From Behind the Machine

By Beale Stainton

From Behind the Machine is a bitter and beautiful love story told across intrepid travels to unknown places with unknown people. The aroma of Addis Ababa, the heat of Bangkok and the cold crispness of the Himalayas creep off the page as the novel and its characters swirl around the protagonist like a well-made macchiato. It is timeless, painful, compassionate, and, above all, it is a reminder of how we should all be living and loving - with honesty, bravery, curiosity ... and a good, strong coffee.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jul 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781925595963

Book preview

1

It’s 5am in the morning. I’ve been sleeping the night away on the eighth floor of an apartment block somewhere on Sydney’s east side. The night has been hot and sweaty, with thoughts of Thailand running through my mind, accompanied by a few pints too many of the finest selection of German wheat beers from the store down on Allison Road, next to Isabella’s restaurant, not far from the Coach and Horses Hotel. The alarm on my phone goes off. I can’t tell you what it sounds like. It’s been waking me for the past two years, but I don’t recall it. I hit snooze. I get nine minutes to return to Thailand. I go there, back to that same sleazy bar in Bangkok. There she is, dancing alone to the electro euro-trash music. She’s focussed in on her movements. I can see the enjoyment in her fine face. She looks over at me, but before I can make her out my alarm sounds again. I snooze one last and final time. I get another nine minutes, but this time I don’t return to Thailand. I tread toward a darkness, an absence, a place I cannot be too descriptive about, because it lies beyond the here and there.

The time is 5.18. It’s still dark out. I drag myself out of bed. In nothing but cotton boxers I stumble around to the bathroom and manage to let one leak into the bowl. I surprise myself every morning, that with my eyes half shut, I’m still able to aim cleanly. I go to the basin and look in the mirror. I’m not looking my best. I force the awful taste of toothpaste into my mouth and water into my eyes. It’s not that bad after all. I return to my bedroom. I make and tidy my bed with the $500 worth of silk I bought in a city on the side of the Ganges river. I find clothes and put them on. They are often the same clothes I wore at some earlier time in the week that haven’t yet found their way into the laundry machine. I put my shoes on. I walk out the front door and press the down button for the elevator. I look at my phone. The time is 5.34. I’m a minute early.

The elevator lands on the ground floor and I exit the complex passing the car park and swimming pool on the way. I’m the only person awake at this time. I make my way across the neighbourhood on foot. From the Belmore/Allison intersection I walk the length of Belmore Road. The convenience store next to the Thai restaurant is just opening. The little Asian lady is standing out the front with her poodle dog. The tradies are waiting around in fluoro. There’s a very tall, young African woman next to them. The bus arrives just as I pass. They get on. There’s a yoga shop not too far down. It’s open too. There’s a woman exiting. She’s wearing the strangest clothes. I walk further and am impressed by the homeless old man sitting on a bench outside the TAB. He looks like a writer. The smell of freshly baked bread fills the air. I pass the Presbyterian church. I pass the park out front of the Royal. I pass the Royal. It’s opening. The lights are on inside and there’s a member of staff bringing tables out the front. I turn my head down Coogee Bay Road and I see the first glimmer of sunrise appear above the ocean horizon.

When I arrive into the Spot I see my workplace for the first time. It gives me positive feelings. I respect it. The lights are off. I’m the first one in this morning. Cafe Randwick is opening, so is Ambrosia, so is Bat Country. There’s a tall figure resting out the front of the cafe. He looks somewhat modelesque, like an advertisement for luxury wrist watches. It’s Lucas. We exchange greetings. I unlock the front door. Lucas follows me in. I walk past the coffee machine and into the kitchen. The security alarm is active. I deactivate it. Below are the light switches. I turn on the lights for the coffee area.

My first sight of the coffee machine is a humbling feeling. I always feel that way when I see it at the start of the day. The grinder is empty. I take a bag of beans from the shelf, roasted over a week ago. I find scissors and open the bag with a wide incision and wear it like a gas mask. The first smell of that freshly opened bag of beans, finely selected and roasted by our friends at Single Origin Roasters, takes me back to Thailand. I see smiling bar girls walk past the coffee machine. They’re holding Chang beers and cheap cigarettes on their way. They’re saying, I good lady for you! I look over at Lucas and he’s setting the tables out the front.

