Sometimes it is fear overcoming her, worse than kidney worry, worse even than the thought of the future and that is truly scary. Shy-attack. Her heart rate rushes and shakes like a washing machine whenever she speaks and whenever she even imagines speaking. So the closer she gets to a word the more unbalanced the washing in her chest becomes. The only solution is to blurt. It can make a fool of you and increase the embarrassment and the shyness feeds on embarrassment, as we all know, and yet sometimes, a good bit of blurting gets the job done.
Then the house next door to Big and Little is under the hammer and what a day of miserystuff it is. The wind is bad enough, and then several early-arrivals come shuffling inside for a last minute inspection and out onto the street for the noise and nodding. The auctioneer raves woodenly about the suburb, the classy street and its occupants. The auctioneer, an all-black undertaker with a very-loud voice ( a real undertaker's whisper)
Hup seven hundred and fifty hupâ¦
yes sir was that a bid?
And eighty hup!
Some punters are chewing their fingernails to stop them talking and attracting an accidental hup. The voice continues:
We have seven hundred and ninety thousand ladies and gentlemen
The auctioneer is brilliant at slow intensity, at the stand-off bids, at time-wasting, that skill of drawing out his phrases like a Chinese chef dragging out noodles from a ball of dough. Plus the patter of delaying and enticing. No don't, no not yet, do not.
All this suddenly brings not the hammer but cold heavy rainfall down on their heads. Not just any rain but rain, close to hail.
It clears, they make small bids, the house sells.
In her room Little has decided she belongs to the lighter side of the human race. This is nothing to do with weight, nothing at all like that, this is a matter of the heart, even of the third eye. Like the sense of belonging upon the earth, the footprint environmentalists keep referring to, except Little has something more spiritual in mind. Little has something Zen-inspired going on in her footprint.
We can guess what it was and why the crying came upon her. Quietly, it came and went. The visitation she would never have of her own. She feels that during her short life, and it may not be a long life, there will be no record, no trace beyond the small data entries in the minor paperwork. Birth certificate. Centrelink file. Medical records. Trivial data on her computer, hardly used.
No children.
Now the crying is over. One cry as the echo of many earlier and no doubt of cries yet to come. She is also a blusher. Blushing is her one significant presence because blushers are not as common and never have been as common as is commonly understood. OutÂside romance novels. Blushing is renewable energy. A redness comes upon her, a red wave comes to the face, her Lupus butterfly flutters to her surface. Rosacea. As often as not it says: I want to hide.
She was for many years mortified by it. Its arrival is sign of her wishing to leave. It is a strange contradiction. But now a confidence has replaced self-consciousness and she accepts being sometimes lightly rouge and ruddy. She accepts her Little-ness.
For now she sets out on the long walk uphill to the post office alone. This time it is Big who's not so happy, groaning and grumpy after a night of torment, the dreams his dafter mental digressions sometimes bring to nightly surface. Or when he meddles his mediÂcation. Groaning. He carries on like a worrier doing re-runs of faux pas and misjudgements, imagined slights, mis-remembered insults, mis-diagnosed ailments, daft as a medical book of symptoms. He is his own DSM.
To the post box. By herself for once. Big asleep. Going round in wobbly circles in her own head, how circles can't have corners when by God the ones in your head most certainly do. How it would be more worthwhile if he gained from it the necessary insight, certitude, eureka leap, at least get a punishment that fitted the crime eg if to drink a bottle or two of wine a la Dazza. Then die in the morning with a curse on your lips, a foul word forming again and again in the brain. Followed by hangoverâ¦
She is, in this fashion, one-footing it after the other, when some slumped-over ding-dong rides past her on a pushbike. He slows and circles back, he passes and, creaking with effort on the old chain, circles around again.
Quite the ballet of two U turns in the sun. Then rides alongside her. G'day, he says.
No! She blushes! Because he may be pale-eared and droopy-shouldered but he's a knockout in the looks department, his face. Lightness and presence and nothing larger than a hi comes from her mouth. It seems to be enough.
