Waiting (27 page)

After the call she texts and suggests he come over tonight, have a meal, and if he can take the following morning off…? Monday is her study day (Long weekends! I bet that took a bit of wangling, he said. He was tempted to say – you academics…).

The meal goes well and they drink too much but when they move into the bedroom she makes it clear they are sleeping, not being any more intimate than that. Angus feels regret, or disappoint­ment though in himself or in her he cannot decide. It hardly matters – as soon as they get into bed they make love. Then they are dozing close together, and she has left the bed-side light on.

Easing from sleep in the morning, her eyes not even open, when she moves her hand over him and slowly reaches down his belly his cock rises immediately. Pharmaceuticals can only dream of such response. She too is impressed, though a girl might wonder if it isn't shallow maleness. It hardly matters as they make love again.

They have been voices on the phone, they have been savouring talking at night more than they had before and now they are silent, or speaking by sounds not words. Over and through the pre-verbal and sensual.

While she is showering, Angus brews coffee in her small kitchen and takes it outside.

The sky is blue, cloudless, windless. It is utterly still. Autumn. Anyway, she is slow getting ready even though or perhaps because it is Friday, her free day, or because she is after all post-coital, and so he has time to soak in the perfect warmth outside. The sun seems to be privatised, hers alone, high above her long, grassed courtyard. Her house is cool and quiet.

Then there she is, walking with her long paces along the path towards him. Why is a lover striding towards us so sexy? And for the one doing the striding: awareness, body, moving closer, being watched, self-conscious, uncertain, happy, legs apart, the muscles of the bottom (so gluteus maximus) alternating. Then the two of them walking together through the streets back to the rooming house. He is lucky, is he not?

After meeting Little at the door it is Jasmin who walks in first, in past the common room, where two or three men are arguing about Bert Newton's hair, and Angus glances across in time to to see a man make sudden eye-contact with him. No. The man looks away.

Coolie! calls Angus. That's what they call you here?

He doesn't want to upset Jasmin – until he sees she has gone ahead, so he stares at the guy.

Coolie looks terrified but shrugs. Angus, knowing this is too soon to get involved with him, turns instead to Little's room, and is surprised to hear Jasmin ask after Little's mum June.

Behind him he hears Coolie shuffle away into the lower levels at the back of the house. Little is unable to explain to them exactly what illness her mother has, and is presumably dying from, nor what her prognosis is, because her mother refuses to tell her.

It seems her mother is the reverse of a hypochondriac. That role is taken, her mother always says, tartly, for Victoria. Vicki the sicki, she calls her sister. Vicki the victim. Vicki, her victuals eaten by ghosts – since she has no physical ailments they find no actual nutrients, so the mind is where the ghosts feed. Not every family has a Sicki, but many do…

Whereas June is sick but claims no cause. Old age, she says, knowing full well that her 75 years, her three score and fifteen, do not add up to greatly-enfeebling drama. It is astonishing to realise these women in their seventies still think of each other like this.

Even so, Little is not about to show Angus the letters she has received. Without much to add to this she blurts out their big trek to the lawyer's and the legal building and the smoothly bald Indian gentlemen so generally reassuring and so specifically interested in cricket.

I assume he said that unless your mum's will states otherwise, you will inherit?

Well…

The lawyer's words or what she recalls of them are secrets. Besides, even Big tends to the black and white, presuming people guilty until seeming innocent, which is totally unfair. Until they show lack of apparent motive, in which case, say anything you like in front of them. But he has physical presence. Little does not.

Just then Big enters the room, reducing the space considerably but increasing her confidence.

No problem from his point of view, Big announces, matter-of-factly. Agreed, understood, well accepted. Protocol. Or whatever it is. As long as no one talks her into changing her will, no one, meaning…

He searches around the room, for delay, then tries studying Angus for intent, and finds nothing there.

… your mother. Will she?

More than likely. Try, I mean.

Bloody woman. Sorry. Maybe you should talk her out if it.

Oh, she won't listen to me. I have already tried to talk her down but she just won't hear it, she's not that sort of person. She… or the sisters… I think Little's mum is stoic enough to do the right thing.

