Waiting (32 page)

Angus shouting… She still feels bad about running off like that.

Just as long as men don't tell her what to think. Feminism is still a force for women her age even if the 20 year olds think they are past it, empowered by raunchiness and mobile phones and hanging out. So totally how social media makes you, like… a little celebrity. But assuming the world owes you a living is not the same as having your own insights, making your own way. She has seen success going to the young and attractive while those girls claim it as talent, not unacknowledged sexual favouritism, that other kind of sexism.

If she took Angus to an academic dinner the men would probably ignore him, the silent treatment carries a long way. Though someone would ask a few casual questions to label him, or maybe drop a witticism of the least possible effort for greatest possible damage. Malign eloquence.

She is happy to talk about her boyfriend, her past life, with him, and he is just as happy not to. Maybe he isn't listening to her as much as he isn't saying things to her; is it perhaps a reciprocal tactic within him, to deflect rather than judge? This fire business for one. Is he one of them – silent men are men who will not comply, men who use silence to refuse. Sir Thomas More silent to the court that will go on to burn him at the stake.

Do you accept the King as the lawful Head of the Church of England?

Or to chest-front the truth. Maybe. Silent men she is more than used to, another kind, academic silence, which is loaded and not-giving-anything-away. People are practised in looking askance, using silent delays after you say something, letting the heavy waters of their doubt flood the gap. The women though, now that would be different.

Most women like men they can rub against as long as they can trust them.

Now she has heard the terrible news her good friend Sue wants a boob job to keep in with younger men and the bruising sex she likes – maybe the sex more than the men. Men who disappoint her if they don't have a mind for her kind of rough. Isn't this taking raunch a bit far? Raunch, raunch, pole-dancing as a sport not a sexist rip-off, old feminism, post-feminism, raunch, reclaiming the slut, the night, the taboos, sisters, the endless carriages of taboo, or self-deception, or…? Academics rationalising everything.

She droops forward, her forehead on the desk top. And words, words, and the meanings of words, and sentences of words pass endlessly, remorselessly, through her head. Sometimes she is assailed by them, by this, and to be honest it is more than sometimes. It is almost psychotic. The endless soundtrack. The symbolic order. And a good reason not to drink heavily when hangovers ruin her mind in the middle of the night or in the long hours before properly waking: her universe reduced to these words driving like stupid traffic towards a city of no arrival. On and on and on.

Below her office Jasmin can see students scattered around another sausage sizzle. They are the kings of sausage sizzle just as they are the kings of Christian gatherings on campus: Chinese students. They regularly cover the paving areas in chalked invitations to debate Jesus and celebrate Jesus and dance for Jesus. Sweetly innocent students bend over and laugh as they scrawl annoying goody-two-shoes graffiti over pedestrian walkways. On steps esp­ecially, the writing spread cleverly across the up-planes between each step. Jasmin sent an email to one of the university boards res­ponsible for the upkeep and appearance of the grounds, protesting this unsightly vandalism by overseas students who pay no taxes, asking the board to ban the use of chalk. Nothing happened. Pity.

Dressed in white as usual these students tend to the barbeques, their whiteness a lightweight sign of their chaste personae but an unfortunate choice for spattering snags and hotplates snappy with simmering fat. She notes the Caucasian girls amongst them, eagerly surrounded by boys. See my Iphone, see my laptop, see my car. It's a Nissan turbo (it has so much skirting it looks like a cat-flap).

Not Sue's kind. Nothing rough to rub against in that lot. The smell of the snags and the browning onion rises to Jasmin's window, reminding her that once again she has missed a lunch in the form of solid food, and mugfulls of carry-through-the-corridors coffee hardly count. When she was a post-grad she lived on coffee and cigarettes in the same way some of her friends lived on shots and lesbians. Jasmin is black and white, espresso and filtered.

A knock on her door, and then a face.

Ah, Jasmin, can I speak to you please?

