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    Earthly Delights
    Earthly Delights
    Earthly Delights
    Ebook303 pages4 hours

    Earthly Delights

    By Kerry Greenwood

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    "Put on the coffee pot, whip up a batch of muffins (yes, two recipes are included), and enjoy this thoroughly original tale. Strongly recommended for fans of offbeat mysteries." —Library Journal STARRED review

    One day, Corinna Chapman, high profile accountant and banker, walked out on the money market and her dismissive and unpleasant husband James, threw aside her briefcase, and doffed her kitten heels forever. Now she is a baker with her own business, Earthly Delights, in Melbourne, Australia, living in an eccentric building on the Roman model called Insula with a lot of similarly eccentric people.

    She and her cat Horatio are quite content with this new life until a junkie falls half dead on her grate, a gorgeous sabra stalks along her alley telling her that she is beautiful, and threatening letters accusing her of being a scarlet woman begin to arrive. Then suddenly Goths, lost girls, fraud, late nights, nerds, and beautiful slaves complicate life for Corinna. And she still needs to get her bread out for the morning rush....

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 31, 2012
    ISBN9781615953721
    Earthly Delights
    Author

    Kerry Greenwood

    Kerry Greenwood was born in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray and after wandering far and wide, she returned to live there. She has degrees in English and Law from Melbourne University and was admitted to the legal profession on the 1st April 1982, a day which she finds both soothing and significant. Kerry has written three series, a number of plays, including The Troubadours with Stephen D’Arcy, is an award-winning children’s writer and has edited and contributed to several anthologies. The Phryne Fisher series (pronounced Fry-knee, to rhyme with briny) began in 1989 with Cocaine Blues which was a great success. Kerry has written twenty books in this series with no sign yet of Miss Fisher hanging up her pearl-handled pistol. Kerry says that as long as people want to read them, she can keep writing them. In 2003 Kerry won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Australian Association.

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    Reviews for Earthly Delights

    3.5/5

    168 ratings19 reviews

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    • 4/5
      First of a series of very nice mysteries, with baking, set in present-day Australia. Corinna has to figure out who is terrorizing the women in her eccentric apartment building, and whether it's related to the deaths of young heroine addicts.
    • 4/5
      Amusing, fun, light and in need of a bit more editing. Corinna is a large baker who lives in a building of interesting people. There are also interesting things going on with junkies, nerds, Wiccan witches, Goths and obnoxious graffiti. Corinna asks questions and ends up in some interesting situations.
    • 5/5
      cosy-mystery, ex-military, law-enforcement, wannabes, amateur-sleuth, Australia, murder, situational-humor, verbal-humor I read the last book in series first, and now want to know everything about the quirky characters, the very retro apartment building, and the Mouse Police! Great plot with lots of unexpected twists and suspense. The depiction of the drug scene and small group efforts to help are so very timely, so too the alternative Goth scene, pedophiles, and the positive aspects of Wicca. But it's also very funny. I loved it! Louise Siverson is absolutely amazing as the voice performer!
    • 4/5
      Synopsis: Corinna is a baker in a area of Melbourne that is busy during the day but not quite so nice in the evening. Finding a dying junkie on her grate early one morning begins her adventures in murder. What also follows is a stalker who is threatening the women in the apartment building in which she lives. She also meets a very handsome private investigator, a young man who will become her baking assistant. Review: This is almost a cozy mystery in that Corinna is rather cozy. Her friends from the area are a witch, a retired professor, a set of nerds, a cross-dressing dominatrix, two young wanta-be actresses, a gardener, and a man who is searching for his daughter. I'm hoping these characters remain in these stories.
    • 4/5
      Great if you want to unwind, have some good time, laugh.
    • 4/5
      It took me a little while to get into this one but once I was about 1/3 of the way in I was hooked. I've read a few of Greenwood's Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and this modern series is definitely worth reading
    • 4/5
      A light, fun read which reminded me of the Stephanie Plum series. My favourite character, by far, was Horatio, Corrina's house cat, closely followed by the mouse police, Heckle and Jeykll. The human characters weren't bad either!
    • 4/5
      Cozy mysteries are an occasional junk-food read for me, and listening in the car is a good way to pass the time. This feels more like a romance, with the protagonist a middle aged large-built woman meeting Mr. Dreamy. It was perfectly fine till Greenwood described Sidney as so hilly that it's not level except at the railway station platform and on tabletops. Cracked me up!! Now I want the print version to discover other gold nuggets. The author also kudos a fellow Aussie author, Jade Forrester. Sadly, Forrester's books have not made it across the Pacific pond.
    • 3/5
      This was okay book about a woman baker with her own bakery in a rundown neighborhood. The story starts when a girl in back of the Corinna’s shop almost dies from a drug overdose when Corina finds her and gives her CPR until the rescue workers arrive. This introduces the characters of Daniel, a driver of the soup truck that delivers food to the homeless during the night and a “teenage” boy who had a drug habit but is trying to go clean and wants to learn baking into the story. I was a little disappointed in the way the ending turned out .
    • 3/5
      Having already sampled and enjoyed Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series, I looked forward to this book with anticipation, but found Earthly Delights to be very uneven. I loved the setting in Corinna's bakery, the descriptions of bread making, and the creation of new recipes for muffins and the like. Corinna's eccentric neighbors in the very unusual Roman-style apartment complex known as Insula were also interesting and brought a lot to the story what few times they appeared. The only real exception to this list of secondary characters was Jase the homeless boy, who did share the spotlight with Corinna more. Jase's skill in experimenting with food and his growing relationship with Corinna really lit up the book. Also, the feeling of contentment and well-being whenever Corinna talked about the life she'd made for herself was a plus. However, there were a couple of things that really dulled my enjoyment.The only real Australian flavor in the book comes from an occasional slang term like "arvo" ("afternoon") and too many Australian political references at the beginning that meant absolutely nothing to me. There wasn't that much investigating done either-- partly as a result of Corinna's being tied to the bakery for long periods of time. The identities of the perpetrators in the subplots were rather easily guessed as well. This first book reads more like a character study of Corinna and her romance with a handsome stranger named Daniel. Perhaps it was because Corinna was so satisfied with her life, but Earthly Delights lacked any sort of real spark to engage me enough to continue with the series.
    • 3/5
      Really 3 1/2 stars. Very enjoyable cozy set in Melbourne featuring a baker and her somewhat oddball neighbors. I did figure out the culprit before the end, which I don't usually.
    • 4/5
      Fun and a little strange.
    • 4/5
      I recently imposed on myself a challenge to discover new (to me) Australian authors but having never warmed to Kerry Greenwood’s more famous mystery series I approached Earthly Delights with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation.

