Waiting (38 page)

She opens her arms to embrace the room.

So I say it's nothing but greed. It's dangerous. And these boys are real funky and worth coming back to anytime. (Come back? It almost escapes, that she is away from the place as much as she's in it.) What's more, ALL the hostels should have a communal room and a kitchen, there should always be somewhere to sit and chat.

She's right into this even if demure “sit and chat” looks like the last thing she ever does.

So the crew give the filming a good run and Little comes forward at last to say a few words and hold down Big's handbag. Sammy and the few itinerants are not asked – and lucky the cops don't call – but Sammy has been filmed in his cherished chair in the corner of the lounge and he has been referred to several times along the lines Big has suggested on the phone in the first place. Which makes him smile. Big suddenly remembers to add all the other half-way house things he'd extended on the phone – how the mentally infirm must have social stimulation, it is better than therapy, it is the base-level of decent civil compassion etc etc, some of these men are just big Humpty-Dumptys but if let loose and alone, to sleep in a back room and wander lost in the streets, nothing will glue them back together.

When the St Vinnies van arrives at 6pm there is Sammy out for his stickybeak in the goodies bags. They do a group-shot. They cram into the lounge eating and laughing with the chicks who stand and hand out food and pour hot soup into their shaking polystyrene cups. It's happy. The chicks like the men. Sure they do. Roll camera. Except it's digital. My God they look like the biggest happiest family you could see, and not one of Tolstoy's unhappy in their own way.

That night Sammy and the man with the scar, a few of the others as well crowd in and watch the TV news or some of the TV newses, so many and at the same time, which increases the usual bickering over the remote. Nothing shows up. Tom tells them it doesn't work like that, it isn't a car crash, it isn't cricket or Essendon players taking something they shouldn't. They may never see it. They can't stay in every night.

SKA, Channel 31, who will run the story? Can SKA sell it to the commercials, SBS, the ABC?

What worries Tom now is his own opportunity lost (it sounds like a TV show) he certainly mentioned being born-again and how it took him from being a drunkard to being dry to make him care about others. How in the years until he saw that flash of light-without-DTs he was more likely to… no, he didn't say his usual of “bugger boys”, times have changed in the outside world, even he concedes that… but cheating and thieving and caring only for drink. He could not enjoy being empathetic, he could not find that experience in the years before he became Jesus' man of facts, no, he could not empathise, that is not until Jesus made him new and placed that feeling in him with His own hands.

But he did not say this to camera. And now he wants to, he wants to talk about Jesus saving people and about empathy arriving in Jesus' hands on him… he is distressed that his only chance went up in smoke.

Telling it

At the door when she opens it, standing tall and firm, Angus seems less than earthy. Something like the villi on the tongue, even like the rasp of a hayfever throat, the cat's or the cow's. She sways to the side but does kiss him as he moves into the apartment. She doesn't want to be but she still is worrying about the fire talk, the man who died. Especially now Angus is here. His name is enough, his body, overwhelmingly, sign of. Why he didn't defend himself. She keeps hearing this verb she uses: defend, which implies judge­ment, therefore an accusation made, which there never was.

Except by her without knowing it.

Of course she has. Her empathy arrives along with her guilt. He doesn't sit at first, unscrews the bottle of wine as he walks towards her kitchen and pulls two glasses from the drying rack. She is old fashioned about glass and washes them by hand, scalds them, lets them drain.

I want to explain about the bushfire, he sighs, of course, as you can probably guess.

And sits down slowly on her lounge. Then looking at his brow, a place of worry, she feels awkward standing, is suddenly shocked at her standing over him – in the verb and place of judging. She must sit. So she sits, beside him.

Angus takes a swig before he speaks, tilts his head in appreciative judgement of the wine.

