Waiting (18 page)

Big is out in a flash. As scary a sight to reckon with, a man in skirts, and this time his upper body bare and hairy, as a crazed Scot at Culloden bearing down upon the English. Closing in on glory and death, and not his own death. He swings open the front gate of the house and wrenches a heavy stoneware planter from the window-sill where it has been chocking the window open. Why? So the noise can get out, in case there are any music agents driving past?

Without any warning Big lifts this fifteen kilo planter and hurls it through the glass.

Inside where they cannot see anything, the pale boy has fallen back onto the carpet, his mouth open and white as a drum-skin, dirt and glass piled on the floor, the stoneware smashed against the amplifier, which in Hollywood would be fizzing and sparking but here is just blank.

Then a head appears through the curtains and it is The Sheriff annoyed to have missed his chance. Maybe just a bit awkward about it, too.

I'm calling the police, says the kid, very brave, all things considered.

The Sheriff feels the cold nasties returning.

It wasn't me, you silly fucken prick but I wish it hadda been. And if you do anything as fucken stupid as ring the cops you'll wish you'd chosen the music for ya bloody funeral. I'll personally stuff ya drum-kit up your arse and there aint a coffin known to man they could bury you in like that. Can't take a hint, can ya.

Then back to his position by the gate.

Don't forget the girls tonight, croaks Dazza. The Sheriff grins.

On Thursday nights around six pm the squads from St Vinnies pull up in their long white vans. The familiar sound of a van's sliding door jumpstarts stomachs inside the hostel and the men step out among the young volunteers, mainly women in their early 20s. It's a chick visit no less, and the men get up close, the chicks are warm and pretty and who wouldn't fall sort of sideways in love with them, with their goodies in foam packs and plastic cups, their happy faces. The promise of something impossible but three times a week dreamy.

Inside the kitchen Little is staring in a Little-like low-key fascination at three eggs frying slowly in the new non-stick pan Big has brought home from the market. This will be one to wash after use and remove, or in less than a week someone will have scored it. Men who use forks to stir their scrambled eggs or, with knife and fork, cut and eat from pans directly, lost in thought, lost in satisfaction, cutting out the washing up, ignoring the undersurface, and the way teflon parts under pressure.

Beautiful is the only word she can think of, for this spreading white eggy country and its deep capitals, its sagging spheres of yolk. She is waiting for the moment when the underside begins to brown and crispen and change flavour. Lifted and eaten before that browning occurs is wasting the egg, losing the memories eating is lifted by. Fried egg is most essentially fried when splottering in the cast-iron frying pan on the solid stove and the high heat of Mother's slapdash manner. Then tamed by the sight of unbroken yolks and browning edges, and the wave upon the hot metal of it is pure nostalgia. Eating often is.

Little does not go outside on slidingvandoor nights. At the table her man is waiting, happily absorbed in the paper, his knees showing and his baggy shorts manly this evening, a singlet and shorts man and reading while his good woman cooks. The quiet for once man she will share her eggs with. Neither of them rush to perve on the chicks, though Little would like to maybe, she entertains the thought that one day, probably a summer evening, the air warm but not heavy, she will smile at the volunteers and watch them being happy and a little too helpful. Toast, of course, and in a small pot, of all things, green peas. Spilling prilling onto the plate, green white orange, what a treat, the kitchen to themselves, the table set and – at this wrong end of the day – brekkie so cosy so sweet.

Eventually the blokes return and bang down their warmboxes and pull out the meals, noisily hungry, all but the drinkers for whom hot food is stomachturning. The chicks the only thing they consume. One of them saying how she had a T-shirt way too tight and didya see her tits, which does tend to spoil the bliss Big and Little had as their own. No tit talk needed between them, their tits are as all kids know, there on the plate: ah fried eggs English bosoms.

The blokes are high and one of the volunteers comes in from outside to collect the boxes and wraps, the one with the T-shirt. Who knows, they all look safely unsexy, in truth, and no doubt practice in front of the mirror, the look sort of girl-guide not lady look. By eight oclock the place is loud with TV soundtrack from one side of the brain to the other.