      Fortunately I found no need for the trepidation. The characters, plot and writing are all equally solid and I was hooked by page five. This is the first of Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman series and accordingly takes some time to introduce the protagonist and her intriguing supporting cast. The inclusion of oddities such as a white which, a dominatrix, a vampire sub-culture and a Roman apartment building in modern-day Melbourne could have been a disaster but Greenwood has made them all, including the building and the city itself, fully-rounded characters rather than the caricatures a lesser author might have created.

      Chapman’s involvement in the crimes that form the basis of the plot seems far more natural and credible than is the case with many amateur sleuth stories. This natural feel is enhanced by the quick, dry humour of the main character and just enough slightly left-of-centre social commentary to keep things really interesting. All in all this was an unexpected delight and I can’t wait to read the next one in the series.
    • 3/5
      I still don't know what I think of this story.

      I read it all, relatively quickly.
      With each press on the Kindle, I wondered why I was still reading it, but read it I did.

      I think it was a romance. Well, "I love yous" were exchanged.

      I think there was a mystery, people died and people almost died and people were arrested.

      There were some vampires. They were fake, but they thought they were real.

      There was some baking done. And recipes dutifully appended to the end.

      These are all elements I usually enjoy, but...

      I liked the characters. There was nothing to dislike about them. You saw the positive, not the negative. You saw what you were told, not what you could intuit. I guess this is a way of saying I saw no depth. I have no idea why the H would fall in love with the h, except of course for what he said, she looked hale and healthy and like she would age nicely as rounded as she was. Even the h is not sure why she fell in love with the H. I mean, as she said, she didn't know him.

      The murders were solved, but they weren't so much murder as providing the weapon, heroin. Then there was an almost murder, but the murderer was found before the death occurred.

      And then it ended and we were presented with recipes. Okay. Done. I guess everybody was just done.

      So yeah, I liked it, I guess. I have never had to use the Kindle dictionary as much as I did in this one. I looked up words and gods and concepts and poets and constellation and Goth-isms.