I switch the grinder on. It starts up with that smashing sound. The beans will no longer be the same as they flow out the bottom like a fragrant rain shower of dark rich soil. I catch it all into my stainless steel group basket. As I pour the first few shots I notice things are out. Shit. It’s a Monday morning. I think about the barista from the weekend. Emma walks in. She’s like the coffee. She’s alive. She’s awake. The place feels for real now. Harry stands at the door talking to Lucas with his arms wide apart. Emma says something, but my mind is on the grind. I have to change it. This requires time and time I don’t have so early in the morning. I see Harry welcoming the first customer in like a circus ring announcer, like a proud candy store owner, like a stock broker during a bull market. I have to grind off three useless baskets to get it right. This means the first customer has to wait longer than a minute to get his coffee. It’s Evan. He’s a big, friendly guy. He drinks a large cappuccino. I hand it to him. In comes the next customer, the next fiend, the next sick addict.

The day has started.

2

My introduction to the cafe scene came late. I was 21 when I met Jane. She was 32, a Sydney waitress turned television researcher. We met at film school in Wellington, New Zealand. In order to be with her it became apparent that I had to go to cafes and restaurants. This was not a problem since she paid for everything. I didn’t know what to drink at first. I had no understanding of coffee. I had never seen an actual coffee machine. Jane drank a soy flat white. So I guess I started drinking soy flat whites too. Even soy milk was something new for me.

About a year into the relationship we moved to Sydney and I had to get a job. I was fresh out of university with a philosophy and anthropology degree, a failed attempt at film school and no real skills or experience. We moved in with Mick who was a good old friend of Jane's. He rented out his attic to us for only $150 a week, in his Surry Hills terrace house. Mick was head chef at the Post Office cafe in Marrickville. He gave me a full time job as dishwasher there.

The place was busy. The kitchen was a lively show of banter and ego. The job was challenging, but required no real skill. There was a second chef, also named Mick, who was a great big American guy. He was a bit weird. One day he almost cut his hand clean off, while parting a roll of parmesan cheese. The hand was hanging off at the bone. He was taken away by an ambulance. I talked to the other Mick about it when I got home later that night. He accused American Mick of orchestrating the whole affair in order to get time off work. This suggestion made me feel quite unsettled.

The Mick I lived with had an interesting influence on my early twenties. Sure he was a chef and all of which that entails. He was Australian to the bone, born and bred in Cessnock up in the Hunter Valley. He moved down to Sydney as a young man and never looked back. He was very well read and a great consumer of music. He introduced me to Charles Bukowski. He tuned me into Neil Young, reggae artist Jackie Mittoo and German band Popol Vuh. I also took a liking to Hank Williams because of Mick. I had a lot of down time by myself and most of it was spent sitting on Mick’s couch listening to his compact discs. In the evening I would spend my time with Jane, but on the rare occasion I’d descend to the lounge and get drunk and smoke cigarettes with the chef. We had some good nights him and I. He went down to the Shakespeare Hotel on Devonshire Street religiously. He was a mate to everyone and they called each other cobber. They called me cobber too. Mick used to always stumble his way home. He would crash through the front door, grab a bottle of Melbourne Bitter, put on some Neil Young, fall into his favourite arm chair, light a cigarette, then slip into a deep sleep. I would find my way upstairs to Jane, and in the morning I’d see Mick at the Post Office cafe in Marrickville, cooking eggs and hollandaise for the masses.

I didn’t last long in the dish washing job. I threw in the towel after only six or so weeks. Dish washing is a shit job. I was unemployed for a little then found some temporary work through a friend of Jane's, with a company called Easy Being Green. We were the guys handing out light bulbs and shower heads, before we got you to give over your carbon points. That job lasted about a month. I was again unemployed, which for my lazy temperament at the time wasn’t a bad thing. This soon ended after Jane and I met Roger and Skye. Roger managed Toby’s Estate cafe in Woolloomooloo. He got me a job and it didn’t involve washing dishes. All of a sudden I found myself at the till serving the caffeine addicts of Woolloomooloo. The system involved writing down the coffee orders, in short hand, onto a piece of paper, which I handed to the baristas. They were not average baristas, but amazing ones. Roger was at the top of his game. Toby’s Estate was like one big family back then. They hung out all the time. I got to know them well. They partied hard and I couldn’t keep up. Roger was an interesting guy. He had this loving relationship with Skye, but he also wasn’t shy of being gay and open to men.

I enjoyed my time at the Estate. Toby himself was always around. He still owned the business. It was here that I first became familiarised with the single origin nature of coffee. I took a liking to the dark flavour and taste of Yirgacheffe from Ethiopia. I began making coffee in a plunger at home for Jane and I. She worked for British Broadcasting Corporation at the time. I then bought a small stove top peculator. This became my favourite method of choice. I just loved the way the brew process happened from bottom to top, and then the whistle at the end to signal completion. I then noticed that stove top coffee tasted magical with Demerara sugar and soy milk. I drank this potion with great joy. I may have even converted Jane, but I don’t think I did. She was a strictly sugarless coffee drinker.