Big sighs and slumps onto something angrier.

That lot are mean sods. Yes, to Little. Their own. Little was in need and they looked away. Her own mother is cold enough but the rest are like ice.

For all his directness, Big is not really comfortable.

It is simply hers by right. She has never been a pest or a problem or a drain on her mother's funds. In any way whatsoever. This place we live in may (he looks past Jasmin's left shoulder) be a dingy kind of hole…

Jasmin realises Little has passed on all her comments. She opens her mouth to speak, apologise perhaps, before Big, seeing her take breath, jumps in:

Dingy, but our kind of dingy. We make do. We are happy here. But there is more to this family money business than making do, or happy. There is principle. And that…

Except he stops before indicating which, or what. He seems less himself, somehow, mentally subdued in Jasmin's company, and even Little has noticed this. After the earlier visit she had asked him if… and Big had replied I will not pontificate in front of a trained and paid pontiff. She is the real thing… to a degree, ha!

Then he catches up with himself and continues:

Even her mother has been miserable to Little in the past. Given her nothing. Poor Little. Now she must have her just…

He lifts his palms.

Then he turns and looks at Little, who is wondering where this speech is going to end.

You have no idea how good Little has been about it.

He is satisfied with that, such a balanced and logical statement of the situation.

There is a yell from the corridor. They realise the door has been open all this time. Their carefully ‘quiet' conversation is audible. But this is nothing about them.

Fuck, calls Sammy, sticking his head around the doorway, Fuck, it's Coolie down in his room he's stuck hisself.

Coolie! Angus turns to the door.

The man you asked about last time, Little explains, looking at Angus.

I know. I know. The arsonist.

Angus realises too late, this maybe isn't the thing to say with Jasmin there.

Is he? asks Little. He's been completely drunk ever since you were here.

She seems to sag. The hostel and its bottomless pit of no-hopers.

Drunk. And swearing, and kicking the doors. We (looking at Big) think he's mental. The Sheriff went had a word to him last night. You know what that means.

Jesus. But Angus is grinning.

The Sheriff calls it counselling, she suddenly smirks.

I tell ya he's stuck himself, blurts Sammy. Ya gotta help. He's bleedin everywhere.

Angus turns to push towards the door, where Big is an obstacle.

Move, says Angus. Hurry.

Big hardly looks at him:

Don't be b-bloody stupid. I am incapable of hurry.

Jasmin is un-moved for watching Angus wrestle Big out of the doorway then she steps forward, involuntarily at first, or she thinks, then strangely rushing. She realises she wants to see.

Fuck fuck for fuck's sake, yells Sammy, as high on the drama as if it were a bush-fire. Do something do something.

Where is he? shouts Angus. Which room is he in?

Sammy leads downstairs to the lower corridor and there, in a startlingly narrow room only just wider than its doorway, the man is cursing and crying. His hands are around his own throat as if trying to strangle himself. No one wants to get any closer. He is leaning back on the bed with newspaper spread everywhere as if to catch the blood. He is wide-eyed, out of it, and screaming I don't wanna die I don't wanna.

Angus pulls out his mobile and calls for emergency. He dodges around Jasmin frozen in her shocked stand-and-stare. Then he is astonished to see her step forwards and yell at the man to be quiet, then tell Big to hold the man down, to push his baggy shorts up bare one of his thighs. What is this? No one knows what is going on: the man screaming for his life, or his death, blood on his mouth and blood over his throat, his vampiric shirt-front; Big going into automatic drama as he grabs the man and holds him more severely than necessary, having never liked him; Little her hands over her ears and trying to get away; and Angus grumbling for the call to get through the maddening options and numbers.

Jasmin swings her bag down onto the filthy floor in front of her and searches frantically through it, finally pulling out a small torch-like length of plastic or pen.

Bare his leg! she shouts again, and before the man can struggle any more, Big is holding him steady with sheer weight, but having trouble holding the leg still and fighting the man's panicky grip on the wound in his throat.

Bare it! she yells, his leg, the one nearest me! She snaps the top off the pen and as soon as she sees clear skin on man's scrawny thigh she jabs the pen into his flesh.

