Coffee and Sugar

by C. Sean McGee

CHAPTER TEN

  The next morning Joao woke with new life and purpose and he felt alive in his own skin feeling himself moving through the air and parting through life, at one with existence. When he showered, he felt every drop of water touch his skin and run down his body, tickling every nerve and splashing in a pool above the rusted grate that guided each droplet in a swirl down into the blackness of the drain below his feet.

  When he brushed his teeth, he felt every bristle scratching the surface of his enamel and he could hear the sound of plaque, bread crumbs and old coffee lifting off his teeth like old wallpaper and he wondered if the same drops that had washed his skin the day before were the very same droplets of water now rushing from the faucet to wash away the black grime from the tips of the bristles on his brush. Had those droplets cleansed his arms and his legs in a time when he was less spirited and if so, how did they feel about him now; now that he filled every breath with a mount of gusto?

  When he left for work, the church was in an abysmal state from a night of savage drinking by The Bishop, something which was becoming more common. Joao said little about the drinking or the drugs. He always knew the Bishop had an unquenchable thirst but for many years; for as long as he could remember, it had been contained.

  Mother always gave the beast enough room to stretch its legs but not enough to dance so he was permitted his nightly drink to unwind. But every now and then, he would come to Sunday lunch reeking of dried vomit but, for the most part, he was a seasoned patron of sobriety, a pillar of moral aptitude who spoke ill of alcohol and all other broths stewed for the devil’s seed.

  Today The Bishop was much different, lying in a yellow patch of drying sticky urine; his belt unbuckled, his pants pulled down to his knees, his dress shirt stuffed inside his stained yellow underwear, one shoeless foot sticking up in the air and his toes poking through tears in his woolen socks looking like a sick headless mushroom.

  He wore a pained expression, probably from having dressed in some untoward disgrace at some point between unbuckling his belt and becoming unconscious during his drinking binge. He looked as if he were constantly being buggered by some pungent aroma with his nose scrunched up and his upper lip arched, dried and stuck to his gums showing his crooked, brown front teeth.

  Joao picked his father up and dragged him towards the curtain behind the kitchen, laying him down on his bed so that he could wake, just a little bit less inglorious than when he had gone to sleep. On his way out he tidied up very quickly, picking up the broken shards of glass on the floor, throwing a wet towel on the patch where his father had pissed his own pants and affixing to the wall again, the picture of his mother, sitting on the wooden bench back on the farm. He shook off the broken glass and hanged the frame back on the wall where it belonged, looking down over them.

  Down the hill, he passed the men with guns, watching over his step, snarling at his face and laughing behind his back. Joao paid no mind, he kept his momentum skipping down the hill, jumping over pot holes and singing to himself as he went along. He couldn’t wait to relive the day before and maybe again, get a chance to serve someone but if not it was ok because it was good enough to be useful at something than to want to find a use in everything.

  At the bottom of the hill, he passed The Nice Old Lady who sold him; the night before, the beautiful plastic table that they used in the church to hold their television and small statues of Jesus.

  “Excuse me, mam,” he said, “I think you might have made a mistake last night when you sold me the table, remember? I think maybe you accidentally took, by accident, of course, I’m not saying you’re a thief, I mean you’re an old lady, a nice old lady and thieves look more like…. Well… them” he said, pointing to the men with guns on the hill and the emaciated boys upon them begging.

  “But I think maybe you mistook the notes and you didn’t know because I had two hundred dollars in my wallet but now there’s only eight and I didn’t want you to be shocked that you had extra money and you didn’t know where it came from, not because you’re old. I’m not saying that you did this because you’re old, I mean maybe you did, you know, not that you’re senile, but sometimes, you know at night it’s really hard to see some things and when you get more, umm, mature, yeah mature, when you get older, well your eyes strain and…”

  “Fuck off you whiny little cunt,” said The Nice Old Lady slamming the door in Joao’s face.

  Joao stood in passive negation staring in through the shop window like a disciplined puppy, unsure what it was he had done to be locked out in such furor and wanting to pleasant himself more to be allowed back in. He thought maybe it was something he had said. Joao called a spade a spade and even sometimes when the spade was disabled, he couldn’t help himself from staring idly at the broken dangly parts making the spade feel more like a shovel, in a room full of spades.

  “I’ll speak to her later, it must be her period” he thought, having learned from his father and brothers that all women’s irrationality was born once a month and knowing nothing of the science of what they were actually talking about, just that it was apparently an appropriate assumption of a difficult woman.

  On the bus, it was much of the same. The wonder and awe that had slapped his face when he first entered the city had no less strength in its daily waking, greeting him like a dancing string with new dimension every time he blinked; new faces, new contours and new struggles etched upon the bridge of worry parting a sea of emotional eyes; each telling their own tale of sunken promise and buried treasure, entrenched somewhere in the pulling depths of their fathomless appetites.

  “Good morning my dear Joao. How did you sleep after your first day of work?” said Fatts grinning madly.

  “Fine sir, I mean, Mr. Fatts,” said Joao.

  “Let’s get started. If you want a coffee, you can have five minutes before the morning rush piles up. The vat’s primed” said Fatts.

  “If I could, I mean, if you don’t mind, could I make you a coffee?” asked Joao.

