It’s a dry heat
January 2013
On day eleven of the heat wave, year two of the drought, in the seventh month of my thirty-ninth year, I stood in the queue at Kappy’s Emporium, wedged against a shelf of stovetop espresso makers, waiting to buy coffee beans.
Just like every previous day of the heatwave, I was dressed in my favourite T-shirt. Pale blue and getting paler by the hour, it had become tight across the tummy since I’d settled into a lunchtime routine of calzones on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and prawn laksas on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
My T-shirt had the words ‘It’s a dry heat’ stamped across an earth-red map. I’d handwashed it each night so that I could wear it again the next morning. Mindful of water restrictions — I could resemble an upstanding citizen when the mood took me — I poured the soiled water onto the couch grass that still covered a few patches of our dusty backyard.
‘You should talk to the garden,’ Rosie had taken to telling me. ‘It helps it grow.’
‘That’s a ridiculous thing for a scientist to say,’ I always replied. It was exactly the reaction Rosie pined for — she knew it and I knew it — but I couldn’t help but get grumpy. Deep down, though, I wondered if she might be right. When she wasn’t watching, I gave it a go. ‘Pull yourself together,’ I muttered at the lemon tree as I drip-fed it from a bucket. ‘Consider yourself lucky you’re not trying to grow new shoots in African soil,’ I told the azaleas. ‘It’s a dry heat,’ I explained to the patch of green that speared from the gap between the concrete and the tool shed — it was a weed, and inedible, but I admired its resilience.
Kappy’s door opened. The bloke who entered was like a cowboy emerging from a fine-grained desert, staggering and swooning, shot through the heart by a bullet that drew no blood. As he collapsed, gasping for breath, I reached around him and closed the door. That’s when I noticed the vintage coffee siphon on a shelf, a steal at $249.95. The Bakelite lid was in terrific shape. The cork on the neck was mouldy. But then I held the glass up to the light and spied a faint crack.
‘Ah,’ I murmured. ‘So close to perfect, so fatally flawed.’
Having lost my spot in the queue, I settled in behind cowboy man. I couldn’t help but notice that perspiration had turned his white shirt translucent, exposing on his shoulder a multi-coloured tattoo of Saturn.
I tapped the tattoo. ‘Take your holidays there, do you?’
He turned and gave me a slow careful vicious stare.
‘Five hundred grams of Guatemalan single roast, ground for a dripolator,’ said the woman at the front of the queue.
I peered at her. Her faded yellow tent of a dress matched her straw-coloured hair, although the tips of her hair were tinged pink. Her earrings nearly touched the floor.
‘Cyndi?’ I called. ‘Cyndi Lauper? Is it really you?’
‘Wait,’ she said, one hand raised. ‘Are they fair trade?’
I groaned, as if somebody has laid me out flat and dropped a brick on my chest.
‘Oh Cyndi. Not you too.’
Cowboy man turned and peered at me.
‘Why so cynical?’ he asked.
I was about to reply ‘What’s with the Hitler look?’ but after the incident with that nice Indian woman from the flats at number 7 —she’d admitted that she didn’t grind her own garam masala, I’d screamed ‘Stop assimilating’, she’d gotten all teary, her daughter had chased me home — I’d promised Rosie that I’d be nicer to people.
With a surge of generosity — maybe Rosie is right, I thought, maybe pleasantness does bring its own rewards — I decided that cowboy man wasn’t to blame for the sharp way his hair parted on his Aryan-white scalp or for the dark red smudge of heat rash that formed a historically appalling rectangle underneath his stub nose. I grinned and shrugged in my boyish way, and flopped my hair about for good measure — if you’ve got it, flaunt it, especially if you don’t have much else going for you — and demurely waited my turn. But cowboy man wasn’t done.
‘I think it’s a mighty fine thing,’ he said, ‘that we in the Western world, we high-end consumers, we privileged few, finally, after decades of oppression, yes oppression, there’s no other word for it, I’ll say it again, oppression, have the opportunity, should we choose it, should we accept the challenge, should we have the courage to look ourselves in the mirror and see ourselves for the pathetic hypocrites we really are, to do the right thing by some of the most wretched people who walk this earth, by entering with them into a partnership of equals in the best traditions of the brotherhood and sisterhood of man.’
