Waiting (40 page)

The repetitions utterly un-nerve him. He is mortified he is scared he wrings his hands in his woolly cardigan, he tells her he is sorry sorry he is weak and stupid and can't be trusted and he is worried if they do get the money from the will, what this might mean. Her entitlement but his cavernous weakness. Cavernous. Oh she will remember this phrase later. What a joke. She yells at him and thinks back to when he went on benders, coming home drunk, his dress torn, his bag, her bag as it happened, lost some­where in some pissy alley-way or worse. He was an alcoholic. He couldn't be trusted. But that was so long ago, it isn't her Big, he's not like that, she has given him all her trust and seen the difference. Now look!

He is abject. Slumped over so she can't even see his face.

But she is not strong enough to sustain her fury. Even the walk back has taken some of it, shaken free by the stamping and swearing the anger she does not usually let herself express. She has almost enjoyed it but stomach-falling she has been shaking, her rage made her strong, she could have lifted the chair and hurled it through the window, she could now too yes she could shout down this lot. She will wake in the morning with the pain of it all through her. He will still be there, huge but diminished, in his narrow bed. Forlorn.

Even if her body is little and her balance wobbly, her spirit is not.

To Look Away

By now the student house without noisy students is filling up again with a new batch of thin young men, one of whom walks through the summer days under a small multi-coloured parasol. So effete and so brave, and staying on too through the summer is the spray-tan blond.

Changes in the rooming house? An old Koori guy who hasn't stayed for a year or more has moved in while he plays didge over in Carlton outside Lygon Court, trying to catch the shoppers and the movie-goers when they emerge from the darkness of the Nova cinemas as catharsis still moves them and as the afternoon sunlight blinds them.

And almost forgotten too next door is the story, their story on TV. They are made of the same electrons that fizz over their Sharp screen and die. Almost worn out of worrying too is Little about the money. She knows Big is contrite and was for days close to breathless with punishing himself. She was getting worried about him, his health his disturbing anguish, Dazza's hospitalisation a sign of big men being mortal.

And she knows – or she now lets herself know – that once her inheritance arrives The Kitty is neither here nor there. Angus has convinced her: it will arrive. Later or even later. But she needs to believe it, because Big has always, and not only from a guilty conscience, been singularly proud of and impressed by Little, and for her recent travelling alone to visit her mother, and facing up to the Uglies. For the phone calls. For her accommodating him (especially impressed by this) as a thief and a weakness who won't do it again.

Therefore a shift in Big. Much like the rest of them, the only exercise he does is exercise his pedantic streak, the proof of which is he knows what to get insistent about, but not when not to. The Where and Why habit he picked up from the block and the chip in his memory of the father. His father was a man of uncertain sanity but intense focus, a specialist in the quibble and the hair-split. His own big father going something like this:

Are you trying to say you can't do it? (to Big as a small boy). I heard you, you actually said – but I can't do it. My boy, there's no such word as “but” – you can say “I can't” and even that is too vague. It isn't possible, or you don't have the skills, or you refuse to do it. Saying But is to resist. You're saying I could but I WON'T.

(     )

This raises the possibility of your stubborn-ness of character, and your defeatism, and we can't have that.

We can't have…?

No. We cannot.

His father died before letting his son know he loved him, as in all sad family stories. All this happened before the vernacular shifted to include the following kind of phrasing:

She wants me to drive her to the chemist, I can't, but.

It would have wrung him in knots.

Yes Knots

Do they leave the hostel which has been their home for so long, buy a house a flat a semi-detached, and where and how and with what consequences? The big question: what will happen? How will living alone work out? Little speaks of it, but Big fears the stasis of his brash blubber, whereas the mind will not stop, mind as a superstitious sense, of windfall arriving, health departing, this nasty double-bind the gods have indulged in and threatened us with. Giveth and Taketh. Now is now but in five or ten year's time, will the rooming house be the same? Who would be here?

