Waiting (12 page)

Isn't that an urban myth? Jasmin asks.

What? Shooting at trespassers?

No. That CFA men are ‘out there lighting fires' all summer. Unlikely. Still, urban myths always mean something – in this case maybe just a fear of losing control.

There are stacks of nutters in the CFA.

Jasmin raises her eyebrows.

Arsonists, I meant.

Yes, arsonists. They cause trouble all over Australia.

She looks at him then sighs and turns to watch a car driving into the driveway opposite.

Angus decides to continue his anecdote:

Anyway, every week-end someone painted the pumas on the bloke's wall purple or in the local footie club colours. After months of this the pumas were either stolen or were knocked back over the wall like Humpty Dumpties. The bloody guy replaced them. Then people threw bottles and flung mud – we wondered if it really was mud – onto the beige walls. They jammed weird things in the gate, road-kill, fluffy teddies, wreaths. The locals had never liked the bloke. His ASIO Trespasser sign pushed him off the map.

He was paranoid, Jasmin says. Except he was the trespasser.

They arrive backwards in time to Angus's first water-world, his ‘Hips and Ponds' by the Yarra. Jasmin seems happier and more easy-going at the Yarra site. Anyway, it is more abstract. Sculptural, un-attached to property: the lawn areas are curved like the Southern Cross Station and by the river itself the level falls smoothly in descending terraces of unbroken lawn. It is sexual, womanly. He explains Jen's nickname for this one, her joke about the women-shapes and the folly of designing completely redundant ponds a stone's fetch from the river, as she put it. She calls it Tits and Ponds.

Fetch, says Jasmin, interesting word to use, sounds as if she's English?

But it's aesthetic isn't it? he says, ignoring her.

Aesthetic! You men. You mean sexualised.

Angus describes how the geometry of it came to him at home one night as he sat curling and cutting with a pair of scissors several flat, cardboard shapes which he arranged and re-arranged on the dining room table. Great tradition that, like serviette poems and back of the envelope inventions. Or old Matisse.

So here they are looking at two sensuous surface-shapes of water on two different levels cut seductively into the sloping banks of the Yarra River. The reference is to the endlessly maintained level, or so it seems, of the river all the way along its course. Like above like, water above water. And the body.

But then, at their final stop, the Lakes site startles her immediately. Angus has sculpted lawns in a unique topography: at first it looks like the steep rises and sand-traps of the famous Royal Melbourne golf course, but they are cut through with lush waterways. The more she walks around the more she knows it is startling, and, paradoxically, relaxing. It's like a Georgia O'Keefe land-not-labia-scape, made of immensely weathered rock and golf-course lawns, and flowing water, and shining lakes…

She gets so excited she lapses into basic human enthusiasm. It too is sexualised. It's a council and they legislate over land and water rights, so he could be said to be ‘aestheticising' and therefore hiding… For now, she simply admits to heady pleasure. Even he knows what that looks like. They are walking through the various levels of this space, and she slips her arm through his. They take their time and stop to let the several scenes become familiar. She loves this slow absorption of him as much as the landscape.

This is all your work? she asks him. How do you even get a contract like this?

Of course it's my work.

He permits himself a grimace.

I'm sure I told you. Councils only tender to qualified architects. And I don't have a degree in that. I was sub-contracting for GroundVision, the big landscape architects. They were sort of supervising me, officially. Just lucky for me, this company was too successful: they took on more contracts than they could handle. I was the fella who got this job from them. In hipster talk, I was the dude.

She can feel his excitement in the finished work, she can feel his body safely beside her. Unlike the terraced house-frontage and more like the hips and ponds, this ground has been cut and lifted into brilliantly terraced waterways, they ease into a wide central pond which spills over small vertical hips, on three separate banks, into smaller, still pools.

Mind you, he says, it's not what I wanted. There are things here that haven't worked.

