Waiting (39 page)

I mean, that woman, Big adds, correcting himself.

Best thing is to hoist the plastic shopping basket in front of him, walk quickly around the corner and check the 400g eggs for cracks. For diabetic reasons they dodge the biscuits and that leaves them with veges and the expensive cheeses. No (definitely) to the latter and yes to spuds (cheap) to courgettes (ditto) to broccoli (ouch, costly) but also, along with cabbage, (essential). In a communal kitchen few of the fellas will nick it and everyone will bitch about the smell if Little over-boils it, like her Mum taught her. And NO today anyway to tomatoes so loved by both, (outrageous) at $9.99 a kilo for the cheap ones. Not good for Little's joints. Beansprouts (ouch but yes, then no) there in packets the little dried black-eye beans they both fart on healthy and wise. The shopping is nearly complete. Some bandaids for knocked ankles hurt fingers etc especially. As Big must be careful of his capillaries, too easy to set free and bleed, now that he's getting older and worrying like The Sheriff about mortal things, and his coil, the human one not the orange hempish-looking-one on top of his head.

They walk home again, adventure over, grumbles made, whingeing finished. Everything has its place and now Little is worrying about Valentine's Day and her mum and the money she'll get, which she and Big will get, if her mum dies, and what happens next if she does, and where will they live if they have real money? These thoughts are skidding around in her head with the weight of the bags and the lights changing and, as they continue uphill, Big is puffing and panting beside her like a buffalo.

Do you love me, Big?

The question shocks him so much he misses his step and stumbles sideways on the pavement. He hopes, he hopes this has nothing to do with The Kitty, which so far has not been noticed. It, mentally, in a locked box in a locker. It, empty-ish. It, taken in notes from the bank but box and lock his mental symbols for it.

What are you going to do for Valentine's Day? she adds.

There never was a Valentine's Day when he was young. He doesn't see why they have to rush into American rituals. Another sentimental trick. Consumer sentimentalism. Someone should write a book about it.

It un-nerves him to be in a tangle over nonsense like this. Breathless, in fact. He cannot imagine being without her, cannot, even when they spend most of every day and night together, imagine what it would be like to fight and break up. Or, in her case, fancy some other bloke, a bloke, young! who wears jeans like her and has a job and a bank account. Drives a car, for God's sake. It could happen.

Of course he loves her.

It is bad enough when she was in hospital. He felt as if a car had driven into him. Perhaps it is the Sammy and the sad and the lost souls gossip about the hostel making him vulnerable to these places in himself. Loneliness. He had it for years when he was a confused teenager, then a shearer's cook, the one person no one wants to talk to, and alternately bullish in his Big way, but smaller by far inside, alarmed that his cross-dressing would ruin him enough to be jailed by country policemen. Family ruined, fate laid flat, he moved to the city, fixed the tranny into place and then illness and then… Little.

Perhaps he could buy her some flowers…

I have something in mind, he says. You know my heart is here and is all yours. This faux Victorian rhetoric saving him he hopes, so he keeps on.

And when the Gods come. Searching for our inner feelings to ransack. They'll drag mine out. Dedicated to your name. I hope they handle such feelings with care.

Are they breakable?

They are… fragile. They are not to be groped or dropped. They are mine for you and the Gods have to be respectful.

Little can hardly believe it, so used to being in traditional terms the Lover not the Beloved.

Hardly unusual for the occupants to have stories of aloneness. The one thing that bonds them. That and complex accounts of how dreary ordinary people are, the recognition that nearly all of them have crashed out of the honesty and lies of relationships. Alone people know pain; it need not be stated. Every day another why, but life is undermined by why, for everyone, even the happy and the ones with family and kids in a scale of tall to short, tell each other lies and fool themselves that family is all they are here for. To have kids who have kids who have kids and… if that isn't tautological and syllogistic what is? The Cycle of Begat.

So when Dazza falls forward from his big chair attempting to spit at the orange tree it is a muted falling. First his great fatness makes no noise and when it happens no one is there to hear him falling. Then it is the sometimes angry sometimes nonchalant Sheriff who walks in from the street and sees him face down, belly spread on the paving.

