Karen Comes at Night

Karen Bellamy came to Fenner Street at one in the morning on the second of April, which she had not done in eleven years. She announced it by text at half past midnight with the words am coming down, don't tidy, which caused Nabil to tidy furiously and without any acknowledgement of the irony for twenty-five minutes, during which Ines was given four separate jobs she had already done.

She was sixty-three and had a bad knee and a way of standing in a room that made everyone in it aware of the room's dimensions. She looked at the ovens for a while, the way a person looks at machinery they have personally sworn at. She looked at the bench. And then she looked, for a considerably longer moment and without any expression at all, at the A4 rota on the wall with two names on it belonging to people not on the payroll of any company she owned.

"Right," she said. "Which of you is the engineer?" Ines put her hand up before she had decided to. "Ines Marchetti." "You fixed my control board." "It was a dry joint." "I don't care what it was, I care that it's Tuesday and my Easter went out." Karen sat down, heavily, on the flour sacks, which were Cerys's, and Cerys visibly decided not to say so.

"Here's my problem," Karen said. "My problem is that I have three shops, and one of them runs a night shift that has, apparently, four people on it, and I pay for two." She let that sit. "And before anybody explains, I want to be clear that I already understand it, because I did this shift myself for nine years before my knee, and there was a bloke called Terry who came in every night for six years and folded bags and I never paid him a penny and I would have gone under without him."

Peter had gone extremely still by the bags. "So," said Karen. "Nobody's in trouble. I'm not having a rota on a wall with unpaid names on it, because that is an insurance problem that will eat this building if anybody trips. But I'm also not having Terry's ghost thrown out of my bakery." She looked at Nabil. "So what do you want?"

The pause went on long enough to be uncomfortable and then went on a good deal longer. Ines realised, watching him, that Nabil had never in eleven years been asked that question by this woman — not what he thought, not what he recommended, but what he wanted — and that he did not have an answer ready, and that he was not going to fake one to fill a silence. She had never in her life been more certain that she was watching somebody do arithmetic in public.

"Casual contracts," he said finally. "Four hours, minimum wage, zero obligation either way. They come when they come. If they don't come nothing happens." "That's a payroll line I have to justify." "Yes," said Nabil. "And the justification is the Easter orders went out on Tuesday."

"I don't want to be paid," said Peter.

Everybody turned round. He had his hands full of bags and the particular look of a man who has decided to say a thing and is now doing it at some speed before he can stop. "I'm sorry, I know that's — I know it's not helpful. But I don't want it. If you pay me I have to come. And if I have to come then it's a job, and I've had a job for twenty-two years and it is the thing that fell over."

Karen looked at him for a long moment. "What's your name?" "Peter Ashworth." "Peter, what did you do?" "I ran a print floor. Wallace and Deane, out on the industrial estate." "I know it. It shut." "It shut," Peter agreed. "In the November. Along with several other things, in my case."

"And you fold bags." "I fold bags very well." "You do," said Cerys, from the sacks. "It's genuinely upsetting how well he folds bags."

Karen rubbed her knee and thought about it. "All right," she said. "Then here's the shape. Ines and Nabil are staff, that's unchanged. Cerys — do you want a contract?" "God, no. I already have a job that owns me." "Fine. So neither of you is staff, which means neither of you can be on a rota on my wall, which means the rota comes down." She raised a hand at Nabil. "And goes back up as something else. Call it what you like. It is not a rota, it is not a schedule, it is a piece of paper with names on it in a building. Put it in the proving room where the insurer will never go."

Nabil made a sound. Karen looked at him sharply. "What?" "Nothing," he said. "That's the right room." He took the paper off the wall, and Ines watched him carry it through and pin it up in the warm dark where the levains lived, and understood, with a kind of lurch, what he had just done and how little any of them were going to say about it.

"Right," said Karen, getting up off the sacks with difficulty. "Marchetti. Walk me to the car."

