Meet Me at the Cupcake Café (4 page)

‘Definite.’

Helena sighed. ‘Oh well. We all need something to aspire to. Quick! Telly on! It’s a Simon Cowell day. I want to see him be cruel to someone.’

‘You need a
nice
man,’ said Issy, picking up the remote control.

So do you, thought Helena, but she kept it to herself.

Chapter Two

Orange Cupcakes with Marmalade Icing for a Grumpy Day

Multiply all ingredients by four to get too many cupcakes.

2 whole oranges, divided. Try not to buy bitter oranges. Blood oranges may be useful to squeeze out frustration.

8 oz butter, melted. Use the fire of your righteous anger to melt the butter if a pot isn’t handy.

3 whole eggs. Plus an additional three to break therapeutically by throwing at the wall.

8 oz sugar. Add more sugar if life needs a little sweetening.

8 oz self-esteem-raising flour

3 tbsp marmalade

3 tbsp orange zest

Preheat oven to 350°F/gas mark 4. Butter cake tins.

Chop one orange – yes, skin and all – into chunks and place in your mixer with the melted butter, eggs and sugar. Mix on high until well combined and the satisfying noise of the mixer makes you feel a bit better. Pour the mix into a bowl with the flour and whack repeatedly with a wooden spoon until subdued.

Bake in the oven for 50 minutes. Allow to cool for five minutes in the tin, then turn out on to a wire rack to cool completely. Spread marmalade on the top. Attempt to rediscover zest.

Issy folded up the letter and put it back in her bag, shaking her head. She hadn’t meant for Gramps to have a bad day. It must have been discussing her mother again. She wished … She’d tried to bring it up with Marian, that Gramps would appreciate a letter every now and again. Obviously it wasn’t working. Well, there wasn’t much she could do about that. It was such a plus to know, anyway, that he was somewhere where they’d stamp and send his letters. The last few months, when he was turning on the oven in the flat at 5am prompt every morning but then forgetting why, had been difficult for everyone. Besides, she had problems of her own, she thought, glancing at her watch. There are pretty horrid days to go back to work, and then there’s today, Issy thought, peering out along the length of the queue to see if the bendy bus was starting to trundle round the corner of Stoke Newington Road. An ungainly thing, it always took a few attempts to make the sharp bend, all the while being honked at by vans and yelled at by cyclists. They were taking them out of commission soon. Issy couldn’t help feeling sorry for them, poor silly buses.

Yep, the first Monday after Christmas had to be right up there with rotten blooming days really. The wind was raw against her face and tugging at her new Christmas hat, which she’d bought in the sales thinking its knitted stripes might be quirky and young and cute. Now she suspected it made her look more like Haggis McBaggis, the lady with all the bags she pushed along in a shopping trolley, who sometimes hung around the bus stop but never got on a bus. Issy usually gave her a half-smile but tried not to stand downwind, hugging her large tin of cupcakes.

No Haggis today, she noted, as she glanced at the faces next to her – the same faces she stood next to in rain, snow, wind and the occasional sunny spell. Not even an old lady who pushed a trolley about wanted to get up this morning. Some of the familiar faces she nodded to; some, like the angry young man who fiddled relentlessly with his phone with one hand and his ear with the other, or the older chap who surreptitiously plucked at his flaky scalp, as if having dandruff somehow rendered him invisible, she didn’t acknowledge at all. But here they all were, every day, standing in the same places, waiting for their bendy bus and wondering how crammed full of people it would be when it finally arrived to bear them off to shops, offices, the City and the West End of London, scattering them down the arteries of Islington and Oxford Street, then scooping them up again at night, in the dark and the cold, when condensation from tired bodies would steam up the windows, and children, late from school, would draw faces, and teenagers would draw penises.

‘Hi there,’ she said to Linda, the middle-aged lady who worked in John Lewis, with whom she occasionally shared a greeting. ‘Happy New Year.’

‘Happy New Year!’ said Linda. ‘Made any resolutions?’

Issy sighed and felt her fingers drift to her slightly uncomfortable waistband. There was something about the miserable weather, the dark, short days, that made her feel like staying in and baking, rather than going out and taking some exercise and eating salad. She’d baked an awful lot for the hospital at Christmas too.

‘Oh, the usual,’ said Issy. ‘Lose a bit of weight …’

‘Oh, you don’t need to do that,’ said Linda. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your weight!’ Linda was a middle-aged shape, with one bosom, generous hips and the most comfortable shoes she could find for standing up in all day in haberdashery. ‘You look lovely. Take a picture now and look back on it in ten years if you don’t believe me. You won’t believe how good you looked.’ She couldn’t resist glancing briefly at the tin Issy was carrying. Issy sighed.

‘These are for the office,’ she said.

‘Of course they are,’ said Linda. The other people in the bus queue were coming forward now, making enquiring faces and asking Issy how her holiday had gone. She groaned.

