Devil's Food (6 page)
Allie grinned again. ‘Come in September,’ she told him, pressing a card into his hand. ‘Or October, for Halloween. Summer’s cold and damp. Thanks for the drink. Hope you find the parent.’
Then she was gone. The door swung back with a thump. Brightness had been removed from the room. The Maori women called for more beer. The Stork settled back into being a comfortable, slightly pre-loved, pub. I liked it better that way. I was more than slightly pre-loved myself.
‘Phew,’ said Daniel, examining the card. ‘You know that young woman is a plant biologist?’ he went on, showing it to me. ‘University of Southern California. Worst case of aggressive galloping health I have ever seen. Well, your dad’s lucky she didn’t get annoyed and belt him one, in which case he would probably still be lying stunned at the bottom of the spa.’
‘And thus easy to find and no longer a problem,’ I replied hard-heartedly. ‘Did you hear what he said to her, Daniel? This is going to be so embarrassing. This is going to be like following Austin Powers around the town.’
Daniel laughed. People were coming into the pub from a hockey match, with sticks and shorts, screaming for warming beverages. I stared into my empty glass. Groovy. Cosmic. California girl. Lord have mercy.
‘Cheer up,’ said Daniel. ‘Have another glass of wine. Let’s get some dinner here. They do wonderful lamb shanks with maple syrup and pumpkin. Then a nice bracing walk back to your apartment, feed Horatio. Perhaps you might like …’ He leaned over and whispered in my ear. His offer was so exciting that I blushed. The Maori women were giving me a thumbs-up and frankly lecherous comments about Daniel were being exchanged. I didn’t begrudge them it as I went into the bistro for a delicious dinner and more wine. After all, I was the one going home to be kissed all over.
Morning announced itself with a shattering alarm, followed closely by the clock hitting the floor as my flailing hand batted at it. Horatio doesn’t like alarm clocks either, especially when he has chosen as his place of repose the bedside table. (With a whole soft warm bed to sleep in, I know, but who can fathom cats? They are unfathomable.) His abrupt leap in response to the alarm spilt my glass of water, and I rose quickly to mop it up before it fused the radio. I really ought to get used to a bottle of water. A plastic bottle, with a screw top. Mornings! Aargh! And no Daniel, who had faded back to his own apartment after, as promised, kissing me all over. Every finger. Every toe. Every inch of skin. And a few other attentions not relevant here.
Coffee. Daniel had left the coffee maker ready for boiling water. I boiled water. I poured. Then I soaped and rinsed myself, dressed in my trackies, brushed my teeth and reflected that no matter how I cleaned the toofy-pegs, they would never be California White. People there must be some sort of subspecies.
Homo Californiensis
. Perfectly good teeth, mine, but not white as snow. Horatio completed the grumpy, slapdash, all-over wash of the cat who has been surprised into an uncool action. He recovered his poise and gave his morning milk the devout attention it deserved. I heated some slightly failed muffins (even Jason makes mistakes sometimes) and decided that today I would complete the baking before I even began to think about where to look next for my father. And drank more coffee.
Jason was sorting orders when I came into the bakery. He was laying out the papers, fingermarking each one with what might have been blood but was probably — jam? He didn’t seem to be wounded at all.
‘Fruit bread,’ he said to me. ‘And that rye and caraway for the vampire cafe. Otherwise just the usual stuff. I thought I might make choccy muffins.’
‘Good,’ I commented, pouring out kitty dins for the Mouse Police and counting their night’s work — eight mice and three rats. I disposed of them thoughtfully. ‘What’s that on your hands?’
He looked down and sucked at his fingers.
‘The donut bloke at the Vic market was knocking off as I was passing and he sold me the last dozen half price,’ said Jason. He had jam on his chin, too. ‘I got three left. Want one?’
Considering how starvation is Jason’s normal state, that was a kind — indeed, generous — offer. I suppressed my shudder.
‘No thanks, bit early for me. All right, if you want to do your chocolate orgasm muffins, I’ll start the ordinary bread and then measure for my bara brith. And wash your hands,’ I added, though he had already gone to the bathroom to do just that, and put on his baker’s overalls.
