At a roadhouse cafe, I ordered a long mac, a piccolo with skinny milk, and a flat white three quarters topped up. The barista, who was taking the order, towered over the counter. He wore a stained white shirt that was too short, showing part of his belly which hung over his belt. He looked like he also pumped gas for a living and butchered cows.

He didn’t talk, just wrote down ‘3 Lattes’ on a docket.

Surely not, I thought.

I wanted to correct him but he seemed like a man who wasn’t used to being corrected. Besides, I didn’t want to be presumptuous. The three lattes were probably for another customer whom I couldn’t see.

—

The last time I was outside the city, I was on a boat in the Abrolhos Islands and, despite taking 250g of expensive single origin coffee, I exclusively drank Nescafe’s Blend 43 instant coffee.

The pining for a more basic drink began when we arrived on the boat and found out the toilet was broken.

Docked in the harbour, the captain assured us the plumbers were fixing it. I had doubts, though.

Placing my bags in the cabin, I overheard the plumber—who was bent over the toilet with his pants halfway down his waist, revealing a crack that could accommodate a 50 cent piece—say to his apprentice: “The thing’s buggered.”

“Too blocked?” the apprentice asked.

“Blocked like an Autumn gutter, mate,” he said.

Collectively, we decided that we could either go in the ocean or in a red crayfish bucket which you then, of course, needed to throw in the ocean—the contents, I mean, not the bucket itself.

I decided then to let go of any notions of decorum and stowed the coffee beans away. Staying in a barren place, like the Indian’s oceanic plains, where you are forced only to think about food and sleep and where you will squat next, the idea of hand-pouring a filter coffee felt, even as a barista, pretentious, like cooking a filet mignon in the slums of India.

Though the toilet options didn’t allow for much discretion, I hadn’t seen anyone go until day three. I was slumping into a chair, watching the sun rise and illuminate the Indian ocean while another passenger, Sam, was fishing. The breeze was cool and blowing from the south and the waves gently lapped against the hull.

Rocking back and forth, I was watching a seal in the distance bask in the warm light when a passenger, let’s call him James, appeared from the cabin’s bathroom. Half dressed, he rushed through the boat’s loungeroom, brushing fellow passengers who were asleep on couches. Having chosen the second alternative, he was holding the red crayfish bucket aloft, shouting, “Watch out. Hot cray. Hot cray.”

Sam had also caught a fish by this point. Instead of watching James empty and clean the bucket and sit at the table while Sam pulled out the fish’s guts next to me, I decided to boil the kettle.

"Who wants a coffee?" I said.

"Yep," James said, scrubbing away.

"Yep," Sam said.

"Sugar?" I said.

"Are you going to have some?" Sam said.

I looked at the bucket and the gutted fish and said: "I think I might today."

I made three instant coffees and brought them to the table with a bowl of sugar, which I did end up using, exactly half a teaspoon of it. I gently stirred it in. Sam meanwhile dumped a generous heap of sugar in and stirred the coffee using a dirty fishing lure.

“What are you doing?” I said. “There’s a teaspoon right there.”

“When in Rome,” he said.

—

I was waiting on a plastic chair in the corner of the roadhouse cafe for 15 minutes before the burly barista bought back, as the docket promised, three 12 oz lattes.

Before I could say a word, though, he left for the exit and lit up a cigarette. It was like he went to rural barista school and the teacher taught him how to make a latte and forgot the rest.

I imagined how he would handle a group ordering a mismatch of alternative brands of milk, sweeteners, and decaf. “No worries,” he’d say. “So that was just 7 lattes?”

I handed the two lattes to my friends in the car. “What the hell is this?” one of them asked.

“A latte,” I said.

“I didn’t order this,” he said.

“None of us did,” I said.

It was mid-morning now. The winter wind was still bitterly cold and the car had no heater. Looking onto the flat and arid landscape, we firmly gripped the hot coffees and quickly drank them anyway.

“Not bad,” one of them said. “For a roadhouse.” We, the other two in the car, nodded in approval.

“Might get another one,” one of them said.

“There may not be another roadhouse for a while,” I reasoned, then proceeded to walk back into the cafe, slap $15 on the counter, hold up three fingers and say to the barista: “Three more of your finest, please.”

—

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