11 hours ago
‘Making the cake is an act of love for the sister I lost'
It began with a secret. Because that was what my sister had become. I was 14 when she died and she was 9. We were on a package holiday in Hammamet, Tunisia. She had gone to bed as normal, after a day of swimming in the pool, eating Nutella-filled pancakes and dancing to the Beatles with my dad at the hotel disco. She woke at 3am, spluttering and unable to breathe. She had contracted a rare airborne virus, we don't know where, that moved swiftly through her body and shut down her vital organs. She died in my father's arms while I stood in the corner of the hotel room, watching, incapable with fear. She was called Candy. She loved sweets, the colour pink and the film Dirty Dancing. I grew up and she did not.
The experience had been so awful, of watching her die, of losing her, of the destructive repercussions for our family (addiction, affairs, bankruptcy, divorce), that I attempted to forget it all, to bury her memory along with her body. I did this so that I could go on, build a life. I did such a good job that by the time I reached my late thirties, with two young daughters of my own, a job, a husband, a mortgage, all the apparatus of a normal life, I had all but erased Candy. I had friends who did not know I'd ever had a sister, let alone that she had died. There were no photographs of her in our home. I could barely remember her, this little girl who I had grown up with in our mansion flat in Battersea, shared a bedroom with until I was 11. I certainly did not talk about Candy to my children, whose innocence I protected with zealous rigour. How could I explain it to them without terrifying them — that a child could die in the night with no apparent cause? To talk to them about Candy would be to introduce a grief into their happy, wholesome lives that I had been unable to accommodate in my own.
Because I had not grieved. I had pretended nothing had happened and buried the pain. But it festered and refused to remain hidden. I began to feel jagged and disconnected, drinking too much, behaving erratically. I understood that in order to be a proper, functioning mother, wife, friend and daughter (my father died 15 years ago, 20 years after my sister) I needed to re-examine my childhood. I started long-overdue therapy and had treatments for trauma, including acupuncture and EMDR. I dug out old pictures of Candy, spoke to people who might remember her, looked at my diaries and wrote about my childhood, trying to locate her in my frozen memory, rebuilding her from fragments. I spent nearly a year doing this before I felt able to talk to my children about my sister. By this time the girls were four and six — sunny, busy, bold, wild, creative little people. I didn't want to talk to them about death, I didn't want them to think about Candy being afraid. I wanted to talk about life and joy and fun. I wanted to create memories for them based around the aunt they would never meet.
So, as the anniversary of Candy's birthday approached in early July, I told the girls that we were going to make a cake. 'It's to celebrate my sister's birthday,' I said. 'She died when she was nine, very suddenly, very sadly. When she was alive she was a bit crazy and she really loved sweets — pink ones the most. So we are going to make a crazy pink birthday cake.'
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My daughters looked solemn as I explained this, but their expressions shifted as I continued. 'First we have to go to the supermarket and you must choose any sweets you want, as many as you like, and we are going to use those to decorate the cake.'
This was an opportunity like no other. Usually I was quite strict about sugar, but here was ultimate licence. They hurtled around the supermarket, laughing, excited, gathering packets of jelly beans, chocolate buttons, sprinkles, glancing up occasionally to make sure I wasn't about to change my mind, tell them to put it all back. The shopping basket was heavy with swag, but they kept filling it, Smarties, mini marshmallows, sparkly silver balls.
Back at home I made the sponges — three tiers, this cake was going to be huge. I made pink icing, a whole mixing bowl of it, with extra pink food colouring for a vivid shade. I iced the cake for the girls — a precarious business, but really I was just slapping the stuff on. We were not looking for anything chic, we were looking for a cake of cartoonish lunacy.
Then it was their turn. 'Be wild,' I said. They began chucking sweets at the thing, piling on the layers until the icing began to sag with the weight of its bounty, the whole edifice studded and sprinkled and starred and ridiculous. By this point my mother had arrived — her birthday is the week before Candy's, an event that, ever since her daughter's death, had been tinged with an inescapable sadness. But this cake was too ridiculous for anyone to feel sad. Once the cake could take no more, I cut slices. This was no easy task, what with all the draped fizzy strawberry laces, but somehow I managed it. We ate the cake and of course it was delicious. 'Candy would have loved this,' Mum said. And suddenly she was in the room with us, the memory of her at least, capering in her pink leotard, convinced she could manage another slice.
We first made the Candy Cake in 2016 and we have made it every year since. When I first had the idea I didn't conceive of it as an annual event, but it has had its own momentum. There have been some alterations — I once tried different-coloured sponge tiers, which was not a huge success. There was the year we covered it with googly eyes, which made it quite surreal. Another year we went big on unicorns and rainbows. When my older daughter became a vegetarian we had to lose all the gelatine-based sweets.
My mother is in a nursing home now, with limited mobility, so instead of eating the cake in the back garden in the sunshine, as we would normally have done, we take it to her and eat it together in her room, pictures of Candy all around us. And as my girls have grown and their personalities have developed, they have decided they want different things from the Candy Cake, so last year they made two. There was still the madcap plundering of the sweet aisle, still the pink icing, still the OTT aesthetic, just doubled.
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The Candy Cake has become our self-created tradition. We can never eat it in one go, so we put it in a tin and lug it around with us, giving friends and family a piece when we visit, spreading the Candy madness, each mouthful conjuring her personality. My daughters look forward to it and plan for it. They cannot remember a time before the Candy Cake — it is baked into them now, and even though they know it is a sad thing, it is also a joyful time, a task we do together like decorating the tree at Christmas. It has facilitated conversations about Candy, brought her into our lives in a tangible way — taste, smell, memory. It makes me feel like I am honouring her, remembering her, cherishing her. Making the cake is an act of love for the sister I lost, and on a sunny summer's day, with the sound of giggles and tinkling sprinkles, the taste of pink icing on my tongue, I feel like I have found her again.
This year, though, I tinkered with tradition. I turned 50 in May, and for my birthday party the girls and I made a classic Candy Cake: big and pink and wild. My friends gathered in the garden — friends made in secondary school, university, at work, all the things Candy never got to experience. This time the cake was all gone in one night, the icing scraped from the plate. And this time I made it for both of us, Candy and me. We live on behalf of the ones we have lost, so I feel like I have to embrace every day, every celebration 200 per cent, because I am doing it not just for me, but for her too. I grow old and she does not, but I bring her with me.
The Consequences of Love by Gavanndra Hodge (Penguin £10.99 pp336). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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