Waiting (20 page)

There's something odd about this, Big says. He stares at the boy. I take it the child cannot speak.

Excuse me.

The woman from across the road stares at the two men and immediately suggests Little move with her down to the other houses. Then as Little begins walking the woman goes ahead knocking on the doors.

But that man is right, she calls back towards Little. There is something strange about the boy, some condition. He doesn't register our questions. But he isn't suffering from shock or anything like that, as far as I can tell.

She moves away again from the door that is not answering and towards a lit driveway a few houses down. Little already pictures herself telling Big something for a change. If, that is, she can get a word past his considering of psychological conditions in the young (as he will) or elaborating on lost children as a theme in Australian imaginations (as he will) and such a fear, such an arche­typal disturbance (as it is).

At the next house she hears the furious whine of a vacuum cleaner. She and the woman have to knock loudly and often until annoyingly much later the sound winds down and a woman's head appears. Shock then, and incomprehension on her face, a stranger holding her child? The mother rushes towards the door, the woman from across the road already by now explaining, the mother, clearly the mother – they now register the boy's skin tone is darker and she is Indonesian perhaps, shrieking in guilty distress, and the little boy is happily playing with the fabric on the Good Samaritan's jumper.

The mother explains the little boy should have met a locked door and she looks back down the corridor it must have been left open by… while she was vacuuming… the boy's autistic, he cannot speak, he makes noises, he doesn't usually wander off. Despite this, there's something unworried about the mother. The woman from across the road smiles tightly, Little is still holding the boy. She doesn't want to give it back. She remembers Big going on about men's dodgy Y chromosomes, older men's sperm falling apart, miscegenation… She holds onto the boy who has not reached for, or been reached for by, his mother. She holds him close to her.

On the way home her mind goes blank and angry and blank again. Once inside, she stops, realises she smells the faint clean smell of infant on her arms. The smell of a child. And the rain. The cold. She is only just inside the corridor when she begins to convulse in tears. She lurches and she heaves in crying. Big bustles out in his slow way hearing her and knowing it can be only her, and she hurries past him into their room and lies down on her bed weeping. Weeping without saying anything.

He needs her to say something but she is all weeping, just weeping and crying out, he wants her to stop, the noise is distressing, and embarrassing, and the others will hear it. It hurts him, her crying, whenever it happens, when he never knows why, and it always hurts him knowing he doesn't know anything about whatever it is, or maybe he does but she never tells him. What can he do? Why won't she tell him?

Little? he begs. What's the matter?

So he sits beside her with his big head in his hands.

Children, he says, sadly, one can forget them.

When she cries she will not listen, he keeps thinking this but he knows it answers nothing. The noise and her jerking movement keeps on: she writhes down her body as if her lower body is unable to stop it. He doesn't know how to or what to and if to do anything. She is so small. He is so big and useless. She cries out for the half hour back inside, and later, and on and off the day following, and then less and less. Where she is unable to be herself for moments of weeping.

His Second Visit

No one is lazing or smoking on the front paving today so he calls out a big farm-like hello down the rooming house corridor. He waits there for a few minutes knowing they are not rushers this lot, they do not charge at life's troublesome gate. The vague shadows he can see down towards the end darken and widen and from it the very large and all-over wobbling man-shape of Dazza appears, and seems to heave from one leg to the other as he approaches. Though no phrase does him justice or describes the sideways sway, the forward progess – a metronome of mammoth, perhaps?

Very slowly then he turns and sees, standing in the main doorway, a short woman with black hair and a shy face. Most noticeable is her blue-check men's shirt which she wears above her blue jeans. Give her a cowboy hat and she'd be a rodeo gal. That, strangely, is something Little has never thought of. All those fussy buttons and plain designs, the unhelpfully unsensual effect of it. She looks like a little academic. Angus's out-dated prejudice.

Agnes, he says, unsure how to address her, and she flinches.

I'm your cousin, Angus, he continues. My mum is Julie.

Little nods and blushes.

They call me Little here, she says. Not Ag…

Little?

Everyone gets a nick-name. I like having my own.

