“Money can’t buy anything for the soul,” echoed my mother playing her favourite and very melancholic Camille Saint-Saens’ 6 Etudes for Left Hand.
LIAM
One day the bastard was gone leaving behind everything but his notorious fast money making machine, sorry, brain.
Leaving you devastated.
ELIZABETH
His voice smells of the little green frogs that once lived in my mother’s pool. His voice is familiar and calming. The voice of this strange man with manicured nails and cuticles pushed nicely back after being soaked in soapy rose water is doing something to me.
In the suburb of West End the coffee shops bring to mind temples where worshipers come together to praise the hot, magical, addictive brew made of Arabica beans. Girls in black, priestesses in veils of aroma, shuttle between the tables stitching wounds of the soul whispering words of sacred mantra: guad, double, black, macchiato, latte, affogato… At hearing these OM-like words even the loneliest among the loneliest is no longer lonely, an illusion that keeps the crowd coming back.
In café Santorini I write inspirational cards for the tables as a bony Lego-made-like Englishman with a face scoured by acne and London weather toils on the old Mignon piano plucking sounds that could have killed Beethoven if the great composer and proverbial coffee drinker wasn’t deaf, and dead, years ago. Jeff the possessor of the green frogs voice has long crooked fingers, perfectly plotted for pocket lifting. They have signed him a contract with the owner Manoli who pays him mostly in consuming but Jeff doesn’t mind. He is under the spell of the arrogantly attractive laid-back culture of Brisbane’s West End and wears a beanie to protect himself of the mid-day scorch even inside the cafe. The ruffled and of non-descript colour beanie is now perching on his head forgotten perhaps and making him look taller and shabbier than he already is. I try not to be too harsh in my judgments, his eyes has this vitrage quality which makes me think they are blue, then hazelnut, then cats’ yellow and grey. I wonder under how they were defined in his driver’s license before. But then he hasn’t got one.
The white-and-blue painted walls around us are decorated with posters of the famous Greek island the café is named after. There are spme sepia photos from the time when cane-cutting in the region was booming: barefooted young men in dark suit trousers, naked from the waist up, dancing in couples on the beach, looking over their shoulders for girls that are never coming. Thousands of hungry migrants of post-war Europe: Greeks, Italians, Germans. Broken dreams, broken English, never enough money for a two-month voyage back home from Australia. One of the photos features Manoli’s uncle Nick known to have been bitten by a deadly taipan. The rumour goes that it was Manoli’s father, who put the snake there and inherited the dead man’s money. Santorinihad opened doors some time later. Some of the inhabitants of West End are so intelligent that they can quote the French novelist Balzac who once said that behind every wealth there is a crime. The less intelligent know only that Balzac was bonkers for coffee and slurp it from a soup pot. I don’t an opinion on this. One sees that crooks are doing well but I am flat broke and hardly in a position to judge local urban myths. My immediate worry is paying for my antidepressants and buying a discount hot dog for dinner, so I focus on the cards containing inspirational thoughts about coffee and try to ignore the vintage effect of Jeff’s eyes on me.
From the Vietnamese restaurant next door, the smell of crab noodle soup and deep fried Phoenix balls trails in. I feel the hunger like a feral animal caught in a trap ready to gnaw its way out.
Now you know what it is if you haven’t foraged for juicy scorpions! says Liam.
I try to ignore him and fight the desperate clingy need to prove I still have someone in my life. Even if this someone is a meerkat messing with my head.
In the late morning when I finished the fill-in shift Manoli told me I wouldn’t be needed tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow. He is masterly squeezing the loop around my resistance to trade my undernourished body for a so much needed job; yet he is leaving a breathing space with a vague invitation to come in “whenever I have time” and create more of my popular “coffee cards”, coloured squares from an old origami box, on which I write in fat letters texts like “Voltaire drank 70 black coffees a day”.
Surprisingly quite a few around here know who Voltaire was and the number seventy as true as it is sounds crazy, but people are impressed and order another latte. That’s what Manoli wants. That and other things.
Manoli is a drongo, says Liam.
What’s drongo? I ask although I know better than to encourage Liam to talk to me thus frightening Amruta, my beautiful GP who still bulk-bills me.
I am fattening up the green letters on the last card which I shape oval when the previously shy and distant noises in my head get loose and a pain of a lighting bolt intensity and trajectory sends me sweating. I close my eyes, a pitiful attempt to shut out the vertigo. The walls advance pushing the white-and-washed-blue houses and Manoli’s unlucky uncle, closing on me turning the cafe into a hall of distorting mirrors with Jeff’s fingers ripping the veils of a discordant darkness.
“Elizabeth, are you all right?” Jeff taps me on the shoulder.
He is not a drongo, remarks Liam.
Manoli brings a glass of water, followed by an espresso, which he plonks in front of me.
He is still a drongo.
“On the house,” says Manoli and scurries away to meet customers.
The double shot works. I come to my senses.
“Einstein, Beethoven and Casanova were religious about coffee.” I cite for Jeff the contents of my cards. Panic attacks make me chatty. “Naples is a great place to drink it. So is West End and the floating casino of Macau.”
If I have blacked out, it’s not the first time.
Jeff holds my hand. From a distance Manoli sharing the charm of a farmed salmon watches us, his face going from pink to red.
The drongo’s hopping mad, Liam observes but I am cautious to agree with everything he says because Amruta, my beautiful Indian born GP wouldn’t like it suspicious that I don’t take my pills. I can’t tell her that I can’t afford pills, even the pill although these days I hardly need it.
Jeff makes sure that I feel better and goes back to the piano. As his fingers hammer the right keys his head is turned to me. I read vitrage empathy in his eyes and that kills me. I look at my bitten fingernails, I am not sure whether the ;last two days I have combed my hair and out of the black uniform of a café temple priestess and back into my unwashed T-shirt and hand-down cut-offs which make my legs look like foldable stilts I am hardly a worship material and his manners become more like those of a percussionist and he is beating the shit out of the old Minone. A fake amphora stuffed with artificial flowers not unlike my mother’s perching on the top of the piano rattles and slides. The thud of its fall evicts me out of my post-panic-attack misery and again I am ready to face the world that acts like…
…like a drongo.
Liam has a thing about drongos.
I might even face the social worker instructed by my half-aunt to offer me ways out of the rock bottom I have hit. My half-aunt, another victim of the embarrassment I spread around. And the social worker offering me retraining, sending me to business class which I never attend, signing me up for lectures. I attended only one and created havoc, it was on how to make money and not to wait on hand-outs. Very embarrassing to be poor.
I look at Jeff. Manoli will charge the fake amphora on his meal.
Money, I am learning it the hard way, is all there is and the world looks to me like a hungry mob engaged in ripping each other off. Nobody bothers to pretend otherwise. For me remains the curse to be different.
The vertigo comes back.
I close my eyes.