The baker

The last trains emptied the city of daytrippers and office dwellers as Chris unlocked the door. The cafe was tucked in an alleyway between towers of glass and steel. He walked into the gloom, past stacked chairs, tables, the counter, the coffee machine - an engine all shiny and fawned over. He squeezed into the kitchen, the heart, deeper to the womb. Clad in his apron, hands washed, Chris gathered bowls, flour, butter, eggs, water, rolling pin. The oven growled to life greeting the long night. Like a warlock, he performed the ritual. He selected the spell's ingredients and measured then by hand. He did all of it by hand, and was praised by some as an artisan, regarded by others as a masochist.

Anyone can follow a recipe and make bread. Some can make very good bread.Some lucky souls stumble across the right conditions for a righteous sourdough. The whimsical and nostalgic enjoy cakes. Pastries lure perfectionists, like sirens unfortunate sailors. People dabble. Few choose it as a career. Those who do, do it for a reason. They chose to be alone.

Theirs was the red brick, onestorey house with cracked windows and the rotting two-seater sofa on the balcony facing the busy street. The patchy, overgrown lawn. Dusty carpet and sticky linoleum inside. The lino is sticky. The walls are tattooed with neglect. There was a shed in the backyard full of carcasses of bikes, boats and cars. It smelt like stale cigarette smoke and unlucky lottery tickets. That's where Chris spent the first 16 years of his life. Gary was his dad. Shane was his older brother.

Chris was good at drawing. It wasn't a passion and he didn't do it for fun. It was a compulsion. A pencil in his hand was alive and had it own ideas. Colour, lines, textures, shapes, shadows. It drew the cruel, ironic truth behind headlines, racial perceptions, pop culture, consumerism. It was bleak, but well packaged. You couldn't help but look at it and think. His best work he kept hidden in the bottom of his sock drawer. It wasn't to everyone's taste. But that was it, that's all he was good at. He was pathetic at football. His clumsy fingers couldn't pluck guitar strings or strum chords. He was neither popular nor picked on. In photographs with his school friends, he was just there in the background, at the edge of the frame. He wasn't memorable. He was blurry.

Gary, Chris and Shane's, drove semi-trailers. He was away days at a time. When he came home, he did enjoy having a few at the local, coming home to continue drinking in the shed. Bright, white, outdoor fluorescent floodlights illuminating him, like on the stage. Some great, leering comedian. He enjoyed holding the microphone and performing his act before his invisible audience. 

He told jokes about Chris - jibes about being a child with crayons. Dolls and playing princesses. Being sensitive. He even paused at the punch line of his jokes, hearing laughter in his head. 'This kid right here,' he said, finger pointing. 'This faggot-'

What hurt wasn't the inane, ignorant nature of what was said, but the sound it made coming from Gary's mouth. His voice had a metallic ring, his words clear and crisp, his intonation en pointe. Savage, growling, roaring and shrill birdlike foul punctuation. All manner of unkindness and cruel intent.

Then there was the way Gary looked at him. Those eyes and their cruel intent, checking that his barbs had landed. 

Dough clung to Chris' fingers. He fought the temptation to pick at it. The long, slippery tendrils and the dried out chunks him feel like his skin was slipping off. He scrunched his hands into fists and beat it. 

When articulate people spoke about Shane, they used phrases like 'wasted potential' and words like 'undiagnosed'. No one expected anything of him. He was a black sheep. He was difficult. But Shane was handsome, with a mop of black hair, attentive eyes and 10,000 smiles. When he procrastinated or failed, he made excuses people accepted. He never applied those talents to anything worthwhile. He had a habit of self-sabotage. He even admitted it, an impulsive self-sabotager.

When he was moody, he was quiet. A shadow in weak light. But he reacted to everything without fear or thought of repercussions. He was entirely present and alert. Ready to be triggered.

When Gary started his comedy routine, Shane started to heckle. It made his skin prickle and crawl. He’d say something in passing. Call Gary names, swear at him, shout and scream. Throw objects. Push and shove. Gary, who certainly deserved it, gave as good as he could take. One or both of them left the house more than once with black eyes, nursing psychic wounds.

The dough yielded to Chris’ persistence. The scraggly bits were absorbed, the dry bits smoothed out and something warm and soft had evolved. Chris regarded it. He felt little like a god.

Shane got Chris a job at the pizza shop. It was busy. The people who worked there were from other places. They were fun. There were girls too - and that's when Shane was charming, articulate and graceful. Chris was a fly on the wall, but satisfied to watch him perform nonetheless. Those night shifts were the best part of their lives to date. And Chris started enjoying his art. 

After work, Shane and Chris walked home. The streets were empty of people. There were small homes with windows illuminated by television screens of insomniacs and those who slept more easily. Dogs barked. The stars were obscured by clouds.

Halfway home, they crossed the train tracks. The irony was not lost on them, crossing over to the wrong side of the tracks and all. They joked and ran around playing chicken with invisible freight trains.

One night, Shane stopped Chris and reached into his backpack. The streetlights glinted off a metal spray can. Chris knew better than to ask where he got them. In sync, they scurried to the nearest concrete bollard and squatted down.

'Go on,' whispered Shane. 'Draw something!'

The spray bottle was like a pen in his hand, a great brush on canvas. A perfect fit. Its rattle and sigh was addictive like a drag of a cigarette, the needle against skin. A rush of adrenaline and brain chemicals provided reward.

Shane chuckled at what he saw, a miniature satire of their bastard father. As Chris added detail, and shadow, Shane made awestruck sound. He looked around as if desperate to tell someone about it, to share the moment. He bounced. Chris had never seen him so alive.

