Waiting (2 page)

Now Big liked this and so he liked the Indian guy.

The government, why won't the government do something about alcoholics and knives, boys with knives, and how we Indian people work so hard and in here it is dangerous, but no, no, they don't do anything for Indian people.

That's what they remember the 7/11 Indian guy saying, with both hands waggling everywhere under the flattening whiteness of fluorescent lights.

So here is this idiot guy again, begging. Déjà vu. Little pushes Big away past him and they get up some momentum, and only later stop to listen because Big quite suddenly wants to stop and listen – and puts a hand on her arm to shush her – to the awful noise of fitness and aerobics flying from an upper window.

Aerobics my arse. Big makes his pronouncement in a boom to the cars and pedestrians in the tram-divided street, the night air in his thin hair. It's a beautiful night, Little says.

Nearly.

Nearly what?

Well, it's not night-time.

Oh, you. (Romantic even, she doesn't say.) Big isn't listening:

Maybe I should join a gym? Me, in short skirt and bloomers, though I could make it a singlet opportunity… Taking on the machines for a bit of authentic weight reduction, blood detox­ification. I like the sound of that: if-i-cation. Effing-cation!

His big voice releases the sounds again.

Ox! Effing-cation!

For years Big has concentrated on shopping as his means of losing weight, he says shopping is the best walking, twice a week, bag-laden.

However, once, he and she had trammed down into the city and joined in early-morning tai chi at Fed Square. They joined in the white T-shirt and black tracksuit enthusiasts who were falling back into Blown Down by Wild Hurricane more than Grasp the Peacock or Wave to the Mountain. Free-of-charge sessions aren't restrictive, anyone can join and so they did, and so there are nutters galore in the classes.

Big and Little doing Tai Chi! Big got the stares and Little got their sad smiles, Fair Wave of Chinese Compassion, and she liked it.

A young man at the back kept looking at her bottom, said Big to her afterwards. Her largest attraction, Big said, and he stared, Big said, for longer than Advance and Overwhelm the Monkey would have required. Little was never big in the bosom, her mother always told her, and Big has said her small boobs are more dumplings than steamed duck, and silky rather than firm tow fu. But she knows that in any large enough group there will be a young man who has the flushes for her big round pumpkinos.

Because he is just a bit jealous, but could never say so, and because Little is a few years younger than him, in her thirties perhaps, Big decided it was fairer to keep the fat than lose the lady. So. They never went again.

She knows Big is coming down quickly from his brief IGA monologue. Relaxing. In the moonlight, on a clear night, the weather is so good they lift their bags but let their discussion drop.

In no time they are leaning on the well-worn rail, waiting for the tram. They face the Post Office. On the ground floor of this grand building they, every second day as a rule, enter by their personal key, go into the corridor of post boxes: the wall of numbers. Once inside, they inspect their souls as if before the grotto… Because Little's mother, who is ailing (her mother is attached to the word ailing), ailing for a year or so now, has told Little to expect ‘the call' in the form of a letter – her own call coming more directly – of her demise. Silence ever since. Maybe she'd forgotten.

Little carried the last letter around until it was worn out along its fold lines. And it stated that Little, just Little and no one else in the family, “her little daughter”, will inherit the home in Adelaide.

Fire

There are men she likes the look of and men she gets used to, mostly. Some men are full-on pretty boys and other men are onto her with their personality and she can hardly, later, recall their faces. Annoying, the vagaries of attraction. Jasmin knows embar­rassingly soon what she likes in this man, he's as close to Lady Chatterley's Lover as an Aussie bloke can be after a day's work of shifting sand and stone. Though she's never admired the foxy DH Lawrence she's known she might one day take on a Lawrentian hairy man. The writer had a thing about his mother and about class, nevertheless, this man is no fiction. He is very oi oi oi, but classy in his own way.

He is a man who looks like a man used to look like. Shoulders lumpy from real work and arms muscular and hairy and scuffed, to be honest, not decorated with neat little muscles and waxed skin. No fashionable tatts that she can see. After ten years of a University life she is accustomed to seeing long-necks and nerds in the corridors, student eggheads and emos, and lecturers pausing in front of the white-board to stand side-on so the students can notice the mood, the tight trousers.

