Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: cafe

  • love in public

    I saw two girls, two women, long-haired and standing round bags, close together on the subway and talking American. The train jolted round a corner and the girl nearer me fell against her lover as if accidentally, snatching a kiss as she fell. The lover was displeased, detached herself, stood gazing out at the striped blackness underground. I supposed that the kisser maybe felt, hey we are so far from home, we are safe here, and nobody knows us. I supposed the kissee felt, now: none of that, people are looking, we’re in public, we’ve got to lock it down.

    I saw two men, two boys, in their middle-age running a bubble stall from a bucket on the crowded square. It is Saturday night and everybody is out. The incredible din. The shrieks and the rumble. A high bus goes past with no lid on its upper storey, crammed with tourists taking pictures who crane as their bus turns a corner then turn their backs, gazing ahead as though now none of this any more even exists for them. The bubble venders are busking, they have two long poles joined by a slack rope and a slightly shorter string, so that when they have dipped their poles and pulled them out and separate them slightly, one string pulls tight and the bubble forms and drifts up into the spangling dark. They must have newly learned this skill and are not very good at it. In between they sneak gasps off each other’s cigarette and the younger one resumes an endless phone call that has now been going for half an hour. I saw one family after another stop to take advantage of the play, their little children grasping after the bubbles to make them sprinkle into rain and the two men gallantly entertaining, letting each child take a turn on the poles, not even screwing up their faces when one after another the families left again, throwing no coins in their yellow hat.

    I saw three girls in their teens chase a boy clear across the square and they were shouting at him, something, all of them laughing, the boy bolted over and collapsed at my feet as the three of them pelted on him and tore him down. They had him there on the stones screaming for mercy, his laugh interrupting him: he asked me for help in Spanish but I said, No, indeed, in English: You probably deserve it, I am going to sit here and take your picture. And I did and the old man in green on the table behind met my eye and we both smiled, in our different languages, a rueful smile. I saw Spring arrive, suddenly it seems across the span of only three or four days; all the delicate trees along the walkways are blooming and shimmering in the light.

  • writing hardily

    Today I was writing in a cafe and when I pulled out my laptop to transcribe out of a messy notebook the woman next to me got up and slid between our tables, saying something over her shoulder under her breath. “I’ve just come from the office…” I was wondering why she would feel so insecure that she would need to explain her movements to a stranger when it sank in – as she sank in, to the bench seat opposite – what it was that she had said: “Ich komme gerade vom Büro, I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” The funny thing was she was clutching her mobile phone like it was a huge reefer she was about to lift on the ball of the hand to her lips, and the flickering of her screen had caught my eye and momentarily bothered me, before I caught myself and realised how insane it was to resent someone for poring over their screen while I pored over mine. She was staring at me across the room, I raised my shoulders and spread my hands. “Was, denn?” She called the waitress over and repeated her complaint in the exact same words: “I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” Around the flower arrangement she pointed me out. The waitress shrugged helplessly, her face relapsing from an attempt at sympathy into a foolish smirk. What could she say? I let go the sward of ideas I had built in the air as they demolished themselves and dissolved in the face of such tiny, such concerted ill-will, and took out my notebook again and tried to let my gaze fall into the precise point of the middle distance where happiness and contemplation and, it sometimes seems, poetry lie thick on the chilly air like leaves on the ice. I told myself this place – a “literary cafe” attached to a bookshop – would not exist if not for writers like me and took up my pen again and foraged on.

  • exactly right like Goldilocks

    I was working in a cafe today for the first time in a while and the woman behind me had an extremely carrying voice. I had sought out a quiet corner by the fountain to write and she came along borne on her throaty rolling laugh, which she brought out every time the good-looking, shaven-headed maitre d’ came past, and sat down to wait for her friend. The friend arrived. The coffees were brought by a Japanese waitress who spoke in a very high, girlish voice, anxious to please. The throaty lady responded to this waitress in her own high pitch, the kind of friendliness that lacks warmth and is in fact sharply dismissive, “Ok great! Thank you!” Then they settled down to conversation and I was reaching the end of my narrative by now and her voice interrupted my thoughts, lazy me, I couldn’t help it.

    Her favourite word was “Exactly!” She used it twenty-three times. With emphasis, and pronounced “Igg-ZAK-ly.” I pronounce it rather that way too, more of an “egg.” Exactly, she would say when her friend finally got to talk, exactly. ExACTly. Her second-favourite was “Ab…so….LUTEly,” drawn out in a way that seems sexy in a tired way to me, almost mechanical. So much affirmation, so much praise. She was like the world’s best world-champion good listener, only louder. Her voice was still ringing in my ears as I walked away. Under a fig tree I ducked into a shoe shop to turn over some suede pair of green things for men, and the sales guy came up and we chatted. We were telling each other how hot it’s been. I told him how the Berliner I brought with me couldn’t grasp it, how he said, I’ll just wear my jeans. “We arrived in December.” “Oh, no.” “I told him, you will NOT want to wear denim, in Brisbane in the summer.”

