‘My mother, Starshine,’ I said reluctantly. ‘Meroe.’
‘I’ve heard of you,’ said Starshine in her flat accusing tone. ‘You’re Wicca. A solitary.’
‘Blessed be. That’s right,’ said Meroe equably. ‘And I’ve heard of you. You’re Starshine, one of Cath’s coven. Until she ran away with that surfer. I don’t know who has taken it over now. Never very effective. What are you doing here?’
It seemed that witches didn’t have a lot of time for tactful indirection, either.
‘I need somewhere to stay,’ said Starshine. Still arrogant. Still sure that she had a right to command my life. I was about to riposte that Jason would escort her to his backpackers’ as soon as he had time and that Satan would be skating to work before she set foot in my sanctum, when I was saved — again. This time by Therese Webb, resplendent in an orange tweed cloak of her own making, who pottered into the bakery in search of a muffin or two. She screamed with delight when she saw Starshine. She flung herself forward and enveloped her in a huge, woolly hug.
‘Jacqui!’ she cried. ‘How lovely to see you! Have you come to visit me? I haven’t seen you in an age! Such a cold morning, too. I’ll just get us a few muffins and you can come right up to my apartment. You must be frozen, my dear, come along.’
‘No,’ said Starshine. ‘I came to see my daughter.’
‘Corinna’s your daughter? How wonderful!’ exclaimed Ms Webb.
I stuffed muffins distractedly into a paper bag and thrust it at Therese, an unlikely saviour. ‘Morning tea,’ I said blankly.
She patted my cheek. ‘Thank you, Corinna. We’re all so lucky to have Corinna’s bakery here. Imagine her being your daughter!’ she said chattily to Starshine, leading her by an unresisting hand and picking up her cloth bundle. ‘I’m just up here, and I’m sure that Corinna will come and see us after she shuts her shop.’
‘I’ll be there!’ I said. The scene which Starshine had meant to stage in my shop had been entirely obliterated by first Meroe and then Therese, and I felt weak. Possibly with relief, but also with oncoming anxiety and rage.
‘Come back here,’ said Jason’s voice in my ear. He drew me into the bakery and sat me down in my own chair. Goss turned to satisfy the demands from the shop and Meroe closed the door between the kitchen and the public domain.
‘Jason, some of that brandy,’ ordered Meroe. ‘And for a change I think we shall all have some coffee, even me. Goddess, what very nasty vibrations, I shall have to cense the entire building.’
‘Yeah,’ said Jason’s voice, seeming to come from far away. ‘What a stone-cold bitch! Here, Boss, you drink this.’
I gulped. It was hot coffee, heavily sugared, with brandy in it. The world came back into focus.
Jason was smiling at me anxiously. ‘Cheer up, Corinna, she can’t take you away,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to say squat to her.’
‘Thanks, Jason,’ I said. ‘By the way, those muffins are amazing. Call them Kama Sutra muffins and double the price.’
‘I’ll tell Goss,’ he said, and got out. Jason finds emotions icky. Meroe, on the other hand, thrives on them. She took my hand in both of hers.
‘She’s always been like that,’ I said bitterly, tongue loosened by brandy in the morning. ‘She just thinks she can walk into my life, take whatever she wants, and walk out. Between them she and Sunlight almost killed me when I was five and they never wanted me, never loved me, they were relieved when Grandma Chapman came to get me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they were totally wrapped up in each other,’ I said, reasoning it out. ‘They adored each other. There wasn’t any room for anyone else.’
‘Yet Sunlight has left,’ said Meroe gently.
I pulled myself together. That was odd. ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘That is very, very unlikely. Really.’
‘I believe you,’ said Meroe, relishing her coffee. She seldom drinks the coffee made of coffee beans, preferring dreadful stuff made out of roasted dandelions or carobs. I personally consider there must be something else you can do with dandelions. Let them flower into clocks to tell the future, perhaps. ‘This week, next week, sometime, never.’
Sun, leave Star? Their collective held them up as an example of devotion. I had never seen them apart, actually. When Star came to blight my life with a demand for something — fortunately, in my accountant days, it was usually money — he would be there, nodding as she denounced my way of life, my husband, my diet, my body weight, my use of chemicals in the washing-up and my ownership of a car. Then they would take the money and go. It was never very much. Cheap at the price to get rid of them. I said as much to Meroe.
‘Well, she was right about the husband,’ she observed.
