Camberwell was one of Melbourne’s most desirable locations. People might think the McPhees must be mega wealthy to live in this ‘tastefully renovated’ five-bedroom home in a ‘leafy tree-lined avenue’, rubbing shoulders with the poshest of the posh. In reality, Gabby’s parents had bought a (then two-bedroom) suburban home for the then average Melbourne house price of thirty-five thousand dollars. They’d held onto it and now the house was valued at around one hundred times what they’d paid for it. Lottie and Monty McPhee had won the Australian property market lotto.
She was surprised to find Charlie already up and making coffee. ‘Morning!’ she said, squeezing his shoulder. She’d have preferred to kiss him and hug him but was making strong efforts not to come across as needy and smothering.
‘Hey, Mum,’ he said, focusing on the milk he was heating. They had their own espresso machine, which had been tax deductible, thankfully. A good espresso machine for the cafe cost up to thirty thousand dollars. This one – shiny red and silver – was about a tenth of that. Charlie was a bit of a whiz as a self-taught barista. He’d been watching videos on YouTube about how to create coffee art with the foam and had perfected the love heart and the tulip, but was still working on the trickier rose.
‘Want one?’ he asked, looking over his shoulder.
‘Yes, please.’
She padded to the double doors that led out to the patio and opened them for Sally to go out, shutting the door behind her against the chill. ‘You’re still on holidays. Why are you up so early?’ she asked, then went to the pantry to pull out her tray of medications. She began to pop blister packs, collecting her many pills and vitamin supplements.
He shrugged. ‘Woke up early.’
‘Something on your mind?’ She poured water from the filter into a glass and began to swallow pills, five at a time.
He grunted, noncommittal, and turned the dial to cut the steam. He banged the jug on the granite benchtop to settle the foam.
‘Did something happen at your father’s?’ She steeled herself, ready for whatever he was going to say.
Charlie sighed and began pouring milk into the navy cup, which already held a shot of espresso. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Gabby swallowed the last of her water and tightened the belt of her fluffy yellow dressing gown. Yellow wasn’t a great colour for her complexion but she loved its cheeriness, so indulged in it with a robe that no one outside the house would ever see.
‘It matters to me,’ she said, restraining herself from losing her temper at Cam. ‘Is it because he brought you back early?’
Charlie carefully carried the cappuccino over to Gabby. His brow was pinched, but whether that was from concentration or unhappiness, she couldn’t be sure. ‘It’s just him, you know. He’s different now.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, as he turned back to the machine to begin another coffee for himself. ‘What do you mean, different?’
‘Just since the baby … he’s distracted and grumpy. It doesn’t seem like he wants us there any more.’
Gabby could have cried. She felt Charlie’s sense of rejection so intensely. She wanted to march over to Cam right now and shake him. How dare he make his son feel unwanted! Fierce anger rose in her – she wanted to hurt Cam as much as he’d hurt their son.
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ she said, trying to make Charlie feel better. ‘Having a new baby is such a difficult time, but he’ll get through it. I’m sure he’s just exhausted.’
‘Yeah.’
Celia’s footsteps bounded down the stairs and she threw herself at Gabby for a morning hug. Gabby pulled her into her lap and kissed the top of her head. ‘You should have slippers on. Your feet are freezing.’
‘Where’s Sally?’ Celia asked, pushing away her mother’s hand as she tried to smooth down the fluffy bits that were sticking up. Gabby loved her littlest girl’s beautiful soft brunette curls, as yet untouched by the endless types of products Summer now used. She still marvelled that she’d ended up with one redheaded, one blonde and one brunette child.
‘Outside.’
Celia sprang off her lap and went to the door to let Sally back in, and she fell upon the dog as though she hadn’t seen her in months. They collapsed to the ground together for a love-in.
‘Want a coffee, Seals?’ Charlie asked, finishing the second cappuccino.
‘Yes, please,’ Celia said, kissing Sally on the head. The dog smiled and put her paw on her arm.
