YOU STILL HAVE TO EAT

Peter, who has now retired from full-time bus driving, is sipping his coffee in the corner of the café. He doesn’t have to be up early for work any more, but every morning just before six, he comes to the café and makes sure it is safe for Jacky and Peaw to hop out of their car. If he can’t make it, he organises someone else to be there. The girls have never opened up alone since the attack.

‘I enjoy the coffee; I enjoy the company. They’re like kids to me,’ he says without any fuss.

Peaw and Jacky make more of a fuss about him, though, calling Peter their Moree Dad. It’s Peter, and customers like Peter, they insist, who gave them a reason to stay and a place to call home.

‘That’s why we’re still here,’ says Jacky firmly.

‘When we first came here, it was hot,’ says Jacky, remembering the summer they moved to Moree to help Thai friends who ran a restaurant in Moree. ‘In Thailand and in Sydney it is hot and humid and then it rains. Here it is just hot and hot and hot. At first it was hard. And very quiet. After eight o’clock nothing: nothing at all.’ After three weeks they wanted out, but stayed on, somewhat ambivalently, until the attack. It was only in the aftermath that they felt sure they wanted to make Moree their home.

Jacky and Peaw own a house on the other side of town where they live with a couple and the couple’s two children. They are good friends with another couple who run a local Thai restaurant. That couple also has a child, and Peaw babysits at night while both sets of parents work.

‘I love it,’ says Peaw. ‘I have three kids now.’

Regular Mel Jensen says the women have a knack for bringing out the best in people. ‘Their best customers are probably some of the more conservative people in the community. Even guys who are quite prejudiced, they just can’t do it to these girls, who remember everyone and make them feel so important,’ says Mel. ‘They have created a place where people have met and made connections. Some mornings it might take you an hour to get out of here, because one person after another will turn up. And the men coming in: I never thought I’d see so many men get into the coffee culture.’

Les Smith, a 101-year-old mechanic-turned-poet who has spent most of his life in Moree, apart from ‘a few years during the war’, drives himself to the Relaxing Café for a coffee with his mate Rudy five days a week. He’s seen a lot of businesses come and go over the years.

‘In the early days all the cafés were Greek. This here was a bakery,’ Les says, pointing at the homewares shop next door. ‘And here,’ pointing at the café, ‘was the living quarters.’ About Jacky and Peaw, Les says, ‘you couldn’t find better people anywhere.

‘It’s a pleasure to spend your money here. They are very kind and thoughtful. You can see how popular they are … you don’t get that for nothing; you’ve got to earn it, and they certainly have.’

Through their intentional, indefatigable friendliness, these two women have created for themselves a place in the Moree community. And in doing so they have also created a place for the community itself, where everyone is welcome to sit on the mismatched chairs, with the fake grass underfoot.

The kids in the hooded jumpers were never caught, but that doesn’t really matter to Jacky and Peaw. They’re far more interested in love than revenge. If the love you give determines the love you receive, it’s no wonder everyone looks so happy in the Relaxing Café. n 75 Heber Street, Moree NSW.

Opposite page Former bus driver Peter McLellan is loved by the two women, who think of him as their ‘Moree Dad’. He turns up every morning to make sure it’s safe for them to open.

Words Charlotte Wood Seventeen years ago my two younger sisters were caring for our sick mother at home. Twice a week, a neighbour called Ruby would come knocking at their door.

‘How’s ya mum, darlin’?’ she would croak. ‘Doin’ any bedda today?’

Ruby was aged around eighty, about four feet tall, and as slight as a stick. She had a smoker’s voice so gloriously raspy she might have roughened it daily on a carpenter’s rasp. The weathered skin of her face was grey with lack of oxygen and the fact she walked anywhere, let alone up our mother’s three front steps, seemed heroic.

No, the girls would have to tell Ruby, our mother was still not feeling so good. Sometimes they would lie and say that she was feeling a bit perkier today, or had some colour in her cheeks, was up to eating. It seemed too sad to answer Ruby’s hopeful questions with the truth: that our mother was dying. But what the girls said really made no difference; no matter their response, Ruby would shake her head.

