Four Coffees

 When my housemate Tom told me about the job he said there’d be things about it that I might not be that comfortable with. He’d done it for a while himself and said he’d make a call for me to the people he’d worked for.

I was picked up early my first day by the arborist in a ute.

“G’day,” he said, slotting the twitching gearshift into place, emphatically, as if in place of a handshake. Alan went up the trees with the chainsaw and drove us to the jobs. Further on we picked up Adrian, the other ground crew. Our job was to carry all the fallen branches and wood bits to a corner of the yard. That was basically all we did, but there were a lot of branches. We wore hard hats, ear plugs, thick gloves and sunnies.

When we got to the site for the day, which was always someone’s yard, Alan would look the tree up and down, walk around it, pat it, and then smooth its trunk once with his hand, cautiously, the way you pat a strange dog. When he was ready he would clip long spikes to his boots, pull on gloves sewn with things that looked like thick razors, and climb up the trunk slowly, like a big cat. When he’d found his footing he’d pull the chainsaw up on a rope hanging from his belt.

Alan spoke darkly about his chainsaw. Nodding towards the orange plastic-coated thing propped up in front of us like half a small motorbike, he would say, as if he was continuing an argument: “That is not a toy. That is a lethal weapon.”

He showed me the scars on his arms and chest. He said these were from only a split second of contact from the chainsaw bouncing back. The trouble came from unexpected seams of different density. He could be clawing through wood of a certain consistency and the chain might catch suddenly on a nobby patch and fly back at its handler like a snake out of a basket.

It was a drought then. Every morning was bright and windless, with the sun feeling as if it was burning off the air. Driblets of sweat changed directions on my back the way big raindrops go down a car window. Some of the places had pools. I asked half-jokingly at one job about us having a swim. Adrian said they had before. They never did when I was with them, and we worked away covered in wood bits next to these suburban mirages. When we weren’t stooping to pick things up we would crane our heads at Alan in the tree, slicing front and back into thick branches, the chainsaw stuttering and moaning and spewing out wood-dust like outboard motor exhaust on some hostile lake.

Adrian and I talked a bit at first. He told me he only got drunk and did drugs on weekdays so it impacted on someone else’s time and not his own. He was in a bad mood a lot so I didn’t try to talk with him too often.

When we were done we’d squeeze into the front of the ute. We drove past a servo once and Alan said someone had held it up the week before. A heavy silence followed. Adrian looked out the window and said: “And you just don’t do that, do ya.”

The back of the ute clattered with our gear. Late afternoon sun glinted off surfaces, and ribbons of light shone in the road pitch like strands of phosphorescent fabric passing beneath us on some great conveyor belt. We stopped at a drive-thru bottle-o so Adrian could buy a longneck for the trip home. Through leafy streets Adrian leaned his elbow out the open window and took long pulls, yelling “woohoo-hoo” at clusters of school uniforms heading home for the day.

I found that as easy as the job was, I was not good at it. Adrian probably had a big weeknight out, because one of the days he had a couple of goes at me for not carrying enough branches in my loads. The second time Adrian went off, Alan muttered about Adrian coming down from ecstasy and his “serotonin levels making him act like a little fucking girl today”.

On the way back from one job Alan talked to me about pot. He asked if I wanted to stop by his place on the way back. We sat on his couch. On his coffee table stood a cylindrical glass tube with a balloon shaped base that was filled with grey water. Grimy fingertips packed in the charge and flicked a lighter to it. The bubbling water sounded like a kettle boiling.

Confessions usually follow more quickly from smoking like this than from drinking. With red rimmed lids and eyes hollowed out, Alan passed a hand over the receding edge of his brush cut, like a genuflection, and said he would be married with kids now with the girl he’d lived with in his late twenties if it wasn’t for “the hot ones, always the hot ones”. He said with women he didn’t know he talked as little as possible and smiled a lot. He explained that this way they were more likely to fill in the blanks about him in any way they wanted.

I was paid at the end of each week by Rob, who ran things. He didn’t come out with us, so he must have just found us the work. Alan drove me the first week to Rob’s regular spot at a beachside place called Uruguay. Adrian said he wouldn’t come with us. I asked him why.

