Sometimes we get each other and sometimes, we don’t get. I know this because my favourite cafe today ran out of cups. The man standing behind me in the queue said to his girlfriend, “Dishwasher’s on the blink again,” and she told their little caramel dog, “Awww, dah dishhwashhah!” while the dog looked up adoringly.
I was queuing behind a man in board shorts whom I had greeted, “Are you the close of the queue?” He looked a little startled, then he smiled. “Reckon I am,” he said, and I said, “I’ll take over those duties if you like.” We were laughing now, just a little. “You can put in a shift,” he agreed, and I said, “I mean, I’ll take it on. Someone else is gunna arrive and ask, this the end of the queue, and I’ll tell them, yes it is! It’s only the one time, but it’s arduous.”
We had run out of things to say but now there was a rapport between us so we couldn’t switch straight back to automatons. And because my friendliness is partly anxiety, I noticed he was having to twitch himself out of the reach of the dried curls of jasmine wreathing the verandah post beside him, which kept reaching for him and snatching at his hair. I pulled out of them free and tucked it into the basket of dried branches it had sprung from, saying cheerfully, “That thing just really wants to get to know you!” and he turned as he finally noticed this source of annoyance saying, “Ohh! You’re right, it really really does.” There were still four people between us and the till were we would place orders and we would have had to resort to gazing studiously away from each other, maybe even whistling or humming a little, all that fakery; but he said, in a kind of gasp of social endeavour, “Reckon they could afford to give these plants of bit of water!” I glanced up. The verandah roof is high and four former or alleged potplants dangle, quietly weeping dead brown tendrils into the air. When he reached the till I fell away, and we both turned back between his order and mine to say, “Have a good one,” and now we were done.
I took an Uber home because I have an injury just now from an idiotic but cataclysmic pushbike accident. I had to go through the kind of surgery a surgeon calls, rather comfortably, “minor.” The Uber driver had a grey and black striped handkerchief tucked in at the top of his driver-side window for keeping off the sun. I said, “Is that the flag of your own individual people: the Nation of You.” And he said, “No, no, it’s a handkerchief,” so I said, “Yes, I know, I was just playing.” A silence. We were not of the nation of each other. And I said, “Just I think it would be so awesome if everybody had their own individual flag and maybe a coat of arms! to wave out the window in traffic. Once in a while you’d spot someone with a similar flag to your own and then the two of you would become best friends.”
Did I mention this everyday friendliness which seems to come so naturally is also in part anxiety, in part yearning?
“Oh,” he said. “That’s funny.” And we talked about the big trees along the road, which are highways for Brisbane’s possums. At my gate he pulled over very gently and I stepped very gingerly down and said, thrusting my fist in the air and indicating the flag, “Viva la Revolution!”
My driver said, apologetically, “It’s actually a handkerchief,” and I tried to let him off the hook on which I had not intended to hoist him: “Yes. I was just joking with you. Thank you for this peaceful ride, have a great day!” And as I pushed back the gate which like so much of this city if overhung by trees I was thinking how even the kin-man and I, the one the jasmine at the cafe was fingering, could have estranged ourselves and caused a brief sore rupture if either one of us had only hung round three or four seconds too long once we’d reached the register. We both understood the same rules: the rules of playfulness, only some of which are THERE ARE NO RULES. The coffee was really good. I gave the thirsty peace lily in the bathroom some water.
Tag: cafe
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kept & cupped
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crutchpapa
Writing this morning in a cafe I glanced up and saw a young woman coming in on crutches, she was slightly built and small and following at a painful distance the bigger, older man who might have been her father or, perhaps, her lover. He forged ahead and sat down, he was already reading the menu while she struggled around the back of the couch and reached the table. He saw me watching and his attitude melted like magic. “Let me help you with those,” he demanded, holding out his hand for the crutches but without getting up.
What a guy.
Did I go over there and tell her she deserves more kindness, and he’s not treating her right? Yes I did. Ordinarily I would have said that to him directly. Today I was feeling somewhat fragile and tired so I waited until he went to the bathroom before I spoke.
