The Rota

By December there were four of them most nights, and none of them had discussed it, and Ines had begun to notice that this was the only group she had ever been part of that had not at some point held a conversation about itself.

Her family were not like that. Her family held a conversation about itself approximately every eleven days, usually loudly, usually about whether Ines was wasting a degree. She had a first in structural engineering and she weighed flour at half past midnight, and at Christmas she would go home for two days and her mother would say the word temporary nine or ten times in a tone of increasing enquiry.

It was temporary. That was the annoying thing. It had been temporary for fourteen months, and Ines was entirely aware that a temporary arrangement which has outlasted a lease is doing some other job, and she had made two serious attempts to work out what job and had abandoned both. The first attempt had lasted a fortnight and produced a list. The second had lasted an afternoon and produced the realisation that she had made a list, which she had found so bleak that she had gone to bed at four in the afternoon.

"You've done that scale three times," said Nabil. "It's out." "It's not out. You've checked it three times because you're not here." He put the peel down. "Go and sit on the sacks for ten minutes." "I'm fine." "I did not ask how you were," said Nabil. "I said the scale is fine and you are checking it, and in about forty minutes you will start the rye, and I would like you to start the rye once."

She went and sat on the sacks. It was, she reflected, the single most effective piece of line management she had ever been subjected to, and it had contained no questions whatsoever. At the consultancy there had been a wellbeing framework, and a quarterly conversation, and a manager called Greg who had asked her how she was in a tone that made the answer legally significant. None of it had ever once got her off her feet for ten minutes at the exact moment she needed to be off them.

Cerys came in at half one and sat down beside her without asking and said nothing for four minutes, and then said, "Right, what," and Ines told her, which she had not planned to do. The degree. The two years at the consultancy. The Tuesday in October fourteen months ago when she had gone into a meeting about a car park drainage schedule and had discovered, sitting down, that she could not make herself say anything at all, and had gone out to the corridor and then to the street and then had simply not gone back.

"They rang for a fortnight," she said. "Then they stopped. That's the whole story. Nobody was cruel to me. There wasn't a thing. That's the part I can't— people want there to be a thing."

"There doesn't have to be a thing," said Cerys. "I know." "No, I mean — I do this professionally, sort of, adjacently. There often isn't a thing." She had her elbows on her knees. "People come into the department at four in the morning convinced they need an explanation more than they need a bed, and about a third of the time the honest answer is that they are tired in a way that has been accumulating since they were about nineteen."

"That's not very satisfying." "No. It's a rubbish answer and I hate giving it and it is usually correct." Cerys pulled her sleeves down over her hands. "The other thing I'd say — and you can tell me to shut up — is that you keep calling it temporary and nobody here has ever asked you to."

Ines looked at her. "Nabil doesn't know about the degree." "Nabil absolutely knows about the degree." "How?" "Because in September the mixer broke and you fixed it in eleven minutes and drew him a diagram," said Cerys, "and he kept the diagram. It's in the office. It's pinned up." She stood, and stretched, and went to do the long trays. "He's never going to mention it. That's not the same as not knowing."

Ines went and looked, later, when Nabil was in the cold room. It was pinned to the corkboard beside the fire certificate: her diagram, in pencil, on the back of an order sheet, with the tolerance she had scribbled in the corner and the little note that said do not overtighten, it will feel wrong before it is right.

She stood there for a while, longer than she would have admitted to. Then Peter came in the back door with the coffee and said, "Everything all right?" and she said, "Yes," and meant it in a way she was not prepared to look at directly at two in the morning. Peter, who had been in the building nine weeks by then, did not follow it up, which she noticed, and which she later worked out he had learned from Nabil in about four nights flat.

The rye went in at three. It was slow. It was fourteen degrees. Nabil said, "Cold for the rye," and Ines laughed out loud for the first time in about a week, and Nabil looked briefly and profoundly alarmed.

