Page 1 of The Midnight Bakery
1
Frankie
Frances let the door of the bakery close slowly behind her, leaning against it for a moment to breathe in the warm, familiar smell. It was welcoming, redolent of childhood afternoons spent baking with her mother: rich, buttery pastry and the heavenly scent of bread, fresh from the oven – like coming home, or at least the kind of home Frances dreamed of. The kind of home she had, once. With her back to the door, she could already feel her shoulders relaxing. She was safe.
Turning, she relocked the door and moved swiftly through the shop – past the counter and the rows of shelves behind, which, come morning, would be filled with bread and pastries ready for sale, and onward towards a door at the back. The bustle of the shop in daylight, filled with people and conversations, was not for her, but through here was her sanctuary – the beating heart of the bakery.
She slipped through the door and took off her coat, hanging it on a peg before swapping it for her apron which she had hung there the night before. The room was dark and still, silentsave for the hum of refrigerators. She could just make out the large metal worktable which almost spanned the width of the room, and the huge mixing machines illumined by glimmers of moonlight which fell through a window at the rear. But she could walk the room as confidently as if it was lit by the brightest of beams – she knew it as well as she knew the pattern of freckles across her nose. It was only when she was ready for the night of work ahead of her that she flicked a switch on the wall, watching as the overhead lights blinked slowly into life.
By two thirty in the morning, Frances had been at the bakery for over three hours and, despite the time, wasn’t even halfway through her shift. She had moved on from making the first batches of bread, those which took the longest, and was now mixing up the paste which filled the cinnamon buns she was working on. Even after all this time, she couldn’t get enough of its sweet scent, and the thought of it mixed with butter, oozing from between the layers of rich dough was enough to make her mouth water. And her stomach rumble. With a quick check of the clock, she smiled: she was bang on schedule.
Time ran differently at night and Frances liked the calm, slow passage of hours, the rhythmic nature of her tasks allowing her mind to slip its gears and freewheel. It was amazing the things which tumbled into her head when this happened. And her name was just one of the things she liked to think about at night. Frances Nightingale…
For most of her early life she never even considered how she felt about it. A happy childhood morphed into an equally happy adulthood, her whole life ahead of her, alive with possibility. It was only much later when all that changed. When Frances turned fifty and found herself looking back on her life more than she looked forward. When she counted all the people who had come and gone from it. When she looked in the mirror and realised she didn’t know who she was any more. When sherealised that the way Robert said her name raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Becoming a Nightingale again was easy, she would always be one of those, but Frances was different. Frances would have to go. Before it was too late. Before there was so little left of herself that she disappeared altogether. But who to become…?
A rebellion was taking place, and its tiny shoots had taken hold with a tenacity which surprised her. She had a notion that she could be something else, something wilder, more carefree, someonewilder…So, now that shewasallowed to choose her own name, she wanted it to be Frankie.
It was a name for the kind of person she’d like to be. Someone optimistic, happy, an extrovert even. The only thing she wasn’t sure about was whether or not it suited her. Was Frankie an appropriate name for someone in their mid-fifties? She didn’t know. It could be, perhaps, if she changed a few things. But, at this moment in time, she was still very much a Frances, and she wasn’t sure how long it would take for Frankie to fully emerge – that’s if she ever did. She liked to think of her as a beautiful butterfly, struggling towards the light as it climbed free from the darkness of its hard and crusty chrysalis, but once shewasfree, oh, then how she’d fly…
The pinging of the oven timer brought her out of her reverie with a start. She was on schedule, but there was still much to do and she daren’t get behind. To others this job might not look like much, but to her it was everything – it was her lifeline.
She had worked at the bakery for nearly eighteen months. Only small, it was just off the centre of town where there were still plenty of older buildings, and although Duggan’s was the least prepossessing of them all, Frankie loved how no two were the same. There was so much to see beyond the plain glass panes of the shop fronts, but only if you looked upwards to the ornate stone arches above the windows, the jagged rooflinesfilled with chimney stacks and decorative balustrades, and even stone balls sitting high up on carved plinths. And from her tiny flat perched way above the bakery, these were the views she was lucky enough to see every day. Or rather every night, because it was then that she liked to look out upon the world – upon the sky, swathed in darkness and sprinkled with stars, and the quiet streets, where light pooled on the cobbles and reflected in windows.
