Cutting a thin slice of the warm Dutch apple cake on the butcher’s block the next morning, I divided it precisely into two. ‘Right,’ I said, passing one half to Anna on the point of the knife. ‘The moment of truth.’
She took a very small bite. ‘Not bad.’
‘For six eggs and three hundred grams of butter it should be spectacular.’
‘It’s not.’
‘I agree,’ I said, finishing my bit. ‘Pleasant, but dull.’
‘It’ll be alright with cream and lemon honey,’ said Anna, although she undermined this endorsement somewhat by tossing the rest of her cake into the compost bucket as she spoke.
I was finding this new one-bite-only method of dieting reasonably hard to watch, but I knew better than to say anything. Getting out a bowl I silently started to make a marinade. Soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, tomato sauce, crushed garlic . . . Serious foodies will tell you that you lose ‘those lovely top notes’ when you cook with pre-crushed garlic, but unless you’re in the habit of taking your garlic neat I find it hard to believe you’d tell the difference.
‘We should put another recipe on Facebook,’ Anna said after a few minutes.
‘Okay.’
‘I was thinking custard squares. They photograph well.’
‘Our recipe’s the one out of the Edmonds cookbook,’ I said. ‘They’ll sue us.’
‘They will not. Anyway, our icing’s different.’
‘Fine. Whatever.’
‘What’s up?’ she asked, pouring coffee beans into the side of the machine. ‘You’re not your normal chirpy self.’
‘Isaac rang last night as soon as I got in and sobbed down the phone at me,’ I said.
‘Ah. That’d do it.’
‘It was awful.’
‘What did you say to him?’
I added a spoonful of plum jam to my marinade. ‘I told him not to ring me again.’
‘Did he listen?’
‘Probably not. I just won’t answer the phone.’
‘Oh, really?’ she said.
‘Really.’
She snorted.
‘I’ll use you as my role model, and be cruel and heartless.’
‘Yeah, you do that,’ she said, picking up the phone. Anna may not be cruel and heartless, but she’s very good at mocking disbelief. She pressed a button and frowned. ‘There’s no dial tone.’
‘I unplugged it last night in case Isaac rang back. Sorry.’
‘Now that’s a marvellous way to run a business.’ She reinserted the plug into its socket.
‘I thought it would make us seem more exclusive if no-one could get hold of us. It’s my cunning new marketing plan.’
‘Brilliant,’ she said.
‘Or we could go completely the other way and dress in fishnets and suspenders.’
‘You don’t think that might give the wrong impression of just what it is we’re selling?’
‘Possibly,’ I admitted.
‘Sounds like a great idea to me,’ said Monty, suddenly putting his head around the kitchen door. Monty lived over the road and had a disconcerting habit of wandering over and appearing in the kitchen without warning – but then he also had a habit of bringing fresh crayfish with him, so it seemed petty to object. He owned the garage in town, which he ran in a haphazard fashion, not bothering to open if the fishing looked promising. He was large and cheerful, with wispy grey hair and a face as round as the moon, and once you managed to track him down he could fix almost anything.
‘Hi, Monty,’ I said. ‘How was your fishing competition?’
‘So-so. Bit of an onshore wind.’ He opened the door wider, and there behind him stood Puncture Man.
I recognised him with acute embarrassment but only mild surprise. There is, after all, nothing like making a fool of yourself in front of a stranger for ensuring you’ll see them again. He was older than he’d seemed when climbing out of a flax bush – mid-to late twenties, probably – with short fair hair and really lovely dark grey eyes. He looked amused, which is a good sign in a new acquaintance unless it happens to be you they’re laughing at.
‘Girls, this is Jed Dixon,’ said Monty. ‘He’s going to be giving me a hand in the workshop. Jed, this is Anna, and Lia. They make a bloody good roast beef sandwich.’
‘Nice to meet you, Jed,’ Anna said.
‘You too,’ he said, and then turned to me. ‘Hi – Lee, was it?’
‘Lia,’ I said.
‘Lia. Sorry.’
‘You should be,’ I said. ‘My only consolation for the other night was that at least I’d never see you again.’
He grinned. ‘Yeah, I hear that a lot.’
‘What happened the other night?’ Monty asked, and I looked at Jed in startled gratitude. Had I been held at gunpoint by a man in pink satin hotpants, it would have been my primary topic of conversation for weeks.
‘I got a flat tyre just down the road from here,’ he explained. ‘I came up to see if I could borrow a jack and scared the poor girl stiff.’
‘He turned up on foot at midnight, and I thought he was a serial killer and screamed the house down,’ I said. ‘Would you guys like a piece of apple cake?’ It’s worth trying to get on the good side of a man who can, if he chooses, spread reports of being assaulted by a telepathic cross-dresser.
* * *
‘He didn’t tell Monty about Rob threatening him with a rifle,’ I said, watching the two of them cross the lawn ten minutes later. ‘I wonder why not.’
‘No idea,’ said Anna. ‘Hey, can you smell something?’
‘What sort of something?’
‘Something rotten,’ she said, sniffing the air like a bloodhound casting for a scent. Anna has very high standards of hygiene – an excellent trait in someone who works with food, if at times a little wearing to those of us with a more relaxed attitude to dirt.
I sniffed in turn, and then shrugged. ‘I can’t smell anything. Is it the trap in the bottom of the fridge?’
She glided fridgewards, inhaling deeply as she went. ‘No.’ She began to work her way around the kitchen, opening cupboards.
‘Oi,’ I said. ‘Less sniffing, more cooking of quiche. We’ve got a business to run here.’
‘Says the woman who gives away cake!’
‘I was trying to buy his silence. And it wasn’t great cake.’
‘McDonald’s don’t make great hamburgers, but they sure as hell don’t give them away,’ said Anna.