Earthly Delights (6 page)

Gloomy thoughts for a shining morning. I went back in to remove my health loaves to their cooling rack and put in the rye bread. I then stripped and chopped all the herbs except the bay leaves. My chopped herbs went into a Swiss-roll style casing of pasta douro. The scent made me more cheerful as I rolled and sliced and slid them into the oven.

My muffins this morning were raspberry. They object to a lot of mixing, muffins. They come out tough if one mixes them too much. Fine with me. I put them in the oven too and went back into the street. Heckle and Jekyll were ambling home, licking fish off their whiskers. I heard a whistle. Seven am and here came my newspaper. I was making such good time that I could have another cup of coffee and some seed bread and cheese while reading about the latest doom and mayhem. The paper boy, who was known for his reckless use of plastic-wrapped papers as missiles, flung it to me as he passed. I fielded it. Heckle and Jekyll split to either side of Calico Alley as the bike passed. They were used to the paper boy. They came back to flank the bakery door like small stone statues, noses lifted to the morning smells.

I left them there as I shut the door and locked it. They could get in through the cat door, carefully placed so that not even a really adroit thief could use it to reach a lock. I wandered up to the bedroom to get dressed and then down to the kitchen for more life-giving caffeine. I shed the tracksuit, noticed that last night’s cat-claw wounds had almost vanished, put on my shop clothes and sat down with another cuppa and the first loaf of
seed bread. It tasted just as I remembered. Really, really good. Sliced beautifully. Dense and rich.

I struggled with the plastic-wrapped newspaper until I managed to peel it. I have taken hours to do this on bad days. Well, it would have been hours if I hadn’t lost patience and taken to the sandwich wrap with a breadknife, a girl’s best friend. Mine has been sharpened so often that it has a rather elegant sickle moon curve in it. Druids could use it to gather mistletoe. Horatio floated to the table and sat down on the paper for a leisurely wash. I read around him.

‘Another heroin death,’ said the headline. ‘Is there a serial killer in the city?’

Now there was a question to which I didn’t want to know the answer. I read all of the story which wasn’t covered by tabby fur. It was so interesting that I actually slid Horatio sideways onto the sports section. (Four heroin addicts had OD’d in the city within three days. Three had recovered, one had died.) Name and story followed. But every one had been a regular visitor to the soup van, which was actually mentioned. Senior Constable L White was quoted as saying that inquiries were continuing and that the respectable portion of the city had no need to worry. Well, that made me feel a lot better. I did not like junkies, no one did, they were a major pest, but where did Lepidoptera get off implying that they were expendable?

I scanned the rest of the news, which was all bad as usual, folded the paper and tried the crossword. No luck. Time to go to work. I could hear the girls opening the outer shutters of the shop. The city was on the move. More cars, the clang of trams, the scurrying of feet. Lights came on in the glass towers. Melbourne was facing another day.

I had an ordinary morning, sending off the bread orders, arguing with the carrier, checking the carrier’s account, showing where he had made a mistake in his arithmetic and watching him trundle off, wondering if he was going to drop the bread in the gutter out of spite. I was a victim of my own success. I used to just trundle the bread along on a hand cart, and I never had this sort of hassle. I resolved to get another contractor as soon as I could spare a moment to find one. I was just folding the account and stuffing it crossly into the drawer when someone who compelled attention marched into the shop.

She was six feet tall in her stilettos. She was wearing a red leather corset and fishnets. She had a head of straight dark hair which fell to her waist and a spiked collar around her shapely neck. This matched the spiked armlets around her shapely wrists. The only thing missing was the whip. She was, of course, Mistress Dread from the leather shop and she was furious.

‘Have you seen what they’ve painted on my wall?’ she screamed in a full throated alto which made me wonder if she had ever studied for opera.

The customers had forgotten all about bread and that, for me, is a bad thing. Various mouths, both male and female, had dropped open. I nodded to Kylie to take over and got out from behind my counter. Horatio raised an eyebrow. This was not the behaviour he expected in a respectable lady. But I needed to get Mistress Dread out of the shop.

‘Show me,’ I said.

Without a word, she turned and strode out. I had to run to keep up with her. She took me into Flinders Lane and stopped me with a hand on the shoulder. She was strong. It takes a lot to stop me in my tracks like that.

