Mrs O noticed the slightly crazed look in Cherry’s eyes. She clutched the cross around her neck and sent up a silent prayer for her friend. She laid a comforting palm on Cherry’s shoulder. ‘Cherry, people are starting to notice you’re out and about again.’ Mrs O kept her voice as cheerful as she could. ‘Let’s carry on as normal, shall we?’ Mrs Overfield wanted so much to help her but she feared Cherry might need professional help. She couldn’t deny, though, that Cherry was an entirely different person to the flour-covered one she’d discovered a year ago. Even so, Cherry had a long way to go before she was back to what society considered ‘normal’.
Cherry got to the bottom of the page and stopped to count: twenty-eight Meddlums for fifteen people. A thrill rippled through her, bringing her to her feet, her goal clear. ‘And we’re off!’ she exclaimed, sweeping a surprised-looking Mrs Overfield down the road with her.
An hour or so later, Cherry and Mrs O were walking back up the high street when Cherry saw the shadow of a Meddlum. Its darkness engulfed one side of the street almost entirely and as it came lumbering around the corner she saw the young girl, tiny against the black fur of a Meddlum Cherry didn’t recognise. The girl looked about seventeen, and wore a school uniform. Cherry dropped Mrs O’s arm and ran across the road, only just missing the bonnet of a car and oblivious to the angry driver honking the horn in one long blast.
You!’ she shouted at the girl, stumbling to a stop in front of her. ‘What are you feeling right now?’ Cherry had never seen this Meddlum before, and certainly not one this big or this obvious. It was tall and round with white tendrils of hair that were thick and matted against its scalp. Its face was long with a protruding nose and tiny half-moon spectacles were balanced right on the tip of it. It sniffed haughtily and made a particularly strong effort to look down on Cherry.
‘What?’ the girl said, clutching her stylish over-the-shoulder satchel closer to her body.
‘How do you feel?’ Cherry pushed impatiently, stepping closer and forcing the girl to step backwards. The girl turned and began hurriedly walking away but Cherry pursued, fixed entirely on finding out what this Meddlum was.
‘Leave me alone,’ the girl called over her shoulder, raising her voice.
‘Cherry!’ Mrs O had only just caught up with her. ‘Leave that poor girl alone. You can’t go chasing after people you don’t know!’ Mrs O was trying to keep her voice down to avoid alerting passers-by to Cherry’s strange behaviour, but the slight commotion had already been noticed and several curtains were twitching.
Please,’ Cherry begged, ignoring Mrs O. She ran around in front of the girl, causing her to stop dead in her tracks. She even placed her hands on the girl’s shoulders. ‘I just need to know exactly what you’re feeling at this precise moment.’
The girl looked at Mrs O, frantic but seemingly harmless, and then at Cherry, kooky but clearly kind. ‘Look.’ The young girl flipped her sheen of brown hair over her shoulders, facing Cherry square on. ‘I’ve had a really bad day. I’ve failed most of my exams and now I have to go home and tell my parents what a disappointment I am. They’re going to kill me.’ The girl was about to sob but she composed herself quickly before continuing. ‘And then David Prime told someone in the year above, who told my friend Hannah, who told me that he was going to ask me out after school today and… and he didn’t. So the last thing I need is some weirdo following me down the street, OK?’ The girl’s eyes shone with tears. She turned on her heel and ran in the opposite direction, desperate to get away from Cherry.
‘Disappointment?’ Cherry said. ‘It’s disappointment?’
The Meddlum looked over its shoulder and winked at Cherry.
‘DISAPPOINTMENT!’ she yelled.
Mrs O reached over and cupped Cherry’s hands in hers, squeezing them tightly. ‘I think it’s time to go home,’ she said gently.
‘Vanilla pods. I just need vanilla pods,’ Cherry said distractedly as she scribbled the nameless girl and her Meddlum onto her list.
‘Vanilla pods. Then home.’ Mrs O led Cherry carefully towards the shops, pretending not to notice the stares from the townspeople.