They stop and stare into the clear water then amble on, stopping, ambling. Only when she has searched over this wide lap of water, walking arm-in-arm with him saying nothing, does Jasmin realise the pond has a backstory, as it were, there is something more. An origin.

The water is flowing down behind these front pools and behind several mounds of island-grass – just like small left-over islands – into a single less-visible pond and then it falls in a low drumming down into a darkened grotto. For the curious, and maybe only the curious, to find.

Angus, she exclaims, it's a hidden cavern! And then, quoting Coleridge:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

through caverns measureless to man

down to a sunless sea…

Above it on a second peak, the highest point, just visible from the front entrance but concealed in detail, is a single stream gurgling towards the pond. This is the source of the water-flow. The origin. The pond and the pools are the holding places, the plan is impossible to know from any one vantage point. There are vigorous thatches of rushes out in the water like islands, and water-stems around the banks, and trees looping down and over the slopes to offer shade. It is a sculpture park. The exposed stones are massive, elephantine, except in the intricate flat-stone walls of the falls. And across the horizontal of the natural eye – ducks and teal glide in the water.

A sunless sea, she says, squinting up at the sky. Pretty apt given the grey day. Old Coleridge was an opium eater. It's an imagined world you've made too, you sneaky man, always pretending to be so bloody ordinary. It is beautiful – I admit it – everything so still and the birds so quiet. Their little legs are kicking away under the surface! Their zig-zagging only accentuates the stillness.

He forgives her everything.

Yeah, I thought of grottos, he says. They crop up in mythology a lot. Women in drapery by the rocks and caverns and the fountains of youth. Narcissus, the suicide in water thing… even Virgin Mary stuff. Trouble is I was looking this up from books and online. The pre-Raphaelites. Don't look so surprised! Just because I didn't know Coleridge.

She laughs her big laugh.

The pre-Raphaelites are kitsch. The poetry is better.

Poetry is concentrated, he says, sort of in-here, isn't it? and points to his chest, then shifts up to point at his head, unsure of where poetry might actually be. I've read if it's any good a poem is universal, yeah? But I want to shrink it down into a clench of stones and a lake.

My God, Angus.

Come on. I've never said this to anybody. They'd have laughed at me. But it isn't being soppy. It isn't even about beauty, or not conventional beauty…

Even so he is a bit embarrassed…

… on a small scale, anyway, hardly epic. Elemental as in… the awe we feel in nature. King Lear on the blasted heath!

Now if you were a woman, Angus…

If I what?

You might know something else.

Are you going to tell me or leave me… dangling?

She laughs.

That's another apt image! It's well known that women have various visions during sex. Sensations of flying, merging, flame colours and folds, etc. One of the biggies… is water and caverns and shadowy and then brightly lit enclosures. Stones and fabrics. Maybe that's why some men were so keen on that cavern kitsch you mention. Especially the ambiguous Victorians. It's the orgasmic female body or, if you like, as some feminists have it, the whole earth is the female body. Sometimes it's orgasm kitsch.

What can I say?

So it's less Lear and more Georgia O'Keefe. Do you know her paintings? She spent years in New Mexico so the rocks and deserts and canyons are deeply part of her imagery, quite as much as her floral and labial motifs.

I'd better look her up.

I can show you.

Is it true, though, the visions?

You'd better believe it. You men have miserable sex compared to us.

I've noticed.

Good. Unless, of course, we are left… dangling.

So I suppose you'd like to write about this, suggesting things you've just said. And can you actually make reference to the sexual stuff?

Of course. And I would. I'd love to, Angus. As one aspect, perhaps. The mosses, watery verges, the rushes, foliage. The wet places.

Really?

He gazes around at the shapes he has made and that she has now re-imagined for him.

I wanted people to feel they were going somewhere, as if they had a purpose. But if they found anything too specific they might feel let down. I wanted to have ideas without them appearing like ideas.

He slowly raises his palms, like a tai chi of shrugging.

It isn't quite behavioural design, is it? she states. It doesn't combine form and function.