    He told me his bedroom has no windows. “Wow,” I said, “that’s hardcore.” “I know,” he said. “But then – you couldn’t open a window anyway! Because of the mosquitoes.” “Iggsackly,” I told him, “iggsackly.”

     

  • that lamp

    I have a lamp that is shaped like a shell, was in fact a shell, is a home for a strange and retiring sea creature long now gone. It glows almost red when you plug in the bulb, a beloved’s ear with light behind it. Lately as the days are tropical cold and dim and windy we light the lamps tagsüber. Near the beer factory is a tiny art printer who lays on canvas and on fine rag paper people’s photographs and paintings. We left the lamp on at home and went out. He showed me some of his work. He opened a drawer and let me roll some of the beautiful paper in my hands.

    Nearby is a tucked-in kind of cafe which you can barely see from the road, it is screened. Inside is like a secret fish tank. The chalkboard says You like cake. We make cake. Cake CAKE. We ordered cake. “Eighteen fifty,” said the guy. Cake is expensive. I said, “Now that was a very good year.” “Huh,” he said. We sat down and went over the book I am bringing to print this week: page after page of it, is it still beautiful, does it still hold. You’re looking for the tiny cracks and nail holes that let seep gradually the water. At the far end of the place a handsome man lay back in his chair. Stroking lazily his little device. He didn’t lift his eyes off it. His daughter dressed from head to toe in pink ballerina costume lay in a pile on the concrete playing dreamily with blocks they have stacked down there, singing and rousing on herself. She was in her own world, he was in someone else’s. Two men came into the cafe and I heard the guy recycling my pale joke. “19.90,” he said, “now there’s a good year. You’d be finished school, out into the world…” Behind my back I could almost hear them gazing at him blankly. I felt bad about the failure of the wordplay I’d transmitted, as though I had set him up.

    Later the night turned out fresh and enchanted, so strange, those nights that bring home the spirits from the deep sea and the mountainside. I lay in the hammock between two large trees, watching as the wind rustled and tumbled like cities through surf, down to the bony ground again and again, carrying in itself everything whole and real, everything breathing. This month I don’t know if you’ve noticed but again the full moon was full or albert full for days and days. This always feels like some kind of special benediction to me, as though we have been given a treat, like we have pulled off a trick somehow and gotten away with something.

    I should end there but there is something more to say. You know the night? In the night if you lie in a hammock you are in the air, you’re in the water. I gazed up, mostly with my eyes closed, into the depths of the tree, the sparring webwork of the lazing bed, the night itself drawing its fleece across the stars. It felt like one of those nights you could climb up into, curled as I lay curled, and the night would heal itself round you seamlessly and simply carry you away.

    When I came in my partner called me over to his screen. He loves the new. He wanted to play me a piece of music, piano music. We were silent, listening to the climbing sounds. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Yes, I said, it’s beautiful. He said, “It’s the first piece of music not composed by human~” “What?” I stood up. I think I was shouting. “Why did you play me this? Why did you?” “What’s the matter?” “Why do you show me this stuff?” “I thought it would make you feel good! It’s not scary, it’s just beautiful. Listen how lovely that is.” When someone who understands doesn’t understand: the world is a cyborg desert already. I said, “I can’t take it. I can’t live in a world where machines compose music. I can’t live.” An ache spread inside my chest, despair, hopelessness, rage. Within me I felt the impaired moon, the night, the thoughts of serene pursuit drain like soap scum away. Poke the pearls and they are merely bubbles, evaporating, the >plink<. Someone let the plug out of the sky and I felt all the buoyancy of things drag slowly down, my heart is hot and sore and sleep seems more oblivion than restorative hammock in a sea of quiet leaves which sparkle like near stars.

  • a strange moustache

    Lady Barista and I made each other laugh today, or maybe I just made myself laugh, which is lamer but still enjoyable. I turned up with my curly-handed mug and passed it across. “Just the uzh?” she said, which is her uzhual question. I was reading the band posters behind her. “Oh! I’m performing in that!” “What?” she said. “Queensland Poetry Festival. We have this fantasy that my poetry book & my CD will be out by that time but I think…. it’s not going to be both.” She picked up my loyalty card and said, “Hey! You’ve got a free one here.” Instead of throwing the full card away she passed it back. “You should keep that.” It had a bright yellow postage sticker on it, for tracking an overnight bag. “Ok,” I said, “but I think you better stamp it anyway. Just in case I try to come back and claim that free coffee again.” She said, dryly, “I think I might recognise you.” I said, “Wearing a fake moustache.” We started to laugh. “Dark glasses,” she said. She said, “I think the cup might give it away.” I was lying on the counter, laughing. “So if someone turns up,” I gasped, “in a plastic moustache – and a big hat – and dark glasses… and a shonky foreign accent – ‘Chello. Do you haff ze decaf?’ – I have to confess that might be me.”

