Waiting (3 page)

Where has everybody else been? There were people hugging their awful secret. There were a few people yelling. There are always a few people yelling.

I hate parties, he groans.

Everybody hates parties, she says, I mean everyone says they hate parties.

Teasing him maybe – yet here they both are.

Not today, he adds. Today is an exception. This, he means to say, is based on strong feelings. Remembering the destruction and the need to move on. But he means her. Anyway, he likes the rush of social drinking, the excitement of it beats the hell out of a glass of something in silence at home. Searching too hard for the flavour of the wine. This is his confession of being single. And philosophical.

Except when driving home is too far and… though not today, I live close by, just down the road, he adds. He gazes across at the troubled pastures in the opposite paddocks, at the three brown horses stationary after their earlier galloping. The horses may or may not be happy but people at the party seeing the horses are happy to see them.

After a fire you see all the usual devastation, the kind that TV cameras can show, but there are odder things that show up, like skulls of kangaroos and things you thought lost which are suddenly visible. Old bikes, wheels, anything metallic really. Glass. Though sometimes glass is simply a blob with charcoally stuff solidified into it. Once, I was walking through burnt out bush and found the skeleton of a snake. It was white and the bones were still intact, which is remarkable because they are very fine bones. It looked like a metre-long comb of some kind.

She smiles and keeps eye contact with him, the newly arriving silence of eye contact. And says nothing.

It seems reasonable, he tells her, that so many locals still experience fear, and enough anxiety for sudden panic. No, not a panic-attack, that's media-speak, but a state of panic, feelings that are the same as panic, or accompany panic, but do not rush about like someone panicking. Dread of a kind.

She is humbled by the gravity of what he is saying. And the plain-ness of his clothing, his calf-length shorts over tanned legs, his sandals - and his strikingly pale feet. A man who works outdoors?

He says he always wears boots, and laughs to be distracted from being, as he had been, stuck yet again in fire talk.

In fact I always wear safety boots. With all the years of outdoor work you might think my feet are hard but they're not. They are probably as soft as yours.

She finds this surprisingly intimate.

My feet may not be as soft as you think, she says, smiling. I go barefoot whenever I can. I supervise my students barefoot, in my office, where no one knows or cares. In tutorials when it's not too cold.

She is embarrassed; she has never said this to anyone before and as mild as it is, she feels now self-centred to confess it. She coughs.

And in good weather I run.

This he can guess. Her tights pay her a very shapely compliment.

They keep talking. They watch the kangaroos grazing across the paddocks below the house. Grey and plump at last, like card players in the shadows. It has taken this long for the grass to return and now it is green and lush from the ash and the potassium, the natural potash. Over in the valley it grows in patches beneath the trees that remain black and are scattered like crochets on the hillside.

After wandering off to get another drink, a bottle, Angus returns to see her in a glancing-over-the-shoulder conversation with a man in a checkered shirt.

He ambles closer as if wanting to stride but worried it will look like the striding male returns. She is smoking a cigarette.

You smoke? he says,

No, I don't.

She looks at him.

I just borrowed one from a bloke over there. She smiles and shows her hands, palms up, as if to indicate she is not concealing anything, cigarettes included. She's catching something in him. She is the hook and the fish of him is dragging. Old river cod. Perhaps it is nothing more than the awareness of her tight-fitting singlet. Opening his sometimes dour brain. Her singlet and the slim, neat shape of her words keep surprising him. Is he so obvious?

The other man smiles at Angus and says nothing. Then changes his mind and thrusts out his hand.

Mike, he announces.

Angus does the usual.

No, it is her voice. It is deep and confident and comes directly towards him like openness or friendship. Now she returns to telling him how her work involves teaching semiotics to dazed under­graduates and writing her own research on the languages and meaning, in other words, the way she can read public spaces (she reads public spaces?). In her lectures she uses the ideas of semiotic theorists but references her own hands-on research as often as possible. Anecdotally, that is.

She says all this to Angus, as if the other guy, Mike in the check shirt, isn't there, and soon enough he isn't.

They understand you? asks Angus.