‘There!’ she declaimed.

It was noticeable, all right. Someone with a can of red paint and a sense that the end justified the means had sprayed ‘
WHORE OF BABYLON
’ in letters a metre high across the whole frontage of the leather shop. I couldn’t think of a thing to say but, ‘Oh shit,’ which was, I admit, weak.

‘Is that all you can say, Corinna? What I want to know is, did you see who did this?’

‘No,’ I said. Her red-lipsticked mouth was only centimetres from my neck and I was fairly sure that she would bite. I pitied the poor idiot graffitist if she laid her hands on him. ‘I came out as usual at six and I looked down the alley and I didn’t see anyone. You might ask Kiko. She gave my cats some fish, she might have noticed,’ I added. This was unkind. Kiko was a friend. I shouldn’t sic this virago on her.

‘And have you had the letter?’ demanded Mistress Dread.

‘What letter?’

‘This one, the scarlet woman one,’ she yelled, thrusting a piece of paper at me. I recognised it.

‘Oh yes, the wages of sin is death. Yes, I got it yesterday.
There may be no connection,’ I said. ‘There must be more than one lunatic in the city.’

‘There may be hundreds,’ snarled Mistress Dread. ‘But I’m putting that cop onto this.’

Good idea, I thought. Mistress Dread might prove an education for Lepidoptera White. Though, on second thought, if she’d been in the police force for long, Mistress Dread wouldn’t be in the top one hundred weird things she had seen.

‘And you’re going to see the Lone Gunmen,’ she told me.

‘I am?’ I hadn’t seen Nerds Inc for a week. They didn’t come out much in daylight.

‘Yes. Ask them if they can identify the print, what sort of computer was used, that sort of thing. Or would you rather I went?’ she demanded, her voice dropping to a throaty low E full of menace.

‘I’ll go,’ I volunteered. Nerds Inc were nice boys and they might not survive a visit from Ms Dread. She was too much woman—or something—for people who conducted most of their human relationships at at least one remove. Either SMS or email. Though they might just fall to their knees in devotion, of course. They are, at least technically, male.

Mistress Dread stalked off down Calico Alley to strike terror into Kiko’s heart and I went cravenly back to the shop. It was far too early for Nerds Inc to be awake. They usually surfaced around noon, when the day had been thoroughly aired. And it was no use taking them bread. They subsisted entirely on pizza, takeaway chicken, nachos and cheese Twisties, to deduce from their rubbish. However, a few bottles of their favourite drink would be welcome. They liked those pre-mixed drinks with names like Arctic Death and Russian emblems on them, and I sent Kylie for a supply while I served several hungry
office workers and the man with the horse and cab. It is a very well tended horse and while Bill likes my bread, his noble steed loves my muffins and gets one a day. I wished him good morning. He looked worried.

‘What do you make of this talk about a serial killer?’ he said. ‘That’s going to be bad for trade.’

‘I think it’s nonsense,’ I said bracingly. ‘Anyway, do a lot of junkies hire your cab?’

‘None,’ he said.

‘Well then,’ I said. ‘Here’s a nice muffin for Dobbin and I hope he enjoys it.’

Bill went out but he had me worried. I did all my trading during the day, of course, and most of my bread was spoken for; I didn’t really need the shop, I just liked having one. A serial killer might have the same effect on Melbourne tourism as SARS had had on Hong Kong as a pestilence-free holiday destination. Still, nothing I could do about it. Kylie came back with the drinks and let me in on the latest gossip. How that girl does it I do not know. All she has to do is stand still and gossip enters her skin by some sort of osmosis.

‘The Prof’s doctor says he’s allowed to walk around with a stick,’ she announced. ‘His nurse told me. I told her to tell him to take it easy, I can do his bit of shopping after two. Not as though there’s much. I can take his bread up then too. Make sure the ditz hasn’t left him with nothing to watch but Oprah. I mean, he might end up watching Jerry Springer and then … I don’t know what Jerry would do to the Prof …’

‘Neither do I,’ I said frankly. ‘We might never get him down off the curtains.’

‘Like Horatio that time the wolfhound came into the shop,’ she giggled reminiscently.

