Benji and the School Fair

The Cliffside Primary annual school fair was the kind of event that the whole neighbourhood came to, whether they had children in the school or not, because the school fair meant food stalls and the domino tournament and Miss Icie’s Famous Coconut Layer Cake, which appeared once a year and only at the fair and which people from three neighbourhoods over came specifically to buy.

The cake was the competition.

Not officially — officially, the fair had a cake competition with three judges and a first-place ribbon and a fifty-dollar prize. But everyone in Cliffside knew that the real competition was: who would come closest to Miss Icie’s cake. Miss Icie never entered the competition herself. She said competitions were for people who needed to prove something, and she did not need to prove anything. She simply made the cake and donated it to the raffle and left the judges’ table to manage without her.

The judges’ table was where Benji was sitting at seven in the morning.

Nadine arrived at the fairgrounds early to help set up the book stall, which was a thing the Standard Five students ran each year. She came around the side of the school building with her box of donated books and found Benji sitting in front of the judges’ table — a long trestle table with a blue tablecloth, currently holding six cakes in various states of covering — and looking at it with the focused attention that, Nadine had learned, meant he had already identified a problem and was waiting for someone to notice.

She put down her box.

She looked at the cakes.

She looked at Benji.

She pulled out her phone.

“The fair doesn’t start until ten,” Omar said, when he answered.

“I know. Benji is at the judges’ table.”

A pause.

“He’s been there since before I arrived,” she said. “The table has six cakes. Something is wrong with one of them. Come.”

Omar and Clevie arrived at eight-fifteen. The fairground was half-set-up — some stalls open, some still being arranged, the sound system being tested at intervals, the smell of jerk already drifting from the far corner.

Benji was still at the table.

“Has he moved?” Clevie said.

“No,” Nadine said. “He moved once, to that end —” she pointed “— and then came back to here.”

“That end” was the right side of the table. Third cake from the end. Covered with a cloth, same as the others.

“He’s pointing at the third one,” Omar said.

“Dogs don’t point,” Clevie said.

“He’s indicating the third one,” Omar said.

The cakes could not be touched. That was the rule. The judges — Mr. Richards from the school board, Mrs. Campbell from the parent association, and Miss Patricia who was a retired food science teacher and took this extremely seriously — would arrive at nine-thirty and the cakes were not to be disturbed before the judging.

“We can look,” Nadine said.

“Looking is fine,” Omar agreed.

They looked.

The third cake from the end of the right side was a three-layer cake with what appeared to be cream cheese frosting, decorated with small sugar flowers. Professionally done. Very neat. The card propped in front of it said: Rainbow Sponge — M. Foster.

“M. Foster,” Omar said.

“Don’t know a Foster,” Clevie said. “Do you?”

Nadine thought. “There’s a Yvonne Foster who moved to the neighbourhood in September. Has a daughter in Standard Two.”

“First fair,” Omar said.

“First fair,” Nadine agreed. “Entered the cake competition.”

They looked at the cake.

“Benji is very bothered by it,” Clevie said.

“He’s very bothered by something about it,” Nadine said. “Could be the cake. Could be something near the cake.”

Omar bent close, not touching, looking at the base of the cake stand. There was something. Faint. A small dark smear on the white cake stand, at the edge, where the tablecloth met the stand’s foot.

He stood up.

He looked at Benji.

“Something was put on it,” he said. “Something dark. Not frosting.”

“Or taken from it,” Nadine said.

They needed an adult. That was the problem with physical evidence — you could not act on it yourself, and you definitely could not move anything on the judges’ table, and you could not accuse anyone of anything without looking like three children making up a story about a cake competition.

They needed the right adult.

“Not a teacher,” Clevie said. “They’ll just say leave the table alone.”

“Not a parent volunteer,” Omar said. “They’ll ask too many questions.”

“Miss Icie,” Nadine said.

They both looked at her.

“Miss Icie knows every cake made in this neighbourhood,” she said. “She knows the recipe of every person who has ever entered this competition. She will know what’s wrong with it in thirty seconds.”

They found Miss Icie at her table, arranging her famous coconut layer cake on a stand for the raffle display. She looked at them over the top of it.

