Waiting (8 page)

The next day, Saturday, Angus is sitting on his verandah looking at the trees when he remembers, guiltily, the woman was in the right. He had better ask the absent ‘businessman' for his contract payment right away. Hope his insurance forms will shut her up. Insurance never satisfies the aggrieved though; they want to shout and accuse and scream indignation. They want the kill.

Come to think of it, he'd better check through the details of his third-party insurance too. Make sure it's up-to-date. Everything legal keeps changing but insurance liability is like taxes and death.

Then someone is knocking at his front door.

There haven't been more than a dozen visitors in all the time he's lived here. Not a salesman, surely? Angus gets up and wanders through the house to the front and opens the door.

Surprise!

Standing there is Jasmin and another woman.

Hi! he says, dopily, shocked, and in a high voice, just to make it worse.

Well, she laughs, aren't you inviting us in? This is Sue, my friend from Uni. I told you about her at the party, remember, you said she was like jam.

Well…

I can tell you're really pleased to see us.

His heart has jumped into cliche. He realises how starved of female intimacy he is. Sue is shorter than Jasmin and rounder and is smiling at him – the two of them, smiling at him. He could hug them and keep them forever.

They stay for a drink and they wander through his rental home, inspecting everything, including the bedroom, he notices, and when they are all sitting on the verandah Angus tells them about yesterday's encounter with the crazy woman.

They debate crazy, they are academics after all, but concede something close, like the woman is over the top self-centred? So Angus tells them (he tells them because his mind is so fixed on Jasmin he over-compensates and talks to Sue) about his mother.

It is his mother who is the model for things self-centred, yet she is pessimistic. Is that a common double? The Mercedes woman kept reminding him of his mother, a Mediterranean version. He tells Jasmin and Sue how his mother went a bit hippie in middle age and once over that went very embarrassingly New Agey, the land of Me for her generation, and how after that she had lapsed into obesity and competitive bitterness.

At least she wasn't an alcoholic, he says.

They drink to that, and Sue asks if she may, then lights up a cigarette.

In his early 20s, Angus says, when he was house-sharing with two alarmingly dysfunctional psychologists, he had taken one of those silly Myers-Briggs personality tests. To their credit, The Two Shrinks, as he called them, did not take Mr and Ms M-B especially seriously. They said what a travesty it was to take the 400,000 or so words of Carl Jung and reduce them by omission to this limited and changeable so-called personality test. It was T20 cricket in duration but Test cricket in its chance of result.

Well, Mr Work Boots, asks Jasmin, what did you come out of that as? What kind of man are we drinking with?

Angus says he was labelled as an Extroverted Sensation Feeling type…

The women look at him.

Is that good? he asks.

Yes and Sounds good, they answer, almost in unison.

I thought I was more of an introvert. Look at me living alone up here.

(Starved for company, he doesn't add.)

God knows what my mother would be. She is a Narcissist. Something I've missed, luckily.

They do very well in the world if they are disciplined, says Sue.

And in the corporate world, adds Jasmin, and in University administration!

He tells them in more detail than necessary how the Two Shrinks were also a bit hippie-ish, how they smoked dope, all three of them, and with their friends, they played music and were all a bit bloody obvious. One of the shrinks suggested he make the most of his psychological typing, try more often to stand in the centre of the world, to feel the elements of him merge with the elements themselves. To feel this in his torso, his chakras, the other one said. Angus agrees, now, belatedly, now that the two embarrassing sets of advice have long faded, that he is in some sort of way a low-key pantheist… Perhaps he has waffled on for too long.

The two women stand and thank him for the wine and tell him they have to get down to the plant nursery before closing so thank you again and goodbye Angus. At the front door Sue puts out her hand and Jasmin steps in close and kisses him fully on the mouth then turns immediately, and they walk to the car, get in, slam the doors and drive away, all within half a minute. Angus is still standing there five minutes later.

The Sheriff

Outside the hostel – the stage, and the cast, and the Sheriff is right into it.

Do it like this, fuck ya! shouts The Sheriff, then quieter and scarier: Do it like I say, mate…

He is the Director.

