That was the last smile for the night. After hours of gruelling work, I had to tell Nerds Inc that unless they got an injection of capital, they were going broke. They nodded. They had guessed things were bad.
‘But at least you get a lot of GST back,’ I said. ‘Put in the return just as I have written it. That ought to tide you over for a month or so. You’re getting good money for research,’ I added. ‘Perhaps you can try for more of that sort of work. Importing so much stuff from the US, you are very vulnerable to fluctuations in exchange rates. Well, goodbye.’ I extracted myself from my chair, into which I seemed to have grown. ‘Sorry about that, boys.’
And I was sorry, but Daniel was waiting, my mother had arrived, and my father was missing.
Eventually Daniel and I shared a bath and, finally, a bed. It was a good ending to the day, but we still hadn’t found my father.
I woke, I baked, I drank coffee, I baked some more, I finished cooking Jason’s soup, I tasted his herb muffins — usual sort of morning. For a Wednesday. For some reason stories about St Theresa of Avila, my favourite saint, were running around in my head. It is nice to have something to think about when making bread and Saint Theresa falling off her horse into the mud, lying there and shouting up at God, ‘If this is how You treat Your friends, it’s not surprising You don’t have many!’ has almost reconciled me to religion several times. Though never quite.
The Professor wandered down for a loaf of pasta douro and a chat about eleven, when all the morning-tea people had gone back to their offices. Professor Monk is seventy-six, a well dressed, charming gentleman who bought into Insula and had Roman furniture made, so that his apartment looks like it was snatched from Pompeii by time machine just before their mountain did the big firework. It has lately been augmented by Nox, a small but imperious black kitten who has Dionysus Monk firmly under her tiny, soot-coloured paw. She is as perfectly black as Belladonna and employs just the same resolute but kindly management of her human. He was idly reading the top invoice in my bundle and gave a short laugh.
‘What’s funny?’
‘Oh, sorry, Corinna. I just deciphered this letterhead. The Frates Discarnati.’
‘Oh?’
‘And I wondered what on earth the bodiless brothers would want with bread.’
‘Bodiless?’
‘Yes. The opposite of incarnate. You know — it went into English as Discarnate — no flesh. Unfleshed.’
‘Euw,’ commented Goss. I agreed with her. I might have said ‘Erk’ but the sentiment was the same.
‘I suppose they mean they are very spiritual,’ I ventured. ‘Still, if they eat that lentil stuff they don’t like the flesh, that’s for sure. Never mind. Can I offer you a cup of soup and a muffin?’
‘No, much as I would like to indulge, I am lunching with Mrs Dawson at the University Club. You might consult our resident Sibyl about those unfleshed brothers. I don’t like the sound of them,’ said the Professor, who collected his loaf and went away.
A good idea but I had troubles of my own. The fleshless ones could wait. Still, it was a strange name. I now recalled why I had been thinking of Saint Theresa of Avila. Her nuns were discalced — shoeless — though definitely not fleshless, and somewhere in the back of my cerebral cortex my mind had been trying to make the connection. It is sometimes a little eerie to discover how much of one’s thinking is going on without conscious direction from the person whom I have always thought of as ‘me’. Whoever she is.
I wandered into the bakery and found someone standing at the Calico Alley door. He was tall, clothed in black robes, and was in the act of putting the hood back from his face. Two others, in brown, stood behind him. He must have been a solidly fleshed man once, but was now thin and flabby, with drooping wattles of empty flesh under his chin. He was holding one of my famine loaves.
‘Well?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t like the bread?’
He was taking deep breaths, I noticed, as though he appreciated the scent of fresh baking which flowed past him, but he said only, ‘You made it too well.’
‘Too well?’ That was not a usual complaint. The Brother’s voice was rough, as from a raw throat.
‘You included some salt, I believe. A little too much baking powder.’
‘And what do you want me to do in future?’ His air of restrained menace was getting to me. I broke off a bit of the bread and tasted it. Pah. Dry as ashes. I could not detect any flavour at all except a fugitive taste of carbonised chickpeas.
‘Make it worse,’ he said.
Then, with a flick of the robes, he and the others were gone. I paused, searching for an appropriate swear word. Nothing occurred. I binned the famine bread. I would not put that into my bag for the Soup Run. Or even the destitute would be complaining.
