The Long Way

The bakery has eleven staff now and opens six days a week and still loses money on wedding cakes, which is a decision that has been reviewed annually by a man with a spreadsheet and upheld annually by a woman with a piping bag.

Raff did the music block in the February, and a second school in the same district the following year, and then took a hall two hundred kilometres away that ran for fourteen months and nearly undid all of it, and they got through that on the strength of rule three and a great deal of driving.

They live eleven kilometres from the bakery in a house with a piano in it that neither of them plays well. The piano was his father's. It came out of a house that was sold in the September after the funeral, and it went into storage for two years, and it is not a good instrument and both of his sisters had a better claim to it and both of them said the same thing, which is that it should go where somebody would keep it tuned.

He tunes it himself, badly, four times a year, having been taught by a man who tuned professionally for forty-one years and who never once suggested that his son should do it for a living. He has said that it is the only thing he does that he is content to be mediocre at, and that this is a considerable luxury for a man who spends his working life measuring rooms to the millimetre.

Kiki bakes a plain lemon cake in a particular tin on the anniversary, every year, and takes it nowhere and gives it to nobody in particular; it gets eaten by whoever is in the kitchen, which is generally Toyah and Marek and whoever the current apprentice is, and none of them have ever been told why, and all of them have worked it out.

They were married in the fourth spring, in a room with about forty people in it rather than a hundred and forty, which was her choice and about which her mother has still not entirely settled.

There was no cake. There was a great deal of extremely good bread, made by four members of staff at half past three in the morning while the bride was asleep for the first time in eleven years on the day before a party, and one plain lemon cake in a particular tin, and Ines the pastry chef came four hundred and ninety kilometres for the day and cried during the bread.

She found out about the phone call in the spring after the wedding at Ardsmuir, and it took a chance remark and eleven months.

Ines the pastry chef mentioned, on the phone, in the course of a conversation about something else entirely, that of course they had been expecting her, and Kiki said that she had rung on the Friday morning, and Ines said yes, after the night manager rang on the Friday morning.

Osgur, at kilometre six hundred and ten, had come off a night shift at seven in the morning, and had rung a hotel four hundred and ninety kilometres up the road that he had no connection with whatsoever, and had spoken to a pastry chef he did not know, and had told her that a woman was going to arrive that afternoon with a hundred and forty wired sugar freesias and would need a bench and a fridge and to be left alone, and had then gone home to bed.

Kiki drove six hundred and ten kilometres to say thank you. She did it in the June, on a Tuesday, on her own, without telling Raff until she was two hundred kilometres down the road, and she took a box with her.

He was on shift. He came out to the desk and did not recognise her for about four seconds and then did, completely, and said, "The freesias," and Kiki Balogun-Ward stood in the lobby of a roadside hotel and put a box on the counter and said, "One hundred and forty. Wired. By hand. They are for nothing and they will not keep and I have driven six hundred and ten kilometres to give them to you, and if you tell me it was not a big thing I am going to be extremely rude to you in a lobby."

He did not tell her it was not a big thing. What he said, after a while, was that he had been a chef for eleven years and had left it because of what it does to a person, and that he had watched a woman come through the door at twenty past eleven at night with three boxes and the face of somebody carrying nine days of her own hands, and that he had recognised it, and that ringing a hotel in the morning had cost him four minutes.

He works at the bakery now. Not immediately — it took three years and a change in his circumstances and a job offer made carefully and refused twice — but he does the early shift on the sweet bench four days a week, and he is better at sugar work than she is, which she says freely and which he denies, and the two of them have an argument about tempering that has been running for two years.

The wedding at Ardsmuir produced three hundred and eleven photographs of the cake, of which the family kept about forty and the photographer used nine.

None of those is the one that matters. The one that matters was taken at twenty past six on the Saturday evening on somebody's phone, badly, from the wrong side of the room, and it is of the top table, and the cake is in it by accident, out of focus, at the edge of the frame.

Also in it, at table nine, at the back, entirely out of focus, is a man in a slept-in jacket who has been at a hospice since eight that morning and has been in the room for eleven minutes and does not yet know he is going to spend the next four years driving.

Kiki found it two years later while looking for something else. She had it printed, which is a thing nobody does any more, and it is in the house, in the room with the piano in it, and it is the only photograph on that wall that is not of a person's face.

She has said that this is the whole of what she meant, at kilometre three hundred and eighty, on a Thursday evening, to a man she had known for six hours: that she does not make cakes, she makes the thing in the back of the photograph, and that she had been saying it for four years about other people's weddings before it happened in one of her own, and that she does not have a tidy remark to make about that and has stopped looking for one.

Her sister has a copy. Raff's older sister has a copy, which was sent without a note and acknowledged without one. Osgur has a copy on the inside of a locker door at a bakery in a town of nine thousand people, and Marek, who is twenty-three now and running the night bench, has never asked about it.

And there is a copy in the glovebox of a car — not the hire car, a real one, bought in the second year and driven a very long way since — in a plastic wallet, folded once, with a corner missing, because it has been taken out and looked at in a service station car park at kilometre two hundred and fourteen more than once, by a man who is generally on his own when he does it and who has never mentioned it to anybody.

They do the drive about twice a year, north, the whole eleven hundred and four kilometres, because his sisters are still at that end and because there is a grave in a town of four thousand people that gets visited in the spring.

They do not fly. That has never been discussed and there is no rule about it and neither of them would put it that way; it is simply that when the question comes up somebody says that they may as well drive, and the other one agrees, and it has now happened eleven times.

They stop at kilometre two hundred and fourteen. The service area has been refurbished twice and the café is a different brand and the four-seater by the window is now a bank of six, and they sit at it anyway and eat something bad and Kiki still puts her bag on the chair where three white boxes once sat.

They stop at kilometre six hundred and ten, which is a different hotel under different management, and the walk-in fridge has been replaced, and the night manager is a man of about twenty-five who has been told the story by a predecessor and is visibly delighted every single time.

And at the Kessock crossing, which has been open every time since, one of them says something about the western diversion and the other one says something about the lorry driver, and it is the same exchange every time and has worn down over eleven repetitions into about nine words, which is what happens to the founding events of a life.

Raff drives the first shift and Kiki drives the second, and the shifts are two hours, and neither of them argues about being tired. Nobody puts the radio on unless both of them want it. And nobody has asked anybody, in a very long time, why they are going to Ardsmuir, because both of them know, and because the rule turned out to be the only one worth keeping.

On the last one, in the spring, coming up out of the coastal plain through the cutting at an hour and eleven minutes where the rain always stops, Raff Oduya-Kine said what he says, which is, "The road is dry from here and there is nothing on the map until the bridge." And Nkechi Balogun-Ward said what she says, which is, "Thank you." And then she said, which is not part of it and which she had been thinking about since Vellhaven, "You know you nearly did not come back." And Raff said, "I know exactly how nearly. Eleven paces." And she said, "What made you turn round?" And he thought about it properly, for about four kilometres, because after all this time he still thinks about her questions properly, and then he said: "You asked me once and then you let it go. Nobody had let me alone for four days. You asked me once, and then you left me alone, and I got eleven paces and I could not think of a single reason to keep walking."