The Last Cappuccino

By Merlin Cullinan

Julian has expectations. He has dreams. So does Charmaine. When he meets her she adds plans.

They want to create a memorable restaurant, and a lifestyle to go with it. What they create is memorable for all the wrong reasons.

This is a story of how things don’t always work out the way you want or expect them to. It’s about choosing the wrong road and going along it with energy and no checks and balances.

Where do you draw the line when you realise you can never cross it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Feb 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789554502

Book preview

500

Part One

1. Way beyond half time. 160,000

You know what my dentist said?

No, what did he say, Joe?

He said he’d give me a rictus smile for $15000 dollars.

I think, at a stretch, he might have offered you a ‘righteous’ smile.

Okay, it’s the same thing.

And why would you want that?

Well, I don’t want to look like a what, a toothless tosser on the slab, you know?

So, you’ll disappear like the Cheshire Cat, just a grin while the rest bear it.

What are you talking about?

Serbian Joe wiped the chocolate-speckled froth from his lips with the privileged and rarely proffered paper serbiette. He never understood why it was called the way he heard it, and never asked. But he did sometimes wonder how his homeland had come to invent it. He was one of the band of brothers, the once-upon-a-time regulars, the declining breed. He kept paying the prices because money meant nothing to him anymore. It would outlast him. He’d finished the game of doing deals, of bargaining, twenty years ago, but he still laughed at the ways he’d driven anyone to a preferential price, just for the hell of it, back in the day. Some of them couldn’t help themselves, they never stopped. It reminded him of the other lot, where the jokes tumbled out all the time, about the grandfather on his deathbed trying to sell his wristwatch to the allegedly innocent kid, but of course the kid had it in his blood and tried to buy it with a cheque.

Thirty-seven years he’d been in the country after he’d left the Balkans. He was fluent now in all the illegal words, proficient in all the asterisked ones, yet spoke the rest of his adopted English as a tortuous pick-it-up-as-you-go-along version, stuck in basic like a damaged old compact disc. If he dropped his three or four favourite adjectives, he’d save twenty five percent of the time he took to string a pronouncement together.

Julian wondered if he sounded as bad in his cradle language but had little chance of knowing. Julian’s own English was the legacy of an old colonial upbringing, a diction rooted in the past and generally only still favoured by ageing Royals and fading colonels who still referred to going orff somewhere and playing the occasional round of gofe before sinking into a customary G & T. You’d occasionally catch examples of it on radio programmes or TV documentaries about the past where politicians would be seen in black and white, delivering pronouncements about doom and despondency to a worn-down populace. He was the café’s Proprietor.

Joe’s cousin, who had made more inroads into his second language, but nowhere near as much money, raised his hand and, catching Julian’s eye, smiled and did what he considered to be a polite mime for another round of the same beverages. Julian scowled and twitched but nodded. People were supposed to come up to the counter and order. It wasn’t table service, you know. Not anymore. But there were no others in the place, and these chaps had never moaned about what things cost these days, so he got on with the business of fighting the infernal machine and producing what he considered to be an exemplary pair of cups of coffee. By the time he’d charged for the sweetener and the soymilk he calculated he’d be putting a tidy sum in the till for ninety seconds work, just the way it should be.

Right from the beginning, and there had been many beginnings, accompanied by a variety of ends, and those largely ignominious, the latest venture, which was too grand a word for it, had been a disaster writing regular invitations to happen. For some of the gifted, money only sharpens their insight into people’s behaviour. For many of the rest, money is a distorting lens. It’s a driver or a buffer, a dream deliverer or a nightmare, a dangled temptation or a squandered fact. It clouds judgement, blinds people to the bleeding obvious, as Julian saw it in his own blinkered way, makes them incapable of adding up the numbers. He failed to spot that he was in the same predicament. Losses are always the fault of the intervention of others, be they human, animal, inanimate or astrological, never admittedly your own, unless you are an idiot, and he reminded himself that he was a long way from being one of those. But at the heart of it, Julian’s biggest mistake wasn’t fundamentally about finance.

Part Two

2. Great expectations

When he was younger, when, as he would quip frequently to his then audiences, God too was still in short trousers, borrowing one of his alleged mate’s clichés unashamedly, he had grown used to the idea that a certain percentage of the population was there simply to do one’s bidding – the servile servant class. The position and belief saw him through to adulthood with little filtering of the notions of history. Even National Service (for he was that old) hadn’t managed any degree of levelling. It was very difficult to rid him of his perspectives and an enormous trust in his own superiority. There actually was a brief period when he did show some respect: let’s be fair. He became a radio operator during his time in the Royal Air Force. The disembodied voices he exchanged communications with were clipped with patter. They were performing complex functions in expensive machines, flying, and they wanted information and permissions quickly and without confusion. He was efficient with Alpha’s and Bravo’s and Charlie’s and Delta’s. There was no idle chatter on the airwaves. He adopted the style and skills of his communicants, a cloak of convenient assumed excellence. But they were never present to challenge his adoption. He was special by association. After that conscripted time, he drifted into jobs, not entirely sure why this had to be, since a number of his chums had managed to continue life as indolent beneficiaries of their forbears’ legacies. Somewhere along those bloodlines some graft had been invested by people whose oily portraits still hung above a mantlepiece or in pride of place in a drawing room or salon. He thought this claimed advantage of birth was an unfair position from his point of view but, maybe scenarios would change. Someone with a decent inheritance might take up the reins, someone needing his style and masculinity, which was about all he could bring to the party, in his own mind a desirable coupling of achievements. Anyhow, and at that time with some five billion people on the planet, his chances of being connected and carrying on the genes weren’t too bad. So, it had happened.

