Waiting (5 page)

Big does not talk about this except on binge nights. His upper­most turns upside-down and secrets collect in his eyes and spill down his cheeks. His cheeks tell the truth, they are wet. He has Little. He has no Jesus figures or icons for his failure and his guilt, he has the one person he has met who wants to forgive him with little noises and small steps forwards and breathing the same air day and night.

The fact was, he told her, he couldn't work in the city or even in a town, cooking at a hotel, say, and sit down every night with a wife and house and a threesome as she wanted, of children, let alone a brace of kids on a scale of taller to shorter like the old 50s photos or like those ducks on the wall. Those sickly ducks! He is happy now being half of this binary of Big and Little.

He is happy to be Big not because he is especially or uniquely big, or that she is ditto little, but that beside her he is ‘Big' and beside him she is ‘Little'.

Who could have guessed, among the marriage counsellors and dating services, such a sensible if eccentric accommodation? The lonely meet sometimes; compatibility is indeed a strange thing.

He is her Big but he annoys her sometimes. The way he goes on about things, just now about those running-on-the-spot stamping-at-standstill machines. Being gawked at. Head sweatbands. That gym near the IGA playing doof-beat or almost as bad – ballet music. He wails:

Tchaikovsky in lycra and bloody headbands!

They don't, she says curtly, wear headbands.

He pauses to study her. Then continues: Always was a soppy composer, that bloody Tchaikovsky. Worst of the Romantics, swooning, self-pitying sop-opera and no soul…!

She can't help sighing. For, loudly, tired of him, his talking.

Outside, the day is pomegranates, lemons, apricots. Leaf and green lifting to the sun. Another day. Sammy emerges from the side alley with a bucket of water and pours it in equal division between these trees. Now here is a simple sum that school gave him strife over, when all it needed was summer, trees, water in a bucket – and the idea of thirds is solved.

In the lounge-room watching TV one night among the many gathered there, the semi-fallen and the semi-risen, Sammy announced: my IQ is really low, that's what they told me at the centre and they're prob'ly right. But I'm OK with cars.

It was during the ad break.

Mate, The Sheriff looked at him. It has never once occurred to me, never once gave it a thought. I reckon you're smart enough, mate, I mean it.

Yeah, came a chorus from the others. Farken oath.

But he doesn't mean it. No one means it.

Even now, much later, The Sheriff much thinner except for the paunch – along with Big and Little they are the stayers at this place – Sammy has kept a happy feeling regarding his unlocatable intelligence. It is a pleasure as satisfying as the water seeping down into the soil and reaching the good places.

Sammy stands in the sun. He looks up at three cars driving by, a yellow-top taxi which stops in front of the apartments on the opposite side of the road. At one of the apartment windows a man is looking down into the street through binoculars.

The taxi stops but the man ignores it, then stands back inside his apartment. Whenever The Sheriff sees this man looking at them he gives him the finger. But some things just are the way they are.

There is no room in their rooms for anything extra. Storage is always a problem. Different if you have a computer, where every­thing inside is compressed, large realms in small bodies. Tardis. There is one old computer, a Mac, for Little's elbow room when it comes to ambition. Still, the Mac takes up more space than Big is happy about, in their small room otherwise overloaded with very second-hand books, paperbacks, hardbacks, dinosaur uncut or knife-cut tomes for the autodidact Big to rummage in. So with Big making suggestions she found difficult to counter, they have set her Mac back against the corner furtherest from the door. It is a gap that Big could not sit in. It is a man-hole, a slit opening in a castle, a Mac aperture in their crammed room. In no secrecy at all therefore she has written a page or two about Sammy and three other people who live in the hostel, as she calls it, The Sheriff obviously and Tom the Saintly the know-all, and also the old woman who has no teeth and barely any gums just a long nose then a chin and collapsible middle region, who when she stands still is more like a wobbegong shark than anything else.

Little is never keen on walking further than the IGA but she likes to look at other people's walks. So this wobbegong woman features in walks: the way she is always leaning forwards from the hips, and walking with both arms loose behind her, not helping, not waving, not even swimming but her palms facing backwards in a very strange walk, of chest forwards and her arms like wings, a walk seemingly unassisted by ergonomics – the latter word care-of Big in lecture mode at the time. When she walks she is not a small shark she is The Winged Woman.