Silence outside, silence inside, except for the sound of flour sliding silkily from the bag, yeast bubbling gently in its bucket, Jason’s cream and chocolate mixture throbbing in the microwave. The Mouse Police had absorbed their breakfast and were idly grooming each other, lying side by side on their flour sacks. If any Food Inspector ever springs me with cats in the bakery I will be in deep trouble, but they are the best hunters, clean and neat, they always bring their prey out of the nooks and crannies because they are rewarded for catching it, and they never do wicked things like walk on just rolled pastry or shed fur in the mixing tubs. Also they are entirely — so to speak — organic, and I don’t like poisons anywhere near my stock. I keep remembering a terrible story about one sack of flour, carried carelessly in a truck where a pesticide had leaked, which poisoned a whole French town. I could not bear it if I injured someone with my bread. Bread has always struck me as close to holy.
‘Oh, there’s another order,’ Jason told me after we had been working seamlessly for more than an hour. ‘Nothing serious — health bread made to their own recipe. For some monks.’
‘They’ll pay through the nose for that,’ I said. ‘Did you negotiate this, Jason?’
‘Yes. You were busy. Anyway, it’s made with half lentil flour, and I priced it at the wholesaler’s, and added nuisance money before I gave them an amount. It’s just a tryout,’ he said anxiously. ‘We make it for them, they see if they like it.’
My eyebrows rose at the negotiated sum. My Jason struck a very hard bargain indeed. The monks had either been very unworldly or entirely outclassed by my artful dodger. I favoured the second explanation. Jason had survived on the streets at fourteen.
‘Jason, dear, that’s twice the price of health bread, which has the annoyance factor built in,’ I said. ‘Well done! But God knows how we are going to get this muck to rise.’
‘I thought the same thing,’ he said eagerly, terribly relieved that he hadn’t made a mistake. ‘No sugar, no salt, no leaven, even if there was yeast there’s nothing for it to eat.’
‘It’s what they call “famine bread”,’ I said. ‘Hand me down that baking encyclopaedia and I’ll see what the English peasants used to do while you get on with the fruit bread. It’s all measured, just make sure that the mixer doesn’t stop or all the fruit will belt down to the bottom and ruin our reputation.’
‘Yeah, all right. What do you mean, famine bread?’ he asked, doing as I requested.
I laid the book flat on the table. ‘You can make bread out of almost anything that can be ground into a powder,’ I said. ‘Except plaster. And sand. You know what a famine is?’
‘Like in Ethiopia. No food. Drought. No crops. Everyone dies,’ summarised Jason.
‘Right. So when your wheat crop fails, you use barley to make bread, or rye, even though it’s heavy and reluctant to rise. You get, in fact, black bread. Or corn, even though it’s crumbly because it lacks gluten. What happens if your neighbours steal your corn, your barley gets barley weevil and your rye gets washed out in a flood?’
‘Potato,’ said Jason, really thinking about it. ‘Carrot, parsnip, pumpkin — you can make bread out of all of them.’
‘Excellent. Root vegetables. What we need is starch and they have lots of it, and though it’s pretty depressing bread, it is bread. And of course there are …’
‘Lentils,’ he said, enlightened. ‘Beans. They got starch too.’
‘Exactly. In bad times, according to this, the starving peasantry have made bread out of all sorts of nuts, acorns, root vegetables and sawdust. People really need bread in poor economies. It’s the starch that bulks out your stomach and makes you feel — well, full.’
‘Okay. We can do the famine bread,’ decided Jason. ‘I got the lentil flour and I suppose we’ll just use baking powder. And can I go get breakfast?’ he asked, suddenly very young. ‘That talk about famines has made me really, really …’
‘Hungry,’ I completed. ‘Off you go, and bring me back a BLT. Contemplating famines makes me hungry, too.’
He vanished, I opened the alley door, the Mouse Police romped out in search of fish, and the morning came in: damp and chilly. Today we were trying Jason’s soup and his herb muffins. It looked like ideal soup weather. I opened the shop door, set the big pot onto the trivet to simmer, found the sour cream and the carefully chopped chives, and counted cups. This was an experiment, so I had just bought a small stove to heat the soup. The main danger was Jason. At all costs we had to keep him away from the shop. One hungry teenager could scoff a whole pot of soup on a famine morning.