Celia had just started to drink weak coffees. Gabby didn’t exactly approve, but it seemed everyone drank coffee these days, even children. A couple of weeks ago, two young boys in school uniforms, who Gabby and Ed had guessed must have been no older than nine, had ordered flat whites on their way to school. Ed had shot Gabby a look and mouthed, Is that legal? There were no laws against it, so what could they do? Gabby eased her conscience by telling herself that surely a weak coffee – and Ed had made sure it was weak – was better than a can of caffeinated so-called ‘energy drink’ they could have bought elsewhere. At least coffee came from a plant and not a laboratory. Besides, in Ethiopia, children were weaned onto coffee at just a few months of age, or so an Ethiopian cab driver had told her once.
‘Can I have a cat?’ Celia asked.
‘I’m not up to cats yet,’ Charlie said, putting his coffee to the side to start a new, weak coffee for Celia. ‘I’m still on flowers.’
Monty disapproved of the kids drinking coffee, but it wasn’t as if Gabby could take the moral high ground. She did own a coffee shop and was carving out a name for herself in the specialty coffee and roasting trade. This was the seventh business Gabby had owned, the biggest and best. It had often been said in their household – by her parents, mostly – that the only reason to build a business was to sell it for a profit. Not this one, though; The Tin Man was for her kids. She just hoped she was around long enough to build it into something amazing for them. But the statistics were sobering, with only sixty per cent of transplant recipients in Australia alive ten years after surgery – little more than half of all recipients. As of this weekend, she would have made it to two years.
She pushed that thought away and instead watched Charlie artfully swirling frothed milk. You needed steady hands for coffee art, something she no longer had. It had been more than six months after the surgery before her hands stopped shaking enough for her to be able to write legibly with a pen once more or hold a glass without fear of dropping it.
Margaret, one of her transplant friends, said it had taken her even longer. She said the whole experience was like being reborn. You have to learn to eat, write, go to the toilet, and clean your teeth all over again.
Gabby sipped her coffee. ‘Mm, Charlie, you have a real talent for this.’
‘Maybe I should come work for you.’
‘I’d rather you went to business school and learned how to run the place,’ she said. Her own studies in business had given her a solid grounding that she’d been able to call upon time and again.
‘But I could still do coffee art for fun.’
‘Of course you could. That’s the great part about owning a business. You can do whichever bits you love the most.’
She turned to Celia. ‘Seals, do you want to come to work with me today or do you want to stay here with Charlie and Grandpa?’
‘Stay here,’ Celia said, now lying on the floor alongside Sally.
Monty arrived in the kitchen then, looking thin, with white whiskers and wispy steel-grey hair sticking up in much the same way Celia’s had done. ‘We’re going for a boat ride,’ he said, joining the conversation. He had slipped a navy cable-knit jumper over his pyjamas, charcoal-coloured slippers covering the fine skin of his ageing feet.
‘Can I bring Sally?’ Celia asked, sitting upright.
‘If she wears her official coat, yes,’ Monty said, putting the kettle on to boil. He was a tea man in the mornings.
‘That sounds like fun. Thanks, Dad,’ Gabby said, smiling at him, grateful that at
least one man in her children’s life was still showing up for them.
‘It’s my absolute pleasure,’ Monty said, and she knew that was the truth.
The air conditioning in the front area of The Tin Man was extra cool to compensate for the heat emanating from the steel roaster, which was in full swing on the other side of the glass wall. The aroma filled the whole cafe. Gabby waved to Ed, who looked smart in her biker boots and black jeans, and set some Colombian folk music to play through the cafe speakers after the current playlist finished. Then she wandered out back to watch Luciano in action.
She smiled and called hello; in return, he gave her a lifted chin and distracted nod, a picture of concentration, like the conductor of an orchestra. His almost-black hair was long at the front but combed to one side. He had about a week’s growth of facial hair and wore a simple blue collared shirt with his jeans and Blundstones. It was probably a good thing he was aloof, because she suspected it would only take one genuine smile from him to turn him into a serious distraction.
