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Loaf Of My Life

Charlie Novak

ChapterOne

Riley

There was something about making bread that felt like a strange allegory of my life. Good bread couldn’t be rushed, it had to be allowed to take its time, and the more care you put into it, the better it turned out. It was knocked back a few times, but it always came out the other side.

You could take shortcuts, make it faster, cheaper, but it never turned out quite the same.

Making bread really did feel like the summary of my life.

Or maybe that was just the three in the fucking morning talking, and what I really needed was coffee, not to spend my time comparing the virtues of bread to my misspent youth. Because making bread had absolutely nothing to do with spending sixteen years bouncing around from job to job, trying to do anything except take life seriously.

It was only recently that I’d realised growing up didn’t have to mean taking everything seriously—but that I couldn’t coast by forever.

That and my discovery of how good making bread felt, like it was scratching the itch on my soul I’d been trying to soothe since I was fifteen.

I flicked the kettle on as I turned on all the lights and grabbed a clean apron from the pile in the far corner of the small bakery kitchen. Washing my hands in the sink, I looked at the list of jobs and reminders for this morning scrawled on the whiteboard. Someone, Kev probably, had written something about croissants, but I couldn’t make out the rest of his handwriting. I was going to have to remind him to write things in print if he wanted me to bloody well read them.

Humming to myself, I made a cup of coffee with an excess of gingerbread syrup, before I began on my list for the day, starting with pastries.

Toasty, the microbakery I’d started last year, opened at eight from Tuesday through to Saturday, supplying the small town of Swallow Hill with a selection of breads, pastries, and little sweet treats. We were only a small operation, with five members of staff in total, but that was all I’d wanted. At least until we got our feet under us.

Because I’d much rather we consistently sold out by early afternoon in a tiny premises than struggle to sell half our wares in a shop twice the size, even if the bigger one would give us a better position on the high street. I wanted to aim for quality and consistency, and I wasn’t fussed if that meant we were only a tiny enterprise.

It’d taken me long enough to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I wasn’t going to risk losing the only thing I’d ever poured my heart and soul into.

I took a long swig of my coffee and then fetched the croissant dough the team had made yesterday afternoon and left in the fridge to rest overnight. Once rolled, shaped, and egg-washed, they’d need another two-hour proof before they were ready to go in the oven, so they were always my first port of call, followed by our pain au chocolat and fruit Danishes. Then after that, I’d be onto bread.

Luckily, being a microbakery meant I didn’t have thousands of the fuckers to make. Which was good because doing more than two hundred wouldn’t have been possible by myself, and then I’d lose my early mornings of quiet solitude in the kitchen.

Strange as it sounded, I liked getting up at half-two and walking through the streets of Swallow Hill to my secret sanctum, opening the kitchen and watching the night through the large window that looked out onto the street. At three or four, there was barely anyone around, apart from the odd delivery driver or someone heading to their morning shift.

Once or twice, I’d seen foxes walking past the window, looking into the warm light of the bakery, their noses whiffling at the scents creeping out from under the door. They’d been so funny to watch that I’d lost ten minutes just staring at them.

But that morning was different.

It was the morning I first sawhim.

I’d just put the first of the trays of croissants into the proofing oven when I glanced out of the window to see a man standing on the pavement outside, looking at the bakery with soft curiosity on his face. I blinked hard and done a double take, because who the hell was wandering around Swallow Hill, a little town in the middle of the fucking Cotswolds, at four in the morning?

He was bundled up in a puffy, dark coat with a red scarf around his neck and a beanie pulled down over his ears, his hands stuffed in his coat pockets. It was hard to see much about him, because he wasn’t standing that close to the window and the streetlights were far enough apart to leave him standing in a pool of shadow.

From what I could see of his face, he didn’t look that old—maybe my age or a little younger, although I could have been way off since I’d always been rubbish at guessing these things. He had a square jaw and an aquiline nose, his lips slightly parted and the cold morning air frosting in front of him.

I didn’t mean to stare and I don’t think he had either because, as soon as he saw me looking, he stumbled backwards and shot off into the darkness like a ghost.

The whole thing didn’t leave me shaken, just confused.

I’d never seen him before and I doubted I’d ever see him again. So, I went back to work and started cutting out the laminated pain au chocolat dough into perfect rectangles and rolling them around little sticks of dark chocolate.

By the time six rolled around, when Charley turned up to help with the baking, I’d almost forgotten about him.

“Fuck me,” she said with a dramatic inhale, walking in and pulling off her coat. “I’ll never get tired of that smell.”

“That’s good, because you’re stuck here,” I said, as I retrieved the first tray of croissants from the proofing oven, putting them on a nearby bench so I could give them a second egg wash before they went into the oven.