I mixed the famine bread. Lentils and rye flour. It would be heavy, almost solid, even though I was doubling the usual amount of baking powder. Mixed with water. No salt or sugar. No taste, either. Perhaps the good brothers were mortifying the flesh. I looked at their order. It was handwritten. There was a smudged letterhead. The name of the group seemed to be — the Discarnate Brotherhood? Frates Discarnarti? I couldn’t read it properly. I didn’t recognise them but I don’t know a lot about the Catholic Church. I knew that the admirable Sister Mary was a Franciscan. Now there was a woman. Small, stout, utterly determined, intelligent, with a heart as big as Phar Lap and a will that could drive a feather through a marble tombstone. It was my turn on the soup van later this week. I always looked forward to it with a mixture of keen anticipation and serious apprehension. It was my taste of squalor and my thanks-offering to the gods who had made me healthy and sane and safe.
On with the leavenless lentil bread, and I set the clock to remind me to take it out. Usually I know when bread is cooked by the scent, but this stuff was only going to smell like old beans until it began to smell like new charcoal. No accounting for tastes, I thought as the kitchen filled with the intoxicating scent of rich Welsh fruit bread, heady with spices.
By the time Jason was back, the rye and caraway bread was in the oven and he was free to compound his chocolate muffins. When they were done I took three of them over to Meroe’s shop. I needed kitchen herbs for the herb muffins, and hers were extremely good. I don’t know whose organic garden she robs to get them, but she has packages of parsley and thyme with the dew of fairyland still on them.
I got to the Sibyl’s Cave just as Meroe was unlocking the door. This morning’s mantle was of fine, bright scarlet wool figured with white sheep. Belladonna was taking up her position on the back of Meroe’s big chair, on which she has been stropping her claws since early kittenhood. She awarded me a brief purr as I stroked her, then returned grimly to her task.
‘Oh, those chocolate muffins,’ exclaimed Meroe, packing me a bundle of herbs. I watched carefully to see that I recognised each plant as she laid it down. Meroe also sells magic spell ingredients and I didn’t have any customers who needed to be turned into toads at present. Though this could change without notice, of course. ‘That boy was a find, Corinna. The Powers That Be were both merciful and on the alert the day he came into your bakery looking for a job. Of course, if you had not been receptive to their influence nothing would have happened.’
‘That’s me,’ I replied carefully. ‘Receptive.’
‘I have been talking to people in Sunbury,’ Meroe said. ‘Since their leader left, the coven has been in disarray, with quarrels and much disharmony. In which I am afraid your mother had some part.’
‘No kidding,’ I said, sitting down and cradling my herbs. Belladonna extended a thoughtful paw and combed her claws through my hair. She didn’t touch my scalp but it made me shiver. Or something did.
‘Star seems to have favoured a very strict, very punitive form of vegetarianism,’ said Meroe. ‘She had followers, but not enough to put her in charge of the coven. According to my friends, she won’t be welcome back if she tries to return alone.’
‘But she’s been there all her life,’ I protested. ‘She hasn’t got anywhere else to go!’ I swallowed down my fear that this meant she would stay near me.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Meroe, patting me, ‘she lives in a collective and the majority opinion rules. While Sunlight was with her, she was protected from expulsion, as everyone liked him. Also, he acted as a rein on her extravagant temper. Now he is gone, she is going to be on her own.’
‘Then we have to find him. We really have to find him.’ I would have jumped to my feet but Bella still had her claws in my hair. Meroe gently detached the black cat.
‘I think that Therese will take care of Star for a while, at least,’ she told me. ‘She doesn’t seem to even notice how rude Star is to her and Therese has managed to modify some of her very rigid standards. Come up this afternoon and you’ll see what I mean. I’ll be there. I’m teaching Therese to embroider in the Hungarian manner. It’s very pretty.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I lied. ‘Now I’d better get Jason his herbs. Come over later and there will be pumpkin soup,’ I offered. Meroe smiled. Bella waved a paw at me. I left the shop, jangling through feng shui crystals and Celtic charms. I needed to get back to basics. Back, in fact, to bread.
The shop was opened by Kylie, who was wearing a strange little blue bolero called, she told me, a shrug. It failed to cover any salient features but that has never bothered Kylie or Goss, who live and die by Fashion. At least she had warm armpits.
The soup was bubbling, the herb muffins came out of the oven an incitement to gluttony, and the shop was suddenly full of people. Horatio sat by the cash register and received his public graciously.
We sold out of pumpkin soup by ten thirty. I yelled into the bakery to tell Jason that his experiment was a success and to go out later and buy some more pumpkins — ‘butternut, repeat after me, Jason’ — and he gave a whoop of vindicated pleasure. As the furore died I went to count the loaves into Megan’s rickshaw. The lentil bread had come out fairly well. It was a bit grey but not too crumbly. Megan looked at the address.