Waiting (10 page)

And the publishers think it's a cracker. Head of School. His fellow academics spew over its second-hand Derridean deconstruc­tions, its last-word-being-said of Edward Said; its only good bits the shredding and insulting of all writers, including Nobel Prize winners (all academics hate them). Et al. But essentially they bite at his success.

Unless they want a promotion. So they all read him, hating him every Friday night while slumped in their beer at the Club. Yes, OK. We know what the public want and this is not a commercial proposition and now go away.

She really must take her tablets.

She had almost been a goody-two-shoes. Bright at school, conser­vative parents, father who was quiet enough to want quiet in a girl but maybe not loud enough to insist. A mother who was a bit fey but never eccentric enough to take risks. They even went to church sometimes. But Jasmin was never quite stable enough to get the goody-goody thing right. Even when she tried. She questioned teachers when she thought they were wrong, holding her hand up and speaking in her loud voice, instead of arguing her concern in her homework assignments.

She mistook girls' friendships and vocal excess for wild approval of her personality, not as sign of barely making it into the clique. She followed the clique's rules but only by being conscientious. The rules never made sense. She was adept enough, luckily, at pretending.

Until it all went wrong.

It happened in her first year of high school: Jasmin sided with a good teacher against her for-many years best friend when her friend implicated the teacher in a taintedly sexual accusation she knew was untrue. She was cut loose by the friend, shocked by her and by her own principle, and humiliated at a result. She had betrayed her friend with the rightness of… what? doing the right thing ethically, for… what?

Then she saw it. Saw manipulation everywhere, she began to see its signs, she knew then how she had been inculcated into unthinking ‘rightness'. She learnt ambiguity. She studied this as her own right over cultural rightness.

She realised to her great embarrassment that she had thought, and spoken, but hadn't seen. If anything, her seeing now is its own problem – too much of. Unavoidable. Now she sees in order to think. Then to speak. Then to write… Now she has to let go and feel more or she'll live long and layered but miss out on the langorous.

Now waiting for this book is hurting her work profile where it matters: her Uni publication credits. Her first book of essays wasn't quite the mustard-cutter the system wanted. They want refereed articles and academic books, the manuscripts of which are shoved very slowly (contradictorily) through the intellectual scanner to emerge as the real thing. Because, of course, she is in the boat, whether she likes it or not.

There have been emails back from the publisher and, in response to her urgent calls for up-dating, there have been none – she has begun to think there is another book in this refusal to communicate. In the age of effortless communication, an email that takes thirty seconds is left unwritten for twelve months. Everyone is saying it. Publishers refuse to stay in contact. When contact took serious effort they used to nag their writers; now that it's easy, they don't. Their writers are the nags.

She is a terrible waiter, the worst waiter she knows. Only she among her friends gets angry if a bus is late, if the traffic stops, if any person even a person she adores keeps her shuffling on the pavement for ten minutes. After twenty minutes her anger goes up by the minute. Fucking publishers! She is aware she swears too much. Remembers Kevin Spacey interviewed as Director of the National Theatre being asked if the British actors were very different from the US: Well, they say cunt a lot more than we do. She loses herself in cursing and once lost in this limbo, this rudeness of the other, of those who steal your time, she loses all tolerance. By the time they turn up she hates the world and her curses fall on them. Shitheads. Time should be used as planned and is never for wasting; to her the worst kind of waste there is – is suspension.

Suspension is far worse than suspense. Richard, the boyfriend, here and not here, the book in manuscript only, here and not here. Suspension has no resolution, it is the nothingness that should be something, that wants to be something and it tears away at her.

She wants something more physically real.

Which is why she thinks, not for the first time, to fancy Angus. His hands-on world, the physicality of work and earth, of water and the long textures of plants. It was Herder (Johann Gottfried, the German) who said of all the senses the primary way we know the world is through touch. Way back in the 18C Herder was thinking that. What a smart mind he must have had. He gave short shrift to Aristotle's favouring of the eye, of sight. Her own discipline.

