Waiting (21 page)

A shy smile appears from behind the hair. When they double-park outside the house he notices The Sheriff has gone and Big is standing there again except he is barefoot this time and wearing a wild orange wig. The man must change his clothes during the day. He certainly looks relieved to see the smile on Little's face and the careful goodbye she gives Angus (now re-instated as a big and comforting man), not that Big even looks at this sudden cousin of hers for more than a few seconds.

Big has always liked the idea of cousins at one or two or more removes: it not only sounds ludicrous, it promises a complete lack of interest. He likes to be as removed as possible from his relatives. From anyone's relatives. Angus and Agnes, they might almost be siblings but for a warp in the syllables. He is loose, she is tight. Cousins are special, Angus has already told her this. Some cousins are capable of being loyal to each other, for years out of touch and then… somehow… close again. There is something of kin and flesh in this, in this shadow between them.

Back

Way back in his own shadows The Sheriff has a wife and kids living out at Bairnsdale. Not that he ever talks about them, beyond the obligatory shrug about the law and how it ruins a man. Crime? Marriage? No, he means the Family Court, an article of faith among ruined men; and he does not, strangely enough, mean the Criminal Court, which really has ruined him. With his own help, of course, but then the same could be said of his marriage. He led the way and the law followed but followed faster than he led, and in institu­tional terms, at least, so to bed. A cell bed. Some crims make good husbands and fathers, the deciding factor being the predictable twins of money and status: if you have them you may be good at anything in the eyes of many.

He had neither.

Now he has even less, he is a nobody with his girth slowly telling him something much worse, that he is just like everyone else. That's scary. When all he had before was not being everyone else.

Many things came from him in late adolescence other than the verbal and seminal outbursts, things like spite and violence, and over the years a hard-earned, hard-man status. After a while it gives a man of a certain philosophical bent, a way of looking at life from the view of a bastion, in this case of the criminal order. It has been his strength and fighting power and his pride to maintain.

Just not a family. Or not the vocation. Nor and not and not ever anything as wussy as egotism. In the other world most of us hear about this only in the programming – ah the fucking Sopranos are back on/are on DVD/are getting tired/are shit hot eh/are finished and yes finished as they are, now it's Underbelly series one and two and… they come, they go, as other glamour crim shows move in and take over like a mobster with hard gunmen. This territory is called celebrity now, funny it took so long when you consider the signs of Frank Sinatra. Narcissism. Even if you don't go to movies with violence and accents you know the punters like accents, the punters like violence, they like witticisms turned side of the mouth as the guy's head is blown off, and they like metal sound-effects, sounds that real guns never make, funny don't you think – how silent the handgun is when the scene requires it and how clattery when the director thinks clattery. And they think like that a lot.

The Sheriff was never a hardware man, he lived his best years by his knuckles, he is an old-fashioned and in his mind gentlemanly face-cracker.

Wife and kids feature small and loud in his vague memory, along with asbestos fences he cut and set down hard into sandy blocks, so he's probably dying of mesothelioma, for Christ's sake, but doesn't know it. The sun is always on in these memory trips. The reason for this digression being The Sheriff's quiet and unlikely reminiscing of late, a mortal streak has flashed through him, opened him if only briefly, yet significantly enough to think back. Odd for a man given to silences that have in the past carried wounding, of professional account, as items in his CV.

Her name is Tess. It has been a sound in his Christmas ear, and hers too therefore on the one day he rings her and implies he and she are linked by a generalised gathering of emotion lost in habit, as that day often is, even for the many who still live in the same house, let alone those scattered down phone lines, he not being an internet man and who knows what she is. The hello is a thin, shiny moment just faintly resembling tinsel and a ritual breaking of the routine that holds for 364 days before and of course following. A sound in his ear.

Her voice has changed from all the fags, thirty years or more of them, dragging her vowels until she sounds like the women who stand outside the Hospital puffing on fags when he walks into and through the awful barking noise they make, the slow raucous sound that's not the coughing, not the waiting, not the trauma. It's talking with all the looseness gone, all the singing gone, no range, no colouring, just forced and monotonous like bouncers or aggro army sergeants.

Now only three months to Christmas. He never buys anything, is he meant to be thrilled to his arse by shop offers? By better deals on cars or clocks or bloody mobile phones or holidays in countries that have flat beaches low in the sunset and where there is always some happy bastard to carry your bags?

He might just consider taking the bus out to see her and her bloke, who's not really a dickhead after all, and stay for a Christmas drink and put up with her broken laughter, and her willingness to make bad jokes about what a waster he was, and then a few drinks later tearing-up, telling Geoff (that's his name) about the time they drove out to the coast up north and stopped at every second beach to camp overnight. Her favourite sentimental story, though he can never work out why.

