Waiting (26 page)

You've just made Redemption sound interesting, adds Angus, and in a place like this.

God's territory, the down and out.

Jasmin thinks that's pretty good too.

Yes, and along those lines, there's Blake, Wilde…

Which makes Big laugh out loud.

Ah, Oscar. And, looking at Angus and abruptly changing the subject: Little tells me you're not the ogre she thought you'd be. Good.

Then everyone is wondering what to do next. The room simply isn't the place for two strangers, ogres or otherwise.

I think we should um leave you to it, says Angus and… ah… arrange to meet somewhere nearby in a day or two. By the way, he adds, do you know the man in the TV room?

Sammy?

Not Sammy, the one with Sammy, the one drinking wine. Do you know if he's from Adelaide?

Big and Little look at each other blankly.

No. Don't know, she says.

OK. Perhaps you could find out for me? Later. I have the feeling I know him from South Australia. But don't mention my name.

Coolie, says Big. He scratches his head and inspects his finger­nails. We c-call him Coolie.

And what was that all about? Jasmin looks over at him as they walk back to his ute. The man in the room, I mean.

He ignores her. Then he turns away to inspect the terrace houses lining the street:

Look at these houses, all of them worth more than a million, and right in among them this rooming house full of down and outs and, well, eccentrics. How crazy are they, this lot?

He laughs.

I've seen this Tom bloke, all squeaky clean but a creeping Jesus. Compelled to confess his sins, button-holing people.

She nods, says he reminds her of the Ancient Mariner. Or the eternally wandering sinner…

They walk on.

Yeah, maybe, he answers, eventually. But something about the other bloke I saw in the TV room… I'm pretty sure he's the one who disappeared after he took a match to the bush up where I used to live in South Australia. The CFA fellas talked about him. Lit fires to get in on the drama. A lot of arsonists do, from the inside. He was in the CFA.

But it's not actually likely is it?

Her tone is perhaps more exacting than she intends.

Yes, it is.

I thought that idea was an urban myth.

He puts his hands on his hips, then drops them loose beside him, immediately conscious of how she might read this more aggressive stance. So before she responds, he says:

No, it's not. The only problem is proof. You listen to the news? They have charged people all the time, based on precisely that, and they are CFA guys who get their kicks out of it.

Angus… I realise you lost your house in a fire.

Jesus, these idiots start fires for the hell of it. They get several fires going, then report them, then head in for duty trying to be bloody heroes and to save the world. You mentioned this urban myth thing before. You can't just reduce things like that. This might be the guy who burnt down… my actual house.

Your place?

He started fires. But he wasn't prosecuted. He got whacked for it instead.

They continue walking back towards her house, where he has parked his car so they could walk down to see Little together.

What exactly do you mean, asks Jasmin, when you say whacked?

Look, it's usually kids, teenagers, who light fires. But this guy was a bloody adult. So he got district punishment.

And what is that exactly?

He was punched about a bit by some very angry firemen.

Please don't tell me you were involved? That's like lynch mob behaviour.

Don't be so academic. Of course I wasn't.

Good.

Worse luck.

You don't mean that.

I bloody well do.

By now, Angus is beyond stopping. The fire of anger is in him. Except the two of them are at stand-off, there in the middle of the street. Jasmin is thrown by his stubbornness and anger; she is unable to move; suddenly he feels like a cowboy.

OK Angus, who exactly whacked him, as you put it?

I just told you: the other bloody firemen, the CFA blokes whose lives he was putting at risk.

She is surprised at his tone; he at hers.

Who else do you think got him. Not the cops?

Angus, don't talk to me like that.

You don't believe me. You think it's bullshit. As if I was that naïve. And what would you know about it?

Fuck you Angus. Don't get aggro with me.

But change is all over him: his sand is now stone. She stalks off.

People died there! He shouts it and begins following her. This guy was responsible and… you defend him!

There is no alternative – she keeps walking.

My house was burnt down! he growls this, to himself mainly. My marriage was burnt down!

