Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All #1) - Alexis Hall Page 0,135
glass of wine. “I keep telling you social services wouldn’t want you.”
“Why not? I’m great. I’m obstreperous.”
“That’s not a good thing,” Rosaline told her.
Amelie did a stubborn pointy thing with her chin that Rosaline hoped she hadn’t picked up from her. “It means noisy and difficult to control. And I don’t want to be easy to control because people being easy to control is how Hitler happened.”
“So, Lauren.” Colin Thrimp made a sort of clapping gesture to remind everybody he was still there. “You’ve known Rosaline for a long while. Would you say this is the first time Rosaline has really done something for herself?”
One of Lauren’s many skills was that she could laugh in your face from the other side of the room. “God no. She does things for herself all the time. You should see her bedside drawer.”
Amelie, too, took this poorly. “That’s a mean thing to say. Mummy’s very clever. She can do lots of things for herself. She can tie her shoes and she always remembers to brush her teeth in the morning and in the evening. She couldn’t fix the boiler but that’s because boilers are complicated. And she never learned to drive but that’s because she had a baby instead of driving lessons.”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” Colin Thrimp pounced. “Are there lots of things your mummy hasn’t been able to do because of you?”
Rosaline pushed her away through the forest of cameras. “Colin, say anything like that again and I will go to broadcasting standards and the press and fuck what the contract says.”
“Sorry. I . . . I . . . didn’t mean it to come out like that. I just meant, well, you’ve obviously made a lot of sacrifices.”
“Amelie’s not a sacrifice.”
“I’m a mammal,” agreed Amelie. “We learned that in science. You’re a mammal too.”
This made Colin Thrimp retreat into his mic again. “Look, you promised Jennifer you’d behave. I need to make some kind of story out of this; otherwise, you’re going to be the one without an arc and nobody will like you and that will be my fault and I’ll get fired. And please ask your friend to put down the wineglass.” He was sounding perilously close to tears. “The only people we ever show drinking are students out with their friends and it’s never more than two friends and it’s always a quiet pub.”
“Fine.” Lauren downed her wine and passed the glass to a production assistant. “The pissing thing about Rosaline—sorry, BBC audience. The thing about Rosaline is that she’s one of the kindest, strongest, most amazing people you’ll ever meet. But until she went on this show, I don’t think she ever realised it. She’s always been a fighter, she’s always stood up for herself, and deep down she’s always known what she wanted. Problem was, she used to worry far too much about what other people thought. But now she’s done so well on the show and that’s given her the confidence to realise everyone else can go fuck themselves.”
“That was mostly lovely,” said Colin Thrimp, “and exactly what we were looking for. But could we possibly have the last sentence again without the f-word.”
Lauren cleared her throat. “But,” she went on, “now she’s done so well on the show and that’s given her the confidence to realise that the people you want in your life are the people who love you no matter what.”
“Auntie Lauren’s right,” added Amelie. “My mummy’s the best mummy in the world and I will love her no matter what. Unless I’m dead or asleep or an anglerfish because I don’t think anglerfish have human emotions.”
Rosaline, however, was not an anglerfish.
And once Colin Thrimp had confirmed they had all they needed, she went and hugged them both, and definitely wasn’t crying.
Wednesday
IT WAS ONE of those humid summer nights where stifling heat was giving way to torrential rain. Which meant Rosaline had to dash through the house trying to close all the windows that she’d previously had to dash through the house opening, and do it quietly enough that Amelie—who had insisted it was so hot that she would never fall asleep ever in a million years—wouldn’t wake up. Returning to the kitchen, she found a combination of the weather and the various distractions, many of them Amelie-shaped, that had punctuated the evening and turned her practice mousses into a series of brightly coloured puddles.
She was just starting on the washing-up when the doorbell rang. And someday she was going to receive an