      Ms. Greenwood writes an intriguing story, but I wouldn't call it engrossing. Thought was provoked, but soon forgotten.

      Yeah, I still don't know how I feel about this. I am not hitting "one click" on my Kindle so I guess that says a lot. I guess. Who knows. I never have written "I guess" so many times.

      I guess, though, I am glad I read it. But I doubt I will read more.
    • 4/5
      Kerry Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series about an accountant turned baker came as a welcome exception to the recent general dumbing down of the 3C (coffee, crafting, cooking) mysteries. Corinna owns and operates Earthly Delights, a small bakery in center city Melbourne, Australia. It is located on the first floor of the Insula, a quirky apartment building designed like an ancient Roman villa. Corinna used the buyout from her accounting job to purchase both the bakery and her apartment, named (not numbered) Hebe, directly above it with her house cat Horatio. A pair of stray cats perform rodent patrol in the bakery at night.Corinna operates her bakery with only some part time counter help, so her days are long. In Earthly Delights she opens her bakery door early one morning to let her rodent police, Heckle and Jekyll, out and finds a young girl dying in the street, apparently of a drug overdose. While Corinna's quick response saves the girl, a series of similar drug-related deaths begin to occur around the city. Meanwhile, Corinna and her neighbors in the Insula are being harassed by an anonymous religious fanatic who leaves threatening letters and defaces and damages the shops. While this series has a wonderful cozy feel to it, there is some rough language - it is the inner city, after all - and some sweet not too explicit sex. Corinna and her community remind me of Armistead Maupin's characters in Tales of the City; bittersweet and charmingly funny. I was so enchanted by the setting, characters, and sly Australian humor in Earthly Delights that I have ordered the rest of the series.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely Enjoyable! Enjoyed it. Have read the author's Phryne Fisher series and now enjoy both. Very different but a fun cozy.
    • 5/5
      Corinna is the baker and propritress of Earthly Delights in Melbourne. She (mostly) enjoyes getting up at 4 a.m. to bake bread for local restraunts and her own shop. Being up so early gives her a slightly different perspective on the local scene. Her part of Melborne has always had it's share of junkies and derelicts, but when one of her mouse catching cats comes into the bakery with a syringe stuck in his paw and Corinna finds an unconscious girl on her grate she knows that this is something out of the ordinary. Before long she finds herself employing a detoxing junkie as kitchen swab, volunteering bread and her time on the Soup Run to feed the city's homeless, and teaming up with a mysterious, but oh so sexy hunk named Daniel to discover who is poisioning Melbourne's junkies. At the same time, the women in her apartment house are under attack from poison pen letters. They are all receiving slightly blurry missives calling them harlots and scarlet women and threatening their lives. It's more than one baker can stand so Corinna decides to put a stop to it. Once and for all.
    • 5/5
      Another fantastic Corinna Chapman book by Kerry Greenwood. Corinna is possibly my favourite heroine. She's smart, sassy, successful, surrounded by friends and has a beautiful man in her life... all while being a fat woman. Positive fat heroines are really difficult to find.Kerry Greenwood writes with wit, intelligence and fantastic descriptives. The Corinna Chapman books are definitely going into my permanent collection sooner rather than later.
    • 3/5
      Ok. So I have recently overdosed on Kerry Greenwood books. And I have problems with them.The first one concerns the baking. Corrina, the main character and narrator, is a baker. Ms Greenwood, our author, presumably knows nothing about bakeries apart from the notion that they smell good. She begin baking sometime about 4.30 (seeing that she wakes at 4, has coffee and breakfast and then dresses before baking) and gets all the work done (both for orders and for the shop) in about three and a half hours. And she has a mouse problem which is solved with cats. Which in the first book the health inspector has no problem with.The second concern is the Ancient History. Greenwood has digusted me before by using the phrase "those hoi polloi" (Translated into english - those the people). Now she has a building built in some 'Roman' style, with apartments given Roman names. Included amongst the inhabitants is a classics Professor who is presumably so into the Romans that he had Roman furniture made. But his life work? Translating Aristophanes. 1. Aristophanes is not that hard - novice greek learners (like me) can translate large amount. 2. Aristophanes was Greek. Writing in Greek. When I learnt Greek, us pro-hellenic types rather looked down on the Romans who stole everything from the Greeks . . . (ok, leave the Greek vs. Roman debate for later). Anyway - it doesn't add up.Third problem - a problem I'm beginning to notice with Australian crime novels. A cute little habit of making an in-joke about the location.Fourth problem - these books are going to be terribly dated. Phillip Ruddock jokes and Buffy references.Fifth problem - 18 year olds who read Girlfriend. They might be ditzes, but they would have given Girlfriend up about 14 or 15 and moved on to Comso/CleoAnyway, in the first book Corrina finds a body outside her bakery, meets a tall dark stranger, goes to a goth club, finds a bakery assistant who makes good muffins, and searches for a missing girl. Badly written, badly researched a lot of the time, but strangely addictive. I was looking forward to the second book.