‘Ah, the poor bugger,’ she’d say, wheezing soulfully at the doormat. Then, as she did every visit, she

would make her offering: ‘Just a bit of sumthink for ya mum, darlin’, to make her feel better.’

Every time, my sisters would exclaim and accept Ruby’s offering with gratitude. Then she would hobble off down the garden path until the next visit.

Ruby’s bits of something really were quite something. The gift always came in one small, speckled ceramic cereal bowl, covered in slightly sodden plastic wrap. In the bowl was always some bizarre concoction. A few sardines wrapped in a slice of devon, perhaps, or three little sippets of white toast with baked beans, given a glossy slipcover of condensed milk, or a thick slab of undercooked scone dough fashioned into a lumpy pineapple-andVegemite pizza.

I can’t accurately recall all of Ruby’s dishes, but tapioca, arrowroot, sago and junket seem to feature in my memory, usually in strong-smelling combination with other treats—fricasseed brains, maybe, or tuna mornay.

Of course, in our small town Ruby’s gifts of solace were just a few among many. A casserole appeared on the doorstep for my sisters at least once or twice a week over those months, most often without a note or anything else to identify the giver. It was the kind of routine kindness that happened then in country towns and suburbs everywhere.

A decade before this, our father, too, had been gravely ill. Back then our mother was just 48 years old, bewildered with shock and grief, and trying to come to terms with this hole punched in our world while caring for a houseful of equally stunned teenagers.

One day, a ute appeared in our driveway. Someone unloaded a small chest freezer and installed it in our kitchen. It was packed to the brim with frozen casseroles, soups, pies and desserts. For the many months of treatment and grieving that followed, that freezer was restocked every week by our neighbours and friends.

That year on Christmas Day, as every day, we went to visit our dad in hospital.

Our neighbours then were Jim and Pat Rodda. They had lived next door forever and we loved them nearly as much as our own family. We had never heard of Jim cooking, but that day we came home to find our dining table spread with a lavish Christmas feast—turkey, ham and all the trimmings—that Jim had cooked for us entirely by himself.

The food was excellent, but the gift was far more than that. Though he and our dad were chalk and cheese—Jim drank beer and adored golf, while our eccentric father spent his time reading Catholic theology and making wine from oak leaves and raisins—they loved each other. And of course Jim was a father himself. It was only much later that I understood the magnitude of his cooking for us that day. It was not so much a present for us, but a message to our father, an expression of masculine love and fatherly solidarity that to this day makes me cry to think of it. Our dad died the next day, taking with him the knowledge that his family would be cared for by our town in exactly such tender, graceful ways.

These things—Ruby’s alarming concoctions, the freezer full of casseroles and Jim’s Christmas dinner—all happened a long time ago, when my siblings and I were very young people. But the experience went deep. Now, for all of us, when news of a friend or neighbour’s crisis hits, our first instinct is: cook. I used to think this impulse was common to everyone, not just people raised in country towns. Perhaps it was usual at one time. But I have come to think we’ve lost confidence in our instincts.

Recently, I heard that one of our neighbours was having cancer treatment, and had been for several months. I felt dreadful that we’d not known, and had done nothing for his wife and kids before now, so my husband and I popped round with a quiche. It wasn’t much, obviously—more a gesture than anything— but still, I trusted my instincts.

When V. opened the door I was shocked. Not because she looked any different—she didn’t, except perhaps a little tired, for her husband was in hospital again, this time with pneumonia. But as she took the quiche from us she began to cry, and said this was the first time anyone had done such a thing. Her gratitude was completely over the top—it was only a quiche— but it made me remember how magnified the smallest gestures of kindness can become when one is marooned in this way by terror and grief. And it made me ashamed, that our neighbours had been left alone with it for so long.

How does this happen? I wonder if it might partly have to do with our contemporary preoccupation with experts, and outsourcing, and privacy. In middle-class Australia, it seems that if something needs addressing, it is always possible to pay >