Thus Big and Little's deep double-wish for good health. Talking of what's wrong with you as they frequently do is like talking about scars – it is provable and has already happened and it is therefore past tense, whereas worsening illness is hidden in the future and everyone gets it.

Both Big and Little are repressed-superstitious. The body carries on, the medications do their job, they go into hospital for check-ups looking for status quo. If Little is a worry-boots, Big is a repressed drama queen. So is Tom except he doesn't know it. The Sheriff is undergoing his own account of mental-macular degeneration, the clouds slowly encroaching, the body slowing, the sharp dulling. Or is he simply relaxing at last? Somewhere in the deep lizard brain is a feeling of letting go the heavies, and this might well be what death feels like, the bloody relief of it coming over you – no more having to put on a front.

These mortals speculations are brought on by Dazza being in hospital for a month, his longest sojourn yet. The fires inside his lungs and internal organs are the townships no one travels to, unless in scrubs and in conditions he does not describe and does not understand. His room has been just as vacant.

So now Dazza's homecoming is a big day! He adds his coughing to the mornings, afternoons, even the evenings, out on the verandah filling out the big pale armchair. Dazza the biggest big of them all, the sickest sick big as well, they suspect, the loudest cougher, the longest hawker, too big even for a tenor, and no breath control at all. He can hardly walk onstage.

He's back but changed. He has missed the only interesting things ever to have happened there and he is pissed off. The TV show they are all in but no-one has seen. This makes him laugh and cough into standstill.

Life does not go on, it shifts like the odd change in The Sheriff's pocket.

And more oddly Dazza's new expression: his nose surely more knobbly than before, something different when he sits among them. Something after the events in the body, the operations and procedures of the hospital, by every scared thought and anxious night he spent there. Each is like a sharp stick and a garden, each stuck in alone, while standing in a group.

Three of my nurses were fellas, he tells them. Two of em gay which doesn't give ya much of a chance, does it? One had to be straight I think but the whole lot of em were fulla muscles not like the runt next door who played the bloody drums.

A rough sequence of drumbeats begins in his chest somewhere, the sound alarmingly wet. He hoiks and sends the load out onto the tree. Ah, how he has missed doing this. The tree has missed him doing it.

In hospital these blokes have ta carry people or stop em runnin off so it stands ta reason they're big gym-junkies and can lift any fucker except me up onto a bed. They use that really tight huggy grip, face to face, when they lift ya, just an excuse eh (cough spit spit again)? Doncha ya reckon? It's (wheezing in a little voice now) wrong. (Big pause to breathe.) Then a guy who was in with me kept goin outside to bloody smoke. He carried a packet of smokes everywhere like a kid with mobile phone.

Glad to have you back Dazza, says The Sheriff, lighting up another.

Some a those people, says Dazza, look as sick as Jesus, you know. The Sheriff spits onto the fence some tobacco from his tongue.

And they don't smoke like some people do it's all so bloody dramatic. They look like actors acting smoking.

He starts to laugh but coughing takes over acting a person who would be lost if he wasn't coughing.

Asleep all the time. I thought Fuck this is bad and I just got out.

He looks glum. The fire burning down inside.

None of us getting any younger, mate, adds The Sheriff.

Yeah I thought you was looking a bit peaky, mate. Was it the punch-up?

What do ya mean?

Dunno. Did you get hurt in the head or something?

Nah of course not! Jesus Dazza, steady on, mate, I'm not getting philosophical in me old age. I'm not writing my bloody will just cause some fuckin noong jumped me with a carving knife. You shoulda seen it. Fark. But it makes ya wonder what's goin on in some bloke's heads. In the past I just went for it. I made em stop thinking about anything until they woke up.

He grins and drops his butt underfoot. He can feel Sheriffness in his chest – and it is not cigarette smoke and it is not phlegm.

Dazza is smiling like all his St Vinnies girls have come at once. And now he has that to look forward to too, those Vinnies chicks a bloody sight hotter than the gay boys in Royal Melbourne.

How did you get on in hospital mate? asks The Sheriff.