    Book preview

    Earthly Delights - Kerry Greenwood

    Contents

    Contents

    Dedication

    Acknowledgments

    Epigraph

    Chapter One

    Chapter Two

    Chapter Three

    Chapter Four

    Chapter Five

    Chapter Six

    Chapter Seven

    Chapter Eight

    Chapter Nine

    Chapter Ten

    Chapter Eleven

    Chapter Twelve

    Chapter Thirteen

    Chapter Fourteen

    Chapter Fifteen

    Chapter Sixteen

    Chapter Seventeen

    Chapter Eighteen

    Chapter Nineteen

    Recipes

    More from this Author

    Contact Us

    Dedication

    This book is for the remarkable Sarah-Jane Reeh

    Acknowledgments

    With thanks to Jeannie, Alan, Dafydd, Dennis, Jaye Francis, Henry Nissen, Richard Tregear, Richard Revill, John Landau, Kellie Flanagan, Ed Jarrett, Michael Warby, Atli, Belladonna and Ashe. And to all who care for the lost, stolen and strayed.

    In loving memory of Sister Connie Peck FM, who even now is giving God a hard time about his negligent care of the widow and the fatherless.

    This book is a work of fiction. No character in this book is meant to represent a real person. The City of Melbourne is also an artifact of my imagination.

    Epigraph

    For unto us a Child is born,

    Unto us a Son is given.

    —GF Handel, Messiah

    Chapter One

    Four a.m. Who invented four a.m.?

    I dragged myself out of bed, slapped at the alarm, thrust bare feet into slipper-wards, stood on what felt like a furry rope and was rewarded with a yowl.

    Oh shit. Horatio was waiting politely at my bedside to deliver his morning greeting and I had just begun the day with a bad deed. Meroe would frown at the effect on my karma.

    Of course, if Horatio didn’t insist on sitting in my slippers it might cut down the number of times this happened, and the consequent karmic debt. I’ll probably come back as a mouse, and that would be on my good days.

    Suppressing an unworthy thought that he carefully positioned his tail so that I would stand on it and then spend ten minutes apologising to him, I spent ten minutes apologising to him—poor kitty! Did the big fat woman stomp on his innocent stripy tail? I would see if a little milk would assuage his sense of insult.

    It did. While Horatio was giving the milk his reverent, devoted attention, I had time to flick on the heater, put on the coffee (without which no baker ever commences the day), survey the squalor of my small stone-flagged kitchen, shiver a bit and drag on some clothes. I tend to dress in the kitchen because there is no heating in my bedroom until the ovens come on automatically at four. I had heard the fans cut in as I shut off the alarm clock.

    Not a pretty sight on a cold dark morning, a baker. Long mousy hair tied back ruthlessly. Face entirely devoid of make-up, eyes dark-ringed as a result of waking when all others are sleeping. Thin faces look skeletal at this hour, fat faces like an illustration in a textbook on forensic pathology under the heading ‘adipocere.’ I’m fat, so it’s the adipocere for me. I grin at my reflection, finish washing my face, put on two layers of tracksuit, and toast some gourmet date and walnut bread for breakfast.

    Not bad at all. Possibly a little undersweetened. I made a note to add more honey next time I baked it.

    I got into baking because I wanted to become an accountant. Bear with me—it makes sense. I was looking for a job which allowed me to attend all my lectures and the local Italian bakers gave me a job as a general hand, hours from four a.m. to nine a.m., which got me to my economics lecture almost on time, though a little floury.

    As the years went on numbers became drier and baking more fascinating. It’s almost an alchemical process. You combine flour, water and the plant yeast and at the end of the process you get something shiny, crunchy, aerated and delicious.