That idiot Coolie is half right. I did design a house and it was intended to be pretty much like the one you saw at Stan's place. That was the idea anyway. And I was paid to do it. I was certain it would withstand a bushfire coming through as they normally do, fast, blowing over the top, radiant heat and even fireballs. Fireball events, I bet they call them now. But this is the thing: it wasn't for Jackson. It was for his son, Mike. Jackson the father was a difficult bastard who had feuds everywhere. He was trouble. The son had gone to Europe on holidays. He owned it, but he wasn't there. So much for your informer. The guy you… .

She tries to, she gestures, but he keeps on regardless.

His father moved in, moved some others out. If you want to know what I mean by that, and how I know, I mean he told the young couple who were house-minding to leave, to fuck off, more likely. Mike was back-packing in Hungary somewhere at the time and they couldn't contact him. Mike wasn't a mobile phone sort of guy.

Angus drinks from his wine. He is actually getting sad but he hardly dislikes this as much as the possibility of anger, a voice that would be telling her if she didn't know him better, that he is unforgiveably furious… No. Catharsis has its own voice.

Jackson used up all the rain-water tank supplies by watering plots of dope, he was a dope head, rude and patronising and a bastard, and stoned most of the time. That's probably why this Coolie bloke knew him. Coolie helped him shift the stuff. Bloody hell, the shamelessness of that creep, being so bloody righteous – think of it, he was outraged and indignant for a dopehead, like himself, who he might well have killed.

Angus is hands-up dumbfounded. And who wouldn't be shaking their head at the warped logic of it.

Bastards of the first order, he says. Beyond any concept of conscience. It's that, it's the total lack of conscience that makes me hate these creeps. Fire-bugs we used to call em, arsonists sounds better for the arse in it.

But you said there was no case…

No court kind of evidence. Not enough, I said, meaning it was too circumstantial. You know how often criminal cases fail when so much is known, but so little can be taken as admissable. They were going to try a civil case but I don't know, nothing came of that when Coolie disappeared. It's easy to disappear. Half the blokes who do a few nights at rooming houses and the like… aren't on the map. But Jackson, the fire would have got him anyway.

Are you telling me it was the same fire that caught this Jackson, the one lit – you say was lit – by Coolie?

It hit fast and at night. Jackson was stoned, unconscious, they said at the coronial inquest. Someone had rung him that evening and couldn't make sense of him.

There was no water left for the roof sprinkler system, none at all for the fire pumps, because he had emptied it on his dope plants. You see what I mean – you have to work with things. In a fire you have to work with the house – the design can't stand alone. You need the pumps and the water and then… you can probably, only probably, no guarantees any more, face down most fires. Jackson was warned about this sort of thing but he was a fucking know-all, he was a shit in a longhi, he couldn't stand the locals. He told people his neighbours were retards, in-bred, half-wits, stuff like that.

It all went up. Not the house, in fact. But the surrounding sheds. He didn't close my shutter systems. You know, I showed you the shutters and the glass blobs on the roof… In the morning they were still open and the glass had shattered, the house was still intact – the fire probably asphyxiated him. Smoke, lack of oxygen…

You can probably guess how humans react to death: do they want a reason? No, they want a culprit. They hated him – but they blamed me.

They blamed me for the idea of the house being fire-proof. Mike blamed me. You can't survive if you die, kind of logic. Talk. All the talk. They knew better. But it all came out, the details. I was exon­erated completely, as it were. Obviously. But people are full of anger and grief and I was it. The authorities copped a load of shit and blame too of course, but this was personal. You know what, it was almost…

He turns to her and grins crookedly

… it was almost anti-intellectual. I had been too smart for safety, I was too big for my boots, I was presumptious and I had talked up my ideas and then… someone had died.

The upper part of the house burnt badly but it didn't go down. And that's without the watering part of the design put into action. I can't escape it. Even if they were wrong, I led him to believe it wouldn't happen. You can see now – why I can't sell promises? I can't sell the promise of safety. It's impossible. Stan is different, he intitiated this, he wanted to do this and he believes in it. And it worked! Well, it worked once.

This all seems psychological, says Jasmin. Your stone construc­tions have a kind of permanence your house and home did not. So, you're making a home permanent, in form at least.

I'm not sure I believe in psychology very much.

