Waiting (9 page)

Pig's arse we are.

Except I found Jesus.

Eventually.

Better late than never.

You took your time. You took your bloody time. And strictly speaking Jesus is only one third of God.

I found Jesus when Billie Graham called to Jesus within me.

Ha! OK, so you have thought about it: you needed to be interfering with boys in order to become a good man. Is that a fair trade?

I was a drunk. I wasn't in the gutter, I was the gutter.

Tom has been reading. A big sigh escapes the Big body.

Just give the Braille a bloody miss for a bit will you?

No. I can't.

Big is an inside man: his thinking and talking are all he seems aware of, this talking to himself or, whenever possible, to the world. But even he can see Tom's face is serious; worse than merely pale, he is unhappy.

Then why not at least (Big in his most exaggerated English accent) shut your bleeding door!

And he slams it shut regardless.

In the rooming house they have a shared lounge-room where they can sit around and talk. They love it. They talk jokes, TV, gossip from the street, even listen to Tom, anything. A common room. Where they chase starry or earth-bound ideas around like mis-bred sheep. In stinking cash-cow houses the landlord more likely uses every pocket of airspace, makes a room out of two cupboards, and so this common room of theirs is a luxury. Their only.

Big has been saying how the mysterious house down the street that always has renovations happening, concrete is being glugged through thick hoses and steel joists are carried through the side path, all without visible result. They must be building an observatory at the back.

And now the observatory idea has come up again.

Nah… I'm not with you on that one, Tom begins. Tom is shaking his head at the idea, which is new to him. Tom arrived a year or so ago and he is not always present at silly-conversations. His mouth opens so widely Big gets in first and expands his reasoning, as if placing the idea there on his tongue and blowing out his cheeks. The outlook, the time, the night lights. Observing the night from this earthy promontory, this unseen jetty… the otherworldly joys of nightwatch and astronomy.

Big calls it again. Nightwash. Even the sound of it… lovely. It is a theory. In science, he reminds them, these men of the world, and Little, that if the theory is beautiful and the facts don't agree, the facts are wrong. Einstein.

No, no!

This from a very impatient Tom.

It's not an observatory, it's a granny flat. Anyway, I hear it began as a granny-flat, he says, his head shaking like a symptom, and it was going well until rising damp…

Rising damp? Here? Have you not noticed the drought?

Then someone notices Dazza is gap-mouthed. Gazzer has had his teeth kicked in and not said anything. And the Kangaroos have lost yet another AFL game. Life's a shit.

At least they weren't Dazza's real teeth. Dentures don't often go walkabout, if they do they'd do better than to choose a piss-ridden alley on a dark night. Lost they are, though, because Dazza, though a larger man than Big, was pushed from behind as he legged it home one evening from the 7/11, and he never recovered enough to get up again. He was, once down, a turtle type of man, heavy and maybe rocking very slightly, back and forth in a heavy shell. Arms and legs useless. A couple of young thugs saw they'd done the wrong bloke and were so annoyed they kicked his face to punish him. It was his own fault.

It is amazingly rare for the very dysfunctional men inside the rooming house to get over-violent, in a place where the lost is the real and the poor is the everyday, where the future does not look the same as it does in the other houses of the street. Apart from the odd blow or curse, a cuff in the kitchen over stolen food, a fight over TV programs, a drunken stoush soon bruised and ended, the occupants' lives in this house are lived… if not in exemplary peace then in a roughandtumble tolerance.

They have fought hard to keep this unique (for a rooming house) roominess with its common room. Rooming houses are more usually reconstructed on the basis of a high compression ratio like a car engine. Now there is a threat which remains: to divide the common room into two more bedrooms.

It is a myth to assume people need wealth to be happy, they simply want both. Or that the poor are necessarily violent, even if they reach breaking point. Here, money isn't visible, health isn't reliable, happiness isn't madly obvious but that elusive funny-drug, that smiling neurotransmitter from ideal societies, is not entirely absent. Happiness is the residue left behind when people are not unhappy.

These men do not work, they exist. Work for most of them is a memory, a thing they are surrounded by and which they, those who ever did work, have learnt not to feel guilty about. About not doing.

