Wednesday, July the 20th, 2005

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The Evil Bakery

“Eek! Eek!” trilled the twins, as they turned a corner by the market square and saw, looming above them, the big dark walls of the evil bakery. It was a sinister, if familiar, sight. Instinctively, the twins clutched each other's hands, as from behind the iron gates they heard what they knew was the bellowing of the Hairy Man. They hoped they would be able to pass by without him seeing them, but they suspected that, as ever, the Hairy Man would be peering out at the street through his powerful binoculars, and they were right. As they tried to flit past, wishing themselves invisible, the Hairy Man thrust one of his massive hairy paws through the railings and beckoned them. He stopped bellowing for a moment. The twins' legs had turned to jelly. Clouds scudded across the sky. Across the way, a French Impressionist painter captured the scene with swift, sure brushstrokes. The twins, the Hairy Man, even the vast gloomy bakery itself, are all a blur, just as they are in my memory.

It is hard to believe that fifty years have passed since this scene took place. I should be telling you about tin, tin and zinc and titanium, but I am ever drawn back to the evil bakery, and the twins and the Hairy Man with his binoculars. What did he say to them, when, terrified, they responded to his beckoning paw as if drawn by magnetism? Is it true that he merely gave them each a pastry and sent them on their way? That later, as they sat outside the Owl Library, they chuckled as the fruit filling of the pastries dribbled down their chins? What exactly did Under-Sheriff Coggery mean when he testified, later, that the very air of the town that day had a tang of rare Oriental spices, and of diesel fumes? I am standing on the bridge now, and hailstones are pinging off my hat, and still the mystery remains.

The Hairy Man lies buried in the churchyard, the twins of course are entombed in some giant foreign cathedral, and the evil bakery itself is no more. It was torn down after the events of that day, in riots, and on the site there now stands a teenage milk bar wherein scruffy youngsters strum guitars and sing inane songlets, oblivious of the evil spirits flying round and round, invisible.