‘That’s true. James was a waste of space. Something very strange must have happened. Thanks, Meroe, I feel better now. I wonder where Therese knows Star from? She’ll hate being called Jacqui. She hasn’t been Jacqui since — I don’t know, school?’
‘I don’t know much about Ms Webb,’ said Meroe, ‘but if you like I’ll call a friend in that collective and find out what she knows about Sunlight’s departure. I didn’t like the Wicca they were practising in Cath’s coven. Too dark, too demanding, leaning towards compulsion. Pure food, pure water, pure thoughts — trying to be too pure in an impure world can easily lead to a loss of compassion.’
‘Just as an occasional cup of coffee doesn’t tarnish your chakras too badly,’ I said, yawning. Emotion makes me sleepy.
‘Exactly. Now, if you are all right to be left, it is time I opened my shop, and Belladonna is waiting for her breakfast.’
‘And that would never do,’ I agreed, getting up and shaking myself. Meroe’s partner in the Sibyl’s Cave is a plump, night-black, intransigent feline called Belladonna, who would demonstrate her displeasure in some noticeable way, like leaving a disembowelled mouse in the window amongst the Celtic jewellery. This always had the strongest effect on vegans and strict vegetarians. Some had been known to faint.
Meroe went and I drank the rest of the coffee and put the last of the loaves in. I sorted out the remaining orders for the day as my carrier, Megan, arrived with her rickshaw, and we counted and loaded.
‘I’ve got a new customer,’ I told her. ‘For tomorrow. Rye bread loaves with caraway seeds. Cafe Vlad Tepes.’
‘Just opened,’ said Megan, tossing her coppery hair. No one knows the city’s businesses like Megan. She is an ambitious young woman who started her own motorbike rickshaw business and will, undoubtedly, be running transport in Australia before she is forty. It is good to be kind to the young, for they will be Prime Minister when we are decrepit and in need of help. ‘In Exhibition Street. Very tasty Rumanian food. They are Cafe Simisoa in the day and a goth club at night. They stay open late for the goths, who go there because of the name.’
‘Name?’ I asked vaguely, though a lifetime of horror movies should have informed me.
‘Vlad the Impaler,’ she grinned. ‘I’ll remember for tomorrow. That all? Bye, Corinna,’ and she was off down Calico Alley and into Flinders Lane, gunning her engine. The future of transport, in my view, was in good hands.
I pottered around the bakery, cleaning up and putting things away and checking stores until the last loaves came out of the ovens, the flames sank and died, the air conditioning shut itself off, and the shop bell could be heard clearly again as a little ‘ting’ whenever some hungry customer pushed the door open and smelt that fine, heartening scent of new baking.
The ten o’clock rush was over and it would be quiet now until noon, when the early lunchers poured out in search of either (1) enough calories to sustain their thought processes through yet another meeting or (2) a reason to go back to work in the afternoon. This was the time when, if all was well in the shop, I went upstairs and changed out of my baking tracksuit into something more suitable and freed Goss for her break. So I did that, though my feet seemed hard to lift and I was still recovering from that burst of emotion. I’m like Jason. I don’t like emotions. I don’t trust them.
I looked at my face in the mirror as I brushed my hair, now shoulder length and not as mousy as it was since I started using Meroe’s camomile rinse. I was as white as a sheet of ivory laid Basildon Bond notepaper. This wouldn’t do. I took some Rescue Remedy and a long drink of mineral water, splashed my cheeks and gave myself a severe scolding. So what if your mother has turned up? Is that a reason to have conniptions?
Well, yes, actually, it was. But I was going to have to get on with the day nonetheless. And when I went to see Starshine, perhaps I could try not to lose my temper with her, perhaps we could make some sort of truce. I went downstairs repeating this like a mantra, but I did not believe it. The trouble was she despised everything I believed in, everything I did, and everything I was. That didn’t allow a lot of common ground. And I felt the same about her.
Jason was serving and Goss was drinking her decaf non-fat milk latte and nibbling a quarter section of the Kama Sutra muffin. She was saying to Jason, ‘Real good,’ when I came in. Both of them looked at me. I tried to answer the look.
‘Yes, she’s my mother, and we get on very badly. I wasn’t expecting her and I don’t know what she wants.’
‘But you don’t like her,’ said Goss. I nodded. To my surprise, they both seemed to understand this.
‘I can’t stand my mum,’ said Goss. ‘Or her new bloke. He’s gross. I refused to live with either her or Dad’s new girl, so he let me live here with Kylie.’
