Lockdown Bakes

This isn’t a happy story. It won’t be a Disney ending. I’ve cried so many tears now that the skin between my lip and nose is paper thin and cracked. It stings.

It is though, a tale of love. The stubborn, persistent kind that can’t be washed away by harsh words or cruel deeds and it started, with a bake.

I eat when I’m stressed. Always have done and probably always will. All of my best memories live in the kitchen. I find them in the flour falling through my grandmother’s sieve. I smell them in the warm butter that I once spread on slices of bread in the morning.

Sometimes, when I bite into that first, fresh brownie, I can close my eyes and live there. My grandmother’s tea-towel stinging. My Father’s guilty laugh. Livia’s snorting giggle.

They are gone now. So after the chocolate melts, I taste salt. A bitter swill of lived experience.

The song on the radio is ending and the news bulletin has started. I rush to turn it off, before the talk of statistics and rates and numbers begins again. In my haste, I have knocked the heavy, ugly bowl that I used to mix my cake onto the floor. It lands on my toe. Slamming into the second joint of my big toe. It hurts.

Instead of silencing the radio, I have turned it up.

“The Prime Minister has announced a Press Briefing at 5pm”

“Alexa, stop radio!” I shout.

There is silence for a moment and I take another bite from the next brownie, then another. One more. Watching the phone. Waiting for it to ring. Filling myself with warm chocolate so that I don’t have to feel.

“Did you see the news?” Mum asks, her voice is high. She coughs and my heart thumps urgently.

“Just clearing my throat,” she says.

I coil the coiled wire of my phone’s handset between my fingers, wondering how many other people are doing the same right now. Or am I the only one that still uses a home phone?

“Beatrice?” Mum repeats and I realise that I haven’t been listening. Sinking again.

“How’s Dad?” I croak.

Mum sighs and I wish I could be with her.

“It’s just been a long time now, hasn’t it,”she replies. The silence stretches like the cord between my fingers. Months of calls. A hundred miles between us. Dad in hospital since the first weeks.

“You still baking the day away?” she asks.

“Mmmmhmmm I reply.”

After the call, I take up my usual position on the balcony. People watching has become a more difficult hobby now that so many of us are stuck inside. There are others on their balconies though. We have become comrades of a sort.

“God, that chocolate smells amazing, dunnit Ma?” I hear one of them exclaim.

“We’ll, we’d make sum too if we ha’ any flour!” a voice replies.

I slink behind the curtain. A guilty tear in my eye. Then, a thought occurs to me. I look out over the houses again. The tennis players on the roof. The single mum with twins. The old man who never smiles.

A burst of trumpet ends on a flat note somewhere further down the street. Close to the school.

A plan forms.

I spend the night baking. Tray after tray of brownies stacking up on every surface until the sums rays are peeking through the curtain once again. I print address labels until an Amazon rush delivery arrives. I don’t include my name. I spend an hour carefully wrapping and packing, until the doorbell rings and a burly Hermes driver takes armful after armful of packages to his car.

I sleep fitfully, imagining the reactions of my neighbours when they receive their gifts.

The Hermes driver takes his time. It seems so inefficient, to have taken them all away, only to deliver them again. So much better if they had been fresh from the oven.

I hold my breath as he delivers my gifts. The same reaction every time. Surprise, confusion, sometimes a quiet discussion, then the door closes. I sit quietly, happily for the rest of the day. It’s been raining and the whoosh of the car tires as they go through the rain is my only companion.

Then, in the early evening, the old man who lives opposite me came out to sit on his balcony. He brings a newspaper and a cup of tea with a saucer. Then, a plate. It is my gift! He brings it up to his nose and smells it. Tests it with a finger, prodding it gently. Satisfied, he lifts it to his mouth and takes a bite.

A circus or what-if-ery erupts in my mind. Doubting myself suddenly. Did I add too much bicarb? Is the chocolate too sweet?

I hope my breath and wait.

He smiles. A real, genuine gap-toothed grin that almost touched his ears. Then I hear a sound from him that I haven’t heard in all of these long months. Laughter. Chortles strung together with delight.

I spend the rest of that evening basking in a happy glow. Thinking of all the lives I have lifted today, lifts me too. For the first time in a long while, I experience and emotion that isn’t sadness, loneliness or despair.

Then, the phone rings. A number I don’t know - so I ignore it. Then it rings again. Even as I walk away, my work mobile starts ringing. A phone that hasn’t rung since I was furloughed. It is buried under paperwork and books and as I scrabble to find it I feel cold. My palms slick with sweat. Very few people have this number.

The nurse is business like, but kind. The first few questions are a blur. Then I am sitting in front of a screen looking at my Mum. There is no sound, but the slow. regular clicks and beeps of some of the machines that she is hooked up to.

It didn’t make sense at first, but then I remembered the coughing on her call. I hear her voice telling me about the visits she has been making to the critically at risk. Of the hospital trips to see Dad. She wouldn’t have wanted to worry me. The nurse said. It’s common, apparently, for the very sick not to realise how ill they actually are. I have to say goodbye to my Mother on a video call. My heart is breaking.

“I love you Mama,” I whisper.

I glance down at my phone, there is a red dot on messenger that I hadn’t noticed before. It is a message from my Mum. Sent that morning. A reply to my frenzied burst of texts about baking and questions about postal service.

Her words make me laugh. There is so much confusion in them. Then quiet support and an assertion of pride.

“Thanks Mum,” I reply. I touch her cheek on the monitor. In a few hours she is gone.

I did warn you that this would be a sad story.

Her last words to me were, “You should jack in that poxy office job and do this for a living!”

So, I am. I’ve set up a home kitchen. Tested recipes on my neighbours and recruited the Hermes man to deliver same day. I spend my days baking, but not eating. I’ve lost so much weight that I’m no longer diabetic, which means that I can leave the house. I’ll be vaccinated soon.

A percentage of my profits go to the NHS. I’ll never be the same again. I think a part of me will always be broken, but I move forward now filled with purpose.