Salt & Syrup

Annika Reynolds, twenty-nine years old and proud of it, pushed through the glass doors of the Shetland Ferry Terminal at five minutes past midnight, clipboard under her arm and a chip on her shoulder the size of Lerwick harbor. She had been a sommelier for five years now, since she came back from Paris at twenty-four with a diploma and a broken heart she never talked about, and in all that time nobody had ever asked her to judge gingerbread.

Her boss, Malcolm, had made it sound official on the phone that afternoon, something about the restaurant sponsoring the winter festival and needing somebody with a serious palate to evaluate what he called the sensory narrative of a rare entry. Annika had repeated the words sensory narrative back to him twice before she understood he was serious, and then she had hung up, looked at the ceiling of the wine cellar for a while, and said yes, because refusing the boss was not something a girl from a council flat did lightly.

The waiting room at midnight was a strange place for a competition. Rows of cracked plastic benches sat empty under the fluorescent hum, the vending machines glowed in the corner with their sad lights, and beyond the big glass doors the pier lights shivered over water black as ink. The air held diesel and salt, and underneath that, warm sugar, lots of it, coming from a folding stage someone had dragged in near the machines.

A man was up on the stage arranging a gingerbread house, and Annika stopped walking when she saw him, because she knew that back. Oliver, from the flat two doors down, the one who carried odd wooden shapes in and out of the building at strange hours and never said much in the stairwell beyond a nod. She had guessed carpenter, maybe cabinet maker. She had not guessed gingerbread.

He turned when her heels clicked on the linoleum, and his face did a small surprised thing, eyebrows up, mouth half open, before it settled into something more careful.

"Annika," he said. "From the building."

"The very one," she said, climbing the little steps to the stage with her clipboard held like a shield. "You're the rare entry, then. Oliver, right?"

"Oliver Bigshot," he said, and when she laughed he held up a finger. "Go on then, everyone does. It's a real name, my father's, and he suffered for it too."

He was thirty-one, she knew that much from the mail she'd once accidentally seen on the shared table, and he was twenty-four when he went off to Prague to learn puppet carving from some master whose name he never mentioned, which she knew because the woman in the ground floor flat gossiped. He was also, apparently, standing in a ferry terminal at midnight with icing on his knuckles.

"You're the one judging?" he asked, wiping his hands on a tea towel that had seen better decades.

"I'm the one evaluating the sensory narrative," Annika said, and heard how ridiculous it sounded, and winced. "Malcolm's phrase, not mine. I taste things and write down what I think."

Oliver looked at her for a moment, then at the gingerbread house, which was honestly beautiful, a crooked little cottage with piped snow and a spun sugar window that caught the neon and glowed like a lamp. Then he looked back at her with something she couldn't quite name, a sort of challenge mixed with curiosity, the look of a man deciding whether to show his cards.

"Alright," he said. "You say you've got a serious palate. Prove it."

"Sorry?"

"There's a spice in this gingerbread. Unusual. Not the kind of thing you find in a packet at the co-op." He broke a corner off the roof, one clean piece the size of a biscuit, and held it out on his flat palm. "Name it and I'll believe you're here to do a job and not just tick a box for Malcolm."

Annika set her clipboard down on the stage, slowly, because this was suddenly interesting and she did not want to look too keen. "And if I get it wrong?"

"Then we both learned something about pride," Oliver said, and there was no malice in it, just a plain flat honesty that she found herself liking more than she expected.

She took the piece. It was still faintly warm, the way gingerbread holds heat long after you'd swear it shouldn't, and the smell hit her first, dark and resinous, standing well back from the usual ginger and clove parade. She put it in her mouth and let it sit.

The taste filled her mouth the way a good tannin fills a mouth, broad and slow, a little bitter at the edges, and beneath it something almost floral, almost pine, with a faint soapy sweetness that most people would call strange and walk away from. She closed her eyes without meaning to. She thought of the smell of a cellar she had worked in outside Lyon, of barrels and old wood and the oil the coopers used on the staves, and she thought of a wine she had tasted once at twenty-three, a late harvest something, made by a man whose name she had promised herself she would never think of again, and she pushed that thought down hard and kept tasting.

"Take your time," Oliver said quietly, and he meant it, she could hear that he meant it, and that made her almost more nervous than the spice did.

She chewed slowly, letting the crumb dissolve, and the flavor opened up further the way good flavors do, unfolding rather than fading, and she knew, she absolutely knew, and the knowing came with a little lift in her chest she hadn't felt since Paris.

"Bog myrtle," she said, and opened her eyes. "Sweet gale. Foraged, not bought, or you'd never get it that fresh. It grows on peat, so whoever picked it was up on the moor, and you dried it yourself because the oils are still sharp. It's used in old heather ales, sometimes, and almost never in baking because it turns soapy if you're heavy-handed." She swallowed the last of the crumb. "You were light-handed."

Oliver stood there with the tea towel hanging forgotten from his fist, and his careful expression had come entirely undone, replaced by something open and young that made her feel warm in a way she decided not to examine.

"Well," he said. "Well, hell. Nobody's ever got it."

