Work Text:
At the end of the street where Jack had lived in Melbourne after the war, there was a Greek cafe and bakery. Among all the red-brown brick, he could always pick it out as soon as he turned down off the Paris end of Collins Street and left the gardened residential buildings of the well-to-do behind. The whitewashed brick always looked fresh under the billowing green and white striped awning. Above the door, art nouveau stained glass grapevines climbed an invisible trellis, always fat and purple and ready for harvest no matter what time of the season.
The menu above the counter said they served only English food and baked only English tea treats. Generous servings of fish and chips, meat pies, sausage rolls, and pasties heaped onto plates. Or the neat presentations of biscuits, scones, and rock cakes under glass domes and slabs of Victoria sponge. There were also his own things, the piles of stone fruit and ripe mangos. Whatever was in season.
But if it was rainy and his hands were bloodless with cold even at fifteen degrees, he could clear his throat and try the bit of Greek he had picked up in the Agean when the Turks actually had flung him back into the sea. The jolly baker would wince a bit at him, as everyone always did at his attempts at a second language. But Greek food appeared nonetheless. The tiropitakia and spanakopita came out. Layers of spinach and feta tucked under thin crispy sheets of phyllo. He usually finished up a portion of each with baklava served with thick yoghurt and figs drizzled with honey and sprinkled chopped halva because plentiful food still had the haze of a daydream after so long at war and he couldn't help himself.
When the baker's well-built son, who was perpetually tucking a dark spiral of curl behind his ear, served him up another slice of warm baklava on the house just because and teased him for being so cold on such a mild day, Jack's cheeks would burn. Even his ears might go red if the handsome Greek lad served him up a mug that was the best bloody cup of coffee he'd ever had and sat down to chat too. It was the best coffee in Melbourne, and Jack said so every time he wrapped his cold hands around it and took a sip.
The baker's son himself was almost always behind the counter. He was usually whistling. Some songs Jack didn't know, some he did. But sometimes the lad, elbow-deep in the dough as flour and water came together or he kneaded and portioned out loaves of what would be golden, crusty country loaves, he whistled Song of Australia and no matter the rain, Jack would warm to his core. He tried to blame it on a sense of patriotism second-generation immigrants felt for him, maybe a sense of comradery between two men who knew the other had been a khaki digger himself. The man could whistle anything, though, and Jack would feel the sun on the baked clay of his outback.
It was two years of coffee before the handsome lad invited him upstairs and then two years of a cubbyhole of a bed for the nearly two meters of Jack and the broad-shouldered Greek before they parted ways as friends. Only another year after, his pretty Greek lad married a prettier Greek lass and, in a blink, had a whole circus of even prettier Australian kids running around that same bakery. It was another twenty years and another world war before Zee lit a cigarette in a funk hole in Egypt and told him that his Greek boy hadn't even dreamed about ratting them out to the police over the buggery even when threatened. She was impressed and he was loved. He'd always been loved.