When I told a friend about this man’s insensitivity she asked, what did you say? I told her, I asked if I could speak. She assumed I was offering help and said no no I’m fine. I said he should not be barrelling ahead and comfortably seated while she struggles on crutches. I said it hurt to see her gamely staggering round all the obstacles while he just left her and took his ease, he should be by her side and supporting and protecting her. I told her men have a protectiveness they can offer us in this world partly through size and I was sorry he was not doing that. She stared unblinking like she was getting chastised, perhaps just shock, and when I said you deserve more kindness and I don’t think this man is giving you that, she smiled a painful smile and said thank you. -
worldburn
Today in a cafe two small incidents seemed to me to illustrate the forms of self-involvement that are more common to women, and to men.
A man walked in and ordered a coffee at the counter. He wanted a latte, he wanted it skinny. It was takeaway and he went over to a table in the window and sat down. He was wearing shorts, dusty boots, and no shirt. His belly sagged between his knees. I thought, this is not one of those seaside towns where people wander in and out of the ocean all day and stand in bikinis eating chips. Wherever a woman would not wear swimming gear, a man needs to put on his shirt.
The waitress barged in, late from having missed her bus. She flung down her bag and began telling the staff about her room, which had ‘nearly burned down’ overnight. She described it as the latest in a chain of events which made her wonder had someone put the evil eye on her. What she described was entirely self-generated. She left ‘my candles going’ but ‘only for a minute’, while she was out of the house at the shops. A poster fell down, into a flame.
‘My whole wall got burnt.’ Her housemate put the fire out. If not for that housemate, ‘my whole room would have burned down,’ not to mention the rest of the house. When I looked up, the man with no shirt had taken his coffee and his bare chest and belly out into the cool, breezy day and disappeared. I was reading the foreword to a recipe book, Indian Spice. Its author Pinky Leilani described the importance of recipes in that culture, that they are handed down and closely kept secret. To cook well is a form of power and a source of income in a difficult, impoverished land.
She described how long it took before the family cook, a man in his sixties, had learned to trust her and share with her his recipes. He taught her to cook. Now she has published those secret recipes to the world, they belong to all of us and have lost their power, the power belongs to her. -
a man of mouse
In a cafe where I write, the staff are terrifically grumpy. One sometimes meets me with a finger propped under her chin, tipping her head: Is it almond milk? Soy? I say, It’s the honey that’s misleading you, by association, and she’ll say, mansplanatorily, “No, no… I don’t associate you with honey.” Today a large man came sloping in, one of those outsized softies whom I never used to see in Ghana, nor, for that matter, in Berlin: tall and stooping, strong but run to fat, crouching over his table as though he feared being forbidden to sit down. The same waitress came to him, scolding.
“You’re late! You’re usually here way earlier than this, what have you been up to?”
Meekly he explained whatever personal thing had altered his day. Doctor’s appointment, tenancy inspection. Once he had humbled himself to her aggression she softened, and patted him on the shoulder. “Well, you’re here now, no need to make a fuss about it.”
The double-whammy! I sat back, impressed. She went on waitressing, he went on crouching and mooning, I went on writing, and then when he got up to leave and he and I had exchanged a wry smile I put out my hand as he passed by my table. “Can I say something?”
Sure, he said, submissive to the death. In an undertone I told him, “You don’t have to explain yourself to the wait staff, you know.”
He looked startled, then submissive once more. There is manhood there, but it’s lurking underneath. “Oh,” is what he said, “it doesn’t bother me.” And as I watched him shambling out of the cafe into the rapidly clearing afternoon rain I thought: It’s going to bother your next girlfriend, though: I’ll tell you that right now. Having to stand up for you, having to do all that mothering. Having to nudge you towards the manly adulthood without which she is unprotected in your relationship. Unprotected from sassy wait staff who like to subtly keep their customers hopping. Unprotected from other men. -
skulldiggery
Paying for my breakfast at the counter I noticed another customer, reading the paper intently, with his finger (forgive me) driven up his own nostril. It was gone to the first knuckle, earnestly swiveling. He drew it out and inspected it. Roll & flick. Turned a page slowly, thoughtfully, and stuck the same finger back up his nose.
