Exile by Rebecca Lim

Author:Rebecca Lim
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

When Mr Dymovsky returns, a box of tomatoes balanced on one hip, plastic bags of produce hooked through his sausage-shaped fingers, Sulaiman and I are barely holding off the lunchtime rush.

‘But where is Cecilia?’ Mr Dymovsky wails in his heavily accented English into my ear as he clocks his customers’ unhappy faces. ‘Reggie?’

Between orders for sandwiches toasted, untoasted, crusts cut off, cut into triangles, cut into rectangles, with tomato, without salad, on rye bread, on white bread hold the butter, on wholemeal with extra mayo, no cheese, I fill the portly Russian in on what went down in the café before noon.

‘But I can’t believe this!’ he says, taking over the till, wrapping the sandwich orders expertly and dishing them out faster than I can make them. ‘I shall ask Sulaiman. Sulaiman, he is always straight- talking.’

During a lull in trade, he intercepts Sulaiman heading out of the kitchen with another tray of warmed-up lasagne.

‘Can this be true?’ Mr Dymovsky asks, looking up into the taller man’s face. ‘There was a gun? Shooting?’

‘It is true,’ Sulaiman answers gravely, pointing at the ceiling where a little tag of plaster can be seen hanging down. ‘You see, there is the bullet hole, sir.’

Dmitri Dymovsky did not make his tenacious way in a new world by relying on the word of others. While I deal with the tail end of the lunchtime crowd on my own, turning out a succession of coffees that are possibly the worst in recorded history — too cold, too hot, not enough froth, too much of the damned stuff and not enough liquid — the Russian ascends a folding A-frame ladder and picks at the ceiling with a steak knife. When he comes back down, he’s holding the knife in his right hand and the bullet in his left palm, its cone crumpled from impact with a ceiling beam. His expression is a little shaken.

‘We shall close early today,’ he says, patting Sulaiman absently on the back as the cook passes us with another tray of hot, fried snacks that will grow sodden and unappealing inside the display cabinet. ‘You are both good and hard-working children.’

At two thirty, when there’s no one left in the café except us three, Mr Dymovsky locks the front door and hands me a mop. He wipes down the flat surfaces and puts all of the chairs upside down on the tables. Sulaiman, paying neither of us any mind, cleans up in the kitchen at his own stately pace, the faint sound of Arabic music weaving its way out of the radio he’s placed on a bench top.

Someone pushes the plastic curtain aside and taps on the glass door just after three o’clock. Mr Dymovsky squints at the dark figure with the halo of wavy hair and mutters something that sounds to my ears like ‘Likha beda nachalo!’, but I have no idea what that means.

When the person continues tapping and pointing inwards, he shouts, ‘We’re closed! Closed! Crazy Aussies, read the sign why doncha?’

I move closer with my mop and realise that it’s Justine Hennessy.

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