  • a singer I’d never heard of

    Our nearest cafe has made such a bold and tender innovation. Simple, really. How shall I describe it? Ok, imagine it’s Monday morning. It’s earlier than you’d like. For reasons unusual you have had to stagger out of bed and you feel grumpy. There’s no milk, argh. You grab your mug and stumble almost literally down the hill. Over your head trees are waving to each other across the asphalt, they would join hands if they could. The crows cark, the traffic spurls, the world is bright and full of love and if I could just get my eyes to open properly I’d see it all. At the bottom of a steep slope there’s a little coffee shop. If you had a billycart you’d be there within seconds. The usual clot of people in suits standing not looking at each other parts on a sweet and familiar sound: a strummed guitar. Monday morning gig! First thing, in the grumpy hour. It’s genius.

    A guy sits curved over a mic whose stand, set at an enquiring angle, seems to be interviewing him. Guitar is plugged into a tiny amp, one of those kerbside amps you carry under one arm. You reach the head of the queue and buy coffee. He is singing. He sings with a tentative grace. The customers, embarrassed, so strenuously ignore him it almost must break his heart. The songs are familiar, radio fodder, he is doing them an injustice. You love him for that. With his voice he breaks open the idea that all songs come fully formed from a studio, there is no struggle, only gloss; that everyone’s life is far better than yours.

    You have had to kind of climb out of your sleep and sleep’s warm privacy to emerge in public city life, to use your vocal chords. Your hair is all over your face and you’re wearing the tshirt you slept in. You lean over and say, You have got the sweetest voice, it’s such a lovely surprise of a Monday morning. Oh! he says: thanks. He takes hold of his guitar differently. Over the back of his machine the barista asks, Did you just request the Beastie Boys? I told him he has the sweetest voice, you say: same thing.

    You are slouched against the besser block wall in the sun. Your hips swing and one clog is knocking on the other, you emit an appreciative murmur when the song is done. This emboldens a man in his suit standing nearby to say, That was better than the original! The singer laughs, thanks him. All of a sudden the music is not invisible and we don’t have to pretend it hasn’t happened. A girl in knee-length boots comes striding in and sits at a spindly table opposite. A guy in a striped tie looks up and smiles. At the end of the next song your coffee is ready, in its own curling-handled brown mug. You can’t leave because you’ve asked the guitarist, Do you write stuff, as well? And very diffidently he has offered: I could pull one of those out… if you like. And he pulls out like a long swathe of coloured scarves knotted one end to the other a lilting song about a little bird; sitting on my shoulder; telling me you’re not the man you use to be. It is a song about self-belief: that thing we’re all in need of. The things this little bird says to him seem cruel and they remind you of the kinds of things your own little bird sometimes whispers, the reasons why you are not also sitting out in the sun in a coffee shop, playing. You think about your dusty guitar and how he said, I haven’t played my own songs for a long time. You notice how he is curled in on himself but from the outside there is nothing not to like: his gentle presence, his tortured and reedy voice, plaintive and frayed but strong inside, like a rope. When the song is done it is a gift that he has given you. You want to give it back, to show it to him. You say, That was really lovely. Have more confidence in your own stuff. Thanks! he says, already sitting up straighter. You look at him and keep seeing yourself. I was so happy when I came down the hill just now! you say: Monday morning gig! it’s brilliant! You’ve made a big difference to my day.

    You pick up your mug off the railing. He ducks his head, says, You’ve made a big difference to my day, too. Thank you, you say again, and leaving the music behind, carrying the music, start walking up the hill for home. Carrying milk and honey and beans. A small swirling land of milk and honey. Pot of steam. A bright morning. A singer you’ve never heard of, but heard, and who heard you. What more can be grace? Come, Monday: come.

  • 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?”

  • revenge on autopilot

    Today I was sharing a cafe table with two pilots who spent the entire time talking about the missing jet. Their talk was loud and showy and handsomely studded with jargonese. They kept glancing over, and shifting in their seats; I felt that they needed an audience and so I was on their radar. (See? It’s contagious).

    One tried to enlist me in his smiling sarcasm when his know-it-all mate discoursed at enormous length with the barista about coffee origins. “Are we drinking coffee?” he asked me, rolling his eyes, “Or wine?” “Well,” I said, mildly, “but it’s nice to enjoy it, right?” It’s so difficult, so impossible, to keep one’s thinking clear of the deeply embedded invisible gateways, like ha-has, imposed by cultural expectation. How obsession with the provenance of soured grapes can be permissible, even compulsory, but an enquiry into how your primary drug is manufactured and grown is dismissed as snobbery.

