The Spilling

It's not your fault that you spilled the coffee. It's Jeff Buckley's.

Charlee was due to have his wisdom teeth out yesterday so today at the counter I texted him how did it go and the poor thing wrote back saying he had fasted for nothing, the operation had been rescheduled for today, he was awaiting his admission. I still felt guilty for having told him the Jeff Buckley soup story, though he told me it was fine, and that his had broken the surface so even though he was going under they shouldn’t be as bad.

I had mine out at 20. I was living at home, playing Jeff Buckley non stop after my first extra-boyfriend affair with a buff blonde from a nightclub floor, with his own apartment and stereo the next morning playing ‘Hallelujah’. My heart was all rockets and flames and long listening sessions in my dark bedroom. God mum hated that album. I was surprised, as, compared to the usual dark shit I blasted, Jeff seemed quite lovely and lame, the sort mums would like. ‘Get that drivel off!’ she’d laugh as I padded down the yellow plush pile hallway to the bathroom. It fascinated me she found him more objectionable than Morrissey, Robert S, Portoisehead. He’s just so sappy she’d say.

Often in my stories, I’ve noticed, there are two things that I am bringing together, two occurrences, a coincidence or some kind of mysterious alignment that causes me to wonder about higher forces. The reason for this search for higher reasons for things is, I think, because I’m a serious clutz and quite an idiot and because really stupid things happen to me in my life—or I cause them—so sometimes it’s helpful to look to the heavens and think - why God? - and receive a stroke of sweet it is bigger than you. I say this because of the coffee. I will get to that, but the coffee is the reason I am telling this story.

Also I would just like to note, in the above paragraph, my use of the em-dash (or is it ‘n’). In Yesteryear she uses them a lot and as I read that book, which I will also tell you why shortly, I feel it is finally sinking in the way they work. Three books in you might think a writer knows this. You would be wrong.

Anyway, so Jeff. You might remember he came out to do one concert in Melbourne in 1996, and then he died. The second those tickets came available, one young floozy was on the phone, and back then you could get tickets on phones if you waited by them for the moment the tickets went on sale. I bought three, for my sister, me and my best friend. Then, jaw pounding, realised surgery for my wisdom teeth was scheduled ten days before.

Not a problem, the dentist assured me. Three to four days recovery is standard, a week off uni. Mine were so deep inside my jaw a general anaesthetic was required, the x-rays showed roots shooting sideways, tangled and forked, a fascinating image of confused evolution. I asked if you got to keep the teeth afterwards and the dentist gave me a weird look. I want them in a jar, I said. I need proof the fuckers are out of my face. I will give them to my friends.

Manna, at Sydney Theatre Company in 2008. I can’t remember exactly what this scene was about, but she spat a lot of blood.

The Jeff Buckley concert was ten days after the surgery. Mum assured me that would be plenty of time, with her quiet smirk as she thought of Jeff. I defied her loathing, and still it confuses me when people don’t like him. The Potato hates his music, Matt too, they screw their faces up. I still think it’s at worst inoffensive. And dead, he’s forever preserved in that time, early adult hormones floating in a dark river. Pale skin, guitar.

I can feel my Dad doing the wind-up - get to the point Jayne. And then I’ll bring in something from outside that feels irrelevant such as how, probably around the time Charlee was going in for his surgery, I—for the first time in seven years of running the bookshop—(em-dash. You’re welcome)—spilled almost an entire cup of coffee all over the counter. Across the bench top, down the edge, all over the printer and some just-processed book stacks and customer orders below. I stood in disbelief. Then rushed around grabbing towels and whatever I could find, my god, as if it’s not hard enough to make a buck. The books weren’t as bad as I thought. A few I could replace with my own copies, a few splashed covers easy to wipe, but oh, Charlee’s pile of magic sourced from far and wide, soaked. Merde. Wipeable … not too bad. Actually, pretty salvageable. On the whole not too much destruction, just one Yesteryear I’d been flirting with reading anyway, one Allen Levi utterly destroyed, a Gary Disher and a history book from customers who were overdue to collect, mildly splattered. Perhaps it’s okay.

