I was driving to a writer’s festival in a remote town east of Perth and, on the way, stopped off at a bakery. The building was dire. The glass of the shop front had cracked. The signage had faded. And the door creaked when you opened. Looking back, though, the exterior was almost charming to what lay inside.

I wouldn’t have gone in had I not been with my dad who doesn’t like pickiness.

“You want a pie? Well, here’s a pie shop. What’s the problem?” he’d say, sternly.

If he did ask that, I’d probably say the following: The display had only four pies and a lamington which looked a week old, every corner was filled with cobwebs, the floors were sticky and the walls stained. And that was probably the bakery’s most palatable defaults.

Behind the counter stood a kid of about 19 years old. He had long hair that extended outward like he was being perpetually electrocuted, and he clearly hadn’t shaved. His facial hair was sparse but long, something you’d see on a senile lady’s chin. He wore a white bonds singlet with more stains than a toddler’s bib after dessert. The blemishes were a brownish hue too.

He wasn’t a person you’d trust to make a quality pie or, for that matter, any food that merely didn’t give you Salmonella.

But the kid wasn’t the unnerving thing.

Nope.

On the other side of the counter was a kitchen bench and above that was a mosquito zapper hanging from the roof.

I didn’t notice at first. I was transfixed on the kid pacing back and forth as if he’d just sculled 14 red bulls. But then I heard a ZAP.

“Did you hear that?” I said to dad.

“What?” he said.

ZAP.

“That. Did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” dad said. “Sounds like a mosquito zapper.”

“Ha! In a bakery?” I said. “Indoors?” I continued. “Unlikely.”

ZAP.

Yes, the zapper was busy electrocuting hordes of flies who fell for the fatal trap. The flies died and then dropped onto a pile of other victims at the base of the zapper cage. Occasionally, the fly didn’t land on the pile, though. Rather, it fell onto the kitchen bench where a rotund pastry chef rolled doe.

I’m not too precious about cleanliness.

I mean, I’m not opposed to a clean bench and kitchen and washed hands. That is necessary, of course.

But I’ve come across several pedantic customers with standards of cleanliness that are impossible.

“What’s the state of the kitchen like?” a customer once asked after ordering gluten-free banana bread.

“What?” I said.

“I mean, I’m wondering whether any gluten particles could accidentally find its way onto the bread or knife? I’m gluten intolerant, you see.”

“Are you asking whether there are flour particles in the air?”

“All I’m saying is I can’t have anything that’s even brushed gluten. Otherwise, I’ll have to be hospitalised. The effects are immediate.”

Even though I’d just cut a fresh loaf of bread with the knife, I assured the man the knife, nor the bread, hadn’t ‘brushed a particle of gluten’.

I don’t want to mess with another human’s health but the man was erring on the side of paranoia, surely. While I had an urge to dump white flour onto the gluten-free banana bread, I merely settled at slicing a piece with an unwashed knife.

And yes.

The man did not die. He sat for a number of hours—very happily, actually.

People are too paranoid. Immune systems are far more robust than what many believe. Although, I say that with a caveat.

While I did use to eat the leftover chips on customer’s tables when I was a poor university student, there are lines.

Dead flies in your meat pie, for example.

ZAP.

I stood watching the zapper light up like a strobe light, wondering why the owner of the bakery thought the fly equivalent of an electric chair was a nice add-on to the interior.

Any person with a mild sense of hygiene would’ve hired an insect specialist or at least tried to investigate the underlying cause for why the majority of insects in Western Australia wanted to come into your store. Cleaning the stale custard caked onto the walls probably would have helped.

I don’t want to make unfair assumptions here but I imagine the conversation between the pastry chef and the kid in the singlet went like this:

“There’s a shit load of flies, aye,” the pastry chef said while drinking an Iced Mocha and smoking a Winnie Blue over a pot of steak and kidney gravy. “What we gonna do?”

“I could get me step dad’s mozzie zapper?” the kid said as he licks a bit of gravy on his singlet.