Daniel came in with news, but it was not good news. I could tell from the way he walked. A slow plod rather than a fast stride. I knew he had gone to talk to Constable Wellesley, the ‘nice policewoman’ at Missing Persons.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘He was picked up by the police in St Kilda Road exactly two weeks ago. They thought he might have been drunk or drugged but he was neither.’
‘Then why did they pick him up?’ I asked, pouring soup into a cup. A china mug, for special patrons. ‘It’s — and I acknowledge that I ought to put an exemption clause into this statement — a free country.’
‘It is,’ Daniel conceded. ‘But even free men are not allowed to walk along the middle of the road and they are really discouraged from lying down in front of a tram.’
‘He lay down in front of a tram,’ I said evenly. I was proud of myself. I didn’t spill one golden drop of the remarkable Jason’s pumpkin soup.
‘Repeatedly,’ said Daniel, sipping. ‘So they picked him up and stuck him in the cells until the Crisis Assessment Team arrived and they said he wasn’t mad so they let him go again.’
‘To go and lie down in front of another tram?’
‘He promised not to do that again.’
‘Damn,’ I said angrily. ‘Couldn’t they have taken him to a nice safe loony bin so that we could find him again?’
‘They were abolished,’ said Daniel, breaking off a piece of herb muffin. ‘There’s almost nowhere to put someone if the CAT team says they’re not dangerous. If I say Previous Government again will you promise not to throw anything?’
‘Never did before,’ I told him.
‘Frying pan,’ he pointed out, and I had to concede this.
‘But it was only once. And I sort of dropped it, I didn’t really throw it.’
The deep brown eyes considered me as he absorbed more soup. Dispassionate eyes, my Daniel’s, problem-solver’s, social worker’s, private detective’s eyes, eyes which had seen a lot of prevaricating, most of it more convincing than I was presently being. I gave up.
‘Okay. Sometimes I throw things, stress of emotion, it runs in the family. My very own grandpa said that his grandfather called his wife an “argumentatious, pan-flinging female”. Any idea where the man went after they let him out of the cells?’
‘Last seen wandering vaguely towards the city,’ said Daniel. ‘That was really wonderful soup. Cheer up, my pan-flinger, it’s not all bad news. I got something else. He had to give the arresting officers an address and he did, and I’ve got it. Interesting thing, though. He had a passport as ID.’
‘No driver’s licence,’ I explained.
‘Oh. I was wondering if he was intending to flee the country,’ said Daniel.
‘Possibly, though I don’t know how much money he’s got left. Where’s the address?’
‘Braybrook.’
‘Where’s Braybrook?’
‘Ah, my inner-city darling,’ said Daniel indulgently. ‘Like a cockney, born within earshot of Bow Bells. The world ends at Docklands. West, to be sure, west away towards Ballarat. But not that far. Want to come and check it out?’
‘Will it be disgusting?’ I asked.
‘Probably.’
‘Then I ought to come,’ I said.
‘A Protestant conscience,’ teased Daniel. ‘I’ll come back at three and get Timbo to pick us up in the car. The inhabitants ought to be getting up about then.’
Suddenly raised female voices impressed themselves on my ears. I knew them. Both of my shop assistants making enough row for a secondary school maths class or a zoo at feeding time.
‘Seth!’ said Kylie. ‘It has to be Seth, you blind?’
‘Seth’s a nerd, just like Taz, and you didn’t even make it with Taz,’ sneered Goss. ‘It’s got to be Ryan. Ryan rules.’
‘Ryan likes them messed up, you skanky ho,’ screamed Kylie. ‘So maybe he is the one after all! Not like my Seth!’
‘
Your
Seth?’
‘Ladies,’ I said meaningfully. They paid no attention to me. Kylie was wearing pink overalls, Gossamer blue, but there the resemblance to good little children ended. They were red faced and shrieking like fishwives. Jason had retreated to a corner of the shop, cut off from escape to the street or the bakery by either a furious girl or the end wall. I raised an eyebrow at him.
‘Dunno,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘They were talking about this TV show and then they just went postal.’
‘Daniel?’ I asked for a diagnosis from the most streetwise amongst us. ‘Drugs?’
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘They remind me of maenads, but I suppose they haven’t been drinking. And neither of them even takes E, or so they have assured me.’
‘Seth!’ shrieked Kylie and swung a clawed hand at her friend. I knew that those talons could open tins and felt that I must intervene. WorkCover would sniff if I asked them to pay for fingernail wounds amongst the shop staff and my premiums were high enough as it was.