Over breakfast I’d been reading how creative writing students in Australia are beginning to outnumber students of literature. At the next-door table a woman with a piercing whine kept up such a torrent of words that her companion was reduced to what Dale Spender brilliantly called housekeeping — quite often performed by women, for men — “Uh-huh, oh. Really? Gosh, that sounds quite, um…” Self-absorption as a performance art. Picking up a small stack of paper napkins I went over to the forensic investigator and set them down on top of his paper. “Excuse me. Can I offer you a… tissue?” The look he gave me lacked shame, regret, or consciousness: it was of pure surprise. -
wasp joy
This summer as the world goes to literal and immediate hell using bushfire and corruption, misogyny and greed, several small incidents have surfaced in my own daily life that help keep me afloat. I found a new bar, hidden behind a drift of trees, late last night as I was pedalling home from some arduous and exacting work that never seems to be done. I had passed this place half a hundred times but a man was sitting outside, on a comfy chair, his long legs crossed and his concentration sunk in a book. I went back around and locked my bike and walked inside, rather shyly.
They had faded couches and long rows of wine boxes lined with glinting bottles. I sat down and took out my book in turn. To be in Berlin, and be not the only person on the train, or in a restaurant, who’s reading. I read for about an hour. It slowly grew dark outside. The bartender came and squatted in front of me: what do you feel like? I’ll make you something nice. She made me something nice, involving cognac and whipped egg white, and I drank it very slowly and then got up and closed my book and went over to the bar. She was rattling ice cubes efficiently in a steel cocktail shaker. Ten euros exactly.
Oh, then… I gave her the note and held out my palm. Rather than picking through it vaguely to work out what might make a fair tip I would let her choose: so I informed her by my cheeky but underconfident smile. She dug in and showed me what she’d found. “Ich nehm’ ein Euro,” I’ll take one euro. We both smiled and I rode home to the pair of large ears which rise from the arm of the couch these days when I walk in. I have my little familiar, my smallest companion, the cat who was left behind in Brisbane six years back and finally got on a plane. She cheers me, too.
Today I sat in a quiet streetside cafe under the late summer trees. A leaf drifted by as I rode home last night and it’s unavoidable that winter will come. My subtropical heart quails each time. At the next table a beautiful man was reading. “Can I have your sugar?” I asked, without thinking, and his smile quirked.
“You can! the only problem is,” he said, in German, “a couple of wasps have been making it pleasant for themselves in there, so… I still took it.”
I opened the sugar and peered. Three wasps, butts bent up and heads gleefully sunk in the piles of golden sugar, made me laugh. The waitress brought me their largest glass filled to the brim with tap water. A car went past behind me very slowly. The cafe has scalloped blankets folded now over the back of some of the chairs. We will sit outside as long as we can, before it’s so cold and grey we have to turn for home and then never run into each other all the rest of the long Berlin winter, which is deadly low and close to the ground, obscures sun and stars, and lasts eighteen months of the year, I’m convinced of it.
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I spoke first
In a crowded lunchtime cafe we were pressed elbow to elbow. The couple beside me talked and talked, while both scrolling idly on their phones. At last I turned to the woman, whose mouth was open and full of food, and asked her,
“Excuse me, would you please be so kind (in German we say ‘so dear’ or ‘so love’) as to swallow first, and then speak?”
Her mouth dropped open further. Her gaze sharpened. So I said, “It’s kind of gross. And I am also eating.”
People who lack emotional honesty are often intimidated by it, I think. They turned to each other and went on as though I had not spoken, except that the woman changed her habit. But the man must have been revolving it in his mind, like the visible food in her mouth. I went on with my meal gazing into the beautiful day around us and was startled by his hand on my arm.
“Firstly. You should ask more politely. And secondly. If it is you who doesn’t like it, it’s you who moves.”
“That’s polite?” I said, almost laughing. But she gained courage from his hostility and soon they were both railing at me, jabbing hectoring fingers in my face, telling me off as only Germans can.
“Look, if you want to have a fight about this, can you do it amongst yourselves? I’m not interested.”
This outraged them further and the woman’s chest was heaving. The people at the next table looked shocked. The waiter came so I could pay and asked, how was it. And I said, truthfully, it was ok, thank you, it wasn’t super like it usually is.
Five German gasps went up around me like balloons. The Vietnamese waiter laughed. “It’s because today I cooked it myself.” It is interesting to me and I sometimes experiment, how much you can frustrate a German by simply refusing to make eye contact – whilst jaywalking, for example – because they long to tell off the transgressor and shepherd them back into the fold, but lack the straightforwardness to tackle someone who has not spoken first.
