Waiting (36 page)

I have, she goes on, a new PhD student… she's wants to do a thesis on the design of areas which surround public buildings. Landscape architecture, I gather. Public spaces, planned spaces, grounds rather than buildings, you know, close to my own work, obviously. She wants to contrast, or maybe just discuss, city spaces and suburban spaces – based on Gaston Bachelard…

Another French theorist? How many are there?

Jasmin never gets used to this occupational hazard.

Her name's Jill. She thinks those spaces we casually walk into, or walk through, or rest in, are more interesting than the ones we visit for more pragmatic, functional reasons. There is…

Now she thinks, Damn, another Frenchie.

… a book by Michel, yeah yeah, I know, Michel de Certeau…

Sometimes she is too easy for him, the joke is a simple falling of facial expression, a slumping of the shoulders or maybe a cocky lift in tone, his voice quacking like a duck, but a Disney duck.

Bacher…? Cert… the French revolution, oui? Oui oui I'm wiz you on zis. I say oui do it.

He spends too long in the sun appreciating his ale.

Jill is not what he is expecting. She is in her early thirties, a serious woman but with a background in… agriculture. She is another farm girl. Jesus, he thinks, she knows things. Which means, he means, she knows things he knows. She is not looking in from a distance, she knows things Jasmin doesn't – or maybe Jasmin alludes to, but can only describe in academic language.

Jill can see both ways. He is beginning to click to this academic difference. Which is something he isn't used to, as strange to him as being the only hands-on blokey-bloke at that conference, among the academics, their faces soft and their hands mild. Their mouths full of stones.

So a conversation with someone who is also a practical person, from inside that world, makes for a very unaccustomed and more-than welcome change. What to say to her? What not to say is how every second idea went wrong, how the logistics ran over him, how… The loose-tongued critic bubbling artesian in him and overflowing onto what is done and dusted. But looking and listening more intently, ‘being cognisant of' the other person plugs it: it is a perverse form of self-indulgence? That is truly perverse.

He drops into Jasmin's place on his way home from a job. Over a glass of wine, he says that Jill is a person with a grasp of both the theory (he'll take her word for that) and the concepts of design but that she also understands how actual work modifies the design and communicates through the materials, through natural forces, through the person's talents and skills – and through their mistakes. Even (grumpily but true) the budget. The resulting work is the endpoint of all of these. Then the public interact with the space in their own way, customise it, sort of. Angus says he sees this all the time, he and Jill have talked about it, the mess, the make-it-mine behaviour. He hasn't expected her to.

That last idea is theorised by de Certeau, smiles Jasmin.

Yes, yes, but really, she's just the shot. I'm impressed.

That's why I recommended her. Or you, to be honest.

It makes him cough. Perhaps she is a bit jealous.

Maybe, she muses, I should have tried my hand at it.

She thinks he is fluffing his tail like a peacock and being embarrassing. It seems Jill is keen to make a book of it, if possible, and they can both see the potential for a good book after the thesis is accepted.

Jasmin has to admit it. Somewhat joyously, for giving it away to a student. Such is the academic life. But a book. One that will count as research.

Thinking of research is her Grotto of Erudition, Angus calls it; her Grotto of Perdition more likely, she says. Stalled in this Grotto, she has been worrying about something; and unexpected associations have finally gelled. Of Little in the rooming house. Jasmin has heard at last the phrases she wants.

I am so annoyed with myself for being so slow, she confesses, standing and moving across to her lounge room bookshelves and removing a thin volume.

I mean, after your original description of the rooming house. And then Little. Even before I even saw her, Little was reminding me of something. Anyway, I've got it. It's a poem, or the final lines of a poem. By RS Thomas. The whole poem in fact fits, as a description of slow and dysfunctional men who live on the edge of their community. And then the ending reveals her. Hang on, I'll quote it properly.

The pages flip over and back and over again, until she consults the index of first lines, then the index of poets, and flips through the poems, closer to the middle than she'd expected.