    Four in the morning is a time when the mind has a tendency to run loose. Where was I? Ah, yes. I can pin down the moment when it happened. I was in the middle of a meeting about a takeover and the CEO was talking about currency fluctuations, I should have been fascinated, but all of a sudden there was a click in my mind. I didn’t care. There was our client with more troubles than the Jam Tin (aka the Telstra Dome) on a bad grass day and I didn’t care. Bastard had too much money anyway.

    You can’t be an accountant—no, you can’t stay an accountant—with that sort of attitude. I left a note about cashing in my superannuation payments on my boss’ desk, went home, levered off my uncomfortable shoes, tore off my bloody ridiculous suit with the padded shoulders, dragged on a tracksuit and vowed that whatever I had to do to make a living for me and Horatio, it would never involve wearing a kitten heel again. I joined the bakery full time, completing my apprenticeship. When I left Pagliacci’s, Papa Toni gave me a lump of his own pasta douro dough.

    It was still with me, growing happily in its bucket, fed with sugar and kept at the optimum temperature. Yeast must be nurtured. Mama Pagliacci used to talk to her yeasts. Before Horatio arrived, so did I. Now I talk to him and I hope the yeast doesn’t feel slighted.

    I set up this bakery, Earthly Delights (anyone heard of Hieronymus Bosch? Look at the picture on the wall next to the glass case. It can keep a queue amused for, oh, minutes), in Calico Alley in the middle of the city. I like cities. Even at four a.m. something is always stirring, though around here it is likely to be up to no good. We have a lot of junkies at this end of the city. They are the reason why my bakery has extremely expensive triple locks, bolts and stainless steel security doors. I can’t afford the health risk if they break in. I’d lose a whole batch of bread if someone dropped a syringe in my mixing tub.

    Yesterday’s mail caught my eye, piled on the table. Mostly bills addressed to Corinna Chapman, baker. One was a strange religious tract which appeared to be accusing me of being the Scarlet Woman. Done on a computer—any madman can make a respectable looking tract in these IT days. ‘The Wages of Sin Is Death’ it proclaimed. Weird.

    Horatio, one paw politely on my knee, was intimating that breakfast might be acceptable. I shelved the tract for later consideration. Cities breed madmen. I shook some of the dried kitty food—why do they mould it into little shapes, like fish and hearts? It can’t be to amuse the cat. Horatio would eat alphabet cat food that spelled poison as long as he felt peckish. And he’d eat it out of anything. There is no need for a special bowl with cat on the side. Who else is going to eat amusingly shaped fish-flavoured biscuits with added vitamins and minerals out of a dish on the floor? Since I’ve grown up, I haven’t any friends who would do that.

    I had bread to make. I took my second cup of coffee with me down the stone stairs to the bakery. I could feel the hot air rising. Horatio would join me when he had finished breakfast. He is a gentlemanly cat and considers it impolite to hurry his food. Besides, he needs to remove every crumb from his whiskers before he steps down to meet the Mouse Police, a rough but pleasant pair, far removed from him in elegance.

    Horatio is an aristocat. I occasionally feel that I am unable to meet his stringent requirements for suitable conduct in a Lady.

    I walked down into the bakery and the lights flicked on, blinding me momentarily. The Mouse Police collided solidly with my ankles in their eagerness to demonstrate that they had been working hard all night and deserved extra servings of Kitty Dins.

    As I counted corpses—seven mice and (erk!) eight rats, one almost as big as a kitten—I congratulated them on their excellent patrolling and laid out the food in their bowls.

    Allow me to introduce them. Rodent Control Officer Heckle, on the right, a black and white ex-tom of battered appearance, a little light on as to ears and with a curious kink in his tail. A notorious street fighter in his prime, now retired. And on the left, Rodent Control Officer Jekyll, a strong young black and white ex-female who had her litter under the mixing tub and now has no further interest in matrimony. She delivered the best right jab I had ever seen to Heckle when he swaggered too close to her kittens, and thereafter they have a relationship based less on mutual respect than on a balance of terror. I have, however, observed Heckle allowing Jekyll to lick his ears, and I once caught Heckle grooming Jekyll. When they saw me watching they both looked embarrassed. As far as I’m concerned it’s meant to be old diggers together.

    I got on with the mixing of the first batch of the day to the pleasant crunching of Kitty Dins and appreciative whuffling. Rye flour, sugar, sourdough yeast, water, a measure of white to make it a little lighter, on with the dough hooks and switch on the machine. My rye bread yeast is derived from a certain wild yeast, which is sour. I can sell all the rye bread I make to Eastern European restaurants.

