Waiting (35 page)

The Common Room

He is there when she arrives. After the shuttle bus and the tram and the hot haul up their street with her shoulder bag and the trolley bag, she will be sick for a week she can tell. Joints. Her Big, in his shorts for some reason, baggy shorts and baggier singlet. He is so funny, out there smoking with The Sheriff, being a lad, being a bachelor boy. He swings in breathless strides down the last few metres, and grabs her in a man-hug and kisses her on the lips the face the forehead. He is being expansive. And wet. Then he takes the bag from her grasp, though why he hadn't earlier she'd like to know. He tells her all has been quiet, no more boyfriend and Julia subdued in manner but apologetic. A big question mark there, he says.

Then it is inside with her and a Big wink to The Sheriff, which she of course sees, and if not the bandages under The Sheriff's shirt, then the bruise on the bridge of his nose.

It has only been four days. The Sheriff nods to her and he turns back towards the street, the cars moving past, a young woman riding her bike uphill in slow pedalling effort, the seat too low, everyone riding bikes with their knees bent. Is it a fashion to ride against your own potential, to ignore your mechanical advantage like driving a car with the first half of the gearbox only and the handbrake on? It is cool to under-perform.

There is, however, the small matter of a visit by the authorities to discuss the lounge-room. The common room. Communal. A good thing. Especially once the blood was washed from the floor. No, they the council, aren't interested in definitions of origin and purpose and the social, no, they want two more rooms on the floor plan. While no one can say more rooms for people like themselves aren't important, they, the inhabitants the inmates, certainly know their own communal life is more important. They benefit from the communal room. Two more people, or, unimaginably, two couples, would overload the hostel and its balance. Beyond the social, beyond safe, and maybe health – in a feng shui sense this would be a bad thing.

Regardless. It had arrived. In the letterbox the day Little had left. A letter announcing a visit from a works department man, accompanied by a social services bod, and for the roomers a clear imperative to keep clear, to let the damage be done.

Not fucking likely. That is the vote and the expression and all in favour of not fucking likely, yes yeah my fucken oath etc. No discord no dissent, they ALL want the common room kept as is.

Aziz, the unlikely status quo.

An angry day when the two men arrive, and a gloomy, humid wet one. And The Sheriff fronts them straight off. With his usual imperatives: about knocking and asking to come in, it's his home, and everyone's home, and courtesy is not an option, it is obligatory. One of the men, the planning man, is short and buttoned-up, with a compact rule and a mobile in two neat pouches on his belt, and while he is not the argumentative type he clearly does not want a lecture. The other man is tall and haughty and will not look The Sheriff in the eye.

I appreciate what you're saying, he offers, with obvious insincerity.

Then appreciate this, says Big, moving firmly towards him down the corridor. The tall man is shocked. No one had warned him about the occupants and he expected to meet a low bunch of the feeble and stupid and to hear slurring of consonants.

Our lounge room is a valuable, communal part of our lives. You'll appreciate that with such colourful clients as us, yes we are clients, we pay, and don't look so shocked. With such colourful background, education, state of health or lack of it, the chances of discord among us are very great indeed. This is our meeting room. It keeps the peace.

He squints at the wall, then eyeballs the man briefly. Big, no fists needed, continues:

Some of us, not myself you understand, but some of us, have been inside. Some are loopy, some are well below par in ways you could not imagine. And if anything came of it, anything such as violence, suicide, assault, um, sexual assault, even bloody murder? yes, it's not impossible. Just think about it for a few minutes, mate, I mean.

He stands close enough to touch the man, and both of them are now sweating, and Big sweat is no prettier than Big in the person, if less ambiguous. He gives the bean-counter, the bean-pole, a savage scowl then goes back to staring at the wall behind him.

It would be very bad ethically. More to the point, legally. Mate. Legally, for the Department. This room, our room, has played its part in the convoluted scheme of life. We don't have any problems here, and there is only one reason for that – we commune.

Commune?

We commune. In the lounge, for Christ's sake.