A short while later, Cherry and Mrs O were back at Cherry’s house. Cherry looked at her now very long list of townspeople and their Meddlums. At the top was Mrs Brewer. Cherry knew that Mrs Brewer loved tea, and was kind to people who were not kind in return.
Mrs Brewer: Anxious and Bored.
‘Let’s start with the Anxiety,’ Cherry muttered. ‘Tranquillity Teacakes, maybe.’ She wrote her choice beside Mrs Brewer’s name.
‘What was that, dear?’ Mrs O asked, looking up from where she was making tea.
‘Teacakes,’ Cherry said. ‘I’m going to make some for Mrs Brewer.’
‘How sweet of you!’ Mrs O beamed. ‘You seem very calm, Cherry. It’s lovely. It’s… well, it’s unusual.’ She eyed Cherry, suddenly worried she was up to something.
‘I’m always calm when I’m baking.’ Cherry smiled for the first time in a long time. ‘It makes me feel…’ Cherry breathed in the scent of pastry and with it the memory of her father struck her, ‘… less alone.’
And with that, Loneliness, who usually stood tall, shrank by two inches.
4
Proof in the Pudding
Cherry’s self-expression had always been minimal. As a child she’d worn what her father had clothed her in, without question. She read the books she was told to read at school, nothing more, and she rarely watched television. She didn’t sing along to the radio and she certainly didn’t write or draw or play an instrument. She hadn’t changed much as she grew older, except that she chose to wear, almost exclusively, pyjamas and slippers. But now that she’d found baking, everything had changed. It was the best form of self-expression she could’ve hoped for, maybe more literally than even she realised.
The Tranquillity Teacakes went down a treat. Mrs Brewer’s Anxiety melted a little more with each bite she took. It didn’t disappear entirely, but its limbs became thinner, shorter and less entwined with Boredom than they had been before. So, with less anxiety about going outside and with more drive to cure her boredom, Mrs Brewer left the house more often than she used to. She now felt more able to stand up for herself when the grumpy woman in the corner shop tried to short-change her. Usually, Mrs Brewer was so eaten up with angst that she would have just left without a word and beaten herself up later on about not saying anything. Instead, this time, Mrs Brewer took a breath and said, ‘Excuse me, but this isn’t right. You’ve short-changed me by fifty pence.’
‘And?’ sniffed the grumpy woman.
Mrs Brewer walked up to the counter and looked her in the eyes. ‘And, I’m not leaving until that fifty-pence piece is in my hand.’
Several people in the shop looked over in astonishment and the grumpy woman (not wanting an uprising among the elderly whom she often short-changed), reluctantly opened the till drawer and slammed the fifty-pence piece down on the counter with a grunt.
Mrs Brewer couldn’t have known that it was the teacakes making her feel less anxious but something in her steady heart told her she should order some more. She turned up on Cherry’s doorstep a few days later with a five-pound note in her hand, asking if Cherry wouldn’t mind making her some more.
The Humble Pie that Cherry made for Mr Datta changed him for the better too, and the other residents noticed the difference in him. Mr Datta had always considered himself a very big fish in a very small pond. He was a tailor by trade and owned an elegant shop on the high street. Each morning he slicked back his hair, donned his hand-made suit and walked to his shop, his journey twice as long as it should’ve been because he couldn’t help but stop to admire himself in shopfront windows several times. Although he was an incredibly talented tailor, no one entered his shop unless they really had to because they couldn’t bear to hear any more about his latest female conquests or the offers to travel abroad to work with the most top-end designers, nor could they stand to watch him admir
ing himself in the mirror, combing his hair and licking his teeth.
Cherry left the pie on Mr Datta’s doorstep with a note from a ‘secret admirer’, knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist. The is dotted with hearts would massage his ego enough to convince him to eat it. Two days later, Cherry smiled to herself as Mrs O recounted, with some astonishment, how Mr Datta had walked down the entire length of the high street without stopping to look at his reflection. Not even once. It was a good start but Cherry made a note to up the dosage a little in the next pie.