No, I shouldn't have used the term. You could simply be building these things as a form of healing. Post stress.

How does the telling of anything make sense to the person told? The narrative. The psychology? The words and the syntax. It drives people mad knowing they are like this and that the other person is like that. And all her ideas. She thinks too much about these things, even now, as he is…

Jasmin wants to shut her silly Gemini head up, stop the silent raving at tangents on tangents about and above tangents – and simply grab him and kiss him on the mouth. And does so, suddenly, hard, then relaxes in his immediate embrace.

Just be quiet, she mumbles.

What?

Sorry. Me, I mean, I have to shut my thoughts up, I'm getting all confused when really it's simple.

He stares at her, hearing her voice, the low tones of yes and yes. She will always be a strange one. He is a simpleton in comparison. Maybe that's a good combination.

Choice, Some

After Big and Little check the mail (nothing) they sit in line for the computers at the library (boring) then search for information about the hostels and try to find their own (frustrating) and (unsuccessful) then wait until Big (carefully, mindfully) suggests he goes to the ATM (covering up) (but nothing will bring the money back).

What is the point of all this waiting for such a thing as some­one to die? There are people outside in the street and at the computers and reading through the dailies over on the papers table and dreaming and farting and texting.

Waiting is a terrible thing. It makes the waiter into the waiting. Noun into verb. It is like a virus taking over and replicating itself inside you, and for what? It is passive, it is essentially a nothing until it is something. Even the articles agree. So someone who is a waiter becomes the waiting and as the waiting is (a) nothing, the waiting makes a waiter (who is someone) into (a) nothing.

It nothings you. My God.

Big is beginning to think it could be a new sin. Was that a Catholic background he had? He and Little look pretty glum and so they should, except Big is also feeling shifty. No one can see that. He mumbles things. Until eventually (needing something) they head off to more likely pleasures, Little tumbling and Big stomping up to the IGA for the usual shopping. In the meat section there's the perennial problem of why the damn stuff is so expensive. Even the mince is $18 a kilo. Mince! Half of it is fat! At this rate a beef animal should be insured for a million bucks. The fruit and veg the same. Inside their IGA fresh food is mugging the customers. Big imagines being mugged by a bag of bananas, hassled by chicken breasts, punched by a tray of Scotch Fillet. Robbery. Half the meat is traded down because it has reached the use-by-date. Doesn't it occur to the admin staff that reduction stickers like this plastered onto creepily green meat are the result of over-pricing meat in the first place? And higher rates of food poisoning.

Big, a capitalist neither by nature nor by education, thinks this could be one occasion where a bit of healthy competition will make the IGA lift its game. Little is entertained by Big's sudden interest in economy. At last he is being realistic. The cheap one, he suggests, is the only one for us. He never thought that way before, she says, and notices him shuffle out of eye contact.

They select dried Chinese noodles, some cottage cheese, a small pot of honey for the sweetie-tooth in both of them, even if Big is diabetic and supposed to be off sugars, even if swarms of sweet little bees made them. Sociable and street-wise and great little rappers, who wouldn't harm anyone who didn't step on them, these little bees. But it's still sugar.

They see a man shouting at his partner and shaking a tray of vacupac bacon at her and she looks grim, bloody grim until she slaps him. Right in front of them. Little is astonished, shocked, makes a squark of sheer don'tknowwhattodo-ness, and Big gasps Oh My God like a teenager. His religious moment. That quick. The big fella belly out and dressed in his floral summerware bag and flat shoes, and Little in her usual jeans but black ones for some reason today, her belt too thin and daggy for jeans and her shirt tucked in firmly like an old-style Baptist pastor talking over the fence.

The man raises his fist. This is too much for Big who bellows at him:

Stop that now! Don't you dare strike a woman!

Which jolts the man from one shock to another, still smarting from the slap, seeing an unshaven woman of gigantic and manly disposition standing in front of him. Is this a sudden onset of schizo­phrenia, why is he assailed by this? He needs to have a shot of something, preferably horse tranquilliser.