I could throw boiled crayfish at them and they wouldn't know the difference, she says. It's like all teaching and learning – some of them understand.

She drops her cigarette and grinds it, twice, in the dirt. In this loaded fire-world and atmosphere it seems an odd thing to do. She bends and picks it up, looking around for something. Proof she isn't a smoker.

Do you know Stan from long ago or more recently? he asks.

Um, I met him through Susan, a Uni friend of mine who lives in the foot-hills not far from here. I say she is half city, half hilly. On the border. Being a literary person, she says she is marginalia.

She sounds like jam.

She left before you arrived and I am just about to go, too.

Oh. Hang on. You can't go now. Tell me about this lecturing stuff you do. I've hardly ever spoken in public, or in front of a crowded room. They say it's way up on the stress-list, one of the things people most fear doing. People crap themselves over it.

Not me, mate.

No?

Never! As soon as I get started… and that's the hard bit… I love it. No, my big problem is stopping. When the hour is up and the next lecturer is scowling at me from the doorway!

I bet you smile sweetly and have the last word – or sentence.

Angus feels a pleasure quite free of the regret each over-zealous response brings on when a man is trying too hard to impress, to see which words might work. He imagines sitting in her lectures, eyes closed, listening as she speaks with such deep pleasure about… crayfish? He has always imagined female academics as a very indoor species dressed in men's shirts, and with buttons. He hates buttons.

Are you following any of this? She is staring at him, a frown just about tangling in her hair.

I am, I'm in there with you and the students and the crayfish and… your… forthcoming book?

She grins. Looks down at the ridiculous cigarette butt.

Yeah, my book. Some people think were are all nerdy, if not nutty. You know, I heard a nervous first-time lecturer refer to himself as part of acadamia.

So, nutty then?

When she laughs he feels her energy swoosh towards him. Nothing buttoned about her.

While she is not pretty, striking perhaps, strong he thinks again, it is her voice that keeps surprising him. Regardless of his gabbling (whenever it is his turn for gabbling) he wants to stay silent. Silent, as many of his days are, working alone, outside.

He confesses that he knows nothing whatsoever about pedagogy and what was it, poetics? and the ways texts, as she called them, made meaning? None of it. And reading public design? It made sense not as a text but as a tactic. Of? Semiotics?

Well, of course you won't know about such things, she replies, and gently claps her hands. I wouldn't expect you to.

He is taken aback. What has she clapped for?

Even she can't tell anymore. She had begun her study in diagnostics, she tells him, in medical science, and how symptoms operate as a language… and the odd vice versa effect of this… but then she sort of sidestepped into signs more generally, just plain old semiology.

You went from the inside to the outside, he suggests.

She hadn't thought of it like that.

Just don't say anything about anything not being rocket science, he adds. Or hipsters.

Hipsters! We have lots of them.

Then she laughs unexpectedly, knocks her dark glasses up and the wings tangle in her hair. His grin turns practical and he reaches forward, standing close in front of her, and carefully disentangles a slim metal wing and its sharp hinge from her brown hair. Taking longer, it seems to them both, than is strictly necessary.

Stay for a while, he says.

The hills are turning lyrical, she thinks, more pastoral poetry than romantic. More Czerny than Beethoven. The wine is getting to her too. Susan's place is close enough.

On the slope below them are fifteen or so vehicles, more than the usual proportion of 4WDs, and all of them silver except for one red, one black.

Which is your vehicle? she asks Angus, gesturing to the line-up.

The silver one.

Ha ha. Mine is the silver one.

Alright, then. The red one. Actually, mine is the red one.

Behind her in its metal frames the house sits there like a lift destined for the upper air, a box built into the side of a valley facing east, so the late light shines through the re-growing eucalypts and bleached grasses and into the dark native scrub roughening the valley opposite.

Angus!

They look up to see Stan leaning over the verandah with a glass in his hand. He grins as if pleased beyond measure and raises his glass in salute. Angus responds with the same.

Jasmin! This time Stan ruts up against the verandah railing and laughs again before turning away and disappearing.

