Like fuck you, you’re shit, and your biscuits are shit and—
“What about you, Paris?” Bernard was asking.
Uh-oh. “What about me what?”
“What are you making tomorrow?” He smiled encouragingly. “Joan here’s making a bookcase. Tariq is doing bee biscuit on a honeycomb stand. Tanya’s doing ginger chemical reaction biscuits which, if I’m honest, I don’t really know what they are. And I’m doing lemon shortbread on a vanilla shortbread table.”
Paris stared at them in horror. Because, with the possible exception of shortbread on shortbread— which he thought might be the biscuit equivalent of denim on denim— they all sounded so much better than his idea. “I was going to make biscuits roses de Reims. But now I’m worried it’ll look really pretentious.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Joan. “What could possibly be pretentious about making a biscuit with a French name that nobody’s ever heard of.”
“Oh no.” Paris hid his face in his hands. “I’m going to be the guy who cheated on the blind bake by smacking someone with a fridge, then made biscuits nobody had ever heard of, then went out.”
Draining the last of his lemonade-and-Kettle-Chip cocktail, Tariq blinked in outrage. “Excuse me. I’ve heard of them. They’re the thing you dip in champagne. They’re very chic. Although I think Leopold the Second of Belgium liked them and he was famously a mass murderer.”
“Well”— Tanya shrugged— “it’ll stop people complaining about liberal bias on the BBC.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Tariq. “Nothing could stop people complaining about liberal bias on the BBC.”
That wasn’t, to Paris, entirely comforting. And while he tried to relax into the evening and enjoy the flow of conversation, his mind kept circling back to what if I’ve made biscuits with unintentionally colonialist implications? and from there to everybody is going to hate me and from there to I should never leave my house and never do anything.
Sunday
“OH NO,” SAID PARIS. Normally baking was calming, but this was anything but calm. This was doing for his love of baking what A-level English literature had done for his love of poetry. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.”
Grace Forsythe materialised at his side. “Is there a problem, my little cupcake?”
There was no problem. Not really. He’d made biscuits roses de Reims a hundred times before, and they were going about the same way they always had. But this was TV and somebody had asked him a question, so he tried to answer it honestly. “I’m worried that my meringues are going to settle while I’m beating these egg yolks and then the whole thing will be dense and won’t work.”
“Tell you what.” Grace Forsythe adopted an attitude of military alertness. “I’ll guard the meringues, and if I see the little buggers settling, I’ll sound the alarm.”
“Would you?” He gave her a look of unalloyed gratitude.
“Absolutely. There’s just one slight hitch. I’m not totally sure what a settling meringue looks like. I’m assuming it’s a meringue that’s hit forty, realised it’s still single, and married the first other meringue who’d have it.”
Paris’s look of gratitude alloyed slightly, and he eyed his bowl nervously. “I just sort of mean ... I don’t want them to collapse or deflate or absorb too much moisture.”
It was at this moment that the judges began their approach. And this wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all. He’d come on national television because he thought— well, Morag thought, but also he thought— that he was shit-hot at baking, and he’d tried to do something really complex and impressive and it was going to turn out that he was actually much less hot and much more shit than anybody had expected.
“Oh no,” said Paris, looking around for somewhere to hide and seriously considering the oven. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.”
“Don’t worry.” Grace Forsythe patted him on the shoulder. “They don’t bite. Well, Wilfred doesn’t.”
“So what are you making here, lad?” Wilfred Honey took up his customary position at the end of the bench.
Paris knew what he was making. He was making biscuits roses de Reims. But saying it aloud suddenly felt impossible. Like he was confessing to a crime.
“Now this”— Marianne Wolvercote pounced on his bottle of champagne— “is promising us something special. I hope you can deliver. From the ingredients and”— she glanced back at the bottle— “accompaniment, it looks like you’re making biscuits roses de Reims.”
“Yeah,” Paris admitted. “But I’m going to mess it up.”
Wilfred Honey had that concerned sagely look Paris had seen on TV. Usually when contestants had grossly overreached. “They are very technical. And this is only the first week, so I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I don’t.” Paris blinked against a sudden prickle of tears. “I thought I did. But I don’t. I’m really sorry. I’m going to serve you awful, terrible biscuits.”
Marianne Wolvercote’s gaze became fleetingly less steely. “I’m sure you won’t, Paris. Just keep a lightness of touch, and when you’re adding the dry ingredients, remember to check the bottom of the bowl for lurking flour.”
“Oh, thank you.” He gave her a weak smile. And, feeling less reassured than he thought he was supposed to, wiped his eyes with a fresh tissue and got on with beating his yolks.
Everyone else’s biscuits were much better than Paris’s biscuits. And even his interview had been a failure because he’d been sniffling too much to give them any usable footage. Still, at least he wouldn’t have to do this again next week. And while going home first would be embarrassing and humiliating and dreadful and devastating, at least he’d be able to tell Morag he told her so.
Not that he would.
Rodney in the Cardigan and the tall man Paris hadn’t been able to use Tariq’s name trick on had already been judged, and they’d received okay comments. Not the excoriation of disappointment Paris both was expecting and probably deserved. Next up was Gretchen, the woman who’d tried to nonconsensually Reiki Tariq over lunch yesterday. Her biscuits didn’t, if Paris forced himself to look past his haze of despair, seem like they’d come out the way she’d been hoping. Of course, from what little he knew of her, Gretchen was slightly, well, slightly eccentric. Which meant it wasn’t impossible that “pile of broken biscuit parts in irregular, shapes, sizes, and colours” had been her plan all along. Perhaps it was a statement on the unseen harmonies of the universe.
Or perhaps her biscuits had just collapsed.
“So these,” Gretchen explained in much the same voice she’d explained that she was going to heal Tariq’s nose by magic, “are spelt and hemp biscuits served on a pair of giving hands, one modelled in vanilla shortbread, the other in chocolate shortbread.”
Marianne Wolvercote stared at the crumbled mounds in front of her. “I’m not really getting hands. So much as ... nothing.”