Backing away from him, his steps unsteady, is the much younger man addressed as mate, but no one has seen him before. In his black pants and brown shirt he looks bigger, and fit, but he's not arguing or not any more. The Sheriff has dusted him once, but gets him down and punches him twice in the face. The Sheriff doesn't wait for any finer points of analysis, intruders don't qualify. There is no argument in his nickname. And this bloke, who walked into the corridor and never for a second thought there would be anyone waiting, knows that now. The Sheriff is a man who hits hard and then shouts, and only then threatens.

So, whatdayado? advises The Sheriff. You walk slowly to the front door, if there's no one out here, and you knock, but if we are out here you very politely, from the pavement you got it, the pavement, you ask for one of us by name and say what ya here for. If ya come as far as having to knock, you just fucken well wait. What ya don't do is walk in like it it's some fucken hostel…

The man glares at him

It is a hostel. I was looking for…

His fist like a gun. The Sheriff shuts him down with a mimed shot between the eyes.

Ya not listnun. This is not a fucken hostel it's my fucken home, ya got it. I live here. If you want to visit you visit my home like anyone else's bloody home, you stop and call out or you knock and wait. If I catch ya doin anything else I'll show you why they locked me in Pentridge for fourteen fucken years, mate, do you understand? People like me aren't scared of weak fucken people like you, mate, people like me aren't scared of any fucker who breathes air, mate. As you found out ya weakaspiss shithead I'm older and smaller than you but I can kick the shit out of ya in two seconds, I'm the hardest cunt you ever will see, mate, and if you come here again and don't treat this house like my home you'll be many teeth less and a few fucken bones crookeder. Mark my fucken words.

His favourite expression that, mark my words, especially with fucken included, and his favourite way of using it is after a knuckle sandwich. What a day, what a great (fucken) day, he hasn't had the pleasure of punching some guy's lights out for yonks. He'll be losing his touch if he doesn't keep in training. Have to hand in his badge. Like fuck.

Now mate, he says, all sweet and tolerable. Who were you lookin for?

He steps aside and lets the dusted-off man walk into the house. The Sheriff pulls a neatly rolled ciggie from behind his ear, and lights it. No wussy lighters, no, he lights up with a match and he draws in the unfresh air, the air of his own personal space.

When the man comes out a few minutes later he walks onto the pavement before saying:

Mate, you've got anger-management issues, you need to see someone!

The Sheriff is so flabbergasted he can only shake his head and then, unexpectedly, he laughs and laughs, as the man skedaddles down the street. And The Sheriff is not a man who laughs very often.

They don't know if The Sheriff has ever held down a job, but suspect not; it isn't easy to imagine him doing another man's trivial work, or accepting anything less than punching rights. He is not the desk or office kind. In matters of law he's more the documentary type, not the planning sort. Real-life action. No Monday to Friday for him, and now he's retired he's not writing his fucking memoir, no, (dickheads, bullshit artists) he's the ageing tom in the yard. His eyes do most of the brawling for him but he does like to keep his action up from time to time, has to, a pity for any dumb bugger who misreads the invisible but stubborn signs of his lurking.

There could, in thinner futures, on colder days, come a stand- off when a thigh muscle cramps or a shoulder slumps and that Sheriffy stance weakens a tad, just enough, to reveal pain no one has elbowed into him. Or someone will land a couple, that is, kick his shins out, see him drop. The Sheriff thinks as little as possible about the future but he knows it will come, damn it, fuck it. It's time he worries about, and winter, the birds impossibly alive in the trees, how you never see dead ones anywhere, so what happens to them, where do birds go to die?

So, he is rolling a spare cigarette, the paper shakes like feathers in the wind. Plumage but not much underneath. Had a parrot once, he did, he thinks, they live for bloody decades but pat them and there's nothing there. They are empty fuckers, full of laughs. He almost lets a wet eye happen (or is it smoke from the rollie in his gob?) when he stares up into the gum trees along the median stretch, full of lunatics in green suits, blue suits, orange and red, their beady crazy eyes, birds full of lunacy and bluff. All the same there's nothing in them. Parrot pie's a friggin joke, for Christ's sake, how many would you need? So he lodges the spare fag behind his ear to replace the one he's smoking, turns inside and listens to the men talking, his being in every business his own man, as long as he is The Sheriff.

