Trick or Treat (4 page)

Uncle Solly was right. His potato salad was creamy with just the right amount of fresh dill, his green salad with the thousand island dressing was delicious, and his sausages did make a good meal. Our constraint vanished when Horatio, whom Daniel had been ignoring while he asked politely, grabbed a piece of bratwurst which Daniel was using to emphasise a point about the war in the Middle East and took it under the table where he could be alone with it.

We laughed as though George had never appeared in our lives and ate more sausage and drank more wine. Then we went to bed, to make love slowly and sleep sweetly, until the alarm shattered the peace and it was four in the morning again.

I woke more abruptly than usual and listened, once I had thumped the alarm into silence. If I had been a cat, I would have said that my whiskers were tingling. Something in the world was subtly wrong, and I did not like it. But I heard nothing and a search of the apartment revealed nothing amiss, if one did not count a starving tabby who was about to expire of inanition unless that milk which I had taken out of the fridge was for him, in which case he could hang on for a few minutes longer. I left him with a bowlful and tried the door and the balcony French windows but everything was locked up tight, just as I had left it the night before. Daniel was sleeping as though stunned, and he had Israeli-army trained reflexes. I was just nervous, that’s all. As any woman would be whose livelihood was threatened by one rival and whose relationship was threatened by another, and who had probably eaten too much weisswurst the night before.

Shaking my head, I made coffee, drank it, toasted the leftover rye bread and ate it with slightly failed microwaved blood orange marmalade. Then I dressed in my tracksuit and carried the next cup of coffee down into the bakery.

My apprentice, Jason, now lives in one of the upstairs flats, so he always gets to work late. The principle is the same everywhere: children who live across the road from the school are always late at first, as are housemaids who live in the hotel or conductors who sleep on the train. It’s a passing thing until you work out that even if you are on the spot, you need at least ten minutes to find your glasses or keys or have a quick last minute pee, and still descend the stairs on time. I was letting this go for a few weeks. Jason wasn’t used to having a permanent home. After that, he was going to refine his last second arrivals to last minute arrivals or I would start docking his pay. I could easily do this by cutting off his credit at Cafe Delicious, run by the Pandamus family of happy Hellenes and his primary source of nutriments.

I dead-heated Jason. I heard the outer door clang open as my foot touched the bottom step. Jason flung himself inside and dragged on his baker’s overalls, ramming the cap down on his curls, flipping switches so that the machines rumbled into life and trying to look like he had been in the bakery for an hour, whiling away the time by reading cookery books and waiting for his boss to rise from her couch. It wasn’t a bad imitation and I let him get away with it.

‘Good morning, Jason. Better open that new sack of rye flour, we’ve got a big order for rye bread. Also, you promised chocolate orgasm muffins today, have we got enough chocolate?’

‘Yep,’ said Jason, all snap and polish. ‘Checked it yesterday. And the new packet of caraway seeds.’

‘Number of vermin removed?’ I asked, as he gathered up the dead mice from their designated place and bunged them in the bin. The Mouse Police were enthusiastic hunters, bless them. They were sitting at attention before a small scene of rodent massacre, tails twitching in anticipation of breakfast.

‘Five mice, no rats, and a bloody big spider,’ reported Jason. The lid of the bin clanged. I heard the rattle of dry cat food hitting the Mouse Police ration tins. ‘Cat food supplied, sir!’ He saluted, looking unbearably cute in white overalls and cap and shining morning face.

We were being naval this morning, it appeared. ‘Carry on, Midshipman,’ I said wearily, flipping open the order book. Jason took the Evil scissors and went to attack the flour sack.

It’s just a whimsy. Everyone has heard the cry ‘Where are the
good
scissors?’ echoing through the house or school or workplace. Daniel, in a theological discussion we had drifted into one night, opined that if there were Good scissors there must be Evil scissors, this being a Manichean universe, and I had to agree. The Good scissors were used for cutting cloth and nothing else. The Evil scissors were used for opening sacks and snipping bacon rind and cutting out recipes from
Good Weekend
.

Orders were bearing up. I sell most of my bread to cafes and restaurants. I don’t really need a shop. But I liked having one and I resented being outbid by a hot bread shop. Some of them are doubtless excellent, but my reports of Best Fresh had not been encouraging.

Machines on, rye bread on, I heard Jason ripping away at the top of the rye flour sack for the big order. I was just wondering how I could have used so much cream when he said, ‘Captain?’

