Something Good

Ten years laterIf Jane hadn't made the cake herself, extracting it from her own oven, she'd have assumed it was some decaying metallic component that had sloughed off a car on its way to the scrap. "Damn," she muttered, glaring down at the pitted slab.Jane had experienced a wave of good-motherness as she'd glided around the supermarket, loitering in the mysterious baking ingredients aisle to study pots of vermicelli and sugar pearls. At thirty-six years old, surely she should be capable of baking a cake. A bit of creaming and folding, shoving it into the oven at roughly the correct temperature--it was hardly rocket science. Jane had wanted to surprise Hannah, to remind her that she was her mother, who loved and cared for her, and not just some irritating adult who happened to inhabit the same house.The sound of thrashing guitars rattled downstairs. "Go to sleep!" Jane called up. Silence. "Han, can you hear me?" It was twenty past midnight. Of course Hannah couldn't hear; she'd nudged up the volume a notch. Jane sighed and tried to poke a finger into the unyielding cake. Scrabbling among the dented packets in the cupboard, she located a tub of Betty Crocker Chocolate Fudge Icing that she troweled on, instantly doubling the cake's height. Things were looking more hopeful. Jane rummaged again in the cupboard for tiny gummy sweets and studded them all over the cake.It looked okay. No, better than okay. It might at least raise a smile, if Hannah were still capable of such an expression without cracking her face. Tomorrow she would be fifteen. Her entire childhood had f lashed by like a dream that Jane had forgotten to savor.Hearing the same song starting over again, Jane shut off her ears and jabbed birthday cake candles into the goo.Happy birthday to you,Happy birthday to you,Happy birthday dear Hannaaaah...Happy birthday to you."Gorgeous cake," announced Amy, f licking back hair that had been highlighted with fine golden streaks around her dainty face."More like a biscuit," Jane laughed, hacking generous slices for Hannah, Amy, Rachel and herself. A small birthday party--birthday cluster, really. All Hannah had wanted this year."It looks great," Amy insisted. "You know what my mum's like with her organic-bloody-everything. She still won't have sweets in the house.""Well, they're--" Jane began, about to say, they're made from real raspberry and apricot puree and won't, you know, trigger Hannah's asthma. She stopped herself. Jane sensed that Hannah wouldn't want her asthma mentioned--not even in front of Amy and Rachel, her firm friends of a decade. They'd zoomed toward her in the park the day Jane and Hannah had moved onto Albemarle Street, snatched her hands and run, a chain of three, toward the trampoline."Want a piece, Han?" asked Rachel, brandishing a plate bearing a mud-colored mound.Hannah was sitting cross-legged in the corner of the living room, examining a clear Perspex case of nail polishes in 'difficult' shades--Moss, Lichen and Bark. Amy's present to her. Hannah still detested pink. Clearly, a hastily rescued cake hadn't met with her approval, either. The great twinkling heap was, Jane realized now, entirely inappropriate for a strikingly beautiful daughter with defiant eyes who was virtually an adult.Hannah glanced up and winced, as if she'd been offered some particularly challenging delicacy like sheep's brain, or a trotter. Her hair, which she'd tinted aubergine with a wash-in color, hung messily around her luminous face. "I'm not hungry," she said f latly."Go on," Rachel insisted. "It looks a bit sludgy but it tastes okay.""No thanks."Rachel shrugged and placed the offending cake on the table. "You okay, birthday girl?" Jane asked, crouching down beside Hannah. Tufts of rust-colored wool were f laking off the rug's edges. They needed a new rug, a new table, chairs and curtains--new everything, realGibson, Fiona is the author of 'Something Good', published 2008 under ISBN 9780373895571 and ISBN 0373895577.