Waiting (34 page)

A few women, a few couples. A thin-as-snakes couple in their twenties, junkies most likely, or recovering enough to eat and breathe awhile under their hoodies. Suspicious and a little superior. Thin men, whiskered men, men in check coats and beanies, and bruised men and tired men, hairy men, surprisingly many full-heads of hair considering, and big tall men with big heads, Goliaths brought down by low-slung things in life.

Fill my coffee for me, two sugars, white please, says the woman opposite, at Big as he stands to get his own. Sure love, he says, and does. Then says it again when she taps her glass and points at the water jug. He knows the variety if not the reason. He wonders how Little is managing with her weird rellies, a tautology really, all rellies in his mind being weird. And then Jimmy arrives, and sits near the back of the room, prompting Big to rise from his seat, grab his cutlery and plate, and move over to the table with him.

Somehow he must know The Kitty is already lost.

If Little returns metaphorically with her inheritance intact it may not matter much if The Kitty (and the dreams intrinsic to it) is empty. Just for now, he thinks, all will be well, just for now. This time is his last chance.

Little Returns

In the airport lounge, waiting to return home from madness, all her inner world shredded but only because it was, bravely, she feels it was bravely, encountered, Little sits waiting for her return flight. As the flight information scans down she sees her plane is still not boarding: the numbers all correct, she is very nervous, due now – why is it not boarding for another hour? No explanation is forthcoming and so she waits with everyone else.

A rip-off mate, says a man to his mobile. When I was at Argyle ‘cause er the actual mob out there… what they are friggin layin off blokes every morning doesn't make the front page does it unless it's over 500 but they've been ripping out the equipment for yonks. Since last year… yeah the blokes have taken off all over the bloody place a… yeah, looking at the bottom line too early. Fucking billions mate in the fucking billions.

Two sisters are sitting side by side, one with alloy crutches and reclining like someone with a bad back, or about to get one, the sisters like her horrible aunts. These two have the same lips, the same pouty way of speaking, a bit sexual really, the same earings, everything. Little again aware she would have liked a sister, a little sister not a bullying sister, the sort a lot of people seem to have. Not one of those police-sisters, a little sister, a smiley happy make-Little-smile kind of sister, and then as she got older a sister she could talk with about things that matter.

Having a man who is a woman is not quite the same thing. He is a man and won't ever not be.

And over to her right, sitting in the vase of his belly, is a man with a very tanned face and a small white moustache, such a funny white and very carefully shaved moustache. He looks a bit perverse: that too-clean mouth the white hair and his bottom lip sticking out, his belly sticking out, a kind of gnome in green shirt and glasses. Why is his mouth pushing in her direction, why is he so unsettling and looking so pompous? Pompuss.

Ah she is all jokes today. Does that man have a company account on his dark little mobile? He holds it closer to his face than his Dutch beard, a black under-the-jaw beard on a smoothly shaven face. God, he has walked up to her, where she sits hiding behind a glass of diet Coke, her face facing anywhere but at him with his under-chin hair, and all that talk going on and on as he walks within centimetres of her chair. Does she really have her thoughts on her face? Like a Dutch beard?

Waiting is so one dimensional. She cannot stop going back over the visit to the aunts, Julie and May and Victoria. And of Angus saying their grandmother named the four daughters after the months they were born in: June and July and then May too late, or early, the matriarch finally having the good sense, after bad taste, to change – naming the last one Victoria. The aunts from central-casting.

She had felt completely unprotected. They were very welcoming on the surface, indicating the offerings of tea and cakes, the cup-cakes not the lamington variety of old Adelaide, even if they themselves were a part of old Adelaide. The three of them sitting in the lounge and Little caught awkwardly in the shortest seat, of course, and isolated in the middle. So the three sisters sat above her and to each side, so she couldn't see them all at once, while they, behind her back, winked or winced or made signals to each other whenever they wanted to. They are slightly younger and had once been prettier than her mother until their ugly sister-ness, an inner attribute ready to be called up in a flash, cast pallor and plain-ness on their faces. And hair on Julie's.