At half five Peter folded four hundred bags and told them, apropos of nothing, that the reorganisation had involved a divorce, a redundancy, and the death of a dog, in that order, over nineteen weeks. "The dog was the one that did it," he said, folding, without any change of pace. "I want that on the record. Everyone assumes it was the divorce, and then they are very kind to me about the divorce, and I have to stand there being consoled about the wrong thing." Nobody said anything. He folded eleven more bags and looked, on the whole, relieved.

In January Nabil put a rota on the wall. It was A4 and handwritten and it had four columns, and one of the columns said Cerys and one said Peter, neither of whom was employed by the bakery in any sense that would survive contact with an accountant.

Nobody said anything about it for two nights. On the third night Peter stood in front of it with his coat still on for slightly too long, and then took it off and hung it up and said, "Right, bags," in a voice that was not entirely steady.

"You can't pay them," Ines said to Nabil later, quietly, at the bench. "I'm not paying them." "Then it's not a rota, it's a—" She stopped, because she did not have the second half. "It's a piece of paper," said Nabil. "With their names on. In a building. That's all it is."

"Karen will have opinions." Karen owned the bakery, in the sense that she owned three bakeries and appeared at Fenner Street about once a fortnight in the afternoon and had never in eleven years seen the night shift do anything. "Karen won't see it," said Nabil. "Karen comes at two in the afternoon. That's a day-shift wall."

He was wrong, as it turned out, but not for eleven weeks, and by then several other things had changed.

What Ines noticed in those eleven weeks was that the rota did something none of them had predicted. Before it, everyone came when they could not sleep. After it, they came on their nights — and on the nights they were not down, they stayed home, and slept, or did not sleep, but did so in the knowledge that Wednesday existed and was theirs.

Cerys, who had been coming three nights a week and going home wrecked, went down to two and got better at both. Peter came Thursday and Sunday and started, in February, going to a woodwork class on Tuesdays, which he mentioned once, briefly, and about which he was so obviously delighted that nobody teased him.

The big oven died on a Tuesday in March at ten past one, which is the worst possible time in the worst possible week, because Easter orders had started and the bakery was running at about a hundred and thirty per cent of an ordinary night.

Nabil said one word, went to the box, came back, and said, "It's not the element." He had the expression of a man doing arithmetic he did not want the answer to. "Karen's engineer is Bristol. He'll be here Thursday, best case." "That's two nights." "That's two nights of about eleven hundred quid of orders we can't fill and about four hundred kilos we can't prove, and Karen will do the sum and the sum comes out as the night shift."

Ines was already at the box with her sleeves up. "Torch." Cerys got the torch. Peter, without being asked, went and stood at the front door to intercept anybody, which was not a thing anybody needed, and which was the most useful available way of managing Peter, and everybody knew it including Peter.

It took her ninety minutes. It was the control board, and the fault was a dry joint, and Ines had not held a soldering iron in fourteen months and her hands shook for the first four minutes and then stopped. Nabil held the torch and did not speak, which was exactly correct, and at one point handed her a mug of tea without her having noticed she wanted one.

At twenty to three the oven came up. All four of them stood and watched the display cycle through to temperature and nobody said anything at all, and then Cerys said, "Oh, thank God," and sat down on the floor, and Peter laughed so hard he had to put a hand on the bench.

They did the night. They did all of it, four hundred kilos and the Easter orders, and finished at ten past seven, forty minutes late, with the shutter half up and Mrs Adeyemi waiting patiently outside for her two seeded and refusing to make a fuss about it.

In the yard afterwards Nabil said, "You'll want to think about whether you're telling Karen." "Why would I tell Karen?" "Because she is going to ask who fixed her oven," said Nabil, "and I am not going to lie to her, and there is a version of the next month where you get offered something." He put his cup down. "I am not telling you to take it. I am telling you it is coming, so you get to decide it rather than have it happen at you. That is the difference between the two, and I did not get it, at your age, and it cost me eleven years."