The Baking Life of Amelie Day by Vanessa Curtis

– yum – or even 50g of desiccated coconut for a different flavour. These biscuits are a pretty good way of experimenting with loads of different flavours and toppings.

Chapter Seven
    I miss five days at school.
    Trish’s latest sample shows that I have another chest infection brewing and I need to take more antibiotics in addition to the ones I take every day by inhaling from my nebuliser. Mum’s been shown how to feed the new stronger drugs into a tube that feeds in through my portacath, so she does this every day and I lie on the sofa and complain about not being able to make cakes. I read recipe books instead, one after another, and start scribbling down pages of ideas.
    I glance at the list of rules from the competition organisers. For the two baked desserts, I have to make some mini-puddings and then a larger one. I’m agonising between dark chocolate fondant mini-cakes with Chantilly crème or rich moist mini-Bakewell tarts with home-made almond ice cream. For the larger cake I’m pretty sure I’m going to do my famous sticky German gingerbread with vanilla custard.
    So I wait until the fourth day when I’ve started to feel a bit better and I go back into the kitchen and start messing around with flour and sugar and peanuts and eggs. Mum comes in from work and does a big blissed-out sniff of the air and tries not to look at the smeared work surfaces, the flour all over the floor and the knives covered in butter and flung into bowls.
    ‘I hope you’re not overdoing it,’ Mum says.
    I pull a face. We’re only just speaking, Mum and I. We have a pretty intense relationship at the best of times. She’s the only one who sees me when I’m really sick and she’s the one who has to deal with it. Sometimes I don’t even want to look at her worried, tired face any more because all it does is remind me how sick I get.
    The day before yesterday she tried to put her arm around me while she held a bowl in front of my face for me to cough stuff into and I pushed her away. Hard. The bowl fell to the floor and Mum jumped as if she’d been shot, but then she saw my face and chest contorting with the effort of getting all the mucus up and her face softened. She sat next to me on the edge of the bed, taking care not to touch me that time, and she held the bowl until I’d finished and carried it out and cleaned it in the bathroom. Then she got me a glass of water and for supper she made me a bowl of thick mushroom soup with a swirl of cream on the top.
    ‘You need to eat it,’ she said. ‘You’re getting too thin again.’
    I still felt sick but I drank the soup and a faint colour crept back into my white face.
    Mum is brilliant. And I know she is, which makes it feel really horrid when I’m mean to her and yell stuff at her.
    Sometimes I tell her to get the hell out of my bedroom.
    ***
    It’s two days until my annual review.
    I’m back at school for a half-day because I’m tiring really easily at the moment and Mum wants me home straight after lunch. It’s kind of tough dipping in and out of school like this. I feel I miss out on a lot of stuff, even just the classroom gossip. The other kids are fine about it and some of them make a point of asking me how I am, but I still feel like I stick out like a sore lung.
    It doesn’t help that I’m smaller and thinner than most of the rest of my class. Despite that, I’m a pretty key member of the football team. Because I’m small and wiry I can dodge the other players and hold onto the ball.
    I play a match in the morning after using my inhaler and then I sit through double maths and by the time the bell goes for lunch I feel pretty wiped. I don’t tell anybody. There are teachers who look out for me and if I told them I was feeling bad they’d send me to the school nurse and she’d ring Mum straight away.
    ‘You OK?’ Harry says. We’re walking towards the back of the school to eat our lunch underneath the big oak tree near the playing fields and the short