Incident 67

Incident 67

Oliver was stirring a vat of molten fondant when incident 67 took place. According to the log, the time was 6:05. While no more than an estimate, it made sense because by then the production area window, an oval of frosted glass spanning the entire rear wall, had taken on a milky but not yet sunlit glow. Any earlier and the window, daubed in steam, not without a certain menace, loomed like a sparkling icon of the night over the brightly lit kitchen. Any later and it shone with such intensity that it sometimes seemed to Oliver as if the frost on the glass was real frost and that at any moment it would melt away to reveal the giant padlocked waste bins outside, and beyond them the small employee car park fenced with barbed wire, and beyond that the houses on Davey Street. Also, the first trays of bread must not have been out of the proofer yet, since the only smells his memory could ascribe to the moment of incident 67 were those of fondant and yeast, and scoured metal from the bowls and benches. That, at least, was the logic he employed when filling out the log some three days later.

The bakery belonged to Oliver’s father, Max. A butcher by trade, he could have more fittingly been described as a food entrepreneur, having done very little in the way of butchery during Oliver’s lifetime. There were the odd training seminars for a technical college in the city, and, thanks to his burly, likeable panache, demonstrations of German smoking and curing methods for culinary TV programs. But Max’s true passion was small business, or more correctly, that form of alchemy which conjured success from failure. Still, were it not for the tailored suit the man looked every inch a butcher; hairy forearms that bunched at the elbow like bulbs of garlic; huge hands; a reddish complexion; a grey moustache that was halfway, quipped Oliver’s friends, between David Boone’s and Nietzsche’s; iron bones; short hair combed the old fashion way; a chest and gut like a monolith.

Every food business, according to Max, was essentially the same. To a large extent the product was a front, a cosmetic variance. This was evinced by the number and variety of establishments that he had taken over and then worked to prosperity: “run one,” he would tell his young son on the way to the pizza shop, the fishmongers, the private school café, the biscuit factory, “and you can run them all.” Thus, well before he knew how to articulate it Oscar had thought of his father’s existence as both absurd and fundamentally manly.

Like the bakery, those other businesses were in the outer northeastern suburbs of Melbourne, where Max had settled with the mother of his five-year-old daughter, Maren, nearly a decade before Oliver was born. The rolling hills of the Yarra Valley reminded Max of Bergischesland and certain parts of Bavaria.