Waiting (16 page)

Or so Big says in the tram on the way home. Then he says:

It is a pity, about money, I mean. I would love to be receiver of it and bearer of it, to bring money into the little pouch of our culture, which is all too frequently buggered, the culture I mean not the pouch, when self-advantage is the norm and the excite­ment, for God's sake. I imagine money being something like an art, or a grace. Not a mere quantity thing. Not the stinking cheese power of it.

His wild metaphors fly without embarrassment.

But societies need measures and with our deluded culture claiming itself class-less (my arse) it falls to us, and money is the measure.

Money is a measure?

Yep. Money is a measure. Measure is not a standard, or a value, it's a power. Our good Mister de Silva belongs to a profession inscribed in our myths as the second oldest. The man of law. I assume our Julia has adopted the first. Both are weighed by advantage, that of money. But this man is of a race who not only likes old-fashioned British names like Hilda… you will have noticed how often he enjoyed using your birth name. Very Asian of him. They know how money is mixed in with worship, real worship.

The Hindu have gods as various as currencies. Come to think of it – Gods are currencies… So he inherits gentle resignation and dare I say it a certain golden-skinned charm. I like him. Gods still echo in us, whichever silly street we live on. They do not say fortune or salvation, they say grace. Some wash more than others.

Little laughs at this.

But some are as shitty as business tycoons. You see, those bastards…

(His talking can degenerate into violent forms.)

Those shit-for-brains…

Then he stops. Without reason, or causal relation, he remains silent. Eventually Little realises he has paused, then for long enough to stop thinking of it as a mere pause. He is doing one of his pauses. Freeze-frames. Who knows where he is? He seems to have slumped. Or is there an answer he unexpectedly requires from her, the lack of which is holding him back?

Yes, she says. I agree.

Still nothing.

Of course I see what you mean, she adds.

She doesn't mind his mild crudities, she finds them endearing. From the big man with his less than fancy knees just showing, enough to make her think she really must get a longer hemline in future. She has to notice these taste issues, he is only interested in the colours and accessories. Finesse is not his thing.

You seem to have stopped, she announces finally. He is staring at the new hospital and is maybe worrying about his weight and his blood sugar, which might, it is possible, turn so bad one day he will regret having any, bad enough to kill off his kidneys, that is, and then what eh? The two of them on dialysis, taking turns on public utilities, and if so, what a catastrophe.

There is something worrying him, weighty in a very different way, and not measurable or bankable, or in any way akin to cricket, or to the visitations of grace. Change. Change worries him. And this is what Big sees ahead of them. It is too big a worry for him to tell Little about it. So he sits staring at the terrace houses as the tram squeaks uphill from the city and as more people climb on and push into the slow spaces in the aisle, the few cubic centimetres where no other person seems to be.

So, like a small but abiding irritation with a lover, Big pushes this worry of his back into its metaphorical cupboard. It is so nearly physical this act, and so difficult, it reminds him of that once clichéd image of someone over-packing their suitcase and then sitting on it to force it down enough for closing.

He is sitting on a suitcase, his burgeoning thoughts stuffed beneath his burgeoning buttocks. Not a nice place to be. Little must find the same thought in her mind and speak of it first and then he can stand up and let the contents spring into view. He just hopes she has been thinking the same thought, and will sooner or later mention it. The springiness is hard to keep down.

Adelaide

Angus has emailed Jasmin to say that he is off to Adelaide for a few days. Also an excuse to send as email attachments several of his designs and a few jpegs of other finished sites. He isn't boasting. Email is so easily flirting without courting, or courting without courtship. Even to explain he can't see Jasmin for a week, as much as he wants to, carries within it a kind of remembered touching.

He is going to Adelaide like other people go to Adelaide – because they have to. To check on his re-built house, still up for sale, to check on legal advice regarding the sale and the long-awaited settlement with his ex-wife, and to check on his mother, or call in and see her, if only briefly. It is, after all, his home city.