    I’ve got an order for Health Loaf, guaranteed free of fat.

    I haven’t told the buyer that unless it’s a special or sweet bread there isn’t any fat in bread. I don’t believe that the Trade Practices Act obliges me to do so. Health Loaf is also free of gluten, which means that I need to use baking powder to get it to rise. Gluten is essential in making bread and provides much of the nutritional value as well as the taste. But there it is. The customer, as some capitalist observed, is always right. It’s a reasonable deal, I suppose. They get something better than the average sawdust, and I get paid. There’s really no satisfaction in making Health Loaf. Without binding elements it’s crumbly and without salt, sugar or spices it’s flavourless.

    I think the eaters would get as much kick out of a handful of unprocessed bran and it would be cheaper too.

    I remember delivering a tray of this bread to some healthy function and catching myself muttering, ‘Eat sawdust and die, yuppie scum.’ I probably didn’t really mean it. Right, Health Loaf mixed and into tins and into the oven. Baking powder is a chemical reaction and starts as soon as the liquid is added. Speed is essential. I stacked the tins onto a slide, into the oven, timer on.

    Now for the French sticks while the sawdust bricks are cooking. Pasta douro yeast, white flour, a little oil, warm water. Go, yeast. Muffins go in as soon as the sawdust comes out, another chemical reaction. I felt like apple today. Haul out the tin of apple pie filling (yes, yes, I know, but do you know how much peeling I have to do for the potato bread tomorrow?) and reach for the tin opener.

    No tin opener. My hand falls confidently onto its place on the shelf and comes back empty.

    Damn. I must have taken it up to my own kitchen.

    I clatter up the stairs in my Doc Martens (good solid shoes are essential if you are on your feet all day, and at least they never come with a kitten heel), find the bloody thing, clatter down again, remove top layer of tracksuit, open tin.

    It’s really getting hot now. The ovens are into their stride. Time to open the door and greet the new dawn.

    The Mouse Police rush outside with cries of relief, as though they had been trapped for days in a lift with Philip Ruddock talking about border protection. A gust of cold air rushes in. I turn off one mixer and set the rye bread on ‘rise.’ I prepare the muffin mix, except the milk, and pause to look out at the dawn and stretch my back.

    Then Heckle leaps inside as though he had been stung. Something is stuck in his foot, he is shaking his paw frantically and mewing loudly. I grab him and extract a syringe from his paw.

    Heckle immediately settles down to allow Jekyll to lick his injury and I stalk out, shaking with fury.

    Junkies! Irresponsible bloody junkies. Never mind finding a sharps bin, just drop the syringe in the alley, a waiting trap for an innocent cat. I kick at the wall with a furious foot, a waste of effort, for when they built this building they built it to survive anything short of an exploding volcano. I swear into the chill grey pre-dawn light. Then I see a figure slumped on my ventilation grate. No wonder it got so hot in the kitchen with some vagrant lying on my grate! I stomp over, reach out and grab for the offending shoulder, meaning to give it a good shake and send it on its way.

    It collapses bonelessly out of my grasp and falls, flat on its back. A girl, with long matted hair shifting away from her blue face. Not just a delicate azure either, but dark blue like my slate floor.

    Not breathing. I run back inside, grab the mobile and call 000, get a bored voice which promises instant attention and instructs me to start CPR. Oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph. My skin tries to crawl off me and find a more compassionate human. This girl is probably riddled with diseases, AIDS, hepatitis A to Z. And she’s just wounded one of my cats with her careless syringe. What a bitch life is. It’s a punishment for stepping on Horatio’s tail.

    I still have plastic gloves on and I can use cling wrap on her mouth. I’m shuddering with revulsion as I lay her out on the cold cobbles. I punch a hole in my cling wrap, clear the airway and puff breath into her mouth. I can feel no heartbeat but I don’t know where to check. I learned this at school, come on, Corinna, it’s push here and then breathe, count, then push again, breathe again. There are soft lips under the plastic. She feels like a child, all bones, high rib cage, stinks like a sewer. Breathe, count, push, breathe again.

    I’m dizzy. I don’t know how long I can do this or whether it’s working. Breathe, thump, breathe, thump. Both cats are watching me from the doorstep. Horatio joins them, looking quizzical. I see his point. I don’t know why I’m doing this either. She’s dead. There’s not the faintest response to all my shoving and I’m using bruising force.