Little has washed and taken the new teflon wonder back to their room and has placed a cloth over it. In their room are books. They read for hours in silence every night. They read mostly in a parallel set of covers, a chair beside each bed. They sleep under parallel covers: Big too big to sleep with and Little too modest. Which is not to say they don't have the squeeze on each other from time to time, Big with his unusual… and Little quite a… But it shall remain their secret and not ours to pry into.

Location

Now the only din from the hospital is the chopper arriving with a patient. Or leaving. Dust-swirls of necessary intensity.

Jasmin lives close to the Women's Hospital, and the building opens its new wings to her, to women, with its new sign in trendy lower case the women's, claiming familiarity… And Little, who lives nearby and who is at this time unknown to Jasmin, and Jasmin to her, not only lives closer to the institution, but feels closer through this name, and should she need attentions of womanly kind upon her body that has to be a good thing. She says it is her hospital. Perhaps the sign is working after all.

Not every sign. There is a bronze sculpture outside the main entrance that nobody likes in a style that no one liked back in 1965. Several figures cast in larger than life-sized body-shells, and hollow… large enough for smokers who need shelter to stand inside and drag on cigarettes the wind would otherwise blow from them. They are inside their own ashtray. When they use their mobile phones the sculpture looks like a phone booth.

When Jasmin is working at home on her research days she remembers how the local postie used to be a character on any street. It was usually a man who would pass in a series of moods along a street multiple with moods, on a route full of life both on show and mostly off, where a postie approaching and stop-starting and then bicycling away was as constant as a bell. In a world of not so nice and even gloomy or, much worse, of dying moments, the postie was a sign of normality, order, even lightness. Bicycles. Pedalling away and slowing, and pedalling away again in silence, an act of common grace.

From her street and all the way around the streets to the street where the rooming house is waiting for the postie. It is usually The Sheriff ‘he who leans on the fence' out there when the postie comes. The postie greets him however inclement it is and however sunny he isn't, The Sheriff that is, who's been too moody lately for satisfactory repartee.

When the postie pulls up today it is sunny though breezy and sure enough The Sheriff is there at his leaning. He pokes a finger at the waterproof box on the back of the bike, the bumper sticker Your Rights at Work – he points at the words but he doesn't say anything. Perhaps the postie is to infer some communication has taken place.

It has been a long time since The Sheriff bothered about Rights or Work and when he did his Work was not Right. It looks like he is stalled over the words, unable to read, like Sammy, but this man is tough and smart, the hard man has had a few lessons in thinking somewhere and sometime. Just don't ask him what or why he is now changed. As for Sammy, the postie knows Sammy likes to sleep. After petty crim stuff and getting caught less easily than others one might have guessed – Sammy has guile when it comes to being brazen enough to snitch stuff fast from under ‘their' noses in shops and houses and he can hide out in the bush without much trouble – but catch him they do.

Now he sleeps a lot. A trick he has learnt in the nick in the boob in the place of arrested life, and rather than read (not his strong point) Sammy has reduced his sentences by sleeping. Now it is a habit. Better than doing the insufferable boob-walk so many of the casual occupants like to show off as proof of their status: a bloke who has done time is not a nobody. Sammy is pale and slow and sometimes he stammers, his tongue like an oyster.

It seems posties are like taxi drivers, they work alone, are paid crap and have to concentrate on the job, the traffic and, for the scooter brigade, pedestrians as well. And this particular postie ran down a small man once and by God no dog had ever turned as nasty as that man turned: in clear daylight he screamed and bashed the postie down with a briefcase full of executive bricks.

Now the postie rides with a limp. Except he steers his bike more to the left than the right. His balance has been lost somewhere. Getting hit by a guy half your size is bigger because you're stuck down on the scooter and have further to fall and he did… so now his navigation through these and other streets is sadly uneven. Not that anyone notices. Since when did posties overladen on underpowered machines ever steer straight, and nor is it sheilas who just can't, it's everyone.

