Cinnamon Rolls a short story by Louisa Bello

The moon had an odd paleness about it tonight. The Parks police were long gone now, at home with their wives and steaming mugs of tea. Tonight, he barely felt the cold. The moon, a punctuated sphere hung there, above him, alone, aghast, in the blackened, starless sky. When would she come? As he sat on the park bench and focused on the moon, it seemed to melt into the horrified, painted face of his Mother.

He tried to shake her away. Those heavily kohl’ed eyes scooped from her pale foundation, dark with hatred, or, what was it? He still couldn’t place it.

He racked his memory for clarity. It seemed so important now. Her dressing table had always been covered in products to style and tease and such; in aid of the creation of her Friday evening look. She used to sit in her robe, on those evenings, getting ready for a dinner dance, a soiree, ‘a child free activity‘ she had often quipped.

The dressing table, a wedding present from her mother, had sat opposite the perfectly made white linen bed. It also reflected the door, enabling Mother, he’d always presumed, never to be caught off guard.

It was the evening of his tenth birthday. Her sour face had twitched in its frozen pallidity, as her maid coiffed (with some obvious difficulty) her coarse brown hair and powder puffed her face white in preparation for the colour. She had watched them both advancing towards her through the mirror, and now he smiled to himself as he recalled his hand had been joined firmly, (and warmly) with Ada’s, as the pair (well, perhaps just Ada) had skipped into his Mother’s bedroom to ask if she could stay for tea.

His reaction had been admirable, considering. Once Mother had proceeded to spit out those most unexpected, shrieking, banishment-type words, casting them both to a lifetime of her ‘Motherly no’s’, he had covered Ada’s ears and tried to take her away from there. He had dragged Ada away, with all his 10 year old strength until, just as they had reached the door, Ada had quite refused to move and then, then, she had spun on her heels and stood in front of him, protecting him (as always) and he had covered his ears to stop Mother’s ricocheting threats and noisy accusations and there, back within that mirror, he caught it.

Ada had smiled – simply smiled, directly into that mirror, at his Mother, and yes, that was it. His mother had been stunned into an envious silence by Ada’s defiant light.

Tonight is an exceptionally cold night. He pulls his woollen coat tighter around his soft, bruised body and despite the cold wind biting his nose, he almost enjoys the shiver it sets off as it sweeps down his spine, and spreads through his chest. The final throes of cold force him to curl his stiffened toes within the confines of his trainers, neon laces dangling below.

Gently he pulls his skeletal knees up and into his body for warmth, (with surprising difficulty, he notes, for such light mass) shivering constantly as they rattle against the damp husk of his chest, through his thin hospital gown, as he lies in a foetal position on the park bench.

His Ada would have kept him warm this evening. His personal radiator, he called her for she was always warm to the touch and supple and inviting. Always ready to accept him in.

He closes his eyes now and breathes in deeply. He sucks in the cold air, setting off another shiver, stinging his nostrils, it freezes his lungs, triggering a hacking blood-spattered cough. With his gloveless fingers, he wipes the phlegm and blood spots from the corner of his mouth and the tears from both eyes and, yes! There she is! Tightly cane-rowed afro, green leggings and the studded nose ring she never took out.

Oh, how his belly flipped at her smile! It would be ok now she was here. She comforted him, always, just like the warm condensed milk on her mothers cinnamon rolls.

And now he frantically fights to keep his eyes tightly closed so as to keep out the cold and the dark of the night, of the park, but, even more importantly, so as to keep Ada’s face clear in his mind’s eye. He sniffs. He can even smell her now and it fills his nostrils, makes his belly rumble and he thinks how warm cinnamon rolls would be good to eat now.

His mouth waters at the memory of Ada’s mother pulling a freshly baked tray from the oven, the paint-chipped windows in their kitchen instantly steaming up. The smell would hang in the air for hours and days, even months afterwards, topped up each Sunday by a new batch. Ada’s mother only baked cinnamon rolls, and, who would want anything else? Rich, sweet flaky pastry filled with juicy fat raisins and aromatic spices.

Enough to tickle delicious sneezes from his nose as he tucked in. Every time.

Ada would jump with glee when her Mother’s oven-gloved hand presented a tray full of warm rolls. Delightedly she’d dive upon them, uncurling each roll, slowly, playing the flute with the raisins, licking the icing dust from her top-lip. The pastry would flake over her dungarees and the kitchen floor. Her mother would smile with joy at the pleasure her daughter took in eating her rolls, her voluminous aproned chest, rising and falling with pride.