I've seen you before, he says, addressing the pedals with great and pale seriousness. Seen you with the funny guy in the skirt most of the time so it's nice to be able to get a word in now you're on your own. No offence mind. Just saying hello sort of.
She keeps walking, her mind in surprise.
My name's Jim.
Like the Gardening Man.
You're right that's me. I should ask em for a job I'd be the only bugger they got whose name is Jim.
It is a quiet street. Jim dawdles to the exact moment and somehow, given he is not athletic, manages to stay upright on his pedals (if they are his pedals) while talking in similar wobbling manner to Little. About the football. She wonders, as Jim takes a critical look at the left wing attack plan of the Cats, is it ever worth the Saturday shout-session?
The cars! she shouts.
He swerves across into Little and knocks her slightly off balance.
Jesus, he says. That friggin car nearly got me. Hang on I gotta get off.
Yes, yes.
Wobbling is no way to treat a lady. He leans and to balance himself reaches towards her. She backs away, a very Little thing, and his hand lurches across, empty.
The cars speed all the time, she suddenly says. It's a strange road. They drive through the red lights up there every day.
Her words fly out. Adrenaline.
I could ride on the pavement, he says. Dink you, I mean. Then we'd be OK.
Little is aware of a gap in her words and how he is getting into it. She seldom has time off from Big. This Jim is making words in her. She tries to think nothing will happen, the blusher again, the self-conscious self lighter than the shadow. The words come out of her body and fly to their perches like birds.
Uphill, she tells him. I've always known that Post Offices have to be uphill. They have to be higher than where you live.
Why?
I don't know. I like them being big, made of stone is really good. I love it if they have a big roof.
This one has a clock tower.
It's my favourite building.
Her walking picks up a definite little jump, she is so happy and she had better enjoy it while she can. Jim squints into the distance of the clocktower.
What's the time then?
I don't know. I can't see well enough.
Me neither.
It's the tower I like, not the time. There's nothing important in my life like a big job or footie.
You don't follow AFL??
We walk up every day. I'm addicted.
Jesus. He is still shaking his head. No footie team.
They are nearly there.
What do you mean addicted?
You know. It's four twenty four I think.
But again there is nothing that matters in the Post Box. The walk there is addictive, then taking out the key, opening the door into the corridor with all the dinky boxes on both sides, and then slipping her key into the box, the sound of metal into metal, their very own box, opening it and â nothing. Just black metal, the emptiness black like the metal.
She sees the young bloke outside, holding his battered excuse of a bike at an angle against his right hip as he stares at two women talking in very low-cut tops, their brown cleavages bumping as they walk past.
Her mother might live forever. Habit, is what Big says. Life is a series of thousands of little habits. You are all those habits, that's all you are. But you are one of my little habits, he has said to her. She considers this now, the habits that join us together, to make any one day happy or relaxing or make one person during some part of one day satisfied, how habits can also fall apart and there's nothing left there except the square black hole behind the little door of the box.
Empty.
She thinks: something is going on inside her and it seems to know what it is, except she hasn't been let in on the secret. The young bloke (What did he say his name was?) squints into the corridor box area, presses his face against the glass â not a very adult thing to do, he should have given that up as a kid â and when he grins his teeth show. Her little birds fall from their perches.
Their Visit Together
This afternoon no one seems to be around, no one is keeping watch over the hostel's front gate. Just an odd guy with a beer on the porch who listens to Angus then moves inside to find Little. The long afternoon shadow doesn't move, falling over the side fence like another lazy bugger down on his luck. Unemployed at last! mocks the shadow⦠Angus waits with his arm around Jasmin and describes his first meeting with The Sheriff.
Little emerges from the shadowy corridor in a rush and says hello, only making eye contact with Angus. The kitten is getting bolder. Angus smiles, impressed. But Jasmin is thinking how Little's birth-name makes her other to herself. Like those Chinese students of hers: sometimes a bold, strikingly attractive young woman in the flush of life, whose name is Florence. She has taught an 18 year-old Agatha. Now parents are calling children things like Brave or Godsgift. American of course. She has read that Africa runs to Fortunate and Happiness.
