Waiting (15 page)

Somewhere during those years of boarding Big began to feel alien to the boy-world and the man-world and while outwardly a bloke, inwardly he found himself drawn to the washing lines behind the houses of the teaching staff. Drawn, that is, to the wives' clothing. He never attempted explanations of his trans-state, his cross-dressing, because he found himself as a man in a shift, not a shift in a man. It felt right. Everything else felt wrong. By the time this cooking thing was done and dusted, and dust there most immediately was on the stations, he began to dress up for work as much as relaxing into something more comfortable in the shearers' quarters.

Vietnam was painful uniform and weight-loss in the tropics, Big's leanest of years, and given his administrative, unarmed kind of soldiering, he could only relax at nights with the card games. He didn't know about MASH then and the crazies who wore anything, including dresses. It was a relief to slip into something rural when he returned. Flora not fauna.

Over the years he moved from place to place with two battered suitcases and in rotation with off-season cooking jobs in towns. The second case was for books, until books, thanks to libraries and now the spanking second-hand market, were no longer difficult to find, or even to replace.

It was tiredness and illness that brought him down to the city. People with illnesses last longer in the city. Country people don't make it. Not Sunday but Hospital too far away. Ideally, Big wanted a change into a life without further change, he wanted life like a small business, repetition over time but the freedom to waffle on. Lack of stress, no pressure. Running a bookshop, say, selling and reading in the slack between selling; or a music shop, being an optometrist, keeping a routine and a set of customers, sun, rain, seasons, and to remember things, to read… Nothing else needed, nothing need be risked… or lost.

Do you have any vices? Little had asked Big when they met for the second time. No he had replied (forgetting the cards). And you? At that stage she was still Agnes: my name means Pure and Chaste, she replied.

This is How it is

Angus is waiting outside the rooming house for the smoke to clear and for The Sheriff to stop staring at him. As if a man not living within these boxes of accommodation is not a trustable member of the human race. It cannot be good, it might even be cancerously bad, for a man to be so powerfully suspicious – constantly on the alert – because 99.9 percent of us do not live there. It must tax the body. Still, it gives him something to do and Angus is quite OK with that even if the cigarette smoke does seem to gust in his direction rather too obviously.

The Sheriff has stationed himself within a metre of him and follows in tow whenever Angus tries to move. He hasn't the touchy-threatening manner of some gate-keepers, the ones who stroke your arm and even lay the Sergeant Plod-like hand on your shoulder before kicking you in the balls, and kick you they will if given the smallest provocation. Even if Angus is wearing work shorts and boots and his shirt is made of blue man-stuff.

Angus thinks of his mother in Adelaide who has put him up to this, to meet the cousin and talk to her about the small family matter of inheritance. The house where the man in a dress entered and was lost in the gloom.

The Sheriff thinks of this visit as another test of his patience. Jesus. How many bloody visitors is he expected to counsel?

The Sheriff defers. There is no reason for a stand-off with Angus, who is too big, too polite, and knuckley. They hold this coolness of the moment across the hapless figure of Sammy, who is draped in luxury across the suede lounge, now lined up against the front fence and bearing a crookedly scrawled sign saying For Sale $100.

Angus waits as The Sheriff goes inside. When he returns he tells Angus that Big and Little are out shopping, as they often are. And yes, that's right, that's their names. That's what he's saying, isn't it? They're both a bit crazy but who isn't, eh?

So Angus asks that his visit and name be passed on. Oh, The Sheriff is a go-betweeen. Then Angus dodges the reclining Sammy and leaves. A hundred bucks, he thinks, for that shoddy lounge.

Little cannot afterwards imagine it's any cousin of hers who has called, not from The Sheriff's indifferent description, nor from any more profound idea of being related to some local man in workboots? Who? Angus Who? Someone from the Aunts' other side, or sides, it is so confusing. He must be the cousin who's a gardener? She has heard his name mentioned. Gardening and maintainance – and about his own mother's disappointment. They have that in common. She cannot imagine what he does – rows of tight little roses and lawns cut though with pathways?

