Page 74 of The Cake Fairies
“Psst, Polly!” a croak of a female voice came from outside the van, followed by a rap at the door. But it couldn’t be Annabelle, because Polly’s eyes were still fixed on the spring in her step. And it wasn’t Nigel, since he’d be more likely to jump off a cliff than put on an effeminate voice – as throaty as this one was. And while those hippy surf guys had been friendly, thankfully they weren’t out for detail-swapping and future dates, most likely currently entrenched in various modes of come-down.
“Yeeees?” Polly answered slowly, so she was almost spelling the letters out. She crept to the caravan door, convinced she’d now reached the electrifying heights of talking to herself, opened it haltingly with the tips of her fingers, and peeped with her left eye through the gap, before committing the rest of her body to fate.
At which point she had to do a double, triple and quadruple take, pressing her back against the caravan door, inconveniently forgetting she’d opened it, and tumbling out into Amber Magnolia’s surprisingly sturdy arms.
“I was in two minds about putting this drop on the list,” Amber Magnolia announced, cradling Polly in such a motherly way that the girl never wanted it to end.Huh, thought Polly,A Mhad said she ‘didn’t do hugs’. It had been too long since she’d known this kind of unconditional love, quite possibly only when she was a babe in arms. “You’ll do a lot of good here today in one fell swoop,” Amber Magnolia carried on, oblivious to Polly’s hammering heart. “But I can only apologise that it’s a little close to temptation – and home.”
“Wh… what would’ve happened if we’d asked Nigel to take us to Middle Ham… just for old times’ sake?” Polly found herself asking. She didn’t want to know the answer, but, suspended between dream and nightmare, surely anything went?
“You’d be lost in time forever. Neither here nor there. He wouldn’t have done it, anyway,” Amber Magnolia added after a lengthy silence, as if she were debating the odds of that for herself. “A fool that man may be, in many senses of the world, but he’s smart enough when the chips are down.”
Polly shivered for the umpteenth time that day, and then had to grant herself a fleeting inward chuckle at the rather apt betting pun.
“In that case forget I asked, but…”
“Always a darned ‘but’ with you, Polly Williams,” Amber Magnolia released her now, and gently turned Polly to face her. She tottered unsteadily on the tufts of grass beneath her feet. “He won’t wait forever, you know,” she waggled her finger, “and now I’ll throw in a ‘but’ of my own...”
Polly gulped.
“…Buthe is The One.”
It was several seconds before Polly could say anything to that revelation.
“How can hepossiblybe The One when he abandoned me? He left me on my own, Amber Magnolia,” she screeched, and then immediately downgraded her noise level to a whisper, taking into account the fact that the spritely forty-something-year-old they’d first met was now undeniably in her nineties. Still that same beaming face, hair turned silver, ringlets bouncing about and as lively as ever. But the last thing Polly wanted to do was instigate a coronary. “He left me on my own in Fortnum and Mason’s café… of all the flipping places.” She braced herself for the memory of the outpouring of her fellow purveyor’s pity. “Although, I’m guessing you knew that minor detail already.” Polly began to sniff. Amber Magnolia handed her a lace handkerchief, and she dabbed at her eyes.
“Nothing could be further from the truth, dear child. It’s high time you asked your cousin what really happened that day.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Go easy on her, Polly. Annabelle’s sorry for her meddling.”
And with that revelation, Amber Magnolia’s form slowly began to fizzle away; first the edges, then the limbs, until Polly couldn’t bear to watch anymore. She hadn’t even returned her handkerchief, she realised as she looked down at her fumbling hands.Go easy on her… meddling?
She scrabbled for the caravan door and collapsed onto her bed.
***
Four and a half hours later, and Polly was a pendulum out of control, emotions searing; an inner rage mounting by the second. And then there were the shakes one tended to get when one had been shocked out of one’s skin.
Where was Annabelle?
Yes, Polly had been happy enough to get on and ‘bake,’ for not a centigrade had come into it. She’d certainly needed the thinking and breathing space. But time ran a fine line, and too many minutes had passed since Amber Magnolia’s ground-breaking declaration that her cousin had been playing some kind of game at her expense. Too many minutes had given Polly way too much time to stew as she beat, whisked and melted her raw Fairtrade white chocolate, coconut and lime cake into shape.
Then Annabelle was back. “Sorry about that,” she made a farce of doubling over to catch her breath at the caravan door, her svelte limbs taking on the appearance of an accordion.
Polly did her trademark flick of the tea towel so that it fell perfectly onto her right shoulder; her body language for ‘you are so in the doghouse’.
“I did say I was sorry! Polly, you’ve no idea. It takes forever to navigate these fields, especially wearing flip-flops,” she gestured at her feet. “Then I kind of got lost… but as luck would have it, I bumped into those guys who helped us out earlier.” How convenient, Polly yelled inwardly. She refused to give her cousin the satisfaction of a verbal sparring. It was always about Annabelle when it came to the opposite sex, wasn’t it? “So we had a chat,” huh, that meant they’d swapped field coordinates and she’d be running off to shag them all at midnight. “And they got me back on track,” just as Polly suspected… she’d taken several tokes of their whacky baccy, “and here I am… so anyway, how’s it all going?”
“Just the lime spirals and a scattering of decorative hibiscus to go on the top.” Polly feigned a fake and sickly smile, cursing herself when the moment called for confrontation. What she’d really love to do was haul that stunner of a cake into her arms – her stunner of a cake, crafted with her hours of tender loving care – and throw it into Annabelle’s face as if she were a clown unaware of her encroaching custard-pie plastering.
Polly vowed to carry on demurely instead – just until she couldn’t keep up the pretence that blood was thicker than water for a moment longer. Family? The word was the biggest let down. The sad fact of the matter couldn’t have been clearer. Polly had nobody. There wasn’t a solitary soul she could count on in her life.
***
“I don’t know you anymore!”
And there it was. Polly twisted her torso to let the words hurtle from her mouth in something halfway between a screech and a yell; covering the metres of air between them as effortlessly as her palette knife had coated the darned (and very decadent) Caribbean-themed cake they’d somehow managed to deposit dead centre of the NME stage, without as much as a challenge from a security guard. A group of revellers walked past her, momentarily taking her mind off Annabelle’s betrayal; their pole-toting arms outstretched, small screens attached to the elongated eyesores they held aloft. Oh my goodness! These had to be the dreaded selfie sticks that Ivy had spoken of bombarding the capital, and Polly was amazed that she’d not yet spotted them elsewhere on their travels. They seemed to add a whole new level of danger to the once healthy pursuit of walking, and she couldn’t help but pan the horizon for unexpected holes in the ground. Hopefully these music-lovers would catch the scent of her tropical creation on the wind and put the blessed things away in a minute.
