Give Me Something to Draw

LORCAN. Six letters, deep black script on the inside of her right forearm, sized to be read across a room, and whoever had done it had done it well, in the sense that it was exactly what she had asked for. Solid. Confident. It had gone in on a Saturday in October three years ago, in the worst autumn of Immie's life, and the man whose name it was had been dead for every day it had been on her.

She had priced it properly. The office at the back of the shop, a cold coffee, two clinics, both of them perfectly nice, both telling her the same thing in slightly different words. Solid black, that size, that saturation, that age — three years, badly aged, gone a bit blue-grey at the edges the way cheap black did. A course of sessions. Six to eight if she was lucky and it responded, ten or twelve if it did not. Six to eight weeks between them, minimum, because the skin has to clear the pigment itself, that's the whole mechanism, and you cannot hurry it. So: a year. A year at best, and a year was the honest answer from people trying to sell her something. And at the end of the year, lighter. Nobody would promise gone. A grey ghost of him, one clinic had said, quite kindly.

She did not have a year. She had seven weeks, because a flour mill was coming to her kitchen with a camera and a print run booked, and what it had paid for was her bare arms. There was no arithmetic anywhere in that.

The deck oven came up to heat at ten past four, and Immie had her sleeves down before it did.

She did it without thinking about it now, which was the part she disliked. Thermal top under the apron, cuffs pulled to the base of her thumbs, and the whole business finished before the kitchen had warmed enough to make it stupid. By five the room would be thirty-odd degrees with both decks loaded and the extractor doing nothing much, and she would be working in a long-sleeved top like a woman with something to hide, and Femi would not say anything, because he had not said anything for three years and had got very good at it.

She scaled the sourdough off the bulk tub, six hundred grams a go, and did not look at the shelf.

The shelf was above the bench where the scales lived, which was a piece of design she was regretting hourly. It held the order pad, a jar of blades, the tin of couche pins, and — pinned at the corner with a bulldog clip since the Tuesday it came through — one sheet of A4 from Waltham Mill.

Autumn Makers. Six bakeries, one mill, the sacks and the trade listing. Half a page of dates and half a page of what they wanted, and what they wanted was hands.

Hands and forearms, working dough, close. No faces. That was the whole concept and it was, Immie had said out loud in this kitchen with genuine admiration, a very good concept. A mill selling flour did not want a baker's face. It wanted the thing the flour did and the thing that did it to it. Knuckles in a slack dough. A wrist turning a boule. Forearms floured to the elbow, tendon and muscle and the small silver scars everybody in this trade collected off a deck lip, because that was what a real one looked like and everybody who bought a sack knew it.

Seven weeks out. Shot in her own kitchen, in their light, on their day, because the print run for the sack paper was booked and Femi had signed for it.

She turned the dough onto the bench and let her palms take it and thought, not for the first time and not with any drama, that there were two people in the world who could not be photographed forearms-first for a flour sack, and she was one of them.

Femi came in at twenty to five with the shutter still rattling behind him and his glasses gone white in the heat. He put his bag down, hung his coat, tied his apron, and had the immaculate look he always had until about seven, when the shirt under it went through.

"Morning."

"Morning."

"It's warm," he said.

"It's an oven."

"It is an oven, yes." He ran the tap over his taped knuckles, the same two every morning where the peel handle sat. "I'm just observing the temperature."

"Observe it quieter."

He laughed — the laugh went off like a tin hitting the floor, it always had, and in a kitchen at ten to five it was genuinely offensive — and got the retarder open and started pulling trays. And that was that, and it was going to keep being that, because he was not going to ask her why she was working the bake in a long-sleeved top when he had watched her work it in a vest all August.

He knew why. That was the thing. He had known why for three years, and every so often the knowing came up through his face when he was not braced for it, and she had to stand there and let it.

She cut the first batch of soda into rounds and floured the tops.

That was the other thing on the board every morning: her grandmother's soda bread, buttermilk and bicarb and nothing clever, mixed by hand in under two minutes because you did not work it, you brought it together and stopped. Cut a cross in the top, deep, and her grandmother's actual reason for it — spoken in a kitchen in Kilburn to a child who had asked — had been so it baked through the middle. Somebody's aunt had told her it let the devil out. Her grandmother had thought that was fine as well, and had said so, and had gone on cutting it deep enough to bake through.

It was the oldest thing in the shop. Older than the shop, older than the sign, older than the ovens, older than the name over the window, which was Hartigan's because that was her name and there had never been an argument about it. The lease was four years old. The recipe was ninety, at the least, and had crossed a sea, and it had been on the board every single morning that Immie had opened the door of this place.

That was what you held on to, on a morning like this. That the shop was hers and it worked and it was on the wrong end of a good street and it was still, four years in, standing.

