Waiting (13 page)

You're looking at it.

You talked about this design?

And her jaw follows the laws of astonishment and cliché – it drops. Such a clear sign of reaction. He must have a real person here.

They had heard about it, somehow. Some unlettered bloke called Angus. They must have wanted to slum it for a while. I was asked to provide a working point-of-view of landcape design, from someone self-trained. Or ‘self-designing', they said, which sounds all wussy to me, as if I have any interest in myself. I even got paid.

Angus, you do this really well, I think, not that I know, just what I can see. And feel. I was just thinking though about those house designs, too, your fire-proofing houses… the business possibilities.

You know what I think about that. You can't fireproof houses.

But you showed me, the house you and Stan built.

All anyone can do it increase the chances of survival. And no I can't sell it, if that's what you mean. I can't sell what may prove to be dangerous hope. I have no…

He stares away from her, turns and shuffles down towards the lake.

No what? she calls after him.

No fucking… something… he says, or she thinks he says.

A few minutes later she hears a swarming sound. Intermittent, not innumerable.

Are those wasps?

No, he says, walking back up the slope. Don't worry, they're just bees.

Bees?

She suddenly sits up and looks around for them.

Over in the trees. I've had swarms come through before. They rest there around the queen, hang on to a branch or a post for a while then stream off like a long comet. Loads of European plants around here, so there's something all year round for them. I used to work in bare feet once, when I wasn't handling stones or tools. You know, lawn laying, fossicking about. Too many bees now, so I leave my boots on.

This doesn't seem to convince her. Bees, wasps, he thinks, what is there to worry about? It is overcast and as they tend to be lethargic in overcast conditions, hardly aggressive – though more easily trodden on.

What I don't want, he adds, is to find European wasps here.

What are they?

European Wasps don't have a barbed sting like bees. They can withdraw it after the first sting, and sting you again. When they get mad they seem to attract their mates. Insects are like that, they call in the cavalry. They can sting repeatedly enough to kill.

Jesus. She shudders.

Yeah, he laughs, it's not funny. They like sweet drinks so I always make sure I haven't got any. Sometimes one of my offsiders leaves a can of Coke under a tree. Have to watch out then. But bees are OK. Look, I'm sorry about the fire and house thing. I'd prefer we dropped it. OK?

Oh Angus. I don't mean to annoy you, it's none of my business. I'm just well…

She looks at him.

Compulsively helpful?

Well, maybe, she says. You'll have to get used to me butting in. I'm a pushy thing… not as a person, but you know, my mind.

A pushy mind! Which means?

I've got big brains! She wriggles her torso like a ditzy showgirl displaying her tits. I'm wearing an IQ uplift. They generate push. It's lift and separate.

You mean…?

I'm being silly. I'm good at tests that measure what the tests measure and I keep getting ideas. And I'm worried about bees. OK?

The cool air thunders low above them and loudly for about twenty seconds and then rain flies down heavy and bright in big random drops. They are dabbled in damp marks like Dalmatians. As they rush to clean the picnic away, it stops. The sun lifts underneath the western clouds.

When were you born, the month I mean?

Um, you mean what's my star sign? He smiles and shrugs. I'm a Leo. I was born in August.

Of course you are, she laughs, not having mentioned her image for him. A fire sign. Fire sign? Why is he fire?

I'm not familiar with this stuff.

The mention of fire turns some visceral thing in him serious, a feeling of… not dread, exactly, not as unpleasant as dread. Except he doesn't believe in the stuff of the Zodiac nor in joining the dreamy set whose brains are soft and sucky for it. She lifts her hair away from her forehead.

I'm a Gemini. Which means I'm a bit impulsive and opinionated. And she laughs. Yes, I'm afraid there's more where that came from. On the other hand, Leo and Gemini, are meant to get on pretty well. So there!

There's hope for us.

Mmm…

Well?

I think it's highly likely. But you can't trust a Gemini.

