August, and the Heat

August broke everything. The bakery ran at thirty-four degrees on the floor by two in the morning and the dough came up forty minutes early every night and Nabil spent three weeks in a state of controlled fury at the weather, which he took personally.

"It's not the heat," he said, on the ninth. "It's that the heat is uneven. You can bake in a hot room. You cannot bake in a room that is hot at one end." He had the fan on the floor pointing at the proving room door, which achieved nothing and which he did not want discussed.

Cerys stopped coming. Not dramatically, and not with any announcement — she texted, twice, in the second week, brief things about the heat, and then in the third week she did not text at all. On the fourth Ines rang her at four in the afternoon and got voicemail and left a message that took her three attempts to get right, because the first two had both come out sounding like the message a manager leaves and she had deleted them in something close to horror.

"She's on nights," said Peter, who had somehow found this out. "Proper nights, the whole rotation, six weeks. They're short." He folded. "She said not to make a fuss." "She said that to you?" "She said it in a text with nine full stops in it," said Peter, "which I have chosen to interpret as not making a fuss."

Ines looked at the piece of paper in the proving room. Four names. Two of them had not been in the building for a month, and one of those was hers on three nights out of five because Halloway had gone to tender and Dennis from building control had developed views.

It was, she thought, the first structural problem with the arrangement, and it was a shape she knew from work: a thing held up entirely by the fact of people turning up, with no provision whatsoever for the case where they cannot. In a building you would call it a lack of redundancy and you would not be allowed to sign it off. In a life everybody signs it off, every day, and calls the result a community.

She said this out loud to Nabil at half past four and he listened to all of it and then said, "Yes," and went back to the bench, and forty minutes later, apropos of nothing, said, "Terry died in the chair, you know. Karen told me in eleven years ago. It's the only time she's ever talked to me about the night shift and I've thought about it every week since."

They had it out on the twenty-second, at three in the morning, in the yard — which was fractionally cooler than the floor, which was where you could hear the ring road, and which was where every difficult conversation in the history of that building had been held, for the simple reason that it was the only place in it where two people could stand without one of them being at a bench.

"I want to say a thing," said Ines, "and I want to say it badly, because I've been drafting it for a fortnight and the drafts are all worse." "Go on." "I think this place is doing something for four people and I think none of us can say what it is, and I've decided that's fine for three of us and not fine for Peter."

Nabil did not say anything. "He's here five nights. He was on Thursday and Sunday in February. He's here five nights and he doesn't sleep and he goes home at seven and I don't think he does anything at all until half two the next morning." Ines made herself keep going. "And we all think that's better than what he was doing in November. And it probably is. And 'better than November' isn't a plan, it's a comparison."

"You want me to tell him to come less." "God, no. That's the worst possible—" She stopped. "I want somebody to ask him a question. And I've worked out that it can't be me, because I'm thirty and I've known him nine months, and it can't be Cerys because she's not here and because it would be her job and he'd hear it as her job." She looked at him. "So it's you. Which is the entire reason I've spent a fortnight drafting."

The ring road did what the ring road does. "I have never," said Nabil, slowly, "asked anybody in that building a personal question in eleven years." "I know." "It is not shyness. It is the arrangement. It is the whole of what I have to offer and it is the reason six people came in off that street." "I know," said Ines. "And Terry died in the chair."

Nabil put his hands on the wall and leaned on them and stayed like that for a while. "That is a cruel thing to say and it is the correct thing to say," he said, "and I would be grateful if you did not do it again for a few years."

He went in. Ines stayed in the yard for another ten minutes, listening to the ring road and being fairly comprehensively ashamed of herself, and then followed. Nabil was at the bench. Peter was at the bags. The room was thirty-four degrees at one end and thirty at the other and the fan was achieving nothing. Nothing was said that night, and nothing was said on the Thursday either, and by the Sunday Ines had privately concluded that she had spent a fortnight drafting a speech in order to damage the only arrangement she cared about.

