The Bread Fairy

This story begins with a cake, then ends with a loaf of bread a decade later. The only connection between these two rather arbitrary foods is the wielder of both cake and bread. Myself.

While we now have an established but tenuous basis for this anecdote I will introduce the antagonist. Her name is Beck. She is my love, and before we knew this together she had hardly spoken to me for ten years.

Beck caught my school bus. We were in the same grade at high school. We shared friends, but weren’t close. She was the arty, cool girl and I a category of human I’m still unsure of a label. She took interesting photos and questioned her world. I played frisbee and made weird music with friends. What connected us most was probably the thirty minute bus ride to and from school.

It was March 2002, the morning of her birthday. Mine was in a few days time. A star sign is something we unknowingly shared. I had the unfortunate habit of falling asleep in my seat on the bus every single day, a condition of a nocturnal lifestyle. But on this particular morning I woke up at her stop. The seats were full except for mine, and as she sat down next to me I can still recall the depth of her expression. It was not something she liked to show much, to anyone.

I have to say that I wasn’t into her at the time. I didn’t know her. But as she sat there next to me on that vinyl bus seat we started chatting and Beck very quickly opened up about how she was feeling. It all came out quite steadily. I was not a trusted ear, but as the adage goes - or so I’m told - the most important conversation you’ll ever have will be with a complete stranger. I might have heard that in a film actually. Now I won’t say that this was the most important conversation that either of us will ever have, but what it did was set in motion a series of events that connect cake to bread. Don’t forget these.

Beck told me everything. How she felt about grade twelve, her friends, herself. A lot. I was not of an age or maturity with anything much to offer in return, and really didn’t know how to help. I had no advice, no counsel, no wisdom. I had no idea how to bring some peace to what was troubling this girl. So I sat and listened. I did what she needed, and at the end of the journey when the bus pulled into school, creaking to a halt, I saw in her a moment of abrupt recognition. She had just emotionally revealed herself in an unfamiliar way, to a stranger, an untrusted bearer of her hurts, and it confused her. She was out of her seat and off the bus before I had collected my wits. But I was no fool. I had made a plan.

One of the things that most impacted me about Beck was that she thought nobody would remember her birthday. I couldn’t understand this. She. Her. The impression I held of this person was so vastly different to her own. After our conversation she was now someone who carried a tempestuousness I saw, and that I could not piece back together. But I would try. So, come recess, I took a friend and we left school to go to the local bakery. I bought a birthday cake. A sickly sweet thing with that red icing that imitates jam when really it is just sugar and food colouring. It was no masterpiece, no feat of pâtissier engineering, but it carried a sentiment, and that is what I wanted. By the time we got it back to school class approached again.

I carried it before me like a fool at court and began the anthem of childhood birthday parties. Everybody joined in. Her group of friends, mine, neighbouring students caught up in the display. By the time the ‘hippips’ were done she was a ghost, aghast at the attention. It took a heartbeat for her to flee the scene as the bell tolled for class, with a brief and quiet thank you. I was left with cake in hand, oh so confused. There were plenty of mouths to help finish it off, but my belly was full with the feeling of dread. Failure. But do not have pity. This story has a happy ending.

Now to see it from her eyes.

On her birthday, of all days, Beck felt very much alone. She was lost in the pressure of grade twelve, the pressure of social conformity, the expectation of family and future. It hung heavy. Then, here I was bringing attention to all of this with a stupid sugary sponge choked with egg, milk and cream, delivered to a vegan. This also didn’t pair well with her sudden fear I had fallen for her and would now pursue something she did not wish to share. So she fled with a panicked thank you. A perfectly valid response.

Almost ten years passed after this. Beck and I finished school, we saw each other at occasional parties, then each year at a music festival of some kind. I came to find great humour in seeing her recoil at my presence. It was almost a game we played. I would go to a festival knowing at some point I would no doubt cross paths with this girl, and every time I did there was the briefest of sentences shared before she would have to leave. I would be polite. I would be friendly. It became an art.

