Christmas At The Cupcake Cafe (42 page)

Someone had packed the toe in ice and brought it to the hospital – they would be getting a big bunch of flowers from me when I found out who had done that, I vowed – but before they had a chance to sew it back on I’d contracted one of those disgusting hospital diseases and it had nearly killed me, and now it was too late.

‘A bug tried to eat me?’ I asked Dr Ed.

‘Well, yes, that’s about right,’ he said, smiling to show overtly white teeth that he must have got whitened
somewhere. Maybe he just liked to practise for going on television. ‘Not a big bug like a spider, Anna.’

‘Spiders aren’t bugs,’ I said crossly.

‘Ha! No.’ He flicked his hair. ‘Well, these things are very very tiny, so small you couldn’t see a thousand of them even if they were sitting right here on my finger!’

Perhaps there was something misprinted on my medical notes that said instead of being nearly thirty-one I was in fact eight.

‘I don’t care what size they are,’ I said. ‘They make me feel like total crap.’

‘And that’s why we’re fighting them with every weapon we have!’ said Dr Ed, like he was Spiderman or something. I didn’t mention that if everyone had cleaned up with every brush they had, I probably wouldn’t have caught it in the first place.

And anyway, oh Lord, I just felt so rough. I didn’t feel like eating or drinking anything like water (Dad brought me some marshmallows and Mum practically whacked him because she was a hundred per cent certain they’d get trapped in my throat and I’d totally die right there in front of him) and I slept a lot. When I wasn’t sleeping I didn’t feel well enough to watch telly or read or speak to people or anything. I had a lot of messages on Facebook, according to my phone, which someone – Cath I was guessing – had plugged in beside my bed, but I wasn’t really fussed about reading any of them.

I felt different, as if I’d woken up foreign, or in a strange land where nobody spoke my language
– not Mum, not Dad, not my friends. They didn’t speak the language of strange hazy days where nothing made much sense, they weren’t constantly aching, or dealing with the idea of moving even just an arm across the bed being too difficult to contemplate. The country of the sick seemed a very different place, where you were fed and moved and everyone spoke to you like a child and you were always, always hot.

I was dozing off again, when I heard a noise. Something familiar, I was sure of it, but I couldn’t tell from when. I was at school. School figured a lot in my fever dreams. I had hated it. Mum had always said she wasn’t academic so I wouldn’t be either, and that had pretty much sealed the deal, which in retrospect seemed absolutely stupid. So for ages when I hallucinated my old teachers’ faces in front of me, I didn’t take it too seriously. Then one day I woke up very early, when the hospital was still cool, and as quiet as it ever got, which wasn’t very, and I turned my head carefully to the side, and there, not a dream or a hallucination, was Mrs Shawcourt, my old French teacher, gazing at me calmly.

I blinked in case she would go away. She didn’t.

It was a small four-bed side ward I’d been put on, a few days or a couple of weeks ago – it was hard to tell precisely – which seemed a bit strange; either I was infectious or I wasn’t, surely. The other two beds were empty, and over the days that followed, had a fairly speedy turnover of extremely old ladies who didn’t seem to do much but cry.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I know you, don’t I?’

I suddenly felt a flush, like I
hadn’t done my homework.

I had never done my homework. Cath and I used to bunk off – French, it was totally useless, who could possibly need that? – and go sit round the back field where the teachers couldn’t see you and speak with fake Mancunian accents about how crap Kidinsborough was and how we were going to leave the first chance we got.

‘Anna Trent.’

I nodded.

‘I had you for two years.’

I peered at her more closely. She’d always stood out in the school. She was by far the best dressed teacher, most of them were a right bunch of slobs. She used to wear these really nicely fitted dresses that made her look a bit different, you could tell she hadn’t got them down at Matalan. She’d had blonde hair then—

I realised with a bit of a shock that she didn’t have any hair at all. She was very thin, but then she always had been thin, but now she was really really thin.

I said the stupidest thing I could think of; in my defence, I really wasn’t well.

‘Are you sick then?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Shawcourt. ‘I’m on holiday.’

There was a pause, then I grinned. I remembered that, actually, she was a really good teacher.