She starts running now in the direction of the University and therefore veering away from her own street, and when he realises he stops following her. Jesus. He can't believe she is running. Then she is gone around the corner.

For ten or so minutes he sits and waits on a stone wall outside a block of apartments, hoping she will re-appear. His blood pressure must have been close to operatic, maybe even melodramatic, his pride displaced into unhealthy squidge somewhere out of recognition.

Fuck fuck fuck.

And in this street of all streets. They must have looked and sounded as if they've just walked out of the rooming house.

Even stranger is standing alone outside her house knowing the house is empty. Back in his ute he resists calling Jasmin on her mobile. He can still see her walking away. Running away. From him. It offends his sense of… what? decorum? It makes him angry at himself.

As if he had insulted her. It was some catharsis she should have recognised.

He's not sure if he feels bad because he dislikes her leaving, so, what she did, or what she thought he did. He hates having yelled at her. He sends her wild thought-waves: text me or ring me and make it sweet. Fuck you, you contact me or just fuck off.

So much for spending the weekend with her.

He realises he cannot remember the man's name. The final insult, having a lapse of memory, the man, the fires… He will, though, he will.

That night Angus cannot sleep for going back over the details of the afternoon. They roll through him endlessly. Who knows if she is doing the same, if his close-up shouting is something abrupt and damaging for her, if she is feeling guilt expanding like waves of drunkeness through her just as they are through him.

Hopelessly unable to lie there passively in his own oppression he puts on a gown and sits at his computer. Such past as he thinks approprriate, begins to collect in lines of typing. Much the better accumulation. Hopeless, blamed, angry, unsure, he is at least doing something about it. Typing and re-typing, remembering:

‘The police identified the same man present at each source of the several separate fires. These fires later joined up into an extended fire-front. The man had been kicked out of the CFA the previous summer on suspicion of arson, for wildly dangerous action in the face of smaller outbreaks of burning. The bloke was self-destructive. No one would work with him. He was too fidgetty. This is a serious problem for a fire-fighting team. Even more frightening was his irrational behavior during a council back-burn when he ordered younger men working with him not to patrol the leading edge of the burn and not to question the intensity of his own, singular fire-lighting from the front, but then he tried to send them in against the wind when it changed. That is selfish and dangerous. He was trouble. This back-burn was saved from escalation only by a sudden shift of wind direction (they happen all the time, good and bad) pushing the blaze back over its blackened fire-path. In the hills the winds shift suddenly like this. Fires make their own wind too and have sometimes engulfed fire crews. This shift was serendipitous (nice big word for a gardener, eh?). There was no tragedy and therefore no specific crime.

‘During the investigation for the bushfire that took my home and the lives of the three local people, this worrying information came together. Not enough to provide a prima facie case for criminal proceedings. They had everything except: no one saw the man actually light the fires. Not with matches or lighter in the grass. So there couldn't be a finding beyond reasonable doubt. Circumstantial evidence, in a civil case, would have dropped him right in it: the probability that he started the fires was extreme. He always knew where the whereabouts of fires. He knew before the CFA men knew, and not through radio calls – he didn't have a CB radio. Because he didn't need to intercept calls.

‘He wasn't very bright. After the inquiry he had the nerve to appear at another local fire dressed in the yellow fire jacket and boots he had no right to, or access to, he must have stolen them somehow, and tried to pally up to some new men in the outlying lines of a burn. Then one of the older men turned up and sent him packing. He was like a paedophile, someone said later. Ingratiating. But fucking persistent, and shameless.

‘After this he made another public appearance he wasn't expecting. In the local casualty ward. Then again, blokes said, in a psych ward, having cut himself or something, tried to ‘self-harm', as they say.

‘The polic investigation found evidence of the assault – they told everyone how hurt the man had become, how much pain had been inflicted, how he'd tried to cut his own arms, they were unusually specific – but they could find no evidence of perpetrators. Then he was gone.'

