ON AIR
‘Give up your secrets, Shorton. I need to know if there is a single place in this town where I can buy a decent coffee. You know the kind: not just drinkable but actually enjoyable. Hot but not too hot. Quality beans. Robust flavour. Milk that still has life in it. And maybe, if it’s not too much to ask, a little finesse about the presentation. At four-fifty a go, I don’t want a chipped cup with old lipstick stains on the rim. I want a pleasurable coffee moment—a gold-star start to my day.’
Harvey can taste it now, smell it. The cinnamon aroma of his choice coffee shop in Surry Hills. Cups and glasses full of promise and relief moving between the tables like an endless game of draughts. Strangers in overlapping moments of suspended time, perched over their addiction. Wooden boxes stuffed with coffee beans, cranky baristas in headscarves, bouncy waiters in faux aprons and Birkenstocks. An urban hip-pocket of movement and existence funded by dressed-up caffeine.
‘Who’s with me, Shortonites? How much better would your day be with a decent coffee or two pushing it along? I want to hear from you this morning. Give me a call and let’s talk coffee. When did you have your last decent cup? Where was it? Was it in Shorton or were you on holidays somewhere? Because, folks, if there is good coffee in this town, I haven’t tasted it. Maybe I’m wrong. It’s happened before, although … audible smirk … rarely after a decent cup of coffee.’
Beam fades up a track from Powderfinger (their halcyon days when Bernard Fanning was still pretending he wasn’t a grass-chewing bumpkin aching to sing about falling leaves and banging screen doors) and he waits for the phone to light up. And it doesn’t.
He goes straight into Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’ (naff, yes, but always guaranteed to inspire a round of mimed riffing among bored drivers) and he wanders out of the booth to check with the receptionist whether calls are getting through. The girl looks about twelve and suspiciously related to Hugh Traynor. She shrugs. No calls.
And so he plays ‘MacArthur Park’ because surely someone will call in during seven minutes of cake being left out in the rain. And someone does, but it’s a taxi driver called Craig who wants to talk about petrol prices rather than coffee and will not be moved from the topic despite Beam’s best segue manoeuvres.
Coffee, he decides, might not be Shorton’s cup of tea on a humid Monday morning and he opts to throw the conversational net much wider, to the topic of customer service: how bad it is here, how entirely absent it is, and what might be done about it. He knows this will run because everyone loves to whinge about customer service.
Beam leads the way with a set piece about his last dinner experience with Grace—a thirty-minute wait for an entrée that consisted of three dips and some crackers, a misplaced order at the next table, a steak seared to old-boot status, and an amusing recount (he chuckles when he tells it, though he was inwardly seething at the time) of the waitress talking on her phone for the entire time Harvey was paying the bill and attempting to give helpful feedback.
The first caller is Carly, a restaurant owner who quite possibly recognises the crackers-and-dip menu item as her own for she is bitterly defensive about the pressures of finding young people who will work on weekends.
‘And what,’ she fires at Harvey, ‘would you know about running a small business in a town that is struggling? What would you know about the impact of penalty rates? About how I can grow several ulcers each weekend working out whether I can afford to roster on three staff instead of two when I probably need about five?’
Beam is passive and quietly compassionate. Knows how to play this. Let the anger fully expend itself … lots of absolutelys and of course, of course … until the caller is sated. Happier for having shared.
Tougher to placate is Jenny, who furiously berates him for laying the blame for average food at the feet of wait staff. And she has a point, Beam thinks, and says so, even if her frequent use of gunna and would ya and ya think ya top shit somewhat lower her high horse.
Jenny’s tantrum ignites the phones. The young receptionist smacks on the glass and holds up nine fingers to Beam. Nine calls waiting, he interprets. Fantastic.
But there is no to-and-fro among them, no alternating of vantage points, no I have to disagree with your previous caller, just a mounting attack on Harvey himself, a personal assault on the outsider who dares to complain.
‘You’re a dick, mate,’ says Jim. ‘Go back to your wanker friends in the city.’
Karen: ‘There’s a reason we live here and it’s to avoid having to put up with people like you.’
Mick: ‘We don’t sell poofter coffee here, mate, because there aren’t enough poofters around.’
John: ‘Shut up and play another song.’
Liam: ‘Cock.’
God, the language in this fucking town. Harvey tries to wrest it back, makes a few humble comments about his own cooking. He recounts a (completely made-up) tale about the nicest cup of coffee he ever had: a simple International Roast served with a biscuit by a kind old lady at the blood bank. But today’s show is gone and Harvey knows it.
Rob: ‘You were a dick at school and you’re a dick now. Go back to where you came from.’
This is where I bloody came from.
Finally, regrettably, Beam mistimes the seven-second delay that would have prevented Shorton hearing him declared a pillow-biting fucktard by a man called Leslie (strangely not ‘Les’), an error that brings Hugh Traynor flying to the window, eyebrows leaping for his hairline, arms all what the hell?
Harvey looks at him and shrugs. Throws on Counting Crows and walks out of the station into a wall of heat that sears his eyeballs.