Here we are...antes de mediodia as promised though I suspect you are all off outside to enjoy the beautiful weather and wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't!
My first thanks is for a lovely summer's day. In a way I wish it wasn't as I can't get anywhere I'd like to be but I love the fact that others will be having a grand day out somewhere even just in their own back gardens. Enjoy!
And I also give thanks for the people who are working so the aforementioned trippers and loungers can enjoy the day. All the people in the shops and cafes and petrol stations and hospitals and air traffic control...and domestic kitchens and power companies and media broadcasting stations for the stay at home souls...I could spend my whole day thinking of these individually couldn't I?
And for the fun I had learning Spanish...la lengua de mi corazon..even though I've forgotten so much of it now!
Peace of Cake (continued)
She inherited the house of course, the mortgage cleared a few years previously. There were two insurance policies that paid out handsomely and a comfortable little nest egg of savings. Callista had never spent a whole wage packet throughout her working life. Her bank balance had been very healthy before the accident; now she became a little richer day by day.
Her colleagues were sympathetic about her loss and made suggestions as to how she could spend her unaccompanied time, her accumulating money. Take in a lodger, they said, take a holiday, join a dating agency. But none of these ideas appealed. They were the only people left in Callista’s world yet remained unable to help her define her dreams, her plans, her hopes of happiness. When the prettiest girl in the office got married she declined to attend but was proud to make the wedding cake when requested. This poignantly romantic creation of fondant flowers and spun sugar lace was admired by all at the reception in a way that Callista was beginning to wonder if she, the producer, was ever going to be.
A few months later the work syndicate’s numbers came up on the lottery and while the others blew their shares on clothes and cruises, on cost price conservatories and cars they’d been coveting, Callista worked out she could live on her winnings for the next few years, and handed in her notice.
She had the ancient gas cooker ripped out and a sleek, state of the art, double oven Aga installed. It radiated a constant cosy glow and was always ready to cook - in much the same way as its owner. Now no one could notice or comment on what she ate, Callista gradually eliminated everything from her diet but the cakes and cookies and puddings she made. Nothing else was necessary for nourishment she decided. There was protein enough in the eggs and nuts and seeds she used, the dollops of cream or mascarpone cheese. Dried and fresh fruits would provide vitamins and minerals, and even a vegetable or two cropped up here and there, in pumpkin pie and marrow jam. And, of course, there was fat and sugar and carbohydrate aplenty.
She bought a computer and keyboard with extra large keys for her extra large fingertips and discovered the discretion of internet shopping. She found sites where she could order all her baking things, her toiletries and household needs, her hard to find plus size garments. It was soon after that she stopped going out - there seemed to be no point as so many things could be sent directly to her. Before long the only people she spoke to were delivery drivers and the occasional customer service advisor on the phone with a query regarding an order.
She exercised a little every day, bending down to fill or unload the dishwasher, chopping and kneading, creaming and folding, slow solid steps between range and kitchen table. When the narrow stairs became too much of a squeeze she had the old scullery turned into a wet room allowing ample space for ablutionary manoeuvre and invested in a wide and very sturdy sofa bed that she left made up in the living room to nap whenever she chose. Though her world was shrinking Callista grew, and grew contented too. The only thing missing from her life was someone with whom to share its sweetness. But all good things come to those who wait. Callista still believed her hero would come for her, inevitably, eventually. And eventually, sure enough, he did. Or rather they did because funnily enough long-awaited heroes sometimes, like buses, arrive in threes.
The first to arrive was the paramedic summoned on the advice of the Samaritans after a desperately breathless call when she thought she might be dying and had no one else to tell. She had collapsed on the bed by the time he arrived, the struggle to don a satin kimono in which to greet him proving too much of a challenge. Resourceful as his employment required, he found his way round to the unlocked kitchen door. Tenderly, respectfully, he coaxed the inadequate folds of the slippery garment over the mountainous folds of her flesh and helped her to her feet. No one had touched Callista’s skin for a very long time and her heartbeats skipped in a far more pleasant manner than they had done a few hours before.
Her second rescuer was the builder contracted by Social Services to dismantle part of the wall, for Callista, now larger even than the Aga, could leave no other way. She knew he was not the one she yearned for when he gobbled up her cherry topped Bakewells as indifferently as if they’d come from a packet, but she remembered him with fondness to the end of her days as the one who released her from her self satisfying confinement.
The third and most significant man to enter Callista’s life was a red haired reporter from the local newspaper who arrived at her hospital bedside the following morning hoping for a scoop on this human interest tale. Easing his ample buttocks onto an inadequate plastic chair he took out his notebook and began to ask gently probing questions. Callista was not really listening though.
‘Would you like a piece of cake?’ she whispered. For somehow she had managed to secrete amongst her voluminous nightclothes a Tupperware box containing remnants of her previous diet to supplement the Spartan nutritional regime now imposed on her.
‘Mmmm, carrot cake - my favourite!’ he exclaimed, suitably furtively, but smiling in moist mouthed anticipation at the butter cream coated slices.
Rotating the portion between his sausage shaped fingers, he gazed as if tasting it with his eyes before taking a dainty bite. Callista watched him chew and swallow, the flick of his tongue to capture a crumb that strayed onto the first of his chins. She savoured his sigh of satisfaction, unselfconsciously mirroring it with a blissful one of her own. All the ingredients were gathered together, the blending could begin. The emptiness of Callista’s soul was filling with peace at last.
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