Waiting (28 page)

Nor is she about to tell Angus.

Though Angus tells her: if Coolie ever tries her out in court, he will get in touch with the locals in SA. Find out the man's proper name, for a start. A strange stand-off.

How could he know the way she thinks of him? Begun that day as a big long bee working intensely in his gardens. The big bee that hurts sometimes but doesn't kill. That she thinks of him as shadowy from lack of shaving, fuzzy-surfaced and sometimes dusty, as if his hair is touched with pollen. Well, that and being a dusty lion.

Nothing moves her from this one conviction: they have shared the adrenaline. It's like a war.

I just can't believe I did it, she says, again. I can't bring myself to accept it. I approached a complete stranger and stabbed him like that.

Stabbed him? God, you didn't stab him. You jabbed him. Semiotics?

She stares at him. He might be right: a pun to pour a crime into a word. (She hears pun, pen and she is literally punishing herself.)

Yeah, and you probably saved his life.

Did I have the right? He wanted to kill himself.

No, he did it just for show. Jesus, that was the closest he's ever come to remorse. You're talking about a guy who refused to accept any blame, he wouldn't own up to fires where people died. It's guilt, that's what it is. He blamed the CFA for treating him badly. He's the kind of bloke who steals your car, crashes it and then sues you for having left it parked in the street. I'd have let him bleed.

You would not. You led the way.

I wanted to see what was happening.

She laughs to hear him say it.

So did I! She has to grin at this. Then says: but it's probably assault.

No, it's not. Nah. It's Grievous Bodily Harm.

She stares: That's worse, isn't it?

Yeah, it was good. Then he allows a pause before adding: he's used to it. That's what he provokes in everyone.

That word again: provoke. Her face hardens in worry. He knows better than to continue.

The trouble with cooking is drinking. Angus peels and slices the onions and garlic and considers the chicken and regards the large wine glass filled darkly beside him on the counter. Drinks from it. Cuts and slices, and regards and drinks, and in this way he quaffs through the preparation and cooking of Cambodian pepper chicken and is himself well peppered by the time his evening meal is ready. To consume, elegantly, with a glass of red wine. It always sounds so palatable, so sensual and sensible. So good it makes you want to drink.

Today has been phone calls and interruptions. His new contract requires park benches positioned not where he has designed but where the council has drawn them into its master plan. Some regulation, and one of them will be underwater. He argues with the officer responsible. Arguments are not work. Arguments isolate us. Whenever he feels this isolation, at home after the arguments, Angus spools back through his loner stories of himself and the accompanying regrets (his haunting what-ifs) and feels so much a fool he goes deaf to anything sensible…

Until he is so depressed he feels like doing the whole damn thing of his life again, joining this time, joining anything, networking for once in his stubborn life. In this fantasy of grinding concern and condemnation he stalls. Too late, the crow cries. Too late! If only he could re-figure the fraught pivot of gaining/losing, the balance and just, by the way, the increasingly likely sense of another wrecked evening. And no, this outdoor man does not drink beer, he introspects the grades of red varieties. His Barossa.

In this manner he has lived far too long. Out of state. No family to move with him, and none here except, unexpectedly, for Little. This association-by-cousinhood is beginning to please him. Being used to sustained aloneness does not mean I'm not lonely. He can hear that stop-start sentence in his thoughts. I live alone. I know alone-ness every day. I am Lonely! Even Little is not Lonely.

Living linked by house or home or marriage or… these are antidotes to the mental illness of lone thoughts and feelings. He thinks. There is the matter of being self-employed and self-sufficient and ask yourself, he asks himself, whether that adds up to a robust, a sustainable self-worth? He also works alone, though some of the time employs Jen, and sometimes he sub-contracts work but rarely, sullenly almost, and then only if three jobs need to be done at once. Then home James.