“What you three want?”

“Can you look at the cake competition table?” Nadine said. “Third from the right end. Something is wrong with it.”

“How you know something wrong with it?”

“Benji is sitting in front of it.”

Miss Icie looked at Benji, who was still at the table.

She set down her cake stand.

She walked to the judges’ table with the three children behind her, leaned over without touching, and looked at the Rainbow Sponge for approximately ten seconds.

“Turn up the card,” she said.

“We’re not supposed to—”

“I’m not a judge,” Miss Icie said. “Turn up the card.”

Omar turned up the card.

On the back, in faint pencil: Entry disqualified — no animal products. Original entered was removed.

“Someone swapped it,” Nadine said.

“More than that,” Miss Icie said. “You see the crumb there?” She pointed, not touching, at the base of the stand. “Red velvet. That smear is red velvet cake. Someone came in early, took out the original entry, put in this one.” She stood up straight. “This is a dry sponge. No egg. No butter. It will not win, but it does not need to win — it just needs to make the real entry disappear.”

“Why would someone—” Clevie started.

“Because the real entry is good,” Miss Icie said. “Good enough to beat something else on this table.” Her eyes moved along the row. They stopped on a cake at the far left end: elaborate, three tiers, decorated with what appeared to be hand-piped roses. “That one,” she said. “Someone is very sure that cake is going to win first place and did not want competition.”

The fair director that year was a man named Mr. Gayle, who was thorough and took his responsibilities seriously. He came to the table with Miss Icie, asked the three children to wait a moment, confirmed the swap with the evidence Miss Icie pointed out, and then made three phone calls in quick succession.

The third phone call was to Yvonne Foster, who arrived twenty minutes later carrying her actual entry — a red velvet layer cake that she had been storing in her car, having arrived early and found her original submission gone and the table apparently already set, and decided, with the particular logic of a woman who had not come all this way to cause a scene at her first fair, to simply take it home.

She had not said anything because she didn’t know anyone yet and didn’t feel she had the standing to complain.

She had been sitting in the parking area in her car for forty minutes.

Clevie found this deeply upsetting in a way he couldn’t fully articulate.

“She just sat there,” he said.

“She didn’t know us yet,” Nadine said.

“Still.”

“She knows us now.”

The red velvet cake was reinstated. The dry sponge was removed. The owner of the far-left three-tier entry — identified by the fair records as a Mrs. Dorothy from one neighbourhood over, who had entered five years running and won four times and appeared to have strong opinions about winning five — was spoken to quietly by Mr. Gayle, and the conversation appeared to resolve something, though the three children were not told the details.

Miss Patricia, who was retired and who took the judging extremely seriously, declared the red velvet cake the winner at eleven o’clock.

Yvonne Foster cried a small amount, which she apologised for.

Her daughter in Standard Two thought this was wonderful and clapped very hard.

Clevie ate three slices of the prizewinning cake because Yvonne Foster kept offering them and he could not find a reason to say no.

“You’re going to be sick,” Omar told him.

“This cake is very good,” Clevie said, and had a fourth slice.

Miss Icie’s coconut layer cake won the raffle. It was won by Mr. Beresford, who had been buying raffle tickets for six years in the hope of exactly this outcome, and he ate half of it at the fair and took the rest home and said it was the best day he’d had in recent memory.

Benji ate none of the cake.

He was a dog, and cake was not something dogs ate, and he had the dignity not to request it.

He did accept a small piece of jerk chicken from the far stall, which he ate with the expression of a person who has done a satisfactory morning’s work and is now appropriately rewarded.

“Does he always know?” Yvonne Foster asked, looking at Benji with the expression that most adults eventually arrived at: part confusion, part respect, part the specific feeling of having one’s assumptions about dogs updated.

“He always knows,” Nadine said.

“What is he, exactly?”

Nadine thought about how to answer this.

“He’s Benji,” she said. “He’s from Cliffside. He looks out for people.”

“He’s a good dog,” Yvonne Foster said.

Benji looked at her.

His tail moved once.

He did not need her to say it. But it was a nice thing to hear, and he was not above that.