  “Knock yourself out, kid. Whatever you need to get your batteries charged. Big day today. We got the final this afternoon. If you thought yesterday was busy, you wait till you see this place fill up. So where are you living?” he asked.

  “On the hill,” said, Joao.

  “Oh. That’s a colourful neighborhood alright. Some pretty bad characters around those parts. You near the bottom?”

  “At the top,” said Joao pleased.

  “You’re kidding me? Are you crazy? That’s just for junkies, whores and tourists. What the heck are you doing living up that high? You know how dangerous it is right? Who are you living with? Do you have a family?” asked Fatts concerned.

  “I live with my daddy. The rest of my family live on the farm. They work real hard they do” he said.

  “What about your father, what does he do?” asked Fatts.

  “He’s a bishop. Real good he is, probably the best. We have a church on the hill, that’s why we moved there. Daddy is going to be famous like The 13th Apostle. You know on the farm everyone comes from all over to listen to daddy preach every week” said Joao.

  “Nobody’s gonna visit that church, not as long as It’s on that hill. Not even god can compete with cheap crack and free pussy. And the people that go up there, they can’t be saved my friend. But I guess you probably know that by now. Just watch out. If you ever get in any trouble you call me ok?” said Fatts.

  “I’ll make you that coffee. If you don’t mind, though. Could you go and do something? I need to concentrate” said Joao.

  “Ok, sure, anything you need little buddy. You need me just holler” said Fatts walking out from behind the counter and moving some boxes from the entrance of the café to the wall near the door to the storeroom, creating a nice neat stack that reminded Joao of the hay stacks his mother used to pile back on the farm except his mother would grunt like a stubborn ox every time she planted one pile on top of the other and she had to swing her gargantuan upper body back into a vertical po
sition.

  Joao took a glass from the sink and rested it on the counter in front of himself. He then took the small white filter from the top drawer, still white because it had never been used in all the years that it had taken up space in the drawer. He placed the filter gently on top of a silver pot, nothing too big; it couldn’t boil a potato or anything, maybe a couple of eggs standing on their ends but it was the perfect size to rest the filter and fill maybe two glasses of coffee for Fatts so that he could dance with his shadow and be sang to by his soul.

  Next he took the container of coffee and pressed his fingers into the fine powder, not pulling at anything, just letting his fingers move in and out of the dark powder like long slender worms, pushing their way down through the container until the compressed wall of thick coffee wouldn’t let them travel any further, then pulling them back up slowly to swim through the loose fine grains that sat atop like a pool of dried granulated water.

  He looked to Fatts who was twisting his hips like a giant crane; his feet cemented into the cold tiles and his body turning on its axis with his back arched over and his hands hanging low like two chains with fleshy mechanical claws gripping at the boxes and spinning and turning on a dime to return the cargo to the wall beside the door, his feet never shifting from where they had planted and the smile on his face, infectious and distracting.

  “Hey look, Joao, I’m a robot,” said Fatts, spinning and turning and making mechanical noises whilst moving his arms on imaginary pivots.

  As much as Joao tried, he couldn’t imagine any worry or bother in this man. Fatts was so magnetized by life that it seemed only kindness and gratuity stuck to his skin. Even the mosquitos that buzzed by his ears and rested on his arms didn’t bite. He was a happy man and looking into his eyes and watching how he spoke with his body, it was impossible to believe that he had ever struggled or cursed his way through a single second of his life. Try as he did, Joao just couldn’t find it, until the uniformed men walked in.

  The same violent looking man with a stone like stare entered the café with his right finger masturbating the latch of his holstered weapon, just as he had done the day before and Joao looked straight at Fatts, who; though apparently calm and inviting, had the same look in his eyes that his father had had when the boys with guns visited them that night in their church. It was the same look a roo gives when it narrowly misses a speeding road train.

  By the entrance stood the uniformed man’s two subordinates, looking anything but subordinate; to the passers-by and to anyone with a liking to their pulse.

  Joao gazed into the eyes of Fatts and froze for a moment in time. He found at that moment, Fatts as a young boy and no older than eight, standing in front of his mother as their crazed landlord cursed in vile obscenity, spitting through the air as every word aborted from his castigating tongue.

  Behind him, his mother shivered in fright, clinging to her son and trying to pull him behind her so that he could be spared from the cruel prizing of her dependent life. But it was no use, the boy stood firm in front of her, staring down the maniacal madman, ready to strike at whatever part he could reach to protect the last dregs of innocence, curdled within a decaying shell of decrepit addiction and mal treatment that was his dear, once loving mother.

  When the man stopped his screaming, he slammed the door shut in Fatts’ face, shattering the two panes of glass in the centre and sending he and his mother backwards onto the floor; his mother collapsing into a useless pile of drooping flesh and brittle bone, her scrawny pen like fingers clutching at the blotchy skin above her eyes, catching the tears that ran down her face onto the palms of her scaly hands and down her arms, filling the open scabs and punctured flesh from old and scarred needle marks.

  “What’s wrong with her?” spoke a voice from the corridor near the now open door, swinging on broken hinges.

  Joao; looking through Fatts’ eyes, saw a young girl standing by the open door watching in estranged wonder as her friend’s mother lay foetal in the middle of the room in her soiled panties, shivering and sulking as drool spilled from her blistered mouth and a small stream of clear urine trickled down her leg onto the floor.