Angus might just admit he is a poor man's designer cum engineer. He might not. It's like depressive feelings not clinical: the present tense can erase them with its amnesic powers. Do this, not that, and don't think. This is yours: fire-bands and shutter-systems around houses, and sculptured flame-overs, the lakes and their mathematically-arranged boulders to hide and reveal hydraulic planning smart enough to please Leonardo. His practical inventive­ness is exciting when he wants to acknowledge it, but the solo self is given to brooding; achievement is an unsupportable thing on a night when lack of belief rises around him like a lake.

Then Jasmin. His excessive and leaky life-boat. And being solo, his every night is now spent thinking of her, remembering her face as well as he can, faces whose ghosts we cannot grasp, her skin though, that and her smell during love-making, the way her legs grip… but into this merging of yesses that mad plunge by her into the guy's arm with her Epistick, or whatever it was, like a madman among cows with a cattle prod. And something comes over Angus tempting him to hate her, to flinch from any attempt to understand why a disciplined academic is such a fright, is so stunningly impulsive. But he can't get her out of his head, his nervous system as full of her as his blood is of wine. A little crazy? Infuriating. Yet how stolid she makes him feel in comparison, a rocky, slow man ever predictable and so very very normal. Unlettered. Undistin­guished. Worst of all – uncool.

Until he realises something that had nudged at him during the day. Jasmin had gone out to his work-site, out at the lakes, where there are tons of the bloody things flying and settling. Bees. That is what she was worried about! She had asked if they were wasps. The bloody bees. He is used to them, he is walking around bees all the time. But she stayed there. She stayed for hours, she stayed with him.

He turns on the TV. Holds the remote like a pen of epinephrine.

Back at the house, Little notices Big grimacing at her. Not his more usual frowning over thoughts far removed. This time Big is close to growling…

Some weedy little creep, he is saying.

She thinks he means Coolie. He growls some more.

On a bike last week. You never said anything about going up to the shops with some weedy little bloke.

That creep. She can't believe it: taking this to heart, this nothing in a bikeclip.

Some young boy rode up beside me and started talking.

You went up to the shops, he shouts, by yourself!

He is letting himself get angry now. And stands with his arms folded then loose then folded again.

I went to the post office. And he tagged along half-way there.

Who was he? Why didn't you tell me about him? You are not used to men's tricks. Just because you are black-eyed and pretty, does he want to…

He is shouting. Inside she is giggling.

She knew if he found out about silly Jim he'd blow up. Now she is stuck with it. Someone has told him.

What is his name?

Jim.

You're on first-name terms! This is terrible. What is this pull towards young men? I know they sneak up on you. A creepy lank-haired pedophile, a kiddie fiddler… they always used to get about by bike. Lancaster, I recall, he did. Famously. Tom probably did. Too useless to own a car.

He had bad teeth.

But suppose he hadn't!

Back outside his feelings Big hears the small clatter of Tom's typewriter from inside his room along the corridor. His hearing is always astute and he hears things even as the purer nature of his ‘mind', as he likes to think of it, does not. The senses follow the scent.

The constant sound of Tom doing good deeds makes him furious.

And sometimes he hears nothing. Usually the sound settles back in the brain and is gone. But he is hearing it now and not being able to displace it can get utterly bloody annoying, on top of his being annoyed.

This should remind Big just how different this rooming house is: there was no Braille typing in the last one they fled from, more the needle and the knuckle-duster, no good deeds, just chaos and violence. No place for a man let alone a woman in that part of the town. There was a big brawl with some junkie skeleton. The bloke fell and died and no one even rang the ambos.

Adelaide Again

After various delays and only one or two serious but low offers on his home, Angus thinks a purchase now looks likely. Back to Adelaide. The estate agent is playing it along a bit, talking loans, and mortgages, trying to establish a better price that is also within the reach of this potential buyer. Only when Angus has seen the agent and inspected his house again – without furniture it feels like a ghost ship – does he relax enough to let the financial deal play out and then, finally, gather sufficient will-power to visit his mother.

