The Traveller’s Daughter. Michelle Vernal
A trout in the pot is better than a salmon in the sea – Irish Proverb
Kitty shut the front door of the house that no longer belonged to her mother, locking it before stuffing the key in her jacket pocket. She glanced up at the grey sky with a frown. She wished she’d packed a waterproof jacket instead of the lightweight belted one she was wearing. Stealing herself against the steady drizzle, she didn’t look back as she set off down the road toward the offices of Baintree & Co.
Her feet were clad in her usual choice of thoroughly unsuitable heels, and she stepped around the freshly formed puddles. She momentarily wished she had a bit more sense when it came to footwear but ever since she’d had a say in the matter, she’d always opted for pretty over practical. Still, she comforted herself, at least she didn’t have far to walk, and as she tottered down the empty footpath, her mind drifted back over how she’d come to be here.
The letter had arrived from the firm of solicitors, whom her mother had been with for as long as Kitty could remember, four weeks ago. In her opinion, Rosa had single-handedly kept them in business these last few years with her conveyancing, not to mention her final bit of business, dying. It held no surprises, apart from what she thought was an odd request on her mother’s part, that Kitty keep her ashes for at least six months before scattering them. Apart from that, her affairs had all been in order.
Rosa’s will was quite straightforward with no beneficiaries other than Kitty, and so the house at Edgewater Lane was hers to do with as she wished. She hadn’t bothered to glance at the statement attached, knowing the firm’s bill had been paid from her mother’s bank account. The account was now closed, and the balance was to be transferred to her account. It was the formality and finality of the letter that made her eyes burn with threatened tears. She’d sat there for an age in the dip of the old couch in the London flat she shared with Yasmin and Paula feeling utterly lost.
She and Yasmin had only let the room to Paula for two reasons. Number one, being that the third bedroom was a box room so small that no one else had been keen to take it upon viewing it. The second reason was the smell; not everybody could stomach the permanent smell of curry that hovered in the air thanks to the flat’s upstairs location over a Bangladeshi takeaway.
Their flat was located in the East End near the old Spitalfields Market and Brick Lane, which was known these days as London’s Curry Capital and had long been nicknamed Bangla Town. Kitty loved the little pocket of East London she had run away to just on a year ago, determined to put as much distance between herself and Damien as she could manage. You could almost smell the history seeping from the bricks; that’s if you managed to block the smell of curry!
She liked to imagine the drama that had been played out on the streets as she wandered around them and to know she was now part of that thread work made her feel special. Sometimes she’d pause down bustling Brick Lane and imagine she could hear the call of the Costermongers’ selling their fruit and veg. Once she had gotten herself in a right stew hot footing it home as she conjured up the darker side of the East End’s infamous past, Jack the Ripper. She could sense a shadow lurking behind her and had picked up her pace so that she’d been puffing by the time she burst in through the front door of her flat.
“What’s up with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Yasmin had stated as Kitty locked the door behind her before swinging round to face her friend, wild-eyed.
“Nothing, I’ve got an overactive imagination that’s all, my mum always said so, but I think I might need a drink.” She filled Yasmin in on her journey home, deciding not to add that she genuinely had sensed a darkness that had spooked her. She got these little feelings from time to time, like when things had come to a head with Damien. She had felt something coming. When she sat back night after night over the following weeks torturing herself by examining every tiny detail of their breakup, there had been no warning signs, though. Nothing apart from the strangest sense of darkness and impending trouble. It had been there during her mother’s final days too, although at the time she hadn’t known she was dying. She’d found out after the event. A fat lot of good it was having a sixth sense when she had no idea what it meant.
There were other feelings too, such as knowing instinctively who was on the other end of the phone, or sensing who was at the door without answering it. Silly stuff really, and she had asked Rosa about it once. Kitty had thought at the time that her reaction had been most peculiar but like a lot of things her mother had chosen not to elaborate.
As for the encroaching darkness, these days it didn’t frighten her because it had already brought the worst that could happen with it. She had broken up with Damien and lost her mother all within a year. For the here and now, she was trying so hard just to focus on the positives. So it was lucky that her passion in life was food. Most days the smell of spices wafting up the stairwell was enough to make your eyes water!
She shared waitressing shifts with Yasmin at Bruno’s, a trendy little Italian Eatery on nearby Ashwin Street. Its main claim to fame was that a café just a few doors up had been tipped by Vogue magazine as the coolest place in Britain to dine. Bruno’s was determined to bask in its glory. Kitty didn’t mind. The busier work was, the better, in her opinion because it kept not just her body but her mind busy and she needed all the distraction she could get.
Of course, she didn’t plan on waitressing forever. Once the money from the sale of Edgewater Lane was in her bank account, there would be nothing stopping her from pursuing her dream of opening her very own cupcake café. Nothing stopping her, except for a chronic fear of failure that was.
Kitty wasn’t a trained baker or chef nor did she want to be. She had been there and tried that. It had seen her spend a year living on minimum wage in exchange for being shouted at by a Gordon Ramsey lookalike. The experience had well and truly put her off the idea. She had packed in her apprenticeship in Edinburgh and hot-footed it down to a secretarial job in Manchester, instead deciding it was high time she had a bit of money in her pockets and fun to boot. The decision to move in with her girlfriends in the North’s big smoke and take a position typing in an architect’s firm had been one that her mother had not approved of. Kitty had told her in no uncertain terms though that it was her life, and she would do with it what she wanted.
She was the first to hold her hand up and say that she found it hard to follow instructions, especially if they were barked at her. She found it hard to stick at things too because her feet got itchy, and she felt the need to move on, but despite her change of course she had never stopped loving baking. She had known though that, if she’d seen her apprenticeship through to the end, bit by bit her love for it would have been snuffed out.
Now in a round about way, until she opened her café she had come back to her first love by selling her cakes at the market on Saturday mornings. There was something so intrinsically comforting in the measuring of ingredients, the amounts of which never changed. As for the sweet and tempting result, well that was pure satisfaction. That was why she didn’t mind the early starts on those cold Saturday mornings. Bundled up in her coat with her woolly hat pulled down well over her ears, she would sell her cakes at the Broadway Market in Hackney. All of her cakes were made with love, and Kitty liked to think it was this that made them that little bit extra special.
The unsociable hours she waitressed along with her early Saturday starts suited her just fine. She had Yas for company, and after the disaster that was Damien, well the less time she had on her hands for repeating that epic catastrophe, the better. She was quite happy to whip up her sweet treats at the ungodly time of three o’clock in the morning in readiness for sale at her popular stall. Or at least she was after she’d had a strong cup of coffee. It filled her with a certain pride as she bantered with the punters to know that she was standing in the shadow of the East End’s famous Barrow boys. They had plied their trade with their unique salesman patter.
Her takings supplemented her meagre earnings from Bruno’s enabling her to scrape by, but it certainly wasn’t the money that kept her baking her little cakes. She knew too that the latest fad was to frown upon sugar but hadn’t those sugar free converts ever heard the phrase, ‘everything in moderation’? That was her motto. She’d even heard mutterings that cupcakes