Part Two – The Park Place Bakery

Yesterday I introduced you to part one of my series on the fictional street of ‘Stookey Hill’.

Here is part 2! Today, the story continues with Primmie and the bakery in which she works!

Part Two – The Park Place Bakery

Primmie was often late to work. In fact, a fairer reflection might be to say usually. It was a variable lateness, sometimes seconds, sometimes eight or nine minutes. The worst one had been ninety seven, but that (Primmie claimed) was because of the dentist.

“Who sees someone for a scale and polish before seven in the morning?” Alan, who was the owner of the bakery, was incredulous. He didn’t like doing much else other than own it, though. He paid as many people as possible to ensure he had as little to do with it as possible. He had a plethora of people on staff: managers, assistants, accountants…anyone who could in any way make it so that all he had to worry about was whether or not he knew where he had put his credit card for his next hefty purchase.

“Glinton does,” Primmie was flustered.

Her gums had bled all the way on her short walk from Lentil Dental which Glinton Dayley had named, creatively, after his favourite soup: “My mam used to make it every Sunday and we had it for lunch every day until it either ran out or smelled suspicious!” he would say. And he would say it with fondness, which surprised everyone because it wasn’t a great story.

“Glinton needs to get a life,” Alan muttered, opening the door of his Mercedes which was unceremoniously parked half on the kerb and not, as you might think, half on the road. The other half was on Mrs Dorado’s drive and she was not happy. Not because she had a car, because she didn’t, but rather because that was just her general disposition.

Alan disappeared in a flume of smoke, revving his engine just to remind everyone that he had an expensive car because he could afford one. And a little bit because he was irritated that he had been required to leave the comforts of his estate three miles out of town at six in the morning because his manager hadn’t shown up. He’d been asleep as well, which didn’t help.

“I don’t think he was even wearing clothes!” Mrs Dorado said, clicking her tongue as she considered the probability that his shorts were, in fact, underpants.

Primmie opened the bakery and let in Sue (who had called Alan) and Anna-Marie (who worked out back). Tyler, the sales assistant, had gone home. He was a lazy boy who most days had to be shaken back to wakefulness as he managed, quite impressively, to nap on one hand propped at the elbow.

However, she had to give Mrs Armitage a gentle shove out, telling her they wouldn’t be able to open immediately because they hadn’t got anything in the oven yet. How she wished she hadn’t kicked Glinton in the armpit when he turned on the drill. Then it wouldn’t have catapulted out of his hand, pinging Lesley the dental nurse in the cheek and causing her to yelp. The dominoes continued as, in trying to catch the drill, Glinton fell over a bucket which had seemingly been left there by the cleaner the night before and suddenly the whole room was awash in disinfected water that had a slight beige sludgeness to it. Lesley slipped, adding a graze to her elbow to match her cheek and Primmie had never seen such pandemonium in all her life.

Glinton, after cleaning up the water and reassuring Lesley that of course she didn’t look like she’d done ten rounds with Mike Tyson, warned Primmie loudly that he was about to start in his drill again and the scale and polish resumed without further incident.

Sighing, Primmie put on her apron and Sue and Anna-Marie began their duties. As they did most days, a few minutes late here and there. But Primmie was a good worker and, on the whole, did a decent enough job.

Which made the murmurings that she was going to be let go even more surprising.

“Have you complained about me?” she asked Mrs Armitage who was watching carefully to make sure she got 2 cream-filled doughnuts that were acceptable to her.

“I complain about you every day of my life,” Mrs Armitage replied, shaking her head as Sue went for a doughnut from which the cream was trailing out, “not that one, dear. I am paying for the filling you know!”

Sue did know. She knew that every day of her life. But, as she always did, she picked a different one, flicked the paper bag round twice to secure its corners and asked Mrs Armitage if she would like anything else.

“Have you complained about me to Alan, though?” Primmie was persistent. She was not pleased to hear at The Frog and Cricket the previous night that Alan was looking for a new bakery manager.

“Did you not know?” asked Kelly, the barmaid as she wiped the bar down, deciding that eye contact was no longer a good idea now she may have let the proverbial cat out of the bag and all the way down the street.

“Do you think I would ask if I knew?” Primmie said, sarcastically.

Kelly shrugged and went to serve an imaginary punter for fear of escalation. Primmie had a temper.

However, as Primmie nursed her rum and coke, she pondered what might have happened. Alan wasn’t particularly bothered by her lateness. He had told her so during her last appraisal. It was a brief evaluation of her skills and abilities, though, since Alan thought appraisals felt too much like hard work. He had tried to get Clare his accountant to do them, but she had insisted they weren’t in her job description.

“I’m not bothered about you being a few minutes late here and there,” he had insisted, “the bakery does very well and makes me a tidy packet. Now, your other competencies – fine. Let’s give them all ticks shall we?” and after that he was gone. Primmie didn’t even know what the other competencies were. But Alan was fine, so she was fine, so that was fine.