Aha! she cries. Listen to this.

He waits for her to read the lines but she is distracted, silently reading the whole poem to herself. Perhaps if he walks off… Now she looks up, smiles at him and something – her dark eyes? her broad lips from the grin? the love (of sorts) she makes him feel for her? – relaxes him. She's never boring.

At first she reads the stanzas describing the family of oddly dere­lict men, looking up frequently to see if her single listener is listening.

And now, she announces, the clincher, the final stanza. Its char­acters and conditions you'll recognise, I think, and how it draws the fable out into a rich and ambiguous metaphor.

And lastly there was the girl:

Beauty under some spell of the beast.

Her pale face was the lantern

By which they read in life's dark book

The shrill sentence: God is Love.

She lowers the book, and looks up at Angus in triumph.

Yeah, I see what you mean, he nods. Little. She even manages to usurp Tom's role. I get the idea Tom is all very holy but he doesn't really put out for the others, just likes to feel good. Little and girl in the poem do, as you say, seem to overlap.

Poetry is yet another thing he has no knowledge of.

This poet, he asks, who was he writing about? If it was a he?

Yes, a he. It's a farm in Wales he's despicting, well, in the literal sense. There's no saying it was real. Thomas, despite the ambiguity of that last line, was a village clergyman. A good Presbyterian but a better poet. Oh God, I love that “shrill”…

She hears herself sounding like a girlie, and is embarrassed.

… I mean I love how it complicates the poem so brilliantly.

Ah, smiles Angus, Big is a beast? Well, the men are beasts. I suppose…

And lastly there is Little… The virginal girl.

Not that Little's a girl anymore, he adds. And hardly a virgin.

How do you know? It mightn't be a sexual relationship.

His frown and smirk are unstoppable.

You really think…?

We can't just assume, she says. We can't. Maybe they don't do anything.

You think they do nothing?

I don't know. I've been thinking about it, not them so much as the rest of the people there and, well, about everyone. So many people don't even have any body contact with anyone. Older people, sick people, people who live alone or in these places, people in nursing homes, odd people, crazy people, ugly people. No one hugs them. No one holds them and kisses them. They must crave touch. It's not healthy to go without body contact.

He has never thought about it. All the same, isn't it just as patronising to assume Big and Little don't have sex? Not that sex or no sex is the most important matter. Yes, body contact. Little's lot is her own. Angus could walk around there now. Or maybe not. As soon as he gets the next few day's work sorted out he'll visit her, see how her own South Australia visit went. His mother. He can still hear the sound of her whacking the car roof and shouting at him. Now there was a shrill sentence. A son of any age is still his mother's child. But of course he has not rung her since his return to Melbourne. Not that they speak more than a couple of times a year.

Angus. While you were away… I went to see that guy, you know, I jabbed. Coolie.

You went and saw Coolie? What for?

I had to.

Jasmin. You searched him out in some psych ward?

No, he was back in hospital by then. Or still.

What do you mean, you had to?… Surely you're not still feeling guilty?

No harm done. Relatively. He was terrified I'd do it again, kept calling for the nurse.

I bet they've had a gutful of him, that sort of bloke.

What sort of bloke?

All she gets is a lifted brow.

Yes, well. He mentioned something about you, as it happens.

What? I bet he did. He's worried is he – and for good reason.

No, not that. He told me about someone called Jackson who you designed a house for.

Suddenly still. Both of them. He remembers now, she had mentioned him.

Jackson… What did he tell you? Angus stands and walks towards the window.

He said your much praised house design wasn't safe. That some person called Jackson died in it during a bushfire.

Jackson. Huh. Look what the cat dragged in.

That's an odd way of referring to a dead man, Angus, especially if you had anything to do with it.

Me? Anything to do with what?

Well, you tell me.

But Angus does not want to explain what that is, or anything else. And feels it is time to leave things unresolved, like that shrill sentence she read from the poem.

