Page 4 of The Cake Fairies
Chapter Three
POLLY
“T
he windfalls need tending to, lazybones!” bellowed Number One from the direction of the scullery.
Moron.
She’d already gathered the stray apples, thank you, Dave; divvying up the least favourable and bruised for recipes at home, saving the best for pies, fritters and cakes at the bakery.
“I’m due me new boiler suit!” yelled Number Two, stomping his dirty feet all across her clean kitchen floor as if he were Fred A-flipping-staire limbering up for a dance with Ginger Rogers. Ha, he should be so lucky.Git.
If George could actually be bothered to open his eyes he’d find it washed, pressed and perfumed with lavender water (and a little itching powder besides… well, a maid has to grab her laughs when she can), sitting neatly folded on his bed.
“Best be spotted dick for pudding, Pols…and home-made custard, too: don’t be thinking of experimenting on us big brothers with any of that new fancy muck from your twee little bakery!”
That was Number Three; the youngest. Ray was currently the mouthiest too. His name, alluding to sweetness and light, was totally misleading. His words reverberated as he bolted down the stairs two at a time.
Polly was sick of it.
Was this it? All her existence would ever amount to? Perhaps she could tolerate the idea of solitude if it were just her and the farmhouse walls; the livestock besides. But the moment her brothers trooped in from the pigs, cows and fields, they rendered her peace a category F-5 tornado.
The saddest thing of all was it hadn’t always been this way. She couldn’t have asked for better big brothers as a little girl. They’d taken it in turns to push her around the orchard in the wheelbarrow amidst her whoops of joy; they’d let her keep her very own chickens and gather up their eggs, they’d even worked together to make her an Easter bonnet for her grand school parade when her mother was too busy scrubbing the kitchen flagstones for the hundredth time – and she’d won first prize! She’d dust those moments off and hold them close to her heart from time to time, yearning for the way things once were. Her parents’ passing had changed the boys forever, turning cider apple pickers into money grabbers; devoted brothers into the bosses from hell, but Polly had refused to let it sour her spirit. She’d always hoped they’d someday change right back – until now, that was.
Now she knew, with every new dawn that skittered over the farm’s hedgerows, with every beam of light that revealed the hop of a rabbit, the frisky jump of a lamb, the pimpled beginnings of a glut of gooseberries, that this was it. This was the way things would always be, until death did them part. Like the plague of green and yellow caterpillars who’d put their slippers on, stoked up their pipes, and furtively got their feet under the table while no one was looking, munching the cabbage leaves to shreds every summer from now until eternity, life with her brothers would be a never-ending hamster wheel of same old. It was too late to change them.
“I’m off out this time next week, as it happens,” she said, bracing herself for their backchat. “So, make the most of the fine dining tonight because next Friday you’ll have the delight of eating earlier, cold, or actually learning how to use a kitchen appliance to warm through a casserole. And don’t say I haven’t given you notice.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Since when?”
“Not before you’ve washed and aired me boiler suit, you’re not!”
One solitary thug couldn’t seem to speak without triggering a Mexican wave of responses from Tweedledee and Tweedledum; an invisible circuit wire seemed to link their obnoxiously sexist DNA.
Bizarrely, Polly’s elders let her sit at the head of the table. But today she let her head fall into her designated eating space, her mass of auburn waves creating a sea of hair in the place of her customary knife and fork. She’d lost her appetite. There were two reasons.
She’d polished off the working ’weeks’ worth of misshapen biscuits. Normally she and Annabelle would save them up for Aunt Jemima and Uncle Bert, times being hard for her relatives across the road. But tonight, she had more important matters on her mind; she’d finally found the perfect opportunity to escape from her modern-day (and extra warped) version of Snow White: Glastonbury’s annual Tor Fair. Summer’s last sing-song before autumn chilled and winter bit at fingers and toes. One hundred and sixty-eight hours and fifteen minutes to go. Plus a few seconds. Not that she was counting her exodus down on those very same digits.
And maybe… just maybe.
But no. She wasn’t going to do it to herself this year, refused to bank her hopes up to helter-skelter height, only for them to plummet back down to the boggy, unyielding reality of the muddy fields where the fair was held.
She was old enough to know better now. There would be no flurry of leather-jacketed rockers on motorbikes from neighbouring towns, modelling Ringo Starr sideburns. They were all at home, going grey, while intermittently bouncing babies on their knees. Actually, make that whinging at their wives about their whereabouts of their own variety of work wear, and the audacity of serving them up the corner-cutting pudding of tinned fruit and evaporated milk. And Polly wasn’t about to become a cradle-snatcher, trying out the next generation, the eighteen to twenty-eight-year-olds who infamously flanked the fair’s edges. They all seemed on a perpetual quest to boost their love lives, cigarettes dangling unappetisingly from the pouting lips of the most pitiful collection of Elvis impersonators.
No, Polly was after an older man, a chunk of maturity and reliability, a coffee and walnut cake of a guy – one without the baggage, or the ego, or the belief that a woman’s place was chained to the kitchen sink. Without the devastating good looks, too, for they always cost you in the end. That was one thing, and elusive enough when you were hunting alone. But add Annabelle’s blonde, Jackie Kennedy-bob of a hairdo to the mix, and Polly positively disappeared into the background with her long, unkempt red mop.