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a birthday story
It is my birthday and I had kind of a depressing morning because (various reasons). But I reckoned I could make a go of the afternoon, and I was right. Riding out into the day aboard my trusty, failsafe, foolproof bicycle I zoomed around town for an hour or two looking for the restaurant, cosy but decent, in which my friend arriving from Copenhagen this evening will treat me to dinner. He says I’ve got to choose. So I chose, and had lunch outdoors in the shade and a large German beer. Needing shade is such a luxury in grey chilly Berlin.
The bowl of noodles was delicious and the beer made me feel better. I sauntered home on my wheels, spinning down the quiet side of an overgrown local park and only gradually noticing that the man crouched forward on his bench was speaking to me. You are traveling much too fast, he was saying, and then his forbidding German conformity dissolved into a slow salty smile when I smiled at him, raising my eyebrows without meaning to, a smile that turned flirty when he flirted back.
“Sicher?” I said, slow and low – are you sure? “Absolut sicher,” he said, and his tone had evolved from censorious to self-mockery and enjoyment.
The African men at the bottom of the park looked me over and I looked at them. I miss Africa. Noodling along the pavement on my way home, which you shouldn’t, but people do, I was warmed when three men in identical backpacks like Mormons stepped aside to let my bicycle pass. “Das ist lieb,” I told them, that is lovely. The tallest one said, gravely, “I come from Stuttgart.”
“Oh,” I said over my shoulder as I zoomed past, “that is also lovely.”
The little German birds are high in their voices like tree bells. When I was in Ghana all those months I kept thinking: the birds fly away to Africa for the winter. So here they are! I kept expecting I might meet one and we would recognise each other. Hey, I know you. I’ve seen you in Berlin.
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Daddy why is your face rectangular
Just walked past a cafe table where both parents had their phones out & were intent on… something, something elsewhere. Meantime the year-old child they had produced in an offline moment gazed at one and then at the other, seeing their faces round the back of a screen. When I next passed the mother was rootling in her mum’s bag for something for the kid and Dad was holding both phones, like a smoker with two cigarettes.
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East German joy
Today I was in a tiny bakery in Brandenburg and laid a ten euro note on the counter. The bakery lady picked it up, her face spasming with disapproval, and shifted it 20cm south before dropping it in the special shallow plastic tray which is supposed to hold the money. Then she turned away to make me a cup of German tea: that is, boiled water with a tea bag sitting limply alongside. Then she picked up the ten euros again, took it and laid my change in the plastic tray.
I said to the man queuing behind me whose hand was resting on a stack of newspapers, isn’t that a sad story? The full page story up front was printed on a black page – a cyclist in his seventies had been knocked from his bicycle by a car door and had died. This man shrugged. In astonishment I said, “Es ist Ihnen egal?” It’s all the same to you? He made a mouth. “Berliner Probleme.”
These are just Berlin problems. We were an hour’s train ride from the city centre and standing on the platform of a Berlin train station. The train had ended early and we were all waiting for the official ‘replacement transport’, a big yellow bus. The bus driver looked me in the eye as I approached at the end of a small queue of people and then closed the glass doors in front of my face and drove off.
I remembered suddenly that Berlin is an island, an island in the pleasureless wastes and Stasi prison camps of the former GDR. Eventually a new bus arrived, with a far friendlier driver, and only two other passengers, who befriended me and gave me careful, detailed instructions for my solo forest walk. As we drove through the little township I peered into people’s immaculate gardens, their kitschy window treatments and collections of tiny sculptures including various clothed animals and dolls made of clay or straw. Hours later the town’s only punk, who had given me directions to the town’s only affordable eatery which was not a snack bar selling mostly ice cream, stopped his matt black van beside me and said, “You must be tired of walking. Hop in.” His big caramel coloured hound loomed over the back seat and rested her head on my shoulder as we drove and he said, casually, “Yes. Hereabouts it’s pretty provincial. I came back because my Mother was ill.” We passed a beer garden crowded with big parties of bikers in their padded black jackets who had come out for the day while it’s still sunny. At the end of the street gleamed a beautiful lake. Shouts came from the sandy playground which had a large sign headed “Principles of Playground Conduct.” A swan stood among the ducks cleaning itself earnestly. I took a shot of rum in my hot chocolate and read my book, having lent the little boy next door in his pram my pen. A girl came out carrying a tray of unbelievably ornate ice cream towers in tall swirled glasses. She set out across the road in her perfect white sneakers. A large man came past toting a tiny bright eyed dog. The sun splashed the crumbling medieval town.