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.
Tag: cafe life
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crutchpapa
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always the waitress
I saw a couple come into the cafe out of the sun, I have seen them before. One woman has a sour aspect and it is difficult to get her to return a smile. Her smile, when it comes, has a difficult, painful quality as though vouchsafing it hurts her in some way. The other is blonde, plump, pliant and yielding. When the dominant woman sits down, the other goes up immediately to order, turning back to ask or ascertain some aspect of the other’s wishes. “You are always the waitress in your relationship,” I thought, watching the woman pay, collect her change, and sit smilingly down. Her partner, who had already had the opportunity to become absorbed in the paper, and whose choice of cafe, I imagine, this might be, got up to go to the bathroom and it was fascinating to watch the blonder partner change. She lost her smile and drew out her phone and became absorbed in something of her own choice, seeming altogether a more serious person. This is her moment with her feet up once they’ve all been fed. We both heard the bathroom door click and she glanced up quickly, putting her phone guiltily away. As the dourer partner reappeared her beloved was waiting, alert, already producing her wallet and opening it, saying something I couldn’t catch, ready as ever to cater to this grumpy child she has settled for to satisfy her cravings for love for the rest of her life.
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housewarbling
I cannot describe what a privilege it is to have a home of my own after two years of house-guesting, couch-surfing, and six-week sublets. A friend who is also deeply introverted said, You must feel like a tortoise with no shell. I do! I did. But we’ve found a tiny high house with a tree-shadowed back deck, crowded between the new high-rises that despoil old Brisbane and at the same time bring her to life. Hemmed in by light industry, free from lawn mowers as nobody has the space, roaring with traffic all night and all day, wonderful. Within four days of first seeing the place we’d moved in.
Winter in Brisbane is beautiful. It’s not cold, but it’s cold. In a month’s time my beloved goes back to Berlin and my throat shrivels at the thought. But for now, a branch to rest on. Our first place together. An afternoon in the sun. A soft prong of furry grey ears that rises from the doona as I go in to collect my jacket off the hook.
At first it was like camping: a spacious, luxurious, first-world camping, serene in serendipity. We had cold showers and tea-light candles, newspaper for toilet roll. The flickering space so golden at night embraced us from the start. We moved our stuff in. I could feel, or felt I could feel, the kindliness of whoever lived here before, three exotic names in the letterbox, and the shallow tree resting out back with its branches never inactive, the artist who lives next door and who when we were chasing our cat spread his hands saying, “My yard is your yard,” the piercing weird tropical birds at night which that first night were louder than traffic, let me feel at last I was at home at last. Oh, at last, at last.
In the mornings I take a pair of double-handled mugs and scuttle down to the hole-in-the-wall cafe which spills with office workers. I take away two coffees and carry them uphill home. The neighbour who spends his days smoking behind a frangipani tree waves and I call back. From inside the house I can hear the morning mewling of my cat, who is back after two years lodging on the soft laps of my parents, who thus enabled me to travel and delay coming home. That’s if this is home: funny Brisbane, which doubles in size every time you turn your back, where we moved from Jakarta when I was twelve and which I left so many times, forever leaving, last heading south in 2003.
After four days’ flicker the power came on and I carried the stinking kerosene lamp outdoors. We had hunted down the kerosene in the local midnight convenience, in its ribbed bottle that in ribbing says poison; on the lowest shelf, but with child-proof cap. It stood next to a bottle of clear methylated spirits. The corner shop when I lived in West End used to sell meths cold, from the fridge. I remembered that, and the painter friends in a rickety place in Paddington who agonised over the old man who liked to take refuge under their high house on a steep slope to drink his meths and milk. This was years ago. He was rotting himself. They were relieved he didn’t smoke. These houses are like matchboxes on stilts and it’s a revelation to a Berliner how it can be colder inside the house than it is outside in the mid-morning winter sun. The whole place would go up in a giant torch, the house itself is tinder.
