Waiting (19 page)

The effect reminds her of the ‘ants climbing trees' dish of the Szechuan region. Noodles, mince, misleading names, a strange kind of poetry. She remembers turning to Richard and explaining the ants are in fact pork mince cooked into soft cellophane noodles so when you lift it with chopsticks some mince adheres to the noodles like climbing ants or the small backs of these children on their rope-frame. The visual poetry of the Chinese extending even to the kitchen.

Now the memory is making her angry, angry ants. He had hardly listened. He often ‘hardly listened'. He even said semiotics is everywhere! to mimic her. To mock. She has thought back on this too often and too thoroughly. She keeps running for the whole 45 minutes without stopping, without truly running, because she is thinking too much. It is a day of long legs and inner workout, and not happy.

At least with Richard gone she has the study to herself. Because she has emailed him, on top of her last unanswered email to him from three weeks earlier, and called it off. Absence has not made the heart anything. Or if so, then an absence on absence. It would be impossible to have him back. To have gotten rid of Dick Whittington but kept the cat. When this second bedroom is such a modest space, and two desks and wall-to-wall bookshelves are the minimum stall requirement for two intellectual racehorses, working together has never been easy. He is a silent, stay-put over distances kind and she a fidgetty, sit-down-get-up sprinter. Half the time she is working she is in fact up making cups of coffee. The two of them were pulled from different temperaments. Without him she has become more like him, oddly, sitting down to sustained sessions of reading and writing up, except this feels more like being herself in a way being with him had suppressed. Which is a bit scary either way she looks at it.

She feels terrible. But relieved.

She has been re-reading The Poetics of Space, ironic in terms of this study problem, for the philosophical awarenesses Bachelard brings to bear upon our feelings of belonging and being, within spaces, enclosures; and reading Michel de Certeau on the outer public, the actual public's use of space, the real as against intended, idealised by designers, the subversion of design by the everyday, the customary and even customising so normal for people and so often ignored by nerds in offices inspired by their own aesthetics and architectural politics.

Counter to them and trying properly to guess the public mind, is the work of Jan Gehl, Danish city planner and friend in need for Perth and Melbourne, as it happens. City planning begins and ends on the street-level, he says. Bring it on. Read, think, plan, but remember, wherever they are the people in a city then behave like people and not like ideas someone else has had.

Ideas are possessing her, though, and unlikely ones. Her brain is a premium, all her years investing in it make it a blue chip enterprise, especially now that she is daydreaming a new and possibly commercial book; and, when she isn't worrying about the hundredth re-write and copy editing of the current research-funding-seeking book she is waiting to see published, she is also daydreaming about this man she has met at a party. Both daydreams are drifting rather slowly but mysteriously towards each other and unless she's making a big mistake, they are coalescing.

She has studied his Lakes designs and drawings and gone over the photos she took and others that he emailed to her. Her ideas will not be quiet. If she finds his public works interesting enough – and here we must assume, in the actual flesh, as it were, designed well enough, oh, well, worthy of her nerdiness – and if she can talk him into it, might she perhaps document an account of the actual working year of outdoor public designs? How each site is constructed, why so designed, the logic and practice behind it (maybe the hard bit given his self-taught, ad hoc approach) and then, most crucially from her point of view, how people behave within it. How they make a site their own, what they change, mark, re-arrange, daub and re-track. What rubbish is left where and why, what graffiti, and camping by the homeless, the sort of reporting in the local press, any of the the above. Interpret these…

Angus, and she cannot stop herself… Ingres, Anger, Angstrom (Swedish, big brother culture to Gehl's Danish…) Angles… The problem with Gehl's books – is their precarious existence in the Architecture Library. They are small but prized publications – and most of them are impossible to find. Once she had searched the catalogue for Georges Perec's famous book only to find the entry: Life: A User's Manual – Missing.

In truth, she is still feeling sad. Silence and lethargy, alone in her study. She wanders, barefoot and night-dreaming, around the house.