All the way to Jasmin's street, not that she expects mail, because she prefers to give her PO Box address for all correspondence of the old variety, akin to Big and Little in this decision, because as posties ride with a list, so too the mail. And parcels, no longer postie but courier business, often list completely out of sight. The PO Box is safe, they don't dare.

On her lunchtime run Jasmin notices old weathered Eddie by his distinctively stooped and dreadlocked figure (it is not only his hair, he seems knotted and matted all over) walking in the shadows past the terrace houses.

It has been said that Eddie may be significantly younger than the ‘old' which people tend to drop in before his given name. If it is. Surprised now, as she always is, at this worn-out upper shape of him balanced on such long and confident legs. She is pretty stringy and runny herself, but after several weeks indoors, more like an etiolated bean, while Eddie is the year-round sun-dried version. He will be heading for the grassed play area in Parkville to lie down and relax and darken in the warmth, if the sun is strong enough, or he might wander across to the shady ledge outside the shop-fronts along Flemington Rd, if he is needy, if he's hoping for a few dollars. He doesn't ask, he never does, he waits. Eddie the silent, smiling, roll-your-own, sun-darkened man of cheery hello and rarely a word more than his polite how have you been? or it's been nice weather recently hasn't it?

Just once she asked him if he used the local rooming houses in the area and if they were suitable for someone like himself. She had felt it rude never to attempt some form of conversation with him. It was more the opposite: beyond his head shaking and a few dutiful comments, about it being too expensive and how you can't stay unless you have an income and an address, and he doesn't even have a bank, you know, it was clear he would not say more. Then she felt rude for actually asking.

He looked away into a middle distance of Silence please. She has never pestered Eddie again or gone against her moments of guilty squirming – as if she was presuming to get information from him, like something in return for the money she regularly gave him. It felt so middle class and unreasonable, such an unfair deal. It was a shock to feel its possibility in her.

These laps she jogs so quickly and so healthily are taken during some part of the day that is free and when her cardio-vascular conscience taps on the door. It was literal once: David the health freak from the next office would tap then enter and they would head off into the surrounding streets away from Carlton and its shops and cafes and its hundreds of lunching-leaning conversations. He was a newly-minted Associate Professor in Lin­guistics, an Aspro of wordy entanglements, and eventually they talked words and syntax so much she had to ban it. She wanted to enjoy the sheer striding of their time together. For a man so given to ideas he was more than ordinarily sexy: well-proportioned and handsome, with fine legs. He even tolerated the ban on his favourite subjects because Jasmin too was tall and despite her embarrassing knees she could actually jog in step with him.

When her boyfriend Richard took up a short-term position in Europe she had to keep calm during these sweaty runs along­side Mr Handsome. She knew she was horny. Perhaps it was just as well he talked shop. Hardly surprising given David's inner walking-by-habit and his blank GPS and his being so blinkered by thoughts that he hadn't realised there were Eddies en route. Nor a woman with frustrated yearnings beside him.

Alternatively, it was strange that a man so physically present could be so boringly attached to the abstract. It surprised her, either way. When a Professorship in James Cook University was advertised she refused to believe he'd try for it, and what was he thinking to contemplate working way up in northern Queensland? Except he got an interview and then the position, and knowing it was a done deal where Melbourne would expect extra years, publications, funding dramas, etc., before a Prof was likely, he went. He packed up and became a newbie Prof. In Townsville.

The rhythmic tapping sound of running shoes on pavement is now her own. So she imagines her new man-of-all-sorts, her heart-improving Angus beside her. Angus in his work-shorts and talking about rocks and trees and soil types, Angus looking over at her with his teasing grin and, if she can talk him into it, stopping for a moment to kiss. She will ring him as soon as he returns from Adelaide. Not that he is the jogging type.

At the children's playground one shape stands clear from the woodchip base and the soft rubber flooring. It rises like a ropey circus tent four metres high in the centre, and sans canvas, a climbing encounter for the arms and legs of curious children, that grabbing onto things toughness they have coming hotly from them. About seven kids stretch and climb it as she approaches and she stops to watch them. They reach and grasp themselves up through a military rope wall, one made noisy and kiddie-crazy by their small round shapes.