The Marble Bar Cook

Cafe Locked Out

Based on a true story.

The Marble Bar Cook

Once she’d lost her job for not taking the jab, and she’d worked in a nursing home, she’d sat in her rented apartment and watched her world fall apart via the periscope of her phone. The job had taken a while to get. At her age, it was almost impossible to get an interview. But she’d loved it. After her marriage had finally fallen apart, and since her two kids both lived interstate where they were constructing their own lives, the residents and the staff had become her new family.

Image Chris Lewis

The staff especially had helped her survive the toil, for despite all the standing machines and hoists, the work was hard on her body, which was now in its early sixties. She’d often thought, when younger, when the kids were still children, that by this age she’d be retired, maybe even traveling around the country she’d been born in but had never seen. Or at least not much.

The Gold Coast, where they’d taken their children several times so they could play in the adventure parks or watch the sun setting out of the high-rise apartment they’d hire, which for a few days, gave them all a sense of what the view would be like if they were rich.

She’d been born to Catholic parents and had a Catholic upbringing, including school, but in her teens, she’d drifted away from the church. She didn’t even know why, despite everything inside the church looking the same, she felt disconnected from those in the pews until finally she never returned.

That said, she still wore a crucifix and often talked to God as she tried to understand why so few things unfolded the way that she thought they would. Like her marriage. She’d felt his heart move away from her, like a ship slowly sailing towards the horizon, ever since the birth of their second child. And while she’d tried hard to stop this drift, the reason her efforts had failed was that her heart had started drifting in the opposite direction.

In the end, the only time they seemed to connect was in the storms of their arguments. But those storms were long gone, as was he. Though when he left, the world she’d built around them, the one she’d used conversations with God to try to plug the leaks and repair the floor, collapsed.

It didn’t help that her ex, without her knowing, had taken out a second mortgage. One he couldn’t service. She’d always left the finances to him. She didn’t care about money because the bills were always paid and there was always food on the table. Even in the colder times, there was always enough until one day there wasn’t.

A short time later, the business she worked for, as a cleaner, also closed down. They didn’t even have the money to pay any of the employees what they were owed. Suddenly, life moved on without her. That’s how it felt. But then one day, something inside her kicked her up and she started constructing a new life.

A rented flat, a new job, and as the years passed, she started having fun again. There was even a man, far younger than her, who would come over sporadically for a bit of fun, and though he would never stay, and she knew that, the hunger he always brought with him used to give her back her beauty.

She adopted a cat that appeared out of nowhere, and as her kids built their lives in other cities, and her ex became someone she rarely thought of, she and the cat started to live. She took art lessons, tai chi lessons, she would get her tarot done, and once a fortnight, if she had the spare cash, she’d go to the pokies and try her luck, and always with one eye open for a man.

He didn’t have to be that handsome, though she wouldn’t have said no, and he didn’t have to be a doctor, or famous, he could even be damaged, for she loved healing. She was good at it. To date, he hadn’t turned up, instead, her cat died, which she found more painful than husband leaving, and then, a short time later, while still grieving, she learnt a new word . . .Covid.

At first, she believed all the TV was telling her. But then, since she was also observing the world via her phone, a few things started not to make sense. Finally, as the TV informed everyone that they would need to be jabbed to work, instead of her reaching out to God, God spoke to her, via a clarity in her soul. He didn’t want her to take it. He wasn’t telling, but urging her to say no. So, she did.

Suddenly, once again, she was nowhere. She was dismissed by a short email. Her children called her crazy and told her that she wouldn’t be able to see their children until she was fully vaccinated, and her friends cut her loose. Even her young lover stopped coming.

Yet still, her soul told her she was on the right path, not that she could see a path from her flat where she was locked down. By the end of the third lockdown, she knew she was in trouble. The mandates were not lifting and her savings were almost gone. She had taken out some of her super, as the government had suggested, but this wad of cash was it.

With no jobs on offer for the non-compliant, she began looking further afield. But where? Then providence saw a Facebook group appear on her feed. Because Covid had seen the amount of international travellers sink, farms and cattle stations were reaching out to Australians to fill their vacancies.