It was raining on Fenner Street. Karen's car was parked badly and had been for an hour and had, remarkably, not been ticketed.

"You've got a degree," said Karen. "How do you—" "You solder like someone who's been taught and you wrote a tolerance on a diagram. I own three bakeries, I'm not stupid." She leaned on the roof. "I'm going to offer you something and you're going to say no, and I want you to say no properly rather than politely, because I haven't got the patience."

"Go on." "I want to put a proper mezzanine in at the Halloway shop and open the kitchen to sixty covers. I've had two firms quote and both of them have quoted me for a building they haven't looked at. I'd like somebody who can look at it." Karen shrugged. "It's four months. It's real money. It is, I'd imagine, about eleven per cent of what you can actually do."

Ines stood in the rain and discovered that the thing she felt was not the thing she had expected to feel. She had spent fourteen months braced for exactly this offer, arriving in exactly this way, from exactly this kind of person, and had assumed she would feel cornered by it — that her chest would do what it had done in the car park drainage meeting. What she actually felt was a kind of quiet, and under the quiet, unmistakably and rather insultingly, interest.

"Can I think about it?" "You can have a fortnight and then I'll ask the second firm." Karen opened the car door and then did not get in. "One more thing, and then I am going home to bed like a normal woman of sixty-three. That man in there who will not be paid." "Peter." "Yes. Keep an eye. I've seen that before and it goes one of two ways." She lowered herself in. "Terry died in the shop, in the end. In that chair by the flour, at about four in the morning, and the day baker found him at seven. He was seventy-eight, and he had been coming six years, and I found out at the funeral that he had a sister in Hull who had no idea at all where he had been going every night."

She started the engine. "I'm not saying that to be grim. I'm saying I never asked him a single question in six years because I thought that was the kindness." The window went up halfway. "It was mostly the kindness. It wasn't entirely."

Ines stood on the pavement and watched the car go down Fenner Street, and then went back inside, where Peter was folding bags and Cerys was asleep sitting up on the sacks and Nabil was scoring loaves and the clock above the mixer was four minutes fast.

She did not decide that night. She did not decide the next week either, or the week after that, and Karen did not chase her, which Ines eventually understood was not patience but a fairly ruthless understanding of how people arrive at things. What she did instead was start, without any announcement to anybody, to pay attention to Peter — which turned out to mean asking him about the woodwork class, and then about the print floor, and then, eventually, in the middle of April, about the dog.

The dog had been called Muriel, which he was defensive about, and had been fifteen, and had been the last thing in the flat that was pleased to see him. He talked about it for about four minutes and then stopped and folded eleven bags and then said, "That's the first time I've said her name out loud since November," in a perfectly level voice.

"Do you want to not talk about it?" "I want to have said it," said Peter. "Those are different." Nabil, at the bench, twelve feet away, did not look up and did not leave, and Ines had by then been in that building long enough to know that this was the entire vocabulary and that it was sufficient.

She took the Halloway job on the eighteenth of April. She told Karen by text, at three in the morning, from the proving room, which was not necessary and which she did anyway.

She did not leave the bakery. That was the part her mother could not process at Easter and could not process at Christmas either. Four days a week she measured a Victorian floor structure in Halloway and drew things and argued with a building control officer called Dennis. Two nights a week she went to Fenner Street at half twelve and weighed flour.

"It's not efficient," her mother said, on the phone, in June. "No," Ines agreed. "It isn't." "So why?" And Ines, standing in her own kitchen at eight in the evening with the light going, found that she could not produce a sentence that would survive being said to a woman who had worked forty years to make her daughter's life make sense.

What she wanted to say was: on Wednesday at four in the morning a fifty-one-year-old man said a dog's name out loud for the first time in six months, and three of us were in the room, and nobody made anything of it, and that is the best thing I have been part of. What she said was, "It's temporary." Her mother said, "Hm," and let it go, which was, Ines understood afterwards, its own kind of enormous kindness.