Angus is a landscape designer, and his sandy skin is believably of the earth, and he stands upright in his outside body and his outside mind. He designs and constructs lakes and ponds for council parks and then he builds them too. He even grins with his muscles. This is a man who lifts and carries stones.

At university Jasmin's kind of day does its lifting firmly but abstractly in a fixed firmament of alliterative and tautological shifts. Heavy. Hers is an inside mind. She knows what a foggy thing the mind is and how she and her colleagues spend years of effort pretending to a kind of precision, but if the mind really was so precise it would veer off into fright at the absolute knowledge of realities like impending death. So, her life remains safe and rational most of the time.

She is standing at the outer of a party in the fire-blackened hills. Men, women, some kids. Meeting where the bushfires have a year earlier taken lives, where the evidence of destruction is still black around them in the branchless trees and charred fences. Crisp black patterning in the surface of wood. Earlier, as she drove into the district she had been shocked and moved by the silent signs of gravitas. But increasingly now on the darkened spindles of trees − dramatically green foliage.

Closer, there is more emotional hugging than any party she has seen: and a lot of crying. There are survivors here one year on from the fires and their tears come through for the loss, the un-changing loss, that most of them have and will keep. She had not realised this was in fact a memorial service done the Australian way – secular – as an anniversay gathering, with some guests having lost family or friends, others animals, no less beloved, and property; nearly all have lost property or know those who have.

Angus knows this awareness is the fire-shadow, how it has fallen heavily over all of the locals. Respect for people's trauma is para­mount. So there is also quite a lot of booze, casseroles and vivid salads in bowls, but no barbecue – it would be unthinkable – so much sad reason for undemonstrative people to hug and cry and have some time out in this company, and to eat and drink… Their shocking dreams cannot live here and never will; they all know the others at night dream of flames and the terrible smell of all manner of things burning.

Angus is telling her about the news channels roaming the area for memories of the trauma. How intrusive they are.

In some ways it's only right, he says, showing compassion to balance the horror they keep referring to. But it can be bloody ghoulish having them driving around looking for people to inter­view. Horror isn't a topic, it's an experience.

He stops and waves, no, he shakes his hands a bit more.

I think trauma is… something like a hologram in the nervous system.

This idea, of holograms, has only just come to him, and he is pleased with it regardless of the gravity behind its use. Jasmin sees his style is to think aloud; even if he is a hands-on working type this man is talking holograms?

Angus nods to his own thoughts.

For most people it's something you can't see, but they… he indicates the guests at this party… they can see it alright. In each other. And in their own minds.

They both look back towards the main group of people.

Sorry, he says to her, I should lighten up a bit. Here we all are – knowing very little about not very much.

And so Jasmin remembers something.

Did you know there's a gang of cosmologists who believe we are not even here? That all of us are holograms. We are being projected from two-dimensional pixels on the furtherest wall of the universe.

Pixels? You mean we're like… bits of graffiti stuck onto a wall? And not just any wall but the last wall in existence? Jesus, how whacky. And I thought I worked too hard.

And he grins at his joke. No, he is no Lawrentian. But she has the last line:

What they don't say… is what's on the other side of the wall.

Ha!

His face reddens with welcome laughter. He is ruddy. But some fraction of his ruddiness has previously been bottled. He has been drinking. But, he is sad, he tells her, and no, he is not a local. He's from South Australia, arrived a few years ago. Unlike the others he does not expect or even want the occasion to cover him, to wear a fire suit of No and Only Us for strangers. Like war suits, for those who have been in wars, so fire suits can be: don't talk to the others, they won't understand. And it is true. They won't.

When he is silent he has a habit of inspecting his roughened hands, and of scraping the edge of one thumbnail against the other. Every so often one of his out-breaths comes louder. Sometimes he thinks he is a dope. Yet he seems self-reliant, and calm. Something in him has been burnt, all the same.