And there it was. A cattle station near Marble Bar, which was as large as Singapore, was looking for a cook. She searched Google Earth and found that Marble Bar was not only remote but was famous for having some of the hottest temperatures on record. After calling the number, the rancher offered her the job and said if she turned up, he would reimburse her the money for the fuel.

Then the fourth lockdown ended. Outside, everyone was still masked up and she knew that another one was coming. You could sense it in the air. Dan Andrews appeared to be simply drunk on power.

And so she packed up her Honda Jazz, with everything she could fit, leaving just enough space for her to recline the driving seat back, so she could sleep, and using Google Maps as a guide, she placed what she couldn’t fit in her car, but could bear to dump, in the cheapest storage container she could find, and left the ruins of what she’d thought life would be and went searching for new views.

This was the longest drive of her life, and as soon as she’d escaped the city, she fell in love with the road. In one hotel, in a tiny town, she bought some vodka mixes and had her own party to celebrate this new woman who was emerging from within. She’d never known she was strong. But there was no fear. Instead, she was waking up either in these cheap hotels or in her car, excited by what she might find in this new unfolding day.

Finally, she reached Ceduna. The last town before the Nullarbor, where almost a thousand kilometers away was the WA border, which was currently locked to people like her. The unvaccinated. She spent two days here, hoping and praying that the border would open. Two days chatting with God, and then calling the station owner, telling him, or explaining that she was on her way but might just be a little late.

She even looked at alternative routes, but all of them came with warnings that they were suitable for four-wheel drives only. At night, she’d walk to the edge of town and stare off into the direction she was heading. Despite being thousands of kilometers away, it felt so close. Like all that stood between her and the kitchen where she’d be working was a thin sheet of glass she just couldn’t get through.

Then, if she looked behind her, there was nothing there at all. When I met her, she’d just cooked breakfast for the three young jackaroos, who were all preparing for a day of mustering. The cattle needed to be tagged and the bulls castrated. Later that day, they would pack up one of the four-wheel drive buggies for her, which came with a roof to protect her from the sun, and alone she would drive around the perimeter, checking to see if the camels had broken the fence.

Never had she envisioned that she would be capable of doing something like this, and yet here she was, passing snakes that raced to get out of her way, and watching wedge-tailed eagles gliding from one thermal to another. This land looked like it had been originally hewn by God, using only a chisel, then he’d left to the bush to try to soften the edges.

There was even a creek that ran through the property in which she would lay naked. The sun warming what skin she was offering it, as the water cooled what skin she had offered its fast-paced current. No one had ever met this woman. This was a woman she’d unwrapped herself with the tools of courage.

She wasn’t even scared of the fact that the job wasn’t permanent. For this woman was confident to find another station or a roadhouse that would hire her. As she let the sun dry her and as the buggy waited for her to return to the fence, she looked around and realized she was the only life she could see in any direction.

If it wasn’t freedom, then it was close. The only weight pulling down her smile was the pains in her kidneys. Stubborn pains that woke her up at night and wouldn’t let her sleep. Pains she could feel now, as well as those other strange sensations she’d also never experienced, made their presence known.

The station owner had been so upset and apologetic. Unvaccinated, as was his whole family, he wished he’d brought this up with her when she called saying she might be a bit late. But it wasn’t something that people were comfortable talking about. Silence was the norm. Even in the clinic, no one had spoken, apart from the nurse, who, once she had finished, had offered her a sticker that congratulated her for getting vaccinated.

The first one had not affected her at all, physically. And since God, no matter how hard she asked him, could offer her no way through the border, she had decided to take the second.

Now she was here. But look at where she was. This part of the fence wove through country that continually took her breath away. It had an ancient majesty that left you feeling both humbled and oddly, home.

Out of all the views she had viewed in this length of time that had decorated her life, none compared to this.

If whatever was wrong with her decided to end her story here, she had already decided she was OK with that.

In fact, after all the old people she’d watched die in the nursing home, their cooling bodies waiting to be collected as the busy staff continued caring for the others, and the director of Nursing called the next family on the list and told them that there was a bed free, dying out here, in all this beauty, would feel, she thought, like an answered prayer.

Michael

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