Also with Banking Troubles

Even if banks are places of strangeness it is annoying to see staff wandering about while you stand on the outside of the glass inactive and feeling like a servant come to beg for your own money. Especially galling when your account has little in it, puns aside, and thus the bank is where they begin the next day, waiting outside the CBA until opening. Boring to wait there in your little shoes. Big with his orange wig on today, this rating as a special outing, meaning money. A bit like waiting to vote perhaps, for those whose names appear as theirs do on the enrolment lists, unlike some in the hostel, the hidden whose names are not registered, the paranoids whose names are scared of exposure and the anarchists who refuse the downright effrontery of being known to the state.

A different déjà-vu comes over Big if not Little, of standing on pavements waiting for opening time under the sign of Carlton Draft and fidgetting in the clouds of cigarette smoke. Out there in the glare of sunlight and the rest of the world at work, but for him and for those others waiting, the only focus in those years was the opening of the front-bar swing-doors, the leap forwards for the first pot.

Sitting there in the gloom, happy as bloody Larry. The slow day-long stretching-it-out skill of drinking as little as possible for as long as the day has hours. As your head thickens the daylight moves further back to let you pass, into memory and anecdote. The clear knowledge sticks like the bar mat: you are drinking, and drinking is all that matters. It's all you want to matter. Drink is a greedy conversationalist.

And if he wasn't drinking, then betting on the GGs. Big tries for the big one. A few safe ponies over the bar with other wandering minds. Much more than that, betting has nothing wandering about it, it's pure focus. Win win win. Real horses.

Long ago now.

The young man who unlocks and activates the front glass door of the bank is as much pastel shirt and black trousers as any alternative signs of personality. This branch is not their favourite place. Big and Little both think the Chinese staff, maybe just a tad more than other bank-staff, prefer the customers with money, preferably a great deal of it, whereas Big and Little are customers of the other sort. They make the young man wince just slightly, a shade of a grimace in the shadow of judgement. But it means little to our eccentric twosome who are so used to stares they are almost a different kind of royalty.

Yet bank carpets are curiously cheap.

They move from the front of the queue to the first teller, who might have rushing thoughts of animals approaching. When she smiles at them it happens without a muscle of pleasure involved. As many as a hundred small muscles are expected to create the genuine smile, and she has none of them. She checks Little's balance and prints it out and then looks past Big's shoulder for the next until he presents his card and slides it across the counter towards her.

You have to join other queue, she says. Attend other teller.

I am of this queue, he tells her. I approached you with my partner and here I am.

The woman stares at him.

We are a couple, adds Big. We are here as one.

This time she fails the test of her facial muscles. She is actually inspecting this messy Big and small neat Little who seems to be wearing a bank-regulation shirt. Little really is very conservative with shirts.

The woman sighs, takes the card and shifts her attention to the screen. She finds more affinity there than with poor humans. Big whistles the theme tune of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? as the paper emerges from the printer. He takes the print-out, the card and places the longest patronising look he can give down on the moment.

Why thanks you so much madam, you are such a help. And have a happy, no a very happy day. You look as if you need it.

And they gather themselves into a royal flourish if not flush, though Little is a-flush, blood filling her face, and they sway out of the bank and onto the glaring pavement. Big doesn't stop until they ease under an awning into shade.

You always embarrass me, she says. Always. Embarrass. The woman…

Was a bit of a bitch, he says, pure and simple, especially simple.

No, she was just doing her job.

It is not her job to pass judgement on my character.

He touches his forearm where the skin irritation has been. He scratches it, then smoothes it over, gazing up at the North Melbourne clock tower as he does so.

Nine fourty five. Ay em.

By then Little relaxes.

Ah Big, I'll never die of boredom.

I read only yesterday, he adds, locked into bank talk now, of a woman who lost more than $100,000 from this bloody bank's shonky high-risk investments even when her money was in a low-risk account. The bank refused to return any of it, nothing, not a cent, then offered a mere squeak of the original amount. The gall. They make billions every year and get away with outright heft. Theft! And it's our money! What do you say about that?

