Flour and Ink

An original short story written for Revision Library.

[1] Cobble Lane smelled of warm butter and sugar long before Adeyemi's Bakery opened its shutters, and on the morning the High Street Awards posters went up, Zara Adeyemi thought the smell drifted down the lane like a promise no one had quite made yet. Her aunt, Comfort, who had run the bakery alone since Zara's grandmother retired six years earlier, pinned the crisp new poster in the window without much enthusiasm: THISTLEWICK HIGH STREET AWARDS, ENTRIES CLOSE FRIDAY. Everybody on Cobble Lane already seemed to know which shop would win Best Product. Two doors down, Whitmore's Fine Bakes had opened in the spring with gleaming glass counters and a delivery van the size of a small bus, and its owner, Graham Whitmore, had a habit of using the word artisan the way other people mentioned the weather. Zara arranged a tray of cinnamon rolls in the window, telling herself that Adeyemi's flour-dusted shelves and slightly crooked sign had a warmth no amount of polished glass could buy, though privately she suspected warmth alone rarely won awards.

[2] Most mornings followed the same quiet pattern. Zara weighed flour while her aunt shaped the first batch of loaves, and in the proving drawer beneath the counter the dough sat swelling gently under its damp cloth, as though it were holding its breath. It was on the Tuesday after the posters appeared that Zara first properly noticed what happened just before eight o'clock, when the shop was still empty of customers. Mrs Kowalski, who lived above the launderette with her three children, slipped in through the side door, and Aunt Comfort, without a word passing between them, handed across a bag heavy with yesterday's unsold bread. Mrs Kowalski's youngest, barely old enough for school, gripped the warm loaf to her chest the way other children might grip a favourite toy, and hurried out again before anyone else arrived. Zara had seen this happen perhaps a dozen times over the past year and had never once mentioned it, sensing, correctly, that her aunt would rather nobody knew at all.

[3] The trouble, when Zara finally understood the size of it, was hiding in the accounts book kept beneath the till. She had only opened it to find a receipt, but she stayed to read column after column of figures marked in red ink, a wound in the accounts that refused to close. Rent on Cobble Lane had risen twice since Whitmore's had arrived, and takings, quietly and steadily, had fallen. That evening she overheard her aunt on the phone to the landlord, asking, in a voice trying hard to sound calm, whether another six months might be possible before any decision had to be made about the lease. Zara later found a second form tucked inside the same accounts book: a nomination form for the awards' other category, Community Spirit, which came with a modest cash prize and, more importantly, six months of reduced rent from the council for the winning shop. The form was blank. When Zara asked why, her aunt only shrugged and said that putting herself forward for a prize for doing what anyone would do felt uncomfortably like boasting, and closed the accounts book with a small, final click.

[4] Zara thought about the blank form for the rest of that week, turning the problem over the way she turned dough, folding it back on itself again and again without quite deciding anything. Entries closed on Friday at five o'clock, at the small kiosk outside the town hall, and by half past four the shop was empty and her aunt had gone upstairs to rest her aching back. She had until five o'clock. Zara filled in the form herself, describing, in her own careful handwriting, the bread that appeared at the Kowalskis' door every week and had done for a year without anyone asking for thanks, and every other quiet kindness she could remember her aunt doing and never once mentioning. She did not ask permission, certain that if she did, the answer would be no, and she ran the whole length of Cobble Lane with ink still drying on her fingers, reaching the kiosk with barely two minutes to spare before the shutter came down.

[5] Her aunt found out three days later, when a council officer telephoned the bakery to confirm the details on the nomination before the judging panel's anonymous visit. Aunt Comfort set down the phone very slowly and did not speak for a long moment, and the silence stretched across the kitchen like the pause before rain. 'You had no right,' she said eventually, though her voice shook more than the words themselves suggested anger. Zara, certain she had ruined everything, began to apologise, but her aunt raised a floury hand to stop her. She said nothing else about it that afternoon, only kneaded the next batch of dough more fiercely than usual, and it was not until closing time, wiping down the counter in silence, that she finally admitted, almost too quietly to hear, that she had not known Zara had noticed the Kowalskis at all, let alone thought it worth writing down.

[6] The winners were announced the following Saturday on a small stage outside the town hall. Best Product went, as everyone had predicted, to Whitmore's Fine Bakes, and Graham Whitmore accepted a silver-plated trophy with a speech that used the word artisan four times. Zara clapped politely and tried not to mind too much. Then the mayor read out the Community Spirit award, and before the name Adeyemi's Bakery had even finished being spoken, a small, determined queue of neighbours who had gathered at the back of the crowd began to cheer, among them Mrs Kowalski and all three of her children, waving a hand-painted sign that simply said thank you. Aunt Comfort walked up to collect the certificate with flour still dusted faintly across one sleeve, and when she returned to where Zara stood, she did not mention the reduced rent, or the prize money, or even Graham Whitmore's trophy at all. She only put an arm around Zara's shoulders and said that she had spent six years believing nobody on Cobble Lane would ever notice the small things, and that she had never been so glad, in her whole life, to be wrong.