    It was, of course, snobbery: they were performing, uninvited; this is tiresome. The cafe was small and their voices rang. Five staff members ran to and fro; a laneway den down deep in the canyons innercity. I seemed to be reading in the Financial Review how one of Andrew Forrest’s companies made a claim to extract minerals from under the soil of his personal property, his farm; another of his companies, the mining concern, has blocked it with time-wasting “inquiries”. The corrugated rubber, mined from rubber trees, on the wooden sole of my clog suddenly scraped loudly against the foot of our shared table, making an explicit, ripe, farting noise.

    By refusing to enact the required Accidental Fart Noise Disclaimer behaviour, I exacted a tiny, petty, and useless revenge on my visiting male experts. You’re supposed to deliberately but as if unconsciously make the same noise a couple times more, to make it clear That Wasn’t What You Think It Was, that was the chair leg. The pilots stared, only for a moment, surprised out of their theories by my apparent demonstration of unabashed personal jet propulsion. Hey, did she cut the cheese? My own flight veered secure in its inexplicable darkness to the right, to the west, out of reach of either the transponder or the secondary radar and reflecting the dim distant starlight on its flanks and back like a turtle travelling inevitably, laboriously, in deep privacy from one tiny unclaimed island to another, by itself.

  • trepanned

    A confluence of kindness in the Sunday cafe this morning. People were slouched about, eating their brunch. A series of wan songwriters entertained us from the speakers. When we first walked in a classical guitarist had just done playing, and when he walked around the tables with his cupped hand outstretched, everybody gave. Then a commotion at the doorway. A very very drunk lady sloshed her way in. She shouldered her way between two quite closely placed tables and sat down. Oof. Began talking to the woman on her right, who clearly didn’t know her. It was a long bench seat along the wall so now all three women, ladies who brunch with a lady who lurches tucked between, were sat shoulder to shoulder like pigeons under the framed oil paintings of Karl Marx. The place is called Cafe Marx, been there for years apparently. The drunken one pulled off her filthy beanie, revealing sparse tufts of grease-darkened hair. She was loud. And she looked smelly. The woman she’d spoken to rose to the occasion like the Queen. “I know,” I could hear her saying agreeably, “it’s freezing outside.” The drunk one said something inaudible, affable. “Ja,” said her invaded neighbour, “gemütlich.” Gemütlich is a word like the Danish word hyggelig: cosy, it means; warm, comfortable, comforting. The kind of word you invent when you live in a climate where a person consistently turned away from every door can die just by sleeping in the park overnight. The waiter came over to reason with her. Her voice rose, she waved her beanie at him. At first he said, Can you go, please, and You will have to leave, and Do you want me to call the Police? “I am the Police,” she said grandly, settling her beanie back over her ears. But the women either side of her and their companions were wonderful. Unworried. Well, worried but cool. They started suggesting to her, Perhaps you’d be more comfortable in the corner there, that looks so cosy, wouldn’t you like to have a table to yourself? Why shouldn’t you have your own table? “Yeah,” she said, in tones of worn aggrief, “yeah, why indeed.” And as she staggered to her feet and lurched towards another table (ours) the waiter once again stepped in, more respectfully, more kindly this time. His customers had taught him that – or rather, reminded him, as we do for one another. Gently he took her arm. “Could I ask you to sit outside?” he said, in such courteous tones that she was able to pretend she had been given a choice, to deliberate a moment and then decide, “Also dann.” Ok then. He escorted her to the door, more like a nephew than a bouncer suddenly. The people on the bench seat shifted and laughed quietly, restive with relief. You know how belligerent you get when you feel like your humanness has been ignored. She was aggro. But lost. In the wind outside she sat down with some difficulty. I went over to the counter and spoke to the waiter in a low tone. “Das haben Sie so schoen gemacht,” I said, “so freundlich.” You did that so beautifully: so friendly. “Aw,” he said, looking down. He was putting something on a plate behind the high counter. I said, I would love to buy a coffee for that lady, if… you don’t mind providing one for her. (Thinking of the risk to his china). But by the time he brought the coffee, hot and rich with crema in a takeaway cup, she had gone. The overturned table and smashed ashtray on the ground were all she’d left behind. I walked up and down the square for a while looking for her but she had moved on. And would continue to be moved on, I imagine, all the rest of the winter. And would perhaps be picked up by the Winter Bus that goes around collecting people who have fallen asleep in the snow. And whose fire in the belly, lit and swollen from the magic bottle, might not be enough to keep them alive til morning, in the dark cold lonely treesung night.

  • the narrow rainbow

    So the skies are white, the rooves are grey, the buildings brown and cream… the either dreary or soothing winter pallet of Germany is restful to the imagination. In every cafe, candles flicker. Little pots of gold.