Coffee and Sugar by C. Sean McGee (primary phonics .txt) 📖

contained. Mother gave the beast enough room to stretch its legs but not enough to dance so he had his nightly drink to unwind and every now and then he would come to Sunday lunch reeking of dried vomit but for the most part, he was a seasoned patron of sobriety, a pillar of moral aptitude who spoke ill of alcohol and all other broths stewed for the devil’s seed.

Today The Bishop was much different, lying in a yellow patch of drying sticky urine; his belt unbuckled, his pants pulled down to his knees, his dress shirt stuffed inside his stained yellow underwear, one foot shoeless sticking up in the air; his toes poking through tears in his woollen socks looking like a sick headless mushroom. He wore a pained expression probably from having dressed himself in some untoward disgrace at some point between unbuckling his belt and becoming unconscious during his drinking binge. He looked as if he were constantly being buggered by some pungent aroma with his nose scrunched up and his upper lip arched, dried and stuck to his gums showing his crooked, brown front teeth.

Joao picked his father up and dragged him towards the curtain behind the kitchen, laying him down on his bed so that he could wake, just a little bit less inglorious than when he had gone to sleep. On his way out he tidied up very quickly, picking up the broken shards of glass on the floor, throwing a wet towel on the patch where his father had pissed his own pants and affixing to the wall again, the picture of his mother, sitting on the wooden bench back on the farm; shaking off the broken glass and hanging the frame back on the wall where it belonged, looking down over them.

Down the hill he passed the men with guns, watching over his step, snarling at his face and laughing behind his back. Joao paid no mind, he kept his momentum skipping down the hill, jumping over pot holes and singing to himself as he went along. He couldn’t wait to relive the day before and maybe again, get a chance to serve someone but if not it was ok because it was good enough to be useful at something than to want to find a use in everything.

At the bottom of the hill he passed The Nice Old Lady who sold him; the night before, the beautiful plastic table that they used in the church to hold their television and small statues of Jesus.

“Excuse me mam,” he said, “I think you might have made a mistake last night when you sold me the table, remember? I think maybe you accidentally took, by accident of course, I’m not saying you’re a thief, I mean you’re an old lady, a nice old lady and thieves look more like…. Well them” he said pointing to the men with guns on the hill and the emaciated boys upon them begging.

“But I think maybe you mistook the notes and you didn’t know because I had two hundred dollars in my wallet but now there’s only eight and I didn’t want you to be shocked that you had extra money and you didn’t know where it came from, not because you’re old. I’m not saying that you did this because you’re old, I mean maybe you did, you know, not that you’re senile, but sometimes, you know at night it’s really hard to see some things and when you get more, umm, mature, yeah mature, when you get older, well your eyes strain and…”

“Fuck off you whiny little cunt” said The Nice Old Lady slamming the door in Joao’s face.

Joao stood in passive negation staring in through the shop window like a disciplined puppy, unsure what it was he had done to be locked out in such furore and wanting to pleasant himself more to be allowed back in. He thought maybe it was something he had said. Joao called a spade a spade and even sometimes when the spade was disabled, he couldn’t help himself from staring idly at the broken dangly parts making the spade feel more like a shovel, in a room full of spades.

“I’ll speak to her later, it must be her period” he thought, having learned from his father and brothers that all women’s irrationality was born once a month and knowing nothing of the science of what they were actually talking about just that it was apparently an appropriate assumption of a difficult woman.

On the bus it was much of the same. The wonder and awe that had slapped his face when he first entered the city had no less strength in its daily waking, greeting him like a dancing string with new dimension every time he blinked; new faces, new contours and new struggles etched upon the bridge of worry parting a sea of emotional eyes; each telling their own tale of sunken promise and buried treasure, entrenched somewhere in the pulling depths of their fathomless appetites.

“Good morning my dear Joao. How did you sleep after your first day of work?” said Fatts grinning madly.

“Fine sir, I mean, Mr Fatts” said Joao.

“Let’s get started. If you want a coffee, you can have five minutes before the morning rush piles up. The vat’s primed” said Fatts.

“If I could, I mean, if you don’t mind, could I make you a coffee?” asked Joao.

“Knock yourself out kid. Whatever you need to get your batteries charged. Big day today. We got the final this afternoon. If you thought yesterday was busy, you wait till you see this place fill up. So where are you living?” he asked.

“On the hill” said Joao.

“Oh. That’s a colourful neighbourhood alright. Some pretty bad characters around those parts. You near the bottom?”

“At the top” said Joao pleased.

“You’re kidding me? Are you crazy? That’s just for junkies, whores and tourists. What the heck are you doing living up that high? You know how dangerous it is right? Who are you living with? Do you have family?” asked Fatts concerned.

“I live with my daddy. The rest of my family live on the farm. They work real hard they do” he said.

“What about your father, what does he do?” asked Fatts.

