Melvin Burgess Stuff

Mary Bale bakes cakes for Christmas. They're presents, all she can afford.

A big one for her sister, medium sized ones for her nieces and nephews, and small ones, no bigger than a pot of jam, for the kids.

They’re expensive on fuel and ingredients, but for luxury gifts they’re still cheap. It’s the only way she can afford to be generous.

She stirs the dark currents and plump sultanas into the moist batter; inhales the scent of rich foreign spices, dark ale and brandy.

The cherries like jewels in the darkness. The nuts biding their time.

Everyone likes a cake.

As she takes one out of the oven, another goes in. A third cools slowly on the worksurface.

She weighs its strange weight in her hands, sniffs it and rubs her cheek against the stubble of burnt currents on its skin.

Something so virile about a fruit cake. Not like a boyish Dundee or a girly lemon drizzle. So deep, so dark and mysterious.

So male.

Later, as she feeds the cake brandy and takes a sip from the bottle cap herself, she feels it more than ever.

How smells can take you back in time ...

The smell of brandy on a man’s breath. The spicy scent under the bedsheets. The sharp, currenty tang of salt on his throat.

Only the scent of roll-your-owns and the leather of a tobacco pouch are missing. With them, she swears, he would stand there before her …

Wilf loved his Christmas cake. She made him one every year for too few years; and so many years have passed since he was gone.

A boat trip with Ben, a friend he’d recently made; an accident. Overboard under mysterious circumstances; two bodies never found.

Too soon. Too soon for babies, too soon to grow old; but somehow, too late to try again.

It was that Ben. A mummy’s boy. Always getting over excited and playing silly games. Not a fit friend for a grown man, she’d always felt.

Wilf appears in her dreams every night still, upright in the water, walking the ocean streams, striding the currents of the deeps.

Marching alongside the whales, treading down the ocean trenches, scuffing his feet on water flow and shoals of passing fish,

Then all the way up, tireless in the water, right up to the surf.

One day, perhaps he will walk out of the water, onto the land and into her arms once again.

Unlikely, she knows. But we can all dream, if we dare.

After Wilf there were some lovers, but none of them struck her heart.

So, in the company of her memories, she has grown old and lonely.

When each cake has cooled, she wraps it in foil and cling film before storing it in a cool cupboard. But the scent, the scent!

It has filled the house from front door to bedroom and beyond.

That night, her dreams of Wilf are vivid enough to eat.

Storming through the high seas, he walks his way right out of the Gulf Stream and into her kitchen.

There, he makes passionate love to her on the kitchen table, surrounded by bags of dried fruit, puddles of milk, broken eggs and ladlefuls of good brandy.

Her cries echo through the night; but the morning leaves her again bereft.

On her way dwn for a first cup of tea, Mary finds a trace of milk on the kitchen floor.

Mary is puzzled. She is scrupulous about cleanliness, in the kitchen at least. How did she miss this?

And why is it still so wet, after a night in the warm kitchen?

Well - love may be still, but the cakes go on. That morning she bakes another for her cousin, large, fruity and ripe.

But for the first time in twenty years or more, something goes wrong in the oven.

Parts rise unaccountably; other’s sink. Cracks make an unexpected appearance.

Looking regretfully at the failed cake, mourning the cost, Mary sees a face hiding among the cherries.

As the day goes on, she is confounded with strange events.

Sand on her pillow when she shakes up the bed.

A twist of seaweed where the sun don’t shine when she takes her shower.

The taps run salty when she makes her mid-morning cuppa, and there is a codling in the lavatory bowl at tea time.

And another cake that comes out all wrong. It looks as if someone has trodden in it.

That night once more she rocked with love, rolled high and low on the tides of her salt dreams.

In the morning, she can no longer believe it is only memory.

She sits on the bed and weeps. The nights are divine, but a girl needs her days as well as her nights.

She misses the conversation, the sitting together on the sofa of an evening, a weight next to her in bed.

But tears never raised the dead. Rising, she brushes them away and gets on with the day.

Not until the afternoon, making the bed, does she discover a starfish and a handful of currents between the sheets.

Finally, she gets the message.

That very day, she begins the biggest bake of her life.