Angus's mother is one of the Ugly Sisters, as he calls them (not knowing Big has rather tactlessly suggested to Little they be known as The Witches). She sits on the same ladder Little's mother sits, equally, but more nicely atop of. Ladder or boa constrictor, raised more or less vertically, with the promise at the peak, the mouth.

They have different stories these cousins. He is aware of it now, like the Ugly Sisters in that fabled family, of their good and of their less than worthy behaviours. And when your own mother is the leader of the pack… He has not met Agnes since childhood.

Agnes is the little cat that no-one loves, who wanders off alone and never comes back. The family don't even make half-hearted calls in the night. She is fluffy, black and white girl cat, a domestic moggie. And perhaps she is a little dim. She is easily frightened into rushing off when there's a noise, and only later, when everything's calmed down, stepping her self back into her fluff. She is still Agnes for him.

Cousin Angus was the boy cat who jumped the wall and never came back. They called for him in panic because he was their favourite. All night, all the next day and night. All the sisters fawned on him, on his height and his good manners. He was their little man. Scary. Not a fool, once free he stayed free. And he lost Chastity after two girls down by the creek talked him into a rather surprising double act to the sound of ducks and dabchicks. He was fifteen and sure of staying free.

There would be no taken-for-granted access to his mind again.

Manners can cool. So the two of them, these cousins, in escaping the snippy world of the fates and furies, are somewhat alike after all. As escapees, his was a slow, continuous escape and hers used up all her courage for the future. Harder than his. It was like migration. She fell into despond, she went and lived with people so down on their own luck they demanded nothing of hers, and then she got sick, and then the kidneys put her in paid accommo­dation, where she met the man who would make her head spin – the man who dressed as a woman.

Angus remembers her father, his disliked uncle, among the sisters their lone keeper of the name. The family said that when he heard of Big, the man-woman, he was disgusted. Then he died of something bad in the stomach – he died of pain – and this wasn't discussed and Agnes never returned for his funeral, which labelled her twice-sinfull. Her mother knew the odds, the nasty put-downs the man had swayed over his daughter. Because he was in so many ways a cowardly ‘angel at work, devil at home' kind of man, no one said a bad word against him and thereby made the family hurt twice for his every awful once.

Her mother hadn't been able to check him, she a mother, a woman in a generation of men who carried on unchecked. They were not good parents. But how could a mother have guessed the kind of Freudian displacement of a daughter whose need for a surrogate father-and-mother-figure resulted in her choosing a man who wore skirts. An act of imagination in her so wild no one could credit it.

Angus's life seems straightforward in comparison.

He has only now seen this for what it is, more sawdust in his boots and dirt under his fingernails, no great success, no great falls from grace either. With each year making its own quite unre­markable fit, his life has been as good at basic joinery as his occupa­tion. Is he repressed? (He wonders what Jasmin thinks of psycho­analysis.) Is this what it leads to? (And the philosophers.) Angus had taken to the wood and now to the landscape, sculpting it for the silly rich and making just enough money to look back on his family with benign – but distant – toleration.

I think she did it the hard way, Angus says to his dowdy mum, Julie, his frumpy mum, his sitting-there-with-lizard-eyes mum. Her chair has no proper back. Not that she lets on that she is in fact slumping like an old woman and she's only 71. From her manner it is unquestionable: know-all, judge-all and, with force if necessary, have-all. Her manner, that is, not in her admissable version of herself. What she doesn't admit to is like another minor character inside her. Julie, who is tactless but all intent.

Who did it the hard way?

Come on Mum, who were you just scheming about ?

Oh, her. I wasn't scheming. I never scheme. I just have unusual ideas.

Well…

Angus pauses and stares through the curtains at the rows of rooves, the silver cars parked on the street like bars of solder. Thinking how much harder it must have been for Agnes, for Little, more alone in the world than he could imagine. She must be strong, or crazy…

Well, he says at last, to his mother, sometimes the crazy ones are the wisest.

