I didn’t see the group of cyclists walk into the cafe for I was pouring milk into a ceramic cup at the time. But I did hear the swarm of cycling shoes, the types with cleats, clicking and clocking on the timber floorboards like marching tap dancers.

I placed the coffee onto a saucer before looking up. The group of cyclists, consisting entirely of middle-aged men, stood in a line which extended from the counter to the entrance. A long line. The men didn’t look like born athletes, more like executives who’d spent a life hunched over a desk. Still, they had shiny, hairless legs and wore matching lycra, the type of outfit I’d imagine Spiderman’s ill-fated sidekick would wear.

I turned to the barista working beside me who was in charge of pulling espressos. “Get the long mac glasses ready,” I said, not intending to be lippy. After making coffee in Perth for six years, I’d noticed a direct relationship with the number of road bikes at a cafe and the number of long macs.

At the till I took the men’s orders. As predicted, every cyclist ordered a long mac, one by one. By the 7th man in line, I refused to wait for him to order. I just said: “That’s $4.50.”

“What’s $4.50?” he said

“A long mac,” I said.

“Oh,” he said and then chuckled. “How’d you know?” He seemed genuinely delighted like he had just witnessed a magic trick.

—

The first coffee I ever ordered in a cafe was a soy latte. The cafe was in a rugged sea-side town and had boards mounted on the walls and piles of surf wax next to the blueberry muffins. The barista walked to the till. She wore an old Billabong t-shirt. “What can I get you?” she said.

Having no notion of the different types of orders, I craned around the room for a coffee menu—only to find spiderwebs and a tv with the swell report. I turned to my cousin Toff (that’s his nickname which refers to the ‘toph’ in Christopher, not the derogatory term for a posh kid) and said: “What are you going to get?"

“A soy latte,” he said to the barista. I asked him what that was and he said he didn’t really know, only that he’d tried one in Sydney with his older sister Sarah who owned a cafe in Bondi.

“Good?” I asked. As a teenager with an unworldly palate, I wanted to know whether the coffee was, in fact, drinkable and not the liquid equivalent of a brownie made from raw cacao and avocado.

“Sarah drinks it,” he said.

I was holding up the line now and the barista began to tap her pen. I still couldn’t find the coffee menu. Panicking, I decided to follow Toff. He and Sarah, I reasoned, had both ordered a coffee from a cafe before.

“What he said,” I said, pointing to Toff. “A soy latte.”

That I ordered the coffee didn’t mean I wanted it. To be honest, I thought the order sounded repulsive.

At the time, in 2008, I’d never come across soy milk, only soybeans in a health food shop in Denmark, a hippy town I grew up in. The soybeans lived in a large hessian sack and, while my mum shopped, I’d watch women with long underarm hair scoop kilos of the yellow legumes into brown paper bags, along with mung beans and lentils. Standing in the cafe, I didn’t understand why you would want to turn the beans—which, from what I could remember, tasted about as inspiring as boiled cabbage—into milk.

After making the coffees, the barista placed the two soy lattes on the counter. I took off the lid and sipped it. I realised the soy milk had already curdled only after feeling the chunks of coagulated liquid at the back of my throat.

“What do you think?” Toff said.

I didn’t enjoy the coffee at all, of course, but I didn’t want to sound uncultured. Toff and Sarah were, after all, the experts.

“It’s so good,” I said.

—

The cyclists had finished the first round of coffees. As I was collecting the glasses, I asked: “Do you guys want another round?”

At first, the men looked at each other, as if cyclists were forbidden to order without consulting the group first. After nodding at each other, a cyclist, presumably the leader, put up his hand and blurted. “I’ll have another one.” That was shortly followed, as if on cue, by every other cyclist.

“Eight long macs, then?” I said.

“Yes, thanks,” the leader said.

I was about to walk inside when one of the cyclists stood up. “Wait," he said. "I don't want a long mac."

I hadn’t noticed him before. He was wearing board shorts and runners and had thick hairy legs.

"What would you like then?" I said.

“A hot chocolate, please,” he said.

—

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