Like all mothers she asks him what he's doing and if he's seeing anybody, the idea of having a grandchild all but inextinguishable in her generation. He tells her about his work as usual, even his meeting with Jasmin. Children. Not. Once he has warmed her to listening, or himself to talking to her, he tells her about Little. He mentions, as he must, the inheritance and what he thinks about it.

Angus, are you saying… His mother is leaning forward into a hoped-for misunderstanding… are you saying you didn't convince Agnes, or that you didn't try?

Sooner or later Angus was going to make it more specific, though his mother is of a suspicious cast of mind by nature and has already arrived where he hadn't begun to go.

I went to see her, he says, and we talked about a lot of things, including this inheritance obsession of yours, the house, or the money from the house…

I think you've misunderstood something, my boy, how I am only doing this for you.

No mum. You're doing it because you want to. Because you get a kick out of it – and the money, which you really do, genuinely I mean, think is yours. That you've earned it.

I most certainly have.

No, I meant you think you've earned it. I wasn't saying you have.

She is not a woman used to hearing opinions to compete with her own, and among her sisters and others she insists on being the word. This is too much. From her own son!

You've been a big disappointment to me, Angus. I may not have been the brains in the household but it seemed you had them, except you have wasted them. Or… Perhaps I was wrong, you were very good at primary school stuff, and at high school just good enough, then university was too demanding for you. I thought you could be a professor or something. Now you tell me you've a young girlfriend who is practically a senior lecturer. Ha! What she'd see in you I really don't know.

What are you doing, Mum?

It must have been upsetting – you failing your exams. I can see that.

I never failed any exams.

I wanted to avoid telling people about it, and no, for all this time I've kept it a secret.

I never failed any exams. Not one. I left uni because I wanted to.

I can see it's still a touchy subject.

Now he is livid. The dishonest cruelty. This from a woman with little schooling and who worked for a few months as a shop assistant before getting married.

It is not. You're lying like this because I wouldn't do your bidding. You can't stand anyone going against you. You don't know anything about proper Universities.

You are working against me.

You're a control-freak.

How dare you. Don't be aggressive to your mother.

Alright then: Angus' mother is a control freak.

A smile reaches across her face even as she says it, the twisted line of mothers… who are manipulative.

You are so touchy, you have no decency or respect. Here am I selflessly caring for my sister and you think I'm up to something I shouldn't be. When I let on for the very first time, after years of pain, and disappointment, what a lame dog you have been, it shows you up for what you are.

And what's that?

I don't know… When she says this she always means she does.

If you don't know, then you should shut up. And I'm not doing your bidding. Little is an honest, very nice woman.

What? What do you mean, little?

Agnes. They call her Little. As soon as he says it he wishes he hadn't.

Little! Ha! Little. Nice? she says in a mocking, facetious tone.

You call me a disappointment. God. I'm going to see June before I go back.

You what? Don't you dare!

You brought this on yourself.

I won't lift a finger to help her again if you go and see her.

Really? Her main carer. Why shouldn't I call in on my aunt and see how her health is? Ailing is it? Maybe she's getting better. I'm going to tell her outright what you've been trying to do. That'll get her better in a flash.

How dare you!

You wanted me to do your dirty work. So it's too bad if I tell her.

Little! Fancy them calling her Little. When her mother dies she'll be utterly unloved. If her mother ever loved her. Orphan of a child. No business here or anywhere… no say, no right whatsoever…

She is rambling. Bile in its blind duct.

He gets up and leaves immediately. Sad to be stretching the legs away from such negativity in your own mother, out to your car. But she for once comes waddling after him, the slowest woman in the world and the most presumptious, a spectacle for the neighbours and any people on the street to see: a woman so self-centred, so usually given to steely self-control, and sloth. She keeps stumbling and heaving, her weight pushing to one leg then the other, from side to side like someone barracking at tennis, and hardly any movement to thrust forward, yet keeping on towards him even as he starts the hire car. She is bent now into her shouting and stumping towards him, then banging her fist on the tinny Korean roof as he drives off.