Waiting (17 page)

And he is, pacing across the room. He has been doing it without realising. Across the room and back, like playing shadow tennis. He's an idiot. And she actually said. Ahead of the pack. As if it was football.

Anyway, it seems her mind has digressed. She stands and walks back into the kitchen, her feet slightly splayed and making a faint slapping sound. Walking, waddling. She is an habitual walker of the back and across, her route being to the neighbours where she deposits her vegetable scraps in their chook-pen. We have amalgamated chooks, she tells everyone, and that she feeds them her scraps because they don't. Not that she'd know, and she takes the eggs at a rate above the percentage of livestock, her two chooks among the twelve forming in her mind the sum of four and maybe five eggs to the dozen. She collects them in her cloth bag and then, every time without fail, before returning home she calls out hoo-roo and enters their house without knocking.

The neighbours have stood at their window and watched her waddling towards the pen, bucket in one hand, bag in the other, thinking the same thing: she is the slowest-moving woman on the planet. And the most presumptuous.

Inside her kitchen is all noise and noise of some purpose other than work. Something is being pounded relentlessly, perhaps to tenderise it. A clatter of plates, that wide flat sound of large dinner plates, a hard but attractive sound after the meat-bashing. She tells him she has bought a steak for him, so nice to have him home, knowing he likes his meat, even if she is a vegetarian and has been ever since his bloody father cleared off.

She dotes on him, she says, she feeds him his favourites, doesn't she, her lovely son.

Then why, he wonders, is she destroying the meat, was it poor to begin with, and is that a hidden message: meat, yes, but a cheap cut, and aggressive hammering. Doesn't she watch all the kitschy kitchen shows, the cheffing experts? Then he has to praise her charring it black and dry, too, or she will stare at him and ask what is wrong with it, or is he simply forgetting his manners. It lies on his plate like a flattened goanna.

Home is Where…

The mealtime roles: Little is stirring the stew she has fiddled with for too long, which is finally managing to thicken in a pot on the stovetop; and Big, the cook, is reading a newspaper. Despite Big being a cook by trade, shearers his speciality, and many times better at cooking than Little is, and capable of knocking something up in half an hour if necessary, such is the truth of domesticity that these two have adapted a division of labour, ie: she cooks and he informs her of the leading stories. Every relationship must come to rest on something.

Shearer's cooks were a class of nutters anyway, anecdotes of knives and breakages and almost always booze, disproportionately high counts of schizophrenic bi-polar suicidal cooks, there were stories about shearer's cooks who butchered and dressed (the operative verb) sheep while in the nude, and who wandered about in the nick when the quarters were far enough from the main homestead. No one would be daft enough to cook with skin bared. He knows he is unusual and he enjoys it. Has the build of, but not the passionate ugliness, of a rugby player, and when drunk he / they / cooks do not molest small women or wives, of their own, or their friend's, nor wander through hotel corridors late at night, pissed and pantless. Mostly they don't. When Big used to go to town he dressed in trousers or huge baggy shorts, the kind he now wears at home. He likes the breeze around the balls but not as much as the nudist. It was his health that undressed him.

This is our quiet time don't you think? she says, and turns to see if he has continued reading or has looked up, ah well, the former. It's really cosy just us and cooking and eating and you reading, the way you do. Every night well nearly every night that is until the others come in and make all their noise.

At which moment he does look up and sniffs at the stewish air around him. Not bad, he adds, maybe more herby than oniony but not bad at all.

Then head down, briefly, then forward and up for the story leading over into the next column.

Did you hear what I said though? It is pretty nice isn't it? I was thinking that if I get all this money we will be able to get a place of our own all by ourselves and this would be normal for us and no one to disturb it.

This time the paper comes all the way down onto the table. The suitcase is bursting underneath him.

Getting a place… um now is that an idea you think might be or would be the go?

She continues stirring.

We can think about it can't we? You know we have talked about being by ourselves and you know how much I'd like to. I know that was when there wasn't any hope of it. Now, if there's my mum's money… we can do it.