She isn't sure what he means by this. Her shawl of shiny fabric is lurid, in streaks of green and gold, and she pulls it closer around her throat. She sits there like a big frog.

Some people have told her she has a kind of crazy instinct for things. Her old hippie aura is still hanging on. Just days ago her niece Meg told her how glad she is to able to consult with her, Julie, and Meg mentioned, to oddly illustrate her flattery, that time when Julie had pushed the doctor away from that little boy after his terrible fall from the tree. The boy had been nesting. Julie picking the child up kept him conscious.

Though it might have risked his spine had there been an injury of that sort. Lucky for the boy. Lucky for the hapless doctor.

All the same, Julie isn't going to take responsibility for anyone's more serious downsides, no, that is bad karma, and she is right into karma these days. It shines in her like her over-bleached hair shines of a youth she no longer possesses. Karma comes before us, she likes to think. It sounds better than it makes sense.

She is still thinking about her wisdom appearing crazy. And she frowns when she responds:

Yes, well. Some of us are ahead of the pack.

But then noises erupt from her raucous throat. A kind of hoot but rough. He realises she is cackling with her own praise; such a pleasure to know her own worth. As if.

When he was a child these cars in her street would have been white, the kind of paintwork that lost the edges of good design so completely all makes and models of car looked the same. Conformity was white. White was everywhere recommended: nothing like a white car to keep the heat down, they are without any doubt the safest cars on the road, it stands to reason everyone can see a car that's white. At dusk, you know, when it's so dangerous, you've got to have a white car.

The unexamined life is not, is it, worth living.

There's no holding back his mother, her froggy-shouldered self-­righteousness:

Now you remember to do what I said and make your cousin change her mind. Poor little loony…

Mum!

Now, Angus, I am not being unkind. She had a breakdown.

She re-settles herself before continuing.

The money we're talking about is ours, Angus, yours and mine. Well, mine to begin with, then yours. I've looked after my (big breath) bloody sister… for all this time and I want her to pay for it. You know there's no one else who is looking after her, I'm her unofficial carer. I have a Uni diploma in Care and she's benefited more than she realises from my involvement. I mean, she doesn't have a clue. I take her to places, I look after her, I cooked her a meal on Monday night. I won't stay with her, no way! I won't waste my time listening to her silly old ramblings. I'd die of boredom I need more intelligent conversation than that. She talks about her little group of friends and the books they read. What a waste of time. She would be dead without me.

What do you mean, dead?

What? Who else do you think looks after her?

Well, the Silver Chain, Meals on Wheels. The Community support people. And, I mean, her friends…

Her friends! All they do is tell her what stupid musical concerts they're been to. She wanted me to take her to a Beethoven thing the other day. Can you believe it? Waste my time at some matinee? She takes me for granted, that's the trouble. I told her I was working.

At what?

Working! Didn't you hear me?

Do you regularly cook meals for her? Do you clean her house?

There are other ways of helping.

Perhaps he doesn't want to hear now this self-deception rant has begun. It is possibly endless. Rants seem endless. Even his own rants seem endless. Why do people rant anyway if endless­ness only proves the rant is useless and can't change anything except to argue the answer – out of frustration. An outdoor type himself, he likes to think people should never sit brooding on their greedy or paranoid ideas, on their hunger or anger. And if they do, then they should do the dirty work themselves. Apparently his share of her dirty work is to do what he has never liked doing under any circumstances – put pressure on someone. Because it's coercion, and that is not his sort of thing, and clearly not Little's either from what he's gathered, from what he overheard about her breakdown when she was trying to teach kids who didn't want it. The aunts all called it a breakdown and keep calling it a breakdown, even now all these years later, they want to hear the word hurt her. As if using that word was more pleasure than any compassion they might have felt towards her. The aunts. Her aunts. His aunts. The wicked sisters.

Why are you pacing backwards and forwards like that? his mother asks. It's making me worried.