Fuck, he mutters, and leans in through the door and yells: Someone call the cops!

The Sheriff never says so but he is fond of Dazza, who asks nothing of anyone. Tom steps out past him and sees Dazza groaning and spitting, and he turns back.

Did you say call the cops?

No, the fuckin ambos, of course, I said the ambos.

Dazza is carted off by the ambos as planned, ailing of heart, lungs, his obesity-over-flap of everything. His absence makes them all fretful. A large space has been left unfilled. No doco yet. What has happened to their common room show-and-tell on telly? None of them is up to phoning the film crew to ask when the program will be on, or if it has been on. Surely not. When will they see themselves, yes, that's what they really want, just like everyone. So: a way of choosing. Someone. How do you draw lots? What does it actually mean – a throw of the dice and lowest loses/or wins? Who has a dice?… Maybe pick a number between 1 and 10… and that has to be possible, and yes. They do.

And Little loses. This phoning thing with lawyers and their secretaries and airlines and accommodation in Gawler and yet the anxiety of initiating a phone conversation remains. Would working in a call-centre, would watching people endlessly crank over their voices in call-centres, cure her? Big is conveniently unsympathetic. He did it last time, it's her turn.

She was a teacher, Little was, he tells the others. Taught to stand on two feet in front of little twerps and put ideas into their heads.

As these big twerps stand she stands heavy with the phone-anxiety she always has, which many people have but rarely admit to, the people who light up a fag before ringing, the many who put-it-off-till-later people and the Iwon'tspeaktothemjustnow people…

It is possibly hard. Because they are with her she must begin. And it isn't hard at all, after her initial silence (Big winces and looks up to heaven and has no sooner begun to talk into the side of the mouthpiece, yes, he should have done it all along) than her weirdly broken non sequiturs (even Tom and The Sheriff sometimes cannot make sense of) cease and though she gabs the words, these baying hounds, she asks in one long panting run of words, she actually does it. And the man at SKA says that SKA and Channel 31 have already shown it, didn't they see it?

What? And on 7.30 on the ABC? They are stunned.

Welcome to media-land where the public are the last to know, even if they are the story. The footage was on ABC, not the full-length thing, which will go to SBS later. As doco. They MISSED IT, but IT WAS ON. Is there a copy? Yes. Can they have one? Yes. Hey!! Can it be sent to their post box? It can!

Incredible.

She replaces the phone in a mood of Little heaven.

Her call, her bliss.

The next day the pomegranates are receiving a once-over. The Sheriff inspects. They have been steadily pecked at by parrots. There is always a good lead-up to a cigarette and what could be better than to do a round of the garden and check the fruit if… hang on, there is something better:

Hey you! The Sheriff growls at a sudden photographer on the pavement. Yeah, you. I'm standen here not real happy to be in your fucken shot. There are things about me I'd prefer kept private if you follow my drift.

A man is setting up for a photograph of the hostel, his aluminium case on the pavement, and the camera with fancy lens attached, lifted to his eye then carried and sighted through then moved as he clearly cannot choose. The undecided amateur photographer? The Sheriff is heading towards him when Tom yells out from his front window:

Eh mate cool it he might be from the TV. He could be PR.

Yeah I uh reckon he…

The Sheriff is too close to the man to change tack. The bloke looks up at him, used to ignoring dissent, his job depending on a thick skin. Everyone knows snappers, amateur or pro, are anything but straight, anything but popular and are downright weird some of them, everybody knows that. Obstinate. Suspicious. Thick-skinned. Kinky. Deaths, corpses, sex in 2D.

Well, are you? What Tom yelled out?

The photographer nods and shakes his head, confusing the signs in the Sheriff's brain.

Mate are you for real? Is that a yes or a bloody no?

Both. I'm here about the TV story but I'm from the local newspaper.

Ah, I gotcha. OK then. Fine. But just remember what I said. I am NOT going to be in any photo.

Were you on the TV story?

I dunno mate we none of us saw it. No one told us it was on.

They never do.

That's bloody stupid.

Yeah, it is. They never do, with anyone. They don't know what they are showing themselves half the time.

Fuck.