Ada would dance and twirl around the kitchen for him and with him as her Mother tidied up around them, spinning him in his chair around and around and around, teasing him with the rolls and kissing him on the nose and the forehead, smiling for him, until finally, finally, she would feed him those home-baked joys, brushing the excess pastry from his thin lips with her warm spice-dusted fingers. Her eyes alight with pleasure, his.

Ada smiled most of the time, even when she was sad and even when she was angry (and she could be both and sometimes at once). She smiled, especially at those certain times when Mother refused to let her see him because, she said, he was too sick, or because, she said, he had to spend the weekend at the rehabilitation centre and no, no no, she said, they would certainly not let HER visit him there.

It was at those times he watched Ada from his large bay bedroom windows. From behind the heavy lined velvet curtains he would admire her face, round and smooth and her wide, strong and defiant nose tilted slightly into the air, in delicate alignment with the top corners of her unwavering and unrepentant smile,.

She would smile right into the meanness of his mother, house coat pulled tightly across her body, her arms folded, foot wedged in the door. Her wine stained tongue lashed and ready for Ada to push a step too far. In these moments he would catch a spark of futile contempt flash through the whites of her brave, almond shaped eyes and when he caught the shadows of sadness or anger or glimmers of rage in Ada’s eyes, on those days he would summon courage and wheel out to the door, drawing upon Ada’s strength to demand Mother let Ada in, or, to allow him out.

He would revel in the memory wisps of cinnamon buried within the cocoa-buttered skin of her neck or the smoothness of the inside of her wrist as she stroked his eyes closed, her rhythm catching his cheek.

And then, down there, where he was complete, and with an unfiltered kiss, he could always find the power to bring her back to him, to erase the tiredness or bitter fronds of their lives. On those days he repaid her, he restored her and he felt like a man.

And when Ada's mother died, she had smiled throughout the funeral and those that hadn’t known her well had reacted badly, and sniffed, noses in the air, at how surprisingly rude she had been. She hadn’t cared. She told him later on, when they were alone that she had smiled at her Mother’s graveside because she was recalling memories, their shared memories.

Her mother on her knees, scrubbing their linoed kitchen floor and wiggling her bottom in time, left to right, right to left, to the big Jazz band tunes of days gone by. Their laughter and giggles as they twirled around the kitchen together, Ada balanced on her mother’s feet, dancing to crackly recordings of Duke Ellington Live at Tivoli Gardens or Dizzy Gillespie or the Cole Porter Band.

Ada, Ada! His lip trembles now as he bites down hard upon the bottom flesh He doesn’t feel it. His taste buds are revisited by the memory of the sting of Ada’s firewater tears on the night of the day they had buried her Mother. He had kissed her tears then, one by one, not wanting them to stain her pretty face.

He had felt hideously drunk upon her sadness. Her tears seemed to burn a layer of skin from his tongue and he continued to feel the pain for days afterwards, as though Ada had purposefully singed the memory upon him that he may never forget the significance of the day.

And they had left the crowds of men and women, who had arrived at midday to the graveyard in their dark, multicoloured silks and heavily brocaded finery, in honour of Ada's Mother. The melee of colours gave warmth to an otherwise bland local day, and even his own Mother had appeared, of course she had stood at the back in severe head-to-toe black, along with her maid (holding a parasol, a parasol!- -of all things - above her head against the midday rain, in south London!) She had come, she had come, he conceded.

He and Ada left the mourners in the kitchen of the small 2-bedroomed maisonette, the glass and wire front door held wide open to their well-kept and flowerless front lawn with Ada’s sunflower doorstop. Some had stood in the hallway and some had stood in the garden (smoking) eating fried chicken and chunky fish moin-moin and drinking Guinness (men) and peach schnapps (women) in honour of the fine woman they had just laid to rest in the frozen ground of the cemetery.

And then the chatter had turned to whispers as they recalled Ada’s smile at the graveside, and Ada, still smiling had guided him, silently and step, by step, to her bedroom where she lay him down gently and, in silence, lay down beside him. Together they listened to the hum of family and friends and acquaintances and strangers below.

That evening when the last of the people had taken the rest of the fried rice in plastic tuppaware and on which the occasion had been duly recorded and blessed in ink with the inscription ‘Ayowonuola Akinwumi, Daughter, Sister, Niece, Aunt and Mother and God fearing servant of the Kingdom of Life Church 1956 – 2011.May the Lord take her soul and bless those she has left behind,’ he had lain quite still next to her upon her narrow single bed.

