Sunday
The next morning, Alanis woke Audrey slightly later than she had the previous day, although still fundamentally too early for comfort, and hauled her up the hill to breakfast. Once Audrey had actually got to sleep, she’d slept well, but she’d woken up ravenous and was, therefore, very disappointed by the watery sausages, flabby bacon, and undercooked hash browns that she was offered.
Although she counted herself lucky that she wasn’t vegetarian since then her options would have been cereal, a fry-up minus any of the interesting parts, or an involuntary fast day.
Since she was focusing more on getting herself fed than paying attention to social cues, Audrey was already sitting down and deciding which of the congealed breakfast products on her plate looked least unappetising when she realised she’d inadvertently sat directly between Alanis and Joshua.
Who now seemed to be trying to flirt across her.
“You did well yesterday,” Joshua was saying over his cereal and under his trilby.
“Thanks.” Alanis wasn’t quite looking at him and wasn’t quite looking at her breakfast. And across more years than she cared to remember, Audrey recognised the awkwardness of a teenager trying to seem like a twentysomething.
“You did—yours was good too. They shouldn’t have marked you down for using buttercream. ”
“They asked for a Victoria sponge,” Joshua agreed, “and they got a Victoria sponge.”
The conversation continued in this not-exactly-about-anything-but-also-not-really-inviting-Audrey-to-participate vein for long enough that she began to feel acutely uncomfortable but also that she couldn’t leave because she’d somehow positioned herself as unofficial chaperone.
Audrey was, therefore, immensely relieved when Gerald rolled up with a plate of nothing but hash browns, sat down uninvited, and immediately butted in.
“Hello, hello, hello.” He speared a hash brown with a fork and took a nibble. “Bright new day and everything. Hope you are all, each of you, shaped like ships and fashioned like Bristol.”
Wordlessly, Alanis looked to Audrey for help.
“We’re all good,” she said. “Just getting ready for the next challenge.”
Gerald nodded enthusiastically and started his second hash brown. “Ah yes.” He adopted an expression of utmost seriousness. Or at least as much seriousness as one could adopt when one still had a notable ketchup stain on one’s shirt. “A cake that shows who you are.”
“I’m making chocolate and chilli,” Alanis volunteered in the exact tone she’d used to explain her bake to Audrey the day before, “because I’m a little bit sweet and a little bit spicy.”
Joshua’s comment was “Like it” in a tone that Audrey tried hard not to cringe at.
“I was going to make something that included my Somali heritage,” Alanis continued, “but that’s all on my dad’s side and he doesn’t actually cook.
So I spoke to his mum—my grandmother— and she was, like, so happy I’d asked that I felt bad saying actually I just need a cake for TV.
So now we do this whole weekly family cooking thing, which is great but doesn’t help with the show.
” She took a spoonful of cereal. “Still, might do sambusa if I make it to pastry week.”
The moment Alanis had finished, Joshua stepped in like he’d spent the whole time nodding and waiting for his turn to talk. “I’m going to do”—he put his hands out in a gesture that might, if interpreted generously, indicate something vaguely cake-shaped—“it’s hard to put into words.”
Gerald fixed Joshua with a look of genuine awe. “Are you making an ineffable cake?”
It took Joshua a moment to acknowledge the question, but when he did he nodded, laughed, and said “Like it” again. Followed by, “And kind of. But it’s actually more”—he swirled his hands—“cupcakes.”
“That doesn’t sound very ineffable,” Audrey pointed out. “I mean I’m pretty sure you could eff a cupcake.”
Alanis punched her on the arm. “Audrey, don’t talk about effing cupcakes over breakfast.”
Audrey hadn’t actually intended to eff in the euphemistic sense. “I just meant,” she said, aware that she was drifting back into Alanis’s “me” box, but possibly as that friend, “they’re, you know, comprehensible.”
“What I wanted to do”—Joshua’s hands were still spiralling—“was, like, it’s supposed to be a cake that shows who you are but, like, who are any of us?”
Alanis was giving him the you’re so deep nod that Audrey remembered giving a few girls herself down the years, Natalie among them. It was not a nod that ever ended well.
“So,” Joshua went on—he was a terminal wenter onner. “I’m doing a range of cupcakes in a range of styles and flavours because I just don’t think one cake can, you know, really encapsulate a whole person.”
“I can see you’ve given this a lot of thought,” Audrey told him. It was how she avoided telling people they were full of shit.
Joshua nodded appreciatively. “How about you?”