And Little, a nickname which might be expected to be-little the bearer of it, in fact returns her, or even finds her. That's the strange bit.
So Jasmin leans in and introduces herself before Angus can say anything except to follow with his own greeting, and Little slowly smiles the same open smile Jasmin likes so much in Angus. It may be a family characteristic â the muscles underlying the face.
Little walks them through the house, past its closed doorways of what must be small rooms, all the way through to the back and downstairs, taking them into the kitchen and the common room where Sammy and a couple of blokes are watching TV. One of them is drinking from a foil bladder. Angus stares at him and something he has not expected, something sudden rushes through him, from the man sitting there, the loud voice, the rugged-looking face. The man looks at him and turns away, lowers the bladder.
G'day, calls Sammy. G'day mate, g'day missus.
They nod awkwardly and Little turns back into the corridor for them to follow. Jasmin stays there staring at the stacks of empties, several dozen stubbies at least, just dropped against the wall, nearly all of them Carlton or VBs, plus silver bladders of goon, and food wrappers and packets scattered on the floor among the chairs, chairs torn to shreds by the years of different bodies. The room smells of stale food and the walls are dirty. The TV blares out a Channel 9 game show.
Some of them, whispers Little, waving her hand, trying to attract Jasmin from the doorway, are a mess, some are not all there. Sammy's alright but he'sâ¦
It's a bit⦠dingy, says Jasmin, in her unconvincing whisper. I suppose the landlord cleans up sometimes but do these blokes clean up their own stuff?
They are supposed to. They do, a bit.
I can see.
When Jasmin starts coughing Angus elbows her then steps down towards Little.
No man of steel to protect the door today? asks Angus.
And Little, relieved to go with this, explains how some of the men walk across to Oxanam House for the free lunch they put on every day. Or the community centre a bit further away. Big and Little don't go, and Tom goes to the further one so he can hold forth to a different crowd from this lot, and The Sheriff goes to Oxanam House, even though he never used to and only goes if someone else does, just keeping them company, he says.
I think, smiles Little, I think he gets lonely. He only talks to people if there's a reason. He likes to be in charge. Some rooming houses are full of drugs and violence but he keeps ours safe. So does Big. I wouldn't be here otherwise. Hereâ¦
She opens the door to what must be their room. It is large enough for two single beds and is immediately tidier, cleaner, and it is brightly lit from the window.
Big is sitting bare-chested in an armchair and with his glasses perched low on his nose. Reading a book. He turns towards them, keeping the book in exactly the same position, as if to imply their visit is so transitory he will be able to return to the page in seconds. Except he sees Jasmin and immediately stands, a whiskery grin splitting his big face.
Ah, I had no idea, madam. And me not dressed in any of my preferred clothes. Little never told me. He gives her a quick look. I thought it would be just her long cousin with the crisis of a family.
Jasmin almost laughs with the shock of him, fat and man-boobed and hairy and well, presumably this is the surly tranny Angus mentioned. Crisis of a family! He is unexpected. Still holding the book and staring at her over the top of his glasses.
Hello, she says, unsure whether to step further into the room and offer her hand, especially as he isn't⦠I'm Jasmin, Angus's friend.
Pleased to meet, etc, he says, and after checking the page number, closes the book and removes his glasses. I am of course Big. You'll catch the subtle nature of these nick-names. I heard you refer to The Sheriff. Yes, he's a good man, now that is, after his redemption, and there's Tom too, who is far too bloody good after his. Tom's redemption comes with a capital R. He was bad enough for Jesus to bless and make him good â and thus a prodigal Christian.
Very Catholic, says Angus.
Ah, but there you're wrong. He's a born-again, a Pentecostal something from America. He's gifted with goodness. That's why his eyes shine. I have noticed his eyes are always wet, some lack in the irrigation department probably, but I like to think it fits him well. It is the infuriating shine of Jesus in him!