  Fatts had on his face, the same look of waking and willowing shame that he wore in this factual moment outside of this daydream, having been caught by Joao in a moment of secrecy that he would rather have kept inside the invisible confines of obscurity. His eyes were wide and glazed with surprise as if his red hand were drawn upon a brilliant white canvas on his face. The girl was looking at his mother crumpled on the floor, but he felt her eyes looking only sullenly at him, casting their judgment and abating their congeniality.

  “Please go,” Fatts said to the girl by the door.

  “It’s ok Fatts. I won’t tell anyone. She looks sick. Is she sick? She looks hungry. Is she hungry?”

  “Just go away,” screamed the eight year old boy in ire disgrace to the only person he had ever called a friend, “I want to be alone” he continued in broken and tear laden speech.

  “I’m sorry Fatts. I just want to help” she said.

  “I don’t want your help. I don’t want to ever see you again” he yelled.

  The girl left, crying into her hands as Fatts turned to his mother on the floor who was shaking uncontrollably.

  “I think I wet myself again. Can you change me?” she said.

  Fatts sighed.

  As he changed his mother and wiped her clean, he thought of the only friend he had ever had, staring at him mockingly and he knew she wasn’t like that. He knew that she cared, but it cursed him for her to see him like this, nursing his drug afflicted mother, cleaning her soiled panties, wiping dried urine from her legs and now, mixing heroin in a spoon and sticking old rusted needles into her veins because she couldn’t do any of it herself.

  When he returned to his own sight; back in the instant of a moment, he watched the same wide eyes looking at him wishing him away as the uniformed man with his finger rubbing against his weapon took him away in a firm handshake and guided him through the store room door and when the handle clicked, Joao looked down at his fingers which had; in the extent of his delusion, placed grain by grain, the fine dark powders into the filter.

  He took the boiling water that sat on the stove beside him and slowly, gently and delicately poured the water along the sides of the filter so that again, the fine grains of his struggle folded over themselves and stained the water with the burden of his silent trouble. The water boiled just right so that it wouldn’t burn or denigrate any of the grains more than the truth of his soul required them to be.

  Joao turned to take from the far end of the counter, the small container of sugar; the one had had prepared himself the day before, pouring it with kind gentility in his heart into a container he had cleaned with his own hands so that it was free of the grease and the plume of the stresses and cynical passage of spoons that shoveled copious amounts of sweet obscenity into stained glasses of vatted mediocrity.

  As before, he let his mind wander as his fingers slid into the grains and felt their way around the image and emotion playing out in his mind. He thought about the kind and sweet moments that filled Fatts’ eyes and the reserve in his soul, those moments that made all of the bitter ones much easier to stomach.

  The first image that played in his mind was of Fatts lowering his massive upper body to unhook the small but sturdy latch at the bottom left corner of the metallic grey roller door at the entry to the café. The sounded of the latch turning caused him to smile, not because of the sound of twisting metal scratching against a worn hinge, but because it was followed by the brisk shuffling of worn shoes on broken cement; the sound of joyous expectation scratching away the binds of beleaguering disappointment as an old man; the same old man who had slept on his steps for the past ten years, threw off his heavy stinking blanket, woken by the sound of twisting keys and turning locks and jumped to his feet in celebrative joy.

  And just as the old man shuffled excitedly; expecting to see the we
lcomed grin of Fatts, so too did Fatts, twist nervously at the key and snatch at the lock, hoping to hear the excited shuffling of feet and then, when the door pulled high and the sun burst in the darkness, to see the old man’s smiling face with his single wobbling tooth shouting good morning through the thick brush of his straw like beard and his husky voice shaking off the night’s trouble with a comical and solicitous murmur.

  Joao wore the same momentous grin on his face as his fingers worked seemingly with their own independence, picking at each grain, finding the ones that magnetized to the joy that sang in Fatts’ heart and that corralled to the theme of a metal latch twisting and turning.

  He took the cup in his hands and softly blew away the steam that spelled from the top whilst slowly twisting and turning hands as if he were trying to gently and patiently find his favourite song on an old vinyl record.

  As his hands turned, so too the grains danced to the song of his heart, each finding a path of its own inside the bitter struggle of Fatts’ soul, choosing to settle where each grain thought that it needed to settle, being only where it belonged.

  When the coffee was done, so too was the secrecy in the store room and the two men came back out into the now filling café where tired eyes were straining over distant chalk boards debating their morning feed.

  The Uniformed Man joined his subordinates with his wallet in his back pocket seeming larger than when he had entered before. Fatts watched him leave almost insultingly and as quick as it had appeared, the anger in his eyes vanished and he was again making robot sounds and swishing his body about like a giant crane, winning the smiles of customers and most importantly, garnishing the widened smile of Joao who was walking over to him now with the cup of coffee.

  “Great,” he said, “this is just what I….ahhh…”

  He shut up.

  When the coffee touched his tongue, the whole world seemed to vanish and all of the wrongs that he had been sweeping away and washing down the street were no less stained in his mind than they were on the broken cement at the foot of his café.

