Читать книгу The Meerkats’ Book on Money - Ilinda Markov - Страница 7

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.

Again away with the fairies! Elizabeth, don’t do this to me!

All I hear is my inner voice that tells me THE FREE FALL IS AN ONLY SALVATION because it’s not the first time I am told I am not needed.

Redundant is the word.

WhenI was told I was no longer needed at my previous equally casual and badly paid job I went home early only to find a short-sighted Chinese girl squinting at me from Alec’s bed, her jet black hair sprawled over the pillow still carrying the warmth of my head. Alec introduced me as a flat mate. He offered me to settle in the spare room. I left and headed for the old abandoned house by the river once belonging to my grandparents where I nursed my cancer-ill mother until her face became smaller than my palm, At the funeral her half-sister told me I was not to inherit the half of the house: we were in such a big debt to her.

Weeds have overgrown the little patch that used to be a garden between the house and the heavy hypnotizing waters of the Brisbane river moving along the tidal moods of the ocean. Exhausted of fighting depression I have contemplated these waters as a way out. Another option presented itself as a knot of red belly snakes curled on the steps leading to the front porch to which I still kept a key but it looked copycat Cleopatrian and melodramatic.

My mother’s half sister, a staffer of someone big in Canberra, waits for a worthy developer’s offer. A City Cat boat crosses the river between West End and St Lucia full of students who remind me that once in another life I was like them full of enthusiasm and youth-loaded arrogance looking forward to a degree in psychology, having my own practice like beautiful Amruta, buying off the rest of the house and more green frogs for my mother’s pool, she loved them. She would go out onto the terrace listening to their primal song, the throaty croak making her feel good even in her last days.

There are no longer frogs in the garden. The snakes have taken care of them. The pond is dry and overgrown but it’s still a home, although I feel like a squatter what I actually am.

In café Santorini I open my eyes and come back to face reality.

It wasn’t that bad, three minutes.

Jeff plays something soft and romantic and it takes time to remember that Manoli has thrown me out hoping my pride won’t last long with hunger and medical bills pressing me, draining me, obliterating my last scrapes of energy: a hyena picking on the sick animal of the herd.

For the cards I’ll be paid with a ploughman’s sandwich and a coffee.

I wonder what meals Jeff gets.

He is not picky. I think he fancies you.

“Thank you!”

“It’s all right!” says Jeff in a green-frogs-voice and his smile kisses my smile, kind of.

The vertigo ebbs and I finish an extra card “Coffee is a hug in a mug.” I place it on top of the other I have already made, and leave. Suddenly it’s the rugged sounds of cool jazz trailing after me as does Jeff’s gaze. I want to wave to him but the hurts carved into my heart prevent me from doing it. I walk away feeling guilty and ungrateful.

Walking down Boundary street I still feel wobbly but it doesn’t prevent me from painfully noticing how West End is changing with a steady stream of highrises pushing their way in, dwarfing the physiognomic traditional stilt-set queenslanders, creating grotesque obelisk-like landmarks among small Greek restaurants, homes of sirtaki music and delightful moussaka, or among non-pretentious Vietnamese shops for those tempted by hot and spicy food. Construction sites swallow the river banks and cranes like vultures devour small parks and alleys, devour old houses like the one I squat in. All in the name of money.

Cashing in. That’s what they are doing. Stinky desert foxes.

As I walk slowly I take in the windows of bookshops where fast literature is banned, of bakeries and delis trying to stay away from fast food trends, of charity venues selling preloved clothes and where you can still score a bargain on odd Royal Doulton porcelain figurines, of cafes spilling onto the sidewalks, of dark narrow corridors where occult paraphernalia and masquerade costumes fight for attention, of homeopathic and alternative clinics suddenly included in medical covers, of places where one can buy a chunky amethyst stone supposedly opening the third eye and the crown charka or pay to be told the future by a gypsy-style dressed taro lady. I take in people who I know smoke tobacco and pot, gather at the Woodford festival for drum sessions in a brave attempt to clean the negative vibes in the world, listen to lectures on palm-sole reading and spirituality and never on money. People who like my mother refuse to join the rat race and pay for it.

I never expected so much envy from you, Elizabeth! To call rat race the beautifully arrange order which renders the rich richer and … you know the rest because you are part of it.

I don’t bother to engage in a conversation with Liam because at the corner where two side streets form a small triangle with an old tree and a grass patch around it I stop in front of a stall with a makeshift cover that looks like a horse float. The dark, slim woman in her bright-coloured cotton wrap is busy around two small burners. On one she roasts green coffee beans in a copper pan, stirring them occasionally with a spoon. On the other, a copper jug with water is heating. As the beans hiss and pop, the woman whose name is Malita empties the pan and takes her time, pounding the beans in a mortar. She then slips the contents into a long-necked clay jar, adds the boiling water, taps the jar and leaves it to steep. Finally she looks up at me as her hands, quick and agile, stirs a new lot of beans, tossing them in the air and catching them in the pan in one efficient movement. I watch the lidded clay jar, steam and aroma escaping through a designed hole, reaching me with an overwhelming aroma. Soon I am drinking in silence this coffee made the way they used to make it in Africa a thousand years ago, the hypnotic liquid bringing mist to my eyes. Malita, an Ethiopian refugee, gives me a smile with her eyes. In Ethiopia circa 800 AD shepherds noticed that goats got frisky dancing around coffee bushes, that was the beginning of coffee.

We know each other but we barely talk that’s why I am surprised when she turns her huge amber eyes to me and they erupt in a smile like her full lips.

“I’ll sing for you an old Ethiopian prayer,” she says and with her eyes now closed chants. “Coffee pot, give us peace/ coffee pot, let children grow/ let our wealth swell/ please protect us from evils…”

I join her and our bodies sway in the slow rhythm of her song, The new degree of our closeness brings tears to my eyes.

Malita refuses to take my coins for the rich strong coffee she prepares for me so I share my ploughman’s sandwich with her. We are in the same boat with a holed bottom. Why money is so important?