Cherry didn’t know Miss Kightley very well but they lived three doors down from each other so Cherry thought it wouldn’t be too odd if she popped over with her Patience Profiteroles. Impatience was constantly prodding the small of Miss Kightley’s back so she came across as tightly wound but she had a good soul. Cherry had seen her wheel Cherry’s bins to the front of her drive when Cherry had forgotten it was collection day, and she was always grateful for these small acts of kindness.
Miss Kightley was in her late forties and was happily unmarried. She’d had several partners over the years but she just didn’t enjoy long-term companionship. ‘The men I find only end up getting in the way,’ Cherry had once heard her say to Samuel.
She owned the local florist, and because she was a clever woman who knew how powerful a tool the internet was, she now ran most of her business online and had employed Felicity and Fawn Seymour to run the store itself. Felicity and Fawn were a married couple whose front garden was full of colour and wildlife, and they were the perfect people for Miss Kightley to entrust with her livelihood. Their valuable help left Miss Kightley free to spend most of the year in Spain, and work from there, and when she did return to the town, she returned with glamour and her kind heart. But Impatience was never far behind either.
One evening, Cherry rang the bell after dinner and knowing that Miss Kightley didn’t like to be kept waiting, she kept her delivery short and sweet. ‘Profiteroles. For you. Just… because.’ Cherry handed Miss Kightley the bowl. ‘And thank you,’ she called over her shoulder as she quickly left, not giving Impatience the time to get riled.
‘Thank you,’ Miss Kightley said, eyeing the profiteroles keenly through the cling film. She had just been berating herself for not getting any afters while she’d been at the supermarket earlier so Cherry’s appearance couldn’t have been better timed.
She pierced the cling film with her fingernail, speared it straight into a profiterole, which she then popped into her mouth. As the cream oozed out of the sides and melted on her tongue, Impatience’s prodding fingers began melting until they were nothing more than tiny little stumps.
Cherry had never felt so alive. She was helping people, really helping them. Perhaps now was the time to help herself, too.
‘Are you OK?’ Mrs O asked one evening, noticing that Cherry’s hands were twitching and shaking. ‘A little bit of calm would do your jitters some good.’
Mrs O was right. She needed some calmness. Cherry hopped off the sofa without a word, poked a hole in the foil that was covering the next batch of Mrs Brewer’s teacakes and took a bite out of the smallest one. Would it help her? She chewed and swirled the sweet bread around her mouth, hoping to get a hit of serenity, but it was no use. It wasn’t working. She could taste lavender and the beauty of the cold side of the pillow but her hands still shook and every nerve ending was crackling. She had thought it might be too good to be true. Cherry could help everyone but herself. Although she was happy to have a purpose, a reason to wake up each morning, this felt like a cruel twist to her strange gift. She had hoped that in helping other people reach their full potential, she would eventually feel like she was reaching her own – but curing her own ills with her gift wasn’t going to be the way to do it.
When Cherry woke up the next morning, Mrs O had a surprise for her.
‘Come on, you,’ she said when Cherry opened the front door. ‘Put something nice on. I’m taking you somewhere.’
Cherry groaned but her curiosity over what Mrs O was up to got the better of her so she put on a new pair of blue and purple striped pyjamas and her usual grey slippers.
‘Cherry Redgrave, you get back upstairs and put on something more appropriate for leaving this house!’ Mrs O said, laughing but only half-joking. She was worried about Cherry’s constant need to wear pyjamas. She had been so much better recently but refusing to get dressed seemed like the symptom of something else, something Mrs O couldn’t fix.
‘They’re the comfiest clothes known to man,’ Cherry insisted. ‘Why anyone would choose to wear dresses you can’t breathe in and high heels you can’t walk in when pyjamas and slippers are readily available to everyone… well, it’s beyond me!’
Mrs O could see the determination in Cherry’s eyes and didn’t have the energy to fight her. Not after she’d spent her morning planning the surprise.
