Dying for Cake Read online

  Louise Limerick was born in 1970 in Brisbane. She is the youngest of five children — four girls and a boy. Married in 1992, she abandoned a short teaching career to become a full-time mother. She now has three children. She pursues her writing whenever she can, while her husband looks after the kids. Dying for Cake is her first novel. Her other interests include reading, drawing and, of course, baking.

  ‘… a great read … a thoroughly diverting book that plunges us wholeheartedly into the lives of its five characters: all mothers of young children, but all different from one another … her depictions of the minutiae of raising children are lovingly realistic but not overly sentimental … this novel is essentially about the validity of different ways of mothering, and the importance of self-fulfilment for women, however that is gained’

  THE AGE

  ‘It is an intriguing plot … Where Limerick’s writing shines in her buoyant evocation of the sticky, constant, exasperating and loving realm of small children and their carers. There are many such delicious scenes in this novel …’

  Andrea Stretton, THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN

  ‘Dying for Cake is honest, original, thoughtful, emotional, mature and suspenseful’

  SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

  Pan Macmillan Australia

  First published 2003 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  St Martins Tower, 31 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Louise Limerick 2003

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Limerick, Louise.

  Dying for cake.

  ISBN: 978-1-74334-915-1

  1. Mothers – Fiction. 2. Missing children – Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.4

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  Copyright © Louise Limerick 2003

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

  Limerick, Louise.

  Dying for cake.

  ePub format 978-1-74334-915-1

  Macmillan Digital Australia www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  For Michael, for his patience, persistence and love

  For Ellen, Peter and Kate Rose

  For Mum and Dad, my brother and my sisters — all.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Cate Paterson, who loved the book and demanded more, Brianne Tunnicliffe and Julia Stiles, who edited with finesse, and Tara Wynne, my agent, for her professionalism. Special thanks also to Roxy, who I have never met, but who saved my manuscript from the slush pile in the first place.

  CONTENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  JOANNA

  CLARE

  SUSAN

  WENDY

  EVELYN

  THE EMPTY CHAIR

  SWIMSUITS FOR BABES

  VISITORS

  CLEANING OUT THE COBWEB

  JEWEL BEETLES

  THE PRICK

  PERFECTLY PEACHY

  ALMOST PERFECT

  SHADOWS

  REGRETS

  MOTHER LOVE

  BRITTLE THINGS

  IN PURSUIT

  SUSAN

  THE CAUSE OF SUFFERING

  THE WORST PART

  RAIN FALLING

  THE GESTATION OF GUILT

  GETTING ON WITH IT

  CLARE

  GROWING BETTER

  WENDY’S CHOICE

  SUSAN

  PAINTING LIFE

  WENDY’S CHILD

  CHANGES

  EXCUSES

  THE END OF CRAVING

  BREAKING THE WEB

  JOANNA

  Ever since Evelyn cracked, I’ve been dying for cake. I crave it when I get up in the morning and I pour my regulation thirty grams of cereal into my bowl. Thirty grams isn’t much, you know. I think I’ll have to find a variety without sultanas. They weigh too much. And the half a cup of skim milk only just settles the bran dust. I look into my bowl and I know that I’m too hungry for cereal. I’m aching for cake. Not the add-an-egg dehydrated variety in a cardboard box. What I want is much more substantial. Packet mixes never fill those empty places. The light texture dissolves like spun sugar on your tongue and smears the inside of your mouth with a waxy film of almost flavours. Almost banana. Almost blueberry. Almost chocolate. Actually, the chocolate’s not too bad. If I was going to bake a packet mix, I’d choose chocolate. One of those fancy American chocolate cake mixes that make you drool. One of those double-layered, rich, choc-frosted cakes. Bloody hell, I can almost taste it!

  Last night, after I’d eaten my grilled steak and steamed vegetables, I saw that ad. You know the one — the little kid is standing on the stairs, watching his mother ice a Betty Crocker chocolate cake in the fluoro-lit kitchen. That cake looked so good, the saliva in my mouth was nearly drowning me when I thought about licking the rich butter cream … But what gets me is why a stay-at-home mum would be giving her kid a packet mix cake for his fifth birthday and icing it like it was an act of love. Do you know how I could tell she was a stay-at-home mum? She looked like me. It could have been me sitting there, with my drab brown hair, in my daggy old clothes, in my 1950s, never-been-redone laminex kitchen.

  Anyway, working mothers buy their five-year-olds sponge slabs from Woolies that feed twenty. The slabs come with a big yellow banana in blue striped pyjamas dancing through three centimetres of vienna cream icing. The cake tastes like chemicals are holding it together and keeping it soft. It doesn’t matter. Kids only eat the icing anyway.

