Waiting (4 page)

The fires usually come over this way, he says, the big one did. They roar and roll over the house like a deafening wave of surf that crashes… then passes, you have to hope, leaving the house safe in its wake.

Hands busy with shapes and shoulders rolling Angus is performing again, this time a Marcel Marceu show of fire and design, making wide-arm curves and shell shapes as if describing the Opera House in a terrible wind.

By chance, he tells her, a real test arrived. They wouldn't have wished it on anyone. And it did, the bushfire swelled over the house – and nothing happened. There are black charring-marks on the corners and gnawings into the wall plates under the roof where eaves would have been and these and other things Angus shows her, a signature of the fires.

He tells her very quietly, this building is one of the survivors.

Not to be overheard, she suddenly realises. That he and Stan had felt triumphant, their house had survived, but then felt a more compromised elation. Many houses with people inside them were not standing after the fireballs passed. There had been broken outer walls and lone chimneys and heat-bleached tiles on the floors and nothing else. Exploded house-frames. Metal roof-iron whacked out of shape by thousand degree heat, the fiery caul which went over everything as the people who waited, the people who stayed, as it was called, become nothing more than ash.

The evening is warm and windless on their side of the hill but the hours are adding up just as the guests are adding the numbers of drinks and subtracting the hours, knowing the equation was reducing their chances of staying for as long as possible and still driving home safely, that is without being stopped and breathalysed out on the highway.

None of this Underbelly drama, no big music. Just a cop sitting there under a tree, seatbelt still on, chomping through a packet of crisps like a man waiting for the last tick in his numbers book.

Angus has just gone off to talk with Stan and the two of them are leaning on the verandah posts staring in a comfortable old friends manner out across the valley where darkness is filling in the eerie paleness between trees. When Jasmin walks up to say she is leaving and thanks and all that, Stan's two children run to them, all excited and wordy and blonde. Their small faces look tender and flushed.

They are beautiful boys you have, Jasmin says, though she makes it sound off-hand. Then embarrassed.

Stan steps towards her and places his hands on her shoulders.

You can have some just like them, if you want. And he laughs, delighted, though she can tell it's a line he might use whenever a woman gazes at the kids.

Um, no thanks, Stan, not tonight. Got some washing to do. Embarrassed for him this time.

My beautiful genes?

Naff off, she does say, they get it from their mother.

If you change your mind, Jasmin, adds Stan, I mean, there's more where they came from.

And he even grabs his crotch. At least it isn't hers.

Jasmin.

Angus nods his head to indicate she move away with him. After a pause, she does. They walk downstairs again, into the quiet, where Angus immediately apologises, obviously annoyed.

Bloody Stan, he grunts.

She says she is leaving anyway, not to worry about it. She has become used to men who don't do sexual and sexist humour, men who changed their ways years earlier, or had never learnt. It is odd to encounter it again.

Angus has grabbed a torch as they leave but instead of walking down to the cars he veers around to the back of the house.

Um, Angus? My car's this way…

I want to show you something.

Come on Angus. No, you've been talking about it all afternoon.

Not… everything.

Perhaps he is going to smooch. He guides her briskly almost pushing her outside then unexpectedly around to the back of the house.

There's a thump from inside the house, a toilet flushing. When he turns to the house he points above them.

Because the house is darker we cut three skylights into the roof, see, there and there. Nice, aren't they?

At night she can see three glows on the roof, as if each bleb of glass had dropped intact from his finger-tips, and one over by the flue stack, where they constructed fitted lids which can be closed like the large shutters, and swung open again, manually in case of power outages, from the glass windows on the east side of the house and verandah.

Thank you again, Angus. Have I missed anything?

For a while longer than is comfortable he stands frowning.

Well, never mind, he says. We can go inside now. No, you're leaving aren't you? I should leave too.

She puts her hand on his forearm.

Forget I said that.

They must been looking at each other for too long. It is more complex than hugs and silly music. In her mind it is wonderfully silly music.

Maybe you could go into business with this house design, she suggests. Patent your designs and get them through as government regulations. That might make another line of profession.

