Waiting (14 page)

Bloody bargain, says Sammy. I bought it for less than $20.

He is grinning foolishly but doesn't stop, the two men and lounge shuffle four-legged past Big and Little, who for once are without words.

Just wait, Big says, recovering. Wait till it changes uphill.

Today she wonders if the IGA shelves are different, if something has been altered? She tells him: the Asian section, that's it, gone from aisle one. He is not an Asian cook so he hoots a little at this anti-trendiness. In the meantime it is reading and considering, choosing and reaching. Salt content and sugar, cals or kilojoules, dyes and inks, preservatives and additives, number this and number that, 202, 212, what the hell, grams against dollars.

It's not that they buy very much, just the choosing, the weighing up of possiblities, the safety issues, all these consume him with pleasure and her with worry. What to choose? What not? It is not easy. It just isn't. It makes Little an anxious companion, not from the company or from the outing, but merely anxious as a condition; anyone with dietry restrictions knows shopping is both a pleasure and a pain. No salt, sugar, and preservatives. Is that the one, up there? She cannot reach the top shelves and his girth almost prevents him.

Big decides to lift her and hold her up like a grab arm until she has reached across and grasped the item he has mentioned (mackerel, in oil not brine) and then he plonks her down again. He gives her an extra little hug and pats her bottom and goes on grinning at her as he takes the tinned fish from her and drops it into the basket.

People are amazed and stare, but then they always do. Around the lanes Big and Little go, people staring at him in his tiny shoes and straggly baldness and the boobs and dress in between. If he stares back the words go empty inside them.

It takes all of Little's considerable concentration to stay on the listed ingredients jar by jar: I think it was this one, but we left it too long in the fridge. To which he grunts. At the moment pies have him in thrall. Lovely pies. Up against the glassy freezers down at the back wall where they both shiver, having approached too close to the mortal matters while in hospital. Behind walls, under eye-level, pain-huddled on the floors of little-noticed guest houses for the meek, the lost. Stop such thoughts. Pies.

There is almost an Um of Recognition between them. The Um that sounds just before the mouth opens and says No or, deliciously, closes onto Yes. Boscastle. The pie to leave you wanting another pie is the only real test of a pie and its pastry and the sauce imagined and oh yes.

Big is not a handsome man but when he is sniffing food his thin upper lip peaks in the middle and pushes slightly above the lower and chirps there and wiffles like notes from a bird's beak. With his lips in chirp and this birdness, it might lead you to think he is a bit soft. No. It is pies that do this. No man wants to burn his mouth. Wine buffs wiffle and slurp above the red wash on their expensive tongues, imagining the flavour if they cannot taste it, losing fortunes to feel it like this, no joke, but a pie is a cheap pleasure. Unless chomped into too hot and dribbled on a bare chin.

Little is looking at him like an audience and says: You and your pies. What is it you say pies and pasties are…? I've forgotten.

Hardly. Forgotten.

Tell me again, she means, the phrase is a secret, like a private smell.

Purses. They resemble purses. Not the money, no I mean the folds and the enfolding. Even talking about it my mouth is eating pie. Ah, we all desire the hot pie and sauce because of the ooh pursey shape of it. I was not a pastry cook, nor a Freudian, however, it makes a certain something of a man and woman, eating pie. Women do it more than we think. I hear that girls nowadays do a lot of it with each other. So it's not just footie crowds of men and Carlton draught and red saucey on the shirtfront. Anything may be a stand-in for something else.

Big has an unambiguously large voice and as his momentum, his spiel, gathers, the louder the boom from his vocal cavities. He stops to inspect the cool section of healthy foods he likes to look at but never buys. He picks up a small packet of the expensive stuff he never buys. Organic.

Now take tofu. As the Japanese say it. Not tau foo or dao foo in the Chinese manner, though the substance is very much the same, silken, aha, silken firm, firm, and quite firm. In skins or wraps it reverts to being bean curd, have you noticed that, the lower class cousin. Now silken tofu is… He is tossing two packets in the air absent-mindedly as if to compare weights and people are unsure whether to keep their distance or come closer to watch. One shop attendant with shaven hair and belt tightandbuckled is getting closer and closer and he carries the worried expression of responsibilty on his face.