But what I wanted to say a while ago… She is remembering now. Already way past star signs.

This work of yours makes me think of a subject I might have mentioned, or not, can't remember now, at Stan's place, something called psycho-geography. Places. The effect they have on the public, wandering through them. Head stuff.

The wine is sweeping her away.

Psycho what?

I know, it sounds phoney! It's about the way spaces… affect the people using them, whether it's a quadrangle or a city CBD. Or a park.

She gestures loosely to the trees. Less a sleepy academic, babbling, than a dog nose down on the grass, snuffling across a place made for the public made fully real by the people who use it.

Someone could write, or film that, she says. Looking for evidence of aspects in the work or of the people using the space, which entice people into whatever behaviour it is, while they're there. You know, customising the place. Graffiti does it, making your own pathways, camping in a space that's meant to be aesthetic, aestheticising a space that's meant for camping!

Cocks and balls and gaping crotches?

Normal behaviour, then.

Sad but true, I think you said.

Yes. It's normal. In the UK there are some writers and film makers who document this stuff and even fake – for fun – mischievous alternative uses for public places. It's kind of cool.

Well, here's your big moment. You could write about my work, couldn't you? he asks. Why not? I think that would be a terr­ific way to introduce semiotics to the public. And this psycho… whatever.

Geography. Well, not exactly.

Oh…?

Not to the public. Just not worth my time. The university wouldn't count that as research. It's hardly more than information. Even text books don't count as research.

Just writing your own work doesn't count?

No. Not automatically.

What does then?

Well, not if it's representation. For non-academic readers. We can write about the meanings of representation. We have ideas about ideas. We think about other people's thinking.

So you write about writing?

There seems to something caught in her hair. She pulls at it and scratches it away from her scalp.

So, says Angus, if I wrote a filthy but hilarious book of jokes my book wouldn't count as research but if you wrote a little semi­otic analysis of my book, that would?

Probably. It sounds pretty odd, I know.

I think I'm getting the hang of it.

He swigs from his glass with the extra pleasure of his under­standing, which is, in analytical response, getting close to being research.

What if your discipline is writing? Like a novelist.

No. Same thing. You would have to write about language, or psychoanalysis, or any of a hundred possible ways of meaning… Or some other relevant area, such as reading theory… or about the writing of people who write about novels, using critical ideas from other people who also write about novels…

Even if those writers know less about the actual writing of novels than you can write about them by yourself?

Yeah, it sounds pretty funny.

I'm getting dizzy.

But you're right, Angus. I could consider works like yours, situated in public and for the public – they carry public meanings, as I was saying earlier about the terraces. Yes, and use my photos. It would mean collecting signs of how the public use the place, like these drink cans in the rushes, plastic dinner plates, the hideaways people camp in.

He sighs in her general direction.

I've been reading a book you gave me last week. Roland Barthes. He just improvises. He's not beholden to anyone, he just thinks for himself.

I'm not Roland Barthes! Still, the ideas are in his work, actually, just deeply synthesized.

Um.

Angus, did they ask you for a paper after that conference? To publish along with the other papers, or at least to consider for publication.

A paper?

That's a no. And that's why they paid you.

Whereas you would all be published but not paid?

Yes.

I was a tart?

‘Fraid so. They must have liked you. You make a sexy tart.

Later they pack up the picnic items and he drives her home. They kiss firmly on the mouth outside her place and she leans closely against him in a hug, but she doesn't invite him in. He isn't sure why. Nor is she, quite. He farewells her with an unintentional pressure against her thighs.

Big

When Big walks back inside and stands in front of the fridge he is already thinking about dinner: he is as hungry and as wide as the said fridge. Hunger is a constant companion, he thinks, when he bothers to think about topics as ordinary and unfashionable as eating and being fat. Now that the fridge has devoured most of its wares, it feels empty. But he is grabbing things and stuffing them back indifferently, his head waggling as he scans the shelves like tennis in a cold climate.