In the hospital, I wake up in a line of young women, each around the same age, each in gowns, hair in surgery caps. A quiet, empty room, Handmaid’s Tale. I splutter, a nurse helps me sit up slightly, asks how I am, about pain. To my right are four girls, heads bandaged, the furthest is being helped from her bed to sitting, then standing and being led out. The one closest to me is drinking water through a straw, the one at the far end now being sit up and led out. To my left are four or five other bodies, still asleep. The one on my left wakes and splutters, is helped to sitting by the nurse who has now left me with some water with a straw. Production line. Mum is there. I ask about my teeth. She shows them to me, in a plastic jar, disgusted and slightly amused. I am happy. She and the nurse help me to sitting, and I am home, with my prized teeth-mutations—which I clean the flesh from and place in four velvet ring boxes I’ve instructed mum to bring—and drugs to the baby-on-the-ceiling eyeballs. Four days, five days of delirium and offering caskets to dry-retching close friends. Six days. Seven. Eight.

Ten. She is not going to the Jeff Buckley concert. She is still in monstrous pain, bleeding, padded, bunny-swollen, punched. She is propped up in bed with a bowl of pumpkin soup and a straw when her sister, best friend and the neighbour from across the road come to say goodbye as they leave for the concert. She sits holding the soup against her chest, ugly-weeping like a spoilt brat. Waaaaaaaa. Have a good time! Waaaa. I’m glad you’re going. Waaaaa. Tell me all about it! Waaaa. Say hi to Jeff for me.

The image fixed in my mind, which I relayed to Charlee at the bookshop counter as he told me of his upcoming operation, was, as the girls moved off to leave, a sob so great escaped my chest that it knocked the soup bowl from my hands and down my front, orange muck slopped across my pjs and down into my thighs, deep into the bed. A tragic scene. The monster wails. The girls are on the yellow plush pile, down the stairs and out the door.

It’s been a crap week. I’ve had a cold - waaaaa - and have been down about an array of things, it’s been school holidays and we’re understaffed, waaa waaa waaa. So then I spilt the coffee. The worst part was that I was so enjoying that coffee. As soon as the situation was rectified I went next door and got another one.

And then, just as I was sipping the new coffee and remarking to myself how I had never spilt a coffee on the counter before, though I normally spill things all the time, and how miraculous it was no other staff member had spilled coffee on the counter, and how dangerous in fact this spot was to drink coffee, this central part of the bookshop with books and computers and postcards and paper and especially the customer orders which often come from overseas and take ages to arrive and that people have been waiting for and have been told they’re here and that they’re so excited to come in and collect …

I spilled THIS COFFEE. There it went. At same point, four or five sips in. All over the counter and down, over the same customer orders I’d just saved, the printer, the CD player this time, the Sinatra Wee Small Hours and the Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud beside it. This time having run to the IGA I had sponges and kitchen towel at the ready, and I did recover most of the books again, except, except Charlee’s stack. Desecrated. My mouth screwed into a silent, ugly cry. Customers tried not to look. Why God? Whyyyyyyyyy?

Charlee didn’t mind. Just now he’s sent me a picture of his lovely face recovering in bandages. I have been buried in Yesteryear, which is all about God. Maybe it was God that made me spill the coffee, to remind me of the soup, and how special Charlee is, or to make me read a bestseller for a change, or to remind me of Mum, and being young, and how she changed those bedsheets with the greatest of empathy. Or it was it Jeff, perhaps, his last goodbye. His Hallelujah.

Ps I didn’t write any more at all, having this substack ‘paid’. So I’ve put it back to unpaid, that was dumb. Please, if you are paying—looking at you dear Claire T—take your money back! Je vous aime. XXXX ps - em-dash, yeahhhh