Nah, I could, I could. However… there are serious risks.

Financially?

Yeah, sure. The money side of it. Very. But I was really thinking about…

The designs?

People always argue about new initiatives, and danger, but we reckon this house is unique, and some locals have looked at it and agreed and we've let them copy it. So the risk… is their own.

Angus, you have to be more savvy. You lost a house and this is what you've gained. Sell it. The design, I mean.

I dunno why, you know, but I can't.

She has no idea where this will lead, as he continues:

People say things like that, that after someone's died, oh if they fix up the road, or the crossing, or the laws, then their death will have meant something…

I don't follow. Are you saying the design…?

I'm saying it doesn't make a death worthwhile. An essential im­prove­ment after a disaster means something, of course. I suppose… what I'm trying… it sounds like the thing you say if you want to say something deep. It ends up on the TV news, it just trivialises the death, or whatever the loss was. There are some very bad places for cliché.

He turns around and rubs the blackened edges of the house:

This house has real meaning, a serious design based on traumatic experience. Nothing less. And so, the cliche may even be true.

That's because you earned it. The truth of it. You put your mind to the problem and here's the result. You turned the cliché back into a truth again.

Suddenly his face seems lighter.

I couldn't have said that, he adds.

Ah, but you made it. I'm just an academic so I can describe it.

It makes her smile, a kind of oddly skewed understanding going on.

No wonder he feels lightheaded. Then he stops and thinks about it, looks up into the canopy of trees on the eastern side of the road. But I am, he says, changing. I've lived out here but I work in the city. I thought I couldn't live in town again. Now I think it's about time to move, to see Melbourne close up. I've earned it the hard way, but still…

Still…?

Earned it. As you said.

Suddenly it seems the table of good tidings must lighten a little.

They hug each other and kiss goodbye, full lips kissing and arms around each other. Neither lets go. What a night. Maybe the emotions and even grief have effected her emotionally, even (could it be?) carnally. Jasmin is certain she can smell smoke all over him. Smoke in his hair and on his collar and smoky sensual heat rising from his throat and neck. She offers her lips for one last kiss, and then holds onto him for a few more moments. He is smoky and leonine. And silent. They are both tall and they stand like trees moved together by wind.

Home and Everyone

Home for Big and Little is a many-roomed rooming house. Or hostel. Or boarding house. Old terms for the same thing never quite nailed by a name. The many mansions of which are blatantly un-spiritual except for the presence of St Thomas. Thomas is their resident born-again, as he never stops reminding them. In his small room with its single window glued over with brown paper – farken Jesus, the others have said, without noticing the blasphemy, we haven't got a window and you lucky sod you've papered yours over, you mad bastard. Tom with his Aryan-style blue-eyed picture of Jesus nailed to the wall. His own eyes are brown. Tom who has been born-again so thoroughly he'd make up whole footie teams of Jesuses (as The Sheriff said, who barracks for a different team). Tom accepts that as the compliment it isn't. The rest of the occupants play for the team that has no name.

Some rooming houses are worse than others. Many are just tolerable, halfway from the working-world and a quarter of the way from bedlam. Some are hell-holes, that other team The Sheriff knows all about but protects this house from, or so he imagines; while it is tolerable, this rooming house remains an underworld open to men and women but mainly caters to troubled men the nineteenth century (Big said this) called down on their luck and the twenty-first calls losers. A useage without moral upliftingness. And only The Sheriff at the door smoking his hourly cigarette comes close to a counterforce. Good on him for being there, their self-appointed sheriff. There is something hard about him. Pentridge most likely.

The Sheriff looks at the world like this:

Two types I can't take. Good lookers and these skinny friggin emos. Good lookers need the paint knocked off ‘em, he says. As for those wussy little emos… if they get on the wrong side of me I'll turn ‘em into organ donors.

Probably, he hasn't, but plainly he would like to. You do not argue with The Sheriff. You can see he is just waiting for it. Short, shaved hair rising (just) on the sides, his head is a bollard, and his face is tanned from real sunlight, and the muscles all over him are stringier now than years before. Stringier. A handsome but hard face, or scary but fair is perhaps the better way of putting it.