Even when she had insisted upon her strength atop of his frail but wanting body and even when he had thought he might snap if she had breathed down any harder, she had smiled quite perfectly above him. He had felt her lips upon his neck and breathed in deeply, the cinnamon in her hair reaffirming what he knew.

But it was when she kissed him, finally, that he had tasted her tears and one by one they had dissolved upon his tongue and the memory of the day, and of the night, had been singed forever.

“Evening mate, you got a light?”

And tonight he fights for silence from his wracking body, tries to curb the uncontrollable shivering and concentrates instead on disappearing steadily, limb by limb into his memories. Into Ada.

‘Ello?’ You alright mate? You alive? Can you hear me?’

A young boy of no older than 15 stands on the park path in front of his bench, beanie cap half-covering his eyes and a thick scarf wrapped around his neck and mouth which muffles his speech. The boy’s cheeks bellow in and out above it with each heavy breath, quite akin to Ada’s, he thinks, the day she fell off her new shiny red BMX bike and grazed her knees at the end of their manicured front lawn.

He, (of course!) had cried with the shock. She hadn’t made a single sound. His Mother had spotted them through the kitchen window (what had she been doing in the kitchen?) and had tried to shoo Ada down the road through the stiff lace, pulling her usual grimaces and making her usual shooing sound. He had watched mother, mortified.

Ada stood up straight, pulled down her skirt and limp-marched ahead of him, right to the front door and straight in to the kitchen. She marched straight up to his mother and asked her for a towel and also a lift back to her home, for, as a Mother, how could she possibly expect a 14 year old to walk home with such injured knees!

Oh Ada! And now he silently sobs, ashamed at that memory (of all the memories!), of his bemused and disapproving Mother (in her ochre paisley house-robe) requesting her driver to take Ada (and only Ada!) to the end of her own road (and no further!). Ada had smiled at the driver and asked him to carry them both to the back seat of the car and the driver had happily obliged (quite ignoring his Mother’s request) and had chatted happily instead to them on the journey about the delicious truffles he had found in the woods behind Mother’s house.

Ada’s Mother had tended to her daughter with her cooing, cuddly ways. That day, he had wished an almighty wish (and not for the first – or last – time) to have lived there with them. And then, when Ada’s knees were covered in snoopy plasters, both mother and daughter had turned back to him, quite unforgotten in his chair, in the doorway, where the driver had left him, and they had smiled in unison, and clucked over him; a chorus of love.

His tears had instantly dried up and he had known then that everything would be alright in the end.

And now the young boy in the beanie hat steps back and away from the park bench, and, startled by the mutterings coming from the frail man on the bench, he edges off into the midnight drenched park. He doesn’t really notice this because there is Ada again, warding him and pushing him down the High Street and chasing off the bullies at the end of his road after school.

There, yes there she is again, down the park, lipgloss glistening in the summer brightness, her battered skateboard underneath her arm, neon glow tights laddered to the knees. And where is he? Yes, he is where is always is. Sat behind her. Adoring her. Admiring her. She turns and smiles at him, her neat rows of white teeth guarding them both, her hands on her mini-skirted hips, protecting him with nothing but a mouthful of coarse words and a surging smile.

He had not noticed it before. A red climbing frame is illuminated and Ada appears, atop, wearing her favourite blue dungaree shorts with neon green tights, one clasp undone, (always undone) hanging beneath her under-formed chest. There she stands, her balance victorious, The spotlight on her. She smiles. Her braids are thick and neat and tight, stretched into rows. Her well-oiled scalp presented to the sky.

Ah, they had both liked him to stroke it, slowly, following the path between them, from her wide unblemished forehead to the base of her long neck. There, at the base of her neck, they were fastened with multi-coloured bands of reds and yellows and blues. But, only when they both lay far behind his house, in the overgrown woodlands which hid them from sight, underneath their blossoming penny tree and their moulting penny tree and their naked penny tree, when they were just themselves, alone and everything was fine; there they knew everything would be alright.

The alarm on his watch rings. He looks at his wrist, jolted back to the present. The bone and fine brown hairs, the thin, translucent skin and the hospital band with his name, Ward and Doctor in Heuretica type font.

He tries not to remember the room or the tv in the top right corner of the room or the blue vase, multiple yellow flowers drooping within it, by his bed.