Big almost sneers at the man's opaqueness. Or his condescension. There are things about communal living that you don't understand,… We are not in favour of this petty, penny-pinching move. What are two piddling rooms compared to harmony among the rest of us? That is what these hostels are for.

The shorter man has walked past them into the lounge. Little is there knitting something long and deliberately domestic-looking, a jumper or something, a homely and woollen touch and ridiculous given the swelter.

Tom is not to be left out of this talk-fest, and opens up with:

Now look, mate, I'm a Christian, I'm a born-again lover of Jesus, but I have to confess to feelings which are not very Christian at the moment, and you are to blame. You are to blame. This is not a Christian thing you're doing. Jesus would frown upon you.

Now look, says the bloke. I don't know your name.

Tom.

He stands tall and Christian.

Tom… this is not my decision, Tom. I am just…

… doing my job, says Big, in a whiney voice. We've all heard that before, mate. Weak bastard. And it always follows some atrocity.

Now come on, this is getting ridiculous. You're obstructing me.

You saying we're ridiculous?

It's The Sheriff. The man had better be careful. So had The Sheriff.

Not you, what you're saying.

Yeah but it's us sayin it so that means us.

I am going into the room no matter what and I have the authority to do it. I will not be threatened, and certainly not by…

What? Threatened? The Sheriff laughs like guys in the movies. Mate, if I was threatenin ya, you'd know it. This is our home.

By occupation, yes. Technically, some of you are classified as homeless.

What? You ugly fucken…

I'm not trying to be rude. I'm sorry, it was… clumsy, me putting it like that.

It's true, admits Tom. Sadly. Even a good Christian like myself, will approach his Lord from the unhappy place in the world of the homeless. But as we all know, Jesus embraces the humble. And the homeless, but not the oppressors.

For some time The Sheriff has wanted to clock Tom and this is very nearly the moment.

The council man moves very carefully away down the corridor and they let him into the lounge where his colleague already has his tape out and is measuring and inspecting and doing the right sort of frowning.

Access could be a problem, the short man says.

Ah, this sounds good.

I mean the space is big enough for two rooms, just, on paper, but access… We'd have to take a doorway out of this wall and these old workers cottages (he thumps the thick stone wall), they made em pretty Public Works back then. Stronger than needed. Doors opening inwards for both rooms… not sure but I've enough info. Need to draw it up and discuss it. Pros and cons for your lot to worry about.

He clearly hasn't seen the bunk-wide rooms downstairs.

Then he retracts the tape, blows the smoke off it, drops it into its holster. Stymied, the other man nods, shrugs, and the two of them nod again to Big and Tom and avoid looking anywhere near The Sheriff. And leave.

It's unclear what this means, this development might be good or it might not. The situation is saveable? They should make a song and dance about it, i.e. go on telly. Everyone thinks of the media, the target for all abuse, but when people want something stopped, it's the media they invoke. What do any of this lot know about the media?

Same as most of us – nothing.

Whether the tussle with the boyfriend has remained on Big's mind no one can say, and the knife incident especially. Perhaps provoked by the sensory effects of knife and flesh on the floor, when the bloody boyfriend tried his hand at pig-sticking and chose The Sheriff for his pig, our large ex-domestic took it upon himself to prepare a roast. Unheard of.

Normally, Little does their cooking, while he spreads out his thoughts for the day. If spicing occurred it was not the joint so much as the monologues, his, on small and greater themes. He is contra­dictory in matters of self, caring little for complaint, and yet he is far from a well man, with his diabetes and insufferable circulation. Once in the shower he looked down past his odd man-bits to see his shanks had turned bright red. Not pink-red as in scalded nicely thank-you, but red-red. His legs were pouring with blood. He nearly fainted until he realised it was oozing from his capillaries and pores. His shins were pin-cushions. A small amount from a great many sources. Not quite a catastrophe. It settled down as soon as he cooled the water, as he stepped out of the shower. As his cooling pores closed down and went back to their normal water-proof. And blood-proof.

He saw not God but the Devil in a grain of panic, he knew Satan at close range leering from his shanks. It is sentence and punishment for a life of excess in food and drink all those years past; and in the present, for purchasing and especially carting home anything heavier than usual, as he often does. Weight is not to be taken lightly.