What he did on the Sunday was not a question. It was not a conversation either, and it took under thirty seconds, and Ines was not in the building for it. She only found out about it in October, from Peter, in passing, in the middle of a completely different subject — and by then it had already worked, which she suspected was the only reason he had mentioned it at all.

He handed Peter the levain. That was all. At twenty past two on a Sunday morning in August he took the big jar off the shelf, put it on the bench in front of a man who had been folding paper bags for nine months, and said: "This is nine years old. It came from a woman in Marseille who gave it to my mother. If it dies I cannot replace it. Feed it at three and at five and write down what you did."

"Why me?" Peter had said, and Nabil had said, "Because I need someone who will do it the same way every time and not get bored," and had walked off, and that was the entire conversation.

Peter fed it at three and at five and wrote down what he did. He did that in August, and in September, and in October, on the nights he was there, and on the nights he was not he rang the bakery at three in the morning to check somebody had. He bought a notebook, and then a better notebook, and by November he had temperature columns and hydration columns and a graph on squared paper, and had started, without asking anybody's permission, to correct Nabil's flour ratios in the margin in pencil.

"He's right, as well," Nabil said to Ines in November, sounding genuinely aggrieved. "Two of them. I've been running the rye eight per cent wet since 2019 because I adjusted for a bad sack and never went back." He shook his head. "Twenty-two years running a print floor. Do you know what a print floor is? It is thirty machines that all need feeding at different times and none of them can be late."

Peter stopped coming five nights in October. He went to three, and then to Thursday and Sunday and the levain days, and told Cerys — who had come back off her rotation in September looking like a different person — that he had joined a second class, on Wednesdays, about bread, and that it was full of extremely serious people and he was the oldest by nineteen years.

"Are you enjoying it?" Ines asked him. Peter considered the question with the seriousness he brought to most things. "I am being condescended to by a twenty-four-year-old called Fionn who has strong views on autolyse and has never in his life run anything," he said, "and it is comfortably the highlight of my week, and I have no explanation for that at all and have stopped looking for one." He folded a bag. "I think it may simply be that he expects me to be there."

In December, Karen came at night for the second time in twelve years, on the eighth, without texting.

She came in, said nothing, and stood looking at the room: Ines at the scale, Peter at the bench with his notebook and the nine-year-old levain, Cerys asleep sitting up on the sacks with her hood still on, Nabil scoring.

"Well," she said. Nabil looked up. "It's the eighth," said Karen. "It's Terry's. I've come on the eighth for twelve years and I've always come at two in the afternoon and stood in an empty shop like an idiot." She put her bag down. "I thought I'd try it at the right time of day."

She stayed until six. She did not do any work, and did not ask anybody to do any differently, and sat in the chair by the flour — which nobody used, which nobody moved when they swept, and which Ines had never once in two years seen a single person sit in. She understood, abruptly and completely, that it was not an ordinary chair and had not been one for twelve years, and that everybody in the building except her had presumably worked this out long ago and had never mentioned it, because that is not a thing you mention.

At one point she and Peter had a forty-minute conversation about print floors that neither Ines nor Nabil contributed a word to. At another she told Cerys, who had woken up, that the second-worst night of her life had been in a hospital corridor in 1994 and that she had never forgotten the name of the woman who had brought her a cup of tea and had never once managed to find her.

At half five she got up out of the chair with difficulty and said, "Right, that's better," and went and stood by the door. "Nabil." "Karen." "The paper in the proving room. Put a fifth line on it." "For who?" "For me," said Karen. "Once a year. On the eighth. I'd like it written down somewhere that isn't just me remembering it."

She went. The shutter went up at half six. Mrs Adeyemi wanted two of the seeded and had wanted two of the seeded every weekday for eleven years, and Ines, handing them over, found herself thinking that this was also a rota, of a sort, and that Fenner Street was apparently full of them, and that not one had ever been discussed.