Gabby settled herself on top of two unopened hessian bags of beans stacked near the fridge. They were stamped with the black and red logo of the Colombian farm. It was loud in here, with the roar of the gas as it pumped through the pipes into the roaster, and the spray of the beans as they peppered the sides of the rotating drum. It gave her a real thrill to watch over one hundred kilograms of green, vegetal-smelling beans transform into rich brown, flavourful coffee beans in as little as eight minutes. If they weren’t sold as a single origin bean – and most weren’t – they were blended with other types of freshly roasted beans, ground, bagged and sold to customers in-house, or to other cafes. There was something so elegant and yet robust about the process. It was a finely choreographed dance.
Luciano had his back to her most of the time, his eyes on the computer screen in front of him, watching the graph trace the heat and rotation speed for this particular blend’s profile. The temperature had to be tightly controlled. The big black roaster – about the size of a small garden shed – generated heats of over two hundred degrees Celsius during a roast, and Luciano had to closely watch the rate at which gas pumped into the drum. He had up to three sets of roasts going at once, all at different stages: one lot roasting, one cooling and one de-stoning.
Luciano left his computer for a moment and hoisted up a big white bucket holding twelve kilos of green beans, lifted it high above his head and poured it into the hopper, where it would await its turn to roast. Then he strode back to the screen. A few beans had begun to pop now, like popcorn – this was the ‘first crack’. Gabby loved this moment, which meant the beans were nearly there. The tension rose and all her senses were tuned in, waiting for the exact point for Luciano to cut the gas. More and more beans popped, like rain on a tin roof. Luciano, his brow furrowed and his jaw set in concentration, pulled out a metal pipe from the drum – the trier – and held it just below his nose. Steam rose from the brown beans, lifting the aroma profile to Luciano. He didn’t have much time.
He thrust the pipe back into the drum and checked the graph on the computer again. From where Gabby sat, she could see the ascending blue and grey lines had nearly met, which would be the point of completion. She sat taller, holding her breath. If he was even moments too late, the beans would be ruined.
He pulled out the trier again, inhaling once more, his head tilted to the side, almost as if he was listening to the beans. There! He replaced the trier, went back to the control panel and snapped off the gas, then released the beans from the drum into the cooling dish below. The roar of the gas fell away, only to be replaced by that of the industrial fan below the cooling tray. A three-armed propeller swept through the chocolate-brown beans as air rushed at them from below, dropping their temperature as quickly as possible.
Gabby inhaled, letting the aromas soak into her, a smile on her face. It was like magic. She grinned at Luciano, even though he was still busy, running his hand through the cooling beans. He picked up a handful to smell, cracking one open with his teeth. He nodded once to himself in satisfaction. The beans were good.
Back to the computer he went, dropping the new batch of green beans from the hopper into the drum. They began to spin, tapping out a rhythm of sorts as the gas roared once more.
Gabby went to stand next to him, and stared at the coloured lines moving on the graph. The maths behind the science of roasting was still just a little beyond the reach of her permanently medicine-affected foggy mind. But her nose didn’t lie.
‘The beans smell amazing,’ she said.
Luciano smiled, still gazing at the screen, but clearly proud.
‘I’m so lucky to have you here,’ she said.
He glanced at her quickly, confused. ‘Why?’
‘It’s not like there’s a raft of experienced roasters in the country just waiting for jobs to turn up. The specialty coffee business is such a small world.’
He turned to face her properly, and she felt his energy hit her. Felt the intensity of him. Felt her blood rush.
‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘We’re part of a small world in Australia but we’re only here because we’re part of the huge world of coffee trade, with our beans coming from so far away. We’re just the last in an exceptionally long line of hands.’
Gabby swallowed. She hadn’t expected poetic reflections from her taciturn roaster. She felt an unusual sense of rapport with him and, heaven forbid, a definite attraction. She’d been given a second chance at life, against the odds – she really didn’t believe it was possible to find love again too.
