There's More to Life Than Cupcakes Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  The Bad Boyfriends Bootcamp

  The Baker Shop Exclusive Discount

  Copyright

  THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN CUPCAKES

  POPPY DOLAN

  For Ben and Amelie, Daisy and Jack, and Finn. Unbelievably, there is more to life than cupcakes – and it’s you.

  Chapter One

  It all started on my thirty-first birthday. You think you’re going to have those ‘What does it all mean?!’ wobbles when you hit the big three-oh but my thirtieth birthday actually went by in a lovely whoosh of rum, ear-ringing karaoke and two different Ryan Gosling calendars as gifts. I was too busy trying not to throw up cocktails to really take stock of where my life was going. But that’s because being thirty has a certain cute ring to it, a sort of shiny novelty. It’s heralded in by numbered balloons and special presents and everyone making you feel awesome, which definitely helps. Turning thirty-one has none of that cuteness. The fact that you’re in a whole other decade of your life has had 365 days to sink in. You know the tick boxes on forms, the ones that ask if you’re eighteen to twenty-five, or twenty-five to thirty-five? You catch yourself worrying that before you know it, neither of those boxes will be your tick buddies.

  I’m not complaining about this year’s birthday, far from it. I had had a tops day in the pub, a nice clean and cosy one where our friends with babies could come in the daytime and the friends who still had lie-ins could then come after and sink cider till very late. I drank rum again, I was given great presents again (sadly no Ryan G this year. Had I grievously offended these people?!), I had funny and gorgeous and kind people around me. But something was different.

  A more sensible Ellie would have paced herself on the drinks front. A more mature Ellie would have let go of the fact she had no Ryan Gosling filth in her hands. And an Ellie with any kind of heart would have been delighted by Pete’s present, rather than slightly horrified by it.

  There was that lovely flash in his eyes that he gets when he’s excited and the crinkles that form just above his cheeks when he smiles really hard.

  ‘Don’t even try. You’ll never guess.’ After he handed over my present, Pete nudged elbows with my oldest mate Jules and she matched his grin.

  It was beautifully wrapped in midnight-blue paper and with a gold ribbon knotted pretty sternly around the middle. I had to use my house keys to saw it off, all the while running through my mind: This is definitely a book. Is there a new Jamie out? Are Pete and I already at the couples’ stage where we just buy each other cookbooks? Maybe I should spice up my underwear collection or something.

  And when I tore back the paper, I saw a book that was strangely familiar. But at the same time, not quite.

  It was an A4 hardback with that maroon marbled-effect paper you always used to see at school. I turned the first page and saw in big block letters:

  ELLIE REDFORD’S TWENTIES LEAVER’S BOOK

  Say goodbye to your twenties and hello to the rest of your life!

  I looked hard at Pete. I don’t think I was capable of blinking at that point.

  ‘Do you get it?’ He plonked down next to me on one of the pub’s trendily battered sofas. ‘I’m just kicking myself that I didn’t think of it in time for last year. But you know when we were clearing out the random drawer months ago, you pulled out your Sixth Form Leavers’ book and something clicked. We should do a leavers’ book for your twenties! Everyone helped with the pictures, see?’ He reached his arm around me to turn the pages.

  There I was on nights out, holidays, hen dos, picnics, uniformly with my sandy hair pulled back into a doubled-over ponytail and with smiling cheeks forcing my eyes into a squinty line. Some really bad uni fashions – I took too long to accept that flares do NOT balance out your bum – one regrettably short fringe, but all memories I was very happy to relive on the printed page. I got a big thumping hit of warmth behind my chest. Pete was bloody great at presents.

  I settled further back into the sofa and Jules and some of my other mates crowded round to have a nose as Pete explained the pages. I leafed through them slowly in smug pleasure and awe.

  ‘Now this bit, this is great. Like a time capsule, sort of.’ He pointed to a double-page spread titled THEN AND NOW … On the left hand was a copy of my actual Sixth Form Leavers’ book: the future aspirations bit. I had a dusty memory of sharing a plastic seat with Jules in the cafeteria, scribbling self-involved dreams. It started ‘When I’m thirty …’ and you had to fill in five blanks, predicting your own future. It had felt so far away then, but as I sat on the creaking leather sofa, Jules’s face peering over my shoulder like I was holding the 1999 Heat annual, it could have been yesterday.

  So this is what I’d written.

  When I’m 30 …

  … I’ll have a massive penthouse flat in London, overlooking the Thames

  … I’ll be a kick-ass executive doing something really creative!

  … I’ll have been to New York a million times

  … I’ll still be best mates with Jules, Stacey and Cherry!!!

  … I’ll have a gorgeous husband and three children. Maybe a dog!

  And then Pete, bless his M&S socks, had filled in on the opposite page:

  And now you’re 31 …

  … You rent a flat in one of South London’s most fancy boroughs. A deli on every corner in East Dulwich! With a house deposit building up nicely.

  … You hold Crumbs magazine together with your amazing talents at work. They’d be printing it with potato shapes if it wasn’t for you.