Except now, it seemed, it wasn’t fine.

She wracked her brains trying to think. What had happened that had caused the rumour mill to churn out the fact – or understanding – that Primmie was going to be fired? Mrs Armitage might be the reason, although Alan thought she was a lunatic. Apparently she emailed him three or four times a week complaining about one thing or another. The last complaint had been because she doubted that the sugar on her doughnuts was the same as it usually was because it was particularly coarse. She liked the finer stuff, more like powder.

No, it probably wasn’t her.

So Primmie was a bit surprised to find herself in Clive and Ellen’s flat crying, of all things. She wasn’t even particularly friendly with them, noting wryly that most of her interactions with the inhabitants of the flat above the bakery were her complaining about them. The irony was not lost on her.

Ellen gave her a kitchen roll and made some comforting noises, but Primmie left eventually and none the wiser. Clive gave her a look of distaste as she left and she heard him shout the minute she got to the stairs.

“Where have you been?” Sue looked annoyed. They often had an early afternoon rush. There was first thing, then lunchtime consumers and for some reason they had a good number of regulars who came later saying they liked to miss the rush. But they only created a rush themselves, so it was a funny old situation really.

Primmie was trying to compose herself. She had inadvertently disclosed to Ellen that she thought Jim from down the way, the barber, had got her fired. This was loosely based on something Sue had said that morning. Not about Primmie, but it certainly implicated her.

“My man, Billy, went to see James Hindbright the other week,” Sue had said that morning as she stretched out a hair net to its maximum in an effort to make sure it caught the entirety of her significant perm. She always called her husband ‘my man, Billy’. Once, Elisa from the florist thought that was his name. Mymanbilly and Sue Cunningham. Put it on a Christmas card, assumed he was maybe from somewhere abroad. No, Billy was from Sheffield.

However, Sue’s retelling of her man Billy’s trip to have his hair cut didn’t feel newsworthy in of itself. So, to start with Primmie didn’t pay much attention. In fact, she wouldn’t even be able to tell you what came after: “he has needed a haircut for weeks and I said to him…” and before: “just like that he lost eight customers that day due to a bad review on some sort of page where you leave those…”

That’s when Primmie stopped in her tracks and made herself try to pay attention again. She had to pause though because first thing rush started and she had to go and wake Tyler from his first slumber of the day.

By ten o’clock, Primmie’s anxiety was at a peak. She was desperate to resume her conversation with Sue, and just needed to think how she might go about that. At 10.15 they went for a tea break and she took her chance.

“Hey, Sue, finish what you were telling me earlier about James and the review…” she stirred her tea so as to look at anything but Sue, feeling her cheeks redden a little at the possibilities as to what might come next.

Sue took a minute to remember, which only caused Primmie’s anxiety feel like stew in a pressure cooker. She continued to stir her tea, considering how best to look nonchalant.

“You remember, you said Billy needed a haircut, and then you were saying about a bad review someone had left…” Primmie repeated it again. How can one person’s memory be that bad? she wondered as Sue looked at her blankly.

“Ah, yes, I remember. Oh it was nothing. Nothing important anyway!” Sue laughed as though that as that conversation over. As far as Primmie was concerned, however, it was far from it.

“No, go on tell me…” Sue looked at her plea with curiosity, so Primmie tried to redirect, “I was just thinking what we might do if we got a bad review in Baker’s Weekly, or something…” that seemed to satisfy Sue who had never actually heard of Baker’s Weekly – which she wouldn’t have done because Primmie made it up right there and then.

“Well,” Sue settled in as though she did have a good story after all, “James got this terrible review – and that day he got all these cancellations and a few of them said they would be finding somewhere else, and so James had decided to do some investigating and even though the review was left by User123456789, he thinks he knows who it is!” Sue’s eyes flashed as though she had let out some trade secrets that would bring a government down.

“Okay…” Primmie felt like she had lost Sue who was sipping her coffee and looking off into the distance, “Sue…Sue?”

“Oh yes, well anyway – he knows who left the review and got in touch with their manager and, according to James, they’re going to get fired!” the glee on Sue’s face was apparent. She even rocked a little on her chair as though perfecting some sort of manic in-the-know evil laugh.

Primmie felt sick and even though she took herself up to Ellen and Clive in the hope of some solace, she found none. Ellen listened to her, but didn’t seem to have any advice.

So, she went back to the bakery to gather her things and told Sue that she didn’t feel well and was going to go home immediately. Sue was fuming, but said nothing, thinking that Primmie did look unusually snotty.

Primmie made a dash to her car, near on hyperventilating as she pulled open the door, flung herself home and hurtled back to her small apartment three miles away at considerably illegal speeds.

She unlocked her front door with shaking hands and switched on a lamp at her desk. Turning the computer on, she fetched a glass of water and tried to steady her nerves. Which she did not manage to do.

Her emails opened automatically and there, to her horror was a new message.

Dear User123456789…

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Come back tomorrow for Part Three – Mrs Dorado of Number 42