You're teasing me. It has feel, surely. My designing is visceral, yeah? You should want to touch it, want to walk around it. Because you can't exactly use it.

They stare at each other.

The park, he says, is actually named The Alice Noble Park after a woman who lived in the district during the ‘8os. She took in children and fostered them. Crazy woman who liked kids. Like the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe she had a dozen kids running through her house like cats.

I prefer cats.

She was all heart. She knew what she was doing: the kids grew up into responsible, happy adults. Well, as happy or not as the rest of us. She fostered kids whose parents were addicts, or were inside, or had simply buggered off. The left-behind.

Jasmin is staring at him almost as if he was the figure of the story. He is silent, seemingly credited with the woman's generosity. Then Jasmin laughs again, a day she has laughed a lot, she realises.

Alice Noble. A woman driven by her name.

Ha.

Through the surface she can see the brownish stems of the water plants, the clear gravel and a cigarette packet. Amazing how packets last under water. She thinks of adults smoking in run-down houses and their kids retreating from raised voices. Shadows, the lack of protection. Good old Alice.

Yeah, nurturing, though I wasn't sure I could do that.

And then…?

When I finished I realised all my ideas had carried over from Europe. But think how different this place might be if looked at in indigenous terms and stories. Totemism, water-holes, Creation myths and Dreaming. Rituals, repeats. I began to daydream this myself as an overview in motifs I'd seen in Aboriginal paintings. Tracks, rocks, stories of travel and experience, initiation and ritual.

Angus… Her breathing has deepened. You're bloody right, Angus. Do you know that?

They have been eating their salad and chicken wings and swirling white wine in their glasses, sitting on his reddish-ochre rug like adults feeling silly and young. They touch just enough to feel close, that closeness suggestive of something further, later. First, she had changed his seeing, now she realises he is seeing what isn't there to be seen. Bypassing her weird semiology.

All the same, he feels remarkably revealed, and… explained.

He tells her that councils use a colour palette and some insist on certain kinds of plants. The job has to conform to rules only the council and the architect know. The public should never be aware of any limits. Bloody annoying if it isn't what the actual maker wants, and he often doesn't.

Each day's work accumulates, and changes, he says. I feel it like contours inside me. I knew the wetness of the water and how deep the ponds and pools were even before they were filled. This big job was worrying at first, then I couldn't get enough of it, I didn't want it to stop.

I wanted to make the rocks smoother here. Angus points to the big layers of stone closest to them. I wanted the single, huge boulder things over there to be like WA rocks, ancient and mouldy. Burnt. So there's a lot that's not here. I hoped the water would surge and stop but it's too hard to do.

He tells her about his compulsion to get lost in physical choices beyond any usual ideas of endurance. Not like extreme sport. Even in everyday matters. Digressing is good for worry-freaks. He begins an anecdote of something digressive.

I was in Newcastle for a few days, he says, at a conference for landscape architects. The real ones, at least they think so. I was well and truly the wild card. I stayed an extra day after everyone had gone. Then I walked from my hotel all the way through town to the other end where I thought the taxi ranks were and had breakfast when I got there. I still remember that bloody cowboy street: the humid heat and a strong wind filled with dust and pollen and the thin gritty stuff that blows up from streets, smoke too. The street kept going forever and all its shop frontages – were shut. I walked for miles. No bloody taxis. No bloody cafes. I chose to walk it carrying two heavy bloody shoulder bags.

I'm not a 20 year old. No one else was carrying anything.

He pauses to think about it.

I do these dumb things. I misjudge things. Maybe it's a funny sort of freedom.

But quite a speech for Angus. This is not his revelation of more than a hungry heart in a boy from the sticks, nor any South Australian run for your life kind of confession. Jasmin has heard many of these. And something else has caught her attention.

This conference? Why were you a wild card?

He has laid it there as bait: for a woman given to talking in public about odd things, not actually doing odd things in public. The warm inner glow turns a somersault and is all touché: