slave to my morning routine. Alarm at seven fifteen, snooze or read until seven thirty, shower, moisturise, smart hair, sensible makeup, freshly ironed shirt, suit as sharp as a paper cut, coffee, cereal, shiny shoes, watch the news, leave the house. I followed it with nerdy precision. My friends mockingly said the speaking clock called me to check the time but I had no desire to change. I relished routine. It made me feel safe. I was a planner, an organiser, a manager and I prided myself on never being late for work unless an unforeseeable Act of God caused a glitch in my matrix.

Now I know my own birthday should not have been, strictly speaking ‘unforeseeable’ but when you are so focused on climbing the corporate ladder you sometimes forget it’s the weekend, then forgetting the day you were born is more acceptable. However, forgetting to bring the birthday cakes was as unacceptable to my team as cancelling the Christmas piss up. Not that I craved acceptance from my staff, I simply wanted to follow the rules. I liked rules as much as I liked routine. A life without boundaries was too much like my childhood. I was at the Metro station when I remembered.

‘Cakes!’ I shrieked at the poor man in a jaunty Trilby hat beside me, who jumped back in shock as if I had lunged to push him onto the tracks.

Feeling like Bambi on roller-skates, I ran as fast as my heels would allow on the polished tiles of the train station floor then clattered along Front Street to the bakery. Despite the November frostiness in the air, I was sweating by the time I reached the front of the queue.

‘Ee, lass, you’ll give yersell a heart attack,’ said a walking beanbag of a man with half a meat pie (at eight fifteen in the morning?) sticking out of his mouth, ‘Where’s the fire?’

‘I’m going to be late for work,’ I grumbled almost to myself. ‘I
hate
being late.’

The man winked, his belly bouncing up and down as if he were sitting on a spacehopper.

‘Ah howay, I bet a pretty lass like you can get away with being late. Bet you’ve got the boss wrapped around your little finger.’

‘I AM the boss,’ I replied as frosty as the weather.

‘Alreet keep your knickers on, pet, or do you wear y-fronts?’

I cursed under my breath as the man wobbled off laughing, his mastication still audible when he was half way down the street.

‘Sexist pig. Just because I’m blonde and five foot four I can only be a P.A. Bloody…
man
.’

‘It’s your turn, lass,’ said the man behind me, tapping my shoulder.

I turned my head with a –
don’t touch my shoulder
– glare. He raised his palms defensively.

‘Sorry, pet, only I thought there was something there. Looked like a big, fat
chip
.’

I blushed. Perhaps I did have a bee in my bonnet about the male assumption (and yes I am generalising) that every small blonde in a suit and heels was only capable of photocopying, making coffee and shagging the boss, but I had spent years proving otherwise. I might not have had literal balls and, outside work, I assure you I was different, but in the boardroom I had metaphorical balls. In my line of work they
had been a necessity to enable me to climb tantalisingly close to the top of the ladder, heels notwithstanding.

‘What fresh individual cakes do you have?’ I asked Shirley across the counter. Her blue eye shadow glowed like ripe bruises. ‘It’s my birthday so I need a selection for the office.’

‘Bakewell tarts, chocolatey éclairs, gingerbread Geordies, custard slices, cream horns, iced finger buns, snowballs…’ Shirley sighed, wafting her hand over an equally limp selection of cakes. Not even the slightest reference to the whole ‘it’s my birthday’ thing even though she was in the business of selling birthday cakes.

I had been going to the same bakery since I wore pigtails and a tatty school skirt turned over at the waist. Shirley had been working there even longer. She had seen me grow from a chubby twelve year old who hoovered up Belgian buns quicker than a Dyson, through my skinnier, elder teenage years when I would nibble a flapjack and force myself to throw most of it away (a terrible waste of money and food), into a curvy thirty-something who had realised I would never be Kate Moss. Her mantra was nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. She was wrong. It did and that something was cake. I was a cake addict and always had been. If I wasn’t baking them, I was eating them. I was probably one of Shirley’s best customers but in Shirley’s world, customer was one thing, friend was another and never the twain shall meet. Shirley knew every person’s taste in the village but rather than using this skill to ease conversation, she stored them up to use like ammunition.

‘You want a custard slice? Why do you want a custard slice? You never have a custard slice. You always have a date slice on a Thursday in winter. What’s wrong with my date slices? Are you saying my date slices aren’t good enough eh? Them are the best date slices this side… any side of the Tyne Tunnel. Are you pregnant like?’

She was the bakery version of the Gestapo. There was no Northern friendly banter to be had with Shirley. Why she associated custard slices with pregnancy I’ll never know. Nor do I want to; the thought turns my stomach.

‘Are they fresh this morning?’

‘Aye of course they are, what do you think Janice and I have been doing here since six o’clock, reading chuffing
Heat
magazine? I filled every one of the éclairs meself.’

She shrugged and lifted up a chocolate éclair that drooped like a penis after too many pints. Janice shoved
Heat
magazine behind the till. I wish I’d remembered to bake my own cakes.

‘Do you know, I really fancy something a bit different. You don’t have frosted cupcakes do you?’

‘Frosted cupcakes?
Frosted
cupcakes?’

Shirley’s mouth wrinkled up like a salted slug. She glanced at the line of customers and raised her eyes towards her stern pencilled brows as if I had asked for cream filled body parts.