I recalled the incident. Not only had Horatio reacted
entirely by instinct and scaled the highest curtain, but he was so embarrassed when he came down that he didn’t speak to any of us for two days. There was now a large sign on the door saying ‘No Dogs Except Guide Dogs’. I exempt guide dogs from my general loathing of the canine species. They are self-consciously Good Dogs. You can practically see the little halo above their ears. And they never, never, never notice cats, much less chase them.

Grandmother Chapman had a failed guide dog as a pet. He was very clever but easily distracted. One can imagine that this would disqualify him from work with the blind, but he was very good with the unhappy. I hadn’t thought of him in years. His name had been Ebony, a black Labrador.

I shook myself alert. Kylie had more gossip: ‘Then someone painted—’

‘I saw it,’ I said. ‘That’s what Mistress Dread came to talk to me about.’

‘If she gets her claws into him he’ll be sliced and diced,’ commented Kylie. ‘Did you see her nails? All silver. I reckon they’re those glue-on metal ones.’

‘More like talons,’ I agreed.

‘Do you think Mistress Dread’s a man?’ she asked in a whisper.

‘I’ve never liked to ask,’ I replied. ‘There are six foot women with size twelve feet. In any case it isn’t our business. She’s a good neighbour. And she had one of those strange letters.’

‘Scarlet woman letters? So did Goss and me,’ said Kylie. ‘I thought it was a joke.’

‘Some madman leafleting all letterboxes with a female name on them, I expect,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m going to see the nerds this afternoon to get some information about the letter. Have you still got yours?’

‘Tossed it,’ said Kylie. ‘You going to see the Lone Gunmen? Ask them if they’re testing any good games. Then Goss and me can come down and play with them.’

‘Have you done that before?’ I asked.

‘Couple of times,’ she said. ‘They’re all right. Not interested in sex.’

I found this hard to believe. Not interested in housekeeping, for sure. Not interested in the outside world. When I asked, in passing, what they thought of the Coalition of the Willing invading Iraq, they asked me who published the game. Political consciousness was not their main skill. Taz had once told me that the city was a lot cleaner these days and it was all down to that good bloke, our premier Jeff Kennett. I hadn’t the heart to disabuse him of this notion. But Taz, Rat and Gully were quiet, didn’t have noisy parties and ran their business well enough to pay their rates, so I had no objection to them. They might have done the graffiti. Their names sounded like tags to me. But I couldn’t imagine them either knowing what the whore of Babylon was or having the nerve to paint it across Mistress Dread’s shop and thus risk incurring her wrath. Wrath which would also descend on me if I didn’t come up with some information on that letter, of course.

We were interrupted by a rush of customers. The herb rolls danced off the trays. I grabbed one to save for my own lunch and another for Meroe. Once you get used to the concept of a thing which looks like a coffee scroll but tastes like essence of green, you’ll find one isn’t enough. You’ll want to eat another. A satisfactory amount of olive bread was passing out of my hands as well. It isn’t the money … well, it isn’t just the money. I like to see people eating my bread. The rush died down. Everyone who was going to work had got there. Now there would be a lull until morning tea.

I slipped out to give Meroe her herb roll before I got tempted to eat it myself. She is a vegetarian, of course. Which doesn’t mean she isn’t picky about her food. As I squeezed into the Sibyl’s Cave I saw that this was not going to be a cheery morning with tea. Dressed entirely in deepest black, Meroe was concocting something in a mortar and pestle and muttering under her breath. Every time she pounded the pestle down she gave a small, terrible smile.

I had been given the lecture about the threefold return and had taken it with a pinch of salt. The theory was that a witch had to be careful what she did, magically, because she would get it back threefold. This meant, effectively, that she couldn’t curse anyone, because the curse would rebound upon her at triple strength, like those washing powders advertised on TV. I hadn’t quite believed it at the time—no one could be that virtuous—and now I didn’t believe it at all. I put the paper bag down on the counter and fled.

I wondered who she was cursing, for she was certainly cursing someone. I hoped that it was the graffitist and not the cop. Lepidoptera was only doing her job. Someone had told me that the Witchcraft Act had been repealed. I hoped it was true.

After that, serving in the shop had a certain charm—there was little chance of being turned into a cockroach and stepped on. We kept selling and Kylie kept gossiping. I hadn’t heard the half of it.