'Sign it,' Shane told him. 'Tag it, go on'

Years away in another city Chris could see it again. A thin trail of black spray paint bleeding from his tag down the smooth concrete; Shane's breath misting in the witching hour cold. The smile on his face. He liked to stay there, in that memory as he rolled layers of pastry and butter, folded them, rolled them, transforming them into delicate, precious, masterpieces.

For a time, the pizza shop was home. The people who worked there, family. Objects along the train line became his black canvas. Shane was his partner in crime, the guy with the ideas. They started talking about getting out of that dive house. Anything was possible.

But in a slow, imperceptible way, the universe turned against them. The electricity was cut for days and all the food in the fridge went off. Gary was put on a different route and was around the house more. It rained for an entire month and mushrooms started growing in the carpet of Chris' bedroom. There was more fighting in the house, not just between Gary and Shane but Chris and Gary too. Chris had been seen – he knew he was no longer worthy of the ridicule. The pizza shop was sold to new owners. The vibe was gone. The girls stopped hanging around.

Gary told them he'd decided to sell the house (which had been given him by his parents, so wasn't something he'd worked for or could claim as his). He was moving to the country, to a farm or something. He'd quit his job. He was in the midst of his own personal crisis.

Shane started disappearing. He moped around the house in rooms no one went into. He smoked constantly and didn’t respond to anything Chris said.

Then, as though nothing was amiss, no shiver of doubt, Shane started putting a plan into place for that bright future. They celebrated, spray painted the walls of the house when Gary. The burned the furniture in the backyard, pulled up carpet and ripped up the sticky lino.

Then he’d vanish for a day or three. Chris was left in the crumbling ruins of the house. He walked to and from the pizza shop alone. He spray painted alone.

Just as suddenly, Shane was back with wild eyes and incoherent stories. Pockets filled with money from places or people he wouldn’t talk about. He’d spend a day or two in bed, not asleep, staring at the ceiling. Then, without warning, he'd sit upright, yawn, shower, drink coffee and go out as though he'd had a refreshing break and zero cares.

Shane’s impulses started getting more erratic. No one noticed but Chris. He didn’t know what to do.

Huddled in a train tunnel one night, barely audible over the roar of thundering rain, Chris spoke to Shane, desperate to connect, to console and be consoled. Now was their chance to escape, to make it. Now was an opportunity. Stop running from it.

'We'll do it together. You know, if you want,' said Chris. ‘Frank and Mike have room at their place. They said we can go whenever we want.'

'Yeah.'

'Yeah, together. We'll work it out. I'll do sign writing or something. And we'll both work at the pizza shop. And we'll save up and get, I don't know, our own place.’

Shane’s face gave nothing away.

‘Or you'll get a girlfriend and I'll be all alone,' Chris laughed.

Shane kicked at the ballast on the tracks. They'd walked to a point where they couldn't see the end of the tracks on either side of them. Everything around them extended into blackness.

'You don't know what it means to be alone,' Shane said.

He pulled the hood of his jumper over his head and walked deeper into the tunnel.

In the oven, the pastry rose and crisped. The warmth penetrated each layer slowly, like cautious sunlight. He sensed the perfect moment and pulled baking trays out, resting them on the benchtop. There was no smell in the world as satisfying as freshly baked pastries.

He left the last tray, the last dozen pastries in the oven. He watched them turn from white to gold, gold to brown, darker and darker.

Chris resisted every temptation to save them. He forced himself to sit back and watch.

It would have been over fast. Split second fast, they assured him. It's the impact - so hard, so fast, that the heart stops instantly. Shane wouldn't have felt any pain. Although Chris saw his broken, bloodied body, smelt the death, when the police brought him to the hospital, he still expected to hear the door slam behind Shane as he stumbled back in later. ‘You will never believe what just happened’, he would say, spark up a cigarette and tell him all about it.

He wondered about those last moments when Shane stood on the tracks, the long minutes he must have waited, blank time no one could account for. Was he looking at his feet? Looking up? Did he face the lights as they raced closer? Was he blinded in the last seconds? What did he think about as the ballast trembled, deafened by the breathy squeal of the train grinding, scratching along the tracks. Like fingernails down a blackboard. Did the driver blow the horn? Once? Twice? Three times? What nerve did it take to stand there. It wasn't like Shane, and it was, at the same time. Perhaps it was that infamous self-sabotage that everyone talked about. The wasted potential. Maybe Shane couldn't bear the idea of shaping a happier ending.

Chris wept and sobbed in shame. His eyes were hot, fiery and stinging with rage filled, hopeless tears. He couldn't change it. He couldn't have stopped it. He wasn't responsible. He'd been abandoned. Or maybe that wasn't it at all. Maybe it was Shane who would be eventually abandoned. Chris would realise what a burden he was. No matter how Chris tried, he couldn't envision a path where he would have left Shane. Shane saw Chris. He saw that Chris was more than a waste of space, nurtured and encouraged him when others ignored him. Chris never thanked him for it.

But Chris couldn't abandon the idea of a happier ending to their story. It wasn't like the movies. With Shane died Chris' compulsion to draw. The ideas evaporated. His hands were clumsy. His work was mediocre. But he couldn't abandon the idea of that happy ending. As many blows as he took, how much he ached and every setback and stumble, he got up again. He worked every long hour, worked till the joints in his fingers ground down and only pain remained. He wasn’t always convinced a happy ending was something for which he was destined, but he refused to give up.

The last batch of pastries teetered on the brink of combustion when Chris rescued them. They were charred and imperfect. Rough around the edges, but charming in their own way.

These were the ones he liked the best.