Here's how you bake a friendship cake for your very own special freak.
Step one: the night before the big event, you sneak out of your bunk and make a calm, polite phone call to an old acquaintance; a specialist in his trade who'd never DREAM of disappointing you, on account of his will to keep breathing. You place an order. Express delivery - you want it fresh.
Step two: you schedule enough time for your project before dinner, keeping your girls busy in different corners of the kitchen and well out of your way. Nobody fucks with this dessert. You draw from your secret stash of butter, sugar,eggs, flour, and lemon juice. You whisk the mixture in a bowl for fifteen vengeful minutes until it is fluffy, pale, and sweet. You let the batter sit while you pick up your late-night order at the front gate: it's bundled tightly away at the bottom of a crate of shrivelled, spotty carrots.
Step three: You return to the kitchen and get down to business. The batter is poured into two spring-form cake tins and baked in the pre-heated oven for the better part of half an hour. Take out the two cake-halves. Leave them to cool. Prepare the icing, add a sprinkle of vanilla extract --- the quality kind, to commemorate the occasion. Grab a spoon and carve out a well-proportioned hollow in the lower cake-half. Next, with all due reverence, you hide the surprise inside its little bed of dough and slather it with a thick layer of walnuts, pickled cherries, and whipped cream.
Step four: Place the second cake-half on top, decorate your monstrous creation according to taste, dish out the dinner, wait for your time to shine. And finally, the new cock of the roost --- the big, massive cock --- demands her sacrifice. You pick up your masterwork from the kitchen. You serve it proudly, with a smirk and a flourish. You’re slammed face-down across the table.
So far, so shitty. Red is perfectly still, breathing steadily through her nose, almost limp in the grasp of Ferguson’s toadies. Forget about her twisted spine, the arm bent behind her at a bone-grating angle, the army of eyes gorging themselves on her humiliation. It doesn’t matter. She’s dignified. She’s the bigger person. If you strain, if you flail, if you squirm, a predator will smell prey in you. She’s NOT going to fondle the psycho’s perverted ego like that.
Teeth clenched, Red rips her gaze away from the butchered cake right under her nose, glaring at the woman who lurks by her cheek like an enormous gnat. Calm. Count to ten --- no, too long, not good for her back. Count to THREE. Control is everything.
Step five: don’t let them see your fear.
A tiny smile is forced onto her lips.
“ Oh, come on, Ferguson. This is bullshit. You’re bullshit. I thought the massive irony of your ... little situation, ” she drawls, “ had given you a sense of humour. ” A sharp breath. Her arm strains against its socket. A drop of sweat tickles the hair behind her ear, darts along her jawline, and drips into the bleeding centre of the cake. A fresh, oozing cow’s tongue lolls among the buttercream. Lengua de Vaca. A delicacy, under any sane circumstance. She’s quite proud of this one.
The hand in her hair pushes her down. “ No? Too on the nose? ” Her own tongue presses against the corner of her mouth, tasting stale lipstick. The bastard by her side continues staring her down, darkly, gloatingly, not a shred of decency in those bottomless eyes. This is what awaits her unless she takes Ferguson out fast: a life sentence of bullying and degradation. The old motherfucker gets a kick out of it.
Red’s heart is a fist of ice in her chest. Disgust fills her every syllable when she speaks again, voice loud and clear and slow enough to make itself understood even to the last brain-dead idiot in Ferguson’s gang of pinheads. “ If your cronies don’t take their hands off me, I can’t guarantee there won’t be any drain cleaner in their coffee tomorrow. Or slug pellets in their cereal. ”
