Ambushed by Cake

This is a story about the only prisoner I met who shouldn’t have been there. It’s also a story about cake. In the open prison we baked a lot of cakes. I’m sure that sounds strange. When you think of men’s prisons, full of killers, dealers, fraudsters and robbers, do you imagine much baking going on? No, they weren’t to hide contraband in, and this isn’t some euphemism for taking drugs or making moonshine. We made cakes. 

Cakes are simple. Flour, sugar, eggs, butter. We rarely had real butter, unless someone had been paid to evade the night patrols and bring a bag of shopping in. Vegetable oil spread does perfectly well though. Hell, just oil works fine. Flour, sugar and eggs we could buy in the canteen. Cocoa powder donated by a kitchen worker, who’d stolen a bag of it. 

You don’t even need an oven. A microwave is perfectly fine. Five or six minutes and you have a beautiful chocolate cake, still gooey at the bottom. Pop the box upside down and watch as men gather in wonder. When you haven’t had good, fresh cooked anything in years, a cake is something holy, something normal, something real. 

Bernard often baked with me. I’m sure he had an eating disorder. He was always either bingeing or purging. One day he’d eat bowl after bowl of cake, washed down with sweet cans of drink. Then he’d refuse to touch carbs for days after. Sometimes I’d make a cake when he wasn’t expecting one, ambush him with it and he’d find it impossible to resist.

Dieting is what put him in prison actually. He got really fat. He had a picture and showed it to us all the time – this is my reminder he said. So, fat Bernard decided to start taking diet pills. They worked. But he didn’t change his lifestyle and so he had to keep taking them. Why not start selling some to cover my costs? He had a nice little business, selling these dubious Chinese import pills. Not approved for use anywhere West of Suez of course. 

And then, and then. A woman who bought his pills committed suicide with them.

David Shipley

2021