Wife No.1, who would be in the wings for only a tiny part of the drama, produced a daughter, who also makes an occasional appearance. Wife No.2, because yes, the odds of attraction were still relatively high, even for old goats, came along with two degrees and an enormous hamper of issues. Why are so many psychos attracted to psychology degrees, he asked rhetorically, of whoever happened to be around? No offspring from that union. She played Lady Macbeth in the tale, or at least that was how he eventually handed out part of the blame. For his part, he was hardly a Macbeth, more of A Midsummer Night’s Dream rude mechanical, he chortled.

He dribbled into insurance after National service at a time when the business was becoming a highly penetrative industry and there was a clamouring for bodies to sell a variety of products on unfulfillable promises to the gullible, the greedy, or the frightened elements of the masses in post-war western selfish societies. With a few grimly learned lines, a few open-ended questions, and some fearful-looking graphs matched by some highly opportunistic ones, he relentlessly lured innocents into the falsehood of a highly safe future for their partners and children. He wasn’t a salesman. He was saving lives, a noble pursuit. In the process he did what thousands of others did and pocketed immense commissions for his efforts from the proceeds of the first two years of premiums. What was anybody going to do forty years down the line? We’d probably all have been nuked by then, he thought, drawing on the benefits of the lectures he’d endured at Her Majesty’s armed forces’ pleasure, and if we survived, the convenient six-point copy on page nineteen of the policy would definitively state the ineligibility of claims in the act of nuclear war, so don’t even think about it, chummy, in more legally-sounding confident and absolute vocabulary. Really young folk of the emerging day had less time for this nonsense, focusing on the mid-1960’s immediacy of the present, principally occupied with booze, fun and that other variant, sex. The drugs followed on like a faithful pet. It was the marrieds with their nippers and their job-extinction threats that took what they believed to be were grown-up precautions to protecting their family’s future, bless ‘em. It was a seller’s market then. As companies waded in like sharks to schools of small fish, the products became differentiated, the customers began to undergo a period of learning and wising up, and the art of selling had to be finessed. This pointed to the moment when Julian had to exit the ‘profession’. His selling skills had peaked with the Well, here it is approach, and he couldn’t grasp the requirements of comparative benefit selling and competitive product analysis. Needless to say, he had no investments in insurance products himself, believing that life favoured the brave, not the quivering uncertain he preyed on.

Whatever could come next? With no income and no master plan, his wife grew tired and then exasperated with his endless turning around in an empty circle. She took their daughter and scurried off beyond the border in search of a more meaningful life.

3. Going it alone

So far, he’d worked with the radio telephony alphabet, initials and key phrases, then with pre-prepared charts and sales patter, generally unchallenged by its receivers. Whatever could he turn to? Who can I turn to? he sang to no-one, remembering lyrical snippets from Lionel Bart’s Oliver. What do people always want, always need, he thought? At some point, even he realised he was going to have to step outside his protective circle and maybe do something. Not about his family, too late for that, but for himself.

Coffins came to mind, then cars, these days, or, in marriages, whatever the Jones’s’ had just acquired at crippling borrowed expense. He didn’t fancy working in the dead and death business much, an inevitable dribble of customers wanting a send-off in some now fabulously fake-veneered box, although one benefit was the unusual likelihood of a direct customer making a complaint.

When it came to cars there was the problem of people possibly knowing something about them these days, and certain technical questions he wouldn’t be able to deal with. After all, with a car, in his previous experience as a family member, one usually had a chauffeur or a mechanic to sort out the greasy oily dirty business of fiddling with fuel and engines and parts. The owner and occasional driver had more to worry about regarding appropriate driving gloves and headgear. Until the day he decided he wanted to learn to fly, he didn’t know much about carburettors and combustion. He also didn’t fathom why people in showrooms insisted on lifting up car bonnets and showing potential customers the engine. Of course, the vehicle needed an engine, unless it was so special it didn’t need one, and then there’d be nothing to show, so what was the point? The point of the car was the mascot on the bonnet, now that said something about you. If you’ve got a spirit of ecstasy flying lady up there, you’re hardly going to be talking about piston rings, are you? In those days, no one was thinking about radiator topping symbols merely as deliverers of death as they speared unwary civilians stupid enough to get in the way of the hurtling Woles Woyce, what? And so, he carried on, putting wandering space and time between him and the unsavoury business of selling something to make a living.

