Chapter 15 - Week Five: Vegan Week (Part 2b)

Rebecca was knackered in the morning. She had difficulty sleeping on such a full stomach, yes, but she’d also stayed up too late messaging back and forth with Robert before realising, oh shit, he has a baking competition in the morning. She’d almost typed this, and then deleted the evidence in a panic before she could send it, instead saying, sorry, didn’t realise how late it is, I should go to bed. Night!

She narrowly saw him type Night before she placed her phone face-down on her bedside table, plugged it in to charge, and tried to force herself into a restless sleep.

Now it was morning, and she couldn’t button her trousers.

Holy shit. Rebecca breathed in, looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror. She still looked puffy, still looked swollen. Definitely going to start her period soon. Still.

She turned to the side.

Holy shit.

Yup, definitely pregnant. No longer the mock-starter-pregnancy that she’d resembled when full a few weeks ago. This was a full-on belly, squishy on the outside, firm on the inside, just an inch or two shy of the crest of her boobs. Yes, she was still digesting from the excess the previous night, but…well, she had room for breakfast.
Probably just retaining water.

She pulled unsuccessfully on the buttons once more.

Robert is going to love this.

She vaguely thought of the Jono-pounds as she traded her trousers for a stretchy jersey dress, packed her things into her suitcase, and checked the room for any stray belongings or escaped chocolate raisins (one beneath her pillow—it found its way into her mouth). They had gone on fast. Of course, it had always been so much easier to gain weight than it had been to lose it, and it was never easier to gain than it had been the second time around. She remembered graduating dress sizes almost overnight, and Jono’s thinly veiled look of disgust as she dried herself off in the bathroom after a fondue night with friends. She’d locked him out when she’d taken showers after that.

She hadn’t been lying when she told Rachel that getting fat was something she was very good at. But it was alarming how right she had been.

There were looks when she arrived on set. Bitchy comments from Will, coquettish little teases from Eduardo. The staff tent had a pastry platter and a fruit bowl set out. She helped herself to two almond croissants and a banana before getting called into the tent.
Eduardo stole Robert for makeup, so Rebecca didn’t see him until the contestants entered the tent. Her very skin buzzed when he walked in, and she willed him to look her way, but she also hoped he wouldn’t because she didn’t know what would happen then. It was impossible to supress her own affection, and she was certain someone would spot something in the undoubtedly electric look that would pass between them. It wasn’t safe, and she was grateful as well as frustrated when he went straight to his workstation, head down like a man on a mission.

Rebecca shifted on her stool. It felt flimsier than usual. And her belly (oh God, she had a belly again) was definitely sitting in her lap. She could tuck her finger underneath the crease. She did. She saw Robert glance at her—at it—out of the corner of his eye once. He then added too much salt and had to start his shortcrust completely over.

After that, Rebecca retreated to the makeup room until she was called for touch ups, which only happened once, when George smeared a paste of bicarb across his face, left it there, later added some vinegar via a second scratch of the same dry skin Rebecca had noticed in her chair earlier, and carried on whilst his fake tan was gradually eaten away into patches of bright Leeds-white.

‘Looks like he has fucking vitiligo,’ Will told her when he came to get her. ‘You would’ve spotted it by now if you were out there instead of in here. What the fuck are you doing—hoovering up the rest of the pastry tray? Fix it. Now.’

Rebecca arrived in time to witness several unfolding disasters:

Odette withdrew her vegetable tart from the oven only for the still-liquid vegan ‘egg’ to form an immediate puddle on the floor. This was followed by a series of what even to the least able of French speakers was obviously a string of long, creative curse words.

Robert, suddenly, was there.

‘Back in the oven,’ he said, and Rebecca realised that Odette was crying. This wasn’t unusual for many of the contestants—fallen sponges, cracked Swiss rolls—it didn’t take much to elicit tears in the tent—but Odette’s ray-of-sunshine cheeriness was a constant, and Rebecca was touched to see Robert even more bothered by Odette’s sudden change of countenance than he was by the fact that his own timer was going off at his workstation. ‘Back in the oven,’ he said again.

His timer was still going. He didn’t seem to notice. Alan did, but only looked at Robert helping Odette pour the leftover chickpea mixture from her bowl into the tin and carefully slide it back into the oven.

‘Does anyone smell burning?’ Alan said.

‘Robert, your timer!’ Shana called out, and, swearing, Robert jogged back to his station.

‘Thanks, Robert,’ Odette said cheerfully as she dried her face on her oven mitt.

‘Fuck,’ Robert said, withdrawing his own tart, which looked as though he’d taken to the top with a blowtorch. Blackened broccoli erupted from its surface like volcanic rock.

‘What temperature did you have it at?’ George asked him.

‘I don’t know, I—bollocks. 220? Damn it, I must’ve knocked the button.’

‘Oh God, what the hell?’ It was Shana’s turn, now, as she took out her own tart to find that it had formed a sort of bowl in its tin, puffed at the outer edges and sunken in the centre. She slid it onto the surface with a dismissive thunk. She laughed. ‘It looks like a sodding bird bath.’