He stands there. And that head of his like a bollard.

Many hostel-dwellers self-medicate but only Tom self-allocates – that is, he takes upon himself small acts of goodness such as tilting the reekers: wheeling out their bulky green bins full of waste and the gaudy yellow-lids full of clink and rattle. Tom parks them on the kerb, their lid-lip-side facing out. A day later, he grabs the handle side and wheels them back in. Tom is the self-appointed caretaker of the bins, he even does the neighbouring houses and the set of flats nearby. Were it not for his unstated but actual stomach condition he would wheel out onto the pavement every rubbish bin in the street.

This guy wants to go straight to heaven.

Bins are better than suicide missions, let's face it. And he can be seen doing it. And stay in one piece. When Tom returns he sits down in his room with Jesus's door open and begins his latest act of self-righteousness: he starts clattering away on his strange, mechan­ical typewriter and because he is God's man on deck he continues to keep his door open for all souls to have a chance to hear the sound of Christian charity. He is dedicating the rest of his life to volunteer work for the church and through this noble typing out, very slowly, of hymns and psalms and such-like, he is converting not water into wine but words into bumps onto pages for the finger-readers.

The noise gets worse. He may be busy but St Tom is, all the same, waiting for Jesus. And who can say when He might come in. To bless Tom, very recognisable in his long Jesus beard and long Jesus hair, in fair copy of the Aryan print of Jesus he has nailed on his wall.

So until then he has found this new trick to pay his way: he types out prayers and hymns on a noisy Braille typewriter, preparing the way of the Lord. This is new, this is probably why he has waited till everyone is nearby to get up to speed. Two finger speed, but Christian noise is good noise…

Before Little can stop him Big swings their door open and stomps down the corridor to bang his big fist on Tom's open door. From the doorway he tells Tom by Christ he'd better give it a rest. Noise is a bloody sin.

Tom can't resist this one and stops, looks up from his darkened window and pale table lamp. His grin would clear bars. Even the Salvos would leave.

I know all about sin, my friend. I was the sinner in the gutter.

A kind of spluttering enters and leaves Big's mouth.

So you bloody say. And here you are clattering in the middle of the bloody night. What the hell are you typing anyway?

Tom explains and only gets snorts in response. Standing there Big notices a small piece of meat on Tom's floor…? There are more things in heaven and earth…

(Self-righteous prat… ) So you're sucking up to Jesus, is that it? Being holier than us. (Another snort.)

Not hard to do, says Tom.

How do you type anyway with so many bloody fingers missing?

That's a bit ripe, isn't it? says Tom. Coming from a chef.

(He is missing the three outer fingers from his left hand. Weirdly, the three outer fingernails on his right hand have been left to grow as if in compensation. Or vanity. The nails are long and curved, and they make Big shudder.)

If you really want to know, says Tom, I look upon it as God's punishment.

God's pun… Bloody hell! You'd be nothing without this sin stuff. You can't get enough of it, can you? Mr Gody goody, after being down and out and a bloody sinner, you unholy bugger?

Not any more.

Not any more what?

Not a bugger. The boys are behind me.

Jesus, that calls for a joke. But where would you be now if you hadn't been a bugger?

I am a reformed man, my sins are in the past.

Pedophilia isn't a sin, Thomas, it's a bloody crime. I'm telling you, you'd be inside like half the knockers in this house have been. There are longer sentences for it than you could ever type into… nobbly-arsey Braille.

He is upset.

I don't think this tone of yours is… quite appropriate.

Stuff being appropriate. Stop making this bloody noise Thomas or I'll commit some sins of my own on your bloody hide!

We are all sinners. Please don't call me Thomas.

Tom is big on original sin. It is also possible he cannot really tell that despite his overt anger Big is suppressing a deeper rage.