Cake in a Time of Upturned Collars

A Memory, for this 9/11

Chris Voll

He stood unmoving with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his trench coat, the collar turned up. He wore a flat cap pulled low. It didn’t leave much of him to see, standing still like that and dressed in charcoal – like he wanted to blend with the grimy brickwork of the Underground tunnel, or disappear. But I wasn’t about to let him escape.

I moved in, removing the lid from the cake box in my hand as I approached. ‘Care for a slice?’ I asked. No response. ‘It’s chocolate,’ I tried. ‘Homemade.’

He looked at me then. ‘Ping off,’ he said (or something less charitable but equally British – I no longer recall with certainty, time being the great healer).

‘Sorry I asked. Can’t say I didn’t try,’ I said. ‘You have a good one now.’ I smiled at him, even as his shutters closed and the trench coat boarded up – nothing was going to get between me and my bonhomie that London night.

‘Honey!’ That was my wife, Norann, behind me. We’d been married all of three months, and had only recently arrived in the UK from the States. I turned around, and saw a cluster of teenagers moving toward her along the platform. I got between them and Norann – and proffered the cake. Did they want some? Uh, yeah, they didn’t mind if they did. They polished off a slice each – ‘quite good that, fanks’ – but that still left at least half the cake. And then the train pulled in, stirring the stale tunnel air, we all minded the gap and got on, and the doors hissed closed behind us as we glided off.

That was October 1998. Today, a decade into the ‘war on terror’ that began one fateful September morning and already six years on from the ‘7/7’ London bombings, 1998 seems somehow more than thirteen years ago. The pace of change and the spread of fear has outstripped the clock.

In marking this anniversary of September 11, I, like everyone else I know, relived that day ten years ago. Where I was when I first heard (at work). What my first thought was (this is an Orson Welles moment, right?). But I also found myself thinking back to that tube ride and the cake. Indulge me…

It had been a big cake, double-layered, if memory serves, with chocolate cream filling and buttery chocolate icing, somewhat superfluously served on the heels of a robust birthday dinner. But it was Kate’s twenty-first (she and my wife have been friends since childhood), and her flatmates had outdone themselves in her honour. No one had much room for cake, so I happily volunteered to see that the leftovers didn’t go to waste.

After the washing-up, we went out to watch the ‘Truman Show’ (hey, it wasn’t my birthday!). Almost two hours of Jim Carrey trapped unknowingly (at least for the first several reels) in Truman Burbank’s life-as-reality-TV show – if you can call a bubble-world full of ’50s decor and plasticine characters any kind of life – and no chance to pull one of his stock-in-trade faces. Pity, that.

Then it was time to say good-bye and catch the Hastings train out of Charing Cross. That’s where we were headed, via the tube, when we met trench coat man.

The train, when we caught it, was full. It was a Friday night. But with persistence we found a carriage with two empty seats in one of those compartments with sliding doors where six, eight, ten people – guppies in a bowl – could share the illusion of privacy, knee to knee. It was an old train, and tired. The bench seats, while not quite wooden-slatted, bore unidentified splotches in the carpet upholstery that almost made you wish they were.

The people on the train were old too. Old in their observance of the timeworn etiquette of avoided glances, raised newspapers, tight-clasped handbags. Joyless as the ubiquitous drizzle that pockmarked the city-smudged windows as the train left the shelter of the station.

But I had my cake. And I meant to eat it, too.

It will always be one of my favourite cakes, I think, even though – or rather, because – I only got to eat one (more) slice. The rest went to eight – or was it twelve, or twenty? – strangers. Those strangers whose company I shared on a southbound train thrumming its way through Kent of an autumn evening. That beautiful evening, while the rain washed clean that tired old train, and the cake worked its magic on all of us.

There were smiles by Tonbridge, laughter at Tunbridge Wells. Shared stories as we left Wadhurst, proprietary walls crumbling outside Stonegate. For the space of one journey at least, we saw each other.

The cake was gone by Robertsbridge. Our stop. ‘We don’t do this sort of thing, you know,’ they told us as we got off. It was a ‘we’ that included not just the people in the carriage that night, but all of England. All of us.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I don’t, either, usually.’

Blame it on the indiscretion of youth. Or on Truman Burbank and his desperation to get out of his sad little life in his sad little prefab world – and the latent cinematic claustrophobia I needed to purge myself of. Or blame the chocolate cake (so maybe that Antoinette lady had a point).

But, when I look back on that memory, I think: Why can’t it be like that more often? Why can’t I be like that more often? Why do we view each other with suspicion (I doubt whether I’d take cake from a stranger)? Why does it take calamity – a flood, fire, accident, or attack – to get us to see each other?

Excuses are tempting: That was then, this is now – the world’s a different place since 9/11… I know I don’t have to settle for that, though. It’s up to me to decide against turtling up and assuming the worst of those around me. I can choose to raise the proverbial newspaper, or strike up a conversation. I can choose to see.

The choices are mine to make. The chocolate cake is optional. A great option.

*  *  *

The writer lives at the Bruderhof’s Danthonia Community, Inverell, Australia, with his wife Norann and their sons. Chris has never met a chocolate cake he didn’t like.