But she is speechless.

Some part of Little remains obscured – or is it obscuring? – as she cannot or certainly does not imagine how it is they must look to other people, especially people who are hide-bound by expectations, and those who serve the public across counters. Perhaps she is too short to see people's faces clearly. Amazingly, when it most matters to protect herself, Little lacks empathy with others. Amazingly useful, that is.

So they stand in the shade under the pizza shop's awning and ignore the strong smell of pizza base and cheese crusting in the wood-fired whatchamacallit, and address instead their paper-work, and in a head-to-head comparing of slips they add up the bottom-line.

They are not a couple in the normal ways of the world and a person of any race would pick that even in their peripheral vision. People fall into invisibility once they are deemed not acceptably visible. As if even one's place on the surface of the the planet, in line, on time, in another's perception of reality, must be negotiated. Difference is this; and this is difference's curse. People disappear.

Or go missing. They have been hearing for nearly ten minutes a high, short yelp coming every 10 seconds or so, made by some slightly confused possum. Yet not quite. Going on too long. Too regular, too yelping.

Big decides on his way from the shower-room. Big, magnificently wrapped in his huge towel like Caesar after a bath, steps out to the front door and views a tiny figure out on the median strip. It is night-time and raining and while the air is relatively warm it shocks him to realise the yelping is coming from a small child. His eye has been caught by the whiteness of the small disposable nappies. There are cars.

He calls for Little to come. He cannot possibly go out himself, frighten the child-thing to death by looming before its small eyes, and she limps out grumbling, her joints hurting from the atmo­spheric changes. She stands there looking at where he's gesturing but unable yet to see into the darkness. Someone else has noticed the child too – a woman is rushing from the apartments opposite, is stamping down the several steps to the pavement in her slippers.

Little half-lurches through the drizzle across to the child on the verge under the big tree. She has never had anything to do with children since her ghostly disappearance from the world of the schoolroom. The other woman is out there and moving across to the child. Lucky no cars now, lucky, but then unlucky the kid is out there at all, in the light rain, the dark and it is well after… midnight.

Little hesitates, the rain is falling, and then she picks the child up like an armload of washing. She holds him and he yelps and he yelps but she sees he is well-fed and is not as distressed as she is. What a mother, where-ever the mother… and he keeps yelping. Almost happily. The kid notices nothing, swings around in this woman's arms to look up into the canopy of branches.

Rain sprinkles down on them. Little can smell the child skin of him and she holds him close to her chest, wraps her arms around him. Tom walks out and stops beside Big. By Jesus, he says, a whooping kid. A bub. They hear Little ask his name. And again. And the other woman asks the child his name and where he lives. Both women look at the child, smile at each other, back at the child. He takes no notice of them. From his small lungs emerge the most eerie and distinctive animal cries, neither kid-like nor possum-like, now that he is there beside them, his eyes wandering, his hands frozen, his mind…

Distracted in well-being. Preternaturally calm.

But what is he doing there after midnight? As if dropped by aliens and not, thank God, by junkies, as anyone might imagine. Little keeps holding him, amazed at herself to be doing this saving-the-child-in-distress thing, except she is confused now, that nothing changes the look of small countries in his eyes, or the heart-rate she can now detect bumping easily in his unworried chest.

The boy is dressed only in a T-shirt and nappies. Nappies. The woman walks across to the nearest lit doorway and asks if the boy lives here and the boy yelps as he yelps and then Little sees Big and Tom watching her from the hostel door and moves over to them. There is something poignant in her movements: holding this tiny boy close to her chest and walking, in her uneven limp, along the pavement, under the street lights. It occurs to her how possibly inappropriate it is to hold the child near one man who is a reformed paedophile and another who is wrapped in a gigantic towel, his big chest bare and who, at first glance, gets even her thinking it is a woman, the breasts so fulsome.