It is Maurice, aka Kuan Yew. She thinks of Florence and Agatha and Verity (and… Agnes, aka Little) girls made clumsy by naming. A baptismal font and a nice-clean 19C England imagination. Maurice and Florence.

Maurice sits immediately, not that she minds. She knows he is here to talk her into a Pass. After being absent for most of the course, not having done the first essay and with the next one over-due, he is therefore expecting to make her say Yes. Offer her a formal (give me time) Special Consideration form or request, or since he's here – something more slippery face-to-face, a cod in its wallop, perhaps?

I have a bit of trouble with final essay but so close now. I want only three more days, and weekend too, of course. So, I can hand it in next Friday.

This might suggest an awkwardness with English useage. Jasmin is fairly certain it disguises a rhetorical trick: posing his utterance halfway between a question and a statement.

No, Maurice.

No?

You can't have an extension – no one can have an extension after the due date. If you had a problem you should have seen me before – weeks ago.

Sorry Jasmin, I know you are very kind person. I was busy.

She has actually seen this boy in the city late at night, he has quite a reputation as a party boy. Handsome, in a sleek kind of way, and though very thin in the limbs, he moves well, and she sees the girls giggle when his name is mentioned. The Asian girls. Even if his Chinese name of Kuan Yew has been displaced for… He is definitely no Maurice.

I can't favour one student over the others. They have all handed in their essays on time, except for one and she's in the same trouble you are. She won't pass either. Maurice, I have finished marking the essays. All of them. The marks are in.

She shrugs the shrug of the fair the even-handed and the too-bad-mate.

Oh, I'm so close. This is my best work.

It's your only work. If you've done it.

?

Your first essay?

Yes.

You never did one.

Oh yes, perhaps it was lost.

No, I never received one.

Perhaps you lost it.

Again, she thinks. He's good – the rhetoric arrives only when required.

No, I did not (starting to bite). I don't lose essays. In my experience it's students who don't submit them. Yes, it's funny that. Remark­ably consistent. You can't submit the first essay 9 weeks late, as you know. Then you've missed two-thirds of the classes… now you're too late for the final essay. You haven't done the course at all.

I am busy studying and I work too.

Yes.

Yes?

Everyone does.

Not international student.

Maybe for once he is telling it straight.

The class presentation, remember? You came in extremely late for yours, after we had finished that part of the class, fifteen minutes before we left our two hour tutorial you came in and then mumbled your way through a piece you only had notes for. No one had any idea what you meant. At the moment all you have is under-par attendance and one failed presentation and the two major essays not done.

I was in classes. You didn't see me.

I'll let that go, Maurice. Perhaps you never noticed but I take a roll for every class and I always have. Would you like to see the dates you were absent, or perhaps the few you were present? No? Why would any lecturer pass you, when a bare pass requires that you at least complete the set assessments?

But…

All the set assessments.

But I have to pass.

Well, no. Quite the contrary. I'm not being hard on you… Kuan Yew, it's simple procedure: if you failed to even do the course work, you have to fail.

You don't understand. I have to pass.

I do understand.

He knows. And she knows. His night life, his holidays, his car (another Japanese turbo of some kind), his elegant and cool clothes, his years in Australia, these are not free. He is expected to return home and apply his education and assimilate with endeavour – and honour. Not as a reprobate who failed the entire investment. His party life is of a kind and frequency Chinese mums and dads could never imagine let alone believe, in the face of their exasperated questioning.

He is not the only student navigating the corridors, a plan in their head of who to tackle and when and how, hopefully, to talk them all into passing when maybe they haven't (it happens) passed anything. Except the gates of gall.

When she leaves her office there is a young blonde woman standing in the corridor.

Excuse me, says the woman.

Jesus, not now, Jasmin thinks, an armload of books and her bag unbalancing her. Jasmin manages to look across as she walks to the stairs. Then she sees yet another student approaching, the arty-hippie girl she is also failing. No, it's too much.