She must touch the world more. To feel. She wants to feel these made things of his so she can share in the pleasure of their being finished, that unlike manuscripts, they exist, they are here.

North Melbourne

The tenants are not pleased the apartment's gardens are so lush. Fresh growth has brought tears to their eyes. When Angus proposed shrubs and even a small tree or two with native bushes and maybe dichondra, it was for soil that was heavier and able to take a small but essential supply of water. Despite winning the tender of re-planning the gardens for the Body Corporate, he opted for the water-thrifty and the less green kind of indigenous plants. At the time, he knew little about planting native grasses and now Wimmera rye grass and a few others have been growing unseen in the margins of his knowledge. There are stowaways in any transaction of dirt. They have grown greenly into several bushes, bunches a metre in diameter and as bouffant as Bob Hawke's ridiculous hair… except they dried out almost overnight in the unexpected heat and went to seed and then the northerly winds picked up and blew the shreds of husks and barbs, the pollen rockets from the grass, up against the doors and windows of the apartments. When in hot weather, the rare cooler nights called for windows to be opened, the tenants and occupants emerged next morning sneezing and itchy-faced, their eyes running from allergy, they were caught in anti-histamine heaven and hell. Their throats raged. Their nostrils dripped.

The Body Corporate took their complaints and rang Angus to let him know what a dick he'd been. Hay-fever Terrace.

He thinks: landscape without pollens? Which pollens? He is clearly not suffering the affliction. He floats as all the others drown.

This is one menial contract with follow-up work. So the problem has passed from bad to worse to a lesser state, forgotten about by the strata manager, as the weather cools and the soil gets a few downpours to calm things down. His off-sider Jen is the perfect relief-worker in this. She delivers, in equal parts, enthusiasm both for her work and for cheerful people-watching. This is something outdoor labouring in public delivers in spades, and which you take as pleasure, even payback, for the mindless staring and sometimes sneering you collect by working in front of complete strangers. They are working on the first terrace, above street level and below the apartment windows. He has driven his ute up onto the pavement and parked it below the terrace so as they dig up the offending plants they can hurl them down into the back of the ute. It is half full of soil and sods.

Hayfever, eh? So you still have a bit to learn about plants? she taunts. Even a man of your experience.

Huh. Bloody landscape architects are worse. They are ignorant about plants. I shit on them.They still get all the best jobs.

How come they don't know?

He thumps another shovel-full down onto the ute. How satisfying.

Yeah, funny isn't it. I thought they learnt horticulture. The people who hire them think they learnt horticulture. But they haven't. They're more ‘urban spaces', where the benches go in those windy bloody squares outside new high-rise office blocks. That's what they are: steel bench people.

You work for them, but? Wasn't the big pond job one of theirs?

The big pond job? I like that.

Eh?

I have spent years on that bloody job, Jen. Lakes. When they cost that much – you call em lakes! That smaller job you call hips and ponds, fine, but not my precious Lakes.

They dig and toss the sods and tussocks and the grassy mess over the wall into the ute, working their way further along the garden and away from the vehicle. Jen climbs back up after driving the ute into position.

I've been lucky, Angus says. Shires only contract jobs to qualified landscape architects, who then sub-contract the work to geniuses like me. I'm better at rocks and water than plants, but I can do plants.

Odds and sods, mate.

Jen is good to work with. Planting these pesky grasses and spreading the soil had been heavy and skin-worrying work, which Angus and Jen stood away from frequently.

Over time they have noticed – hard not to – the strangely lurching blokes walking up this street; and the gay couple who strode in matching shaved heads with skulls of matching shape and matching clothes and matching shades, and even matching dogs; and the funny Chinese man who jogs up the street and back several times in steps of no more than half a metre, his jogging only slightly faster than jumping up and down. That lurching walk, Jen told him, the ones the lanky blokes do, is called the boob walk. No, nothing to do with girls, it's the walk they do inside.

You mean crims?

