THE ZANABIAN HISTORICAL ARCHIVE: THE ZANABIA ICE CREAM HUB

Filed under: Frozen Matters, Municipal Confusion, and Things That Melted Before Anyone Could Agree About Them It was, by unanimous and entirely unverified consensus, the hottest afternoon ZANABIA had experienced in at least nine days. The sun sat directly above the village like a large, self-satisfied egg yolk. The MOWA waterfall had slowed to a thoughtful trickle, and even the rain, which in ZANABIA usually arrives uninvited like a relative with an opinion, had decided for once to stay away and let everyone suffer honestly. It was, in short, exactly the sort of afternoon on which the Ice Cream Hub does its finest work. Nobody in ZANABIA can say with any confidence who founded the Ice Cream Hub. The Archive has searched. The Archive has, if it is honest, searched rather half-heartedly, because the three competing explanations are each more entertaining than any answer we might find. The Panther Head family maintains that it was built by a great-aunt who has since become somewhat mythical. The Coconut Heads insist that it was always there, in the way that mountains are always there. Mr Swanse maintains, with the particular confidence of a man who has never once been right about anything historical, that the building simply appeared one summer morning, already open and already smelling of vanilla, as though it had grown tired of waiting to be invented. Papa Woolybay finds this explanation deeply unsatisfactory, mostly on the grounds that somebody, somewhere, must owe him rent. Whatever its origins, the Hub itself is magnificent: a rambling, cheerfully crooked building with striped awnings that have never quite matched, counters of every colour stacked with jars of toppings the size of small barrels, scoops that clank and wheeze and occasionally produce a flavour nobody ordered, and a menu chalked and re-chalked so many times that certain letters have simply given up and moved elsewhere. Outside, tables lean companionably against one another beneath strings of lanterns. On a day like this one, every table was full before the shop had properly opened. Because the Hub had announced, three days earlier, a new flavour. THE ZANABIAN EVERYTHING. It was said, by whom exactly the Archive cannot confirm, though Blenchy claims partial credit, to contain one small taste of every flavour the Hub had ever produced. Sunflower and Honey. Hot Malt Swirl. Rainbow After Rain. Midnight Mango. Nervous Vanilla, which trembles faintly on the spoon. Very Confident Chocolate, which does not. Coconut Committee Crunch, invented, appropriately, by a committee. Questionable Pistachio. Strawberry With Absolutely No Further Questions. MOWA Mist, tasting faintly of waterfall and rumour. Yesterday’s Surprise, whose contents remain a matter of archival dispute. Plain Vanilla, regarded throughout ZANABIA as suspiciously adventurous, on the grounds that nobody trusts a flavour with nothing to hide. To this list, the Hub had lately added Thundercloud Toffee, which crackles faintly if you listen closely enough, and Polite Lemon, which apologises for its own tartness roughly half a second after you taste it. Word of The Zanabian Everything spread the way important news always spreads in ZANABIA: badly, and to everyone at once. By nine in the morning, the entire country had arrived. By ten, a queue had formed that could, without exaggeration, be described as a neighbourhood. It began near the Hub’s crooked front step, wandered with quiet ambition past the postbox and around Mr Swanse’s vegetable patch, and eventually entered into a gentle argument with a hedge. It developed, as ZANABIAN queues invariably do, its own customs, its own gossip and, within the hour, its own governance. The Queue Welfare Committee was formed beneath the second lamppost by a Panther Head gentleman who had brought a folding chair and, evidently, a sense of destiny. Its stated purpose was to ensure fairness, shade and an adequate supply of small talk. Its actual achievements by midday amounted to a rota for fanning the elderly and a firm but ultimately unenforceable ruling that nobody was permitted to queue-jump on the grounds of “just asking a quick question”. This ruling proved short-lived. At eleven o’clock, a second committee formed, smaller and more suspicious, to investigate why several members of the first committee had already been seen leaving the Hub with ice cream, despite having joined the queue considerably later than everyone else. Accusations were exchanged. A subcommittee was proposed to investigate the investigators. Mama Woolybay, passing by with a shopping basket, observed the whole affair with the calm of a woman who had watched this exact drama unfold roughly forty times before. She said nothing, which somehow made it worse for everyone involved. Meanwhile, a separate and much older argument had reignited near the outdoor tables: whether soup-flavoured ice