“Good thinkin, Billy. That’ll teach the little bastards.”

“Where we gonna put it?”

“Well, they hang around here, near the bench here. So I reckon just above that, aye.” The pastry chef puffed away, then skulled the Mocha.

“Makes sense,” the kid said.

“It’s like a double trap, Billy. We attract ‘em in with the smell of pastry and the light and then BAM. Out like a light switch, Billy.”

“Yeah! Bam. Out like a light switch,” the kid in the singlet echoed, before driving off in his holden ute to get the zapper.

ZAP.

I’ve made these assumptions because the kid seemed unapologetic about the zapper. Actually, he looked almost proud when another fly flew into the electric light like he was gloating in how effective his idea was. I looked at dad and cocked an eyebrow, gesturing my confoundment.

I wondered, how many ramshackle establishments have I been to who run an unsanitary operation like this?

A lot, I’m guessing.

I worked at a wine store and the owner—let’s call him David— once told me he worked a vintage in the Swan Valley, a stretch of wine country in the Perth hills.

“We had a cockroach infestation,” David said. (Apparently, the cockroaches had crawled into tanks where the freshly picked grapes were.) “For every bucket of grapes, there were about 20 cockroaches,” he added.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

David proceeded to tell me he consulted the head winemaker who finally instructed him to put the grapes through the press—the press is like a giant juicer—which meant the end product consisted of about 1% cockroach juice.

“Did you taste it?” I asked.

“Absolutely not. Curiously, though, the bottles sold well.”

So well, in fact, a few years later, a lady asked David who was working in another wine store at the time whether he had any bottles of THAT vintage left.

“It’s one of the best Cabernets I’ve ever tasted,” she said.

He didn’t have any bottles left so he called up the head winemaker.

“No,” the head winemaker said. “All sold out. It’s the best selling vintage we’ve ever had. ”

“But,” David said. “Wasn’t that the year of the cockroach infestation?”

“Yeah!” the head winemaker said. “We’ve been trying to get them back ever since!”

The problem, I believe, is we know too much. We know cow’s milk makes us bloated, or something. We know a solitary cashew nut can send half a primary school to hospital. Sometimes I wonder whether the mass hysteria is what weakens the body and not the ingredients and germs themselves.

I watched a documentary on a temple in India which idolised rats. So much so, the devotees welcomed, even encouraged these rodents from the surrounding slums to make the temple home. They left out water bowls, food, even nesting pods.

The devotees didn’t shy from touching them, either. One even sat down in lotus position and began drinking from a bowl of water from which 10 rats were also drinking from.

That the resident was 90 years of age but looked only 60 proves perhaps that drinking from the same water as sewer rats is not only unharmful but the secret to minimising wrinkles, hair loss, and staying flexible.

I’d imagine a few doctors would like to refute this statement.

So where does this curious relationship between what we believe is harmful and what is actually harmful start and stop?

I’d like to argue flies in pies.

ZAP.

“So what do youse want?” the kid behind the counter asked me and dad.

The pies looked edible enough but I couldn’t shake the idea that under the crusty exterior lay hundreds of dead flies hanging suspended in gravy.

My dad—who grew up in a place where bakeries like this were fairly standard—thought otherwise.

“A steak and pepper, mate,” dad said.

“I don’t know if I’m that hungry,” I said, despite having complained about being malnourished the entire car journey. Dad, who was aware of the reason to why I suddenly lost my appetite, told me to stop being so precious.

So I relented. I decided that the stake and pepper looked the least like they had sat there for a month.

He was picking the two pepper steaks out of the cabinet when I was about order when the zapper went into a flux. There was a ZAP so loud and prolonged you would've thought a bird had flown into it. Everyone looked at the light show that was the zapper.

I stared down the kid, demanding an explanation. I mean, did he really expect us to eat there after that?

The zap finally finished. The kid looked from zapper back to us.

“Woah,” he said, eyes wide and grinning. “Big fucker, aye.”

—

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