Satisfied with this quandary The Sheriff goes inside checking only to see if Tom the bloody know-all is still head-out the window listening, but he can't see him and come to think of it why not? Tom would normally have come straight out, the vulture, all keen for fresh meat, more than keen, yeah predatory, a bit unbalanced like and all the Jesus-freak stuff.

It seems Tom has his earplugs in and is typing flat out, getting mad at his mistakes and shouting a decidedly unChristian text and intonation, you can't rush Braille you can't use white-out on bumps you can't go back with Spellcheck. Either it's right or it's wrong and if it's wrong you start over.

A bit like skulling sessions in the pub, one error increases the likelihood of another and another, until you land up senseless on the floor. He has the lay person's belief that knowledge makes us free. Not a Stoic nor an Ancient Greek – he also has the Christian spin because what he really believes is that knowledge of Jesus makes us free. But given the sore truth that the average footslapper has no Biblical passions and that Tom has no intellectual capacities but a great memory, he is limited to the Bible stories and the street's events.

Tom is inclined to forget this was the exemplary drama of Moses and the Old Testament and that Jesus the Zealot was a Jew. Christians came after he was conveniently gone. The evangelical parsons worry this into wrongfulness, Jesus no Jewish SonofGod but a fresh lad with blond hair blue eyes and better dress-sense. Who came to radiant albeit painful adulthood through a cosmic split, so he would die as he never was born, a mid-life Chrisis, an intra-generational being, an atypical phenotypical phenomenon.

Tap Tap Tap Fucken thing Riiiip

Tap Tap fucking Tap …Tap Tap… Tap

But When?

Today Little goes up alone and during work hours. The humors not favouring Big today and Little hardly faring better. Little walking uphill is painful for her loopy joints. Go, however, she does. On a promise. Why do we let them get under our skin? Nothing from or (guiltily) about her mum – nothing from that the ABC or crew. Having to wait and wait and wait. It can make you weep.

Something about this depressing feeling and it happening next to the PO and the bank prompts Little to think of seeing their Kitty. There is something reassuring in money, not in plans of possible spending but to know they are not hand-to-mouth. The idea of Kitty being there snug in her Locked Box – just a separate interest-gaining account in their bank. Because they don't go online for banking they can't see the numbers and feel good about them. So she limps over to the bank and stands in line with the various locals, as the adverts for holidays and fortunes made in bonds bland out her brain. Blue backgrounds and too-happy blonds. White teeth and dental hygiene seem to suggest healthy money.

I'm sorry? says the woman.

I'm just checking, says Little, because we don't use cards.

Why-ever not? asks the teller.

Perhaps you should, she adds, after peering into her screen. There have been recent withdrawals. You have $100 left in this account.

No! You must be wrong. There should be nearly $900!

Uh uh.

Someone has stolen it!

I doubt it, there were several smaller withdrawals made in… And the teller gives Little the days, the week. The week, even Little knows, she was in Adelaide.

Little's stomach is jerking, worse than anything she's known. Worse than shopping under the crazy lights, worse than buying the old meat discounted in the IGA, worse because how can it be – she stands aghast, the print-out in her hand the numbers all wrong.

No it isn't right it can't be, she tells the woman, they have been saving The Kitty for ages. Someone has stolen it, they never withdraw it. Oh yes, the woman says, pitilessly, four withdrawals in a week… and she prints out the summary of transactions, withdrawals from the St Kilda branch.

St Kilda. The Mission. Where she first met Big. A reformed gambler, he had said.

She is red-faced and worn out by the time she gets home. What else: she screams at Big, screams and pushes him down the corridor into their room. Tell me if you took the Kitty, she is screaming and he is not answering which means he has. She knows then it's lost, gone as money years ago was gone, in St Kilda where the cards always fail him. She pushes him against the wall, she grabs her own favourite glass and smashes it down onto their small table and pieces of glass fly into the room between them. Big hides his face like a kid under the words and the spittle, her face darkening, his guilt shuddering, the worry she will explode, break down and need the paras again. It will be his fault, all his weak fault. She keeps saying she can't believe it, she can't believe it, of all things, of all things, how could he, how could he. The Kitty!