Taking the Work Back Home

By Ray Sims

When I was fired from my job at the patisserie, after seven years of dutiful service, I could only blame myself. So I did. But my colleagues - who were, by their own imposition, also my loving friends – put all the blame on the new girl. 

She had noticeably soft hands, and so from her first day she was an obvious outlier. 

When she arrived, I was asked to show her how to make cassata alla siciliana. She laughed when I showed her the example and I blushed and laughed too. The owner of the patisserie, our boss, was obsessed with us making them, he liked their perfect roundness and the precocious red cherry that sat pert in the middle of white fondant, and which said: I know what you’re thinking. The new girl, sifting icing sugar, balked at the tennis green of the marzipan, but after we were done and had made twelve perfect circles, she smiled. 

‘I think they’re quite sweet.’ 

On the cool, steel surface of our work table, I fanned my hands in the flour to make a ghost. I had to make a dozen loaves by noon. 

On the metro home, I stared dutifully at the floor. The square tiles on the floor of the train carriage were pistachio-coloured, with flecked triangles the colour of malachite. I loved the smooth wooden backs of the chairs. Since I had cut my hair short last summer, I could relax the nape of my neck right where the seat rounded up into the window, and feel the rattle of the carriage in the knobs of my spine. 

The feet across from me wore royal blue saddle shoes and swung gaily with the thump of the wheels. Attached to them was her.

We smiled at each other, both carrying the secret smudges of flour and sugar that were the marks of a long day’s work in the kitchen. On her neck, underneath her ear, was a brush of pink. She must have helped the other girls with the macaroons – I hadn’t seen her since the morning and the hour that we had spent together. 

A thought occurred to me. 

What’s your name?’ 

I hadn’t been told when she arrived. She just took my hand in her soft one and smiled as Temi draped an apron over her shoulder. 

‘What’s your name?’ I said, again, screaming over the whistling of the tube. ‘Ellie,’ she said. 

‘I love the name Ellie,’ I said back, and she nodded again and grinned. There was lipstick on her teeth. 

I dreamt one night that my feet grew long and pointed, and as I slipped my way out of bed and to the kitchen to drink a glass of milk, she came out of my bathroom with a pink towel around her head. My towels, my real ones, were grey or mustard-coloured, so the one around her head must have been hers. She pointed at my feet and laughed, and I could only ski down my corridor. When I opened the fridge I woke up. 

The problem with Ellie was that she was too attractive. She was simply and undeniably beautiful, but also too charming for words. She was very, very good at listening, which went a long way in the patisserie where most people just talked to fill the silence, never expecting an ear.

She was naughty too. She would comment on the attractiveness of the customers, men and women, and profess her undying devotion to the most surprising of candidates: a huffy older woman with a strange mole on her chin; a greasy haired young man who looked at us all with the slathering jaw of a wolf; a shy young woman in a cloche hat who mumbled her entire order; the widower with a huge moustache who delivered cream. 

Under the grey of her uniform she wore blue stockings. Temi told me that blue stockings had a rich history and were a sign of an intellectual woman. One day I walked into the bakery early and heard a gentle sigh echoing from the largest fridge. When I walked in the first thing I saw was Ellie’s blue stockings around her ankles, and Temi’s face buried between her legs. I walked straight back out and screamed into my apron. I liked to make the fillings for cakes the most. On a good day, I would be handed the fruit delivery personally, crate by crate. Some were for decorative purposes, some to be folded into batter, but most to be stewed with rivers of sugar and spun into transparent magic like stained glass. 

A few weeks into Ellie’s arrival at the patisserie, she joined me in the stewing room, watching me stir the large copper pot. The steam from the jam clung to her eyelashes like dew. She came right up to me and stared into the sticky swirl of red. 

‘What happened to your earring?’ I asked, pulling at the single teardrop hanging from her earlobe. 

‘I lost it.’ 

‘And were those your only pair?’ 

‘No. They were my favourite pair.’

‘I’ll buy you new ones.’ 

‘You will not!’ 

Although we often got the same train home, we rarely sat next to each other. I measured the months by the wear and tear of her paperbacks. If she had been watching me too, she never let on. But over time, our behaviour had softened. I helped her tie her apron and tucked her hair into her shirt collar. She lent me hand cream to heal my worn skin. 