‘Yes, Midshipman?’

‘There’s something crappy about this flour.’

I really must teach Jason some more descriptive words when we have a spare moment, I thought. I rose with a groan to inspect it. He was right. I buy rye flour in smallish paper sacks, as even in the heaviest bread it is an addition, not the main ingredient. Jason was right. The opened sack smelt mouldy and slightly acid, not the right scent at all. Rye ought to smell sour. I damped a small amount of it and the smell was marked, enough to make the Mouse Police sneeze, and the flour was greyish and slightly greasy, not the fine dry meal it should have been.

‘Quite right, well spotted, that man. Damn. Where are we going to get another sack of rye flour at this hour of the morning?’

‘We could go and ask Best Fresh,’ he suggested, ducking out of cuffing range.

‘Over my dead body.’

‘Well, we can’t use this stuff, Cap,’ he told me. He was right. ‘And we’ve only got enough rye to cover the standing orders,’ he said, ‘not the new one.’ Right again. And I would hate to disappoint a new big order, which might then go over to a lesser baker. As it might be, just down the lane.

‘Where did that sack come from, sailor?’ I asked. Now that I looked at it, it wasn’t the usual supplier. Their lettering was red, this was black.

‘Just says “rye mixture”,’ read Jason.

I am going to need glasses soon and I am resisting firmly. It’s not that I am getting short sighted, it’s just that the rest of the world wants its print too small. ‘Wait a tick. Aha,’ said Jason triumphantly.

‘Do you know what the penalties are for saying “aha!” to a superior officer?’ I demanded.

‘No shit, Corinna, look,’ he urged, dropping the naval affectations. He hoisted the sack onto the bench. ‘It’s not for us, anyway. It’s for Best Fresh. The van must have mixed them up.’

‘So they’ve got my sack of unrefined special organic rye flour,’ I said. ‘Expensive unrefined organic rye flour. And we’ve got...’

‘Their crap,’ said Jason with admirable nicety. ‘I’ll just seal it up again and go over and get our flour.’

‘Tell them there’s something not right with it,’ I said.

‘After I get our rye flour back,’ he replied. So young and so cynical.

He sticky-taped the sack, lifted it into his arms, and I opened the alley door. The Mouse Police rushed out and Jason followed, walking easily away in the darkness with his load. I went back into the bakery and put the coffee machine on. Today was not going to be a good day, I could tell.

But it improved when Jason came back with our flour, which had not even been opened.

‘They were going to send it back,’ he told me, engulfing three ham rolls and a couple of leftover muffins with his can of Coke. Coke! At that hour! The boy has the digestion of an ostrich. ‘They don’t use neat flour. All their stuff comes in mixtures. Just upend it into the mixer and add water, yeast included. There was only this one guy Eddie there to mind the machines. Don’t reckon he knows a thing about bread.’ There was a pause as he chewed briefly and cut himself a doorstop of bread and cheese. ‘He scammed me ten for bringing the sack, said he’d be in deep shit if the boss came in at nine and found the rye mix not started.’

‘And you told him the flour was iffy?’

Jason widened his eyes in an affectation of innocence which verged on the extreme. ‘Yeah, Boss, I told him. Twice. I said, “Don’t use that stuff, it’s shitty”, and he said, “Thanks”, and gave me the money and I came back.’

‘Well, we can’t do any more than that. We told him and he’s in charge. If the boss doesn’t come in until nine...’ I said with a certain complacency, noting that it was now getting on for five thirty and we had better get cracking on the rye or we wouldn’t make the new order. ‘Nothing more that we can do. Is our rye all right?’

Jason had anticipated me and produced a teaspoonful of the new flour. I sniffed and tasted. Perfect. Sour and silky.

‘Then prime the mixers, Jason, we’re making bread,’ I announced.

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ he grinned around his last mouthful. ‘Captain?’

‘Yes, Midshipman?’

‘Do I get to keep the ten?’

‘You carried the flour,’ I said, getting out of my chair. ‘You keep the fee.’

‘Aye, sir!’ he said, and we sprang into action.

Morning came. It was one of those Melbourne spring morn
ings which make everyone long to be somewhere else: in the country, by the sea, sitting on a suitable mountain. Sunrise was as pink and soft as Jason’s raspberry icing, with delicate blues behind and above and streaks of pure gold which John Martin could have used for
The Plains of Heaven
. I stood in my lane gazing at the sky as the Mouse Police bounced back inside for a little snooze, smelling of tuna scraps and uninterested in aesthetics.