‘Frosted cupcakes,’ she mouthed silently.

‘Cupcakes are very popular these days you know,’ I said with a weak smile, ‘very on trend. You could stock them in here and make a killing.’

‘Maybe in poncey Los Angeles, pet, but this is Newcastle. We have proper cakes here, not cakes made for fairies.’

‘That would be fairy cakes,’ I muttered.

She turned to Janice who was on pies.

‘She wants cupcakes, Janice.
Frosted
cupcakes.’

‘Frosted cupcakes? Ee, Shirl’, they’ll be askin’ us for caviar sandwiches next.’

‘Howay, Janice, stick that Victoria sponge out on the window ledge for a bit and it’ll be frosted in no time.’

Janice and Shirley sprayed their smokers’ laughter over the cakes.

‘Who does she think she is, the Queen?’ Janice tittered.

‘I don’t think even the Queen has frosted cupcakes on her birthday, Janice, she’s got more sense.’

‘Hello I am still here,’ I coughed.

‘Now if we’d known, we could have suggested she put an order in for a birthday cake with a photo of herself on it,’ Janice suggested.

Shirley sucked air through her teeth.

‘Ee I don’t know, Janice, we’d need a big cake.’

‘Just give me a selection of a dozen,’ I hissed, my cheeks reddening, ‘in a box, please.’

‘Sorry, no boxes left. Will a bag be alreet or do you want me to run over to the jewellers and get you a silver tin?’

Shirley and Janice laughed until it looked as if Janice might have an asthma attack.

I left the bakery late for work with Janice and Shirley’s laughter ringing in my ears and a dozen sorry excuses for cakes squashed into several soggy paper bags. I called my friend Roxy from the Metro platform to vent my anger.

‘Howay man, Chloe, why do you let her get to you?’ Roxy snorted. ‘That woman’s been pissing you off for two decades. Build a bridge, get over it, or go somewhere else.’

‘It’s my local bakery, Roxy. I shouldn’t have to go somewhere else. I was simply trying to suggest they move with the times. It makes good business sense.’

‘The woman has more wrinkles than an elephant, Chloe, she wants to stop time, not move it on towards her inevitable unhealthy death.’

‘I just think she should give the customer quality cakes. Is it too much to expect quality these days?’

‘You don’t expect quality, you expect perfection,’ Roxy yawned.

‘The problem being?’

‘The problem being your standards are way too high, pet. Now man, Chloe, you’ve got to learn to chillax. Go with the flow. It’s your birthday; you should be in bed getting oral sex from a fit fella not shagging yourself trying to get to work on time in case you get a bollocking from the boss. Which is
you
by the way.’

I glanced at the station clock that seemed to be ticking louder by the second.

Tick late tock late TICK LATER TOCK EVEN LATER!

‘I hate being late. All I want for my birthday is to be on time. What’s that slurping noise? Where are you, Roxy?’

‘I’m in bed getting oral sex from a fit fella.’

I retched and hung up at the sound of Roxy being apparently eaten alive by her French footballer boyfriend, Thierry. A globule of yellow custard oozed through the soggy hole in one of the paper bags and splattered on my shoe.

‘
This is a passenger announcement. I’m sorry to announce all trains will be subject to lengthy delays due to a suicide on the line.’

‘Selfish bastard,’ I hissed, ‘why did it have to be my bloody train?’

‘I blame the recession,’ said the lady to my left on the platform.

‘Hope it’s one of them bankers,’ said another.

It was the second unforeseeable Act of God of the day. I should have known things were not going to go my way.

The office was an open plan, strip-lighted, non-descript space painted in company colours with a restricted view of the Newcastle Quayside. The area was stylish and very up and coming. The building itself was neither plush nor cosy but it was, I admit, my home away from home. I loved work just in the same way I had loved school when I was finally in one long enough to love it. We had moved around so much before I turned twelve, I was the human equivalent of a flu bug. When we finally stayed put, I craved and relished the routine, the structure, the goals and the sense of achievement that came with reaching those goals.

Meeting Roxy and Heidi, my two closest friends, at school also changed my life. They were different from me in every way but we complimented each other, like porridge, banana and honey, like poppadums, pickles and beer. I helped Roxy scrape through her exams with after-school tuition and Roxy helped us discover boys, alcohol and sex (her after-school tuition being of the more practical kind). Heidi, the kindest of the three, cared for and counselled us and acted like our personal life coach. Even though our career paths veered off in opposite directions after school, we had never lost sight of our friendship and the fact that we still all lived along the Metro line from each other helped. By comparison, at work I had made more acquaintances than friends, but I accepted that as the curse of being the female boss with her sights set on senior management. At work, I was an altered version of myself. I was stern but fair, motivated, focused and slightly aloof. I figured I didn’t have enough time for my two best friends as it was, so I couldn’t cope with juggling more. My staff seemed happy with the arrangement. To be honest, I wouldn’t have been asking my work self out to the cinema on a Friday night either.

‘Where’s Margaret?’

I placed the cakes on my secretary’s desk and watched as the smell of sugary snacks brought my staff scurrying from their workstations like mice in a maze squeaking, ‘Cheese, cheese!’

‘She’s in the boardroom. Did you get custard slices?’

‘You don’t move that fast when I call a meeting, Nigel.’

BOOK: Cupcake Couture

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