‘I was wrong,’ I said. ‘You’re nothing like Hitler.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You’re more like Jesus on Easter Sunday morning, standing in front of the cave with the boulder rolled back, rubbing the conjunctivitis out of your eyes, shaking off the rigor mortis, dabbing your bleeding hands and feet with a man-sized Kleenex.’
‘Whatever you reckon, fella,’ cowboy man said. He yawned and turned his back on me.
‘You’re Jesus done up in a 100 percent brushed cotton shirt made in Vietnam by some growth-stunted, napalm-ugly seven-year-old who earns five cents every two years, which he sinks into his heroin addiction and helping feed his nine brothers and sisters.’
The woman in the yellow dress tried to squeeze past me but I grabbed her elbow.
‘I’m your biggest fan,’ I said. ‘I’ll never accept that Madonna made it bigger than you.’
She shrugged free of me without a word.
‘No chance of an autograph, then?’
‘I’ll have 250 grams of East Timor Fair Trade Blend 2,’ cowboy man said. ‘Ground for a stovetop espresso maker, please.’
‘The East Timorese must be dancing in the streets,’ I said.
‘Hey, every little bit helps. Just because you don’t care about the evils of globalisation, doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t do our bit.’
‘It’s one big party over there in Timor. We’ve stolen all their gas and oil but, hey, some destitute farmer’s gonna clear a full 75 cents on your bag of coffee. Good. On. You.’
Cowboy man sighed as he signed his credit card slip.
‘Doing your bit to help the impoverished Visa Corporation, eh?’
He swivelled on his Nikes and stalked out of the shop. I stepped up to the counter.
‘Good morning, Henry,’ Walter said. His forehead was creased. He withheld his gap-toothed smile.
‘How are you, dear?’ Gitta said, an unfamiliar fire in her eyes. ‘How’s your lovely Rosie?’
‘She’s never better. I’d go as far as to say that she’s fair trade.’
‘Excuse me but we believe in fair trade here,’ Walter said, addressing the room. ‘Okay, what do you want today? Come on, we are busy, very busy.’
‘The usual, I think,’ I said with a wink.
Each time I bought coffee beans from Kappy’s, Walter concocted a different blend. Each time he wrote the details on a card that I read only after I’d made and drunk the first cup. At that first sip, I wanted to think about the nose, the body, the taste, the aftertaste. I didn’t want to wonder if the slopes of Kilimanjaro really were misty or if the Blue Mountains really were blue. I didn’t want my head filled with guilty thoughts about destitute Tanzanians who ate gruel and slept in locked sheds. Or about the East Timorese, poor bastards.
Sometimes Walter knew straight away what mix of beans to give me, as if he could predict the fluctuations of my mood for the upcoming week. Other times he whispered suggestions to Gitta. She either nodded, four short sharp bangs as if she was hammering a nail into wood with her chin, or pursed her lips so hard that it was a wonder she didn’t draw blood.
Not today. Today they turned away from me, their podgy midriffs merging as they conferred in Dutch.
‘Well? What’s it to be?’ I said. ‘No, don’t tell me.’
‘Today you get nothing,’ Gitta said. ‘No coffee for you.’
‘But — ’
‘You are too rude. I am ashamed to call you my friend,’ Walter said.
‘Come back next week and we will serve you,’ Gitta said, ‘but only if you behave. Can you? Can you behave?’
‘I don’t have a clue what you’re going on about,’ I said. ‘I really think —’
‘You do not shake up women in this shop,’ Gitta said. ‘Never never never.’
‘That’s not what …’
I paused and breathed deep into my lungs, just like Rosie had suggested I do at moments like this. Eyes closed, I watched myself take hold of Cyndi Lauper’s elbow. My little joke. Except that I’d grabbed her rough. Except that I’d barked at her.
‘Oh no,’ I whispered. ‘Not again.’
Patrick Allington is the author of Figurehead (Black Inc., 2009) and is a Visiting Research Fellow, School of History & Politics, The University of Adelaide. This is an extract from a novel in progress, Potatoes In All their Glory.