Serious Sweet Read Online Free PDF Page A

should and then onwards to do her job and serve a purpose.
    This was another good thing to have in mind: she was employed and her employers found her useful and wanted her to keep appearing as agreed and paid her and provided a workforce kettle and mugs – free to all staff – and encouraged community-building traditions, like the rota that meant each last Friday in the month someone had to bring cake.
    It occurred to her that the pressure of her approaching turn as a bringer of cake was OK.
    But, then again, it was a pressure.
    When a cake failed it ruined the mood for the whole of the office and finished the month sadly. Success in the cake area was therefore important.
    She’d have to buy one, because she couldn’t bake, not reliably. Baking the cake, anyway, would invite hysteria. If it was a dreadful cake from a shop, you could blame the shop. Your own dreadful cake – people have to be polite about it, but they don’t want it and you being around in the aftermath of your rotten cake provision means that co-workers have to sneak off and ditch their slices. Then you’ll end up catching sight of binned cake wrapped in paper towels, but still obvious, or cake troubling pigeons on the window sills, or anywhere really, it would depend on how resourceful your co-workers at GFH were, and the more resourceful they were, the more energy they’d have to waste in jettisoning your disaster which was your fault and the entire mess would be so deeply humiliating that it didn’t bear considering.
    So she shouldn’t consider it.
    She should acknowledge instead that it wasn’t a big deal and she was being melodramatic.
    Nevertheless, she’d been testing shop cakes once a week to be sure she’d avoid catastrophe. How good they were depended quitedepressingly upon price. She wanted a relatively cheap cake. She also wanted a cake that felt innocent and as if some experienced relative’s hands had formed and finished it – plain but delicious and heartfelt. She wanted to give people something kind and simple.
    That wasn’t available.
    The cheap cake was horrible. The expensive cake tasted of greed – of greedy bakers.
    She couldn’t win.
    Who knew cake was such a bastard?
    It wasn’t the major issues that tripped you up – glorious suffering and mayhem were oddly easy to discuss. You could similarly try not to be embarrassed or pursued by your very many inadequacies. But ridiculous, obsessive anxiety about virtually nothing: that was shameful and so you didn’t mention it and so it festered.
    I am letting myself be harassed by eggs, butter, sugar and flour.
    She should buy chocolate for Gartcosh Farm Home. Chocolate cake.
    Chocolate always worked.
    A cake could be nasty, commercial, impersonal, slightly toxic – if it was chocolate, it worked anyway. This was some kind of rule.
    Foolproof.
    Perhaps.
    You couldn’t be absolutely sure, because maybe it would be possible to make the people at GFH finally tired of chocolate. It was a bit of an open goal when it came to providing treats and so it occurred very often.
    She shouldn’t be boring.
    She shouldn’t trash a path to joy for everybody.
    She shouldn’t ruin chocolate for everyone forever.
    Jesus, this was hard.
    Cake was hard.
    No.
    She was out of the park now and on her way back to the flat – her strides fast with patisserie-related tension.
    No. This is crazy.
    She paused at the kerb, as if being cautious about suddenly appearing traffic, although no sign of any such thing was even distantly approaching.
    I cannot be bullied by cake. Not even real cake – by theoretical cake.
    She sniffed, frowned, stepped into the empty road.
    What I should do is get a chocolate and another one
 …
    No.
    NoChristfuckshitforshittingfuckssake.
    I mean, really.
    What she should do was not think about it.
    Starting now.
    Not think about chocolate cake without