  I know the kind of cake I’m dying for. It’s not the kind of cake you can buy in a box, or at Woolies. It has to be homemade. The kind of cake they sell here, at the Vista Cafe. I drool like a dog when I look in that display cabinet and see those cakes. Mud cake, the top so thick with dark chocolate you need a hot knife to cut it. Pumpkin syrup cake, flecked with citrus rind and drenched in sweet orange syrup that congeals like sticky toffee on the crust. Blueberry sour cream cake, thick and buttery with a cinnamon sugar crumble and a juicy berry in every second mouthful. Vanilla slices, caramel tarts, melting moments … My heart’s rocketing around in my chest as I stand looking at those cakes. Then I remember the weighin tonight. I order my skinny-chino and I go outside where I can’t see the cakes, not with my eyes open anyway.

  I sit outside under a large white market umbrella, at a table with a mosaic of blue and green tiles embedded into the top. The tiles make a pattern that looks like waves frozen in the act of uncurling. I look at the tiles and try to think about the sea. It doesn’t work. As I lift m
y three-year-old onto my knee, the waitress brushes past us with a tray loaded with coffees and cake. Warm apple teacake. Lightly crusted on the outside with sugar and strewn with soft wedges of apple. The rich butter curls slide down the soft yellow crumbs and unfold onto the plate. I’m drowning. My mouth fills with water and I can barely breathe.

  I can’t afford to eat cake if I want to lose ten kilos. Least of all that teacake oozing with butter. Sixteen points! That’s nearly my whole day’s food quota under my Fat-Trimmers points plan. So, when my skinny-chino arrives, I try to make the sweet froth last as I juggle Sam on my knee.

  ‘More frop,’ he says, grabbing the spoon, and he makes me spoon so much froth into his mouth that I’m going to have to order another skinny-chino before the others get here. And maybe a baby-chino for him, just so I can at least get the sugar kick from the chocolate sprinkled on top. Even just a little taste of something sweet … but it’s like throwing matchsticks into a fire and it never satisfies me for long.

  Sam’s a big boy for three. Long legs and big feet, puffy inside his sandals. Smelly feet too. He sweats a lot, especially in the heat. Even though it’s March now, there’s still enough heat in the midday sun to start him sweating. As he leans back on me and his Paddle Pop trickles down my arm, I smell the savoury sweat in his hair. That smell and the quick beat of his heart remind me of the rabbit I owned as a child. I remember holding that rabbit up to my face and inhaling the smell of grass and sun and sweat. I remember feeling its heart beating against my cheek. I look at him, Sam, my only baby now Jake’s at preschool. I stroke the soft pink cheek and stare at the long-lashed eyes and I feel like I’m going to explode with love. It’s moments like these when I can’t understand Evelyn at all. Why doesn’t she tell us what happened? Why does she just sit all closed up and silent? If it were my baby …

  People talk. They talk about Evelyn and they say that she won’t ever get better. They say she’s trying to protect herself. I don’t think like that. I won’t think like that. She was my friend and I can’t think of a reason why she would have done what people are saying she did. When I think back to the weeks before it happened, my mind’s full of empty spaces. I do remember this one day when something wasn’t quite right. Evelyn walked into the cafe for coffee, after she’d dropped William at preschool. It was the first time I’d seen her out and about since the baby was born. Clare had been doing the drop-offs and pick-ups for her. I remember thinking what a beautiful baby she had. Tiny little Amy, only four weeks old. Evelyn didn’t look beautiful. She looked worn out, and while the rest of us gooed at the baby she just sat there melting in the summer sun like Sam’s ice cream. She was quiet, too quiet, and when she looked at me she looked straight through me as if I wasn’t really there at all. And that was just before … No, I mustn’t. I mustn’t make the connections that everyone else has been making. All new mums get tired. Amy was stolen. That’s what I believe.

  The day Amy disappeared, Evelyn went queer. She didn’t explode. She’s not the exploding kind. She kind of did the opposite. She imploded. I think that’s the word. Kind of caved in on herself and shrunk away until she certainly wasn’t anyone I could recognise. Yet sometimes I wonder whether, in the moment before she completely lost it, Evelyn did let it all out. At least that would have been gutsy, to yell and scream and kick like a wild thing. I like to think she did but somehow I doubt it. It would be so out of character for Evelyn.

  Evelyn was always too well mannered to make a fuss. In any argument she was the first to back down and could put us all to shame just by being so nice. Nice. That was my impression of her when we met on the day our children started kindergarten. Evelyn was helping the teacher soothe five howling three-year-olds. She held two of them in her lap but only one of them, William, was hers. The other kid was wrapped around her neck and screaming for his mother. Evelyn was crying too. Big drops of empathy rolled down her cheeks. ‘I feel so silly,’ she said to me, embarrassed by her tears. ‘I just can’t help myself when everyone else is doing it!’

  I liked Evelyn from the beginning. I tried to prise the kindy kid loose — the one that wasn’t hers. His grip around her neck was so tight that she was beginning to choke but the kid just wouldn’t come off. I was grateful when my old friend Susan arrived with her daughter, Laura. She shook her head at the chaos and took control straight away.