Fark, drawls Sammy. Farken hell. I seen everythin now. Jesus. Is she a para?

These men are used to paras.

The phone-call connects and Angus gives the address, tries to explain what has happened, but omits what he has just seen. Snaps the phone shut.

It's adrenaline, she says to the man, who is drunkenly aghast, from shock, then screaming with new cause, calling her a fuckin bitch a fuckin witch. Big has wrapped some cloth around the guy's throat and he tightens it more than enough to shut him up. If he holds it any more firmly the guy will survive the slash but die of strangulation. Jasmin repeats:

It's adrenaline. It slows down the bleeding.

She turns to Angus.

I carry one of these all the time. I'm allergic to bee stings.

She shows them the EpiPen she has just used. An epinephrine dispenser. Her hands are shaking and she seems just as stunned as they are, as if something has burst like an aneurism.

Allergic, you mean you get rashy? Breathless? No, you mean something worse.

It takes her a while to respond.

Jesus. I can't believe I did that.

She is still staring at the pen.

Something worse, then?

Worse? Oh yeah. I'm highly allergic. My throat swells and blocks, I can't breathe. I could go into anaphylactic shock and have a seizure. People like me die of bee-stings.

Fuck.

This time it is Angus swearing.

Yeah, well, I want to stay in the land of the living. I've had to jab myself twice so it's pretty dramatic. Shit, I can't believe I jabbed him.

Lateral thinking, he adds (as lame as it sounds).

Now that he thinks of it, he can remember hearing of people carrying a big hypodermic and a phial of adrenaline. An irony here in a house more where than a few junkies have slept.

And it just happens to slow down bleeding?

She nods.

I read about that online. I always research any medications I get prescribed. Or that anyone else I know is prescribed. I…

She makes it sound simple. How crazy this is. Little has come back and stands mumbling to Big, her voice hungry from worry. And Jasmin stands close to Angus and they all seem to watch and just as equally ignore the whimpering guy on the bed.

When the para-medics arrive in their blue overalls and tight latex gloves the cut and stuck guy has calmed down and is wailing, sorry for himself, and is now seemingly more drunk than before. They don't waste any time getting him out to the van and driving off. They don't know what to say when Jasmin tells them what she has done. They are not police but there are hints of a follow-up, one of them frowns angrily and says Christ, but they are moving fast.

Eventually the police arrive and she has to explain it again. They take notes, addresses, details, are relieved to hear she does know about the adrenaline but far more relieved that she is not an occupant. They tell her it's not an easy one, not to go anywhere, not to worry, unless he lays charges for being alive. It can… fall into some category of assault, given her lack of authority in the matter. Angus is quick to tell her, after the cops have stood in the sun for a cigarette and rubbed their considerable stomachs for a while, that whether she accepts it or not, the guy has form, he won't choose to be fronting any court or have any scrutiny from police, not with his dodgy history.

Here they are, Angus and Jasmin, still stunned over a guy of no real value to either of them: a meeting of fire and impulse. Not quite the party they met at. Standing in this crazy street again.

It seems Jasmin returns to lecturing with a changed and possibly minor level of post-stress disordering in her manner. Students find her more tolerant of late essays. There is something high-pitched in lectures; she addresses her topics and the lecture-room faces with a kind of fury, almost, something hotter and stranger than intel­lectual passion. In the corridor face-to-face encounters with her leave them wondering whether they have done something to offend her or if maybe she hasn't remembered them, some previous warmth and humour missing from the moment.

After the semester ends – only a few weeks after the drama – she knows she can calm down and marks their work as rigorously as always. She knows she has always been more impulsive than quite makes sense. Nothing as odd as this EpiPen thing before, nothing apart from a fist fight with an aggro boyfriend who, startled by her anger, retaliated by breaking her rib. This is not a story she is forthcoming about. It isn't a story that most people can under­stand, that domestic violence is properly seen as instigated by men, and it nearly always is, and excusing men on the basis of provocation is a dangerous and receding clause in the law. Sometimes, though, it happens. To her shame (sometimes in guilty pleasure) she acknowldges her own case.