  As the first sip eased down his throat he felt his own soul stretching out his skin, making every nerve tingle and as he cast out a relieving sigh, he felt that very soul embracing him in a warm ardent hug and it spoke to him and introduced him to his shadow and he saw his shadow for the first time and it invited him to dance and with every sip, he was taken in familiar arm, dancing in the whim of eternity where god itself hummed the echo of his dancing feet as they shuffled and tapped upon the golden floors of heaven.

  Joao watched on in distant celebration as Fatts drank from the essence of his own life, reliving every secret he had abandoned deep in his memorial regret and listening to the faint whisperings of his childhood that he had ushered into absolute silence and so too; in that very same moment, tasting the sweetness ingrained in the unexplainable sensations that he was unconscious to when all of his senses aligned in one repeated moment, crouched over a rusted lock with the passage of dawn at his toes.

  Feeling dizzy, Joao sat down on a stool to catch his breath leaning his head over his skinny legs, resting his hands onto his knees, staring idly at the floor and heaving in and out like an old work horse retreated in its stables.

  His mind was light and fuzzy and his head felt like he was being pricked with a thousand tiny hot pins and very soon this sensation swept down the entire of his body until; while fastened in his absent stare, he wiggled furiously his sleeping toes to rid them of the sensation and convince whatever demon were trying to possess his sleeping body that there was still someone at the controls.

  Joao felt like this after every coffee that he poured. At first it was a light and intermitting depression, a warmth in his mind that streamed through his veins and tickled his toes. It was the kind of warmth that weighed his blood and made him feel heavier and more aged. It was a feeling that always passed, generally quite fast like a sizable wake trailing from the side of speeding craft or the sadness that followed the death of a pet as behind any incident, some time is taken to extract the fibres of love from one’s heart and set its spirit free.

  As Joao sat heaving on the stool, he was being swept up by the wake of Fatts’ struggle and it was so unlike any he had felt before. He wondered for a moment if this was normal if other people experienced what he experienced and how exactly did they keep their head above this torrent of sadness?

  “Are you alright Joao? Do you feel sick? You don’t look so good, why don’t you lie down for a moment” said Fatts helping Joao off his stool and taking him into the store to lay down on a pile of coats and kitchen shirts.

  As he was being carried along, Joao’s eyes followed the ground and the back and forth of Fatts’ feet, stretching out in front of his sight and pulling the world beneath them as if he didn’t move himself, that he was so strong and gallant, so heavied by his youth that he made the world move for him.

  He imagined that his legs must be so strong to carry so much sadness and shame in his heart but that none of this was his fault and that a man as kind as Fatts should not feel shame for something he did not bring upon himself, something that he willed to change and for being able to see and still love and care for; in his junky mother, a thread of goodness that was enshrouded in a thickly woven tapestry of decrepitude and despondent and irreversible self-abandon.

  “Thank you, Joao. That was a wonderful coffee. You have quite a gift. Would you like to work the counter?” asked Fatts.

  “Really? Yes, I mean I’d love to but maybe not all the time. I get tired after I make a coffee. I think I’m not good at it. My mother says I am like an appendix, completely useless and the only time you notice me is when something is wrong. I guess she’s right, I mean look at me. I can’t even make a coffee without feeling sick” he said.

  “Do you actually believe that? That you’re useless?” asked Fatts.

  “I guess so. Mother would know. And daddy, he went to school and all. He can write good and really read and he says the same thing. I was no good on the farm, just kept getting in the way. I used to make everyone coffees, though” he said.

  “Oh yeah,” said Fatts enthusiastic “and what did they think?”

  “I never told them it was me who did it. I watched through the broken kitchen window. Watched them all drink their coffees every morning and night and they really enjoyed it, but if they knew it was me who did it, I don’t think they’d like it as much.”

  “Suggestion is a heck of a thing. Don’t feel off. What you have can’t be taught or learned in school. And what’s the point of being smart enough to read if everything read makes you dumb. Do you know what a fifty one percenter is?” asked Fatts.

  “No, I don’t. Is it like math or something? Do I need it to work the counter?” Joao asked unartfully.

  “Not at all. This is something you don’t wanna be. Something that everyone is, a fifty one percenter. There was an old proverb I always liked. Made me feel good about my simple education. It says that ‘it’s better to be untaught than ill-taught’. Basically means it’s better to know nothing and figure things out by yourself than to learn the wrong way by someone who was probably taught the wrong way and to not know something right. You see, everyone in this city is a fifty one percenter. What I mean is that when they were in school and university, they were all content, no not content, they were relieved to get fifty one percent in all of their exams. You see, all that’s important in this world is certificates. A certificate looks like a hundred percent. You see someone with a doctor certificate or a lawyer or an engineer or something like that and you assume the certificate means they have a hundred percent knowledge, but they don’t. In fact, all of them are fifty one percenters. At university, they either struggled to keep up with the knowledge or they were swept up by the ‘the world is yours’ mentality and spent their time in bars, growing beards and debating dead philosophers as if it actually mattered. Then when it came time to their tests and exams, they all scraped in over the line and they were e
cstatic, to get fifty one percent, because, at the end of their learning, fifty one percent meant a hundred percent title.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, even though they only know fifty one percent of the subject, they have a certificate that says they are a hundred percent qualified. That is the world we live in, a world of fifty one percenters. Think about it, nearly every doctor in this city got forty nine percent of their answers wrong in university meaning that; being a fifty one percenter, every second decision they make will be wrong. Now you imagine how many decisions a doctor will make every day, how many do you think are wrong?”