To test his theory Big asked the woman if she suffered from lower back pain but she stared at him and said she suffered from PAIN fullstop.

Drama! Tonight Little is tittering away at her keyboard, the sounds of her keystrokes annoying but not enough to damn someone for wanting to write the letter she must, to reply to the letter she has just received.

At the front, under the tree and just above the grass no one trims, is a pathetic mailbox for people no one writes to. It is full of spider mail. But that doesn't stop Tom the Saintly standing there occasion­ally, the back of the box dangling open and the long hand of God sorting through the spiders and junk (most of it junk), the out-of-date letters to men long gone to other streets and other falls – because sometimes there's a letter for him. From his Christian group. The choir group he doesn't sing in.

Being at the front nevertheless risks another kind of arrival. Amazingly, given he is so Christianised, Tom dislikes other kinds of Christians if it means having to listen to them. To the Jehovah's Witnesses and the various missionaries who busy themselves along this street, he says No, no. Go away, I am already saved.

When they stay – they always stay – he tells them he has asked Jesus what to do about the particular problem of JayDubs (they see they have come to a man who likes to talk a great more than they do) and Jesus has answered very precisely: JayDubs are religious wimps, they don't know what they talking about, they should shut up and go home and bake cakes.

So, says Tom all smug (beginning to sound like Big, who in truth he secretly admires), leave the soul-searching for men who shake uncontrollably while staring through the Gates of Hell. They run.

Three days ago, however, letters all sorted and junk thrown in the communal bin, Tom knocked on Big and Little's door and when Little opened up he announced:

Right royal post for you Ag… Sorry. Little. Looks offficial if you don't mind me saying. Not religious. Not from charities. Properly official.

She grabbed it and turned back. He stood there as if expecting a tip. She shut the door.

Her mother! The Letter! Her ailing mother. How long she has been worrying about this promised letter. Her estranged mother's demise. Little has insisted her mother address everything to their PO Box.

But no letter arrived.

Yet here it is, grubby from the street box – they might never have found it. They might not. She keeps repeating this nonsense to herself.

Except it is not from her mother at all. She re-reads it yet again. It is from the family solicitor in Adelaide announcing that Little's presence is required for a reading, not of the will but of what he as executor regards as the terms and conditions of it, a preparation for such a moment as, and when, her mother either requires more serious medical care, or passes on.

What strange wording. And then… a discussion to consider the interests of the various parties involved. It will require a solicitor of Little's choosing in Melbourne for the Adelaide solicitor to communicate the details through.

Now Little can hardly think. She bites the fingernail of her favoured typing finger and looks over at Big as if to delay the words of death and loss and the ever-rising thought of money. No, she shoudn't, but there it is…

Big is sitting on the edge of his bed, holding his pate with both hands as if showing it to her. The palms are flat on each side of his baldness like a ten-tasselled cap. His shoulders hunch, he grimaces and his face stays squinty and peculiar as he squeezes out the words. Little looks at him and just thinks about his huge oddness.

He is slumped like a big fat toad.

Which reminds her of her mother, so old and unwell, yes, but how unwell? Is it really time to consider the death of the mother before she has died? And her off-putting hints of money. Is it just a cruel tease? Mothers do not feature in Little's or Big's lives. Big had confounded utterly his very own mother years earlier when he said he was not going to live in the real world in a suit and a tie but waddle down easy-street in a dress and small heels. Green preferably.

In truth it has always shocked Little to think of the physical stuff, such as small Mother-Big giving birth to Big and then swaddling him and feeding him from the breast and sending him off to school. Long ago Little, long ago after putting it off and pretending otherwise concerning her life and loves, introduced Big to her own mother. While the mother's social standing stood and ran from the room Big stayed put and Little insisted she too was no longer living in the land of the real.