I have fond memories of that cafe in Woolloomooloo, working with Roger, Tom and Christian. It really gave me the experience that I needed to enter any cafe and know what it was I was ordering off the menu. I also had the beginnings of a skill that would one day pay my inner city rent, buy unforgettable love affairs with exotic women in exciting countries and allow me to climb mountains in places like India, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea and Japan. I think I was at the Estate cafe for about two or three months, then Jane and I packed up, left Sydney and road tripped around New Zealand. Along the way, we drank a lot of flat whites of varying quality. We saw every corner of my beautiful country and never seemed to look back. I even switched over to long black, and then eventually to a straight espresso.

3

I went to Ethiopia some time back, during the spring of 2014. I did not plan on going. I was supposed to go home to New Zealand. My heart was set on a young American woman travelling solo through my home country. We met in Melbourne in the spring of 2013. It’s a long story. When I look back at it I am surprised by just how enraptured I became with her. I believed she was the one. I don’t know why. I just did. She was living in and travelling around New Zealand in a van and we planned to spend a good amount of time together. We were going to hike the wilderness, work on organic farms and write our own travel blogs. Everything seemed fine, but it all fell apart when she said she did not want to touch or be intimate. This was the straw that destroyed everything and broke six months of longing. She planned to live with me in a van. She planned to share the same bed. She planned to have the most romantic time to be had between a man and a woman, but all without any touching or physical intimacy. Let’s just say that night on the phone was the last time I ever heard her voice.

She was shattered and disappointed. I was shattered and disappointed. I had already put in leaving notice to my employers. I was at the time making coffee at the Three Beans cafe in the Met Centre on George Street, down town Sydney, between Wynyard train station and the Suncorp building and I still wanted to get away. I had to get away.

Screw her! I thought to myself.

I had already booked my flight back to New Zealand. It was non-refundable, a waste of money. I was living in Mount Colah at the time. I shared a house with a fine fellow named Derek, a gentleman, a poet and a naturalist he was. The first day off to come my way I walked into Student Flights in the Hornsby Westfield’s. I asked about tickets to Nigeria. They said they had some, but not very good ones. That was lucky. I asked if there was anywhere else in Africa they would suggest me to go. The kind, young man at the counter gave me a deal on return flights to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia via Hong Kong. I don’t think it took me long to pay him. I walked out of the store and that’s how it happened. Thanks to a confusing young woman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania I now had six weeks to prepare for five weeks in Ethiopia, the home of coffee.

I returned to Three Beans the following Monday and told them the twist in events.

You not going to New Zealand now? asked Kelly.

No, I replied.

You going to Africa now.

Yes.

But Bob, what happened to the American woman?

Well I guess that’s all over now.

I have very fond memories of Kelly, my boss at Three Beans. I taught her husband Leo how to make coffee. I guess he was my boss too, but more like a friend. Between 7am and 11am in the morning we would grind through 8-9 kilograms of coffee bean, so the job demanded a lot. The artificial light shining through the claustrophobic retail space, which was only interrupted by the crowds and lines of suited men and women filing off to countless surrounding city offices, also kept the task of making hundreds of coffees somewhat more gruelling. So we had no choice, but to work well together, like a machine behind a machine. They had two young children, owned a house on a tree lined suburban street in Carlingford and spoke Cantonese. Leo was from Dongguan. Kelly was from a town nearer to Macau. They were the first Chinese people I really came to be close to and they made me feel like a part of the family. They were also hard working and humble, which is what kept me with them.

For some three months I spoke constantly of going to New Zealand. I spoke constantly of the American woman and they accepted my intentions with grace. I understand I was about to cause them hardship by leaving. This was their first business and they needed me. Neither of them knew anything about coffee and they had bought into such a high volume shop. I was a good barista for them, but I also had my own personal things happening. At times I thought of coffee making as secondary to my love life, my adventures and the unpredictable journeys of my free soul. My job at Three Beans kind of felt like that at the time.

It was strange explaining my decision to spontaneously go to Ethiopia. Kelly was worried for me. My customers were concerned too. They didn’t understand Africa. The Ebola virus was breaking out in the countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Everyone thought I was walking into a death trap. I could have told them that there was an entire continent between the west and east coasts of Africa, but I knew it would not really have an effect.

That time at Three Beans was one of the most exciting in my life. I had destroyed one dream, but I survived to form another, extremely different dream from the broken ones ashes. I was working with a close team. We had great customers. I was on my way to Africa, on a quest to mend a broken heart. I was both there and not there, chained to the coffee machine, but I was also as free as a bird. My employers understood me and I respected them.

I called my buddy Anthony, a barista from way back. When it comes to coffee he’s the man. He’s a battler like no other I know and a romantic like only the best.

