Cream Eggs in the Irises
It’s Thursday and I’m in the baby changing facility at Waitrose eating a no-butter flapjack. The air smells like baby wipes and there is a small, bright spotlight that draws out my shadow as I move beneath it. It’s not a bad place to eat in secret while I mentally guess replacement ingredients for butter. In my haste, I tossed the wrapper in the nappy bin, but I assume it must be oil. And oil must come from somewhere; it might even be palm oil. I don’t really know much about oil, to be honest, but I know it’s not butter.
I should go back to Lenka soon.
Thursday mornings tend to be quiet on the shop floor, but today the place is packed with kids. Most of them, the little ones especially, wear tiny, lurid rucksacks. Some sort of trend, probably. They don’t pick their feet up when they walk, the kids. You’d think they were bored but I’m sure it’s their way of moving slowly while they look at stuff.
I say ‘Thursday mornings tend to be’ like I work here, or something. I don’t.
I say ‘stuff’ like it’s any old stuff, but what I mean is Easter eggs.
They’re undeniably enticing. When I was a kid, I would run my hands over the foil, smoothing it into the grooves in the chocolate, seeing how hard I could press without breaking the shell. My finger twitches just thinking about it, so I send it to my lower molar, the one that gets food stuck in it all the time. I contemplate how Easter affects the ratio of milk products to non-milk products in a supermarket. Like, if someone were to hold a big milk-magnet over the store, would most of the products lift right out of it? Hundreds and hundreds of Easter eggs floating upwards like some weird, reverse, rainbow hailstorm? Or maybe only the milk would go, leaving shoppers knee-deep in chocolate powder, scraps of foil, sugar and what-not.
I’m down to the last two bites already. Lenka will be wondering where I am.
She clasped her forehead as she drove into the carpark today. Lenka. Ordinarily, I don’t like it when she drives with one hand, but in a carpark it’s fine, I guess.
‘I forgot the kids are off,’ she said.
‘Well,’ I said, like remembering this would have changed anything.
‘I hope we get a table,’ she said.
What she meant was ‘our’ table. We have been coming to the Waitrose café every Thursday for the past three months, or so. I don’t know how we slipped into this habit. Well, I do, actually, but that’s another story. It’s busier today, yes, but even on the busiest days I’ve never really seen kids in the café. It’s not what I would call a family café. That said, our usual table by the corner window is occupied by an old man with a newspaper and a kid with a colouring book. Lenka stares at them from the café entrance. Her feet are angled inwards and her hoody has slipped off one shoulder. I go over to the cake counter while she works through this.
Temptation is a cruel thing, but of late I’ve been using it to make me stronger. I bend to look through the glass cloches at the counter. The classics are there. Carrot cake, coffee and walnut, all butter croissants, Victoria sponge, banoffee cheesecake and some sort of muffin which I presume is the healthy option. The milk magnet comes back to me and I wonder what percentage of these cakes would lift away, leaving a mound of flour and spices. And would the eggs be raw or scrambled? Who knows. Perspective is the weakness with dairy produce, in my opinion. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. When you’re born, you don’t think you’ll be ripped from your mother so that some superior being can extract her milk and dump it in a cake. You don’t think at all, not really, because you’re too little, and maybe because you’re a cow, but, either way, your opinion wouldn’t count anyway.
‘It’s good to see kids with colouring books.’
Lenka is beside me. She has found a way to deal with the table incident; sacrificing our spot has somehow contributed to the greater good. Her hoody is on straight now.
‘Forget the diet,’ she says. ‘You love carrot cake.’
I sigh. Milk anxieties aside, carrot cake is my third –no, second – favourite food. On this one, the frosting has been whipped up into stiff curls with a small, sugar-crafted carrot on each of the sixteen segments. The sponge is brown from cinnamon and demerara. If I pressed down on it, I know it would rise back up again, slowly. My mouth is watering. ‘No,’ I say, stepping back from the glass.
‘They have healthy muffins,’ she says at the same time.
I have already glanced at the allergy code on the miniature blackboard just in front of the muffins. Milk, eggs and butter. The hattrick.
In my head there is a farmyard, an Old MacDonald-style, picture-book one where the animals aren’t even real. There is a cartoon cow with big eyelashes and yellow horns, which is ridiculous given that she is a cow, not a bull. And then there is a horse on one side of her, a sheep on the other. They are all looking over the fence at – I presume –the reader. There is a rooster perched on the highest fence post. I have no idea what a real working farm looks like; perhaps I don’t want to know. My storybook farmyard is naively drawn and one-dimensional. This alone says everything, I feel.
‘No,’ I say, folding my arms and looking straight at her. She raises an eyebrow. She sees my reaction as a sign of strength and so will be satisfied with it. After all, there’s no point refusing cake half-heartedly.
