Chocolate Cake

He’d been up since 4. Been working since 5. Slicing his hands and having his shins battered just to dig a big dirt hole by some village in bumfuck nowhere. The money was alright. But didn’t feel worth spending nights in a freezing porter cabin, to half wake up from a half-sleep before the sun. Spending the day having his ears pounded by the diesel generator and the endless torrent of shite that came out of the other lads’ mouths.

It’d been a long 10 hours and there wasn’t much in the way of relief. Not every village in England is lined with pretty flower baskets. They’re not all teeming with friendly postmen and American tourists flocking to ancient pubs. Some of them are shit. Like this one.

There wasn’t much for the people of the village in the way of prospects. Miles from any meaningful work and they didn’t get many ramblers passing through anymore. None during a breezy November like this. When a shift at the hole was done, your two choices of venue were the shop or the cafe.

The cafe featured two unmistakable signs of a lack of quality, an old Wall’s Ice Cream freezer at the front, common at all sub-par cafes, and lasagne was inexplicably included on the lunch menu right next to bacon rolls. But it was the only place you could sit down and get a luke-warm meal, so Neil trudged on in his filthy boots to ‘Spencer’s Cafe and Restaurant’.

At 3:30pm in a cafe in a small, deprived village in early winter, the menu is sparse. It doesn’t ordinarily get many customers and so doesn’t prepare much food for the lunchtime rush. Neil joined the queue of other men in muddy high-vis jackets, all waiting their turn to assemble an early dinner from almost nothing. No rolls, no jacket potatoes and none of whatever Spencer thought constitutes a lasagne. But under a plastic dome on the front counter sat half an oozing chocolate cake. Topped with thick, beige icing and a Malteser on each slice.

Neil hadn’t eaten all day. He was bruised. He was tired. He’d wept himself to sleep the past 3 nights discretely in his rigid bunk. His father, and his father’s father had both succumb to type 2 diabetes. But a lifetime of insulin pens seemed worth just a lick of the thick fondant mortar holding the cake together. Just for one fragment of joy in this cold corner of Purgatory.

Neil could only gawk at the cake for a moment before chaos fell on the cafe. Through the door came a young man screaming and waving a shotgun in the air. It was one of the local boys who’d taken the wrong path at the crossroads of eternal boredom and becoming a smackhead. A hobby that a few residents of the village had taken up in recent years.

He wailed at the woman behind the counter to hand over all the money. Neil would later reflect on how badly thought out this crime looked to him as a bystander. Robbing a place where everyone knows your name, with no disguise, where there was likely no more than £50 in the till at any one time. But at that moment, he had no time to mull all this over, he was too busy diving under a table in panic to contemplate the flaws in the young addict’s plan. Neil had always been confused by the idiom ‘pissing yourself’ to describe fear. Until now.

A good number of the other workmen had spent their days at the hole boasting their false claims of being ‘ex special forces’ or former amateur boxers who’d sparred with an endless list of TV hardmen. These stories all fell to pieces when, instead of disarming the unfortunate robber, they all dove under nearby tables too, huddling in a ball like fluorescent gerbils sheltering from the cold.

The locals however, were having none of it. Their faces plastered with looks of anger and disappointment rather than fear. An old man in the corner spoke up.

“Christ sake Liam you silly bastard! What kind of an idiot robs a cafe!?” This angered the twitchy gun-wielder.

“Well there aren’t many pissing banks round here are there Ted you spanner!?” He turned to the woman at the counter. “Just give me the money Doris!” Her name was Pat. This did not elicit much fear in anyone other than the workmen. It seemed the villagers were all too familiar with this brand of nonsense.

“Right! This is not on. My boy’s been waiting half hour for his beans now this. I’m calling the police!” cried a mother in shrill defiance, almost sending her sludge-like coffee to the ground as she thrust herself up from a rickety table and stomped outside. It felt as if she thought a gun-toting maniac trying to rob the place was a sign of poor service on the cafe’s part.

The weight of everyone in the room perceiving him to be a harmless moron, even whilst wielding a shotgun, was too much for Liam. He snapped, and in part an attempt to wrest control of the situation, he fired.

There was no Tarantino-style smearing of brain matter on wall. No carcass went flying across the cafe. The only signs of carnage were the smattering of brown goop on innocent bystanders and a few plastic shards sailing through the air. Liam had shot the cake. It rendered the cafe silent.

Maybe it was the fear, maybe it was the volume of the blast that broke Neil’s psyche or maybe it was witnessing the last thing in this prison of banality that could bring him relief vaporise into coco dust. Something led Neil to take a leave of absence from consciousness, deferring control of his body to primal instincts.

He rose to his feet in an instant, paying no regard to the table above his head. Saying nothing but the word “aaaaaaaaaaaaah”, he threw the full mass of his slight frame into Liam. Ploughing through cheap furniture, chair legs groaning as they scraped across the hard floor. Climaxing at a sickening crack of Liam’s spine against the Wall’s Ice Cream freezer.

Liam was dragged away, the police and local paper were called, locals set about reorganising chairs and collecting stray coffee cups. A child was given some cold beans. Neil sat slumped against the freezer. Two of the more motherly villagers patted his head and asked if he was alright. Repeatedly.

Neil was offered anything the locals could provide in recognition of his bravery. Only one word could penetrate his quiet sobbing. “Cake.” He whimpered.

As luck would have it, the till attendant was able to source more slices of the now eviscerated chocolate cake from out the back. They were presented to Neil on a small white plate. He grabbed the biggest slice and took a hefty bite. It was stale.