The Coffee Lovers. Ilinda Markov

said ‘family house’.”

      He gets the hidden question. “No, no family.”

      “Not now, or… ” I can’t believe I am pushing for an answer.

      “Arnya, I’ve been in one long-term relationship if that’s what you want to know, but she was already married. To her work. She was supposed to plan her holidays. She would refuse to go to a party or a concert if she had to get up early the following day. She never told me what she was doing in that office. It occurs to me now that probably I never asked.”

      “How about you? Have you ever had a job?”

      “My father trained me as a nurse, but I got the diving bug and volunteered for a green movement to save giant green turtles. You wouldn’t believe how many green turtles die swallowing hooks and fishermen lines or getting entangled in sharks’ nets!”

      I can see him: a dark, suavely moving shadow in deep waters, his flippers making look like an amphibian. Water. The water world. The ocean. The second planet full of life different from ours. I hope he also saves the green turtles from the tags they staple on their flippers, or from the cameras they stuck around their necks; the mighty man, the Big Brother watching the intimate life of an innocent ocean creature, how she eats, how she mates, how she lays her eggs in a pit which she digs with her stump-like flippers somewhere in the Pacific, perhaps on a Yasawa Fiji island, she plops her eggs surrounded by seagulls waiting to feast on her unborn babies, she cries and covers her eggs as good as she can with her stump-like flippers, then she goes back to the ocean, back to life.

      “How about you, Ms Stefan?” Bruno touches my arm.

      I am unprepared. I have hardly stayed long enough to share my private life with a man I have bedded, so I haven’t got a story ready to tell.

      “Odd jobs, and as I said, I write… ”

      “It’s not the writing age, you know.” He makes it sound like the Stone Age. At least he produces perfect scrambled eggs with crumbled Raclette cheese. The moment he splashes some of the mixture onto a plate, I dig my fork in and start chewing.

      Hunger has been taken care of.

      Still thirsty, I am also cold. The central heating is doing a good job, but I don’t wear much. Another pullover, which I spot among the cushions, is soon wrapped under my armpits and tightened in front.

      “How about your mother?” I ask.

      Bruno darts a hostile glance at me. I feel embarrassed. I talk with a mouth full of toast and jam, which he also provides. The jam is made of grated orange peel.

      “How do you like your men? Bearded or closely shaven?” He ignores my question about his mother.

      “Closely bearded,” I answer, guiding a reluctant piece of syrupy orange back into my mouth.

      He is preparing my coffee now decorating the crema with milk froth in the shape of a heart. The blob wobbles and slips out of the overfilled cup. Bruno tries new decorations like pictograms similar to the crop circles that appear in the wheat fields of England and are rumoured to be coded cosmic messages.

      I can’t crack the code of Bruno’s message.

      “How very barista!” I exclaim while I sip the pictogram coffee.

      He doesn’t react.

      I leave the coffee to cool down. I like that it’s thick and sticky. I need it thick and sticky.

      Soon we go back to bed, back to sex and more observations like, “On Mars, they don’t look for coffee, they look for water!” We continue to cautiously explore each other; advancing slowly towards the mythical light at the end of the tunnels, rocks drilled in for explosives, then abruptly we stop at a sudden archaeological site, a fine brush in hand, dusting, lips blowing away a film of burial rites still lingering around, ashes, skeletons of dead loves and hopes, our fingers cringe at the touch of their own fingerprints, recognising the smell of dried blood under the nails.

      I start to like it on the floor.

      I start to like Bruno’s guttural whisper, “Once, I had a coffee with the Masai Mara warriors after doing their jumping dance. Arnya, I bought some lovely bead strings made by the women in the Masai manyatta village. I’ll give them to my wife one day, they are better than a diamond ring.”

      I roll over and quieten my breathing. Then I reach for the cup with thick and sticky coffee. It’s cold by now and cold coffee may look like an oil spill, but I start to smear it on Bruno’s body: his neck and the small well at the base of it, his chest and in the furrow between his nipples, his belly and the small well of his navel, then I clean it with my lips sucking on his chin, his collar-bones, his nipples, my tongue drying the well of his navel. I have another sip of the remaining coffee and share it with his cock that looks just like another tongue playing with mine.

      Bruno moans under me. I have him as a prisoner, a prisoner of the pleasure I give him. The power game. I am winning it.

      A sudden fierce screech of brakes and a deafening thunder. Bruno jumps and swaying rushes to the window.

      I remain on the floor with a face smeared with coffee and flaky traces of semen, invaded by a blurred feeling that my mother’s nurturing breast has been taken away from me.

      Bruno comes back. “Nothing serious,” he comments kneeling beside me.

      But the screeching noise continues and has the decibels of a Metallica concert. I plug my ears with my hands. Yet I know the sound is now raging from within me: metal scraping metal, glass incising glass. The diamond needle screeching, skipping on a Duke Ellington song. Noises in my head loosen; nailed boots echoing through the stairwell, growls of pain.

      I want to get up but sway and sag back, closing my eyes to shut out the vertigo. The walls advance, turning the room into a landing, a man is falling into the jaws of darkness. Dimm, don’t go!

      “Arnya, are you all right?” He scoops my trembling body. “I am not going to hurt you. Tell me what’s wrong.”

      He holds me tight, it hurts.

      When you love, you get hurt; when you get hurt, you lick your wounds; when you lick your wounds, you feel sorry for yourself; when you feel sorry for yourself, you fall in love again; when you fall in love, you get hurt; when you get hurt…

      I grasp his hand. Panic attacks make me clingy. “Tell me about Africa.”

      Africa, dark like a black buffalo, frightening masks to ward off evil spirits like the ones Margherita was afraid of, vuka-vuka the aphrodisiac made of red-and-yellow striped Myalabris beetles, copper bangles clinking in the rhythm of the Zulu warriors’ dance, Madam Sonya had golden ones. Africa, the birthplace of coffee and mankind.

      Panic attacks make me chatty so I don’t wait for him but start talking first, my all-time mantra.

      “Naples is a great place to drink coffee.” My teeth are chattering. “So is the floating casino of Macau. So is Brisbane’s West End where I live and where I met that Greek man. He was my lover if you can call him one. It was mid-afternoon when it all started and the sun, hot and dangerous — it’s always hot and dangerous in Queensland — hung over the hypnotic Brisbane River, her movement jazz-arranged, syncopated, no longer the Brisbane River but the Styx, boundary between Earth and the Underworld, Hades — where ancient Charon ferries the souls of the dead. The souls of my dead. I left the riverbank and walked along Boundary Street past sidewalk cafes, each with its own aromatic veil, and entered my favourite, Babylon. There I met the Greek barista.”

      “The way you met me?” Bruno is supporting himself on his elbow, his body half-lifted as if suddenly finding himself too close to me.

      “The way I met you. He was a barista like you.”

      No reaction.

      I continue, “He was a Mediterranean seducer. A mortal Greek god. He took me home with him. His house was a temple of love. I