Although Audrey privately didn’t think “I’m making ten different cakes because I refuse to be categorised, man” was a great response to the brief, she was starting to wonder if her own was any better. “Simnel cake.”
Gerald’s sincere tell-me-more look searchlighted from Joshua to Audrey. “I’ve heard of that. It’s French, isn’t it?”
“Not really. More Shropshire.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Sort of chocolatey?”
“Fruit.”
“And it has a distinctive decorative style?”
Audrey nodded. “Yes it’s—”
“Sort of a fleur-de-lis in sugar work?”
“Balls of marzipan.”
Gerald smiled. “That’s the bugger. Knew I’d heard of it.”
“And how does it show who you are?” asked Alanis with the devastating innocence of a young boy asking whether the emperor might not be a bit chilly with his dick out.
“Well…” Audrey squirmed in her seat. It felt a bit pathetic to say Because it’s from Shropshire and I’m also from Shropshire. But what else did she have? “It’s traditional, where I’m from. I used to make one for my mum every Mother’s Day.”
Joshua laid a gentle hand on Audrey’s arm. “I’m sorry. How did she die?”
Since parsing potentially ambiguous headlines was a major part of Audrey’s job, it didn’t take her long to work out where the confusion had crept in. “Oh, no, I mean I used to make them, but I stopped. She’s fine. She lives in Much Wenlock.”
“That’s not a real place,” Alanis protested, oddly insistent for somebody in no position to actually know. “You’re refabulating us.”
“That’s not real slang,” replied Audrey. And then, used to having to prove the reality of her hometown, she pulled out her phone and brought up Much Wenlock on Google maps. “See, here it is.”
Snatching the phone, Alanis dragged and dropped the little streetview figure into the middle of Much Wenlock. “Oh, it’s so cute. I didn’t think people really lived in places like this.”
“What did you think all the houses were for? Instagram?”
Alanis was still staring somewhat entranced at the chocolate-box wonders of Much Wenlock. “I just…it’s super pretty and I don’t, I don’t know, I suppose it would be nice to live there? Your parents are very lucky.”
They were. For a start they’d been lucky enough to buy a house in Much Wenlock before property prices went through the roof.
Which meant that when Audrey had come slinking back from London with her tail between her legs, her choice had been to live in her childhood bedroom for the rest of her life or move somewhere comparatively normal. Like Bridgnorth.
“So why did you stop?” asked Gerald. “Making the cake, I mean. Seems a very fine tradition to have if you ask me.”
“I moved away.” It was a technically correct answer but an uninformative one, so Audrey continued. “To London. And, well, I was busy and my girlfriend wasn’t one for baking.”
Alanis blinked like Bambi’s cottagecore sister. “That’s really sad. What happened with the girlfriend?”
“We broke up.”
“Probably for the best.” Alanis shot a shy glance at Joshua. “I wouldn’t want to date somebody who wasn’t into baking.”
* * *
“Welcome,” Grace Forsythe was saying, her hands clasped in front of her like she was trying to crush a mouse to death, “to the first baketacular of the eighth season of Bake Expectations. And in keeping with this season’s back-to-basics theme, we’re going to ask you to make a cake.
No particular kind of cake—any cake you like. ”
Audrey had watched enough episodes of the show to suspect that this was about to launch into one of the host’s famously long, whimsically alliterative lists. That suspicion was about to prove founded.
“It could be,” continued Grace Forsythe, “chocolate or cherry, madeira or matcha; you could make cupcakes, bundt cakes, upside-down cakes, or right-side-up cakes. It could be tiered or layered; you could top it with ganache, or just with panache. If you wanted to be trendy, you could even make it naked, although then we might have to broadcast after the watershed.”
There was a brief pause for people to give suitably amused reactions, during which Colin Thrimp managed to sneak in a “Jennifer says please wrap it up before Christmas.”
“Just as long,” Grace Forsythe kept right on talking as if nobody else had spoken—which, in Audrey’s limited experience, was pretty usual for celebrities, “as it shows”—she clapped—“us”—she clapped again—“who”—clap—“you”—clap—“are. You have three hours, starting on three. Three, darlings.”
Audrey had barely started sieving her flour when the judges and camera crew descended on her station.
The part of her that paid attention to technicalities wondered if they’d picked her first out of kindness to the other contestants, assuming that her media background would make her more comfortable and give the rest of them time to settle into things.
The part of her that had met Jennifer Hallet, however, suspected that people’s comfort wasn’t a high priority for the production team.
“So, lass,” Wilfred Honey was asking, “what’re you making, and what does it say about you?”