There was that other thing too. He didn’t want to work for anyone else anymore. He didn’t want to be told what to do. It was unseemly now. He wanted to be his own rightful King of the Castle. It was others who would be waiting for his instructions, his orders, and grateful to do his bidding. It was time.

What people seemed to want was anything to do with electricity. They wanted TV’s, phones, fridges, washing machines, radiograms, things they could show off about to their new neighbours. He was hardly in a position to set up a business trading in these goods, selling them or leasing them or renting them out. Most of them were ultimately dull, these noisy machines, but not as dull as carpets or curtains or paint. Is that what all of childhood and education was about – giving you the opportunity to stand in a shop for eight hours a day selling household goods to overstretched social climbers trying to stay ahead of those Jones’s he’d never met but could sense and referenced often? Actually, as others would say then, it was precisely these people he needed, thanks to other things.

People were beginning to emerge from a long period of enforced austerity. Apart from births, marriages and deaths, and from the remaining aristocracy who still believed eating out was only for the hoi polloi, there was a slow marching forth from houses and fixed eating patterns. People were venturing out to eat in restaurants for the sake of it, not simply because it was Aunty Enid’s sixtieth birthday. They wanted some fun at their own modest expense, and with someone else doing the preparation and the cooking and the clearing up. Eureka!

4. The Empire strikes back

In the end, Julian’s fresh inspiration was India. He didn’t do much in the way of research, preferring hearsay to hard work. He reckoned on this basis that the many Indian restaurants cropping up in the country had a couple of big pots on the go that contained two base curry sauces, and that they threw in a few extra bits to make them milder or stronger according to the menu they handed out to customers. It sounded like what they used to do in coaching inns in olde England, the stuff of legend; some big fireside pot always on the go, mysteriously credentialed meat chucked in and dolloped out to tired and hungry travellers, and if it didn’t kill you it might even do you some good.

Like England’s most popular curries and ones you wouldn’t really find in India, he dreamed up and devised a very short menu with two dishes that never changed, his signature dishes, as he’d heard about from other places. Like a foxy predator, he paced the neighbourhood until he found a small, dreary, badly lit and, possibly apart from the proprietor, empty place, bookended by a pharmacy and a flower shop, potentially a source for new patrons, he thought. He went in and the lugubrious Indian showed him to a table by the window, the wish to advertise the exotic haven’s popularity to passing trade. He looked through the long menu, convinced there was no way such a variety of dishes could be produced in a tiny kitchen without his notion of the big sauce or saucepot and a selection of affordable spices being true. He ordered, expected, and got the four soggy poppadums, bland buttered chicken, jaundiced rice, chewy cauliflower and a naan bread that could have rolled itself out of the window. For the sake of tradition, he ordered a bottle of Mateus rosé served tepid, and chewed his way through the meal. He felt as alone as Keir Dulla at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the loudest thing in the room was the sound of his cutlery scraping across the plate. Eventually he summoned the man from behind the counter that also acted as the bar and where the cash register lived, paid him off after politely rejecting the delight of coffee, or was it kulfi, and stepped out into the night watching the restaurant sink back into its resigned murky gloom.

I’ve found it, he said to the mirror. The next day he called his sister. Yes, there was a sister, rarely referenced unless some task requiring her services needed to be performed. She had what some would call a proper job - a solicitor. If you want something done, go to a busy person, he’d been told. So, after she told him how busy she was she listened and said she’d do him a favour. Sylvia was younger than him, diligent and a quick worker too. She recognised the laziness in her brother but something in the blood always seemed to soften her and she usually responded to his little lost boy routines, thinking ever optimistically that one of these days he might actually make something work, despite his views clubbing together to confirm that his analysis of the world around him was a conspiracy to deny him the respect and riches he naturally and automatically deserved as a blood right, in reverse order. She made a few calls, traded a couple of small favours and assembled her findings.

5. Currying favour

Julian had never spent much time delving into the books of Charles Dickens, as a boy being more of a Biggles follower, and as an alleged adult a Playboy fan, or, in the latter case, at least those dog-eared and curiously smeared copies that seemed to survive in barbers’ shops when he visited them on occasional weekends. But he had seen several TV series of dramas, black and white, adaptations of books like Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. Because they were, predominantly, a visual experience for him, he hadn’t got into the nitty-gritty of descriptions for the great range of characters who were not the titles of the books. He was oblivious to the fact that he was a natural bit player in a slightly updated Dickensian world. This made him interesting because he had few of the soft spots of the innocent or naive grand heroes of the novels, but many of the traits of the n’er-do-wells, the schemers and the deceivers who often upstaged those eponymous lead characters. He was more in league with the Bill Sykes