Though some do. Tom does, sitting in his room thumping his Braille for God's blind followers. Thumping the Bible and thumping the Braille and thumping his foot on the floor in time to Billy Graham's famous bass-baritone, George Beverly Shea, the man whose Southern crooning and larynx are tuned for Jesus. The man has a beautiful voice and yes, even athiests think so. But how sentimental and old-fashioned these Jesus people are. Gentle Jesus has a deep voice.

A ship is booming into the harbour. Its foghorn or boomhorn, it sounds like cigars, like deep colourful and flavoursome movement in the air. It doesn't sound like Jesus.

Jasmin

She and another lecturer are running through their course introduction for their first year classes. Both are dressed in black, as they must. She explains to the students that while some fields of study are hardly esoteric, the general public (this term meaning nothing sensible) hasn't heard of them. Their own, for instance.

The faces this early in the year are facing the front. Two women taking turns to speak with energy and conviction. All these eager faces. She knows how quickly this will change.

Simply never spoken of. Not even given a populist treatment like Alain de Botton's choir-boy philosophy. Baldy Baton, or what­ever his name is, passing on the ideas of others. (A few nervous chuckles.) Yet Jasmin feels everyone is capable, if they only think about it, of understanding the various layers of semiotics she and Jill are about to springload this course with.

They show just how applicable the ideas are. How everyone is ‘reading' signs and symbols every day, in books and TV programmes, on blogs and Facebook, in the works of genre in film and entertainment, popular culture, everywhere. How celebrity ‘icons' like Beyoncé or Miley Cyrus – through their constant PR stunts – are providing signs we the public, but especially the fans, are reading all the time. That is, we are doing it whether we know it or not.

What is a man who wears a turban? Well, perhaps he's a Sikh and thus the slippage when a Sikh is attacked and bashed in a northern suburb because he is a ‘terrorist'. Meaning Arab/Moslem/Al-Qaeda/etc etc.Words and their thrown-down relationships to things, to meanings, the patterns of judgment, and reaction, hatred even. The students are dazzled and worried. They applaud because they know it's a great performance and don't know you don't applaud at University.

After the lecture she leads Jill back to her office. The trick is to say as much as possible in the lecture then clear out fast. First lecture especially. Further questions can be asked in the tutorials. Otherwise some sticky students rush to the front and do not detach easily. Some people will not take a hint.

I think that went pretty well, Jill announces, easing herself into the chair on the student side of the main desk. She is Jasmin's new PhD post grad, already lecturing and tutoring since the year before when she was rounding off her Masters. Jasmin opens a cupboard behind her desk and pulls out a bottle of whiskey.

This is called Starward, she says, reading the label then turning it to Jill. It's distilled in Essendon.

Essendon, you're joking? A single malt?

They look at each other, then at the bottle. Jasmin laughs.

It sounds crazy, I know, but it's not bad. In fact it's better than not bad.

Good enough for a minor celebration, she adds, as Jill's eyes widen. But I'll have to nick some of that ice I saw in the staff fridge. Just a bit.

She walks outside and after looking along both reaches of the corridor she sneaks into the tiny staff room where a fridge and kettle are set up.

When she comes back she closes her office door.

Don't want anyone watching this, she grins, not at 11.30. My expert status will be shot and I don't want that.

Expert?

As an academic she gives public talks whenever the suggestion comes up. She loves being part of the University's ‘Expert on call' campaign, not because the Uni is flogging its staff as a community resource, which it is, but from a desire to make her field more widely understood. This term ‘expert' loaded with University authority and male power now also means flunky (no public capital letter) of the Institution, and this duty is obligatory.

Give me a break! she explains to Jill… I tell them what I have is expertise. As for what I am…? Jesus, who knows what I am?

She pours them both a shot and then takes a sip.

Of course, one of my male colleagues told me not to rock the boat. They always say that.

And what did you say?

I said I'm not in the bloody boat.

Jasmin invites herself around beside Jill and pulls up a second chair to consult the pages of notes her thesis might pursue.

They talk for half an hour and Jasmin swings her arms about and points and laughs and cannot hold back one jot from her own field of mockery to the field of genuine objectivity. Already there is forming an idea she might put to Angus, the man of public spaces. The party gardener.