It has taken them two days to ask the caretaker person and carefully inquire among the other men, who may or may not be reliable but who always have an opinion. Tom being the likeliest when it comes to opinions. He suggested Legal Aid was their man or woman. Free more or less, cheap certainly, for those on pensions, of limited means. He has heard about it down at the local soup kitchen, some blokes there have been to Legal Aid and swear by it. Little wanted to think about it and put off calling for a few more days until she got used to the idea, her nerve coming and going like an attack of indigestion. But they did, they found the Legal Aid person's number by walking up to the community centre with Tom. Using a telephone is not easy for a nervous Little, yet the worry made her make herself do this. She rang to contact a Mr de Silva, Lawyer, and Mr de Silva's secretary suggested they make an appointment immediately.

Little manages two fingers in the great tradition of hopeless typists and slowly puts together the sentences acknowledging receipt of the letter, comprehension of the contents of, and arrangement to meet the Legal Aid solicitor and could they please send the legal information to that address, i.e. care of Mr de Silva, LLB. Done! She feels a rush of pride, or panic – she has done it after all, this wordy formal thing.

They mark the day of this leter to the solicitor on their other­wise pristine calendar. She tells Big it is a bit sad – to have only this one mark on its bare days. Even if it is a very neat Little mark. There is something intimate about calendars. Rendezvous. Assign­ations. Other people can stand in front of the month and read the ink and lettering of these hidden meanings and wonder at them and their hearts open but the brain stays closed, it is almost religious and afterwards they remember nothing. Intimate, but ephemeral.

Revelations, thinks Big, lying back on his bed. And to think there is money in it for the two of them. The meeting that is the gathering to divide the crusts, the who and why questions over Little's mum's house.

So they decide to mark the day that is today, too, and appraise the gap… And wait to hear when the day of the appointment must be, to connect this day to that day. Equals a proper job done. The hanging of the calendar.

And both their birthdays while they're at it. And hey… they'll think of other days tomorrow.

On their next trip they visit the library. For the computers. Little loves to skydive in GoogleEarth, she loves the way she can type in a city or a valley and then hurl herself down from such crazy heights through the darkness into suddenly coloured streets and treetops. Bungy jumping into GoogleEarth, it is her sex and her drama and her self-annihilation in one hit, better than anything real. She does it again and again. Pixel-jumping. Setting it up, feeling in her stomach the map veer from one side of the world to lumpy bumpy Australia and then hovering over Melbourne, then plunge. The intoxicating plunge.

It is the pleasurable other-side of her encounters just outside the morgue, the ex-morgue, when or if they walk that way up to the shops. There she has to stop and stare at them. The airy things. Not a plunge so much as a fall.

Big beside her. Big does not admit of the supernatural. Tom of course is beholden to historical ghosts only. Big thinks Jesus is the biggest boogey of them all. No, when Little stops at the end of the shadowy street it is not exactly pleasurable, but she must pay them her moment of respect. Life and death is a worry out on the real streets.

Big waits. Whatever Big thinks he tends to say aloud, and what he said when they saw once the the house-for-sale sign on that street of Little's ghosts, Rue de la the Morgue, Big said to the house inspection crowd. There was a famous actress in the crowd. He said the adjoining house was once the city morgue. In the 1880s.

He said it to the famous Melbourne actress with the famously gaunt face frozen now, after years of smiling at her cosmetic surgeon, into smiling. Her surgeon must have had a sharp sense of humour. The strain of making her lips steady and straight added a peculiar gravity to her appearance, so the public, who loved her, their favourite famous actress, thought her especially moving. Gravitas.

To return. They must find the said solicitor. GoogleplainoldMaps. The address, the tram route. Little can do this kind of thing by herself, so Big stumps across to the small chairs at the newspaper table, thinking if it is not a children's library why are the chairs so bloody small? He occupies himself with the news.

Just for now she sits there breathing. Her body is not so good today. Kidneys and other things and this secret list from medications taken some time ago thank God when. When. She hides it away all the time certain it and it and all the its are standing out on her skin like blisters, saying look see yeah yeah her, this one is really and truly loopy not merely lupy, and still breathing. Sometimes she thinks the Google falling stands in for all the other things in danger of jumping out, shouting and plunging, the slurring in her mind no longer her speech, here where every second boarder slurs from something.