‘OK, you gannets.’ She opened the tin. Wind-chilled faces cracked into smiles showing winter teeth; iPod buds were removed from ears as the bus stop cheerfully descended on the marmalade cakes. Issy had, as usual, made twice as many as she thought she might need so she could feed the office and the bus queue too.

‘These are amazing,’ said the man through a mouthful of crumbs. ‘You know, you could do this for a living.’

‘With you lot I feel like I do sometimes,’ said Issy, but blushing with pleasure nonetheless as everyone clustered around. ‘Happy New Year, everybody.’

The entire bus queue started to chat and perk up. Linda of course was doing nothing but worry about her daughter Leanne’s wedding. Leanne was a chiropodist and the first person in Linda’s family to go to college, and she was marrying an industrial chemist. Linda, proud as punch, was organizing the entire thing. She had no idea how difficult it was for Issy, having to listen to a mother who wanted nothing more than to put in corsetry eyelets for her twenty-six-year-old’s wedding to a wonderful man.

Linda thought Issy had a young man, but didn’t like to pry. They did take their time these days, didn’t they, these career women? She ought to get a move on, pretty girl like that who could cook, you’d think she’d get snapped up. But here she was, still catching the bus on her own. She hoped her Leanne got pregnant quickly. She was looking forward to giving her discount card a bit of a workout in the baby department too.

Issy, closing her tin and still seeing no sign of a bus, glanced behind her into Pear Tree Court. The oddly shaped shop with the grilles tightly down looked like a grumpy sleeping man in the drear grey light of a January London morning, bin bags set outside still waiting for collection.

Over the last four years various people had tried to turn it into a business of one kind or another, but they had all failed. Perhaps the area wasn’t up and coming enough, perhaps it was the proximity of the ironmonger’s, but the little children’s clothes shop with its exquisite Tartine et Chocolat French designs – at eye-watering prices – had not lasted long, nor had the gift shop, with its foreign editions of Monopoly and Penguin Classics mugs, nor the yoga shop, which had painted the entire frontage a supposedly soothing pink, put a tinkling Buddha fountain outside by the tree and sold incredibly expensive yoga mats and Gwyneth Paltrow-style soft bendy trousers. Issy, while far too intimidated ever to set foot inside, had thought it might do rather well, considering the high numbers of local trendies and yummy mummies; but it had turned out not to be, and once again there was a
For rent/enquiries
board in yellow and black, clashing horribly with the pink, showing in the window. Of the little tinkling Buddha there was no sign.

‘That’s a shame,’ said Linda, seeing her looking at the closed-down shop. Issy hmmed in response. Seeing the yoga shop every day – and the lithe, ponytail-swinging honey-coloured girls who worked there – had just reminded her that now she was over thirty, it wasn’t quite as easy to stay a size twelve as it used to be, especially when you had Issy’s grand passion. It wasn’t as if she could ever have been a skinny minny, not in her grandfather’s house. When she came home from school, Gramps, although he must have been tired from a full day’s work already, would beckon her into the big kitchens. The other bakers would stand out of her way and smile at the little girl, while barking at each other in their rough voices. She would feel embarrassed just to be in there, especially when Gramps announced, ‘Now, your education truly begins.’ She had nodded, a round-eyed quiet child, prone to blushing and self-consciousness; feeling out of place at a primary school whose rules seemed to change on a weekly basis, understood by everyone but her.

‘We shall start,’ he said, ‘with drop scones. Even a child of five could make a drop scone!’

‘But Grampa, I’m
six
!’

‘You’re not six!’

‘I am! I’m
six
!’

‘You’re two.’

‘I’m
six
!’

‘You’re four.’

‘
Six!
’

‘Now here is the secret to the drop scone,’ he said seriously, after he had made Issy wash her hands and patiently scooped up the four eggshells that had fallen on the floor. ‘It’s in the burner. Not too hot. A hot burner kills pancakes. Gently now.’

He held on to her, up on the brown kitchen stool that wobbled slightly because of the hole in the linoleum, her small face poised in concentration as she let the mixture drip gently off the wooden spoon and into the pan.

‘And patiently now,’ he said. ‘You can’t rush these things. A burnt drop scone is no life. And this cooker …’

Joe had poured all his energies into his beloved granddaughter, teaching her the techniques and tricks of baking. It was his fault, thought Issy. She would definitely bake less this year, lose a couple of pounds. She realized she was thinking this while absent-mindedly licking orange buttercream off her fingers. Soon!

Still no sign of the bus. As Issy looked round the corner, glancing quickly at her watch, she felt a heavy raindrop hit her cheek. Then another. The sky had been grey for so long now, it seemed, you could never tell when rain was coming in. But this was going to be a bad one; the clouds were nearly black. There was no shelter at the bus stop at all, unless you counted three centimetres of guttering from the newsagent’s behind them, but the proprietor didn’t like them leaning against his windows, and often said so when Issy went in to get her morning newspaper (and occasionally a snack). The only thing to do was hunker down, cram your hat over your head and wonder, as Issy sometimes did, why she wasn’t living in Tuscany, California or Sydney.