She orders the carrot cake, and a latte. I watch the coffee fall like a dream into the milk.
‘Americano,’ I hear myself say. ‘Black.’
We sit at a table that Lenka has already claimed with her hat and umbrella. We aren’t near any windows but we have an upholstered bench. There is a table for two closer to the window, but it has normal chairs and a tray of empty cups. I can see how Lenka made her choice.
She takes a deep breath as she sits down and glances about the space. I let her adjust while I unwrap the small, cinnamon biscuit that came with my coffee.
‘You’re eating that?’ she asks, jutting her chin at the biscuit in my hand.
I put it down slowly. ‘I keep forgetting.’
‘What’s to forget?’ she says, tearing open a sugar sachet. ‘Don’t you think you’re taking this a bit far?’
I can almost taste the biscuit, feel its sugared edge resisting my teeth. I glance at our usual table. The colouring-kid is now scrolling through a smart phone.
A customer at the counter asks, ‘Do you have any vegan cakes?’
Lenka rolls her eyes, sips her latte.
‘Only the scones,’ replies the assistant. ‘This batch is still warm from the oven.’
Lenka starts now. It’s her usual diatribe about calcium and bone density and omega 3 fatty acids and stunted growth and quality protein and vitamin B12 and milk-surplus and wastage and the-circle-of-life and thousands-of-years-of-omnivorism and incisor teeth and hunting instincts and, ‘Did you know that’s why we sweat from everywhere? It allows us to chase something until it dies from overheating…’
My stomach growls. The scones. I didn’t see the scones.
Lenka sinks her fork into the carrot cake. It compresses and springs back, exactly as I thought it would. The forkful breaks away softly. If I were to put my ear against it, I’m sure it would sound like a kiss. She plunges the fork into her mouth and watches the situation at the counter. ‘And they say I’m the one who needs a psychiatrist.’
I stare at her even though I have been trying not to mislead her in any way. Whenever she says something like this, I want to get up and leave, but of course I won’t. I would like to tell her that I can walk to the bus stop; there’s no need to drop me home. Instead, I say, ‘How have you been?’
She puts her fork down and leans right back against the upholstered bench. ‘Last year you hid chocolate all over our garden,’ she says. ‘For me.’
My thumb rubs at the edge of the biscuit.
‘You put cream eggs in the irises,’ she adds.
For something to do, I stir my coffee. It looks like rainwater in an ashtray. Or an old, stagnant pond.
‘Hello?’ she says, leaning forward and waving a hand in front of my face.
I blink. Her fingers are a smidge too close, like they want to strike me. ‘I remember,’ I say, ‘hiding them.’ I do. I hung chocolate coins in the forsythia, I studded our peony heads with tiny, praline eggs, I stood golden bunnies in the hanging baskets and I hid a hollow, milk-chocolate cow in the lavender bush. And she’s right, I did that for her. But I won’t reminisce out loud. Like I say, I don’t want to mislead her. I clear my throat. ‘I’m just gonna go to the loo,’ I say, pointing back towards the shop.
She nods and pushes her plate away. Her eyes are wet as if she’s been replaying the memory too. But worst of all is the carrot cake, that I can’t stop looking at, its destiny in ruins, the little, sugar-craft carrot discarded at the edge of the plate. I stand up and leave.
So now I’m in the baby changing facility, wondering who would save me if I choked on this flapjack. That’s a real possibility given how hard I’m eating it. And there’s another one in my back pocket. With raisins. I imagine a cow, a baby one, leaning its side into my thigh. It chews its grass, I chew my flapjack. We eat together. This is how it should be.
I’m still chewing when I exit the facility and turn towards the shop floor.
‘Surprise!’ says Lenka.
I jump back and clutch my throat.
‘What are you eating?’ she says. ‘Are you eating?’
I don’t answer because I’m coughing. Coughing is good. It means I’m not choking. I bend forward and cough some more. It also means I can’t answer.
‘Why are you eating in the toilets?’ she says.
I cough until I’m done, then straighten up to meet her gaze. Her eyes are narrow and her mouth makes that weird, kidney-bean shape that means she’s kind of disgusted and kind of angry. In her hands she is holding a hollow, milk-chocolate cow, the same kind I hid in the garden last year. It’s clearly for me. Reaching out and taking it would be easier than telling her what I’m eating, why I was in the mother-and-baby unit, but my imagination wanders to the scenario where I refuse the cow and let her drive home with it to stand it in the lavender so that she can pretend a little, on Sunday morning, then cry for hours on the floor in front of my former sofa, and her mother will call me, frantic that she’s not picking up, and my Happy Easter text will go unanswered, and eventually I will bike into town – because the buses are less frequent on a public holiday – and I’ll end up accepting the cow anyway.
By the time this thought is over, the cow is cradled in my arm, staring indifferently at the strip light above.
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