I will find something. Some old scraps.

No you won't. Little has walked in behind him. She must say this on principle. None of this old scraps. I'll cook something in a few minutes if you'll just be patient. Just be patient.

Nevertheless.

Nevertheless?

I will find something.

Find what? Oh go on then, see if I care. I'll have to get up and…

Ah! He has dragged out half a cabbage, its edges greying.

Just steam this for me will you.

Please, I think you meant.

Of course I meant. The steam was wafting towards my tongue. The words were already on their way to you through that lovely aroma above the shredded cabbage when it's turning slightly translucent. I have never understood people saying Ugh! the smell of cabbage.

They mean boiled cabbage. Boiled and boiled and boiled cabbage. It stinks. My mother…

Your mother?

Over-boiled cabbage.

I'm sure she did.

Emergency then, shopping, because you cannot sustain a large man and a small woman on steamed, or boiled, or fried or even rankly raw grubby-around-the-edges cabbage. Back to the shops.

Walking with Big is always a stop-start affair. They are walking at his half-pace, which is still too fast for Little. He stops. Frowning at his left forearm: as of today there is a small bruise like a tiny seeping peach among the hairs. Not nice and not anything he has addressed before, so why he chooses this moment half way to the IGA to inspect it so seriously is one more mystery among all the others in heaven and earth. Nothing much interferes with his inner-outer monologues and yet this… Big is no multi-tasker, more a mono-tasker. He breathes, he blinks, his blood choofs around its predictable track. Silence in such a big talker is striking and silence makes a big man suddenly bigger – such a man looms. A man looking always for advantage will learn this early and use it, but Big has no idea: his reflections are not of the self or power or anything as tacky as that. He muses as a full-time occupation.

The bruise or wound or cancerous or gangrenous whatever it is thing on his arm loses its hold on him.

Ah, bugger it, he says and begins walking again.

For her jogalong part, Little says nothing. She is used to all this. They all have to renounce something. In a life of renunciation, disability, repetition, it may be enlivening to see the dead. Near the old morgue. As she does and maybe shouldn't.

When Little first spoke of this morgue experience to Big she mumbled and phrased her ideas oddly enough for him to think it was a small voice coming out of Samuel Beckett and not his Little. It didn't make sense. Well, given she spoke in a monotone stretched along the same pitch, it neither rose nor fell, it just was, then just as equally it wasn't.

Perhaps Little is able to see something out there no one else can, or will admit to. An other world, or this one populated by ghosts? Or is it her daydreaming emerging into two if not three dimensions somewhere mid-way along the shadowy street? It's not as if they see a lot of movies.

This happens beside that drab building with offset angles and too many small windows in high positions in its walls, too high to see inside, but light sources perhaps, an 1860s cum 2001 Libeskind design except instead of scraped steel it is badly rendered brick with a metal (as rotten as old bags) roof. Very near the one for sale the day they saw the famous actress with the frozen smile.

Was she one of the ghosts? The morgue. Hence the light but no sight. The dead in there, naked and cold. Once. Long ago. Little certainly saw something in that street, mid-way, outside the morgue that maybe in the warps of time still is a morgue. Or remembers, psychically, its former charges.

Today she hesitates and remembers they have only just started moving forward after Big had frozen, so she renounces the ghosts. Nothing there, just the house with funny windows, a street, shadows from the overhanging plane trees, and Little in a leaning-forward stance but frozen like the smile on the actress's face.

Big smiles with his whiskery jowls hanging.

Come on Little, he calls, stamping on regardless in the solid gait Big is known for, his trolley in front, his skirt around his knees.

Leave those dead buggers alone, he says. Come on. I can't afford to lose my momentum once the hill starts or… you know how hard it gets.

Just below the main street they see a Garage Sale sign and staggering down the street towards them holding one end each of an old suede lounge are Sammy and a young guy who arrived at the house a few days earlier.