cream, a Hub delicacy of long standing and admittedly divisive, could reasonably be called ice cream at all, given that it is, by its own description, warm. Mr Swanse had strong feelings on this matter, as Mr Swanse has strong feelings on all matters. That morning, he had appointed himself Acting Inspector of Frozen Matters, a position that does not exist, has never existed and was created by Mr Swanse specifically so that he might wear his second-best spectacles and carry a notebook in an official-looking manner. “The temperature of the substance,” he informed a small and largely uninterested crowd, “is not the issue. The issue is intent. Did the soup intend to become ice cream? That is the question this Inspection will determine.” Nobody could say what an Inspection of Intent might actually involve, least of all Mr Swanse. He spent the next hour walking briskly between tables with his notebook open, nodding gravely at things and writing down the word “Suspicious” a total of fourteen times. Blenchy, for his part, had appointed himself to an entirely different post: chief and, in his own estimation, sole taster of The Zanabian Everything. He had never once been formally assigned to this role, but he discharged its duties with tremendous personal conviction. “Quality control,” he explained to Stobby, holding a spoon aloft like a small ceremonial sword, “is not a job. It is a calling.” “You’ve eaten six flavours already,” said Stobby, who had eaten five and was keeping score purely so he could look responsible while doing so. “Seven,” said Blenchy. “I went back for the Nervous Vanilla. It needed reassurance.” Stobby, who considered himself the sensible one of the pair despite mounting evidence to the contrary, nodded solemnly and had a small taste himself, purely to confirm Blenchy’s findings. This is a thing responsible friends do for one another. Papa Woolybay, meanwhile, had positioned himself near the till with a small notebook of his own. It was considerably less official than Mr Swanse’s, but consulted with far greater anxiety. He was attempting to calculate, on the back of an old receipt, whether the Hub stood to make a fortune from The Zanabian Everything or lose one entirely. His sums kept producing different answers depending on how many free samples Blenchy had eaten in the meantime, which made accurate accounting all but impossible. “At this rate,” he muttered, “we are either extremely rich or catastrophically poor, and I cannot for the life of me work out which.” The trouble was this: despite the queue, the committees, Mr Swanse’s Inspection and Papa Woolybay’s arithmetic, no bowl of The Zanabian Everything had actually been served to anyone. The flavour had been announced. The queue had assembled with tremendous faith. And yet, hour after hour, it did not appear. Theories multiplied. Some said the recipe had proven too large to fit in a single tub. Others suspected sabotage by a rival flavour, jealous of the attention. Mr Swanse, naturally, suspected intent. It was Mama Woolybay who solved the mystery within four minutes. She had quietly slipped behind the counter around noon, ostensibly to fetch a spoon for Papa, but actually because she had grown tired of watching everyone theorise instead of simply looking. The Zanabian Everything did not exist yet because nobody could agree on the order in which the flavours should be layered. The two Hub apprentices assigned to the task had been standing over the empty tub since sunrise, taking careful, courteous turns to say “after you”. Neither was willing to go first for fear of ruining the whole enterprise. Mama Woolybay looked at them both for a moment. “Start with the vanilla,” she said, “and stop being so polite about it.” Within twenty minutes, the first bowls of The Zanabian Everything were finally, gloriously, being carried out into the golden afternoon. By evening, the heat had softened, the queue had dissolved into contented little groups, and the committees, having achieved nothing of measurable value, as ZANABIAN committees generally do, had quietly disbanded in favour of eating. Lanterns were lit. Mr Swanse, his Inspection concluded with a final ruling of “Frozen Matters: Unresolved, But Delicious”, sat with a bowl of soup-flavoured ice cream that he had, at some point, stopped questioning. Blenchy had reached a personal total of eleven flavours and showed no visible remorse. Stobby had reached eleven and considerable remorse, which he was managing with a twelfth. The whole of ZANABIA sat together beneath the lanterns as the last light slid gold across the melting bowls. Nobody ate alone. Everyone’s ice cream was a little softer than intended, and nobody minded in the least. As the Archive understands it, that is really the whole point of the Ice Cream Hub and possibly, if we are honest, the whole point of ZANABIA. It was never actually about the ice cream. It was about who you were sitting with when it melted.