They asked her how she intended compensating them for the expenses of looking after her mother, because there have been expenses, big ones, and as the daughter she will have to make a significant effort given that she lives out of the state. This was simply not true: Little knew money was debited from her mother's account. But Julie hardly bothered being civil, she told Little to do the right thing. Julie stated it like law: the house is being left to them so they can, when the estate is cleared (Little is not the fastest boat on the river but she realised this conversation was one where her mother is already dead) they can balance out the time and money they gave so freely.

But if the house is left to her (Little can almost feel them opening the oven to throw her in) if her mother is willing it, outrageously, to her, they will challenge the will. They are carers and their position is the duty of care and with that recognized they will win the case.

Little wanted to cry at this distortion of all things good.

They stared at her in their lined-up intent, with their black hair turning to grey, the kind of look Little suddenly saw as her own in a few years time. Unless she keeps her smile, her Big smile. May and Vicki were bland smilers and nodders, though cold ones… Now there were no smiles. The cakes sat coolly on the trays. Julie was beyond the sneer of patronising. The will was being re-written at this very moment, she stated, is that why Agnes was here? Well, is it?

Re-written? Little had no knowledge of that. Was her mother playing with her too? One thing was certain: she knew little more about this than the week before.

She feels immoral somehow, now, waiting in the airport lounge. She cannot report back to Big with a clear conscience, she, as if she has been as guilty of manipulation as her aunts, except not as good at it.

When she had returned to see her mother again the old woman was looking pained at Little's account of the Ugly Sisters and then she shushed her and told her to go home. In minutes she had changed, she was a weather system. She swirled around and growled for Little to go, saying only that the future was uncertain for everyone except herself: there was only one thing happening to her.

Why does she board so early? Even as people arrive late, and then later, and then fuss around finding their seats. She may be lucky, her row, the seats D and E to herself, her safely quiet seat F by the window. She can hide. Wait with her mind in three places: someone really interesting will come and sit beside her … or, better still, no one will… or a problem person will stagger in and sit down. And then two women are beside her, all laughs and happy times, wanting to squeeze in and because she is so quiet they get in before she can think. One of them asks:

Hey love, could we swap, so you have the aisle seat and we can sit together out of your way?

Little is up immediately. The first woman settles against the window.

Melbourne here we come, laughs the blonde one, as she lowers herself into the middle seat.

Nut? Want a nut?

She is already holding an opened bag of cashews in front of Little's face. My God how does she do everything so fast? Then it's crisps maybe if not nuts and then:

We're good time girls, eh. What about you? What are you doing in Melbourne?

Little mumbles, she is good at mumbling, she needs time to adjust, but she won't be getting any of that by the look of it. She doesn't know what to think.

Don't worry dear we'll do the talking eh? Bet you thought no one else was coming, you had the seats to yourself, looking forward to a quiet trip? Nah, we're the life of the party!

Yeah we are. We will talk your head off, says the other one by the window, a brunette wearing dark-rimmed glasses. Not joking, or anyway she will (a thicker sh than usual). Talk the leg off an angry donkey. You'll find her a very smart lady.

Yeah I am but she, pointing to the brunette, she's mega smart, she's way up in Mensa and her hubby… your bloke's super super intelligent isn't he?

Sure is, he's higher than me on the tests though of course he's a bloke i.e. a bit of a problem. So what then. Anyway I'm going to listen to music, and she begins re-arranging her tangled ear-phones, but she's (she can say she) going to keep talking to you. She likes you. She likes everyone.

Except my husband.

Oh yeah except him.

You know what I'm doing in Melbourne? the blonde leans towards Little. I'm having a dirty weekend with a guy I met on the internet. Naughty me.

Little is not a nosey woman, she is not an over-orderly are- you-sure kind of person and not quite a nutty checker of details. Overwhelmed by all this manic information, still, she cannot not ask.

Didn't you say? Aren't you uhm?… married…?