‘But she can’t do anything to you,’ Jason repeated. ‘You’re a grown-up.’
‘She can do things to me,’ I said grimly. But Jason was, of course, right. I laughed. ‘No, she can’t make me go with her to her godforsaken collective in the mud. She can’t make me live on turnip peelings and collected rainwater.’
‘Sweet,’ said Jason. ‘Tell her to get stuffed and let’s get on with the baking.’
‘I do love you, Jason,’ I said, and he blushed. ‘As you say. All the loaves are sent and gone, we just need to sell out the shop and we’ll be closed for the day.’
‘I gotta finish the soup,’ he said. ‘And take the knives to Maison.’
‘You can go now,’ I told him. ‘Goss and I will do the lunchtime rush. Just turn off the heat under your pumpkin pulp and you can blend it when you get back. Tell Maison to put the sharpening on my account.’
He ducked his head at me and went off to slide the knives into their leather roll, chopper on one end, carving in the middle and vegetable knives at the other end. You could equip a reasonable riot with my knife roll.
Nothing else happened for two hours. Lunchtimers flooded in, bought rolls and loaves and muffins until we ran out, and ebbed back to their desks. Goss and I were just putting the last of the loaves I’d put aside into the Soup Run sack when Jason came back, strangely and pitiably resigned, in police custody.
Two police officers, both young men with John Wayne swaggers and new guns on hip. They set every hackle I had to rising as they shoved Jason into the shop. He stumbled but did not even direct an indignant glance at them for their roughness. This serve of indignation, then, was going to be on me. It was going to be a heaping one.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked in my most middle class voice. My girls’ school might not have taught me much about education, but it was excellent on snobbery, class and arrogance. And intimidation, bullying and violence.
‘He yours?’ asked one police officer.
‘I beg your pardon?’ I raised an eyebrow. I did not begrudge the hours of practice I had spent on learning to do this. It had its usual effect. He looked away and his mate said in a more conciliatory tone, ‘This young man says that he works here. We hear that a lot.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ I replied. ‘In this case it is true. That’s my apprentice, Jason. Why are you manhandling him?’
‘He was carrying prohibited weapons,’ said the first police officer. ‘These.’
‘Yes?’ I raised the eyebrow again. ‘He was taking my cook’s knives, in their proper covering, to Maison to have them sharpened. On my orders. If they are prohibited weapons then you had better arrest me too. Shall we go?’
‘You don’t know this kid,’ protested the first cop.
‘We used to see him around, sleeping rough. He’s on the gear,’ the second said to me, leaning close so that I could tell it had been a long time since he and a toothbrush had been acquainted.
‘He’s a bad boy. You’ll wake up with a knife in your throat one night,’ said the first.
And that was quite enough of that.
‘Goss, just get me a pen, will you? I want to note down these officers’ names and numbers. Now you have been assured that Jason has committed no offence, I am sure you will give me back my knives and leave him alone in future. Officers … thanks, Goss … Kane and Reagan. So kind of you to be concerned,’ I said sweetly. ‘He’s off the gear. And I know my own business, as I am sure that you know yours.’
Kane, the taller and heavier of the two, stuttered for a moment on the verge of some unwise declaration. Reagan, the shorter, gave him a push and started him out of the shop. Jason sagged against the counter, his arms full of sharp knives.
‘Just take the knife roll away from him, will you, Goss?’ I prompted.
‘Bloody jacks,’ mumbled Jason. ‘I wasn’t doing nothing! Just coming back with the knife roll. It was all closed up and tied around. Not as if I had a shiv in me sock. But they had to stop me and make me open it and then walk me all the way down here as though I was a murderer. Saying how they were gonna lock me up with rapists.’
‘Yes, they weren’t nice people,’ I agreed. ‘It just hasn’t been our day, has it, Jason?’ I put a hand on his shoulder and he covered it with his own for a moment.
‘They used to move me on,’ he said. ‘In the old days. I suppose they don’t know I’ve changed,’ he admitted, tearing the last ham roll in half and eating it in two bites.
‘No, but they could have given you the benefit of the doubt. And taken a look at you. Officious, both of them, and I like my police persons at least thirty and not getting their street talk from
NYPD Blue
. Don’t worry, Jason. I never doubted you for a moment.’ And I hadn’t, either, I realised.
‘I won’t mind the cops if you don’t mind your mum,’ said Jason, eating the second last cheese roll.