Freckles(5)

Morning, Freckles, the usual, he asks, barely looking up from guiding dough through a machine and folding it over. Danish pastries, he tells me before I even ask. Apple and cinnamon ones, fuckin machine broke this morning. I’ll have them ready for lunchtime instead. Good enough for them.

He always talks about customers like they’re the enemy, like they’ll be the ending of him. I’m a customer but it doesn’t insult me, it makes me feel good that he talks to me like I’m not.

He folds the dough over again, into another layer. White and blobby. It reminds me of Tina Rooney’s stomach when she came back to school after having a baby, and her flesh had grown around her caesarean scar, doubling over like raw dough. I watched her in the changing room as she lowered her camogie jersey over her head. She’d seemed so exotic at the time. A girl our age who’d had a baby. She only got to see him on the weekend, and her bedroom cubicle was plastered in photographs of the little thing. I don’t think any of us had appreciated how hard that was for her. How she was living two completely different lives from one day to the next. She’d told me she slept with a fella at Electric Picnic, the music festival. In her tent. During the Orbital set on the main stage. She didn’t know his full name or have his phone number and she was going back the next year to see if she could find him. I wonder if she ever did.

Bleedin Whistles gave me an earful about the pastries, Spanner says, bringing me back in the room. He carries on, not looking at me: I tell ye, the nerve of him, givin out to me about what he gets for breakfast. He should be happy he gets anything at all. He says the last bit louder, over his shoulder, glancing towards the door.

I look outside to homeless Whistles sitting on a flattened piece of cardboard, wrapped in a blanket with a hot coffee in one hand, and biting down on a fruit scone.

He’s lucky to have you, I tell Spanner, and he calms a little, wipes his brow, throws a towel over his shoulder and gets me a coffee and waffle.

I don’t know where you put those things he says, sprinkling the waffle with icing sugar, before wrapping it in newspaper to hand it to me.

He’s right, I eat what I want and my body stays the same. Maybe it’s because I walk so much all day every day, on the beat, maybe it’s because of my mam’s genes. She was a dancer, apparently. Or wanted to be one. That’s how she met Pops, she was doing performing arts, he was a music professor. Maybe she got what she wanted for a while at least between wanting to be and not being. I hope for her she was. You wouldn’t want to give up something for everything and end up with nothing. Quite unfair on the something.

Two euro twenty for a coffee and pastry, a morning special. Less than half of what you’d pay in Insomnia or Starbucks down the road. A real bakery competing against those commercial chain fuckers, don’t get him started. I’m in here at 5 a.m. every morning … Spanner’s mostly cheery though, he’s a good start to my day, the best and fullest conversation I have with anyone most days. He steps round the counter and reaches for his cigarettes in the front pocket of his apron and stands outside.

I sit on a high stool up facing the window, looking out to the village Main Street that’s slowly coming alive. The florist is moving her display out onto the pavement. The toy shop is being unlocked, new flowers, rabbits and eggs hand-painted on the window in preparation for Easter. The optician is still closed, the off-licence, the stationery shop, the solicitors. The coffee shops are opening. Spanner beats them to it every morning.

Across the road in The Hot Drop, she puts a chalkboard out front advertising a special omelette and carrot cake. She’s slowly but surely putting more cakes on the menu. It used to be just toasted sambos. I wonder why she’d bother, his are the best. Spanner eyes it, narrow slits. She waves nervously, he nods his head slightly, while inhaling, eyes squinted, smoke drifting in.

Friday night, Spanner says, blowing smoke out the side of his mouth, speaking as if he’s had a stroke. Are you going out.

Yeah, I say, continuing the lie I began with Becky.

I’ve committed to it, now I just need to find somewhere to go. I ask him about his weekend.

He looks up and down the road, like a 1950s burglar casing a joint.

I’m going to see Chloe.

Chloe the mother of his daughter, Chloe the woman who won’t let him see his daughter, Chloe the weight watcher’s cheat, the solpadeine addict, Chloe the monster. He sucks the cigarette, his cheeks concave.

I have to go see her, and end this. I just need her to listen, face to face, one on one, no one getting in the middle and confusing everything with their opinions. Her sisters.

He rolls his eyes.

Ye know what I mean, Freckles. She’ll be at a christening party at the Pilot so if I just happen to be there, no reason why I wouldn’t be, I’ve drank there before, me mate Duffer lives around the corner so I’ll go out with him, few pints, all very above board, and she’ll have no choice but to speak to me.

I’ve never seen anyone drink tobacco in like him, long and hard, inhaling practically a quarter of it before flicking it. The cigarette goes flying across the path of a woman, a local pharmacist I recognise who drives a blue Fiat that she parks at the Castle car park. Startled, she yelps a little as the cigarette just misses her, and looks at him angrily, then, frightened by his size and demeanour, a baker not to be messed with, continues on. Whistles whistles negatively about half the fag being wasted, then shuffles over to the still-lit cigarette in the gutter and brings it back to his cardboard seat.