‘Hooray,’ whispers Freya. ‘Ihatesaunas.’
‘I quite like them,’ I say.
‘Of course you do.’
I smile at her, because she seems extremely happy about the baking, and you’d have to be incredibly mean-spirited not to be pleased for her that she’s got such a treat after her suboptimal morning.
‘Just so you know,’ I murmur in her ear as people mill around us before we go off to have our discussion with the judges, ‘that was terrible teamwork and I was totally sidelined.’
‘You absolutely were,’ she agrees. She shoots a grin at me and I feel as though it hits me right in the chest.
We all had to make enough food for six people so that each of us can have a little of each plate for our lunch. We aren’t allowed to leave our partner for long, though; there are six tables for two, spaced far apart, set up for us all, and we’re all told to sit down at our own tables in our pairs.
We also aren’t allowed to choose our own food; we’re each given a plate piled high with a small portion of each of the dishes created during the task.
This weekend is such a peculiar experience that it doesn’t even seem odd any more to be sitting alone with Freya, or to dissect the events of the day with her.
‘How are you going to taste them?’ I ask. ‘I think I’m going to take a mouthful of each to see which one I like best. On the assumption that the judges’ taste buds speak for all of us, I’m going to start with the one that got the lowest marks.’
‘Very good plan,’ Freya approves.
Six mouthfuls later, I say, ‘Yours isreallygood. Way better than all the others except the chef’s one, and in my opinion better than that one too.’
‘It wasours, not just mine,’ Freya says. ‘And, also, thank you. I’ll take that compliment.’ She grins at me and I smile too.
And then we both eat little bits of the four less-good dishes to show willing, and all of our portions of Freya’s risotto and Suzanne’s deconstructed paella.
‘I’m looking forward to seeing what you bake this afternoon,’ I tell Freya as we finish eating.
‘Whatwebake.’
‘Of course. You’ll be incredibly grateful to have my expertise, actually. I really know my stuff. I once helped my grandmother bake a cherry cake.’
Freya laughs, and, honestly, it’s weirdly as though we don’t really dislike each other that much any more.
The conversation with the judges about desserts has me floundering and Freya buzzing.
I try to listen but zone out quite quickly because it’s a whole vocab that means absolutely nothing to me. I’m really annoyed with myself for not having been listening when Freya makes the comedian (I’ve forgotten his name again; he’s very famous to the YouTube generation) throw his head back and roar with laughter, and the other two judges snigger, hard, one of them snorting something very unappealing out of his nose as he does so.
‘I’ve got so many ideas,’ Freya tells me as we make our way with the other pairs over to the ice bath hut.
‘How do you have ideas for your books?’ I ask, suddenly curious.
‘I don’t know really. They just come to me. How do you have ideas about anything?’
‘Yeah, I don’t know.’ I’m not sure that I do have ideas in the way that Freya does. When she was discussing the potential desserts we could make it was like light bulbs kept going off inside her head. I’m not sure I’m a particularly light-bulby person. Well, I’m not. Definitely.
‘I think maybe once you start writing, or baking professionally, or whatever it might be, you have more and more ideas, because you get into the way of it and things just pop up in your mind because you’re always thinking about that kind of stuff. I imagine. Probably the same with art too,’ she says.
I nod, genuinely interested.
We don’t have time for more conversation, because it’s time to watch Jerome and Anita, one of the other pairs (the word ‘couple’ keeps popping into my head in relation to this task, and I keep pushing it away because it’s so particularly inappropriate in regard to me and Freya), do their ice baths.
‘You didbrilliantly,’ Freya tells Anita when she gets out. ‘You were so much more stoic than I was.’
This is objectively not true; Freyawasstoic, other than a bit of swearing when she got out, whereas Anita squeaked throughout.
‘Thank you so much.’
