Waiting (24 page)

I feel just a bit naughty being in the house you share with your boyfriend.

Boyfriend?

Oh, she cries, her voice theatrical: I've ditched the boyfriend!

And your cat? Moss has strutted up to Angus and is calling loudly for attention.

He stays, says Jasmin, looking down at him. His name is Moss by the way.

Boss more like, says Angus, the cat still staring at him.

And she pours two glasses of wine. What a pleasure to say ditched. I've ditched the boyfriend. The relief surprises her, coming from the words in her head. How different, how much richer and freer saying it and thereby having done it. She makes a high barracking sound like a footie fan. She feels turned-on by Angus being there, by the transgression of the ghost of the boyfriend. Yes. Him being here is pretty nice foreplay. She can feel it.

The wine soothes him and the wine soothes her and she makes fun of her whacky students and the endless ironies her work on public signs reveals. Angus and wine and talking. Another kind of talking cure. Soon they are sitting against the shapes of each other, the erotic good humour of skin… And they are kissing and she is draped across him, his hand is inside the upper of her dress and stroking her breasts. They are done with this waiting when there is no reason to wait, time to go into the long gulping urging of fucking now before the woozy surface of wine closes over.

She moves off to the toilet and sits there pretending she is waiting to decide. This man with the on-off grin that even when off is warmly ready to appear again; she has told him it could be his nick-name except she knows Onoff is a character in a Depardieu movie called A Pure Formality. Angus is big like Depardieu but Angus is leaner and sexier. She has decided. And when she wipes she has to laugh at the evidence.

Back in the lounge she takes the glass from him and kisses him on the mouth. It isn't slowing her down she cannot resist and then she has grabbed him by the belt and she begins to unbuckle, un-zip his blokey work-shorts, almost growling OK you, let's see what you have.

Jesus he thinks, I'm being asked. No more male fumbling.

No, they both fumble through into her bedroom, where he is soon undressing and she is already lying back, having dramatically lifted her top over her shoulders and flung it away. So long since he has reached down and caressed bare skin, now hers, her long slim body under his. His cock is hard and has that happy feeling between weight and lift. And she is pulling him in… He is old-fashioned, her open-ness turns him on, her trust in taking him, in moving under him, her firm bottom, his muscular back and arms. And then she is squatting in his lap as they rock, yoga-like but hardly Tantra, until coming simply when it comes. A first night is its own aphrodisiac.

She and Angus are strangers who have been without for too long. They are lying on her bed worn out and laughing at the adolescent rush of orgasm through them, as happy as teens drinking, their firmed bodies better than lank young bodies, his strong from work and hers toned from running. Full of self-congratulation, empty of energy, they lie there, her long body next to his, her breasts softly touching his arm and he facing her, a low incandescence,

Though afterwards she squirms silently with mental bodies: how off-putting her come-on wording might have been. While it's a turn-on for him, this getitandgrabit lust, there are men who'd die back into their undies at the sound of it. Men and their worries. She has discussed with other women women's favourite penis shots in films as if it was normal entertainment. She still likes the wrestling scene in Women in Love: two men unavoidably naked and willies exposed in real time, not set up for a three second slip past the camera. They have talked about 9 Songs, the Winterbottom film with explicit sex but such a cold film. A colleague was impressed by Michael Fassbender's bratwurst in Shame, filmed so fulsomely with the camera provocatively held at at cock height. That took some beating.

Not this time.

Angus snoozes, his penis lolling between them without a twitch or tremor left in it.

It must be waking in Jasmin's apartment the first time. Moss has shoved his way into the bed, under the sheet between them and is purring loudly against Jasmin. Still early, Angus is surprised that they have had their full night and slept and it is only, now, 2am. Surprising, as if sexual elation has woken him. He moves quietly from her bed and draws on his trousers to walk outside.