Or maybe it was the cards.

On the table he lays out the joint and begins inspecting the few knives they have collected, knives he has rarely handled in passion. It reminds him of the ghastly boyfriend and his pathetic weapon. Nothing sharp enough to hack a lettuce let alone bone out a bloody great leg of lamb. He rattles through the drawer to find the one and only and much over-used iron and rasps it, almost sings the knife-edge up and down the length of it. A thin steel song at last, as the knife has hungered for it, he says, hungered for it, poor thing. Blunt to a knife is as flat tyres to a Ferrari, as droop to a Casanova. De-boning. Then as the few men in the hostel that night gather to watch, he spins the joint to face him and as deftly as a locksmith if not a surgeon (they all think surgeon) he presses the knife in and along and laying the wound open reveals the clean white bone and then turns, repeats, and pausing, with his left hand (to keep his right working-hand clean of the meat) lifts in front of them the entire bone and its quarter of shoulder blade. It has taken seconds.

The boyfriend is lucky Big was not in this form the previous week.

As they stare at this lamb bone they see the femur of the Greek hoisted before them. Still, amazingly, he can feel the muscles of his right forearm telling him: they remember doing this kind of work, they remember how to do this work, as they have just now amply demonstrated, but they are not used to doing it.

He shrugs and changes knives to slice and dice in regular geometric rhythms, the white onions, the garlic, the broken herbs, the usual old rosemary and a few caps of mushrooms, yes, just a few, and then with his hands alone he crumbles the old bread he has been drying and soon enough they see a stuffing and stuffing that is stuffed into the place of the bone. Then he strings the whole thing up, winding and knotting, winding and knotting, doing a few more than necessary for the gallery, holding his high C as it were, a few sustained notes for the groupies, and then off to the cupboard for a pan.

It has only been in the last few years that cooking programmes have attracted the punters. Anything from sniffy I'macockney kid with street-cred like Jamie, to big-hearted please-everyone Ainsley, and to big-breasted yum yum saucy and smiling Nigella, have made the ordinary kitchen-mouse open up and say they too every so often like a good cook-up. Cook as in the verb: to cook. Then bloody MasterChef with its patronising judges and its gauchely tweaked effects turned cooking into wannabe-melodrama.

Potatoes and pumpkin next. Magically, their skins are soon hanging in long unbroken curls below not the peeler, but a small vege knife; Big is doing all the skills tonight, none of this tools for the job nonsense, this is a virtuoso at work. Clanging and jostling the trays and the pans, Big is all noisy and wondering why he hasn't done this before, what fun, this is worth every penny of delay, they the audience, The Sheriff and Tom, Little of course watching on, and Sammy and Tourie tic-free in fascination, and the man with Brain Operation even he watches, left and right, this tennis and touch-ball.

Poetry in bloody motion, Big, poetry in bloody motion. Shits on the telly…

Ah yes, trust Tom to say that, Tom who is Christian and is helpful and is no fool (except God's) but is all the same given to the bleeding obvious.

To finish the first part of the show with a flourish: a dusting with flower a sprinkling of olive oil a laying on of laurels of rose­mary, and then shuffles of naked and quartered white and bright orange veges and there you go, the big work done and into the oven the veges waiting in line for the timer and turning of the joint which truly is a joint now, the lamb-ness gone with the stuffing the powdering the oiling, this baptism not of but before the fire. The anointed. The performer of rituals.

It is worth applause!

And they applaud.

Understanding

When she wants to Jasmin can do blunt. It must be her academic double-act: waffle when dissembling, blunt to win.

Angus. I have a suggestion. It's to do with your work and of course you can say no. You may well want to say no.

There is something in her quite bouncy, but unlike careless energy it is very direct. She is enthusiastic even if she doesn't have the words for it. Her eyes are dark and he feels like holding her to collect the package. Or that something is going to be imposed on him. Dissembling isn't unique to anyone. He swallows two mouth­fuls of ale for the pleasure of his fake indifference, then slides his pint glass back and forth in front of him.