“He’s a bishop. Real good he is, probably the best. We have a church on the hill, that’s why we moved there. Daddy is going to be famous like The 13th Apostle. You know on the farm everyone comes from all over to listen to daddy preach every week” said Joao.

“Nobody’s gonna visit that church, not as long as It’s on that hill. Not even god can compete with cheap crack and free pussy. And the people that go up there, they can’t be saved my friend. But I guess you probably know that by now. Just watch out. If you ever get in any trouble you call me ok?” said Fatts.

“I’ll make you that coffee. If you don’t mind though. Could you go and do something? I need to concentrate” said Joao.

“Ok, sure, anything you need little buddy. You need me just holler” said Fatts walking out from behind the counter and moving some boxes from the entrance of the café to the wall near the door to the storeroom, creating a nice neat stack that reminded Joao of the hay stacks his mother used to pile back on the farm except his mother would grunt like a stubborn ox every time she planted one pile on top of the other and had to swing her gargantuan upper body back into a vertical position.

Joao took a glass from the sink and rested it on the counter in front of himself. He then took the small white filter from the top drawer, still white because it had never been used in all the years that it had taken up space in the drawer. He placed the filter gently on top of a silver pot, nothing too big; it couldn’t boil a potato or anything, maybe a couple of eggs standing on their ends but it was the perfect size to rest the filter and fill maybe two glasses of coffee for Fatts so that he could dance with his shadow and be sang to by his soul.

Next he took the container of coffee and pressed his fingers into the fine powder, not pulling at anything, just letting his fingers move in and out of the dark powder like long slender worms, pushing their way down through the container until the compressed wall of thick coffee wouldn’t let them travel any further, then pulling them back up slowly to swim through the loose fine grains that sat atop like a pool of dried granulated water.

He looked to Fatts who was twisting his hips like a giant crane; his feet cemented into the cold tiles and his body turning on its axis with his back arched over and his hands hanging low like two chains with fleshy mechanical claws gripping at the boxes and spinning and turning on a dime to return the cargo to the wall beside the door, his feet never shifting from where they had planted and the smile on his face, infectious and distracting.

“Hey look Joao, I’m a robot” said Fatts, spinning and turning and making mechanical noises whilst moving his arms on imaginary pivots.

As much as Joao tried, he couldn’t imagine any worry or bother in this man. Fatts was so magnetised by life that it seemed only kindness and gratuity stuck to his skin. Even the mosquitos that buzzed by his ears and rested on his arms didn’t bite. He was a happy man and looking into his eyes and watching how he spoke with his body, it was impossible to believe that he had ever struggled or cursed his way through a single second of his life. Try as he did, Joao just couldn’t find it, until the uniformed men walked in.

The same violent looking man with a stone like stare entered the café with his right finger masturbating the latch of his holstered weapon, just as he had the day before and Joao looked straight at Fatts, who; though apparently calm and inviting, had the same look in his eyes that his father had had when the boys with guns visited them that night in their church. It’s the same look a roo gives when it narrowly misses a speeding road train. By the entrance stood his two subordinates looking anything but subordinate; to the passers-by and to anyone with a liking to their pulse.

Joao gazed into the eyes of Fatts and froze for a moment in time. He found in that moment Fatts as a young boy, no older than eight, standing in front of his mother as their crazed landlord cursed in vile obscenity, spitting through the air as every word aborted from his castigating tongue.

Behind him his mother shivered in fright, clinging to her son and trying to pull him behind her so that he could be spared from the cruel prizing of her dependant life but it was no use, the boy stood firm in front of her staring down the maniacal madman, ready to strike at whatever part he could reach to protect the last dregs of innocence, curdled within a decaying shell of decrepit addiction and mal treatment that was his dear, once loving mother.

When the man stopped his screaming, he slammed the door shut in Fatts’ face, shattering the two panes of glass in the centre and sending he and his mother backwards onto the floor; his mother collapsing into a useless pile of drooping flesh and brittle bone, her scrawny pen like fingers clutching at the blotchy skin above her eyes, catching the tears that ran down her face onto the palms of her scaly hands and down her arms, filling the open scabs and punctured flesh from old and scarred needle marks.

“What’s wrong with her?” spoke a voice from the corridor near the now open door, swinging on broken hinges.

Joao; looking through Fatts’ eyes, saw a young girl standing by the open door watching in estranged wonder as her friend’s mother lay foetal in the middle of the room in her soiled panties, shivering and sulking as drool spilled from her blistered mouth and a small stream of clear urine trickled down her leg onto the floor.

Fatts had on his face, the same look of waking and willowing shame that he wore in this factual moment outside of this daydream, having been caught by Joao in a moment of secrecy that he would rather have kept inside the invisible confines of obscurity. His eyes were wide and glazed with surprise, as if his red hand were drawn upon a brilliant white canvas on his face. The girl was looking at his mother crumpled on the floor but he felt her eyes looking only sullenly at him, casting their judgement and abating their congeniality.

“Please go” Fatts said to