Waiting (41 page)

Many locals were prepared for a fire. They knew what fires did and what staying behind meant, what fleeing meant. Staying behind is what they knew kept a house intact. But this fire was unlike other fires. This fire changed like a virus. It tricked them. As they watered their walls and soaked bags and battened down in preparation the people did not realise this was a war to change everything. They waited with optimism. They are different now forever from the people who live anywhere else. Mortal changes change everything.

The fires miss his district and his rented house and Stan is therefore spared another bout with the arch-enemy. Angus is despondent more than anything else. One side of his open ribcage sealed with money the other side open to the matters of the heart. This fire. Jasmin. Where and how? He is content with the thought of his life backing and filling like the bobcat on a conventional job. These earth-works of his, these water designs which will make the book Jill the post grad student will credit him in. A book!

Jasmin is waiting for him. He must decide. Jasmin is here and now; she is not a house. Nor a book.

She has been told her own book is due out in six months, and the ex-boyfriend is extending yet again. This arrives in his inbox like an email arrow into his heart, or thigh at least, whereas the lad in the UK gets the one in the eye.

Will Angus buy a place? Will he buy his place near hers? Now that he has enough money to get into debt to a mortgage and a banking system addicted to share-holders' meetings not customer satisfaction. His job is steady and profitable, early mornings aside. He is mad to keep waiting for something that he also worries about arriving. But that's life.

Tying her laces is a method-acting paradox for gaining control and Jasmin feels priggish sometimes just to be bent over doing it and then running out into the Parkville streets in such a neat and disciplined manner in her rigour and her running. She calls it her army-running though only to herself. Doing an army-run. At lunch time.

Except the running changes into privilege and quietude not her own but theirs the unseen and probable conservatives the voters among the plain trees and street-side terrace houses of Parkville where it seems no one walks on the pavements unless in the occasional car and the high school students from University High the exception in their happy noise at lunch time. On then she runs into the sunny parks that glow within their walls of houses and back lanes the parks and lawns like parcels of brightly kept otherness, niches or nooks that have stopped time or have stayed out of time's changingness as much as the fields and corn-harvest landscapes of old English painters like Samuel Palmer, at which moment she thinks of the image of a man reclining among the heavy over-laden heads of wheat reading a book or sleeping as Palmer enscribed him and so then of old Eddie who used to lie in the sun here but no Eddie and come to think of it no Eddie for weeks or even months. Her own Eddie. His worn coat and his dreadlocks. It occurs to her that like many men of the parks and places-of-no-address Eddie may simply or with great difficulty have died without any family or friends to register him missing, nor there to care for him or speak to him or speak of him. Eddie may have shifted suburbs or shifted states of habitation from under trees and shrubs to under a roof though he said he couldn't abide being indoors in hostels because of fire.

It is sad in her running – not army – feeling he may have died, and is probably lying somewhere inert inside his rotten old clothes, his happy courteous manners no more, no longer happy to receive a few coins or notes from passersby.

On the path running towards her a long heavy man in shorts who looks clumsy and untrained and running alongside him a Chinese woman of fabulous strength her lean athletic figure in lycra and her running style perfectly compact her spring quite extraordinary her power contained by his frantic slowness her own grace obvious – are they lovers are they mismatched in other ways Jasmin has to laugh inwardly as they pass her lumbering and leaping and then gone.

The outdoor men in her life a total of two and possibly one less. She thinks back over her relationships and her unexpected finding of Angus, like a stray creature, an alien, simply appearing among her various routines where normally speaking very little changes, no one new arrives. She thinks of her colleagues and their semesters of coming and going while the University world stays much the same. Routine. She runs and runs, hypnotised by her inner monologue.

And the book on its way she has been told, her most significant book. At last. It feels like more than two books! The power of the second will surely increase the presence of the first. Why she reached for and did not take the Angus book? The possibility still bugs her but personal matters always bugger research. Independence is all. They would always have compromised her or led her into writing. She either pulled back from or went at too hard with this unacknowledged factor, the relationship. It has been done…

And her wondering over to Little, Little her own wayward figure and her family feuding the incongruity like the runners passing by Little and her small graces her aunts and their awfulness. How much she likes Little. At a distance it must be said. Adult children challenging the will in such willfulness her unprodigal home. How is Little a housewife a question she can't answer how a partner for her house and her house-husband the Big. They are two characters in a novel who have no futher story they remain until no one wants them to change, who would be the one to change them who could bring this wrench upon them?

Now she is tap tap tapping her runner shoes on the Uni pavings and the students watch her and part as she surges and weaves her long running runningness among them her sportswearclad figure and her hair in a bob.

Dazza

Nobody has seen Dazza for the day and it becomes obvious that the Dazza who returned is not the Dazza who left. He is now a great mound of sleep. There is a junkie walking back and forth on the pavement this morning and The Sheriff does his tom cat thing at the front, which keeps the bloke at several paces duelling or triaging with The Sheriff, the Spectre of heroin and the Dealer who isn't coming out, so this bloke keeps pacing and then stops, stands deadly still for minutes… then shuffles off, stops… he is dishevelled and thin, made rock-star poetic by the shockingly evacuated cheeks. Keith Richards. His stillness, without shiver or shudder, is impressive. The council has done one good thing: fitted a steel mesh gate on the side path to stop junkies stumbling and swearing down at night past Dazza's room, annoying unholy levels of abuse out of the big man.