Yeah love but I feel trapped at home with him. He doesn't do anything, he always wants to stays at home with me, he says, with­out him getting what that means – you know, as if staying home all cosy with him is any bloody fun. No way, I want to party. He's a sports nut too, but, and he's always taking the boys to games and to training and to busy-bees and wind-ups and all that stuff. I hate sport meself. My boys hardly talk to me because of all this bloody sport. It's as if it's the only bloody thing there is. In other words, he's made them side with him, and on top of everything he's half Chinese so that means his bloody mother I mean his own bloody mother tries to run our bloody household as well as her sad place in Mt bloody Lawley.

You've only got boys then? asks Little.

Yeah worse luck. She looks briefly despondent. What I'd a given for a girl.

Her almost-empty cup of wine becomes of fascination to her and she crackles the plastic in her fingers, pushing the shiraz level higher and higher. She turns to Little, her face neutral now, then tilts her head:

Buggered if I'm going to let that hold me back. Not after twenty years and a nervous breakdown. Yeah I was nuts there for a while. For a good while. So this guy in Brighton, who's loaded by the way, is my big break-out. How about me eh? He likes me, he says I'm hot!

She shrieks and sits back, pushing her small chest forwards. Pity she doesn't have bigger boobs, thinks Little.

Across the aisle a woman asks the stewardess for a tea with sugar sounding almost thuga and in short time the vessel arrives. Little imagines the woman asking for a thoda water, how she might have preferred a thoda water but could not let the words escape her.

And I, adds the brunette, leaning forward to speak to Little despite her ear-phones, I work in catering. I'm a chef now but I used to be a computer analyst. Hard work and all brain stuff but now I run a function centre – I run the kitchen I mean. I'm happy as hell, I can't imagine doing anything else.

Anyway I'm Jennie, says the blonde, unable to concentrate on her shiny mag. My friend's Karen. What do you do? Do you want a drink? I'll… where are they?… order some drinks. This is a hoot!

My… boyfriend… is a chef, says Little chuffed to have this sudden commonality with the women. Or he was. He's not in good health, well not in bad health but he's on a pension now. He's a tranny.

And she says that.

What! My God girl aren't you a surprise?

And Little is surprised that she's come out and said it.

Your bloke's a woman. My God!

He only dresses up. He's a bloke underneath it.

Ha ha ha. Underneath it! Do you have sex like a man and a woman?

Little shuffles and waggles her head, too embarrassed. She has slowly realised the other woman in the window seat looks a bit like Big, especially when he wears his glasses to read The Age or later in the evening some library book or other. Or a word game, yes, given that the woman is at this moment head-down into a double-page spread of cross-words. Cross-words is Big's game among many games, performed when Little is obliging enough to sit and read out the clues and questions, supplying Big as he walks around thinking. His alternative is to sit-and-look-abstracted, then shoot the right word back, or ponder a word, and finally snatch it like a wounded fly on the wing. Into the trap. Little is the secretary and collaborator, never the player.

And he's an auto-didact, Little suddenly announces.

A what? My God, says Jennie, how kinky!

A pause.

Not that I know what an auto-died… ack… is.

When her very-intelligent friend Karen explains this condition the woman is embarrassed but more possibly disappointed and looks away again into her glossy mag. Little notices the lisping woman across the aisle is reading something very different and after much leaning forward and staring Little manages to make out a title… Structural Building. Is this about buildings or art or is it something pop-psychological even? The reader may be slight in frame and thick of articulation but she is holding the book in big work-hardened hands. She must be a gardener like Angus, a sculptor a …

A hoot, Jennie says again. More drinks!

And it is a hoot, except for the silences. In these silences the energy to keep up face and fun lapses. Little sees the sad face of the woman, the worn-away prettiness covered only so much by make-up. And so it goes as the three of them keep talking, or Jennie and Little mainly, and that means Jennie mainly keeps talking, and with intermittent remarks from the Big look-alike, yes, Jennie keeps talking, just as Karen had promised she would – talking every minute of the way to Tullamarine.