‘You take Kylie into the bakery,’ I said to Daniel. ‘I’ll keep Goss here. Jason, nick down to Cafe Delicious and ask Del for two of his banana creams, will you? If we can’t get a rise out of them with a banana cream, then we might have to call that Crisis Assessment Team who said my father wasn’t insane. Then tell Meroe I need her at once. Run!’
Jason, freed, ran for his life. I saw him vanish out the door and into a street which so far did not contain a lot of curious customers. I put both arms around Goss and dragged her out of range of Kylie’s claws. Daniel lifted Kylie off her feet and carried her, still screaming, into the bakery. I held Goss as tightly as I would a child who’d just had a bad dream and said, ‘Calm, Gossamer, calm. Take a nice deep breath now. It’s all right.’
She was shaking as though she was very cold and straining against my arms. But baking makes a baker as strong as a wrestler when it comes to underweight teenage girls. I sighted a magazine open on the counter and two names caught my eye. Goss was trying to breathe deeply but was gasping. Her hair was wet with sweat. I leaned her against the counter and read about two actors in a show called
The OC
, which I had never seen. Adam and Ben were their real names. But they played characters called Seth and Ryan. Both good-looking boys, if you like them quiet and brooding. Which, of course, I did. But Kylie and Goss had got into this state over an article in
Girlfriend
? I had seen them disagree before but never like this.
I could feel Gossamer’s heart pounding like a drum and see the pulse in her throat. But at least she had stopped screaming. Now she started to cry, which was a good sign, if you call that progress. I sat her down behind the counter and applied a handful of tissues to her eyes, which were running with black tears. She sobbed as though her heart was broken. I really didn’t feel I could leave her, though I was wondering what on earth was happening in the bakery. I could hear Daniel’s soft, honey-sweet voice murmuring and then Kylie started to cry as well. Poor girls! They sounded like children whose dog had just died and whose whole world was crumbling around them. What had brought this on? Teenage emotions were vehement, of course, but not usually so destructive out of a clear sky.
‘Blessed be,’ said a voice from the door. My resident sibyl had arrived. ‘Jason told me what happened so I have brought some herbs. We shall make a tisane. Meanwhile, we shall take Gossamer into the bakery and Jason can look after the shop. He is coming up the street with two of the Pandamus banana creams, which ought to be useful. Nothing like the shock of sweetness to break a hysterical thread.’
‘I’ll just see how Daniel is getting on,’ I said, and slipped through the bakery door. Kylie was weeping into Daniel’s shoulder. He was clasping her lightly.
‘Safe to bring Goss in here?’ I asked quietly. He shrugged, which is hard to do with a weeping maiden in your arms.
‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. What were they arguing about?’
‘The respective merits of Seth and Ryan,’ I said.
‘And they are?’
‘Really, Daniel, haven’t you heard of Seth and Ryan?’ I asked scornfully, and returned in a moment with Goss, who sat in the baker’s other chair and wept and wept. She did not react to Kylie, which was good. The kettle was nearly boiling, and Meroe produced a glass teapot and began measuring herbs into it. As the level of weeping did not diminish, she shook fully a handful into the pot and poured boiling water over it. In the shop I heard Jason draw a long breath of relief. Then he slid inside the bakery, stuck the banana creams in the fridge, and removed himself with alacrity from this scene of woe. I would have been glad to do the same. But it was my shop, my bakery, and they were my girls.
Meroe asked me what had happened and I reported it as well as I could.
‘Odd,’ she remarked. ‘Daniel, what about drugs?’
‘I’ve been around the drug scene for a longish while,’ he answered, patting Kylie gently between her shoulderblades. ‘I’ve seen speed-fuelled rages and narcanned kids coming out of a death trance to scream with outrage. I’ve seen the Ice jitters and heard the cocaine raves and the Mogadon mumbles, even met a few bad acid casualties left over from the sixties. But I’ve never seen anything like this,’ he admitted. ‘They went from being angry to being sad, and that doesn’t usually happen with drugs, even when they wear off. And while neither of them is a genius, I know they know about the risks of E and the party drugs. Meroe?’
‘I can think of some herbs which might do this,’ she said, her lips pursing in disapproval. ‘Some combinations of herbs. They would have to have been taking them for a while,’ she added. ‘And they are not herbs which I would ordinarily combine.’