Jill's new thesis isn't formed fully and she needs a case study… As usual, Jasmin says too much, shoots off a monologue of opinion backed by theory which, in better balance, Jill should be discov­ering for herself. Even so, Jasmin will return to re-writing her first lecture – on football – within seconds of the student leaving and forget the content if not the context of what she has been saying.

Jasmin is overwhelming. She gets passionate. She is impossible, and impossibly generous; when so many academics guard their thoughts, she supervises like an open aorta.

When she closes her door after this session she stands there dumb with fecundity. Briefly. Jill, on the other side, stands in a daze stronger than anything brought on by single malt.

Then the door opens and Jasmin walks out, locks it and says:

I'm coming downstairs with you. She holds up a cigarette and lighter.

I didn't know you smoked.

I don't. Just feel like the occasional ciggie.

That night, as she watches the TV news, Jasmin is more subdued: no interaction for an interaction maniac means silence, even faintly calm. The 7.30 Report and some right-wing prick of a leader comes on to infuriate her again. And when water and land-use interviews begin and some patronising dill rants on… It all gets too much for her and the weather changes in a flash. Talk talk talk.

Stretched across her lap is her black Burmese, sleepy beyond purring. Moss. If she moves, Moss holds onto her with his claws extended, to let her know getting up isn't allowed. Even her cat talks too much.

She is so thoroughly used to being alone now that Richard the partner (that dull word) has all but faded from the rooms. She has laboured past the waking at night stage, wondering if he has another woman over in England. His reluctant (sounding) phone calls are prose rather than poetry these days, well, nights. Beside her stands a long-stemmed glass half full of wine and the remains of her Hainanese chicken rice. If Richard doesn't return, then what? Will she even want to keep up the rent by herself? Though she can afford to, just. She looks around. Her small table is a hand-span high with essays, papers, files and newspapers, magazines, books, tissues, at least two apple cores…

There's a pile of washing by the door, the washing she never got around to doing on the weekend plainly visible from the dining table. All girl habits, all show and tell, including bras and crunchy knickers. She is more than a bit relaxed in these habits and Moss has a smooching affair with all her smalls. Cats.

Just in time John Clarke appears beaming and bald and crazily channeling Tony Abbott still being the CarbonTaxDestroyer or BigNewLyingSomething but so very earnestly, which is better than Christopher Pyne being serious because ex-Jesuits are funnier than uptight goodytwoshoes fullygrown school prefects and no one is funnier than the droll and mischievous John Clarke.

Breakfast is her usual prevarication between toast and honey, and a choice of fruit or oats (fruit bats, she associates), and yoghurt if her teeth aren't bothering her, or puffed millet the floaty and lightweight healthfood of fairies – and a choice of fruit. Honey and milk, that sharp wet combination of possibly healthy intake, or is fructose intolerance the unpredictable bogie eating her heart muscles? Why is eating so difficult in the morning? After 12 hours of fasting, why does the stomach resist its own desire to eat again?

Bare arms on the table. She presses down onto the vaguest thoughts of her tutorial plans. Improvise! Always works best. She walks to the sink with her empty bowl and washes it out by hand rather than let the muesli harden impossibly (why is that?) on the ceramic. Every day she does this she hears her reason in her head and as unstoppably as thinking fruit bats after fruit ‘n' oats.

Sometimes she thinks she is trapped by trivia of her own devising. As for her lectures, yes, improvise. Know your stuff and it will come. Trust your game of the intellect. Good luck everyone.

What cannot be trusted is a publisher. Why is she still waiting nearly two years after they gave her the nod? Publishers are full of fire and stinky smoke: we know what the public want and this is not a commercial proposition and now go away. And yet Andrew bloody Hutton has written an unreadable book-as-insult on post-colonial post-modernist readings of novelists who those same novelists now want to kill him for. Because if they can read more than a para or two of the sections based on their books he seems to be crucifying them, with more spit and vinegar than nails, for crimes they never committed, for sins they never acted out and for structures not fascist, sexist, racist and backward, but merely for what the publishers call ‘readable' ‘what the public want' ‘exciting', breathtaking, artful ‘works of greatness'. And these same publishers have published him.