Instead he focuses on the sounds, so pretty as Ada hummed indecipherable but exquisitely whispered melodies into his ear and into his dreams. Her smile into his eyes as the doctors inserted the needles into his arms and to his side and into his leg. And then he had fallen asleep.

He had awoken, his body aching in so many places and at once, gagging on the tubes in his nose and his mouth. But worse, much worse, was the realisation, the helpless pain of finding only his Mother at his side where Ada should have been. His Mother, fussing and crying above him (but not touching him). Mutterings from doctors at his bedside, his mothers whispers about recoveries being 'long and hard, almost impossible' (Mother had never been parsimonious with her sentiments).

He caught glimpses of his Mother shaking her head at the doctor and loudly whispering of how they would manage alone somehow now, she would take care of him now for the rest of his life, and he had struggled to find her, to place her. He had panicked and retched with the force of realisation. Ada should have been there with him and that she was not. She would never be again.

No, no, he is not in the hospital, but yes, he understands now, he is in the park opposite, he is on the bench. He knows this now, yes, of course he does, because he fought for this, after all.

Now, now, he struggles to open his eyes and to focus on that beanie headed boy’s knees. The boy is standing quite still in the dark and through frozen tears he struggles for focus by blinking once and twice. He makes out another two, jean-covered pairs of knees in the moonlight, in line, side by side. He is aware of the danger, but where is Ada? He shuts his eyes, in the fearful realisation that Ada is not here to protect him and suddenly feels a numbing thwack in the side of his head which makes his ears ring and ring and ring and then Ada steps forward to kiss him in her green and yellow and blue wedding glory, the bright sunlight framing her face, as though she were the sun.

He smiles back in a suit she had designed just for him, of the palest gold and which brought out the blue in his eyes, so she said and she bends down to his wheelchair and she holds his hands tightly and she whispers, ‘you know, you know, you know .’

His face smacks the ground with a speed that surpasses his thoughts and it feels as though he is being bitten by a thousand tiny splicing iced teeth all at once as the gravel embeds into his cheek on the left side of his face. His body remains there, curled into the foetal position as the boys kick him and kick him and kick him until finally, he is able to reach for those moonbeams and into those beams after all.

He opens his eyes. From his vantage point, at the side of a motorway, his head is aligned with feet. Many feet. In shoes. Mostly white plimsols or trainers. He can see a red car… upturned in a ditch ahead , the wheels askew. He sees a daisy, white and yellow on the roof. Stationary ambulance sirens wail deafening. The flashing lights blind him momentarily, so he closes his eyes.

He wants to sleep. The feeling overwhelms him. The blur of green uniforms spill from the back of the ambulance. There are many strange faces emoting concern, bewilderment, sorrow even horror – horror!

He tries to move his head to find Ada but he can’t. He sees her and relief floods his senses. She is lying next to him, lying! Her hand upon his face. She is still. He cannot feel her hand and his tongue is muted into stillness; he sees there is blood on her lips, those precious lips and a pool of blood under the crook of her neck.

His head is numb and he tries to breathe in, breathe her in closer to him, but she is too far away now and yet, yet, she reaches through the green bodies and across the wires and the machines and past the sirens. With one arm, one hand, she reaches through the people and over to him. She presses his eyes closed with her slender fingers. His ring, the ring and their promises, on her third finger, right hand.

He smiles inside as he sees his ring on her finger, though to others, his eyes loll and his mouth is filled with pipes. He is placing it upon her finger. Everything would be alright. Ada was there.

Then, then, he awakens to the white walls and the cold sun upon his face, shining brightly through pale blue curtains. He is in the hospital room. The room with the yellow flowers in the blue vase and the tv and his mother weeping above him and the doctors chatting aside of him and Ada, where is she? He knows in a heartbeat that she is gone.

So now, as he lies on the gravel in the park outside the hospital, barely breathing, he instinctively presses his body against hers, as he does every morning before she gets out of bed to get ready for work, before she drives him to the Centre in their red second-hand beetle with the daisies he painted for her on the top.

The sun is rising now above the park, with barely a winter strength and he knows this much, yes he knows with a certainty as clear as the memory of Ada Wilson saying ‘I do’, to a room of their friends and none of their family. He knows that he will not last another minute without her.

And as he struggles, his body automatically fighting for its last breaths, the moon is fading from the lightening winter sky. He sees her there, atop of the red climbing frame once more, neon tights glowing, her smile beckoning. He smiles back, quite smugly some might say, contentedly, those who knew him would say. He smiles because he knew and they knew, together, as they had always known, that everything would be alright, in the end