  “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “That’s the world we live in buddy. Designed and mapped by schizophrenic and bi-polar geniuses and administered and maintained by fifty one percenters. There is nothing wrong with you Joao. You’re a hundred percent in my book. Don’t compare yourself to any of these pseudo scholars. If you do, that’ll be your forty nine percent decision and guess what; you’ll be just like them. How you feeling?” he asked with a gentle hand on Joao’s shoulder.

  “Better Mr. Fatts. I feel better. Thank you. You’re a good man Mr. Fatts. Like on the TV” Joao said, picking himself up off the floor and walking with a more steadied step out of the store room to attend to his mop and broom.

  “TV?”

  “The Carriage of my Heart,” said Joao, surprised he had not picked his own resemblance in the mirror by now.

  “I don’t watch television. Maybe you can describe it to me one day” said Fatts.

  “Ok, great, well there is this boy from the country that moves to…”

  “One day” said Fatts, lightly patting Joao on the back, taking the rest of his coffee in his hand and sitting on a stool in the corner of the store, watching discreetly, the people eating, conversing and lazing about in his café; the life that emanated from each and every one and as the cup touched his lips, he closed his eyes and vacationed inside his soul once again.

  Joao took to his mop and busied himself around the café, watching how the leaves inscribed on the sticky tiles always seemed to match and he wondered if the tiler had meant it this way or whether he had just been lucky. They looked very pretty running along the floor and up along the walls, but they were disorientating and after basing his senses in cheap bleach, his mind started to drift and the walls started to breathe, pushing in and out and all of the pretty blue flowers started to spin like little cellophane fans.

  Joao smiled as; from the bustling street, in walked The Nervous Lady who; for as long as she had walked in through that entrance, had always brought with her, a fervor of anxiety and viral stress for the other baristas who generally played a game of paper, rock, scissors to see who would have to brave her intolerable fickleness; at times debasing their the façade of endearing respect, throwing their hands about in front of her depreciating eyes.

  Today though was different.

  The Nervous Lady walked straight up to the counter smiling, something which made all of the baristas more than slightly apprehensive and had one of them reaching for the night stick taped to the bottom of the counter. Her eyes were glistening, like how the glasses did sometimes when the afternoon sun dropping by the open shutters cast its reflection into the tiny droplets of water that spilled from the rim of the glasses and beaded on the silver counter.

  “Coffee and sugar,” she said smiling to The Barista.

  “Sure thing mam, I’ll bring it right over,” said The Barista.

  “I want the boy to make it, not you. He knows how to make my coffee. Yours tastes, cheap” she said after a length pause.

  “Whatever,” said The Barista.

  The Nervous Lady took to arranging her seats; the dance of obsessive delight that had her sitting for no more than a single second before her mind dirtied her perspective and had her itching inside her conscious eye, electrifying her blood so that she jolted from her seat, twitching her fingers wildly and like a golfer; crouching down to the green with his squeezing eye locked on a single yard, she eyed the distance between her hands and what would be that of her imaginary companion and she danced around every angle, twisting and turning her neck, rushing to where the empty seat sat; prodding it lightly to and fro, trying to quell the obsessive itch in her mind.

  The two baristas stood dumbfounded, looking obviously and rudely at The Nervous Lady, as did the scores of patrons sitting about the café, the bread bastilled in their hands, frozen in time, one inch from their mouths as their wide eyes paid no respect to the absurd that played out before them, watching in insolent splendor as The Nervous Lady lost herself in her nervous dance, making the imperfect, perfect and present in her attendance.

  As she sat twitching her fingers, one of the baristas brought over her coffee and laid it out before her, watching her oddly as he slowly back stepped away from her table towards the counter where his friend stood smirking to himself.

  The Nervous Lady stopped her twitching and took the cup in both hands and gently pulled it to her lips, pulling a cold breath into her mouth as the cup lifted off of the table and as the coffee hovered before her chin, she smiled to herself as the breath she had taken broke free from her expecting lips and brushed away the lines of steam that ran up from the hot liquid, bridging just on the rim of the cup.

  As her breath escaped, so too did the lines of steam and with them; like salt in a freezing current. A part of her soul; a recurring itch, went with the current, with the lines of steam, out and away from her being, into the passage of day where it became the breath of a discerning man walking through his life carrying an imaginary bag of all the things he didn’t like or need not care for but collect he did and he would never know why.

  The Nervous Lady touched her aged but soft lips on the rim of the cup and closed her eyes as the hot liquid poured onto her expecting tongue and her senses exploded with aghast.

  “What the fuck is this?” she screamed, spitting the vile drink out of her mouth and painting the clear glass window before her with the black coffee she exalted from her mouth.

  “Oh shit,” said the barista, “here we go.”

  The Nervous Lady jumped from her seat and threw the cup of steaming coffee through the air so that on its way to the counter, the hot liquid poured over the tables and floor below and the small cup smashed into hundreds of pieces as it narrowly missed the barista’s head who ducked and dove, out of its range; angered and amused, excited and deranged.

  “Fatts!” The Nervous Lady screamed, “Fatts, get out here now. Please, please, please, please, why are your insolent baristas so intent on insulting me? Fatts!” she screamed.

