Serious Sweet Read Online Free PDF

traces of nuts.
    And no gluten.
    And no alcohol.
    Organic chocolate.
    Chocolate that helped starving villages and put orphans into schools, that built the schools, that saved lives and nourished communities and made strong women sing and wise men love them.
    No one could argue with that.
    Although there was no need to fuss or think about this. Not about cake.
    It was just a fucking cake.
    Which should be chocolate.
    Why the hell were they all so demanding?
    Making people bring cake. Which sadist thought of that?
    Not that it wasn’t a good idea.
    It was nobody’s fault but her own that the prospect of cake provision could burrow a hole through her head within seconds and let all the sense drop out, have her imagining accidents: choking, allergies and sickness, these swiftly followed by her sacking and destitution, homelessness, begging and death.
    Just a cake.
    Just the threat of a cake.
    So don’t think about it.
    She should move herself forward to something else.
    She should pick one of her shiniest, best things. Pick a warm thought, a true one.
    I will meet you.
    She opened her gate, walked up the path to her front door and undertook to ensure that while she waited for the doubtful bus and then something unpleasant beyond it and then work – she did like her work – she could have that promise, kept safe.
    I will meet you.
    Fear or no fear, the thought was with her – all the way in.
    I will meet you.
    It was so dangerous with hope that she’d only consider it in little rushes, for fear of worrying and pulling it apart. For fear of fear and the way that her fear would breed further fear. One plus one equals more.
    I will meet you.
    But it was with her, anyway.
    My name is Meg and I’ve passed my one-year anniversary and I have this with me.
    I will meet you.
    Meg could feel it was almost certain that if somebody parted her ribs and looked inside, there would be a light to find because of this. Because of all this.
    It was with her.
    Here it is
.

A middle-aged woman sits beside the window in a café. Behind her there is a chaos of children and parents – some kind of community group outing. Mothers and fathers chat tiredly around one large accumulation of tables while their charges ramp and squeal. Beyond the window there is weather: grey horizontals of rain and battered leaves being tormented along gutters. The park across the way is a riot of lashing and tearing green. Only the woman is still. She stares through the glass with a kind of absence, a type of seriousness, which keeps the children from approaching her, even though they are unstoppable everywhere else.
    The woman sips from a mug of something and turns back to the sheets of white paper on her table – these three squarish sheets with black handwriting across them. She studies them and, from her expression, it’s impossible to tell if they are keeping her attention because they are wonderful, or dreadful.
    Then she smiles.

Jon had vomited quietly, neatly, into Valerie’s downstairs toilet, flushed his evidence away and then ascended in search of clothes.
    Throwing up had been calming, although weirdly impersonal.
    On my back and the back of my shirt – right through my shirt – I’m clammy.
    I need to change completely.
    Something with which Val would happily, delightedly agree.
    Jon had padded up to the second floor and barely begun combing through Val’s subsidiary wardrobe in the Rose Room –
her term, not mine: bloody Rose Room, bloody ridiculous
 – when his phone rang. Predictably, he flinched in response.
    Even though it’s not her.
    Even though she would anticipate and relish my being curious – it would please and not disturb her – and she no longer has the right to shout at me.
    How lovely. Now that I think of it. This lack of shouting.
    At present, Valerie was allegedly at or near what she’d described as a villa in the Bahamas,