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She forced herself from her warm bed. The floorboards were cold, even through her socks, and the chill helped to ground her. She found her work uniform and pulled it on. Then she went to brush her teeth.
In the kitchen, Dad was working on his laptop, specs on, phone to his ear. Tupperware boxes of pineapple tarts were stacked up beside him, labelled in his neat handwriting. The Hunts, one of them said.
He pressed mute as Joan headed past him for the front door. ‘Aren’t you having breakfast?’
Joan scrubbed a hand over her face. Controlling the fade-out had taken longer than she’d wanted. ‘Slept in,’ she said. ‘I’ll grab something at the bakery.’
‘We should eat more fruit,’ Dad said, a bit absently. Joan could tell the client was saying something to him on the phone. He called to Joan as she left. ‘Have a good day!’
Joan worked every Wednesday evening and all day Saturday at an old-fashioned cake shop with a window full of scones and fondant fancies. Inside, the owner had packed ten tables into the small space between the counter and the door, and all day long, people scraped their chairs back and forth on the wooden floorboards to allow servers and other customers to pass.
Joan barely had time to think between spooning thick cream into ramekins for scones and cutting slices of Victoria sponge. It was eleven a.m. and then one forty-five p.m. and then two thirty p.m.
By three thirty, most of the cakes were gone, and the bakery was empty except for Joan and her friend Margie. Joan wiped off the chalkboard and wrote: 50% off everything.
‘Have we sold any of these meringues?’ Margie held one up—a blobby white thing with a dip in the middle. ‘What even is this?’
‘Maybe a snowman?’ Joan suggested. It was November. ‘Like a festive thing?’
Margie took a bite, and her expression turned thoughtful. ‘Huh.’ She offered the rest of it to Joan, stretching over the counter.
Joan had picked up a tray to clear the tables, and so she leaned to take a bite from Margie’s hand. Meringue crumbled in her mouth, an airy candy cane. She raised her eyebrows.
‘Right?’ Margie popped the rest into her own mouth. ‘They’re good. Why aren’t they selling?’
‘Maybe they need faces.’
‘Maybe little arms,’ Margie said. ‘Little chocolate arms …’ She held out her own arms, hands starred to demonstrate, and Joan grinned. ‘You started that English essay yet?’ Margie asked.
‘You haven’t?’ Joan was surprised. Margie was so organised that she kept the calendar for their whole friendship group. If Joan wanted to know when Chris was free, she’d ask Margie, not Chris.
‘I can’t even look at it!’ Margie said. ‘Remember how nice Mrs Shah was last year? What’s going on with her? She’s the worst now.’
Joan paused, laden tray in hand, not sure if she’d heard right. ‘How nice she was last year?’
‘Guess she prefers teaching history to English.’
‘Mrs Shah taught us history last year?’
Margie gave her a funny look. ‘Why are you saying it like it’s a question?’
It was one of those unsettling moments when Joan’s memory didn’t align with other people’s. Joan’s history teacher last year had been Mr Larch, a short man with a booming laugh that bellowed from his whole chest.
Joan went into the kitchen to stack the dishwasher. It was a big industrial thing that Margie called RoboCop because the top half had a thin visor-like screen, and the bottom half opened up like a mouth. When she closed RoboCop again, there was a dark mark at the edge of its silver door—the size and shape of Joan’s thumbprint. She rubbed it idly and was surprised to find that it was rough like a burn mark.
Her mind, though, was on Mr Larch. When had she last seen him? He was usually on uniform duty, standing at the school gate to call out people wearing sneakers or the wrong socks. But he hadn’t been there in months.
‘Hey, where’s Mr Larch these days?’ she called over her shoulder to Margie. ‘He on holiday or what?’
‘Who?’ Margie called back.
‘Mr Larch from school,’ Joan said, but when she came back out, Margie looked blank.
‘Who’s Mr Larch?’
Margie used to do impressions of Mr Larch all the time. ‘You know,’ Joan said. ‘Big glasses. Always banging on about uniforms.’ She mimicked: ‘What colour are those shoes, Margie Channing!’
‘What are you banging on about?’ Margie said, her smile half-amused, half-confused. ‘There’s a Mr Larch Reading Garden behind the library. Is that what you mean?’
