Page 76 of The Cake Fairies
Chapter Thirty-Four
ANNABELLE
Once the tears came, they wouldn’t stop. Thank goodness Annabelle hadn’t a clue as to who any of her pity party were. They weren’t just tears over her spiteful betrayal. They were tears for everything she’d bottled up for so long – aside from those minor crocodile tears on their first evening in 2019 in Alex’s café, anyway.
“Oh my God, I’m Kate, babes,” said a rakish beauty with a halo of daisies atop her head and a hand-rolled cigarette poking out the corner of her mouth. She sprang to her feet and ran over to them both, scowling at Polly, enveloping Annabelle in her painfully slender arms.
“Come over with us and patch things up, sweets,” she gestured to Polly, too, after a few seconds of deliberation and some very unsubtle non-verbal critique of her taste in fashion. Then she was introducing her gang. “So, this is Fern.” Annabelle turned her panda eyes in the direction of a sweet-looking woman with tousled caramel hair. Fern raised her beer bottle back in salute. “Then we have Alexa, Cara, Poppy, Meg, Sadie, and er… David… I insisted he bring the wifey along, what can you do?” Kate coughed then.
“We do make quite a tempting proposition.” Kate arched a perfect brow at Annabelle, whispering out of the side of her mouth as if they were confidantes, her DIY cigarette flopping about. “Let me see, who else is here?” Annabelle would never remember all this lot; did it really matter? But Kate was off. “Ah yes, Pete, Johnny,don’t ask, do not even go there,” their hostess tsked before exhaling a great plume of potent smoke, “Margot, Liam, Hugo, Millie,” she extended her arm to present the rest of her groupies, “and last but by no means least: Zoe.” A strawberry blond sporting a fringe to die for, the kind that fell into the eyes but was bang on trend with it. She appeared to be drinking a rather civilised cup of tea, and politely raised her hand at the mention of her name.
“Sit, sit.” Kate pointed at some beanbags in the shape of giant peaches. “Bud? Or something stronger?”
She didn’t wait for their answer and bounded into their ‘van’ as her friends shared hushed conversations, scrolled on their seriously swish iPads, or just generally floated off into their own bubbles.
Annabelle turned to Polly. “Listen, it’s really not as bad as it sounds, Polly… I mean it is quite… okay, make thatverybad but I had my reasons, as inexcusable as they are, I guess I… Well, of course I’ll totally understand if you shun me forever and I lose my stake in the bakery… and… and… and…”
Sniff. Snort. Blubber.
The conversations, Instagram selfies, and daydreams taking place across the campfire’s scant few flames dried up one by one as Kate handed each of the Cake Fairies a posy of beer bottles. Annabelle appreciated the cool tang, lining up four of her personal clutch beside her beanbag in a wobbly queue, gulping greedily at the bottle in her hand.
Somehow, this crowd of strangers encouraged her to keep talking, to re-live, but thankfully not re-enact her appalling behaviour, until her apologies flew ever thicker and faster at poor cross-legged and subdued Polly – for what they were worth; the pressure of an audience to keep talking and all that.
“You know what’s happening here, don’t you?” the guy Kate had referred to as David blurted out. He tipped his jaunty black cap towards the dying campfire as if that might hint at his revelation.
“Erm, no. Not really,” sniffed Annabelle.
“Your apologies, all your bad deeds and stuff… they’re, like, energetically transferring themselves into the fire.”
“Okaaay.”
“He’s right actually.” Kate re-lit her cigarette.
“You’re burning them up, turning them into cinders and ash, and nothingness. Back to square one. Kiss and make up. Everything’s right with the world again. My lifestyle guru told me all about this. I thought he was bullshitting me at the time. I mean, he got my wife into crystals, feng shui’d the house… and the next thing you knew he’s suggesting we get into tant—”
“She knows what you mean, Dave. No need to elaborate.”
Gosh. Annabelle loved Kate’s voice. It was sort of south London but posh, an impossible blend of streetwise and sophisticated. She sensed these people really needed their downtime away from the intrusion of the cameras; that the only reason they’d decided to include Polly and her was because they sensed the cousins didn’t know who they were or what they did. Nobody else would have had the audacity to indulge in a slanging match in front of them. Not that Annabelle had been doing any of the shouting.
Polly’s response came at last, knocking Annabelle completely off her perch (beanbag): “You’re right. She’s right.” She finally lifted her head from the ground, where she’d been studying endless blades of grass, to pan the crowd of campers. “You were right to make your move,” she turned to look Annabelle in the eye, “I’ve done nothing but hold you back with your life.”
“Awww.”
A sing-song chorus of love enveloped the cousins to the left and right. It was badly out of tune, but somehow that didn’t matter. Polly laughed a self-deprecating laugh.
“It’s funny how the perspective of time travel makes you see things with fresh eyes,” she stared into the glowing amber embers, and Annabelle hoped she wasn’t getting too high off the mounting fumes of the very different spark of fire making its merry rounds, although that was probably a given.
“You what?” that was the Liam guy, with the John Lennon sunglasses. He rocked forward onto his haunches, listening intently.
Annabelle chuckled nervously hoping Polly would take the rather large hintnotto go any further down that road.
“Well, the festival does that to you, doesn’t it?” Polly scoured the gathering again for their agreement. “All this freedom and peace and love, it kind of makes you feel like you’re back in the sixties… when it all began here. Like I said, you tend to see things with fresh eyes.”
Her devotees nodded fervently.
“I’ve bought her with money, you see.”
Annabelle lost her eyebrows somewhere in the depths of her hairline at that point. She doubted anyone would notice.
