Be the source.

The bread bikes turn left out of the bakery, and at the second corner they pass a gate in a wall, and behind the gate the buses are sleeping. I've walked past that gate for nine years. This morning I went in. It's a sand lot. Twenty-odd minibuses nose to tail, every one painted, every one with eyes. The eyes are done by hand above the headlights and each pair has a mood: one surprised, one suspicious, one I'd call tired of my nonsense. The washer does the bonnets first, bucket and rag, and by the time he reaches the tenth the first is dusty again. Sand is weather here, not a problem. Modou is twenty-two. I asked twice, because he looks nineteen. He's the apprentice, which means all day he rides the back step, calling stops and taking coins, and at half past four it means checking the door hinge with a torch in his teeth. The door is his, he told me. The drivers stand in a circle passing a thermos of coffee, sweet, with something peppery in it. I was handed the cup without being asked. That's how a depot says morning. Then the engines. Not together. One catches, coughs, settles into a rattle, and the man beside it moves on to the next, so the sound builds across the lot like a choir finding its note. At a quarter past five the first bus pulled out with three passengers, and the fourth was me. Cheikh drove the loop to the market and back and never asked why I was filming his windscreen. The bikes had gone past the gate by then, the other way, with the bread. Tomorrow I'm staying on past the market: the first bus stops at the top of the beach steps, and I want to see what's down them.

I sew from four because the machine is quieter than the street, and at four the street is only two sounds: the sea somewhere behind the houses, and the bakery. I have never owned an alarm. The oven door opens at ten past four, every day, and it sounds like a car boot slamming underwater. That's my clock. This morning I put the needle down and walked the sixty steps to see what my clock looks like. Moussa was singing. He scores the loaves with a blade the size of a fingernail, one flick each, and sings while he does it, low, the same four lines over and over. I asked what the song was. He said he didn't know, his mother sang it. I meant to ask for the words. Forgot. Next time. The deck oven is as long as my workshop. When he pulls the peel the loaves come out crackling, properly crackling, and it goes on for a full minute after they're on the rack. By half past four the riders are in the doorway. Ibrahima has a cloth-lined bag on each side of his back rack and packs the bread standing up, end to end, sixty to a bag, without counting. Well. He counts with his hands. The corner shops open at six and want it warm, so the bikes go out before the light does. I followed the smell down the street. It got to the corner before I did. First customer, half past five, a woman with a basket who took twelve loaves and no bag. Full house, she said, and left. I went back to the machine and didn't sew much. Thanks to Moussa for the doorway, and to Ibrahima for not running me over. The bikes turn left out of here and pass the minibus depot. That's tomorrow, half past four, if I'm awake. I'll be awake.

There are forty people in a basement corridor that normally holds two, and okay so, I'm one of the two. Open house. The lab does one at the start of every semester, which I didn't know when I told Otto he couldn't visit (Otto, I'm sorry: you can, twice a year). Families down the corridor, hands and noses on the glass, and the axolotls staring back, because no eyelids (part 2). Dolores stood by the end tank and answered "is it smiling at me?" forty times. I counted. Same answer, same patience: "That's just the shape of its mouth. It's a very happy-looking shape." Eli cracked. Eli, who refuses to name them on principle, was asked by a small person what the big pale one was called and said, under his breath, "Pickle." PICKLE. (I've been calling her Big Doris since part 2. Mine's better. Eli disagrees.) And me, I ran a table. A folding table with a sign, THINGS I GOT WRONG (by Tess), and a list: 1. Not fish. Salamanders that stay babies. 2. Not smiling. It's the mouth shape. 3. Not pets. Not these ones. 4. Not from Wisconsin. One lake system on the edge of Mexico City, and it's in trouble there. 5. Gills on the OUTSIDE. The feathery bits. 6. The pink is a lab thing. Wild ones are dark and blotchy. People read it and laughed and then asked me questions, which was terrifying, and then fine. Something I didn't say in part 1: I nearly quit after it. I called them fish to Dolores's face, went home and thought, I'm not a science person, I should do a story about a bake sale. Then Margit explained gills in the comments and was kind about it, and I came back on Thursday. Dolores says I can keep coming all semester. I wrote it on my hand, and then I washed my hands, because Eli says you always wash your hands. So it's in the notebook now, in pen, where it stays.

Nobody would tell me what the Wednesday lot was, so I went on a Wednesday. Same community centre as Saturday, back room this time, half six. Bernard's parts crate from the repair cafe is on the table with the dead toaster still in it. Two folding tables, seven adults, three teenagers, and a whiteboard headed THINGS THAT DID NOT WORK. It's longer than the list on the other side. Bernard says that's the point. The club is Bernard and another retired engineer: Pauline. Yes, Pauline off the tea urn. Lemon drizzle on Saturdays, electrics on Wednesdays. They argue about screwdriver sizes and have done, she says, since 1989. I'll list what they've built, because you know I will. One line-following robot, shoebox-sized, running on the motor out of a bread maker. It follows a strip of black tape round the lino and gets lost at the corner every third lap. Everyone cheers when it doesn't. One gripper, sprung with the lever out of a toaster. Opens, closes, picks up a whiteboard pen, drops the whiteboard pen. They're working on the dropping. One doorbell, wired into a biscuit tin by one of the teenagers. Nobody asked why. So, the shape of it. The library lends what you don't need to own. The repair cafe fixes what the library can't. The Wednesday lot take apart what the repair cafe can't fix and teach with the bits. Nothing gets binned till three lots of people have had a go. Which brings me to the pressure washer. I took it back up the hill to Mo this morning, dried and wiped, cleaner than I found it, which is the rule. The disco ball went back in its carrier bag. Office Friday was grand, thanks for asking. No cake on Wednesdays, just custard creams. Derek held the phone again and would like that noted. It was drizzling. It's Sheffield.

The queue started before the doors opened, which round here is a sign of something. Part two, then. Saturday, the community centre hall, ten till one, once a month. The repair cafe. The queue, in order: nine toasters, a sprung desk lamp from about 1974, a coat with a zip that's given up, a music box that plays one note and then thinks about it. Two vacuum cleaners. A clock. Then Mo from the library, ten past ten, with his TO FIX crate in a wheelbarrow. The rule's on a sign by the door: you sit with the fixer and you learn. No dropping and going. Bernard is seventy-four, does electricals, and has a biscuit tin of screws sorted by a system I couldn't work out. He finds the right one without looking. Nell does sewing and has never met a zip she was bothered by. The coat took ten minutes. She made the owner do the last bit himself. The music box got its tune back, all of it. The lamp, both vacuums and the clock went home working. I brought the pressure-washer hose from part one, the one that sprayed my shoe. Bernard looked at it, said "jubilee clip," and it was done in four minutes. Four. I'd have put up with that for a fortnight. Tested it in the car park after. Dry shoe. Grand. Toasters: eight fixed. Crumbs, mostly, and one lever spring. The ninth was pronounced dead at twenty to twelve, calmly, and went in a crate under Bernard's table marked PARTS. "That's for the Wednesday lot," he said, and wouldn't explain. Nobody will. So that's part three. Cake: lemon drizzle, from Pauline on the tea urn, gone by eleven. I had mine at quarter past ten because I've been before. Rained the whole time. Nobody minded. We were inside with the toasters.