And mostly what she saw was the aloneness of everything. Not necessarily loneliness, but the lone woman who nursed her child in the house at the top of her street; the solitary man who sat writing at a desk each night; the dim lights glowing in the distant houses of those who couldn’t sleep; or the pavement sleepers just trying to make it through the night. They were things most people never saw.
Once blind to them too, she had worked during the day and slept through the night, but now that the night-time was her realm, her eyes had been opened and she saw things differently. Or perhaps it was just that in the dark things were easier to see. The way she thought about it, the daytime was for busy, for rushing around, and it was easy for things to get lost in all the noise. People got lost too, but the daytime hid them. It buried them under all the things there were to think about and all the things there were to do. With so much else going on, how could you possibly see it all? At night though, things were different. The world was quiet, was still, and the invisible was seen far more easily. Sounds daft, doesn’t it? How could you see things more clearly at night? Frankie used to think the bright colours of daytime would be more revealing, but they weren’t, they just added to the noise.
None of it really mattered anyway. Everyone else was asleep, so even if Frankie did have something to say, who was there to listen? And she actually liked the night. She was free to thinkwhatever she wanted to, and when she was done working, she got to go home to bed just as other people were leaving theirs. She got to sleep through all the noise and confusion of the day. She missed the sun, but that was about all. If you gave up something for long enough, you forgot about it after a while. And there was much of Frankie’s life she’d do anything to forget.
2
Beth
Beth couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t tired. Not just a little weary, but the bone-numbing, mind-cauterising kind of tired that stalked your every move. It was just one of the things which had changed about her life since the accident.
It was noon, so by now Jack would have eaten his breakfast and probably attempted the washing-up too, but the other thing he would have done is to switch on the coffee machine for her. She raised her head a little from the pillow and, sure enough, the smell was like a siren song, dragging her body towards it as if she was caught in a tractor beam. She threw back her covers and slid her feet into her waiting slippers. It was time to get moving.
Jack was reading the newspaper as she entered the kitchen, no doubt still wrestling with the crossword. He did this most mornings while he was waiting for her to rise. His wheelchair prevented her from giving him the hug she would have liked, but she approached him from behind, and did what she always did – slid her arms around his neck to lay her head on his shoulder.Her lips touched the warm spot of skin above the collar of his tee shirt, one of her very favourite places.
‘Morning,’ she murmured, leaving her head where it was for a moment. She could feel Jack smile and he pressed his head against hers in reply.
‘Morning,’ he said. ‘You’re just in time, three down is a killer.’
Beth peered at the paper over his shoulder.Aurally challenged aviator, anag, she read.Nine letters. She stared at the page. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘I need coffee first.’
She backed away so that Jack could reverse his chair and manoeuvre across the kitchen. ‘Coming right up,’ he said. ‘Although there was only just enough left in the packet, so it might not be as strong as you like it.’
‘Sorry, my fault,’ said Beth, following him to take down a fresh pack of coffee from a cupboard he could no longer reach. She placed it beside the coffee machine so it was ready for later. Jack didn’t say anything else, even though Beth suspected he wanted to. One day, they might be able to afford to have the rest of the kitchen modified, but that was a way off in the future yet. Converting the downstairs to provide usable spaces for Jack had taken all the money they had, and some they hadn’t, so, for now, it was up to Beth to second-guess a lot of what Jack might need – or want – while she was either asleep or at work. She took a seat at the table so her husband could still bring her a coffee as he’d intended. It was a small ritual, just one of many they fitted in to each day but, like a lot of things in their life now, vastly more important than its simplicity might have suggested.
Inhaling the fragrant steam from her mug, Beth sighed in anticipation. ‘So, what’s on the agenda for today?’ she asked. ‘Did you still want to go to the library?’
A cloud crossed her husband’s face. ‘Maybe. Not sure it’s worth it, really.’
Beth nodded. ‘I reckon we should. They’ve had a rubbish selection the last three times we’ve been. Which means that today all the gems will be back on the shelves just ripe for the picking.’
‘What’s the weather like in cloud cuckoo land?’ asked Jack with a wry smile. ‘No, don’t tell me…the sun is shining.’
‘You’ll be eating your words later, Mr Millner, you’ll see. Besides, I want to see if they have any books on slow cooking.’ She didn’t, but that wasn’t the point. ‘Let me just finish this and sling on some clothes, then we can get going. If we’ve got time we could go for a walk across the common as well.’