  “Fuck this I quit” said the barista tearing off his apron and slapping it against the counter, pushing past the patrons with little apology and disappearing into the flux of people, swiftly shuffling about on the footpath outside the bustling café as inside, patrons watched; some through hidden peering eyes and others in blatant obtrusive display, some shocked by the woman’s outrage with their eyes wide and mouths agape while others; who were akin to her difference, enjoyed the show through their peripheral vision, caring not to enlighten themselves on her stage by directing themselves to her waking sight.

  The other barista put his head down; pretending to clear some cups and plates while out of the store room came Fatts, rushing to see what the commotion was; a chiseled look of war etched upon his face.

  “They insulted me Fatts. You’re insolent barista, the one with spiky hair, he insulted me again. I asked him specifically that I wanted a coffee and sugar and I wanted the boy there to make it like he did yesterday and the barista agreed like he understood and he shook his head and he said yes like he understood. I was very direct Fatts. I was very polite and he shook his head Fatts. That’s universal. It means I understand. See you’re doing it now” she said as, following her speech, Fatts focused on her eyes and nodded his head in agreement.

  “He insulted me Fatts. He pretended to listen, but he wasn’t, not rea
lly. Probably thinking about sex or football or something. I’m meeting someone Fatts and look, now I have a stain on my dress and look at the window that I have to look through, it’s got coffee all over it. He insulted me Fatts, they all do. I see them looking at me, but I don’t care because they’ll all shut up when my friend arrives and they see how handsome he is and then they’ll all wish they were like me and they’ll all be looking at me, but different. How long have I been coming here Fatts?”

  “Eight years, seven months and…’

  ‘Eleven days. Every day now for eight years, seven months and eleven days. He’s going to come through those doors again, I know he will and I’ll talk to him this time and we’ll be together, forever. He wore shiny black loafers, the rich kind, not like those evangelists wear, like an important man, a rich man. And there was a silver buckle on the toes, looked really smart and his suit was pin striped and he had a strong chin and he didn’t have a beard, but he could grow one if he wanted to, you could see that, but he kept his face clean and shaven and his eyes were that colour of green/blue like in the tropical oceans, like in the travel magazines and his hair was neat and tidy and he smiled at me and said hello. We were meant to be you know?” she said.

  “I believe,” said Fatts.

  “I talked to a medium last week. She is a spiritist. She said that all understanding equates to a solution. You know what that means? It means that if I think and believe something to be true then it must be and as long as I think it to be true then I can equate it and make it true and I know we were meant to be, so I just have to keep coming here at the same time every day, keep calculating the truth and the universe will equate the solution. He will walk through those doors again. And we’ll be together forever. Do you believe me?” she asked manic to Fatts.

  “Of course I do,” he said, “you are a wonderful kind lady and you deserve to be loved and respected. You deserve all of the kindness in the world. And I know the universe is looking out for you. You’ll see him again” she said.

  “I’m sorry about the cup. Can I have another coffee? By the boy?” she asked innocuously.

  “Sure,” said Fatts smiling, “Joao, could you help this dear lady with one of your special coffees please?”

  “Ok, I would love to,” said Joao placing his mop back into its container and rushing behind the counter where the other barista busied himself picking up the pieces of the shattered ceramic cup and drying the splotches of coffee from the floor and cabinets.

  Joao prepared the coffee with the same care and assent towards the honesty that sang behind the chorus of absurdity in The Nervous Lady’s song.

  He dressed himself in her naivety and gazed through her eyes, touching every grain of coffee as his heart touched upon every moment of sorrow that she carried deep in her gut and he looked too, with expecting eyes, at every pair of feet that shuffled about on the broken cement outside the window where she sat, waiting for a pair of black loafers with a shiny silver buckle over the toes to walk past the window, stop in front of the entrance and turn on a five cent piece; like a soldier’s procession, and move into the café where she would follow the feet until they stood upon the tail of her own shadow and as he followed her eyes up the length of the man’s trousers, to his chest, his heart exploded with hers as her eyes locked upon her late companion’s and heaven swam at her breast and at this very moment, Joao’s fingers picked at each grain of sugar and spent them into the bitter black coffee below and as he pulled himself from his delusion, from her bitter sweet life.

  Joao calmly watched The Nervous Lady sitting in her chair watching the passage of feet on the broken cement as she had done for the last eight years, seven months and eleven days; waiting for chance to bring love back into her life, and as he watched her, his hands slowly turned the cup back and forth as if he were gently trying to start a fire with a stick, turning his hands like one of Shakespeare’s witches, boiling her brew until the tiny individual grains of sugar slowly sank into the bitter coffee and found their places, putting themselves were they needed most to be and with a single breath, it was done.

  He took the coffee over to The Nervous Lady and sat it down in front of her. She looked into his eyes for a moment as she bid him thanks, but she paused as she caught her own stare looking back at her.

  The Nervous Lady smiled; as she had at him when she arrived not long ago and she made a companion of expectation once again and as the coffee touched her tongue, her senses exploded with delight.

  Her soul danced; picked up by its own reflection, carried away in by the song of belief on the winds of hope. It reminded her that it was good to have hope, to expect the impossible and to make a prize of every breath and more so; for her, to feel sure in returning her eyes to the broken cement, knowing that the next pair of bustling feet to come out of the corner of nowhere would be, the lover she had waited all these years to one day see again.