In some ways it is otherworldly: streetlights open the underview beneath trees on the boulevade. A yellowish half-lit layer of atmo­sphere floats between the branching foliage of trees and the verge grass below. Like a portal into otherworlds vaguely European. More light rain (but this is Melbourne) is spraying through the trees and finding his face and quickening his breath. Rain is sparkling under the branches like the night's annunciation. Two taxi pass, accelerating in the lanes heading north and, surprisingly, a cyclist speeds along in silence.

Beauty. Never the same twice, nor does it stay, unless memory lays one upon another, traveling the same road. Even the sensory minutes of it holds less in the world than a night's program of it, or a sleep interrupted as now. Out here it is entering him, pure and without risk, gorgeous. This is more than beautiful. This is his endorphins working.

Oh Jesus he's getting sentimental.

Though it does feel like Europe. Others have noted this about Melbourne. The trams, the parallel slip-roads, the weather. So this is nostalgia, even if he has only once, and very briefly, been in Europe. And that was years ago. Being here, then, is only half of that experience of feeling ‘here' is like ‘there'. He should tell Jasmin what he is thinking. Perhaps having only half of the experience – and thus the lack – is the essence of nostalgia.

Their Talking Cures

You can't say we are not inconsiderate, Big had said. Using the triple negative for her amusement. Well, his. Beyond the glass door the post boxes are stacked on three walls of this blind annex and the width is less than three metres. When both of them went inside, half of the space was occupied by Big. It is a very confined. Sometimes at the lunch hour and the after-work shopping hour as many as three or four people might enter and be face to face or even bottom to bottom just to collect their mail. It is that kind of place: intimacy among strangers and just as well it's brightly lit.

At their first visits – and it was summer after a sweaty walk – Big took out his key, went in alone and people approached the glass door, opened it with their key and were well inside before they found him bare-armed and huge and lanky-bald and stolidly hot in a woman's dress blocking their way. To walk past him was to approach face-to-face, or side-sidle or bend around and past this… this… and he sometimes engaged them in unwanted conver­sation – or was in a bad-mouthing mood, stood there talking, his face wronged from bad mail or bad air or who knew what.

Little had to tell him how alarmed people looked as they rushed out, never looking back, or how they turned and stared inside at him still flat-footed in between the walls of boxes.

There are times one simply has to face oddities in oneself. One must accept that people do not always feel relaxed or generous. Or talkative. Some of us are destined to be disliked without good cause, destined to be laughed at forever, left out of the fun, taken as fools, considered lesser or smellier, and without good cause. Looks, perhaps, appearances, certainly expectations of safety – the world made is up of timid people, after all, people who are fearful of the cuckoo in the nest. Big is a cuckoo. No God can have invented him but then no God presides over this misaligned place. A Big-like kind of sentiment to be sure.

So now he is resigned to standing near the fountain as Little discreetly and rather beautifully in her mousy kind of way enters the glassed-in space alone. She bends, opens the box and peers inside, removing a letter or two before locking and straightening. Triumphant at having found mail therein, if she has, she emerges with the letters like someone walking out from an overlit alien vehicle of the non-abducting kind.

They search the letters nervous for The Letter with a SA postmark to say her mother ha… her mother has… Even Little accepts this as her feeling, to find out that her mother has. Died.

Why is it taking so long?

It feels like another disorder in her joints unlike lupus not her old loopy but some adrenaline sort of thing aching there. She has never been good at waiting. Anyway not today.

They feel reassured that at least the mail is safely delivered and monitored and the uncertainties of the postie-round is not for them. Off they go to the library to use the computers as usual, to dive-bomb the suburbs in GoogleEarth, to read The Age, The Australian and snipe at Rupert bloody Murdoch and laugh at that frigging clown Tony Abbott and enjoy the rest of the day until closing time, and with that phrase in mind walk across the street to the stickiest pub in Melbourne and drink, for him a pint of Guinness and for her a G & T. Perched high on the bar stools like regular cool kids. Just one round, and rare. Kidneys. Blood sugar.

