Crumbs - Dan Brotzel

The cake sat in pride of place in the fridge, an ornate confection of glitter balls and sculpted chocolate frosting and sugar stars and gingerbread men done up as edible silver astronauts. It wasn’t exactly Bake Off standard, but it had a certain enthusiastic seven-year-old’s flair, and it was better than anything he could ever have done himself, as a child or an adult.

Mum had helped Lily with the decorating and the baking, channelling her daughter’s wild imaginings towards a realisable vision. The theme of the competition was Outer Space. The prize was an icing kit, and Lily wanted it badly. He had suggested a recreation of the lunar landing, perhaps with a nod to the popular conspiracy theory that it had never really happened. To his surprise they had gone with that as a broad theme, although the module had proved too fiddly, and the fake-landing idea had proved a bit too close to home for a medium which – like embroidery or Ceefax imagery – could only ever aspire to a very approximate realism.

The kitchen was a happy mess when it was done. Lily’s face was smeared with icing sugar and chocolate, and there were pools of egg white and dusty patches of flour everywhere – emblems all of a happy time, of hanging out with mum and a job well done.

The cake was moved with great ceremony onto a specially-emptied fridge shelf to set. Mum put out the fancy cake-tin it was to be placed in next morning. He only had one job: to get the cake to the table in the hall before the start of school, where it could be judged along with all the other entries.

All good! he said that night, from his seat at the PC. Leave it to me. He went in to the office late on Tuesdays, after doing the school drop. But first he’d have to work late tonight, to finish off the pitch deck. It was almost there, but he’d had some inputs in late from Tim and Karen. Both were useful additions, but none of it as yet cohered; no one had gone to the trouble of making all the strands of their submission hang together as a logical, fully integrated argument building to a powerful inescapable conclusion: Hire us!

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The night was not easy. Jake, the youngest, was up three times complaining of pains in his ears, and that woke his sister. Lily crawled into the bed with them some time in the wee blurry hours, and repeatedly broke into their slumber with her sleep-talking and her sleep-flailing. Mum had to get up on Tuesdays at 5.30am, and her alarm shocked him into consciousness at the very moment, or so it seemed, that he had finally reached the deep sleep he had been straining for the whole night.

‘When I get up, I make a point of being with my children. I get them ready for school, and I am present. Work can wait.’ So said, in a recent interview, the ceo of an early-stage fast-track tech company that was now entering hyper-growth and had been marked out by some analysts as a potential unicorn. Said the ceo: ‘If I check my email before I talk to my children in the morning, they know.’ This was the same company his presentation pitch was designed to win over.

It was a wonderful idea, and one worth trying. One day. But he had been up till past midnight getting the deck to a place he could be happy with. And though at that point his eyeballs were melting and he’d have been grateful to still recognise wood as wood, never mind worrying about mixing it up with the trees, he had gone to bed with a quiet sense of great achievement. His own personal work-cake was in the oven, and he had a sneaking suspicion that he might just be Star Baker this week. If there was any early feedback, he wanted to know about it.

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He stumbled into the kitchen, and began the rituals of breakfast and pre-school prep. Every so often, he shouted out groggy bulletins urging his children to wake up, come downstairs, eat their food. Mum had stuck up helpful notes with messages such as ‘Don’t forget Lily’s swimming goggles’ and ‘Ask Miss Hankey if Jake can go up to next reading level’. The notes embarrassed him because (a) they made him feel like a hopeless bloke who couldn’t organise basic family stuff himself, and (b) he was utterly dependent on them for getting through the next hour and a half.

Many of the movements were so familiar he could do them, as now, in his half-sleep. Beans in microwave. Bagels in toaster. Cut up apples. Shoes in pairs by door. Empty dishwasher, fill again. Drinks – hot milk for one, cold for the other. Porridge oats, Weetabix, a slice of chicken.

Then it was the scramble to get their clothes on and get them out the door in time. He had a system that he used, called the Big Five: Hair, Teeth, Bag, Shoes, Coat. ‘Which of your Big Five haven’t you done yet?’ Actually it should really have been the Big Six, because Getting Dressed needed to be in there too, and that was often the hardest one of all.

Getting them up the stairs. Getting them to concentrate on their clothes, instead of drifting off to re-build their railway track (him) or re-arrange their squishies (her). It wasn’t that they hadn’t anything specific they’d rather be doing, though they were always up for anything with a screen. It was that anything else was to them more interesting at that point than the one thing he needed them to do. And so inevitably, there would be tears and screams and shouting. And the kids didn’t always behave very well either.

In the midst of all this, his phone vibrated in his dressing-gown pocket. It was a purple fluffy gown of his wife’s which he always wore; he only allowed himself to get dressed after the kids were all done and stuck in front of the telly. He shouldn’t look; there would be plenty of time for all that later. Remember what that ceo said. And she was a ceo.

He looked. It was from Dom, his own personal Paul Hollywood. He could tell from the subject line already – ‘Urgent: Major concerns re deck’ – that he was not in line for any special handshake this week. He sat on the edge of the bed, oblivious now to the escalating squabbles coming from the kids’ bedroom next door.

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Dom was indeed concerned about the deck. The whole thing was poorly paced. Visually, it was cliched. It was way too long. It said nothing that couldn’t really have been said – and probably said much better – by any of our rivals. It was repetitive. There were gaps in the logic. And where it wasn’t illogical, it was banal. As a result, Dom needed everyone to drop everything else they were doing and get in for a 10am stand-up when roles and tasks would be assigned to fix this mess.

