Page 23 of The Gingerbread Cafe
Keep Calm and Bake Gingerbread, as one of Nell’s old metal signs would have said. So she was doing just that. Although she’d come to see it would be much easier to keep practising the baking tips she’d picked up from Lukas if she lived somewhere with a proper kitchen. Her maisonette was barely suitable for microwaving a strudel and she was fed up of traipsing backwards and forwards to the café and leaving poor Angel Gabriel at home.
That was how she came to be standing nervously at the fresh white door of Nell’s flat above The Gingerbread Café, clinging to her oversized artificial Christmas tree. She was moving in. Now it was just a matter of getting the damned tree through the door.
After some deliberation with no one in particular, she decided against the face full of needles option, and instead settled on going in butt first and dragging the tree after her. There. Didn’t she sound like the wise, successful café owner she was about to transform herself into?
She smiled and unlocked the flat door with the key she hadn’t dared to use until now. Then, rescuing the leaning tree by thetrunk, she took up her reversing position and used her bum to push the door open. She leaned her weight backwards, hoping it would encourage the awkwardly wide branches to twang through. After a few tense seconds and not much twanging, she pulled harder. And at last …thuuuuud.
‘Bloody ow!’ Gretel crash-landed onto her back with the prickly tree on top of her, cheap baubles clattering around her like giant coloured hailstones. Well, at least she’d had the sense to take off her handmade stained-glass ornaments and pack them carefully in boxes. She was basically a grown-up. Now, how would an adult get themselves out of this bristly mess?
‘Girl, whaaaat?’
Gretel tensed, before realising it was Amber’s voice. And there was her thinking it was usually Lukas who wasn’t far behind a festive tree disaster.
‘I dropped by to say hey and noticed the back door was wedged open with a box. I tried shouting for you …’ said Amber, attempting to wrestle Gretel free from the awkward heap of branches.
‘I guess I didn’t hear you,’ Gretel wheezed, hauling herself up and dusting stray needles from her snowman tank top.
‘If you’d said you were doing this, I would have been straight here. Are you OK?’ Amber was patting her down as though checking for broken bits.
‘Oh, I’m fine. I don’t need any help.’ Gretel waved a hand.
Amber’s eyes widened. ‘Clearly.’ She picked up Angel Gabriel’s cage, which was near the front door. ‘Come on, I’m here now. Stop being such a one-woman island.’ Amber nodded towards the flat, which had a short corridor and then a closed internal door. ‘Did you take a look yet?’
Gretel screwed her eyes shut and groaned.
‘Hey, what’s up?’ She felt Amber’s hand on her arm.
‘It’s nothing. I …’ She exhaled sharply. ‘I haven’t been brave enough to check this place out yet. Nell and I spent all our time together downstairs in recent years, even on special occasions. I haven’t been up here for ages. And I’m guessing the place is still filled with her memories.’ She clamped a hand over her face, partly to suppress a sob and partly because she knew if she breathed in too deeply, she might smell Nell’s gentle fragrance of honeysuckle and baking.
When Gretel had had a short burst of dutiful messages with Lukas to let him know she was moving in, he’d told her he hadn’t got around to clearing out Nell’s things yet. She’d sent a curt message back telling him not to dare. It had been bold by her usual standards, but she was still reeling from his behaviour on Christmas Day. He knew how to ruin a girl’s favourite time of year.
‘We can always have a clear-out,’ Amber said gently.
‘Get rid of all those …memories?’ Gretel could feel herself starting to shake.
Amber shrugged. ‘I suppose you’ll want to treasure some stuff. But aren’t memories mostly things we keep in our heads? You don’t have to live in a museum.’
Museum. It was an odd word when you said it too many times. Hypnotic, even.
‘Woah, you’re wobbling. Let’s get you inside.’
And with a caged ferret in a Rudolph jumper under one arm and a sniffling Gretel lassoed with the other, Amber guided them both down the short corridor and let Gretel open the internal door.
When Gretel opened it, she remembered what Lukas had said in one of his messages.It’s not what you’d imagine. He was right.
She’d expected it to follow the same Christmassy theme as the café, with reds and greens and glittering fairy lights. Hadn’tit been like that the last time she’d been up here, several years before? The tiny maisonette Gretel was leaving was certainly a shrine to Christmas. She’d thought she’d be moving to a home from home, but with more space and the chance to use the money she’d been spending on rent to breathe a little life into the café. Business had been eerily slow since Christmas and she couldn’t keep ignoring that either.
‘It’s … beautiful,’ said Gretel.
She stood for a moment, taking it all in. The main living space in front of her was large and airy, with wide casement windows dressed with sweeping white voile. In fact, the whole room was a sea of white with touches of dove grey and the palest lavender. A coffee table took pride of place in the centre of the room, decorated with a vase of silk eucalyptus which seemed to emanate calm from its silver-blue leaves. Other than the slight issue of the dust, it seemed the whole room was inviting her to relax and inhale.
Gretel slipped off her snow boots and tiptoed across the light wooden floor, letting every element of her new surroundings soak in. The comforting fragrance from the bunches of dried lavender strewn across the white dresser. The softness of the cloud-coloured rug she bent down to touch. And the sound of …peace.
‘This place is incredible,’ Amber breathed, as though sensing the tranquillity too.
They moved to the kitchen, which was just as light as the living space, with modern white cupboards and gadgets in shades of cappuccino. More pots of silk eucalyptus leaves were dotted around on shelves and the white wall tiles shone brightly in the January sun which bounced off the frost outside and streamed through the windows.
‘Lukas redecorated the flat for his auntie a few years ago,’ said Amber. ‘I mean, so I heard. You know, gossip or whatever.’ Shedarted back to the main room and busied herself finding a spot for Angel Gabriel, as though she’d said too much.