Ten years later.

I had been travelling quite a bit. My hair had a few dreadlocks, some shells, bits and pieces woven into them. I was not, however, so much of a cliche that I had changed much. But when I saw Beck this time the game had grown old.

She was beautiful. Undeniable. I was at a festival again, and in between acts there was Beck, alone and once again confronted by this reminder of the past. I had a few other friends with me from school days, and a bit of conversation was exchanged. She was again withdrawn. This time though I just moved away to watch the music. I had tried for years and in my mind she had not come to forgive me. But unbeknownst to me I had perceived it all wrong.

Beck had never thought ill of me personally. Her words. I was just someone from a time that she did not love. A pixel in her memory of difficulty and stress. But here, in this time, at this festival, she had changed too. And so the cake that I had never intended as anything more than friendly was now the joke that brought us together. A seed that had slowly sprouted and grown story.

We kept in touch. I mentioned the cake. We saw each other a couple of times after discovering we lived so close. But it was nothing more than friendly at best. There was a smile at the edge of her lips each time that told me she didn’t dislike my company.

I knew she liked poetry. I liked sending poetry. I wrote a lot of it because I was male living in an alternative place, had travelled, had long hair, and liked words. I swear I wasn’t a cliche. But I sent her a little piece I wrote while walking to work about a magpie and a mosquito. That piece of poetry caught her eye, and caught it hard. We continued to share poetry. We scrawled it in chalk over the floorboards of my house during parties, on the street, and then stared into one another, touched and kissed. Something was happening.

I was about to go travelling again. Everything went on hold, but we kept writing to one another. Something was happening.

I came home where she leapt into my arms at the airport. Something was happening.

We made mischief together. We lived and loved and travelled. We got engaged in the Himalayas. Something had happened.

By this point you will no doubt be wondering where the loaf of bread comes into this story. Well baked goods take time to rise, and this one is about done.

We lived in a tiny flat with giant camphor laurel trees down our street. Huge trees spaced close along what was once a wealthy estate in this part of our city. Wedding parties and photographers came to shoot here constantly. We became playful critics of trends and tragedies that greeted our street.

Of a Sunday there was a converted power station that had long been a trendy bar and arts hub which held free comedy. Both floor and gangways were crowded with people every time. Beck and I were students again, studying hard, having fun, set on new lives and careers, and free comedy was too hard to pass on. We would smuggle our own bottle of wine into the gigs and afterwards we would go past the local shopping complex to raid their skips. There are many names for this practice but we knew it as dumpster diving, salvaging otherwise wasted food to save our tiny budgets. The bakery would always fill a full skip with their weekend spoils. And so Beck and I would make off with bags and bags of baked goods, so many that I often found creative ways to disperse of our spare bread.

We had a share house a few doors down from ours. The place was a continual party, but come Wednesday and Sunday nights it was unnaturally quiet, french windows above the kitchen sink parted slightly to vent the hot Queensland air. On one particularly great night I took a full loaf of salvaged bread, dubbed myself flamboyantly as a ‘bread fairy’ and launched a loaf through the parted window to land upon the share house’s kitchen bench with a smooth swish. I will never forget Beck’s face on that night. It was another depth of expression. Far from the fear of cake, my moment of bread delivery was the redeeming bakery experience for us as a couple. She looked at me with eyes that signalled an even fresher love, which sounds overstated considering the petty act of bread corruption I had just delivered to our neighbours. The bread fairy, however, had stuck.

This arc has been just one joke of our whole relationship. From one bakery to another I found love, and she found me. Bakery bliss. From our days as high school students with cake, to a young couple as bread fairies, and to now in the form of what the world might dub as adults, we have kept our humour. Times may now favour sourdoughs, but we have not forgotten the crumbs upon which our emotions have landed.