There were howls of pain and anger from next door now, but he didn’t hear them.

He went down to his PC, opened up his email, and began drafting a furious reply. He was very surprised by Dom’s response, he began with deceptive mildness. He had put a huge amount of work into it, at great personal cost, and he stood by what he had done. He believed that the client would be impressed by the dexterity of the argumentation and would gratefully discern, as Dom had clearly failed to, the subtle nuances of its movements, and how each strand both answered a specific point of the brief and also demonstrated by implication how each of their key competitors would not be as well placed to deliver on its requirements. Did Dom even get what the client wanted? Was he even looking at the right version of the deck? Was Dom determined, in short, to carry on being a fucking annoying moronic twat?

A scream from upstairs, too loud even for him to ignore. He clicked off his PC. This was an email he would never send. And besides, it was 8.47.

8.47! Fuck. He raced upstairs, roughly disentangled his fighting children, and began combing hair and scraping teeth and pulling on trousers with the energy of only-just-suppressed violence. He dragged the children into the car, and they had torn halfway down the hill before Lilly pointed out that they had left the cake behind.

Swearing quietly but intensely, he executed a neat Sweeney-esque turn and pointed the car back round the block to their house. He double-parked, sprinted in, shoved the cake in its tin, picked up his vital laptop and work-bag – which he discovered now he’d also forgotten – and drove off fast, much faster than the roads round his home allowed.

At the bottom of the hill, the turn to the right was one you could lean into without braking when cycling; he tried the same in his car now, but was forced to brake very sharply when an Ocado van emerged unseen from the left. The children lurched forward, folding horribly forward for a split-second over their belts. And the plastic bag with the cake-tin in flew off the front seat and rolled over and over again in the footwell.

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Outside the school, he kangarooed the car awkwardly past smug post-drop-off parents and in and out of side roads, looking for an elusive space. But everywhere – even the semi-dodgy spots, on private areas and resident-only slipways – was taken. In the end there was nothing for it but to park the Kangoo in the very nearest road, in front of the driveway of a man who had shouted at him only last week for parking in front of his driveway.

Next came the Sweaty Breathless Jog of Shame, up the pathway into school in the face of more smug parents who’d got it together enough this morning – and no doubt every morning, the smug staring fuckers – to get their kids to class on time. Once Jake had been dropped at his class, after some desperate knocking on the glass door – and after he had even remembered to ask about Jake’s reading level, though he had no recall now of what Miss Hankey’s response had been – he and Lilly whizzed frantically round to the school hall.

The lollipop lady – an enduring and much-loved figure, who enjoyed minor celebrity status in the local community – had agreed to judge the cakes. Cake deadline: 9am. Time now: 9.12am. But there had to be a grace period. There was always a fucking grace period. Sure enough, the lady from the office smiled at Lilly, and made a space for her offering. Her dad opened the tin and inspected the contents.

It was total devastation inside. One astronaut had been beheaded; the other had been broken into three pieces, all now embedded at awkward angles in brown sugary mud. The carefully sculpted chocolate lunarscape had attached itself smearily to the inside of the tin lid. The decorative stars and balls and planets had all fallen off or stuck to the sides where they didn’t belong, so that none of the constellations that mum and Lilly had spent so long on recreating could be made out. The artful surface crater no longer worked either, not now that the cake was essentially all crater.

Or rather cakes. He pulled out the four main pieces it had broken into, and tried to arrange them into some semblance of a pattern. Then he added the smaller pieces around them in a rough orbit of cake asteroids. Then, for want of anything else to do, he poured the thick layer of crumbs from the bottom of the tin over the remnants of his daughter’s Outer Space-themed competition entry.

Next to her ex-cake, the other entries bore extraordinary witness to hour upon hour of tender kitchen artistry. There was a space galaxy cake, atop which meringue planets – all to scale, all decorated according to current astronomical knowledge of each body’s respective surface – revolved around a marzipan sun. There was an intricate space shuttle in mid-launch, whose great billows of smoke turned out to be wonderfully plumed cupcakes. Someone had created an ingenious space beach with the help of popcorn, Cheerios and crushed honeycomb. There was a giant rocket made with five different colours of sponge, and another marbled wonder that recreated that famous shot of the world as seen from space.

In short, there was evidence everywhere of mums and dads who cared enough about their kids to get their cakes to school unbroken. He felt a sudden stab of hatred at Dom, and another because he knew that this was just his guilt lashing out.

He wondered what was worse. The pitying look on the lollipop lady’s face? The forthcoming row with the driveway man? The realisation that he was still wearing his pyjama trousers? But really, there was no competition. His daughter’s face – on which the dark night of extreme disappointment was already turning dawn-like into an expression of almost cosmic forgiveness – easily won that prize.

Originally published in Brotzel’s short story collection, Hotel du Jack, 2020 

Dan Brotzel's books include a novel, The Wolf in the Woods (Bloodhound Books) and a memoir, Awareness Daze (WF Howes) -- an account of his attempt to observe a different awareness day or fake holiday every single day for a year! 

Twitter: @brotzel_fiction | Medium: danielbrotzel.medium.com | Sign up for an occasional newsletter