Silken tofu is bloody sensuous, I love the sexual susurrus of it… soft in the mouth… What exactly do you want, mate? Now don't put your hand up like that. You're putting me off. I am talking, no crime in that, correct me if I'm wrong. My impromptu on the feeder-response of food, its commodity, its repeated pleasures, eternal recurrence as found in… soy product or… a pie.

He sighs. His bold or embarrassing presence catches Little as always between selves: on the outside she shines, on the inside she shrinks. Reflected glories. She cannot decide if she is an inside or outside person but today her outside is winning.

Yes, the staff member is shushing him. Little giggles and pulls at her face, the shushing man is so funny and skinny his shirt does not fit properly, he is all bones and he is all billows, and his pants hang down low on his buttocks so the crotch sags sadly.

Sir, uh, Ma'am, um, could you be quieter please? Big pause. Could you please put the food down?

Food?! Tofu?

Please, Ma'am, do you mind… I am referring to the food.

It is not unreasonable. It isn't something a staff member has to do often and the words sound all old-fashioned when a public place is already blaring with radio comedians straining to be very funny and failing, and with the couldn't-care-less mobile-phone pollutional blatherings as shoppers do big business or hold love affairs or merely ask for dinner instructions: no I've looked on that shelf and it bloody well isn't there, no I'm not going back to the other… How many shares do you want exactly, I mean how much money are we talking about here?… Mate, I mean mate… isn't there some sort of sauce I can get, what's wrong with you, I don't believe it, she asked me if I love her, look what about broccoli… yeah broccoli.

Big takes a breath.

That man called me Ma'am! Are we in America?

Stop it Big, Please. You're overdoing it.

Huh.

He tosses the tofu back into the cooler.

I was talking about sensual pleasures, not food. Pleasure is a state. Food is a category of thing, food returns us to baser qualities, after passing through the worthy or even tiresome alimentary tract of, well, even shop assistants. Through the guts of…

The man in question has now been replaced by his boss, who must be the boss, he's older in a shop full of staff who still fantasise about turning 21 if the rigours of night-life let them live that long, or women who are long-suffering and harassed enough to find loud and daily laughter in the shop a welcome cartharsis but who do not wear the harder glasses look of this man in his 50s. He looks like Henry Kissinger, but smaller. And closer. He frowns at Big, like a man who is a boss looks at a dunderhead. Big is not easily intimidated.

Oops, it's the boss. Please don't give me your overpractised ‘I've had enough of this' expression, says Big. I am talking with my lady here, and anyone interested…

I wish you wouldn't, she whines.

… if anyone else is interested in my ideas, as um I think a few were before this – he stares at the first staff member in his baggy blue shirt – this barely dressed youth… I am talking to, as they will keep saying now, the delights of your produce – the plump and I won't resort to the clichéd, humble, but simple, no perhaps fundamental, pie. The soft soya. Not a public crime in my book, Sir. Not a crime, a favour even.

Of course this is not the first time the boss has noticed him, nor the first time he has tried to shush him off, even if Big pretends it is. The boss has spoken at length to his staff about the fat man in the dresses and pretty pink or green shoes, the little handbag held so sweetly in his great fist. This IGA has its very own tranny. Well, cross-dressing pseudo-intellectual show-off. Now to get rid of him.

We don't want any disturbance from you.

Me? Are you referring to me?

You are annoying the lady.

The lady!

Sir! Enough.

I'm a Sir am I? I don't think so. But I am a regular. Even though your prices are the worst in Melbourne. I pay.

Big cannot resist stating the quandaries to a man who at 50-something is a not insignificant boss in charge of a not entirely humble and clean IGA, in a small inner suburb. Running a smaller business calls for a neat even tight sense of authority; it forms a man who dresses in the plainest tight but not too tight clothing, and who wears heavy glasses without making it trendy or retro, just awful; who has keys dragging at the belt. A man who also sees All from the security camera monitors. Up There. This includes frequent imagery of them, Big and Little, but he has never caught Big doing anything criminal.