"Mill sent the shot list," Femi said.

"I saw it."

"You saw it Tuesday. They sent a longer one last night." He had his phone out, thumbing, tray of croissants forgotten under his elbow. "They want a couple of the soda. They liked that it's not yeasted, it's a different flour bag, they can shoot two products off one bench." He looked up, and he was pleased, and he had every right to be. "It's on the sack, Im. Not the leaflet. The sack."

"I know what it is."

"And the trade listing. That's the bit. That's the shops we can't get an answer out of, all of them looking at the same page." He shook the phone at her. "That's the oven paid."

"I know."

The oven. The deck she was scaling on, the new one, forty grand of German steel on finance in Femi Adegoke's name, because when she had gone to the bank with a three-year lease and a personal guarantee already on it they had looked at her the way banks do. So he had signed. He had put his name on it and his flat behind it, and he had pushed the relaunch and chased the mill and got them, and he had never once said any of that out loud in this kitchen, and he never would, and that was worse.

"Femi."

"Mm."

"Nothing. It's good."

He went back to his trays. She went back to the board, and cut a cross in the next round, deep, and thought about the cost of a laser.

A year of sessions and a grey ghost. The shoot was in seven weeks. She had done that arithmetic in the office with the phone still warm in her hand and it had not come out any differently since.

So it was ink, or it was long sleeves at a shoot about forearms, in her own kitchen, at the end of October, which was not a thing you could do. You could not stand in front of a photographer paid by a flour company and say, no, I'll keep my arms covered, thanks — for a campaign whose entire concept was arms — and have it be a small moment. It would be a large moment. It would be the whole day. Everybody in the room would be very kind about it, and Femi would be standing there watching them be kind, and he would know exactly what was under the sleeve, and so, by the time the tea went round, would everybody else.

Or it was ink. Cover it. Put something over it, and turn up with an arm that had a design on it, and let a photographer shoot a baker with a tattoo, which was the least remarkable thing in London.

She loaded the soda into the top deck, closed it, wiped her hands down the front of her apron, and got her phone out with flour still on her wrists.

Beckford's, Sixpenny Row. She had walked past it a hundred times going up to the box junction — a frontage further up the parade, past the kebab place and the launderette, black paint and gold lettering, a shutter, a light on inside at strange hours. Two of her Saturday girls had work off him. Both of them had said the same thing, which was that he was worth the wait, and that there was a wait.

The waiting list on the site said nine months. There was a form. She filled the form in on the corner of the bench with one thumb, and the boxes it wanted were the boxes she could not answer well, so she gave it what she had. Existing tattoo, inner right forearm, roughly this size. She measured it with her eye against her own hand and wrote it down. Looking for a cover-up. As soon as possible, please. It's for work.

Under the last box, which said anything else we should know, she looked at the cursor for a while, and then wrote no, and sent it.

The phone went twenty minutes later, when she had the first bake out and the second loaded and the shop still dark at the front.

"Beckford's." A woman, a smoker's voice, unhurried and entirely unbothered by the hour. "You put a form in about a cover-up."

"I did, yeah."

"You said as soon as possible. How soon's possible for you?"

Immie put her hip against the bench. "Today," she said. "Any day. Whenever he's got."

There was a pause, and the sound of pages, actual paper pages, going over. "Right," the woman said. "Well, then somebody's put her back out and she's not sitting a back piece with it, so I've got three hours going spare at three o'clock this afternoon and it'll otherwise sit there costing me money. It's a consultation and a start if he's happy to start. He won't be rushed and I'm not going to pretend he will be."

"Deposit's fifty, comes off the day. Card, now, over the phone." Another page. "Name?"

"Immie Hartigan."

"Right you are. Trudy. I'm the one you'll be dealing with about anything that isn't skin." The pages stopped. "Eat something before you come, love. People turn up at three having had a coffee and a cigarette and then wonder why they're on the floor."

Immie looked at the deck, at the timer, at the shelf, at the sheet of A4 under its bulldog clip with the mill's autumn brief on it. Seven weeks. Hands and forearms, close, no faces.

"I run a bakery," she said.

"Then you've no excuse," said Trudy, and took the fifty pounds.

Immie put the phone face down on the bench and stood there a second in the heat, and then pushed her cuffs up past her elbows, because there was nobody in the room but Femi and he was at the far end with his back turned and the extractor going, and because the top deck wanted the soda out and you cannot do a deck oven properly in sleeves.

Six letters. Deep black.

Gone in seven weeks, or covered in seven weeks, and she genuinely did not care which word it was as long as the outcome was an arm she could hold a tray up with in front of a camera without anybody's face changing.

She got the peel under the first round and drew it out. The cross had opened the way it always opened. It had baked through the middle.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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