Is he always like that?

Oh yes.

Stan, their host, another tall, sandy-haired man like Angus, but thinner, and noisier. He is known to be clever and very generous and he has taken endless trouble in times of trouble to help many people in the hills community. He is a prominent local member of the Greens. Compassion has not made him any more subtle.

Angus explains how he lost his own two-level house in the South Australian bushfires. Burnt to a ruin, the lower rooms left standing but the roof gone, the rafters black and distorted. It had blown its brains out. He was lucky to be here talking about it, given his panicked escape late in the fire-path. Not his idea. Not his house design either, just a house he'd purchased with his ex-wife in a difficult time, her choice and his… for going along with it.

Do you have a partner? he asks her.

Urh, yes. Well, I think so.

She ‘thinks' of Richard, far away on his travels overseas and, like the Universe, disappearing towards that wall of pixels. Perhaps right through it.

She can't read Angus' reaction, or his lack of one. To be fair, nor can he.

But he's in the UK at the moment. He's a bit of a prick, if you want to know. He's an academic too.

He raises his eyebrows (he wants to go huh and he hears it, silenced).

Right, he says, after a pause. Anyway, though I never lost friends to it, my house was lost in a bushfire, so I'm part of this lot. Except from another time and place. The experience is the same, regardless.

His face is grave again. He is going to add something but doesn't, or perhaps he can't. It is slight and slow and yet she catches some­thing in this slowness. And she remembers this afterwards.

Now Angus has re-built the SA house to make it as fire-proof as possible. Because he couldn't sell a conventional house he'd never wanted, to pay for the divorce settlement he'd never wanted, to someone who most likely wouldn't want a house in a fire zone. Unless it was safe. Crazy.

How safe is safe? she asks.

It's hard to test an experiment like that, to test it with real danger, and he smiles at her, the opposite of her own work in research, housed in the safe world of ideas.

He has experimented. There is a lot going on now, where before there was nothing. So when Stan contacted him from Victoria to ask for help in designing his own ‘fire-proofed' house, it seemed an extra-ordinary deliverance.

Angus takes her arm, gently, to direct her around to the side of the house. He helps her clamber up against the rear walls then explains how they began. How without taking more than a wink and a tinnie from the local experts, he and Stan had set about finding slow but beautiful fire and river-coloured bricks then mortaring them into double-brick walls with brick and block interior walls. Then, their big trick, insetting one course of bricks and wrapping the outside walls with steel bands, flush. And inside too, but hidden from view within the wall cavity. Surrounded by the most intense heat these walls should never burst open, nor implode. Inside, the vaulted ceiling is made of fire-proofed wood, again, banded with steel so the roof can never blow open like his own insanely blown-open house. No eaves to catch the embers. No maintenance either. And windows with shutters.

We could be in Italy! he says, a bit pissed now, opening his arms like a tenor cracking on a high note.

He slips on the crumbling clay surface and skids away from her and down the slope like a kid, or a long man in the luge. It takes more than wind out of him. She is laughing as she looks down. The man-genius reduced to stumbling legs. His left trouser leg is streaked reddy-brown from the clay. And his elbows.

Jasmin lowers herself towards him and gently brushes the clay from his arms. He sees her trying her best to hold back laughter and has to nod, and nod.

I'm as dusty as an old book.

Or an old bottle of wine?

You know, you should use your semiotics to study old books. Maybe even wine.

He might almost be lecturing. He is so innocent. But she is studying him.

People do, Angus. Books, and yes, even labels, on wine or on anything. That's why I don't. I look at… well, you know, I told you. Public things.

I think I'm getting the hang of it, he says.

More quietly than before, he then explains the deep incision they cut into the clay of the slope then reinforced with concrete, so it looks like a kind of acoustic shell. How they tucked the house in under it: the earth shape diverts the flames and the heat-wave up and over the specially-clad roof. The house is made part of the slope, stretching east. On the south west side of the cliff the soil is re-grown with prostrate ground-covers, native, of course, growing with minimal water through summer. Further back are the trees along the gravel access road and the public roadside.