Love? Listen to yourself!
‘I enjoy watching the beans,’ she said, simply to have words coming out of her mouth instead of tiny whimpers, which she hoped had just been inside her head and not actually audible. ‘The aromas seem so alive to me, so inspiring and exciting.’
Gabby was nearly the same height as Luciano, so their eyes held each other’s evenly. Above the intense heat here in the roasting room, she could feel the warmth emanating from his body.
‘Do you cup?’ he asked, striding to the roaster. He placed a bin with a plastic liner under the cooling tray, then opened the chute to fill it with beans. From there he poured them into the de-stoning machine, a vacuum-like apparatus that sucked out foreign bodies such as stones, nails, corn kernels and other things that had contaminated the beans as they’d dried on the sides of roads in their country of origin. To much excitement in-house, last week the de-stoner had extracted two small white tablets from the Colombian beans.
‘Yes. For the past year, I’ve been the only one cupping, to test the quality of the roasted beans we bought.’ Gabby stared at the back of Luciano’s olive-skinned neck, peeking out from the collar of his shirt. He straightened, heading back to her and the computer once more. ‘Have you written up flavour profiles for these blends yet?’ she asked, her heart beating hard enough for her to feel it in her chest.
‘Not since the last lot. I need to do new ones.’
The beans in the roaster had just reached the Maillard phase, the point at which the flavours began to develop. They were turning yellow before Gabby’s eyes through the peephole.
‘Let’s cup together on Monday,’ she said. ‘I’d like us to work together on the flavour profiles this time.’
‘Okay. Sounds good.’
Leaving him alone to focus on the beans, she spun on her boot heel and swished her way out of the roasting room, the length of gold bells around her neck tinkling.
She was his employer, scheduling essential work – so why was she blushing as though she’d just asked him out on a date?
Keep your head, Gabby. Keep your head.
6
Krystal’s racing mind woke her at four-thirty. It was Friday 4 October – the second anniversary of Evan’s death, and the day Krystal was going to meet Gabriella McPhee and tell her who she was. Rain splattered against her bedroom window. She pulled the doona up tighter under her chin and tried to get back to sleep, but she w
as too nervous.
Instead, she threw off the covers, pulled on her ugg boots and went to the kitchen to make coffee. While the kettle boiled she looked around at the apartment, wondering how much it had changed since Evan’s death.
There was the same blue couch with its worn pink and yellow cushions, though the couch itself was definitely worse for wear, having had two young boys eating and drinking on it. But she could still see Evan lying there, a baby asleep on his chest. He’d spilled red wine on it once and the stain was still there too, alongside Olly’s ‘painting’ made with black and brown felt-tip pens.
When she and Evan had first moved here, Krystal had been fond of bright, Mexican-inspired colours and busy patterns, and Evan embraced them eagerly, saying he’d had enough of white walls and perfectly styled houses for one lifetime. ‘I love the craziness and colour you bring to my life,’ he’d said, while wearing a lime-green lampshade with burnt-orange tassels on his head.
She particularly loved their bedroom, with its wooden bedhead painted azure, pink cushions, a white doona with colourful flower accents, and a picture in a white wooden frame of a grey and white donkey wearing a wreath of bright flowers around its neck.
Where she’d come from, in the Dandenong Ranges, it was frequently cold and misty and rainy. But there was still so much colour to be found in the greens of the bushland and the patches of wildflowers, and a big blue sky above. Here in an apartment in the city, she’d needed to capture some colour and bring it indoors.
She wanted to tell Gabriella all of this, to let her know she had the heart of a man who’d embraced change, who’d been part of the Farner Seven legal team that had won one of the biggest cases in Australian history, but who’d then been brave and carved out a life for himself out of his family’s shadow; a man who never once became cranky with one of his kids when they woke him up wanting to play with him, even if he’d only had a few hours’ sleep after a late night at the restaurant.
The Gift of Life Page 5