She has another cousin, female, a madam, a brothel cousin. Who the aunts have said is mere moments away in any given week from Trouble. Protection money, the one kind suited and skivvied and blinged, the other blue and uniformed and blow-jobs all round.

Little wasn't the one to spread this around. It was all a bit un-nerving, this family gravity of want and strangeness. She was the one little cousin who did not want to be abducted by these other-cousins, or by their odd professions, and end up spilling skivvied babies or shelling peas in outer suburban mansions. Big had no idea what these images meant when she told him. Hardly surprising. So this cousin Angus was self-announced, more or less. From Melbourne? Or has he flown all the way from Adelaide?

Knowing Angus' mother is the family witch, Little fears it must be entreaties over the will: she should leave her money to the family, divvy it up. They have claimed it repeatedly, her mother has said. Family myth-making, keep telling a lie and they will believe it: we looked after you when you were crook. Sure, Little is to believe they bathed her own head years ago, and during fevers drove her to the hospital, sure, and went out to work for her? Saved every­thing, bolstered her bank account, paid her bills? She has had a nervous breakdown, not a lobotomy.

That night she cries again. She tells Big she is scared of her family. And cries. He never knows what to say.

When she cries she doesn't listen.

Morning. Sluggish to wake and watch the light dandle on the window ledge. Big is still asleep. There is something about all this she must wring her hands over and then some more. After this cousin Angus's coming to see her to… what? claim her soul? in the form of one share of a modest house? There is too much she doesn't know about this house business, something legal and almost certainly unavoidable now, and how else to find out than to keep that appointment with the Legal Aid solicitor person? Mr de Silva. Down droops the face of Little. Down and what to do? She calls out to wake Big.

From beneath the massive pile of blankets and old coats stacked on his bed for warmth, Big rises and squints, coughs and shakes his head, skin pale as the terrible blind over the window. She tells him she can't handle it anymore without legal advice.

The words move through him and very nearly leave him untouched until he breathes more air, pauses, and then re-hears her. Ah! The lawyer thing. No putting it off anymore. Not subtle, but very pleased. In town. An expedition! Collins Street for the brave. No, not brave, a man of the law is sober, and sensible, not a frigging alcoholic like the last one they visited out in the suburbs when… Oh, who cares when, or why. This Collins Street person will tell her the secrets of inheritance and the scheming of relatives. All this jumble in Big's sleepy head.

And so they went, first to phone up and confirm, and then they went. First, that phone call. All very straightforward for most of us, unless using a phone is a trauma. And it is. Little does not like it. Makes herself, enough to be able to manage the task. She knows she is not alone. Even her mother used to light up a ciggie before phoning anybody, smoking herself into it, and would carry her fags and lighter across to the phone whenever it rang. And she is indomitable. Poor Little never got near that. Distress has buoyed her, though, or burdened her, enough to suffer the anxieties of ringing. She and Big stand in the phone booth near the Town Hall, the same phone booth in which she saw a drunk holding himself in his right hand and pissing down the side glass while casually or blindly continuing to make a call. No choice now that booths are disappearing into the vacuum, into the airless wake behind mobile phones.

The secretary has found Little's letter on file – sliding the middle drawer out of the steel cabinet, another rare thing in our digital screen-after-screen world of emails, reluctantly though, then sliding it back with a grunt. She proposed an appointment within days. So soon? Lucky Little. Or a dishevelled lawyer?

They went. They actually got there.

You can imagine Mr de Silva's astonishment. That good old-fashioned reaction, when the two of them come in: Big leading, arms wrestling him forward, his red handbag just so, his legs in black patterned stockings, and following very closely behind him Little dolled up with a black wig, a baggy red jumper over a green skirt – her schoolgirl look, Big likes to think. The ‘look' held together at the waist by a broad, white leather belt she found in a local op-shop Big swears by.

And the solicitor in a suit no one will ever remember.

My God.

But then, eyes front and serious, all in a day's work.

