Anvita put down her crusty phallus. “What are you even making?” she called out.
“Great Dragon Smaug. You?”
“Big Dick.”
“Nice.”
“Please stop shouting,” implored Colin Thrimp, “and making references to genitalia. Jennifer will be livid.”
“Actually”—Josie glanced up from where she was busily producing more bread than any human being had a right to produce—“I’m starting to think one of my plaits looks a little bit like a vulva.”
Eventually the room settled down, despite rather than because of Colin Thrimp’s entreaties. And Rosaline got back to her heart, which was browning nicely and not losing its shape too much.
Being in a state of what she hoped was okayness turned out to be a little disorientating. Normally she was too rushed and panicky to pay much attention to what was going on around her, but now she was worryingly open to distractions. There was Josie singing folk music under her breath. The restless tip-tap of Claudia’s kitchen-inappropriate shoes. Nora cheerfully giving a producer baking tips like she was presenting her own show. And the way Harry’s shoulder muscles shifted beneath his T-shirt as he took a baking tray out of the oven.
“What are you doing now?” Colin Thrimp asked him, nearly making him drop his rolls.
“Uhm, taking something out the oven.”
“Can you say that like you’re not answering a question.”
“Oh yeah. Sorry.” Harry paused and took a deep breath. “Right now, I’m taking something out the oven.”
“Could you tell us”—for a man with no corners, Colin Thrimp could sometimes sound remarkably sharp—“what exactly it is you’re taking out the oven.”
“Rolls.”
“Again. Like you’re not answering a question. And maybe tell us what the rolls are for.”
“So these are rolls, what I’ve just taken out the oven. And I’m going to use them as rocks. Because I’m making a rock pool. They’re sort of a German rye bread. Because that looks a bit like rocks.”
“And why are you doing a rock pool?”
“Because—”
“Like you’re not answering a question.”
Harry’s hands curled and uncurled against the bench. “I thought,” he said very slowly, “I’d do a rock pool because in the summer me and my mum and my dad and my sisters go down Southend and we take the kids rock-pooling. I don’t know much about it, but they like looking at the crabs and stuff, so I’m going to see if I can make a little crab. And maybe a nice starfish. And I’m doing a pesto flatbread for seaweed.”
“Thank you,” said Colin Thrimp, with visible relief.
“No problem, mate.” Harry’s relief was equally visible.
But after Colin had gone, Rosaline noticed Harry was still standing at his workstation, staring blankly at his bread rocks as if a wicked enchantress obsessed with the finer points of rye bread had cursed him to a hundred years of waking sleep. He wasn’t her problem—he wasn’t even really her friend—but he’d been there when she’d been panicking about her phone. And last night she’d . . . she’d liked talking to him. Hearing about his family and not feeling she had to defend hers.
Besides, her left ventricle still needed a couple of minutes, so she slipped across the room to his side.
“All right, mate?” she said.
He turned, offering her a wry smile. “I do say that a lot, don’t I?”
“Yeah, but it’s . . . it’s you, isn’t it? Seriously, though. Are you all right?”
“Pretty much.” Lifting his forearm to his brow, he pushed his hair back, and left a little streak of flour behind. “Those interviews . . . they’re well hard, ain’t they? Because when you’re doing something, it’s not like you’re normally telling people what you’re doing at the same time. Like, here I am making a sandwich, and I’m cutting the bread so I’ll have bread for the sandwich. And you’ve got to hold the knife proper so it don’t go all wonky and you don’t cut your hand off.”
At that moment, Nora’s voice drifted across the ballroom. “Now you can see,” she was telling a producer, who didn’t even have a camera, “I’ve got a nice rise on this. And if you ask me, it’s all in the mixing. My mother told me you put the yeast and the salt on the opposite sides of the bowl, and that’s what I’ve always done, and it’s always worked.”
“Or,” Harry went on, “I’m wrong and it’s a piece of piss.”
Rosaline squeezed his arm. “I think Nora just really likes talking about baking.”
“I could probably get used to that, but then they want you to have a feeling about it as well. They’re all like, Does this remind you of your childhood? And I’m like, Nah, mate, it’s a bun.”
She laughed and then hoped he’d meant her to. “I’m not a big fan of having feelings on demand either. But there can be something quite emotional about baking—it reminds you of when you baked or who you baked for.”
“Yeah, and that’s great. But then they say ‘Make us two dozen mini pies’ and my dad’s like, All you’ve done is ruin pie and mash, and I’m like, I know, but that’s what they told me to do. And I suppose I could say this reminds me of my dad, but it mostly reminds me of my dad wanting a bigger pie.”
Harry might not have liked talking, but when he spoke there was something about the way he saw the world—simple and complicated and full of people he cared about—that Rosaline found more appealing than she should have. And she laughed again, imagining an older version of Harry unsatisfied by a bijou pie-ette.
“Oi, mate”—he nudged her—“that’s my fucking heritage.”
A wail of despair echoed around the room. Ricky was on his knees on the floor. “Oh no. It’s only gone and exploded.”
In a more rational world—the world that Alain seemed to be living in—they should all have taken that as a timely reminder to focus on their own bakes. But instead, the majority of the contestants gathered around Ricky’s oven as the companions of Thorin Oakenshield had gathered around the door to the Lonely Mountain.
Within lay the tragically decapitated remains of the Great Dragon Smaug. Rosaline could see at once what had gone wrong. The fillings had been too moist, which had generated steam, which had created pressure, which had split the beast’s mighty flanks and made its head tear open like an overstuffed grocery bag.
Anvita patted Ricky consolingly on the shoulder. “Well. At least it doesn’t look like a gargantuan wang.”
Culinary glamour shots, interviews, and a disappointing lunch, inevitably served late, had become very much part of the routine. And even sitting on a stool, waiting for the cake slice of Damocles, was losing a little of its edge.
Though only a little.
Claudia was up first with what she claimed was a three-tiered bread wedding cake but which looked a lot to Rosaline, and to the judges, like three loaves on top of each other. Harry’s rock pool went down well, as did Alain’s poppy and fennel seed rooster, and Josie’s harvest basket, although that received some criticism for not strictly being a sculpture except insofar as it was a sculpture of some bread.