It is a very serious situation, says Big, in a phrase he knows says nothing much. He means it. He is not a man to show his anxiety but here it is: in the worrying thought of having to move. Very serious, a phrase he knows is raising the drama, and raising the drama is something he likes on principle, but this is different. He is sitting on the burgeoning case, he does not want any bursting open when the situation is wrong and he'll have to miserably squash everything back in. What can he do? She is only thinking aloud.

He pushes the paper away from him.

Our own Little house?

He emphasises the capital L in a way they are familiar with.

You're cute.

It's a big responsibility.

Like that house next door, except that would be too close. All this lot would try to make it their second home. The thought makes her heart slump.

Big is being sober. He decides to outstate her if he can:

This place is very social, you know. We have more time with our fellow humans and have more fellow feeling than, and I'm not talking mate and mateship, than ordinary people in jobs and families and bloody fantasy land. We are lucky, living here…

She turns the stew off and turns to look at him, to see what he's saying, and there it is these few words when he's more usually given to many. His face forward when more usually he lifts it like a big bird and nods his words out for all to hear. There are tears coming through Little's eyes. Little is not stupid.

We'd be by ourselves, she says. Don't you want that?

And she might as well continue now it's begun:

We could go for one of those holidays you're always talking about.

Big's eyes open suddenly and stare at the wall.

Holidays?

For a man who does no work, the sound of it, so bare a word so kitschy a scene, startles him. They have for years talked trips, talked other places. Big expanding on this or that or even the place to go, Big big on the ideas and the large suggestions, Little left with the crumbs, the detail; and even if detail in words and discernments is his thing, in general, when it comes to schemes he prefers the gesture and she the filling in. He plays like a champion, all bravado and vision – and all of it is complete bluster.

What holidays? he says.

Her groan is like a yelp and she begins crying as seriously as the situation. Big looks back into the newspaper.

Out there for everyone to see, someone's mattress stands north and south on the front porch. To see and turn away from, sickstain perhaps, and soiling brown and blood perhaps, discolour its centre, and the question anyone else's mattress faces us with of in order: old boyfriends and old girlfriends, old meals, babies and children, old bowels, on and on.

Now the sun has a sprung inner substance of its own. The sun booms like a container ship, one without tugs, just the nonstop work of gravity, our own centrifugal and centripetal music of space-time. Our small world, with one white tug and a modicum of warmth, increasing though, a long way to go, to burn, but burn us it will.

When Dazza sits in the sun in the XXL armchair he says he often considers his selfhood. Dazza, the big man hardly mentioned among the many big ones, except for the humiliating time when he had his teeth kicked out and his dentures split asunder in the side alley everyone pisses in. Over-fed, fried food as sexy as sex, Chiko Rolls usually, and far more likely than sex when you consider his enormous girth. No cleavage-blessed woman in red leather is going to share her Harley with Dazza. Though he does look like a Bandido. No, he is the tree and the elephant.

He is a Dazzling spitter. Leading from the front and bringing up the contents of the unconscious – this man hoicks up noisy things from his throat and propels them into the garden and onto the tree. It is done without great extension, just a slow leaning back of the head then a sudden forward slingshot – it flies above the paving stones and splats onto the trunk of the orange tree. Trees and Eden and this big Adam in the sun: he coughs and coughs to hoick and sling.

The return of the repressed.

The Sheriff walks out to be The Sheriff in the morning sunlight. Awake and alert and to scratch his crotch, which is thankfully silent, and to sweep a ciggie down from behind his ear to his lips and, without his matches today, to flick flick light up warm up the air that little bit extra. Ah yes… That's better. Reason to wake up, wonder, take of a morning cuppa, lay down something the length of a bowl, then wash and stretch. How often he's thought this deep reassurance before old age, that he still has the basic wherewithall to function and fight and laze in the sun as naturally as someone else might feel the pressure building and then simply let off a fart.

A Police van stops level with the front gate, its doors slamming onto his feeling this good. Two cops? Boys in blue, well one of, a big usual cop and, in long black trousers, long legs and a high bum, her toughtalking hair pulled back, a sexy, unmadeup woman.