    I can smell singeing. If I don’t get those Health Loaves out of the oven in five minutes they’ll catch fire. But somehow I can’t leave this filthy, childlike corpse, because what would I do if I stopped? Go inside and shut the door?

    Hands are on my shoulders. Someone is lifting me to my feet. I stagger up and see, blessings upon them, a pair of ambulance officers who look like they know just what they are doing.

    So I drag in a deep breath—I get to keep this one—go inside and haul the loaves out of the oven. They are slightly more crisp than usual but I’m sure the taste-challenged won’t notice. I find my cold coffee and drink it and the red mist recedes from my eyes. At school no one told me that CPR required Olympic levels of fitness.

    Then I go outside to see what has happened. I don’t want to. I just do.

    The paramedics have attached an oxygen mask to the girl’s face and are injecting her with something. I ask what.

    ‘Narcan,’ says one. ‘You did a good job, but it might be too late. The respiratory system shuts down, see, and starves the brain of oxygen. We get a lot of brain damage. But narcan cancels out the effect of opiates. Works fast. Right. Back away, lady. They usually wake up cross. Here we go, Jules.’

    Julie, his mate, had the girl by both arms, a constabulary come-along-o’-me grip which immobilises quite well. She needed it. The girl came up from her deathly trance screaming and bucking like a frightened beast. It was astounding. One minute she had been utterly still, pulseless and breathless, and the next she was struggling like a fish on a hook. Colour flushed her face. Pink, for a girl, not blue, for a corpse.

    ‘Cunts!’ she shrieked in an accent which I’d always heard associated with the best schools. ‘You narcanned me! I only had one hit! Gimme back my hit!’

    ‘Could have been your last hit,’ said Julie, holding her tightly. ‘You took too much. Take a breath, now.’

    ‘They’re always like that,’ observed the ambulance man, who must have seen how shocked I was. ‘You did good there. M’names Thommo. Nice to meet yer.’ We shook plastic gloves. He lit a cigarette. I suppose we all have our drug of choice. I took one of his smokes, though I stopped smoking three years ago. It tasted divine. Thommo continued my education. ‘Druggies mostly react like this. Don’t let it worry yer. From her point of view, we robbed her. Now she’s got to go and hustle for another hit. Lucky we’re not in the job for the gratitude,’ he added. ‘You want to come into casualty,’ he advised the girl. ‘Get a doctor to look at you.’

    ‘Yes, come on,’ urged Julie. ‘You were pretty close to the edge, you know. Can you tell me your name?’

    ‘Fuck off, cunt,’ said the patient.

    ‘Come on,’ said Thommo. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

    ‘No!’ screamed the girl, struggling so hard that she broke Julie’s grip. She staggered to her feet, unbalanced on one broken stiletto.

    ‘Working girl,’ said Julie. ‘They don’t want to miss out on a paying client by going to hospital.’

    ‘I’m not,’ shrieked the patient, hands out, fingers curved into claws.

    ‘Hey, Suze,’ said a deep, rich voice, as casually as if he had met her in the street at lunch hour, instead of confronting a screaming hysterical dervish in a back alley at five in the morning. ‘What’s happening?’

    A man had strolled into Calico Alley, walking over the hard damp cobbles without making a sound. He was tall, with close-cropped dark hair, a scar across his forehead, and the most penetrating, bright and beautiful eyes I had ever seen. He was dressed in jeans, boots and a leather jacket lined with fleece.

    ‘These cunts want to send me to hospital!’ Suze replied, moderating her tone. I wondered how many of my exceptionally respectable neighbours were even now listening fascinated from their bedroom windows above. Usually the only noise in Calico Alley at that hour was the muted hum of my machines and the occasional squeak as the Mouse Police made another arrest.

    ‘Chill,’ advised the man. ‘These kind people saved your life, and even if you don’t, I think it’s worth saving. Now say thank you nicely and come on. The bus stops at Flagstaff tonight, remember?’

    To my amazement, Suze turned to us and said, ‘Thank you,’ in the carefully enunciated voice of a well-behaved little girl who has taken elocution lessons, and followed the tall man out of Calico Alley.

    ‘Who was that masked man?’ I gasped, leaning back against the jamb and fanning myself.