You are annoying everyone and it is NOT appropriate for a food shop. Your voice is far too loud. You are shouting.

Big is disbelieving.

I don't shout! I have projection. I have volume. It was claimed that the great Caruso could close his mouth over a full-sized egg. I too. It is a generous vocal space and it produces the largest voices. I can demonstrate.

He reaches for the egg cartoon.

No! Do not.

Even with their shopping and the trolley they make reasonable time on the way home. As the street begins to get steeper they see the suede lounge on the median strip under a tree and Sammy and the new bloke slumped in each corner. Big laughs and hoots at them.

And I thought I was soft! says Big, too amused at his anticipation to be derisive. Little giggles her usual and they walk on past and get home first.

Way inside, further and far, hidden and held, Big knows he is soft. He would like to be exact, to have distinctive shape and focus, of intellect that is, of mind. But he is soft. The autodidact's weak­ness is extensive but loose knowledge. And thin. How often he has wished he practised a discipline, history, say, its luxurious range, the chaise lounge of the intellect, the million finite parts in place, yet its mystery being in more and more; and not anything like physics, never the wildly sprawling physics, its parts astonishing and mathematical and grindingly even beautifully testable, but even so, built too much on the hypothetical, calling up trust, not memory and interpretation. History would be good. To have it. He realised years ago: he is not a thinker, he is a recaller. He is Barry Jones, not Paul Dirac.

Like the physicist, however, he is a never-look-you-in-the-eye kind of man. His ramblings are like Tom's more than he cares to admit, he admits, sent over the shoulder of the person addressed, sent close to the right elbow, sent into the street, the walls, never quite you. He only ever looks at Little. He thinks and remembers and talks so much… to prevent him seeing.

Inside him there is not the black dog of depression but the grey hound of uncertainty.

Big is the expert who must find an audience well beneath him. His parents were ten pound Poms. He had begun his education in the country. High School was reading books and little else. He and Little share this reading, even if his has continued till now and hers has not. But at school, he was fine at exams as long as they were about the books he read at home to avoid his unhappy mother and the space in the house town gossip referred to as ‘the Pommie bastard who ran away and left them'. Most of the exams were about other things.

At fifteen he shifted to a small regional Agricultural School, lower secondary not tertiary, for boarding at and for finding something as trade-like as woolclassing, or woolpressing, never shearing, not hard work, for even as a teenager Big was averse to bending and lifting kinds of work. As a naughty boarder and before being classed or pressed Big was made to do kitchen preparation as punishment. Washing veges. Peeling spuds. Prep work. And the tuber dropped. Seeing the big cooks, so like himself, boasting and bullying their way around the lesser and thinner helpers in the School kitchen opened Big's eyes.

He did most of an apprenticeship. In those days, in the country, demand was stronger than the rules, and by the time he was in considerable ship-shape, Big was cooking on a shearing team. Routine, set menus, recipes, memory, banter, talk and the making of Big as a no-questions, no-problems sort of man. Pressure at set times but nothing to generate panic, anxiety, all pressure within limits. Eating from the stores, or thinking about it, then making meals for the worn-out or rat-arsed shearers – what could be easier than that?

At night when the men were drinking and playing poker Big was not-drinking and winning their money. Card games could be read about and gambling was its own kind of reading. For the shearer's gambling was a kind of calamity. Big learnt to dissemble, to disguise his winning runs with noisy folds and groaning Ah Jesuses. Then he began to lose at cards.

Then National Service hit him. Away with the fairies in Vietnam for two years. Only after his return did he lose himself in the bush tracks from shed to shed, or in his case, kitchen to kitchen, Kookaburra to Kookaburra, the cast-iron wood stoves made in Oz. Take it easy.

Because mental worry was not, and remains not, worth risking. Physical stuff can be muddled through especially if you have the Big physique. But the unhappy life in stress and odd-hours and odd-shift jobs, like the work of nurses, paramedics, police, nightshift workers, security men, no no, it would have wrecked the nervous system, he was certain of that. So there it is. This delicate inner body is his weakeness and his secret, and this pressure has made a man fat.