Now to the usual: what has brought you to my good self, etc, and what are you in need of, and so on. Almost immediately, Little realises she has not given this man the Adelaide lawyer's details, so all this session will have to remain speculation. She feels so stupid. She hands them over with her mother's original letter. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's worth finding out anyway. For example, could the money go sideways, as money likes to do, and lodge in the mother's sisters' accounts before the daughter's? Instead of the daughter's? Is that even allowable?

Contestable, he says, reading through the paperwork. Very much so.

Could the money, deep breath, could, the money, all of the money, that is, come… to… her?

Of course, Agnes, and most likely. As her only child you also have first legal claim on it. And the house, from what you say, Agnes.

Agnes. Clunk. Oh how she hates this Agnes. How she always forgets it. It's enough to make her want the money right now or lose it altogether.

Well, Little keeps on, can the money from the sale of the house be divided, if her mother does divide it, between herself and her aunts? Her mothers sisters?

And the answer is, mmm, also yes, as long as Little receives a fair and reasonable share, especially as she is somewhat dependent, perhaps then the larger share to herself, then a lesser amount… could… be split between the sisters, and seeing within the law, siblings have only minor rights, but… not if not written in the will. Way less. But. There's no compunction. Her mother can choose her daughter as sole heir.

They look at each other over the unpolished table and its coffee cup stains bleached in perfect circles. She has to ask it.

And what if Julie has been a carer?

Um. Julie? Carers?

My aunt.

Um. Tricky.

He adds: Carers can be tricky. Certainly. He pauses to consider… However, it doesn't over-rule inheritance, it merely confirms her wishes as benefactor if she chooses them as beneficiaries. You may be confusing issues here with the cases that go public when an aged parent leaves money to carers who are not family, and the family contest it. Different. Very. Do you understand, if there is a dispute over the estate? If your mother makes no provision for family who are carers, we are back to them fighting what is in all likelihood a losing battle. It's just not cricket.

This makes her think, and Big grins and nudges her, silent for longer than she can remember, that all this is getting very exciting. Dizzying.

And if so, and then, if Little died, they were maybe thinking of kidney failure, would the money have to go from Little back into the family, meaning those aunts, very sideways…

No, no, and he used the Agnes again. Once it is hers it remains so thereafter, and subject to her will alone. No backwards business in wills. Does, she, though, have any kin?

What?

Kin. Any children?

No.

She should therefore make out a will, and subject to the mother's will, regardless of undue sibling anxiety, which presumably names her daughter Agnes as next of kin, the balance of which she would then inherit. Thus Agnes name her own beneficiary, if she were to decease, to that person, or cause, alone, the money would go.

Ah! It makes Little's brains stop and hide like maths did. If not from hardness and alien-ness, from unlikeability – she does not want to think like this. Even more alarming is hearing the solicitor call her by her real name. Repeatedly. She should change it.

On the other hand, this man of the law looks allright. His room is neat and comfortable without being ostentatious, without being intimidating. He tells them he is from Indian stock, well, he is of course from Sri Lanka, and he makes them feel at home, regardless. He says he is such a cricket fan, he will be their wicket-keeper, their first slip, if necessary.

If there are more pressing complications their lawyer will be coach and backroom man, too, he is very versatile, yes, versatile, he is an all-rounder. And they like him and he likes them. Yes?

Are they interested in cricket, by any chance? As it happens, Big, not a sporting type, nor an unhealthy follower of it, does find the old game of interest, in the much-remarked upon way of test cricket sharing some of the expansive, the attributes – care of Neville Cardus, was it – of music. Handel. Five days of it. Like history.

Big explains the similarly expansive nature of their daily life, of wandering, or lazing in the hostel, making it sound half weekend magazine and half identication parade. The lawyer from Sri Lanka has never before met a cross-dresser, not a real wharfie in drag, not a rooming house Prof with a handbag, who is a… fantasist?… in his rooms.

Big is equally pleased, and if not a cricket man exactly, he can certainly enjoy the humour of the man's playful tropes, just as long as the man doesn't take them too seriously. Only time will tell. He knows lawyers, like medicos, fancy themselves as either cricketers or writers, and think they are better writers than the writers, and some are, in which case they are writers, the argument is gone. Writers are always all kinds of other things, even cross-dressers. But cricketers?