Around 7 months before Ellie came to work at the patisserie, I had been sent to a sanitarium in the mountains to rest. Mostly they stuck needles in me, finding the signs of all kinds of intolerances and allergies – beetroot, semolina, hessian sacks. 

The treatment room was a dusky grey, a colour which deliberately brought to mind absolutely nothing of note. You would lie down on the soft paper, the same grey as the walls, and wait to find out what was to be done to you today. The nurses would pinch lightly, like they were trying to wake you up from an afternoon nap, or wiggle a 

single finger, rubber-gloved, into your mouth. I usually closed my eyes, to let my body float up to the ceiling, so the pokes and prods felt miles away. Like someone gently shifting a swarm of bees, only for them to fall back into place. I hovered near the ceiling and pressed my back to the flaking paint. 

In the evenings there I would lie in a cool, still bath and face the window, looking out on the bizarre horizon. The sky and the slopes of the mountains were the same sleety blue, divided only by a blurred line. In the bath the same thing happened between my body and the water, my skin would fuzz at the edges and melt. I wore buttery yellow pyjamas when I was finally left to my own devices at bedtime. We ate alone through the week, at the small wooden tables in our rooms, but at weekends

dinner was communal. You would be sat always next to a nurse or therapist, opposite another patient, and would be silent. 

I wrote letters to Temi while I was away. She told me about the new recipes, the imported semolina flour and the way it felt between your fingers, the new aprons which scratched. Before Ellie, while I had been sent away, she was my closest friend. Her letters were funny and splattered with cake mix. 

The small relief I had was a trainee nurse, my age, who occasionally was tasked with hooking me up to a horrid IV drip. Without fail I could make him laugh, every time he dropped in, and he would take off his half-moon glasses to wipe tears from his eyes. The first time he came into my room he took my blood in a small glass tube, pressing a cool hand to my forearm and fixing his gaze on mine. I told him he would make a terrible vampire – he was too polite – and he smiled, pressing his fingers into my skin. He had eyelashes like a cow, soft and long around dewy brown eyes. In the final month of my stay, he would leave the IV drip by the door and instead I ran him a bath which we sat in together. On my last day there I showed him how the mountains and the sky were the same, and we watched a solitary sled make its way through the clouds. 

My dog, Glory, was from those mountains, and learnt to follow me everywhere, traipsing at my heel. She had lost all her energy but still had the sharp golden eyes of a wolf, and would snarl quietly from time to time at people she didn’t like. When I came home to my apartment, and the sun was beginning to set, she would be there on my bed, curled into a tight spiral like a pain au raisin. I would hold her muzzle in my hand and stroke her until I fell asleep.

We made tiny Polish makowiecs with poppy seeds, and apricot ensaimada from Mallorca. Our boss disavowed locality, he had no interest in the topographical heritage of the cakes and pastries we made. When one of the girls would suggest a cake which reminded her of home, it would be sworn off outright, but impulsively months later he would declare we were making Romanian cozonac or chocolate babka as though he had invented the recipes himself. 

He prized eggs above all else, ordering cartons of yolk-rich organic ones. They slipped into the flour and congealed like rain in dust, bulging in the bowl. Eggs are nothing without seeds, he told me once as I folded fennel seeds into the swirls of a cardamom bun. He was always vulgar and never quiet – the patisserie had its own gentle rhythm that he always disturbed on entry. Dough was dropped and sugar split. 

The last day I worked I was looking for butter, to secret between folds of puff pastry. I caught my reflection in the fridge, warped like a smudged painting, my eyes dark like the night. I walked into the back kitchen to find Ellie pinned against the worktops, the boss rabid as he jumped back from her like he had been burnt. It was all too much. 

The way her cheeks were burning bright red, the handprint on the back of her skirt, white flour on black linen, the way his hands were splayed on the counter, no shame at all. 

I took the sharpest knife we had and chopped. I think he screamed, but no sound came out of his mouth. His skin went pale, like all the blood had left his face and rushed straight out of his fingers. He stumbled backwards and caught a silver tray as he fell, spilling the tarts everywhere and making the kitchen ring with a loud clanging.

The blood pooled and turned sticky and I stared in horror as Ellie dropped to her knees and grabbed his wrist. Her hands were covered with blood too then, it spilt onto her delicate fingers and her apron. 

I was sorry for a time, but I was tired of baking cakes. When my contract was terminated, I got the subway home, and let the stale air of the tunnels lift the hair from my face.