Catching Alice

Food is the new shopping and shopping is the new sex. Alice wasn't really getting very much shopping or sex in her life right now, so she thought she might as well eat something. Yes, food. Not hard cornflakes that grazed her gums or char-grilled toast, but proper food that could feasibly, if she closed her eyes and let her imagination run riot, masquerade as sex. She opened the fridge. Not a thing. And certainly not a host of sun-dried tomatoes or a bar of rich Belgian chocolate. She wanted something that would make up for all that she was lacking in her miserable life. She wanted something to make her forget the bitter aftertaste of her tyrannical, unfaithful ex-boyfriend, Jamie. She wanted something so sweet that her teeth would rot just thinking about it. A sponge. A light sponge smeared with seedy raspberry jam and double cream. She pulled the round cake tin from the drawer beneath the oven and set about weighing out her flour. But as she reached for the self-rising flour, her arm wobbled dangerously. She really should go on a diet. She opted for a carrot cake. Fewer calories, she reasoned. Except the fridge revealed only half a moldy carrot. Alice wiped a floury hand through her hair and set off for Chelsea Green. The houses on her street were the color of sugared almonds and were dappled with sunlight this Monday morning. Bywater Street was the gypsy caravan of Chelsea. Myriad baskets of flowers and rare lilies adorned the doorways. Her neighbors were, as far as she could make out, Woodstock refugees and grandes dames, opera singers and retired colonels, practicing their scales, getting to grips with elementary taxidermy and feeding lobster thermidor to the roses in this first flush of May. Spring was here, and if she concentrated, Alice was sure she could hear birds above the traffic noises on the King's Road. Wearing her holey leggings and a dyed-in-the-wash T-shirt, hoping that her cousin Simon's Turnbull & Asser size-eleven slippers could pass for the latest in Gucci footwear, Alice attempted to mingle with the tawny-skinned women and heroin-chic men hanging around outside cafes and chewing the fat over their modeling portfolios. But catching sight of herself in the window of an exclusive lingerie boutique, she realized that there wasn't a cat in hell's chance of her flour streaks being mistaken for the labor of love of a top Toni and Guy stylist. She ruffled her rebellious chestnut curls in a bid to liberate some of the baking ingredients and dashed around the corner to take a shortcut away from the withering glares of the beau monde. Alice rounded the corner to Chelsea Green, a curious place. Those who had never been to the city would recognize it instantly as London and break into a rendition of "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" in a Dick Van Dyke cor-blimey-me-old-treacle sort of way. Surrounding an elegant patch of manicured grass, it boasts shopfronts from a film set: a fishmonger's whose rainbow trout leaped from stream to weighing scales with a casual flip of the fins, a greengrocer's whose pears and potatoes nestled in a blissful time warp on a bed of AstroTurf and a newsagent who sold penny chews and sherbet fountains. Those who knew better regarded it suspiciously as London's answer to the Stepford Wives, lots of impossibly perfect women whose racehorse legs deemed it impossible for them to have given birth to a souffle, let alone the pristine toddlers huddled in the back of the Mercedes. Alice, realizing that the only part of her anatomy that could be mistaken for that of a racehorse was her rump, stood behind one of these beings in the greengrocer's and tried to pull her T-shirt down to her knees. The woman was squeezing a peach so perfectly blushing it shNaylor, Clare is the author of 'Catching Alice', published 2000 under ISBN 9780449005576 and ISBN 0449005577.