Fair enough. (So she is Little) Still, given the weird naming in our family. Our mothers. Then you and me: Angus and Agnes.

He pauses and watches her shy (and silent) attention.

Talking of old women, I'm a bit late because an old woman a few doors down was leaning out from her fence and I thought she was unwell, or something, so I went over to her and then she grabbed my arm and wouldn't let go.

Little laughs.

I couldn't get away and she wouldn't stop talking.

He still looks astonished. Little laughs so much he is surprised. She is remembering Big trying frantically to shake the old woman off. Ages ago. Big is no listener, he avoids her now, says hello missus! and stumps past her.

Awful names, except, adds Little, serious again, for Vicki.

Angus is puzzled. She frowns: I mean why did they Vicki Vicki?

Ah. Well. Our great-grandmother was born the same year Queen Victoria died. Queen Victoria was born in May and crowned in June, so grandmother named her babies by the month of their birth. It worked for your mother, June and mine, Julie, even for May, except she was several years younger than June. Then another daughter was born in July. Two Julies. Completely mad.

Little looks triumphant. So. She's Victoria!

After the Queen. Where it all began. Didn't you know any of this?

No. No one ever said. But why did my mother call me Agnes?

Buggered if I know. Same as mine calling me Angus? We're not Scottish. Anyway, nice to meet you, um, Little.

She steps forward and they shake hands, very formal and very men's shirt.

Hello… Angus.

It's good, she enjoys it. He seems a nice enough man to find things out from. Pity they all seem to know stuff: every man she knows wants to be an expert. For her there is the heavy matter of her shyness. He looks at the tawdry garden then back at her. The trees are surprisingly healthy.

I was wondering if we could go somewhere for a coffee. To talk about this family stuff. You know, about my mother, in fact. I'm not intruding, am I?

Going off with someone has never happened before. For once Little thinks about that, instead of automatically saying no.

I'll have to ask my boyfriend.

She limps back inside, but quickly, he notices, as if keener than she is letting on. While the minutes collect and dissipate, Angus has to stand waiting again, as many as fifteen or twenty. It confuses him. Should he continue standing there like a prat or… call her name down the corridor? Maybe suggest he call in some other time? Or just leave? Several men wander out and smoke and swear about the fucken weather, the fucken nags and then the fucken gall of some­one over somethingorother. Why do these men use fucken every few words? They are getting angry again about that little paininthebum, they call him, Tourie, for fucken swearin half the night. They've been lucky – Tourie had been gone for months and only came back for a few nights, slumping in the big corner chair and, sometimes, yelling.

A very thin, very drunk man shuffles in off the street, and ignoring the others, walks past Angus, says who the fuck are you, and disappears inside. Later Angus hears a grunt and sees a fat, whiskery man come to the door and then stop, arms crossed, to inspect him. But who is the one to stare at? He is wearing, as casually as a farmer's wife in summer, a long sleeveless cotton dress and flat shoes. His arms are bare and astoundingly hairy and his long thin hair wavers and almost lifts in the slight breeze.

We don't want any more crap about your aunts, Big announces to Angus, rubbing his fists up and down both sides of his large unshaven face. Today is blunt philosophy:

The aunts are easily led, yes? And your mother leads them so she's the problem. Why do you want to see Little?

Until Little appears behind him wearing an additional flush of lipstick. Embarrassed for Big's presumption but then…

Angus wants to say: I'm not on my mother's side. I don't like it one bit. My mother's a cow.

Instead he says:

Look, I know what my mother's like… Don't worry – I know what's going on. It's ridiculous and I've told her that several times.

Big stares at him for a few seconds then goes inside. Presumably this is assent. Little looks around her:

Do you have a car? My legs aren't good today.

Yes, the red ute over there. It's my work car.

They have between them, and in common, the old family snipings made familiar by repetition, about her lupus and his labouring, this car of his covered in working-class dust, not glory, certainly not the abstract kind mothers dream of. The hardly-known children now hardly young and both of them a disappoint­ment to their parents. You're just a gardener, his mother has said. Landscapes are for painting.