Yep. These blokes are showing off, it's badge of honour stuff.

Jen is used to engaging with crowds from her two-day a week job at the Zoo. Large numbers of people visiting all year round, people asking questions. She has a strong, almost man-youth figure with straight shoulders and a strong torso, which gives her what the yoga practitioners and the racing drivers call good core-strength.

She has a curiosity about the body and perhaps because many women assume she is lesbian she is sympathetic to the variety of anomalous body and gender types in the city.

Not like this in the country, she assures Angus. You just never see any of these city types in the bush.

None that she could call to mind anyway. Some rather effeminate men in towns would be all, and the more usual girls like herself, muscled up and shaped from farm work done since they were kids. Bigger towns, though, are Bogan land. Fat.

As they work across the garden area they leave behind rough craters where the grasses have been been ripped up. Angus swaps his fork for a rake and begins evening out the soil and smoothing it over. When they had changed this garden from its original, introduced species to the current native plants, they had removed a fragrant row of jasmine. As he rakes through the soil he can still sense the small white flowers the yellowish rush of perfume – lust of the shrub. Daydreaming at work. It's that kind of day.

They finish unplucking the rough and scratchy armfuls of grass and begin replacing them by nip and tuck with smaller sprawling plants. Plants without fever. He hopes.

Idler varieties of daydreaming he does in his lone ranger self. Angus is overtly Mr Independent, even at school preferring to apply himself, against his parents' and his teachers' insistence, to physical things, not academic. Though he later completed one tatty year at the University in Adelaide. He had thought about wine-making, enrolling at Roseworthy Agricultural College and majoring in oenology. Even as a boy he was keener to feel the scent of things, the world of sensation. He liked the wind the sun the rush through his nostrils of seasonal aromas, the sweet scented gum of gumtrees in afternoon heat, and leaf-fall and blossom, and pasture grass curing after cutting…

He had been a country boy, after all, and his parents on the land. He still thinks of himself as physically and psychically among the elements. Here, at the apartments, he is aware of the several concrete steps down to the pavement where his ute gapes like a steel hollow – he can practically touch this physicality, and likewise feel the two-story beige walls behind him above, and across, his back and shoulders. When his mood is full, as it is now, he is inclined to feel blessed. Body and soul. Fulsome. All the old phrases.

Today he is also thinking about inner city living, and whether he might, himself, take it up. The Jasmin effect. Or just the awakening of his more social self at last, hibernation post-fires probably over and done now, and the Adelaide shadows lessening.

A man is walking past the apartments wearing a dress of tight-fitting cotton. A summer dress for God's sake. The man, it's definitely a man, is also wearing a shocking orange wig, the colour clashing with the blackly pepper-and-salt stubble on his jaw, and the dark hair of his fat calves. Angus signals to Jen, who immediately stops work and stares at the man.

Back in South Australia, Angus' mother has told him he has a cousin living in North Melbourne, a nervous ninny that is, his mother says, a girl of something age, except she is in her 30s by now, poor thing. Except this otherwise colourless and inconse­quential cousin of his lives with a huge, cross-dressing man in his 60s. A very strange kind of father-figure, indeed, a weird (for his mother weird is the end of the world) gay man who parades around in full public view thinking he is a woman. When Angus had told her cross-dressers are not necessarily gay or even trans-sexual his mother had winced at both words, at both possibilities, and changed the subject.

More recently she has suggested something else, he should find this cousin, who it seems is likely to inherit her own mother's estate unless someone more deserving does. Angus needn't guess who this more deserving someone might be. His mother and her sisters have been rivalrous since childhood and remain so despite being in their 70s. And he is used to his mother's implicit conversation running quietly underneath the spoken. Worse, much worse, she wants Angus to visit the cousin and see what she's like now and well, have a word to her about family obligations and so on. Inferences he can hardly bare to consider.

Now that bloke, he says to Jen, has the kind of build the blokes in the bush have. The build, I mean. Not the skirt.