  It was Susan who suggested that the mums make a quick exit and go for coffee at the Vista Cafe. So a small group of us did. We had coffee and cake and enjoyed ourselves so much that we decided to meet regularly. I remember how Evelyn laughed that first day. Her green eyes glistened. She was so different then from the time after Amy was born. I can’t remember what we talked about. Probably our kids. We were all going through the same stuff. I can remember the taste of the mud cake I shared with Evelyn. It was made with dark chocolate, not just cocoa, and it was dense and moist and …

  It’s strange how this whole business has made me feel so hungry. I don’t like to analyse myself too closely but it’s weird that I should have this incredible longing — for cake. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a little shallow. On the other hand, maybe I’m so deep I can’t even begin to sort myself out. All I know is that ever since Evelyn imploded — gee, I like that word — I’ve been dying. Day by day, a little bit more. Just dying for cake.

  CLARE

  It was nearly nine o’clock when I realised that Sophie hadn’t had a thing to eat for breakfast. I thought I’d been doing well this morning. We were all up at seven-thirty and I had Sophie dressed by eight. The dressing ritual’s usually rather prolonged in our house because Sophie never wants to wear what I pick out for her and she takes a long time to choose clothes for herself. Most of the time she insists on wearing long dresses, which are very impractical for preschool, so we usually start our day with an argument. In the end, she wins.

  She won this morning when she finally decided to wear the orange dress and the hot pink socks which, in combination with her frizzy copper hair, make her look like she’s on fire. When Sophie was finally dressed, I put on my jeans, had my breakfast, made Sophie’s lunch and kissed David goodbye.

  At eight-thirty I realised that I couldn’t drag Sophie away from Sesame Street so I put her cereal and juice on a tray and let her eat in front of the television. At a quarter to nine I came into the room jangling the car keys and there she was, watching Big Bird, her mouth hanging open like a goldfish, her breakfast untouched.

  I switched off the television and she gave me one of her looks with her surly green eyes. ‘I’m not in the mood for nonsense this morning, young lady,’ I said. ‘We’re late. We have to pick up William.’ I took her tray back to the kitchen and threw her pink Minnie Mouse backpack in her lap. She got off the couch and pouted at me. ‘You never let me do anything I want!’ she grumbled as she headed for the door.

  We were just pulling out of the drive when I saw her sad little face in the rear-vision mirror. That face has the power to knead my heart and make it yield love. Guilt consumed me. Sophie’s eyes were full of crocodile tears. ‘I’m hungry,’ she whimpered. ‘I didn’t get any breakfast.’ I stopped the car and raced back inside to find something for her to eat. There weren’t many options. Cereal would spill in the car. All I could find were two Choc-Mint Slice biscuits. ‘Here,’ I said as I slipped them into her hand. ‘You have to eat something for breakfast.’ The tears dried up instantly and, as she began licking off the chocolate, I knew I’d been had again. More guilt. My child has such a bad diet. Sometimes I just know I’m a bad mother.

  Anyway, the upshot of that little episode was that I was running late, as usual. I think I’ve been running late since Sophie was born and she’s five now. She should be in school but David and I kept her back a year. Correction — I pleaded with David to keep her in preschool on a five-day fortnight for another year. It’s only March and Sophie can already read and write. It was selfish, I suppose, not to let her go on, but once she’s at school, I don’t know what I’ll do
with myself. I can’t go back to work. I can’t face teaching again. Have another baby perhaps? Not a clever option.

  You don’t know what I was like after Sophie was born. I was a mess. Almost as bad as Evelyn. Correction — never as bad as Evelyn. I got help. I still have help. The help sits inside three little silver packets with tamper-resistant seals. The help gags me every morning and lodges bitter particles halfway down my throat. I don’t mind. Everything has its price.

  I know David wants me to do something with my life. I think he wonders what exactly I do with myself all day. He thinks I’ve joined some sort of hedonistic women’s coffee sorority. A time filler for bored suburban housewives. This morning he suggested that perhaps, if I’m not interested in having any more children, I should go back to work or do something at TAFE.

  ‘Why don’t you go out and look into it today?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll do it another time, David. This morning is my coffee morning.’

  ‘Coffee? What a bludge. I wish I could sit around drinking coffee all day.’ He started stuffing his briefcase with papers. ‘But one of us has to generate some kind of income.’

  The truth is, David works as a solicitor and generates more than enough for our family to live on. Money is not really the issue. David hates the fact that I’m still on antidepressants. It makes him anxious to think that I’m not coping, especially now that Evelyn has been admitted to the psychiatric ward at the Royal. He worries that I will lose the plot completely and that he will be left bringing up Sophie. He thinks that if I had something else to do, besides mothering, I might manage to pull myself together and get off the drugs. Maybe he’s right. The pity is, I just don’t have the nerve. The thought of a job, and all the juggling it would involve, fills me with terror.