"Nobody's ever been asked," Annika said, picking up her clipboard, and he laughed then, a real laugh, loud in the empty waiting room, loud enough that a gull somewhere outside answered him.

"That's true, that's fair," he said. "Look. I've got a proper workspace in the back room, the terminal lets me use it for my puppet work in exchange for mopping their floors at night, and there's more, other trials, other things I've been playing with. If you're doing a real evaluation, a real one, you should taste them where they're made, not off a stage next to a vending machine." He rubbed a fleck of dried icing off his thumb, not quite meeting her eye. "Only if you want. No pressure either way."

Annika looked at the gingerbread house, and the black water beyond the doors, and the clock above the machines that said her ferry, when it finally came, was still over three hours out.

"Show me the back room," she said.

The back room was behind a door Annika had walked past a hundred times without noticing, because it looked like a janitor's cupboard, and Oliver knocked on it in a particular rhythm before pushing it open sideways, and she realized the whole door was a false front, hinged where a hinge had no business being. "The terminal gave me the old lost property room," he said, holding it wide. "Nobody ever claims anything on an island this size, so it was mostly mine if I wanted it, and I wanted it."

Annika stepped through and stopped, and forgot for a moment that she was supposed to be working.

Puppets hung from hooks on every wall, dozens of them, marionettes with carved faces and jointed limbs, some of them dressed, some of them bare wood, and they turned very slightly in the draft from the door as a room full of quiet guests might decide whether to greet her. There was a workbench under a lamp with knives and chisels laid out in careful rows, and jars of thread and wax, and shavings on the floor that smelled of pine and linseed. And in the middle of the room, on a low table, sat a wooden box the size of a sea chest, lid propped open, and it was full of paper.

"What is that?" she asked, drifting toward it before she'd decided to.

"Time capsule," Oliver said, coming in behind her and dropping the tea towel on a stool. "Sort of. I started it three years ago, when I was twenty-eight and having a rough winter, and the idea was I'd write one note a week and seal it up and open it in ten years, so the version of me ten years on could see what mattered to the version of me now. Except I keep opening it to add things, which rather defeats the purpose, I know." He scratched his jaw, leaving a smear of icing near his ear. "There's dried flowers in there too, from my mum's garden, and a ferry ticket, and half a heel of a shoe I broke dancing at the Up Helly Aa do, don't ask."

Annika leaned over the box. There were hundreds of notes, folded and refolded, written in a hand that swung between careful and furious, and on top of the pile lay a sprig of something brown and papery that had probably once been heather. It smelled, faintly, of the moor, and she thought of bog myrtle and peat and the sharp oils of a man who foraged his own spices, and she stepped back before the thought went anywhere.

One puppet hung nearer than the rest, right by the lamp, a woman with a clever carved face and a dress of dark green silk, and Annika touched the skirt without thinking, the way you touch anything lovely, her fingers reading the weight of it, the slippiness, the give.

"Careful," Oliver said, but not sharply. "That one's mine. She's the lead in a piece I'm building for the school hall at Christmas."

"She's beautiful."

"She's a nightmare. Her left knee jams if the humidity's wrong." He came and stood beside her, not touching her, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off his sleeve, and he looked at her fingers on the silk and then at her face. "You use your hands like that and then claim it's your tongue that does the work?"

"Sorry?"

"You said earlier, your palate, your five years, all of it comes out of your mouth." He nodded at her hand, still resting on the puppet's dress. "But you touch things the way a blind person reads. So which is it, Annika? Do you trust your fingers as much as your tongue, or is that just something people say?"

Annika took her hand off the silk slowly, because he had caught her out and she knew it, and pride was a funny thing, it stung first and then it wanted to show off. "Prove me wrong," she said. "You've got three hours of my ferry and a room full of your own props. If you can find something my mouth knows that my fingers don't, I'll say so out loud, in front of your puppets."

Oliver looked at her for a moment, and then he grinned, and it changed his whole face, made him look like the twenty-four year old who'd gone off to Prague with a suitcase and no plan. "Right," he said. "Sit down, then. And close your eyes."

She sat on the stool by the workbench, and he rummaged in a drawer and came back with a length of velvet ribbon, wine dark, the kind he probably used for puppet hair or costuming, and he held it up.

"This okay? It's clean, it's soft, and you can pull it off yourself any time you like, one tug and it's done. Say no and we do it with eyes shut and peeking like a cheater at cards."

"You're very thorough with your consent, Mr. Bigshot."

"I had a relationship for two years with a glassblower who taught me you ask about everything, including the hot end of a punty rod, so yes, I ask." He waited, ribbon in hand.

"Yes," Annika said. "Tie it."

The velvet went soft across her eyes and the room went warm and close, all lamp-light and pine shavings and linseed, and every sound got bigger, the tick of the old radiator, the sea pushing at the pier beyond the wall, Oliver's footsteps on the boards as he went to the time capsule and came back. "Three samples," he said. "From the box, because everything in it means something to me, so you're not just tasting, you're tasting my last three years, which is a bit mad when I say it out loud, but you started this with the prove it business."