Instant
I. In which the narrator confesses
Now, I am a fusser. A fiddler. A snob. I treat making coffee as a serious job. I treat every brew like a small tense exam. I know where they grew, and I know who I am
when the kettle goes hiss and the water goes pour in a slow snaily spiral — and counting — and more of the blooming, the swelling, the rising of cream, till the smell fills the kitchen like somebody's dream.
I have views about roasting. I've views about grind. I own burrs. I own cones. I own quite a strong mind. And the truth, since we're here, and there's no one about: I am good at this. Really. Absurdly. Devout.
II. In which none of that helps
But some mornings I wake in a room I can't place, with my bag on the floor and the night on my face, and the power went off around quarter past three, and there's no one, and nothing, and nowhere, and me with a head like a drum and a mood like a stone, and I'd trade my whole kitchen for one cup alone.
And there. By the kettle. Against the bare wall. One sachet. Just one. Nescafé. That's all. A gram and a half of pure hope. And I stand in the dark with my head and this thing in my hand.
III. In which we ask where on earth it came from
And it grew about here. That's the joke of the thing. No mountain. No mist. No cool volcanic spring. Just robusta — squat, bitter, and stubborn, and cheap — on a red slope of ground that's too poor and too steep for a crop worth the name. Picked by hand. In the sun on a tarp in a yard. Turned. And sacked. And then run
down a road, to a shed like a town, where the burrs are the height of a man, where the roasting drum turns like a planet — and steam, and the blooming, the cream, and the smell fills the shed like somebody's dream — then a cold, and a vacuum, a cyclone of air, and the water goes out of it. All of it. There, at the end of the line, at the end of the roar, comes a dust that is patient. That waits. Nothing more.
Then the dust becomes sachets, the sachets a chain, and the chains go by lorry and pirogue and train to the kiosks, the bus parks, the glovebox, the shelf of a person who's holding together a self that is tired, that is far from its bed, that would ache for one hour of upright, one hour of awake. And they hang there like bunting, on strings, in the sun, over every last counter. One dose. And just one.
IV. In which I tear the notch
So I tear at the notch, and it gives, and it's done — no burrs and no bloom and no counting. No, none — and it whispers out powder like ash from a pan in a mug, in a glass, in a bowl, in a can. Then the water goes in, and the whole thing goes brown like a curtain, like weather, like night coming down, and it turns, and it darkens, and rises, and then it smells, oh it smells, like a morning again.
V. In which I am honest about it
Is it best? It is not. It is not even near. It is not what I'd make you at home with my gear. It has none of the peach and it has none of the plum, and it tastes, if I'm honest, a little bit glum.
But a perfect thing absent is nothing at all, and this one is present. And yes, it is small — but it's warm, and it's bitter, and it does what it said, and it lifts off the drum and the stone from my head.
So here's to the sachet, the plain and the rough. Not the best. Never best. But the one that's enough.