  Joao was exhausted.

  His mind was awash with endorphin and he felt as if he had just run a marathon. He sat on a stool behind the counter and just watched The Nervous Lady experiencing her bitter sweet moment, thinking nothing of or to himself, thinking nothing at all, just watching in silent admiration.

  “You’ve made a tough fan there Joao. She is a special lady, very misunderstood. I don’t know what you do with your coffee, but it looks like you’re the only one who seems to understand her. You’re a good lad” said Fatts.

  “She is very sad and so very happy.”

  “She’s zero and one, both extremes. Bi-polar I think. What she has is not a symptom, it’s a gift. She feels intense. So much better than the rest of these people that are content living their lives in summary” he said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Joao.

  “All of them, They entertain themselves my watching mediocre television, listening to mediocre music, reading mediocre books, having mediocre sex and living mediocre lives and you know what? They call this happiness. They’re scared to live, scared to feel. So scared of crashing from every height into every fall that they convince themselves that this television crap, the latest bestseller, the news, fashion, football, the newest shit band, all of it; their whole lives, they convince themselves that all of the mediocrity they consume is satisfying” he said.

  “They set mediocre expectations for themselves so that they are always met. You ever heard the expression; don’t judge a book by its cover? Bullshit. They buy a book based solely on its cover and a three line blurb. You know what a blurb is, don’t you? It’s the three line description on the back of a book that gives you the gist of the story. You see, they need to know the story before they will read a story. God help them should they ever just open a book and discover something new. In fact, this three line blurb will ensure they only read stories they’ve read before; the same tired and worn narrative that in the guise of mediocrity, never gets old. They need to know what the movie is about before they watch it. They need to read a thousand reviews before they will listen to an album. They need to experience someone else’s mediocre emotional response before they will interject their own. They need to know why before they do anything. You look at religion and spirituality and all of this nonsense. It all exists for this stupid mediocre expectative want of people. Everyone has the one empiric question. Why are we here? They are too scared to feel, too scared to live their lives and find out for themselves at the end. They need to know the plot, the whole bloody story before they will commit to living. Lots of mediocre summaries and blurbs to help people get through their mediocre books, movies, music and lives so that when they get to the end, their satisfaction comes not in the journey or the experience, but in knowing that the meaning of their lives was exactly as what was scribed in the three lines they had read before this farce began. Fifty one percenters Joao, the lot of them, except her. She’s special” said Fatts.

  “She is real lonely,” said Joao.

  “She comes in here every day at the same time, has for the last eight years. I sta
rted opening on Sundays on her account you know. She met a man a while back. He came in here for something. If you ever get close enough to ask her, she can tell exactly what he ordered and how many bites he took before he slipped away. She fell in love and she didn’t get his name or his number. She doesn’t even know what he looks like. Didn’t see his face, just the back of his head and his shoes. She didn’t have the gall to look at him when he came in. You believe that? She didn’t even see his face and still she fell in love. Incredible. So she started coming here every day following at the same time, hoping he would come back. She figured, if he worked nearby, then chances are she would see his loafers walking by the broken cement in front of her table. If he was here for a meeting, chances are he’d be called back in one day and would wander as he had into her life and that next time, she wouldn’t let fate beguile her with hindsight. Every day at the same time she is here, always fidgeting away at the stools, making her placing just right and having herself imaginary conversations, whispering away under her breath, smiling and tilting her head, blushing with some imaginary things that were said. She’s a special lady indeed. She doesn’t take to too many people but looks like she’s taken to you. I want you to serve her from now on, ok? Can you do that?” he asked Joao.

  “I’d love to. I mean, if that’s ok, yes. I can serve other people if you like” said Joao.

  “Are you sure? It looks kind of tiring, kind of slow. Maybe we could put a different price on it. Special coffee. I’ll cut you in on some of the profit. What do you say?” Fatts asked.

  “Sound fantastic,” said, Joao.

  “What should we call it, this special coffee of yours? The Bitter Sweet Life, Reflections, Calma Mater?” said Fatts laughing to himself.

  “Coffee and Sugar,” said Joao.

  “Coffee and Sugar by Joao,” said Fatts, “that’s it. Simple and perfect, I’ll go and make a sign up” said Fatts excitedly.

  Joao was happy, happier than he had been in; well, the entirety of his life, for he finally felt really that he had found somewhere he belonged and he felt like the boy from ‘The Carriage of My Heart’ and how he felt in episode seven of season thirty six when he got his first job singing in a bar and was asked to be a regular and it’s when the music business guys saw him and he became famous and Joao felt a bit like this now; not that he was going to be famous but that he was sitting at the right table, that his universe had just exploded and was now set to expand.

  Later that evening; after the sun had fallen from the sky and brought with it the billions of star dust that lit up the blanket of night, from the streets came a different bustle, started first by chanting and singing; a chorus that was born from a great distance and by the time it was turning to enter the café, had reached an outrages crescendo.

  Hundreds of youths locked arm in arm and all dressed in their city’s colours all streamed into the café and spilled into the available booths and piled around tables clicking their fingers, ordering rounds of bottles of beer and shouting jovial, racial slurs against their rival and singing insulting songs, all in the name of pride.

