So secretive we were, so sly! “Not a word to Nai!” Dan said, in emails full of tricks and plans, and by Saturday morning I was on the phone with Emily, saying, “We are the MI5 of cake!” Nai turns thirty today, see, and we like Nai, and we like cake, so what better way to celebrate than to bring them both together in a streamer-strewn room, Saturday night at Number Twenty-two.

“If I have it in me,” I’d said, “maybe I will also make cupcakes!” and the also signalled the already-accounted-for hazelnut meringue tower of our chocolate cream dreams. “If,” I’d said to Marc and to Dan, and “If,” I’d said to Emily, but the voice in the back of my head knew better. The voice in the back of my head said, in a voice dusted with sugar crystals, “There is no if in cupcake”.



By the time Emily sent a mid-morning text to find out if I was awake, twelve cupcakes were lined up on the cooling rack, while the oven worked on another dozen. “It couldn’t be simpler to make cupcakes,” read the Nigella Lawson recipe online, and then it prescribed putting all the ingredients in a blender. Faced with the empty space in my cupboard where no blender sits, I said, “Oh, Nigella Lawson,” and reached for a wooden spoon. It is true, though – the cupcakes couldn’t have been simpler to make, and I wonder now why it has taken me so long to come ’round. I think I’d been thinking I couldn’t be bothered putting together so many small things, when clearly I should have been fêting the one porcelain mixing bowl from whence so many small things come. There were twelve, then there were twenty-four, then, okay, there were twenty-three. There was a lemon zesty cream cheese icing, afterwards, and there were sugar letters in blue. There were pink sprinkles all over, like it’s a party now.



What I want to know, though, is what the voice in Emily’s head was saying, because closing in on party time, Olive and I tumbled into Number Twenty-two from the evening chill to discover what you can do with four hundred grams of Nutella. Emily, she’d made a chocolate-hazelnut cake with a chocolate-finger swimming pool of green jelly water. Ludivine Sagnier wasn’t sunning by the side, but a miniature couple relaxed under cocktail umbrellas, belying the terror they’d experienced some short hours before. “I came downstairs after my shower,” Emily said, “and found the pool had melted.” “The people had drowned,” she said. “I screamed.” But she is handy, is the girl, and by the time party time closed in, the miniature couple had been revived and Blu-Tacked to the side. By the time party time closed in, they were reading summer bestsellers under paper parasols in red and blue.



So giggly we were, so fidgety! as party time closed in, and we stood in the dark with the candles lit. “5,” Dan texted, like the spy he is, and we blew out the candles, for if we hadn’t, Nai would have been greeted, in five minutes, by hunks of molten wax. Then we heard a rustle, and we scrambled into place. We relit the candles and held our breath. Nothing, then nothing, then nothing. “My face is itchy,” Emily said, and her hands were full of cake. She wrinkled her nose as if it had fingers. We blew out the candles again.

“Well,” I said, “this is fun and all,” and then we heard the front door open. “Sshh!” we said, “sshhh!”, and “sshhh!” again, like in the best comedy shows, and somewhere inside me I snorted. The light came on under the door. And the footsteps, and the footsteps, and still we waited. And then the click of the living room door opening, and Nai peered round the door frame. There was jubilation then, like balloons on the wind, and those of us who remained in control of ourselves yelled “Surprise!!!” Me, I think I fell back on “AAAAAA!!!” but you cannot tell me that is not surprising.



And then, my friends, and this is no surprise, then there was cake. There was cake and cake and ice cream and cake, and somewhere in there there was the birthday song. Nai charmed all the Spanish girls. Marc ate all the Pringles and then started on the shiny streamers. Elaine’s peach agar-agar revived us from our sugar stupor, but then Emily started sliding behind the chair again, and I was curled up on Dan’s red futon. It must have been near two in the morning by then, and it was time for kisses good-bye, and the cold outside.

The number ninety-one wasn’t long, and, back home, it still smelt of baking.