At first Angus thinks he is simply explaining, but he is more troubled than that, and less innocent – this email is, yes, part catharsis, and also part argument. Justifying himself. He re-reads it several times. Attaches it. The rest of the email waits for an apology. It waits as he walks away and returns, re-reads it, walks away again.

And then he types in how sorry he is. How… (the words move around in his stomach) he wants to see her as soon as she is willing. Then he swishes it away to Jasmin.

He is no fool and it cannot annoy her, but he has thought about this: what if the answer has the power to make the disagreement worse. It happens so often and so easily it must be a curse waiting in the minds of us, a little failing we cannot quite think ourselves around. The old ‘I meant well, I was only… , but then you…'

How to stop thinking of the obvious? He tries to keep her at a distance, or is it himself he is avoiding? He wants to ignore the sensory desire of her, too, this open-ness returning in him, of her lips, the feel of her body against him, her unexpected observations. Her contralto, the alluring skin of her neck. The erotic is so layered in his mind he feels immoderately joked and un-joked by his earthy and mossy work-day memories. The erotic has two natures, but a common being, it is inside and outside; it watches on, it sees no one, it is there and it is gone.

How long will it take for her to answer? He worries for the next hour. Then another hour. She mightn't even be at home to receive it. He can't concentrate enough to read. He wishes he had a dog to take for a walk. Instead, he makes a piece of toast and layers honey over it. The crunch, the sweetness, temporary comfort.

Perhaps he will email her again saying she is… and only dig the hole deeper. One thing he knows: you can't know how serious an argument has been, or remains, until you reconcile with each other, or are at least face to face and trying. He wants to hear it arrive. The volume is turned to maximum on his computer. When it arrives he will hear. This will tell him what he is dying to receive, and fearful of reading.

Bing!

But he rushes straight in.

In her reply Jasmin vaguely apologises for running off as a rebuff and one she couldn't handle talking through. She again acknowledges his lost home, his anger over it, his grief even. (He had never thought of it as grief, maybe she was right.) How some things trigger a reactive streak in her, she says, especially as he was aggressive and, she felt, had put her down. Calling her ‘an academic'. He was slighting her. Name-calling never a good thing. He might consider this. The way he had behaved… (ie: apologise for it). So he is a grump too. But she does understand him, sort of, and is not upset, not especially upset.

Relief weakens him. He sighs hugely. In a few minutes he is becoming Angus again.

Does her email require an answer?… And how soon? A response, at least? And if so, what? The endless confusions of tone and intent. As he re-reads hers is he really sure she is apologising or is that a winning rationalisation he is reading for his own benefit?

He is not much of an emailer, not a Facebook man or friend, and his hills-dwelling mind is sad again to feel so un-related, dis-connected. Well, un-compromised. His choice, of course, but no less melancholy for that. Who doesn't want their cake eaten? He feels another big operatic sigh come and go, leaving his chest lower and his shoulders slumped.

Then he remembers: Coolie.

Changes

Nothing prevents her delaying as much as work delays her, work being her everyday and nearly total preoccupation. Living with a fellow academic has only intensified this over the last five years. Five years! When Jasmin wakes on Sunday morning she thinks of the day ahead and when she waits into sleep she recounts the days passed. Uninterrupted, such seamless diurnal involvement might continue until she is over seventy years old and she has more than a few times wondered about that. Wondered how at seventy she might recount fifty years of academic activity in much the same way as she thinks back over each day as she prepares to sleep.

In wondering what might change between now and then she thinks about and keeps thinking about Angus. Delay. Delay. By Friday night they have been emailing themselves back into equi­librium for a week. They speak by phone and she hears again, because she is at home, at night, before sleep, how his voice is smoothly modulated and surprising for an outdoor man, the un-muscled part of him, the shouting all but forgotten. Because it is convenient and close by, Angus has just suggested he meet Jasmin at her house when he next returns to see Little. It is a return to Little's home and for them (Jasmin had said, relaxed enough to joke about it) the return of the repressed! – of their bingle in the street.