The fact is, not a lot changes in the hostel. Not much in the way of outdoor behaviour occupies the men, unless that's walking to and sitting in a beer garden, a park more likely, or wandering up to locals in the street and asking for a few dollars to…

No one says why this man at the hostel, a new arrival from the week before, always sits in silence at the front, unless from lack of interest in the world of motivation. This man may lack choice: though he is a man clearly changed. It is obvious, less from his bottle of beer and him sunning himself and more from the long scar which curves up from low on his left temple to high on his skull.

Little is looking at him. It is alarming. And fascinating. The scar. To look at him is like staring at a woman's billowing cleavage, the eye goes there of its own accord. The ancient Greeks knew, they who placed sight highest of the senses, knew sight for what it was: for its objectivity, its speed, and its lack of interference from the emotions.

At first.

Soon enough the mind wants something else, like touch…

Difficult in this case. When looking at this man doing nothing, doing something seems inappropriate. He smiles, then begins speaking quietly, of nothing much, and this worries Little who imagines, and she may be right, that he has lost part of his brain, the bit we call getupandgo (he is not alone in that) but also aggro. His appearance causes a tremor in the house; fear of the scariest, some kind of lobotomy? He is scarily calm and pleasant, in his first comments to her, if they are to her. He is sitting, she is standing, the sun is shining and the front yard is in front of them:

We could grow some roses here, he suggests. I like roses. Roses are beautiful. There's no reason we couldn't grow roses. Just there.

To her relief, he's not as soul-less as Dazza had said, Daz, the sit-down-and-spit merchant. When she and Big call some of the men soul-less they don't mean lobotomised, as the men mean it, they mean unethical, having a deficit in the region of morality, ie: they steal your stuff.

I like roses too, she says, but I think they grow too slowly. They need a lot of…

Horse poo. We could get some horse poo.

His voice remains flat. There's the sense of interference having taken place, not from emotions but, well, of the emotions. Are they there?

The Government guide book to rooming life (the user's manual) refers to those who are homeless and unemployed long term and those who have ‘barriers to employment' and this worries Little. This phrase is suggestive of a physical obstacle, but where exactly? It is only a knee-jerk metaphor, she knows, this ‘barrier' sounding so council-like in manner, like a road divider or rail to prevent people falling over the edge of… Looking at the man with the scar she thinks of something terrible like scar tissue inside his brain, sealing something off.

For all her sometimes nagging and whinging she is at heart a sympathetic person. And he is so gentle and nice she immediately feels silly. He is a faintly benign even graceful presence. Out with that awful word in the booklet and in with this sense of grace. She breathes a sigh of Little Relief. All this is accomplished without the man saying anything of the slightest consequence.

He keeps talking. A woman gave him a ten dollar note yesterday and said it would be enough for a nice cup of tea and a sandwich, and he felt it was really funny that she thought he would, as he drank it. A beer sandwich.

Sometimes his words go off like a muted phone ringing, a certain regularity, not a bell so much as a small quiet piece of music, within the sense of what he is saying. She knows it is probably just his repetitions but after a while it is quite reassuring. Why should the whole population of Melbourne work anyway, mainly to make food and serve it to tables of non-stop conversation, of the young esp­ecially, who waste all their wages on coffee, on alcohol, in ridiculously noisy and darkened nightclubs. The rest eat and eat, always eating, always talking, every restaurant in the city crammed every night – even at lunchtime. People are obese? What's the surprise?

A woman from across the road sometimes stops to talk to them and the men are so so polite, until she goes and then the dumb talk comes out quick as a smirk. Of course Julia is a hit with everyone but Julia comes and goes who knows where or why and now she has been missing for several weeks and she only sometimes talks with Little because Little makes her irritable, the buttoned-upness of Little can do that; in turn, Julia makes Little so shy she is mini mouse.

No one wants it. Shyness. The men who Little knows all claim to be experts. Knowing things is not the same as knowing yourself but it gets them through life. Shyness is always stopping you and pulling you over to slow down and feel ashamed, it is the traffic police working over-time when there is no speeding going on. It is breathalysing you when you haven't had a drink. Shyness is something big and it out-weighs the person it waits in – it is the drab-coloured cuckoo.