‘I’m sorry to hear about your toes,’ she said briskly.

I glanced down at the bandage covering my right foot.

‘Ah, they’ll be all right, just had a bit of a fall,’ I said. Then I saw her face. And I realised that all the time people
had been talking about my fever and my illness and my accident, nobody had thought to tell me the truth.

It couldn’t be though. I could feel them.

I stared at her, and she unblinkingly held my gaze.

‘I can feel them,’ I said.

‘I can’t believe nobody told you,’ she said. ‘Bloody hospitals. My darling, I heard them discuss it.’

I stared at the bandage again. I wanted to be sick. Then I was sick in a big cardboard bedpan, which they left a supply of by the side of my bed, for every time I wanted to be sick.

Dr Ed came by later and sat on my bed. I scowled at him.

‘Now …’ he checked his notes, ‘… Anna. I’m sorry you weren’t aware of the full gravity of the situation.’

‘Because you kept talking about “accidents” and “regrettable incidents”,’ I said crossly. ‘I didn’t realise they’d gone altogether. AND I can feel them. They really hurt.’

He nodded.

‘That’s quite common, I’m afraid.’

‘Why didn’t anyone tell me? Everyone kept banging on about fever and bugs and things.’

‘Well, that’s what we were worried about. Losing a couple of toes was a lot less likely to kill you.’

‘Well, that’s good to know. And it’s not “a couple of toes”. It’s
my toes
.’

As we spoke, a nurse was gently unwrapping the
bandages from my foot. I gulped, worried I was going to throw up again.

Did you ever play that game at school where you lie on your front with your eyes closed and someone pulls your arms taut above your head, then very slowly lowers them so it feels like your arms are going down a hole? That was what this was like. My brain couldn’t compute what it was seeing; what it could feel and knew to be true. My toes were there. They were there. But in front of my eyes was a curious diagonal slicing; two tiny stumps taken off in a descending line, very sharp, like it had been done on purpose with a razor.

‘Now,’ Dr Ed was saying, ‘you know you are actually very lucky, because if you’d lost your big toe or your little one, you’d have had real problems with balance.’

I looked at him like he had horns growing out of his head.

‘I absolutely and definitely do not feel lucky,’ I said.

‘Try being me,’ came a voice from behind the next curtain, where Mrs Shawcourt was waiting for her next round of chemotherapy.

Suddenly, without warning, we both started to laugh.

I was in hospital for another three weeks. Loads of my mates came by and said I’d been in the paper, and could they have a look (no, apart from getting my dressing changed I couldn’t bear to look at them) and keeping me up to date on social events that, suddenly, I really found I’d lost interest in. In fact, the only person I could talk to was Mrs Shawcourt, except of course she told me to call her Claire, which took a bit of getting used to and made me feel a bit too grown up. She had two sons
who came to visit, who always looked a bit short for time, and her daughters-in-law, who were dead nice and used to give me their gossip mags because Claire couldn’t be bothered with them, and once they brought some little girls in, both of whom got completely freaked out by the wires and the smell and the beeping. It was the only time I saw Claire really truly sad.

The rest of the time we talked. Well, I talked. Mostly about how bored I was, and how I was going to walk; physio was rubbish. For two things I had
never
ever thought about, except when I was getting a pedicure and not really even then, toes were annoyingly useful when it came to getting about. Even more embarrassing, I had to use the same physio lab as people who had really horrible traumatic injuries and were in wheelchairs and stuff and I felt like the most horrendous fraud marching up and down parallel bars with an injury most people thought was quite amusing, if anything.

Claire understood though. She was such easy company and sometimes, when she was very ill, I’d read to her. Most of her books, though, were in French.

‘I can’t read this,’ I said.

‘You ought to be able to,’ she said. ‘You had me.’

‘Yeah, kind of,’ I muttered.

‘You were a good student,’ said Claire. ‘You showed a real aptitutde, I remember.’

Suddenly I flashed back to my first year report card. Among the ‘doesn’t apply herself’ and ‘could do betters’ I suddenly remembered my French mark had been good. Why hadn’t I applied myself?