I felt like Humpty Fucken Dumpty. After me fall. Humpty Fucken Dumpty.

As bad as that eh?

Yeah.

The two of them, one sitting one standing, happy to be sharing this stuff they call a conversation, regardless of coughing or getting old. But not philosophical. There's a lot to like in it.

But it's not true about The Sheriff. There is an urge in him to do what he cannot understand. It feels something like an instinct but has all the wrong detail. It is her and the kids. The wife. He wants to go back to see them without having an excuse. He is getting philosophical in his old age, or is now, a few too many dents in his badge.

Then there is a notice of sale for Angus' house in South Australia. The letter arrives stating his share of the sale, and with it the contract of sale with little red tabs on each page for where he must sign or initial the deal. It is not enough money, although he has not been cheated, and it is more than he had expected until the final negotiations. House prices had leapt in the years since they bought the place, he and the ex-wife; they didn't merely climb, they absolutely soared, prices used up all the verbs for crazy rising, they found happy metaphors and some of it Chinese for ‘investment in Australia'. Then as the city celebrated or cursed over this, it all plunged in the real not the metaphorical altitudes: the hills. After the post-war charm of living in the hills and the trees and the bush and then bushfires… hit home. Hit homes. There was only this same one buyer who maintained his liking for Angus's property. Even then the agent was philosophical about this rather sober outcome.

This lapse of values doesn't indicate how much Little's mum's house might now fetch. While Gawler is not the city or the Adelaide Hills, there must have been gains made there, maybe Chinese land investors have transferred their love to Gawler. It sounds like a Chinese term for something.

For his own cut of his house price, it means a good solicitor not a good ex-wife. Because she hated him and in disproportion to her years of happiness with him, her years supported financially by him. Because of anger. She told him she'd bring in the Lesbian Solicitors to cut his balls off.

Now he has a happier quandary: what to, where to, buy?

He and Jasmin are lovers again in the happy way of being lovers not quarrelers, visitors not de factos. Even if words and sudden changes of mood mark their lives, hers mainly. His by association. And Jill is making progress with documenting his grotto world, the live-in men who camp there not always happy to discover her taking photos of them asleep, and photos of the rockpools and the falls, and of the mist rising and the ducks gliding. All very fucking pretty, one of them yelled at her, but why can't a man sleep in his own nook in peace? Public land. A man can.

She is working on them for interviews. Photos. The book.

Then the weather turns demonic: for a week the temperature hits numbers above 40 in Victoria and the inevitable fires begin, they are as unstoppable as illness, some spontaneous, others hardly accidents, lit by the nut-cases who know the case yet not the casualty. Winds over 100 kilometres per hour thrust fire into some houses. This is the worst fire anyone has seen and it fills TV sets and in vast tracts of orange and red firefronts it overwhelms the communities as houses are taken ferociously by fireballs that shatter them and leave them as flattened racks of bricks and shrouded in ashes. Fire destroys people and little babies, it takes cats and dogs, blackens horses in the stable, cattle in paddocks, and guts cars and vaporises birds. Communities are eaten by fire. Families can lose one or more of each other (fire is like a war) and along a familiar road some people are gone forever.

Yet someone goes back into these regions and re-lights the fires. Unhappy with the as-yet uncounted dead and wasted towns, the streets sagging with bricks. More death, the hand asks, more from those fingers. Angus feels medieval and Koranic about those fingers. The removal of. God knows how the survivors will think of it. How to talk of justice for the dead knowing there will be many rests of lives without them.

And as the hours pass the city people watch from the terrible distance of television. Only they will know this. The deaths will increase, more bodies will be found, people will be found burnt naked to their beginnings. Ordinary volunteers with no training find them. They will never be the same. Towns are turned to flame-scorched rubble and convoluted roof-iron, this rural Bilbao of loss and destruction, where metal fireballs crashed on streets. Ordinary people who bought carrots and eggs in the morning and yacked to a neighbour that afternoon know now the neighbour is dead and the small family with children have died. Under the metal. Under the bricks. There is nothing left.