  … You’ve been to New York (though just the once – so far) and even had a snog on the Brooklyn Bridge, like that Sex and the City thing

  … Jules is still one of your besties. Stacey made a nuisance of herself when she moved to Australia and we all know why no one speaks to Cherry any more.

  … TOP MARKS for gorgeous husband. Nailed it on that one. The children bit won’t be far off, hopefully!!!!

  I felt each and every one of Pete’s exclamations. Like you feel those early stoma
ch cramps before you realise you’ve got food poisoning. Pete’s an accountant; he’s more likely to declare love via an Excel spreadsheet than he is to use effusive punctuation.

  But I knew what was hidden under that seemingly jaunty clutch of exclamation marks. It’s the pregnant elephant in the room that neither of us knows how to mention, and just like a pregnant elephant, it’s been like this for a while now. Pete wants to know whether Ellie-at-thirty-one still wants what Ellie-at-eighteen clearly did. And if so, why is she taking so long about it?

  Do I want a baby?

  Exactly.

  I felt something constrict in my throat, closed the book carefully and went to the bar.

  Chapter Two

  Maybe I wasn’t in the best mood before I even got to the pub that night. I should put my hand up for that one. Pete and I had been to see my parents earlier in the day, for a lovely lunch in my favourite gastro pub. Mild-mannered parents paying for three courses of fancy sweetbreads, foams and confited business, with a handsome husband by my side. What kind of grumpy guts can’t enjoy that? I’m a foodie; and I mean I’m really a foodie. I have more cookbooks than novels on my shelves. I bake a Bakewell, well. For the love of Delia, I’ve even ended up working on a foodie magazine – albeit a small one with a bonkers CEO and I only sell ad space. But stick a big fork in me and you’ll have to seriously compress the wound to stop all the salted caramel sauce that will spurt out.

  So the birthday lunch is delicious, the chatter all so merry, Pete is doing a good job – as he has for the last six years – of pretending golf doesn’t make him want to recall all the groin strain injuries he’s ever had, just to feel some sort of emotional stimulation. But then, when we go back to theirs for coffee, they give me a Magimix food processor. It’s so substantial and shiny it looks like it could enter orbit.

  There I was, cooing over the instruction booklet, outlining the three (yes, three) different super-sharp chopping blades, how the dough hook worked, the recipe for the perfect aïoli, as happy as a fox with a bin bag. I was in a conservatory in Buckinghamshire with my husband and I was giddy over a Magimix. Yes, I am absolutely aware that that is the most middle-aged, middle-class sentence ever constructed. But actually, I’d long ago embraced being a food geek and it certainly wasn’t news to Pete or the extra inch at his waistline. There’s not much I can do about having a retired civil servant for a mother or a golf-playing dad. So the middle-aged, middle-class thing I could probably have let slide as my post-lunch carbs coma welcomed me snugly. What tipped the scales was Mum sneaking in The Conversation again.

  Now and then, like a trolley dumped in a pond, The Conversation comes along and disturbs my sense of calm with a clunk.

  It usually goes like this:

  Mum: How are you feeling?

  Me: OK.

  Mum: OK?

  Me: Ye-es. Why?

  Mum: Well, it’s just that you didn’t have any wine with Sunday lunch that last time you came. And I thought …

  Me: Mum! No! Come on. I was green to the gills with a hangover. Probably due to the seven cocktails the night before. If I was pregnant that baby would come out like an extra for Mad Men: liquored-up and slurring.

  Mum: Drinking while pregnant is no joke. I saw an article—

  Me: Ah, yes, is that the dishwasher beeping? Anyway, how’s Jean?

  Because, you see, I’m over thirty, married, healthy, employed, female and alive: so according to my mum it’s half past have-a-baby-already.

  This week’s Conversation came as part of the Magimix appreciation society around the wicker table.

  My mum cleared her throat softly. ‘It’s great for purees. You know, soups, sauces, food for Baby.’

  My mind sort of left my body and floated up to the glazed ceiling, butting against the wooden beams, as it tended to do when she pressed on the procreation issue. Who was this Baby? Had she, through the sheer will of her passive-aggressive hint dropping, managed to magic up a child for me, one I didn’t even know about? Was I going to be forced to take it home, along with my leftover birthday cake? And while I was sitting there having an out-of-body experience, Pete hadn’t so much as flicked his eyes away from the page about not overloading the feeding tube. It wasn’t weird to him that my mum was referring so confidently to this future hypothetical tot and its potential dinner menu.

  Which makes it official: it’s just me who has the problem. Somewhere along the way from being an eighteen-year-old with dreams of a hot husband, a corner office and half a Von Trapp family band, I’ve hit thirty-one with an excellent bloke in the bag, but a lukewarm career and a slight chill in my bones about the whole baby business.