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I thought school was stupid.’

Claire shook her head. ‘But I’ve met your parents, they’re lovely. You’re from such a nice
family.’

‘You don’t have to live with them,’ I said, then felt guilty that I’d been mean about them. They’d been in every single day even if, as Dad complained almost constantly, the parking charges were appalling.

‘You still live at home?’ she asked, surprised, and I felt a bit defensive.

‘Neh. I lived with my boyfriend for a bit, but he turned out to be a pillock, so I moved back in, that’s all.’

‘I see,’ said Claire. She looked at her watch. It was only nine-thirty in the morning. We’d already been up for three hours and lunch wasn’t till twelve.

‘If you like …’ she began, ‘I’m bored too. If I taught you some French, you could read to me. And I would feel less like a big sick bored bald plum who does nothing but dwell on the past and feel old and stupid and useless. Would you like that?’

I looked down at the magazine I was holding that had an enormous picture of Kim Kardashian’s arse on it. And she had ten toes.

‘Yeah, all right,’ I said.

1973

‘Don’t cry,’ the man was saying, shouting to be heard over the stiff sea breeze and the honking of the ferries and the rattle of the trains. ‘It is a tiny … look, la Manche. We can swim it if we
have to.’ He was trying to make a weak joke but it did nothing

This did nothing to stem the tide of tears rolling down the girl’s cheeks. He wiped one away tenderly with his thumb.

‘I would,’ she said. ‘I will swim it for you.’

‘You,’ he said, his voice cracking, ‘will go back and finish school and do wonderful things and be happy.’

‘I don’t want to,’ she groaned. ‘I want to stay here with you.’

The man grimaced and attempted to stop her tears with kisses. They were dripping on his long-collared shirt.

‘Ssh, bout-chou. Ssssh. We will be together again, you’ll see.’

‘I love you,’ said the girl. ‘I will never love anyone so much in my entire life.’

‘I love you too,’ said the man. ‘I care for you and I love you and I shall see you again and I shall write you letters and you shall finish school and you shall see, all will be well.’

The girl’s sobs started to quiet.

‘I can’t … I can’t bear it,’ she said.

‘Ah, love,’ said the man, his accent strong. ‘That is what it is; the need to bear things.’ He buried his face in her hair. ‘Alors. My love. Come back. Soon.’

‘I will,’ said the girl. ‘Of course I will come back soon.’

Jenny Colgan

Were you a sherbet lemon or chocolate
lime fan? Penny chews
or hard-boiled sweeties (you do get more for your money that way)? The jangle of your pocket money … the rustle of the pink and green striped paper bag …

Rosie Hopkins thinks leaving her busy London life, and her boyfriend Gerard, to sort out her elderly Aunt Lilian’s sweetshop in a small country village is going to be dull. Boy, is she wrong.

Lilian Hopkins has spent her life running Lipton’s sweetshop, through wartime and family feuds. As she struggles with the idea that it might finally be the time to settle up, she also wrestles with the secret history hidden behind the jars of beautifully coloured sweets.

‘This funny, sweet story is Jenny Colgan at her absolute best’

Heat

978-0-7515-4454-1

Jenny Colgan

Come and meet Issy Randall, proud owner of The Cupcake Café.

Issy Randall can bake. No, more than that
– Issy can create stunning, mouth-wateringly divine cakes. After a childhood spent in her beloved Grampa Joe’s bakery, she has undoubtedly inherited his talent.

When she’s made redundant from her safe but dull City job, Issy decides to seize the moment. Armed with recipes from Grampa, and with her best friends and local bank manager fighting her corner, The Cupcake Café opens its doors. But Issy has absolutely no idea what she’s let herself in for. It will take all her courage – and confectionery – to avert disaster …

‘Sheer indulgence from start to finish’

Sophie Kinsella

978-0-7515-4449-7

Jenny Colgan

They may be twin sisters,
but Lizzie and Penny Berry are complete opposites – Penny is blonde, thin and outrageous; Lizzie quiet, thoughtful and definitely not thin. The one trait they do share is a desire to DO something with their lives and, as far as they’re concerned, the place to get noticed is London.