Mrs O signed. ‘Fine. At least your hair looks lovely,’ she conceded. And it did. The purple scarf Cherry had tied around her head pulled her black Afro hair off her face into a curly explosion at the back of her head, bar a few curls she’d pulled through to the front.
Mrs Overfield led Cherry along a familiar route through the town, with Loneliness and Worry trudging not far behind. After a few minutes they entered the village and Cherry’s steps started to slow so much that Loneliness almost stumbled into her.
‘Please don’t take me there,’ Cherry said quietly. ‘I’m not ready.’ She could see the familiar outline of her father’s bakery, silhouetted against the sun. On one side was Sew & Sew, the arts and crafts shop, and on the other was a second-hand bookshop, imaginatively named The Second-Hand Book Shop. Cherry stared at the bakery. It was still so full of character. Cherry had chosen the fire-engine-red paint on the window frames and door when she was a child and her father had gladly obliged. The sign above the entrance used to read Samuel’s but the paint was cheap and now, a year after her father had died, it said S mue ’s. Cherry couldn’t bear it.
‘Cherry, my dear. How long can you shut yourself away for? I mean, really?’ Mrs O said gently, looping her arm through Cherry’s. ‘I know it’s painful but… don’t you think the best way to mourn your father is to honour his memory? I’ve tasted your baking and it’s just as good as, if not better than, Sam’s.’
Cherry stared at the sign above the door and was hit with a sudden feeling of having let her father down. She thought of all that time she had wasted under her bedsheets, indulging in Loneliness’s game, when she could have been looking after her father’s legacy. They continued walking and as they got closer, Cherry spotted the makeshift sign pinned to the top of the door frame. On a large piece of cardboard, someone (Mrs O probably) had added the words and Daughter underneath what was left of Samuel’s name.
Cherry rolled up her sleeves, literally and figuratively, an idea beginning to take shape in her mind. ‘You’re right,’ she said.
It’s time I take what I can do seriously, she thought. She started to think about which types of treats she would bake first, how she would rearrange the tables and chairs and how she’d make use of that large kitchen in the back. This was the purpose she’d been looking for.
‘And I know you’re stubborn and you probably don’t want to… wait, what did you just say?’ Mrs O spun to face her.
‘I said, you’re right,’ Cherry sniffed. ‘It’s been long enough and Dad wouldn’t have wanted me to spend the rest of my life… alone.’ She glanced behind her and saw Loneliness shrink into her shadow. ‘I am a baker. I’ve always been a baker. It’s time I started acting like one.’
Mrs O had done more than just put up a scruffy sign. While the outside needed a lick of paint, the inside had been restored to its former glory and Mrs O explained how the townspeople had all chipped in. Miss Kightley had paid the rent on the building for the next year on the condition that Cherry always had profiteroles on hand. Mrs Brewer and Mrs Overfield had bought her the missing bits of equipment they couldn’t find in her fat
her’s old things and they’d replaced anything that was broken with new things. And Felicity and Fawn had guaranteed her fresh flowers for every table, to be delivered weekly for the next six months.
‘It’s wonderful.’ Cherry couldn’t help but stifle a sob as she walked through the door and saw all her donors, her friends, standing in a line at the counter. They’d all been loyal customers of her father’s when the shop had belonged to him and now they were showing her the same support. She would stand behind the counter proudly, not only because she wanted to be there but because her father’s friends wanted to see her there too. That meant more to her than they could possibly know.
‘We know you’ll turn this place into something magical. Just like your father did.’ Mrs Kightley wasn’t the emotional type but Cherry was sure she heard the thickness of a lump in her throat.
Cherry looked over at the OPEN/CLOSED sign on the door. She’d always hated it. It was old-fashioned and made of tin that had turned rusty over the years. She couldn’t understand why her dad wouldn’t replace it and she’d always avoided touching it if she could. But now that the shop was hers, the sign was also hers and she couldn’t bring herself to see it go. It was only small but it was a piece of her father and so it had to stay.
Cherry shook her head to clear her thoughts. ‘First things first.’ She turned to her friends. ‘The menu.’
5
Too Much Of A Good Thing