  The thing is: I do love babies. And I do want a baby; I mean, especially with Pete. He’s tallish, handsome, kind, clever and understands the many uses of good quality olive oil. I could feasibly win a Nobel Prize for making more like him. But as much as I want a baby and I see that everything on paper looks peachy … I’m not sure. I want a baby but I’m not convinced I want to be a mum. Yes, I do understand that’s kind of part of the process and inevitable. I see the lovely, fluffy image of a baby in my mind – its wispy hair, its tiny shoes, its sleepy smell – but then comes swooping in the image of me as The Mummy: red raw eyes from no sleep, greasy hair from no shower in three weeks, diary covered in an inch of dust as my social life moulders, emails piling up from colleagues saying how comfy my replacement is getting at my desk … Not to mention the possibility that I could take a lovely, innocent bundle of joy and through bad choices, a short temper and my desire to watch a lot of telly, turn it into a rotten human being.

  But I really need to sort out these wobbles. Because it’s not just my mum: it’s Pete. He’s bringing up his own version of The Conversation quite a bit: The I’m Just Wondering. ‘I’m just wondering whether I should get cracking clearing out that big cupboard in the spare room, just in case we need more storage space …’ ‘I’m just wondering whether we should RSVP to Phil’s wedding next summer in Greece now, or wait a bit. We don’t know where we might be in a year’s time …’ It all feels like a warm-up to ‘I’m just wondering when you should come off the Pill’.

  It seems like that ‘one in the oven’ phrase is getting more and more appropriate to me. OK, so I have none in the oven right now, but the whole timing of getting preggo seems super crucial. Like a good cookie baking away at 180°C, you’ve got to know when to commit to whipping them out. Too early is a mistake, but leave it too late and you risk being all dried out like a Weetabix. So do I get my eggs mixed up with Pete’s … ingredients now – when it feels too soon – or do I play that dangerous game of hopping about in front of the oven, nervously biding my time and then leaving it all too late? I could be the dried husk of a cookie in a few years if I’m not careful. And that makes me shake in my trainers just to contemplate it. So the only thing I can do is nothing. I stop thinking about it, read a book, put the washing on, hope Pete won’t bring it up again till I’m totally mentally sorted on the issue. Because that’s bound to happen soon, right? In the meantime, I’ll just keep having my recurring dream about floating egg-shaped kitchen timers.

  Chapter Three

  The phantom Baby was following me round the pub that night and Pete’s gift – as thoughtful and inspired and amazing as it was – only served to make me a little bit twitchier about this child everyone was so sure I was having.

  In a badly thought-out act of rebellion, I got stupid drunk. I’m the last of the original thinkers. When my lovely mate Lyds finally showed her face at elevenish, the first thing she said wasn’t ‘Happy birthday!’ or ‘Sorry I’m a bit late – I was at a silent disco and left my phone in the loos’ but, ‘Ooof, darling, you stink of Bacardi. Is it Back to School night or something?’

  I gave her a full body hug. ‘Could be. Because I’m still young. We’re still young, right? I look like I did when you met me, right? I could pass for eighteen, yeah?’ Suddenly I was aware I was holding her by the shoulders.

 
Lyds squinted, most likely taking in my blood alcohol levels through the fact my eyeliner was now on my cheeks and that I was still digging my fingers into her leather bomber jacket.

  ‘Sooo, are you having a good birthday?’ she asked in a deadpan tone.

  ‘Yes! Especially now you’re here! My friend, my bestie, my Lydia Chlamydia. Oh, come here.’

  I remember that she sidestepped my second hug and the fumes that followed it. ‘I am your bestie, right?’ Her eyebrows arched.

  ‘Of course! I wuv you.’

  ‘So you’d do me a favour, right?’

  ‘Anything for you. An-nee-thing.’

  According to Lydia, this is when I agreed to go on an adult education baking class. For her.

  The thing is, I can already bake pretty damn well. I get gasps of delight at my double-chocolate cookies. I get near-orgasmic grunts when a friend bites into my lemon drizzle. I’m not reinventing the wheel here, but I do myself proud in the baking department. But, as with most of Lyds’s cunning plans, me taking a baking class had very little to do with me baking.

  After she’d sneaked the OK out of me on my birthday night, I tried to wriggle out of the deal, with the argument that I’d hardly been in sound body or mind. But I found myself having coffee with her instead a few days later as she makes her case over flaky pastry. Butter is like an addictive drug to me – I am powerless in its presence.

  ‘I refuse to believe that you found a hot, viable man in Beginner’s Textile Jewellery.’ She half-squinted as if preparing her rebuttal but I soldiered on, ‘I literally refuse to believe it.’ I held up my hands, palms out, as if the idea of this man was the muddy netball I was not interested in catching during Year Seven PE.

  Lyds twiddled one bleached strand of her otherwise hazelnut hair. It was tinged with pink at the ends; a new colourful addition I guessed was down to her hairdresser housemate in Brixton. With a shake of the artfully tumbled curls, Lyds said, ‘No, I’m taking Textile Jewellery: Matilda and I are going to get a market stall!’ The Indian bracelets clacked and tinkled on Lydia’s wrists as she punched the air in excitement.