‘Thank fuck,’ Will whispered; his hand was still on Rebecca's sleeve, where he had held her back to keep her out of shot as the drama unfolded. ‘Finally, some usable footage. Christ, but they’re a bunch of boring fuckers.’

‘A bit rich coming from the producer of a baking show,’ Rebecca whispered back.

She froze, realising she’d just said that out loud. Her body suddenly felt very heavy. She was still bloated, puffy and sloshing from last night. She felt rather like a water butt with legs.

Finally, Will laughed. Rebecca’s shoulders relaxed.

‘You’re really going for the whole fat and sassy thing, are you?’

‘Sure,’ Rebecca said, deciding there were worse things to be, if both annoyed and weirdly turned on by Will just calling her fat. ‘Why not?’

‘Weirdo,’ Will said, not without affection. ‘Could you go and fix George’s face now, please?’

#

Judging was brutal. Rebecca worried her hands off screen, too anxious to eat, while the remaining contestants sat on their stools in a neat, equally anxious line behind the judging table. Silently, cast and crew watched, unblinking, as Stephen and Judy worked their way down the table, taking their forks to tarts like weapons, leaving no crust unturned.

‘Really disappointing,’ Stephen said.
‘You’re better bakers than this,’ Judy said.
They left the tent, and the remaining contestants sagged together into bleak exclamations and pronouncements that Vegan Week was cursed and that they would be the ones to go home—or that the judges were so fed up of them that they’d send them all home and declare Judy the de-facto winner. Will was loving it; there was three cameras on, to capture the glory of their wet, red faces. Rebecca wanted nothing more than to sweep in and gather them all into a soft hug (while surreptitiously digging into the tarts with a discarded fork—they didn’t look _too_ bad).

A few minutes later, the tarts were swept off to the decision room, but Rebecca did not follow them; it was a closed set, as though Stephen and Judy were filming something nude and intimate. So instead, she waited on the periphery of the baking tent, sorting and re-sorting her kit, watching Robert and Shana from the corner of her eye, every so often catching Robert watching her from the corner of his (she thought, from the subtle turn of his head). She wanted to say something to him. She wanted to cheer him. The only thing she could think of was to drop a brush, hike down her top at the neck, and bend languorously to get it (oof), which raised laughter from both Robert and Shana. Job done.

Finally, the judges returned, and she watched just as anxiously from the side lines once more. She didn’t want any of them to go home, not yet, but certainly not Robert. It was too early. This early on and he wouldn’t cement himself in the memory of the nation. No cookery books sold, no bakeries opened and kept humming with a steady stream of tourists eager to brush shoulders with semi-celebrity bakers. Being sent off today would involve being sent to obscurity, off to a life of a lumber mill, which, sure, he liked well enough, but his future should clearly lay in baked goods and a woman with too much padding, where his heart belonged.

Rebecca wished she’d been able to send him words of encouragement last night, over messaging. Perhaps if she had, if she had developed some code, or just been braver, or just not cared, he would have performed better today.

(Or if she wasn’t getting fat so damned quickly, she’d have been less of a distraction).

‘The judges have made their decisions.’ It was Ed’s turn to tell the contestants who was going home, because the judges were never brave enough, and Judy certainly didn’t have enough of a soul to look like she was sorry (God, Rebecca thought, that was bitchy. I am hormonal.).

Alan won the week, which surprised no one, and Rebecca felt a pang of dislike at his smug smile, knowing that one of the others—whom she liked measurably better—would be going home.

‘I’m afraid the person leaving us today is…’ Ed shifted from foot to foot. His trademark ratty ponytail slithering over one shoulder. He wrung his hands. He looked genuinely bereft. Behind him, the cameras hovered, zooming in on each anxious expression, on the clasped hands of the contestants.

‘…Shana.’

‘What ?’ at least three of the contestants said. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ Robert said, and Odette looked in a state of genuine shock, frozen to her stool.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Ed said, and he came in to enclose Shana in a hug, but Odette had got to her first.

‘It should have been me,’ Odette was saying. ‘My tart was liquid. Liquid.’ Her pretty face was furious as she turned on the judges, her accent contorting her vowels into a particularly breathy Belgian rage. ‘_What were you thinking?_’

Stephen and Judy were approaching with hands outstretched for shaking, but seeing Odette's fury, they took simultaneous steps back.

'It's okay,' Shana said. 'I promise it's okay. If it wasn't this week, it would have been next.'
'Bollocks,' Odette said with spite, pulling Shana into a hug, which, Rebecca gathered from Shana's slight smile, was not wholly unappreciated.

'Are you sure about this?' Robert said to Stephen and Judy, who were now half-hiding behind a row of decorative cake stands.

'Sorry,' Ed said again.

'Christ,' Robert said.

I'm sorry, Rebecca mouthed at Shana, when she was able to glance her way.

'Do you want a next series or not?' Will said, finally irritated with the contestants'
complaining. 'You'd think we were sending her to the gulag.' He turned to the cameras. 'Fuck's sake, still? Just fucking cut.'