I set fire to my house once, late one night. I set a pan of oil on to heat and then sat down to write. Maybe that’s a story for another occasion. The firemen came clanging down our narrow street and couldn’t get through, they had to leave the vehicle and leap out, they rushed in and stomped through, after I’d put the fire out, in their giant boots and yellow rubber overalls. The guy in charge swept a glance up and down my walls, which were floor-to-ceiling books, and said, “This House…. is a Fire Trap. You have got to get rid of some paper.” I was glad, then, to be rid of the flammable kero, its brilliant, electric, improbable blue. Carrying it to the checkout I realised something, and said to the plump fellow staffing the till, “Hey! They probably added this colour because it looks toxic – to show that it’s poison. There’s nothing like it in nature. But, now… we actually have energy drinks that are exactly this colour!”
“Yeah,” he said, incurious, bagging my groceries though I’d said, “No bag,” standing unmoved as I fetched them back out again and piled them under my arms. Sometimes it seems the whole world is an artificial blue whose dire warning passes unheeded. Sirens are not lovely temptresses on wet rocks, combing and combing themselves, calling us off-course to pleasure, but flashing kerosene-coloured lights that revolve with a wet sound that’s unbearable and which we tune out and ignore. I wonder how deep have we poisoned our minds. Are we lit inside like the material world, carpeted in concrete and no longer allowed to grow dark (its dearest crop). The hoop of day revolves around and round earth’s hub and the thousand flights track the near cloud like lit flies, the native, believable blue and green of the world’s watery and earthly chores lying at ease, overridden, injected a billion times with a million kinds of toxic compounds of our own fevered invention: carrying home plastic instead of water, dining off plastic instead of wood; is this why a home of one’s own, until the water rises, is the kind of refuge that it is… nowadays.
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plain clothes police
This cafe installed in a loading bay has floor-length open windows, I am sitting with my back to the sun reading an ambitious local free paper. It has a row of Brisbaneites each standing holding their sign, the sign of what they’d love best to see, the signs of the kind of world they want. Invariably, or infinitely variably, it is a form of ‘everyone accepted for themselves’ or ‘a world without prejudice’ or ‘an end to war’. However underneath the idealism are pragmatic and tousled lists of self-love, love in the most measly sense: what I’m wearing? Label X jacket, shoes by Label Y. Even the youngest, even the oldest, are able to parse their outfits breezily, ‘a loafer,’ ‘a pant.’ Where I like to eat? Groovy Bar Z.
Last week we read an earlier issue of this publication in the same two seats in the loading bay, then as now a cold breeze running through the crooked, open space like large, stately passages of cool sea water. A fly tried to drown in my eggcup of honey, I fished him out with a teaspoon. Flung him out into the sunny breeze and he flew free, a kite trail of honey sprinkling the grass. Moments later my companion nudged me: Butterfly! Indeed, as if out of thin blue sky, her brown wings velvety light and tremoring she supped the round drops of honey. She laid her wings open in an ecstasy. I scooped a little more out and flung it wide, see if I could make her dance. She did.
A police car pulled up under the tree. A man in casual clothes got out. He was unshaven and looked rumpled and sweaty. He slammed the door then thought better of it, reached back in to retrieve something, a folder, locked up behind himself and came past the long draughty doorway. I began to laugh and pointed past him at the police car, accusingly. “Did you steal that?” “No,” he said, surprised, good-humoured. “I know,” I said, “just it would be so funny.” I cracked myself up. My tablemate reported the off-duty officer was still laughing when he crossed past the open passageway which is their galley kitchen and which ends in a slice of street. Two men came in and sat across from each other at our next table. The table was white-legged with a polished wooden top; of a series of mismatched chairs the guy in neon pink singlet drew out the one painted egg-yolk orange. I went over to them and crouched by their table. They looked startled. “I’m sorry to interrupt. I have this friend who’s obsessed with orange. Would you mind if I took a photo of your shirt and the back of that chair?” He waved his hand and the other guy barely smiled. “Sure, knock yourself out.” But twenty minutes later when they had finished talking and I had filled three more pages of my notebook they got up to leave and stopped off with us. “Did you get it?”