The milk bar man is going back to China. His wife is frail and, says Peter, needs traditional Chinese medicine. More than she can get here in Australia. She needs a carer too, he explains to me in halting English while I pay for three two-litre bottles of milk.
The Chinese couple had kept the shop going for ten years at a time when milk bars, like public telephones, were disappearing off the map. In my two decades in this suburb about eight corner shops have closed. And in the past three years Peter's milk bar, like his wife, was just hanging on.
Mary was down to skin and bone underneath her sagging cardigan and plain pants. She wore a poorly fitted black wig. She would shuffle to the counter, her slippers hardly lifting from the lino floor. Her eyes, behind large spectacles, barely acknowledged you. Her thin lips remained impassive. A customer needed to be patient.
I would say hello and thank you but never expected Mary to return the compliments. It was enough for her hands to be able to take my coins and place them beside the cash register before she shuffled away.
The business appeared to be winding down. But there were still milk and newspapers. Ice creams. Smokes. A few magazines covered in cleavage, the women's eyes shining, their botox lips open wide.
Sometimes I bought my milk elsewhere, rather than just pop 300 m around the corner. From the green-grocer near the supermarket. From the 'convenience store' near the train station. From one of the other four milk bars in the suburb, all of them about a kilometre away.
But it was always a guilty purchase. One day, I thought, Peter and Mary might just shut up shop, like the milk bars in Wilkins St and Yarra St and Albert St. In Douglas Parade. Along the Esplanade. In Osborne St.
When Peter told me he and Mary were going back to China I presumed the milk bar would be closing. No, he said, a younger person is taking over.
'I am almost old enough to retire,' he said as I placed my milk in my back pack. 'But I think I will get some part-time work.' He had been a ball-bearing engineer.
Peter explained that in China the government will be able to provide a part-time carer for Mary. And there will be extended family