Down in the shade behind him are the winos and junkies, the addicts, active or inactive, the so-called personality disorders, the divorced who were never truly married, the dispossessed who were never in possession, and others who are lost from the sane or the compulsory world, the compulsory, not cheaty or loser-ish, though liver-ish, and sad. Sometimes there's an overdose of something chemical, which might be existential or in injectable form. Mostly they come and go. The building is dug in below ground level, its basement a descending layer of single rooms, and down there, more than merely lost, are the very lost. They have given up waiting.

Like young Mister Tourette's among them, who crashes on a filthy mattress in a back room most nights, wakes at uncertain times on uncertain nights, and stumbles out to the street with were­wolfishness shouting out of him fucken fucken and cunt and fucken cunts and fucken shits shits arse fuck. The fouler words they are the more his mouth likes them. Out on the median strip under trees and streetlights glowing orange, his poor nervous system is given a volume lost and found in amplification, from hissing to outright barking. It washes his mouth in a gasm of swearing.

It is not romantic. The neighbours if not understanding are at least tolerant and in saying nothing are speaking volumes for his poor buggeration. Tourie, the inmates call him.

Tourie come inside!

In front of the television something quietens the axons and neurons, and his poor, clichéd synapses from going like the clichéd cicadas out there in Australian poetry…

At the rooming house they come and go. Someone called it the House of Broken Teeth. A weird family. Happy family, it's hard to say, as they often don't know each other. Stayers cop a nick-name, like St Thomas and The Sheriff and, of course, Big & Little. And poor Sammy who is dim, no meat in his sandwich, and all the others you read about. Some like extras from Awakenings, slumped in the catatonia of encephalitus lethargica, starting up only when the St Vinnies chicks arive with warm food and thermoses and ooo arrhh their very happy bodies. Otherwise, this village of theirs inside its four walls moves unexpectedly. Even the walls move: people kick them when they are dazed, insane, drunk, angry.

The kickers have ailments usually. Like Little. Her connective tissue, her unhappy joints. Sometimes she needs crutches to walk, but for now she is a limper. Little and her kidneys, says Big. Fatigue and pain and sometimes a fluffy butterfly rash across the bridge of her nose. Her wolf visitor, the lupine rash she tries to cover with makeup when she's outside.

Big considered calling her Wolfie, as in canus lupus – but she's no Wolfie. Big is the one with hairs in his nose and expressive ears. He trims them in the tiny magnifying mirror he has positioned as close as possible to the low sunlight the window allows into their room. Wolfie – he likes it, it is affectionate and… But when he mentioned lupins, her little leguminous kidneys podded quietly inside her, it seemed organically and affectionately right. He's funny and he's a diabetic and sometimes he hears voices saying big, unhappy trannie and too dumb even for insulin. No, he isn't a trannie, but he is Type 2.

Diabetes may make a married couple of us, Big suddenly says. And you know what I think of the perilous contrivance of marriage, let alone dialysis machinery, hospital beds, boiled cabbage, nutrition in general. I shall have to take evasive action, lose weight, join the gym and make a spectacle of myself.

She knows Big had a wife and even a son years ago. How his physical, if not financial absence from family, while working and boozing around the sheep country from shed to shed, led to a slowing of the financials. That and the cards, poker, rendered him absent on both counts. His compulsion to skirts was never in the closet, though in those years mostly happened behind the counter, in the kitchens and under the aprons, on the canteens or messes, and no-one cared as long as he was clothed and kept cooking.

None of this is the worst of his memories, the divorce having that position. And the cards. Poor health being what it is, and some degree of fault, but family was its own dark achievement. He joined the many who see too late the child going silent and feeling hurt and changing from sunny to sullen, as the wife rightly stops the lies and lets the truth happen, like a great hose. Only later does anyone realise it's not the adult but the children they married and who needed honouring, the children who at birth took vows to be loved and be held, and when the father breaks those vows enough for divorce, fathers are perhaps forever outside the vows that deep within them were all the truth they needed. But couldn't keep. Lost.