It is as she suspected. On that very first day, she finds a handprint in the dough and knows she is doing right.

After another night of passion and crumpled sheets, she starts the next morning in earnest.

She begins, as is proper, with the heart. Rich with fruit and heavy with love.

When she bakes his liver, she adds extra brandy. Wilf always loved a shot.

Creative with desire, she binds his limbs with sinews of angelica and vanilla pod, winds liquorish tendons around his thighs.

She raids her meagre savings to enrich her creation. You cannot stint when you are baking up a man.

Soon the sea salty signs around the house begin to disappear, to be replaced by tell tale traces of batter on her sheets and currents between her teeth.

What was a dream, is becoming real.

At last her creation is all but done. It lies on the kitchen table, 6 foot tall and weighing as much as a walrus.

At night, he is light on his elbows as ever, but one thing is still missing.

Lovingly she crafts the pillar of love. Marzipan and Royal icing, as hard as rock, as sweet as sugar, as large as life.

Let the honeymoon commence.

That night she lies demurely in bed. Tonight, she hopes, the loving will be real.

Hours pass. At last she falls asleep, disappointed.

Then, in the wee hours, she is awakened by a creak on the stair.

The door eases open. A shadow cast across her bed.

Despite her dreams and her mad faith, she is beside herself with fear.

"Is it you?" she squeals. "Wilf? Is it really you?"

A familiar voice whispers, "Cover your eyes."

Obediently she puts her hands over her face. Her heart clamours with love and fear.

A weight settles on the bed beside her.

A hand - a real hand, flesh and blood - restrains her.

"If you ever see me," says the beloved voice, "I turn back into what you made."

She gives him her most faithful promise. Gently he binds her eyes with a silk scarf.

Then, he makes love to her.

And what was it like?

Who knows? The love secrets of the resurrected dead are not to be told.

Let us just say that what follows is anything but demure.

She is loved in all ways.

Her cake man will never grow old.

When he wears out she only needs re-bake him.

He will never grow limp or tired.

Truely, this way she can have her cake and eat it.

All this and more is hers - so long as she keeps her eyes shut.

For a full year she lives enrapt in her secret life.

During the day her creation lies insensible, 16 stone of rich fruit cake on the kitchen table.

Each night she binds the scarf across her eyes.

The stair creeks, the bed sighs, the loving begins anew.

Her real life is spent in utter darkness, but she says the price gladly.

She would give worlds to see the face she knows only with her fingers, but for a miracle, blindness is a small price.

Then came the day. She awoke in the dead dark of night after a night of love to find herself alone.

From up the stairs, the smell of baking.

She sniffs. Gingerbread. Someone is baking gingerbread it the dead of night.

She realises at once: something has been awry a while.

A softness of touch, a loss of enthusiasm.

She had it down to honeymoon turning stable, but now - gingerbread in the kitchen at midnight! - she knows it’s more than that.

She removes the scarf from her eyes. She is alone.

She sits in bed, waits, listens.

Then she rises and leaves the room. First, she visits the toilet.

A small fish lurks in the u-bend. There are pebbles in the wash basin.

On the landing carpet, a frond of bladderwrack.

The bastard.

Who did he meet while he was dead?

As silent as deceit itself, Mary creeps downstairs on tip-toes and pauses outside the kitchen door.

Voices murmes low. A man. No - two men.

Wilf is not alone.

Mary eases down the door handle.

"Mary! No!" Wilf's voice is urgent with fear. "Don't come in. You'll see me."

"Don't you love me, Mary? Don't you want me?"

She pauses just a moment. Then she pushes open the door.

She sees a brief flurry of flesh, anxious eyes, jerking limbs, before it all turns to cake.

They were doing it on the kitchen table.

Wilf on top. Under him, face down, impaled, a gingerbread man

She recognises his face at once among the ginger crystals.

It's only bloody Ben. She might have known.

"Just my sodding luck," she hisses as she goes for the electric whisk.

She plugs the whirl in. Helpless, the cakemen can only watch.

She descends upon them, waving the whisk in rage. "Gay sodding cake," she howls in outrage.

And she shears the whisk down through their dough boy brains.