Calico Alley was empty. I could see all the way to the steps which lead up into the arcade. Yet someone was singing, quite near, a song about wassailing. The voice was a clear, honey-sweet tenor: ‘God bless the master of this house and the mistress also/And all the little children that round the table go...’

I listened until it faded away. Someone walking along Schmutter Alley or Flinders Lane, perhaps, caught in one of those odd inner city soundscapes which make St Paul’s whispering gallery so famous. Nice. Very nice. And my day was

3
0

further improved by the scent of cooking rye bread and the appearance of my most glamorous neighbour, Mrs Dawson. She was wearing a rough silk leisure suit which was a sonnet in burnt umber and carrying her terracotta coloured jacket and the umbrella without which spring in Melbourne is a very soggy thing.

‘Spring,’ she observed with a smile.

‘For the moment,’ I agreed.

‘I met our witch and a few friends in the Flagstaff Gardens,’ she told me. ‘Dancing in a ring.’

‘Must be a solstice or a festival or something,’ I replied. ‘Er . . . clothed?’

‘Completely,’ she said.

This was a relief. Meroe was a solitary amongst witches, not belonging to any coven. If she was dancing with others it meant some occult celebration was in the offing and most Wicca ceremonies are carried out skyclad, which struck me as unwise in the Flagstaff Gardens at dawn, or indeed at any time.

‘Rye bread,’ said Mrs Dawson with as much greed as a refined lady should exhibit at dawn in an alley.

‘I can only spare one loaf,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a special order. And it nearly didn’t happen at all.’

While I was fetching and wrapping a loaf of the first batch of bread I told her about Jason’s return of the odd flour.

‘The thing which is now worrying me,’ I confessed, ‘is that I should have made sure the idiot in charge didn’t use that rye mix. It was definitely off.’

‘Not your responsibility,’ said Mrs Dawson, deftly reliev
ing me of guilt. ‘Jason told the man that the flour wasn’t good. And if their rye bread fails, my dear, that is not your fault either. Price for confession and absolution . . .?’

‘One loaf of rye bread,’ I agreed promptly, handing it over. ‘Eat it in good health, as Uncle Solly says.’

‘I do like that man,’ Mrs Dawson observed. ‘The reason I wanted your rye is that I bought some of his gravlax yesterday. Divine with sour cream and capers. Well, I have done my exercise and my detective story has to go back to the library today. I intend to make myself a few open sandwiches at about ten and eat them in the roof garden.’

‘With Russian tea?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Do come and share it with me if you can get away,’ she added, and walked on.

When Mrs Dawson drank Russian tea, she drank it from an elaborate silver samovar which Trudi wheeled up to the garden for her. It had tea glasses in silver holders and dispensed a delicate straw coloured beverage, drunk with lemon, which would entirely complement Uncle Solly’s gravlax and my bread. It would be a very civilised morning tea. I would see how business went today.

Soup Run Donnie came sidling along just as she left. He had probably been watching for her departure from around a corner. Before the adamantine Sister Mary had reformed him, he had been a lookout man for many a burglary, and he just didn’t feel comfortable standing brazenly visible, even in Calico Alley at this hour. I hauled out the sack of bread, heavier than usual, and he lifted it onto the trolley which everyone but Ma’ani used to transport food offerings from the charitable.

‘Been a good night,’ he said. ‘Lots of customers.’

‘Any madmen?’

‘One,’ he said, smiling nervously. ‘But they took him away. Bye,’ he added, and was gone.

Sunrise had gone, too, and I ducked back into the bakery to see how the chocolate muffins were coming along. I had an order for a tray of princess cakes for a child’s birthday. Bless the little darling, she insisted on my cakes, resisting the temptations of the very good patisseries in her area, who would have happily made her a cake in any shape whatsoever including—to judge from their window display—trains, planes, armoured personnel carriers, subatomic particles, geese with brooms and Barbie dolls. But it was princess patty cakes for Karina, and I had to concentrate while making them. They have to rise nicely and evenly or the whipped cream filling tips the pink icing top off. I started my seldom used cake mixer, which makes a loud clatter, so the love of my life had to shout to be heard over it.