Cake
‘I baked this for you.’
He presents me with a square metal tin, on its lid a photograph of a golden retriever. A friend of a friend, he is tall with dark hair and a goatee. We are in the kitchen of his flat near the University, our mutual connection in the next room with a small group of other students. It is a night shortly after my 20th birthday. His eyes are pale turquoise and his fingers are warm as he hands me the tin. Part of me is wishing everyone else would leave so we could be alone together. Part of me is terrified that if they did I would not know what to do next.
As I prise open the lid, I wonder if he is interested in me in that way, or if he is just being kind. I am not at my best.
Body dysmorphia means that, like a vampire, I cannot see my true appearance in a mirror, but in photos I can tell that I am frail, pale skin drawn over protruding sinews, organs discernible through a concave belly. Surely, no one would want that. Still, when I arrived he offered me the least-frayed puce velour armchair in his cramped lounge, and now there is this gift.
Inside the tin is a cake, heavy with cocoa, butter and brown sugar. It smells of the sweet apricots he pulverised to flavour its sunrise-coloured icing. My mouth fills with saliva and closes like a vice. I will not be compelled to consume delicious calories by anyone, not even this sky-eyed man who wears a black leather trench coat and listens when I speak.
‘Don’t show the others,’ he says. ‘They’ll all want some. It’s meant for you.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, sincerely, though I have no intention of eating any of this tempting treat.
We rejoin the others. Leonard Cohen sings, and arguments about politics and art roll on unresolved. Eventually, the group disperses to various shared houses. I leave, clutching the sweet offering shut up in its tin. As I walk home up the dark hill to my student flat, an invisible thread of desire, which I am too frightened to turn and follow, spools out behind me.
Alone in my bedroom, I reopen the lid and sink my hands into the cool icing and through to the soft, moist cake. I close my eyes and see the turquoise blue of a spring sky; feel imaginary hands on my skin.
Then I wiggle my fingers and bring them together inside the cake to form tools for excavation. I begin to scoop and separate. I smell chocolate, fruit and sweetness. My stomach growls like an animal. I gouge, my hands never approaching my lips, until, finally, the whole baked confection is devastated.
Carrying the ruins carefully through to the kitchen, my feet are cold on the cracked lino. I wash out the tin, pushing the mushed contents down the plug hole, encouraging them with crumb-smeared fingers. Once the cake is all gone, I use Palmolive Gold dishwashing liquid to clean my hands. Its smell of chemical lemons lingers as I lie in bed, empty and safe.
Clare Needham (she/her) is a writer, mother and public servant from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. She was a founder and co-managing editor of JAAM literary magazine. Her work has recently been published in Turbine | Kapohau and Brevity. Clare lives in a cottage in the hills with an abundantly fluffy cat and many spider plants.