    ‘That’s Daniel,’ said Julie, similarly affected. ‘He’s the heavy on the Soup Run. You’re a baker, aren’t you? Then he’ll be back.’

    ‘Oh, good,’ I said faintly. ‘Why?’

    ‘’Cos he’s on the Soup Run,’ said Thommo, nettled. ‘Gotta go,’ he added, listening to his radio. ‘Fry-up on the ring road. Come on, Jules.’

    Julie stuffed her equipment into her bag and prepared to follow her partner.

    ‘What’s a fry-up?’ I asked as she walked away.

    ‘A burning car,’ she said. ‘Nice work. You saved that girl’s life. ’Bye,’ she said.

    I went into the bakery, made my muffins and my French bread, threw in a few twists with the leftover dough, all the time trying not to think. The terrible colour of the girl’s face. The feel of her bones under my hands. And the cruel ungrateful strength of her reaction, which had not surprised the ambulance officers at all.

    It was only when I observed Horatio examining Heckle’s foot that I was recalled to my own duty of care to my dependants.

    Heckle, uncharacteristically, allowed me to feel over the injured foot. I could see a small puncture in the hard pad of his weathered paw. It had been bleeding freely, which, in view of what might have been in the syringe, was good. I bagged the syringe and put it in my drawer, meaning to take it with Heckle to the vet. Could cats catch AIDS? There was a feline version called…what was it called? God, I was so tired, and so cold…

    Heckle, who is basically an old softie, was purring rustily under my absent-minded caresses when there was a knock at the open door and the rich voice asked, ‘Can I come in?’

    ‘Why not?’ I asked, feeling weak.

    He drew the door closed behind him. Horatio, contrary to his usual practice, walked towards him, tail straight as a taper, uttering a polite greeting. Daniel of the Soup Run dropped to one knee, holding out a hand. Horatio was graciously pleased to allow his ears to be stroked and his whiskers smoothed.

    ‘What’s your name, ketschele?’ he asked.

    I found my voice. ‘He’s Horatio. This is Jekyll and this is Heckle, and I’m Corinna.’

    ‘Delighted,’ he said to all of us. ‘I came to thank you,’ he added, taking the other chair. Jekyll planted herself firmly on his foot. She is a cat who makes her intentions plain.

    ‘It was nothing,’ I murmured. ‘It bloody nearly was nothing, too. If those ambulance people hadn’t turned up…she was as blue as this floor…’

    I hadn’t realised how upset I was. Daniel dislodged Jekyll gently, took off his coat, wrapped it around me, and ferreted around in the stockroom. He came back bearing a bottle of brandy which I used for making fruit loaves, poured me half a glass and put it in my hands.

    ‘Nothing like that ever happened to you before, did it?’ he asked quietly. ‘Do you want water in your brandy? It’s all right. You’re shocked. You’ll get used to it.’

    ‘I hope not,’ I said, sipping. I don’t drink a lot of neat spirits and I choked a little. Daniel patted me on the back. He was so blatantly, physically attractive that even without the shock I doubted if my knees would have held me up. He had the same lithe, graceful movements as Horatio. No wonder they approved of each other. His jacket bore his scent, a clean male smell with a hint of sweet spice; cinnamon, maybe. He also had eyes one could happily drown in. And that wreck of a girl had been transformed into a good child under his influence. A magician. Meroe, the witch next door, would say he had great mana. He seemed to be considering my answer, which didn’t deserve any great consideration.

    ‘True. One should never get used to human suffering. But it is inevitable if you do this kind of work.’

    ‘What kind of work?’

    ‘I’m on the Soup Run,’ he said simply, as though this explained everything.

    ‘What’s the Soup Run?’

    His eyes widened into trout pools. I had amazed him.

    ‘But you live in the city. You must have seen us. The pink and green bus? We stop at four locations in the city. I’m on the late shift, ten p.m. until four a.m. I’ve just finished.’

    ‘Of course. You’re a social worker.’ I had certainly seen the bus, and remembered the shrieks of outrage from Keep Melbourne Clean when they used to stop outside a McDonald’s near the station. The pink and green bus attracted the homeless and the junkies like bees to Solomon Islands honey. I found it hard to imagine this cat-like spunk as a social worker. He saw what I was thinking and smiled.

    ‘Not really. I’m not trained in social work. The Soup Run has to deal with the wounded ones, the ones like Suze, as well as the hungry and the cold and the lost. Sometimes the clients can

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