You entered through tall saloon doors set on a terrazzo entrance step. On either side of these doors, shallow awnings came down like brows over the windows. The Cafe Achillion’s two window displays were bedded with coloured tissue paper: the left display was reserved for fruit and vegetables (only legumes in ration times) and the right for tobacco products and small items associated with male and female grooming, mainly creams and brushes. The cafe, Achilles told customers, had the largest selection of combs in suburban Sydney, no competition. Valia took care of the displays and Achilles appreciated her eye. The cafe’s slate floor, crazy-paved with cream tiles in brown mortar, had been sold as a Cubist design and one fashionable in Europe. There was no pattern remotely like it in the southern hemisphere. This was true. You got used to the floor. Along one wall were seven booths, appropriate for five adults each, and along the other wall was a long counter—this space was Valia’s domain. Behind the kitchen was a windowless central hallway that terminated in a living room with a back door to a verandah. The bedrooms lay off the passageway. There were three bedrooms: Penny’s, Valia’s and Achilles’—but Achilles hadn’t slept in his room for years, since Eleftheria’s death, preferring to rest on the back verandah, which he had enclosed with louvre windows and canvas curtains. Instead, he used his former bedroom to keep bread and packets of cigarettes; things that would spoil or be stolen if stored outside or behind the counter. In the yard was a shed for dry goods, an overgrown olive tree, a kitchen garden with radishes and herbs, an enclave of grapevines, lemon trees and, amid this, the stump of a banksia. (Achilles found the large native tree ugly and obstructive; he left the stump in the ground because he found it aesthetically pleasing. Also, he liked signs of his own governance.) From underneath this dead banksia slab, during rain showers, huntsman spiders ventured forth into house and cafe. Achilles devoted his spare time to pest control, fearing the cafe would be overrun with bugs, that something terrible would happen to his family.

Chapter 5: 2002

2002

1.