Which prompts The Sheriff to recall when he last saw Dazza. And it's too long. He tells the guy to keep his distance or The Sheriff will do to him what they do to run-over pets, then he walks along the corridor and down into the depths to look for Dazza. A bit of knuckle on the door raises nothing so he opens it. And knows right away why he hasn't been hearing the cough and hoik followed by a slap of artwork on the tree at the front.

How old was Dazza? Fat guys, it's hard to gauge. Jesus, poor old Dazza. Fuck the world for letting go of people who harm no-one. This house has a reality no one can take from it, a kind of untidy grace under all the cursing and slow drawling voices and the smell of grog or stew or hot soup from the St Vinnies crew so blindingly happy in their orange placcy vests. But poor old Dazza and poor old Sheriff as he sags against the doorframe looking at the big fella upside down on the floor his eyes open but long long gone.

Not The End

There is a line of information not pursued by Little. It occurs to her she may live in a false world of anticipation. The lurch, as they say. Her mother's side of the family, like all families, has two and in her case two very different lines of longevity. Her mother's mother's side die after retiring and she has assumed the same fate awaits her mother and her mother certainly lets everyone entertain this thought. Her mother is also superstitious and has handed this on to Little, and her medical tilt is therefore towards hypochondria, which Little is exempt from, being too truly unwell to need it.

Need, however, is part of her mother's stoic inner theatre – or should we say martyrdom – and this need needs to be appreciated. Little is not sure what happens next. She rings her mother to see just how close this illness of hers is to the dark end of the spectrum. Little listens appalled and wondering if she isn't just a tad psychic:

I am not better, says her mother. No better at all. But not worse… They say nice things and want me to go calmly however I can see through these cheap young doctors. They are no less patronising than before. You may have noticed I was losing weight (Little hadn't) so they carry on about eating all my meals and finishing the dessert and that ‘get a bit of weight on' nonsense. I tell them I eat and I tell them I do not have any problem with regularity and they say I have to make an effort to eat.

I tell them I read and do crosswords and they say stop watching so much TV and do something like crosswords to exercise my brain. I ask why they don't tell me my prognosis and they say I should take an interest in my case and not fall into passivity. I cannot sack these stupid stupid doctors fast enough. I would like to know who trains them. To think this is the way we leave the world: attended by fools.

What can Little say? Her mother sighs and then groans.

Mrs Graham here was visiting her husband day and night for five years until he finally stopped eating. He recognised her every time – and the children – he was confused only at the end. But the arrogant young doctor wrote Alzheimer's as cause of death and now she cannot get a gold card pension – he was a Returned Serviceman but cause of death must relate to war service. Almost anything fits but not Alzheimer's, which he never had. Too late now. Too awkward to change. One mindless act by a young doctor and her life is significantly altered I mean it's not so much the money as the sense of being looked after and let's face it the respect. Not a lot of that is there? She's one of us now, regardless. She visits me now because she's become so used to the routine. She's a nice old duck.

Little knows Mrs Graham is five years younger than her mother.

What Little has not been considering is that her mother's father's line live on and bloody on despite being ill and crotchety and being prone to complaints more in the mind than the body, and then they slowly descend into the darkness closer to 90 than 80. She may have ten more years of lying back and talking with Mrs Graham, or about the pointless vagaries of the weather.

Then the letter arrives. Inside the PO Box, in that narrow shadow it sits – white and noir-ish, dramatic as a gun – she reaches in and very very slowly slides it towards her.

She carries it out onto the pavement where Big is staring at a tram full of passengers staring back at him. What a show-off.

The Letter. When she opens it, with Big alongside, she sees it is not The Letter, from the solicitor, but another letter from her mother… and her mother is saying her new young doctor is not quite the fool she has been taking him for. He has reassessed her case and studied her most recent tests and everyone will be overjoyed to learn that contrary to her previous results things seem to have improved. She can reasonably hope that she is ‘in the clear'. Not one word, as there had been no word before, of just what it was she'd been suffering from, and now isn't.

St Agnes has saved her mother's life. For a while.

Feelings of vengeance don't come often to Little. When they do they unsettle her and make her want to be a big bloke with fists. After all the sickly sinking and hinting at days even hours left to live and breathe all is ‘in the clear'.

My dear, says Big. It is a blessing. We can return to our dreams of domestic bliss on a later occasion. We like it here don't we? This is where we belong and having money would change everything. Your old mum is alive, we are alive and it is all ahead of us. This waiting will kill us. Best to be sensible. Expect nothing.

Her anger viagra is a thing to behold.

His mother's voice on the phone is unexpected. Angus listens and only once interrupts to make sure he is clear about what she is conveying. She rarely calls but her sombreness is strange. Never expecting her tone or even her words to change but now he knows another irony. After calling Jasmin they decide between them it will be better to go together.

They ring first to make sure Little is home. When they arrive it is more and more and stranger and stranger as Little and Big stand in the sun and Jasmin holds Angus's arm with smiles on all four faces and then he apologises and tells Little what his mother has told him.

That Little's mother died last night.

Little's face is bloodless but nothing happens. Then her mouth opens and she begins to weep.

Big's eyes are staring. He shakes his heavy head.

Fuck, he says. Oh fuck.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to David Musgrave and the small team at Puncher and Wattmann for their faith in this and other books of mine, with special thanks to Ed Wright for his warm and astute editing presence. I must also acknowledge several varied and stimulating conversations I had with a certain man in the street.