Little Goes to Adelaide

At the library Virgin Blue is promising cheap seats on the red display on the computer screen. One event modifies a seemingly unrelated other. Big and Little decide they cannot afford two air fares at these prices. They do have money in a separate bank account. The Kitty. And The Kitty is not for touching.

Anyway, says Big, flying isn't natural. I can prove it. Yes. I've noticed: the sky is different on both sides of the plane.

It's what?

Different. You look out one side and then across to the other side and what you see is quite different. It's as if the jet splits the sky in half.

Like many anxieties in Big – he won't admit them.

Little will be travelling alone. With that decided, their next search for cheap tickets turns up a good one, well it would wouldn't it, the lucky discount. She can home-and-away it, to Adelaide, for $285 return.

It's done; another week passes. Nor will they have to raid The Kitty. It is only flying, she needn't worry about Big, He who waits… who will sit around yacking to the others while she does the anxiety.

After the taxi to the airport, she is still nervous. She has made sure of arriving two hours before departure time. Just in case. Nothing about airports has ever seemed normal, they make Little feel alien. She is early, not to admire but to ease her fear of getting it wrong, late, being silly or confused, and missing the flight. These waiting lounges are the price she must pay, shopping centres without real shops, the space the lack of real food, everything sort of half-real, hateful, and disturbing. She is, being alone today, easily disturbed.

Nothing to do but wait, wait with head down in a magazine in the gate-lounge among the waiting. Other people. She remembers Big telling her about someone who said that Hell is other people and how she'd laughed, not just because the statement was so unexpected and true, but so funny, and funnier because Big always wants an audience of other people, and it is she who finds the truth in it. Some French philosopher. After life in the hostel, so-called normal people at the airport are scary, seated and staring straight ahead, and talking too loudly, and too happy. Happy in small groups, or much worse, happy in big groups, and even that family by the bar. They all look the same: the eyes the jaw-line the ears.

Somehow she start thinking about her mother's home in South Australia. Maybe not sell the house at all but return to live in it, there, in Gawler, with Big… Leave the hostel and its colourful dopes and eccentrics, its strange loyalties. She knows absolutely no one in Gawler at all. No friends. After her mother's death she will have no family there to bother with. Just a grave.

It never takes long, the high altitude shoosh from Melbourne to Adelaide. By the time Little is comfortably relaxed and alive in her seat she feels the nose of the silly plane dip and she thinks of toys in a kid's bedroom, planes suspended on string from the ceiling and tilting down to the carpet. Taking aim almost. The runway. The home. Which means: firstly buses and directions and, secondly, the Nursing Home, and thirdly, highest in the triumvirate, being with the great unfeeling one.

She makes no excuses for her fear at the bumpy Adelaide air heat-lumps everywhere, she is scared and then ah the asphalt the runway bang it oops bang the wings tipping arh my God why can't they land like they do in films a chirp a puff of tyre-smoke (the same chirp the same puff every time) like a gentleman taking a lady's arm to walk off…

Where is the shuttle bus? She is standing under the sign, or the one she thinks she remembers from other trips. The exact same routine. Small pulsations occupy her left temple. And the glare! Constant glare coming off the blank-walled buildings and the glass and the roadway and the sky, and the cars flashing their windscreens at her, and the bus shelter's reinforced glass and the belt buckle of some bloke walking past with a trolley-bag, glare from everything in the too-bright world. The rattle of diesel engines and then there it is, with a huge woosh, stopping in front of her: its small trailer for bags its safari image its little wheels.

It will yes yes yes take her to the city and then all this ordeal again to get her luggage and her baggage (herself) ticketed and safely sitting on the train to Gawler. What a pity her mother has rented out her house. Little will find the small room she has booked near the nursing home, near but not near enough to feel the malign awareness of the aunts who have made sure her mother is surely nursed and homed within a short drive from their homes. After all, when they go to visit, when they calculate it's time for another hand-holding and talking-session in her old and less-resisting ears, they don't want a trip. No. Not that Little is trying to curry favour. No. Whereas and on stronger ground for her it will have been a trip. More a minute by minute endurance.