Read this extract from our May Great Read, Dying for Cake (Pan Macmillan Australian). 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 tile and try to think about the sea. It doesn’t work. As I left my 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 pre-school. 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 café 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, too quiet, and when she looked at me she looked straight through me as if I wasn’t really there at all. And was just before…No, I mustn’t. I mustn’t make the connections that everyone else has been making. All the 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 certain 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 way 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 preschool. Evelyn was helping the teacher soothe five howling four-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 sill,’ 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 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 café. 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. T 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.
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