Say something, she thinks, say something, say anything. No, not something, say it's not true. He keeps staring out towards the cat on her front porch.

Ignore it. The guy's a liar. He's a creep.

That's what I called him. He called me a bitch so I gave him a mouthful. I suppose I shouldn't have.

There is silence between them.

Aren't you going to tell me how it happened?

Oh? You seem to know already. This little shit makes up a few stories about me, just to muddy the scene, and you take him at face value.

I never said I believed him.

You look as if you do.

No, I don't but it's…

He puts down his glass, unfinished, and says goodbye as a leaving action only. Says he'll think about it.

To Sing Is To …

Sammy has been singing all morning, songs no one can recognise. Singing puts things right. Singing takes the stutter out of him.

Little is listening to him, a long crease dividing her forehead from one side to the other, a long songline of worry for the unheard, the unseen. She is aware of this even if no words arrive in her mind. On his bed Big is reading an old copy of The New Yorker. Found at the pub. Not that he drinks often, nor especially much either, not a man for the bottle, if only because doctors over the years have made it very plain where the bottle will land him and how fast. All the same, when he looks at Little he might know the words and the worry Sammy is not able to state. Express, yes, state, no.

Not known for subtlety, Big mentions the concern he sees on her; she tells him that Sammy is distressed, that he is calling out for something like an unhappy dog. She feels too mousey to go out to him. It is too hard to know what can be done. She thinks that is what he is doing. All Big does is indicate the door with his massive paw, this right royal ‘go forth and see' in a simple wrist movement. She nods, winces, tries to think up something friendly, not too direct and not about the weather either. Sometimes even trying to help someone is hard to start doing. Tom the help and Jesus-talker has no trouble, and probably never did, even before Jesus turned up in his head, though now she can hear his Braille typewriter tap tap tapping under his slow fingers in his room. No, he hasn't come out to help a lost soul.

She must. She goes out and stands just beyond the door where she can see the young man pacing, into the lounge and out along the corridor as far as the kitchen, then turning and repeating this loopy loop of demented pacing and singing.

Sammy, Sammy, she says. It registers and his eyes flicker, he twitches his head sideways, to and from her, pacing without interruption. What's the matter, you seem upset.

Nevertheless, he carries on past her, along the corridor into the lounge room, and after a few seconds back out and towards her on the return, but this time he opens his mouth without singing.

We have to keep it, he says. We have too. I love the lounge it's my favourite place in the world I don't like sitting in my room all day I don't want to sit in my room all my life I want to watch TV and see everyone coming in and talking and coming in and going out and then someone else coming in. I like my place in the corner it's my place. It's my home. No one else wants to sit there but I do.

This is the most he has ever said. Sammy is a Silent and what isn't covered by dimness has the feel of sad. But now his face is crumpled into the centre; he seems as toothless as the long-gone Winged Woman, and all protruding lips.

We will stop them, asserts Little, surprising herself with the sound of boldness.

What are we going to do? wails Sammy.

We have to. Fight.

And there it is. No one wants anything to change and no one knows how to do this, how stopping such things is done. Fighting is a word.

I hate seeing you so upset, Sammy.

This is the magic phrase. His face reasserts itself. He is Sammy again. Not convinced about the fighting bit exactly, happy to hear her concern for him. A smile on his large face. He is alone here, she realises, he is a sign, of neediness, the reason why the room must be kept. They all need the room in the same way, only he has nothing else. If the room closes he will close with it.

When she tells Big he tells her about the men he notices in the pub. How they sit alone at the bar nursing a pony. Their very small beer. Men in their poor divination of one glass with no future left in it, except loneliness, which is the worst tense of all, and illness, the painful stones inside them sitting there in the poor light. Alone, their eyes, their attention, well hard to say, their eyes turn towards the street then back to the barmaid, the way her arms curve, the small memories of intimacy, perhaps, from the long-gone places.