They are looking for…? Well, one of your new blokes, as it happens, long dark hair, ex junkie, about 36, a gentleman with not many, very few, let's be honest, fuckall teeth, goes by the name of (consulting his clip-file) John Fitts.

Fitts, because of course he bloodywell doesn't, does he, not anywhere or in anything and yes he's around someplace, take him he's yours, don't bring him back, nice day officer. Then The Sheriff has to ask them outright, given that Dazza is awake now and holding his target practice back.

What's he done then?

We're not telling you, Charles (this makes The Sheriff wince, they do it on purpose). It has something to do with him, if it is him, begging outside the IGA bottleshop and kicking some bloke who wouldn't give him money.

Fucken hell.

Yeah, pretty much what I thought.

The guy has taken the art of begging up into bloody idiocy.

They stride in, they know the way, they know every crack and cobweb in this place. And he is caught red-bummed: sitting down, waiting for his turn with the toaster. So utterly domestic, but even crooks and junkies or ex junkies do the simple everyday things. This man does try to eat.

Dazza lets fly and the orange tree receives another act of grace.

The Sheriff can't believe they called him Charles and his whole day is shot. It has occurred to him again this week, how when he stands sunning himself or considering the street or chesting some dozy fuck inside the hostel, that one day he will not be The Sheriff any more. He will be… Charles… And when the down-time comes, when he is cleared off to a nursing home, it might even grate on him to fall totally into Charlie like a kiddie, his brain gone soggy among all the other wrinklies and sweeties and toad-faced oldies. Now he can feel his fists curling and the desire to whack some fucker in the chops gets huge. Any fucker. Whack them until he feels young and strong again.

Thinking of this, he really does want to go up the street and whack the young bloke playing drums. The old fire is not gone yet, not bloody likely. The idiot amateur son, the completely untalented but indulged son of the neighbours, has a tightened drum-hide inside his head, and for all his fitful arrhythmic crashing from two doors up nothing resembling rhythm ever happens.

There must be a father somewhere. They own a Volvo after all. But it is the mother The Sheriff has had it out with, and she is usually civil to him. They all complain about the terrible thrashing the son gives the skins and mutter how much they'd like to… She listens, not exactly sympathetic, or taking them seriously, as if men on the unemployed side of life must necessarily be deaf. And lack rhythm.

Big comes stumping up the pavement, the trolley bulging. He has been up with the cockatoos, shopping at the Vickie Markets. Big takes a wide digression from a house nearby and calls out Hello Missus very loudly to the old woman who is leaning out towards him trying to grab his arm. She hangs forward from a post beside the gate and is talking about her cats. She keeps on talking until he is at the rooming house.

Jesus Christ himself, thinks Big, laboured less to carry his cross up Mount Calvary. Or Golgotha, as the Aramaic has it. Nor did Jesus do the shopping you can bet on that, the vegetables especially heavy, the whole trip onerous. One can't even think. And I a far from fit man do it too often. Why can't the way be reversed at least with the market uphill and the descent therefore on the homeward and laden leg. He is getting very annoyed.

He sighs and stops dead.

No. Why does every twenty year old emo boy think he is a master drummer? He's going for it in bang bang bang mind-tripping on a small scale and bashing on a big one, and in no time at all he is banging the mind of a different Big. More drumming, when just last week he's yelled at the kid. Now with this recurrence from the mind of Nietzsche taunting him, yes, all the bloody way from the 19C, Big props his trolley, steps out onto the front porch of the house and yells in through the neighbour's window.

Shut that shitforsaken racket or I'll wring your neck, you scrawny little bastard.

It is a scrawny little bastard. They all think that, a spoilt and spindly boy living with tight black jeans and the matter of paying rent to his mother the only issue he need worry about.

The drumming stops. Big returns to his trolley, thumping of foot. Then goes inside the hostel. Ten minutes pass. Then it starts again. Bang bang bang a bang thump crash bang bang… Very stupid.