Hey man, I said to my friend.

Hey man. How’s it going? he says.

Do you want to come down to Sydney and cover me at the cafe while I go to Africa?

Yeah could be man, could be.

4

My time in Ethiopia was over a year ago. So much has happened in between. I’m living in the eastern suburbs of Sydney now and I’m only just starting to realise where I am, in a situational kind of way. I’m the barista at 36 St Paul’s Street. That’s the cafe. It’s another story. I washed up here five months ago. Let me tell you how that all happened.

I landed at Sydney airport on the sixth of November 2015. It was a desperate landing. I was in the most dire situation imaginable. I had not eaten or slept in over thirty hours. I had some spare change on me, but it was all in Thai baht. I had some $12 in my Australian bank account and the same on my Sydney opal card. I did not have a job or any means of making an income. I was homeless. This was how it started. This is how I arrived back in town. To top things off I was also coming down off a crystal meth high, and I was deeply in love with a Thai prostitute. It’s not the most ideal way to arrive back into your resident country, but this was unfortunately the deal for me.

I was lucky to get in touch with my friend Paul. He’s saved my arse before, but that’s another story. He invited me to sleep on the couch of his share house in St Leonards. This was perhaps the gesture of kindness that saved me from complete destitution. I caught the bus from Sydney International Airport to Burwood train station. From there I walked to Woolworths. I purchased three blocks of the cheapest chocolate for $3, a 1.5 litre bottle of soda water for 75 cents, a large bag of salted chips for $2 and 2 bags of salted peanuts for $1 each. All of these supplies cost me less than $8. I walked across the street and sat in the park. It began raining heavily. I stayed mostly dry beneath a small shelter eating chips out of the top of my backpack. There were normal civilised people about, eyeing me as they passed.

I lived at Paul’s for about three weeks. I made some money, but not that much. I did a few jobs for Matt at Sydney Coffee Cart Company. I’ve worked for him a few times since and he’s one of the nicest blokes I’ve had the pleasure to meet. I don’t remember what I did with the money. I was having trouble finding a stable, full time job so I didn’t save any of it. I was an emotionally drained and broken individual too. I felt most comfortable sitting in parks. I was surviving on peanuts and chocolate. For some days I was very rarely eating at all. My mind was on the woman I left in Thailand. One afternoon I arrived at Central station. She messaged to say she was pregnant. I believed her and I believed that it was mine. It was around this time that I first met Harry at 36 St Paul’s. He gave me a job. He didn’t think much of me to begin with. I looked broken and smelled like I wasn’t washing my clothes or showering. I probably wasn’t, but he liked the way I poured coffee. There was something he liked about me right from the start. I guess he could see through all the trouble I was in.

I moved out of Paul’s and into a backpackers in Coogee so that I could be closer to the cafe. I was getting a little bit of money now, but not that much, only enough to pay rent, buy food and have the occasional binge on beer and cigarettes. I was working about four half shifts a week, so I spent most of my time hanging out on Coogee beach. My skin turned dark. My bunk at the backpackers became covered with sand. I talked to my woman in Thailand constantly. She was going through some pain and wanted me to send her money. I wished to, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have any to send her. She was calling me all hours of the day and even though she was pregnant she still went out drinking with her bar-girl friends. This upset me. She was an emotional wreck. There was a lot going on in her life. She had a world of troubles, but she truly missed me and that made me cling the way I did.

After two weeks at the backpackers I moved into an apartment, but not into a room of my own. For the next ten weeks I slept on a mattress on the lounge floor of two Chinese doctoral students at the University of New South Wales. They were cool guys. I only really talked to one of them. He was publishing papers which criticised Australia’s stance on climate change. I didn’t mind that place. I still drank a lot and smoked cigarettes. My plan at the time was to work the next three months with Harry and then return to Thailand, be with the woman I was in love with and live happily ever after with her and her child somewhere in the rural north east. I didn’t have a clue really, but it was around this time that she had an abortion. She video called me from the clinic bed. There was a part of her that knew I wouldn’t be returning to Thailand any time soon. After my ten weeks of roughing it with the two Chinese guys I had saved enough money to give myself some options. The old barista left the cafe, so I worked substantial hours. I bought a pair of shoes and began to run. I stopped smoking cigarettes. I controlled my diet. I read a few books too. While sleeping in those guys lounge I completed East of Eden by John Steinbeck, The Beach by Alex Garland and I started Moby Dick by Hermann Melville. I spent the weekends watching jazz music at various locations around the city.

With the money I now had in the bank I could have gone back to Thailand then, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I knew that if I did, then I’d probably return to Sydney in the same state I did in November. I knew