Jasmin sees this. She sees as a profession. Semiotics: she is all eyes and thought. But she is empathetic, not just analytical. She makes eye contact with him and holds it, so it's personal. His blue eyes. The burn she knows she sees if not how she sees. She believes his strange words of loss, the semiotic not on the outer, as she is used to, but inside, in the reach of intuition. She is the real stranger here, not him. She has known students for whom even Twitter cannot quash the grief. For many others, yes, oh yes, so totally is Gen Y putting bad news out of their busy minds (Whatever, she asked me, and I'm like: I'm real hot tonight for Jason. He's such an idiot ha ha. The girl I'm after tonight I want to get her pissed and then… LOL). She knows how many other people in the fire fronts crouched and lay down in tears and burnt. How survivors had no choice but to return, saw past the house in brick-pile and ash, to their loved ones in white frames of bone.

Angus. His name sounds like a stone, she can hear in it Ingres, Angst, Angastura, Anxious… Anger? Or, here, in the fire-shadow, as he puts it, saying Angus she hears Sadness.

He makes a confession. When he told her he worked in land­scape design that was his party version: his actual job carries more stubborn weight – landscaping, gardening – and way less kudos. He designs public places with lawns and waterways. He moves mountains, and then he builds them up again.

He says his profession has added to the surface tension of the world: heavy cities, and now massive landscape constructions that might sometime (yes, he has dreamt it) plunge below the earth's surface when a critical mass occurs. Think of it: so much concrete and stone in one place. Jasmin does. He has blue eyes. He is responsible for earthquakes?

He was apprenticed years earlier with dusty carpenters and holds as a precious memory the elegant wooden frames of houses before they are covered over with tiles or tin. He appreciated the pine wall-frames and the window battens and later the rafters, the way buildings waited, open to sunlight like something made for sun worship, their pinewood skeletons a kind of poetry of rafters.

Until bloody roof tilers clamber over a house and darkness spreads within the rooms below. The slab goes slug-cold in winter.

Look at Stan's house, he says, pointing to the walls. This is one good thing borne of adversity. Which I…

He thinks better of saying it. Instead he refers to the strange metal framework of the external walls. How the lawn is a generic lawn but the house is clasped in unconventional metal frames. The outside walls are steel-banded like coopers' bands around a wine barrel, but square, not hooped. Jasmin has been wondering when to ask someone about this. It's not something she has ever seen before. Why then? she asks him.

It stops the walls exploding outwards, he says. It's a unique idea which I… Well, I designed it for Stan. He built it.

When she frowns, disbelieving, he tells her: really, he's not making it up. He has, he insists, no qualifications whatsoever, just a lot of nerve. But he knows about fires. And what happens to houses.

A woman approaches them and tops up their glasses. Angus smiles and she says something to him Jasmin doesn't quite hear. Then he laughs, the house story apparently forgotten.

Well, it must be damn good wine he's drinking. She in turn sees him like his rafters, standing above the roofline, an image of frames and happy angles. But he is up and down; there is something lost about him. He too seems banded, like the walls. Even his conversation has bands around it. But it has bright blue eyes. Light among the darkness of the mood and the eerie burnt-out landscape.

Glancing, warily perhaps, when she is looking away, Angus sees she has a sensual face and dark eyes. She has visible cheek-bones, her lips hold a generous and now, he guesses, a wry smile for those close to her. He can't see (he will later realise) that the woman is always worrying over books and complex meetings with her students at University. Her academic face.

As they continue talking Angus's guard is relaxing into unex­pected anecdotes she tells and he laughs at, and in her eye contact, and at the way she refers to Melbourne as a design city, and he likes that. Design. Not his kind of design, more her kind with the de and the sign parted with a hyphen. Designate. As a place of signs. Signs? Is that what she does, something to do with signs, he asks her. Well, she excuses herself, she is a semiologist. She lets him get away with What, a seismologist? after his images of stones and earth­quakes. (Once, at a performance of Coriolanus, she heard a dragged-along bloke say to his girlfriend, this Cornelius had better be good.)