A Slice of the Bakery

Sourdough, Asha discovered, did not burn quietly.

It began as a smell so lovely it pulled her out of sleep at ten to seven on Sunday morning: warm crust, a bit of toast, the smell of the bakery on any ordinary day. She lay under the duvet and breathed it in. Then the smell changed. It went dark round the edges, like a marshmallow held too long over a beach fire, and then it went black all the way through.

Asha sat up. The window was misted. She wiped a hole in it with her sleeve.

Two doors along from Mrs Oddie's, smoke was rolling out of the Gull Street Bakery in a fat grey sausage and drifting off towards the harbour. Bernie Crowe stood on the pavement in his apron and his slippers, flapping a tea towel at the doorway as if the smoke were a seagull he could shoo. A tray lay on the step beside him. On it sat six round loaves, each one the colour of a car tyre.

Kit appeared in the doorway in his seagull pyjamas, sniffing.

'Is it the end of the world?'

'It's Bernie's oven.'

'Oh.' He climbed onto her bed to look. 'Gulls can smell food from miles away. They'll be disappointed.'

By the time Asha had pulled her jeans on over her pyjama bottoms and got downstairs, Dad was already across the road. Gull Street was waking up badly. The man from the flat above the chip shop had his head out of the window. Somebody's dog was barking. A gull landed beside the tray, pecked one loaf, and flew off looking insulted.

Bernie had stopped flapping. He was crouched by the oven door with a torch, and when Asha came close she heard the oven make a noise she had never heard an oven make: a long, tired clank, like a lift giving up between floors.

'Fifty-two years old,' said Bernie, to nobody in particular. 'My dad bought her secondhand.'

He switched the torch off. Inside, something went tick, tick, tick, and then nothing at all.

On Saturday the bakery window had a new sign taped below the old one, in thick black felt tip: 'NEW OVEN £10,000. BEAR WITH ME. B.'

Mrs Oddie had brought a cake. It sat on the counter beside Barnaby on a plate with a gold rim, and it leaned a bit to the left.

'Victoria sponge,' she said. 'I made it last night. Not my best. The jam has ideas of its own.'

She took the bread knife from under the counter, the same one she had used on the orange tree, and wiped it on her cardigan sleeve. Asha decided not to mention that.

'Pretend this cake is the bakery,' said Mrs Oddie. 'Ovens, ovens and all. Bernie needs ten thousand pounds and he hasn't got it. So.' She cut the sponge in half, then each half into five. Ten slices. Some were fatter than others. 'He sells each slice for a thousand pounds.'

'Who'd pay a thousand pounds for cake?'

'Nobody. They're not buying cake. They're buying a slice of the bakery.' She tapped the plate. 'Buy one of these and you own a tenth of Gull Street Bakery. A tenth of the ovens. A tenth of the doormat. That's a share.'

Asha chewed her plait. 'So I'd get a tenth of the scones?'

'Better. You'd get a tenth of the profit.' Mrs Oddie looked at Barnaby. 'Profit is what's left once the flour and the wages and the electric are paid. Say there's two thousand pounds left at the end of a year, and Bernie decides to share it out.'

Asha did it on the back of the scone bag.

£2,000 ÷ 10 slices = £200 a slice

'Two hundred pounds,' she said. 'For doing nothing?'

'For trusting him with your thousand. That money shared out to owners has a name.' Mrs Oddie paused, enjoying herself. 'It's called a dividend.'

In the window, beside the telescope, a large ginger head came up off a large ginger paw and looked straight at the cake.

Asha looked at the cat. The cat looked at the cake. Mrs Oddie looked at Asha over the top of the lifeguard, and waited.

'Dividend,' said Asha slowly.

'He turns up regularly,' said Mrs Oddie, 'and asks for a share.'

For a second nothing happened. Then the joke arrived all at once, the way a wave comes over the harbour wall when nobody is watching. Dividend climbed down from the window ledge one paw at a time, as if he had a meeting, and walked along the counter to the plate. He sat. He stared at the fattest slice. He did not blink.

Asha laughed so hard she had to hold on to the shelf.

She had been holding Coastal Birds of Britain, which was thick and had a cormorant on the front, and she had been meaning to dust it. Her hand let go of it without asking her. It slid off the shelf edge and landed flat on the counter, exactly on the end of Dividend's tail.

Thump.

Dividend did not yowl. He turned his big ginger head and gave Asha a look so full of disappointment that she stopped laughing at once. Then he pulled his tail out from under the cormorant, very slowly, and began to wash it.

'Sorry,' said Asha. 'Sorry, sorry. Is he all right?'

'He's been sat on by worse.' Mrs Oddie broke a corner off the fattest slice, scraped off the jam and put the crumbs on the counter. Dividend ate them without hurrying. 'There. Profit shared out. He'll forgive you by Tuesday.'

'You waited nine weeks to tell me that.'

'Eleven,' said Mrs Oddie. 'A good joke needs time to grow.' She turned to the till. 'Didn't it, Barnaby?'

Barnaby said nothing, being a till.

Asha wiped her eyes on her sleeve. On the back of the scone bag, under the sum, she wrote in small letters:

1 cat = 1 dividend. Paid in crumbs.

Dividend finished the crumbs and sat looking at the other nine slices.

'Bernie's ten slices are just the start,' said Mrs Oddie. 'Big companies cut themselves into millions of slices. People buy and sell them all day long, in a place called the stock market.'

'Like the Saturday market?'

'Noisier. Fewer bikes.' She wiped her hands on her cardigan. 'Mostly it's computers now. The price of a slice goes up when lots of people want one and down when they don't.'

'So I could buy a bit of anything?'

'With real money, when you're older. For now, pretend.' She took the pencil from behind her ear. 'I'm giving you one thousand pounds. Imaginary. Don't tell your brother.'

Asha opened the paying-in book to a clean page. Her hand was already itching.

Mrs Oddie made up the companies from things in the shop, which took longer than it needed to, because each one came with a story. Asha chose five. She split the thousand evenly, two hundred pounds each, so that no single one could get too big for its boots. That was Mrs Oddie's phrase.

Sat 15 Feb: pretend money £1,000.00
Puffin Rail, 50p a share × 400 = £200.00
Northern Kettles, £2.50 × 80 = £200.00
Lighthouse Paint, £4.00 × 50 = £200.00
Big Dipper Biscuits, £8.00 × 25 = £200.00
Cliffside Bicycles, £10.00 × 20 = £200.00
Total = £1,000.00

She checked each line twice. Then she added Cliffside Bicycles a third time, because Dad would want to know.

'Every Saturday,' said Mrs Oddie, 'I'll tell you the new prices. You write them down. No peeking at the answers.'

'Will they go up?'

Mrs Oddie looked out of the window at the sea, which was grey and lumpy and going about its business. 'Some weeks,' she said.

Dividend had fallen asleep beside the plate with his chin on the slice he had chosen. Across the road, Bernie was sweeping black crumbs off his step.

Asha drew a neat box round the total. One thousand pounds. It looked very safe, written down like that.