  “Fifty one percenters Joao,” said Fatts smiling to himself and patting Joao on the back, speaking in a loud roar to battle with the ruckus coming from the animated youths throwing back drinks, shouting at the television and slapping each other on the backs in their primal competitive dance.

  “Dyu ave pizza?” slurred a young man waving plastic notes in his hand, an assortment of colours, some of them cheap and some of them expensive.

  “What are you studying?” asked Fatts.

  “Medicine. We’re all. I mean, them, over there, the table. We’re studying medicine. We’re gonna be doctors, fucking save lives and that; pretty cool yeah?” slurred the youth, spitting his words of the counter.

  “Fifty one percenters Joao. His parents, just the same. You know the fastest sperm never fertilizes the egg. It gets there and is so tired it can’t even wipe its brow against the wall. Then millions more come along and bite and chew and make a hole so one lazy fucker can hop over the lot and jump through the window and take advantage of the situation and be the hero. Nature is also a fifty one percenter” said Fatts laughing.

  Joao laughed with him though he didn’t quite understand but what he could take away was that it was ok being him, that he shouldn’t feel less than these well to do middle class university kids or their parents, just because he wasn’t schooled and he didn’t learn how to think from a book or that he didn’t know or couldn’t remember how to pronounce the four syllable words they used together that made them sound really smart.

  The crowd in the café got bigger and louder and the game got closer to starting and Joao watched around the room, smiling to himself and thinking of what Fatts had taught him. He liked watching the different groups within the groups.

  There was a group of three or four guys who were generally not very attractive, in most cases overweight and they knew a lot about football and they said lots of names and statistics and lots of stuff that Joao didn’t know about and the person who remembered the most statistics was revered and he spoke like an angry father to his son, lathering the law in his fist, striking down on his child’s applauding mutiny.

  And as he scanned the room; his hand twisting a wet sponge in a dirty glass, his eyes caught a surprise. There, staring up at a television, with a magnificent smile on her face, watching the weekend lottery was Charity; her hands clasped together, her eyes drawn upon the screen, drifting into imagination and her smile; so bright it could make the sun seem like a tiny star in the blanket of night.

  “Hi Charity, are you here to watch the game as well?” asked Joao.

  “Shhh,” said Charity, “come back in a minute. Sorry Joao, I’ll talk to you in a second. Just give me a minute, ok, hun?” she said.

  “Ok,” said Joao, feeling a little flattened but not entirely deflated.

  He went back to his post behind the counter and continued to clean glasses. He had spent the afternoon making coffees for a lot of patrons and I guess they had made a lot of money because Fatts was very happy.

  Everyone left with massive smiles on their faces.

  Fatts said it looked like everyone had just been laid for the first time. Joao thought about chicken laying lots of eggs with people inside them. He didn’t get the joke but laughed along anyway.

  Once the students came in, though, there was no more coffee, only beer. They came in every night at this time, once their classes were done for the day and they stayed for a few hours, drinking and singing; usually in good spirits but sometimes breaking into a fight, at which point, Fatts would pick them up like empty chip packets and throw them onto the sidewalk.

  So, now that there was a game, their spirits were lifted higher and the beer was flowing and for Joao, this meant simply attending to the sink and keeping the glasses clean.

  Joao looked on while his hands scrubbed at dirty glasses as Charity sat by herself with her head titled high so that her hair draped over her shoulders and scratched against the middle of her back and he was catatonic watching her as she was watching the screen.

  When the lottery was done; after all the numbers had been read and the hosts waved goodbye to everyone and well after the credits had rolled across the screen, Charity sat with her eyes glued shut and her smile widening so much that it seemed she would tear her face in half if she kept going. Joao wondered what she could be thinking, what pleasantry was staging in her cerebral theatre. She looked like she was witnessing the birth of a child, the rescuing of a puppy from a well or the returning of a lost child to its parents. The smile she wore was not one that was handed out on a whim and it felt awkward watching her as if he were stealing some private moment.

  After a minute, she opened her eyes and took a breath and Joao could only see that she had opened one, because of the angle she sat, but he watched her move and wondered if he could go over and speak to her now.

  Charity stood up from her seat and pushed her chair in
gently and started to walk towards the door but as she walked she hobbled horribly as if she had suffered some horrific trauma to her legs. She looked in pain and her thin white legs wobbled under her shifting weight as if they were foreign to her body; on their first day and receiving their first orders, mixing everything up.

  As she hobbled and stumbled towards the door, her hands gripped at the back of chairs to steady herself and she apologised here or there to patrons whose hair she pulled on by accident or shirts that she tugged on whilst firming her grip and making her way through the café.

  “Charity, are you ok?” shouted Joao rushing to help her, putting his right arm under her left, steadying her direction and helping her to the door.

  “Thanks, Joao. Sorry, I can’t stay and talk. I have to be somewhere. But next week, we’ll meet and I’ll take you to that place I said, ok?” she said.

  “Ok,” said Joao.

  Charity turned to kiss his cheek and as she did, Joao saw in the reflection in the mirror the black bruise over her right eye and her purple swollen cheek bone and her split and scabbing upper lip.

  Charity hobbled out of the café and rested her right arm along the wall beside her as she slowly made her way up the street and into the disappearance of the night.