“I don’t go to places like Uruguay.” He said this pronouncing the name of the country tightly with the pre-emptive derision people use for places they know they would not be made to feel welcome at.

When we arrived Rob was seated by himself. Rob had the sort of full head of silver hair that would have looked distinguished on someone else. He paid me for the week from a wad of cash and asked what I wanted from the bar. I told him I didn’t drink. He said: “You don’t drink, you don’t work.”

Two much younger women who Rob knew joined our table. Alan smiled and then said almost nothing other than, “yeah, that’s right” and “cheers”.

Later on I asked Alan about what Rob had said to me. Alan thought he might have been serious; he said there’d been a traveller who worked with them who Rob had stopped getting out because the bloke was training for something and wouldn’t get pissed with him at the pub.

All that Alan would say to me about Rob other than this was: “That man has not worked an honest day in his life.”

When I got home I mentioned to Tom about being at Alan’s place. He said, “Oh, they used to get the bong out right there after a job—closing ceremonies.”

I told him what Alan had said about Rob. Tom looked into the distance with a pained look, chewed some of his muesli, which made him look like a pompous horse, and said, “Well, no. Rob gets the work for Alan and you lot, so that’s the business he runs.”

I kept talking to him for some reason. I said that I’d been talking to Alan a lot on the drives and that he actually knew about a lot more things than I’d expected. Tom said: “Whatever Alan knows he’s learned from television.”

Tom was from the south of England. He liked to put people down. I knew he’d helped me get the job, but I’d started to hate him.

But he was right about one thing. We had a job far up the northern beaches that Rob drove over for. The old lady living there looked like the oldest person I’d ever seen. She had completely white hair and watering, almost colourless eyes that couldn’t have been able to see much.

Rob said they were moving to another job and that I was to stay and move a pile of logs in the back yard out to the front kerb for pick-up. He said they’d be back in a couple of hours, but that after an hour or so I should go knock on the back door, and: “Ask her for four coffees.”

I asked him how he took his coffee when he wasn’t drinking it. He didn’t laugh.

When the time came I knocked on the side door. The old lady asked me nicely if we wanted any coffee or tea. I thought it would look better if the four coffees weren’t all the same, so I said: “Yes please—two with milk, two black thanks.”

She fossicked around with her small old-lady tins and cups and I felt a twinge of guilt. They must have been charging her for four labourers when they only needed one. This may have been an annual gig for them.

I took the hot mugs from her and walked to the back of the yard with the handles through my fingers, like knuckledusters. I sat down in the shade and drank mine quickly. It was instant and tasted bitter.

I looked at the three still steaming things in front of me. I could have just poured them into the grass, but I figured that if I’m involved in this the least I can do is drink all this bad coffee; like an odd penance. I worked my way through the other mugs and felt pretty wired.

After a while Alan came back and said: “Let’s go, mate—Rob’s having beers.”

Rob was settled in his usual spot at Uruguay with the same pair of younger women who’d been there the last time. One was smiling at Alan. Rob ordered a round from a waitress.

My schooner’s white membrane had dissolved by the time everyone else had finished their drinks, and stood out on the table, untouched and glassy looking, like cider. Rob turned to me and said, “So you’re still not having any then?”

Alan stroked the edge of his bald patch, looked sideways, and, given the mixed company, stayed silent.

I called Rob a few days later to ask when my next period of work would be. He started talking about everyone getting on and having a drink together. I asked if he was telling me he wouldn’t give me work because I hadn’t had a drink with him. He said: “Yeah, well you stuffed it up the other day, didn’t you.”

I said that I was more of a coffee drinker. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I wondered if this had sounded like a threat—which it wasn’t, not consciously anyway. He must have thought it was, because he changed his tone and said Alan was going on vacation for a few weeks so there wouldn’t be any work till after Christmas. This was sort of true. Alan had told me earlier that he was driving down to Melbourne to visit friends for a bit. He said Rob kept asking him to let him come but he wouldn’t take him.

END