THE BUSINESS

EVERY MORNING IN Melbourne most people descend upon cafes for their morning cup of coffee. They cost around $5.00 each and while nobody really knows why they do it they do it all the same – every morning. Maybe the café has replaced something missing in our society and paying the $5.00 isn’t so much about the cup of coffee as it is seeing someone at the counter regularly, looking at their face, maybe exchanging a quick hello and a ‘how are you?’ and that’s about it. Not many of the cafes even stock the local newspapers anymore. I know for me it was just about feeling like I was still a part of the community in some way. When you have those feelings of loneliness you just want to see someone and even if they don’t speak to you at least you walked somewhere and did something.

On the way you pass houses you’ll never be able to afford and see father’s locking front doors, wearing ironed pants, and getting into moderately priced cars to go off about their day. And you see mothers holding the hands of their children walking them to school before they too, presumably, go to work or find some other way of obtaining money for contribution to the household.

I don’t really know because I’ve never lived that way and I know that kind of life isn’t meant for me. We all wonder that if we’d done things differently would we be in a different situation now, and they answer is yes; the hitch is whether you’d really actually feel any differently inside about the futility of it all.

Anyways, I lived in a block of apartments next to a house and one morning someone backed their car through the fence and into the carpark of the units I lived in. They ran away and didn’t come back. A tow truck arrived later that afternoon and took it away and there was no more speak of the car that trespassed into that carpark. The fence is still broken from what I know. The wooden slats bow down to the cement and are becoming more and more grey with time.

So now I start to see these people who live next door all the time. They’re a family so to speak. I came to learn that the older brother lives downstairs, another brother comes around from time to time with his boy, and a mother sometimes can be seen walking up and down the streets watering other people’s gardens. I guess she just likes nature or something and she’s found some kind of purpose to make things a little nicer around here.

I had some people around one night. They were people I’d met over the years. The friendships never last long but the acquaintance seems to linger on forever. I’ve had many people tell me that someone or other who knows of my existence but never much about me or what I do with my life. I don’t think they wonder about it, I’ve just heard it comes up from time to time, maybe the questions are ‘whatever happened to that guy?’ before their conversations quickly turn into something else. There’s not much point conversing on a topic without much to go on other than the existence of some person, and why would you care anyway; you’ve got your own stuff to handle.

But this one night it was my time. And someone brought up the topic of jobs, it's a frequent topic, I mean, let’s be honest here. Drinks were passed around and people got up and asked anyone else if they wanted a drink and such and then they’d sit around on a crappy couch or on the floor and basically say whatever it was that was mostly first thing that came to mind, and usually there wasn’t any real a conversation to be accurate– it was more a group of people talking at each other rather than to each other. Betty was sitting on the floor with a seltzer can and a cigarette and started talking about Jean’s job and Danny enquired:

“isn’t Jean a drug dealer?”

“Yeah so, it’s still a job” Beaty reckoned back

“Is it? Maybe it’s a business – is it a business if it’s illegal – I guess so?”

“Yes it is a business and that’s a job; it meets all the requirements of a job – she has to do things, she has to put in work and network and do all the things that people with jobs do so it’s a job”

I guess that settled it.

Suddenly there was a cry from next door and we all ran out, Betty, Danny and me. The two brothers and a little boy from next door were yelling at each other and one cried out that the older brother had held a knife to his mother’s throat.

“HE WANTS THE HOUSE! ALL HE WANTS IS THE HOUSE! HE’S A MOTHERFUCKER! THIS FUCKING BASTARD! The younger brother screamed. The boy stood by the car on the front lawn not saying anything but you could see it all going into his eyes never to come back out again.

“Hey FUCK YOU!” cried the older brother back “IT IS MY FUCKING HOUSE! I’M THE OLDEST, I DON’T WANT YOU HERE NO MORE MOTHERFUCKER. THE LAST TIME YOU CAME AROUND I CALLED THE COPS AND NOW THERE’S A RESTRAINING ORDER – YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO BE HERE!!! FUCK OFF RIGHT NOW OR I’LL CALL THEM AGAIN AND YOU’LL GET FUCKING ARRESTED!