As they walk to his ute she is aware of his height and sturdi­ness and she feels for the first time a kind of blood affinity in her, trusting him in his strong movements, unlike any man she has walked beside before. Other than Big, who more often lumbers or strides, but sometimes waddles beside her like a gargantuan duck. Angus smiles at her as he moves to open the passenger-side door. A gentleman. A cousin.

Over coffee for him and fruit juice for her the story of the Ugly Sisters becomes clearer. In a roundabout way he tells Little his mother expects him to talk her out of accepting her inheritance, that is, if the will in fact favours her she should be obliged to pass the main share of spoils to the aunts. Plural, meaning specifically Julie, his mother. Who, by her own conviction and by some counter-intuitive logic, thinks she is the primary carer of Little's mother. Angus says he has no intention of coercing Little into anything.

What he doesn't reveal is the shock of finding her in that rooming house.

If she is relieved to hear him she is distressed to know – well, she knows, she knows, but to hear it so frankly – the Ugly Sisters have ganged up against her. Angus won't tell her his mother is outraged that Little wants her own money. His mother imagines, more, insists the Law must support her, because carers are carers, they can be prime beneficiaries over family, if in fact downandout Little can be deemed family. He won't. It would make Little tremble. Humiliate her.

Little pulls at her hair and gurgles the last of her juice through the straw. She is angry. They are worse than the crazy men in the rooming house, she says, who come in drunk and try to steal your money, your phone, your personality! They have nothing, they are trouble, but these aunts are even worse. Really nasty. Sorry to be calling his mother nasty but she is!

This backs Angus into guilty silence. He know what she means: but he thinks instead of CEOs filching tens of millions from companies they have run into the gutter, losing billions of the investors' superannuation. The punters who lose everything are nothing to the Top Dog who takes a bonus and runs. No, sadly, walks. Into another job doing exactly the same thing. Men without any conscience. Julie, his own mother, the family CEO sitting back on her couch of slow greed, too much time on her hands and sly and patronising in her mind-control of May and Vicki. Who in her thoughts casts Little as lost, and irrelevant.

Julie has even said she is doing it for Angus. Just how she can argue any of this, when the house was bought by Little's mother and father, and is not in the family line at all. How deluded. She thinks Angus should inherit Little's mother's house? Angus squirms and does not tell Little the awfulness of this.

But suppose my mother believes her, wails Little. She tries to do the right thing, my mum, she might give them the lot, even the house.

What would you do with the house?

Do with it? A small distress weighs her mouth.

Is it any use to you?

What do you mean? Is it?

No, I'm just curious.

I don't… have to say that. I don't know.

This is going to wake her up in the night, him saying that. Not going to go away, she can tell. Why, why did he?

I'm sorry. I'll have a word to her. Your mum, he adds. And to my mother.

Your mother? I thought she…?

It won't be nice but she doesn't worry me.

Except she does. She is way past being pleasant or changing her mind. He knows if he opposes her: she will give him that hard, mouth-down stare of disapproval and say nothing. She will blank him out, her face at its plainest, and coldest. After trying on the stony-toad she usually gets nasty and sarcastic, turns into the full Gorgon: look into her eyes and she'll petrify you with things you misjudged years ago, old slights that are real, but others that are mythical, hysterical, skewed but hurtful. If you are still moving she will get into the teary. Jesus.

She's going to fight for this, he says.

Does your mother know what you think?

I told her she's wrong but I doubt she believes it.

How come she doesn't?

Angus cannot answer this. Little has seen the truth:

She sounds awful.

Yeah. She is.

Is she a loony?

On the short drive back Little is leaning forward with her dark hair covering her face almost down to her chin, saying nothing beside him in the ute and no longer quite so cousin-happy. He can sense the hurt words piling up inside her. He tries some words of his own, he tries some more, he wants them to touch her like a cat rubbing against her legs. So the words he uses are quiet, if not quite purring, they tell her he likes her and he will not be any kind of enemy and he is sorry for asking about the house, it must have sounded like more of a challenge than it was − it was mere curiosity (and how her close-to-homeless state could change into home-owner, and whether she would return to Adelaide to live). Really though it is none of his business.