The younger brother spat straight back “MOTHER HAS A RESTRAINING ORDER AGAINST YOU! I FILED FOR IT! AND NOW THAT YOU’VE TRIED TO KILL HER YOU’RE GOING TO FUCKING JAIL YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”

The child still stood there looking on with his hand on the bonnet of the car

“And your fucking boy! RIGHT THERE! He isn’t allowed around here neither or anywhere near my business too! He disrupts my business – he’s not ALLOWED here or anywhere near my place of work!”

“YOU DON’T DO ANY FUCKING WORK!” the younger one yelled back.

After a while the cops were called and by then we’d all just gone back inside and briefly spoken about what we’d seen before getting back to the topics of life that always seem to matter when you’re drinking in company.

That’s when you know the conversations are good. But when, after you’ve known people for a little while and the real reason you’re hanging around each other regularly is all centered around drink and drink alone; after work or for whatever reason – there’s only so far the conversations can go before they devolve into remember when situations and that’s when I’m out. A frequent one I’ve heard is “remember when such and such fell down the stairs? They were so drunk!” and then you know it’s time to leave and do something else for a while.

The people always get upset about it and it eventually comes back to you by way of whispers that you’re an asshole for some reason for not being around anymore and that’s some kind of sin against the sanctity of a friendship. A friendship from what I’ve seen is about everyone being on a level playing field across all levels of their life and if you have a win somehow, people get a bit hurt by it; but if you fail at something they’re there to drink with you, but how long they can listen is another matter entirely. And usually if you don’t solve your problems by the next time you see the person, well, you’re on the outs with that group and probably bound for isolation again anyway. So, what was there to loose; you’ve got to know the limitations of friendship and what others can tolerate from you.

I WOKE UP at midday the next afternoon. Heart sore, head racing with thoughts; which produced pain. Waking up with a hangover is something like waking up from a dream of being shot in the head sometimes: you’re hurled back into existence against your will, but exist you must.

I decided to walk down to the café and get one of those coffees everyone seems to get each morning. I wasn’t thinking all that straight and it felt like I had to do something. There were people with dogs on leashes and children waiting with their parents. Guys wore beanies and their girlfriend’s wore trainers. Why you’d want to go to a gym with a stomach full of milk and crushed up coffee beans was beyond me but each to their own. Maybe it isn’t even about that, maybe it’s just the representation: what people want you to think their lives are like. I know the way people treated me in general changed a lot when I stopped wearing black all the time and cut my hair shorter, but maybe that’s another story.

On my way back I saw the older brother again in the front lawn without a shirt on.

“Everything ok after last night?” I asked.

“yeah man, everything's fine but if that motherfucker comes around again I’m going to kill him”

“Hmmm”

“Hey, sorry if this is too much,” I still had a little booze left in me from the night before so I was inquisitive, or maybe it was the coffee , but I risked overstepping the mark here but I’d asked it before I’d really thought about it “what is your business all about?”

“Oh yeah! My business! I run it from the bottom room down there – it relates to computers, it’s all very technical”

“Oh, I thought by the way you spoke last night that it was somewhere else – what’s it like being your own boss?”

“Great man, great – I ain’t got no motherfucker telling me what to do. It’s just that this asshole brother of mine keeps sending his child over to fucking distract me from my work”

“What does he do?”

“He just fucking sits around man, he comes down into the basement and sits around fucking not saying anything. He’s just fucking there and it…” tears started to form in his face “it’s not his fault man, I just need to get this thing off the ground, for the family – I need to provide for the family, and I have to work”

“I get it man, keep at it” I said and walked on my way.

You see, these houses, full of people, families, all mixed up trying to get a dollar to keep what they have. And at what cost. Is it still a family if you’re employing the state to keep you all apart from one another. And what of the mother? I thought.

It turned out after a while that the guy hadn’t tried to kill his own mother. There may or may not have been a knife but it was, as it was relayed to me, more of an argument and the mother called the younger brother to come over and have a word to his older sibling to basically get off his ass and get a job earning some money instead of sitting downstairs in her house all day.

For all I know he still sits in there doing whatever it is that he does. The house has a nice paint job and the kid still comes around on his bike and knocks on the door and the mother answers and puts her hand behind his back and then he goes inside. I little while went by and I hadn't heard much yelling but sometimes they'd talk very loud while I'd still next door wondering how I’m going to find a dollar to give to someone else for the privilege of paying off their debts via their mortgages on the unit I was living in. But I really felt for that little boy. While we’re all off doing our heads in trying to get somewhere or do something or other the children see it all and they remember it, always; I do.