How at one beach while skinny dipping they had met flimsy little hippies skinny-dipping in the waves, while he-man here was all muscles and tatts, and the whimsy girls were all bare tits and bums, not starved like their wimpy guys, their long-haired dope-fiends, and how the girls couldn't take their hippie eyes off him. He the crim from down south. It was enough for the silly bugger to get half a hard-on, which naturally they all saw when he went into the waves. And to make matters even worse, some of the guys objected, got a bit wordy, when he surfed up on one of the girls from behind. It had been fun before that. He was a real gentleman. No words, he had stayed calm. Only how pathetic the young blokes were, how lucky to emerge with all their ribs intact.

And all the other stories, less amusing, less the man, full all the same with booze and nostalgia. What else is Christmas for?

So what if he had gone down to her at Bairnsdale before and never told anyone? Three months to arrange it, who knows, by then he might chuck the idea over the sideline. There had to be a chance of a flirt with Shana at the local pub. He knew she needed a good reason, a footie premiership, even a funeral once, or the old Christmas cheer to lift her skirts, even if they were jeans now, such bloody good shape she was still in. Mind you, years younger than him but something of those hippie girls' eyes in her too. Last time, though, it was all different, she barely noticed him. Life moves on, mate, he hears his stupid head announcing.

Life hadn't been too bad. To even up the hard-school-of-life score he'd made his name in, where rival hard-men had beaten the shit out of him a few times, though it has to be said without witti­cism and funny accents either, nothing West London about some of those encounters. At times the Aussie you're not a bad cunt compli­ment rang without its complement as the boots went in. Hospital is like prison, you plan revenge, and he did, and he did what he planned. Past tense, Big would say past tense, don't even think about it unless you get a lift, great advice from an overweight git. Pack a little bag, stay at a local pub not far from her place, well his place it was, once, of course, before the courts finished with him, now past tense. Yeah, nice little hotel, that and wonder who came in who stayed. No luck last time but who knows, every Christmas is the same unless you do something like this, something different that changes it, so the loners might by chance get the bonus and win the bloody hamper mate.

Now he practises his silent walk back inside the hostel, along the otherwise creaking corridor, the walk some people in his past did not hear until it hit them far too late, now (in this day and age, as he likes to say like his father liked to say) it pays dividends. For Sheriffy behaviour – he hears them before they realise he's there – it gives him the one-up on the blather going on. This time it's the overseas bride thing they've been stuck on recently. He makes it clear what he thinks as they see him all to clearly thinking it:

Jesus, you blokes yabbering about fucking Filipino wives again.

I'm not mate, I'm not talking about fucking Filipino wives. I'm talking about not fucking Filipino wives.

Look smartarse isn't that what you were raving on about last week?

Yeah maybe if…

And didn't I say again? Now did I mean it and was I right to say it, this word ‘again'?

Right mate but there are two more of them so its different Filipino wives.

You're fucked.

Now… mate… I know you don't really mean that.

Or what?

It would be hurtful, mate.

As against you getting hurt?

Ha ha. Yeah right.

The issue of Filipino wives or brides should have no hold on him but it does, since he first flipped from slagging men off about it, to slagging the women off for doing it, to considering it might even be a good idea for yours truly. Then dropping it again through lack of conviction either way. He thought, or worried really, over the sudden epiphany, when he sort of saw himself walking hand in hand with an earnest woman, younger, Asian, possibly Catholic, like various older men he sees walking around the streets. The moneytohome issue… So hearing it return in idiot talk at the hostel, two sides like a giant clam, these big guys one on each side, does nothing for a calm night. It is a slow meal of bread and soup, lousy with salt not flavour, not traditional island spiciness. Not that he has never been to the Philippines. He can't even spell it.

In the kitchen Big and Little are digging into some of Big's ideas. It is a pity his ideas are not food. When Big sees a couple, meaning a young man, especially a worryingly rough-looking young man and a young woman, he always pays attention to their posture, their carriage, as the term once was, their manner and general decorum. Not easy, this and though he looks at the man first and last it is the woman he observes closest: he wants to be sure the woman too stands well, is not cowered in any way. All being well he is reassured the man is not full of aggro and the woman has all her teeth.

Little says she looks at the woman, firstly at her face, to see if she is happy and smiling or close to, or used to, and then, yes, like Big she checks the other stuff about aggro and teeth. It has to be said, and The Sheriff says it, that some people wouldn't know how to be happy and the guy might be a bloody saint and she might be all over glum, just a sorry woman. A woman who cannot welcome good times or good luck if the bloke's just what she needs, a big enough dope to stay at home with a woman who doesn't appreciate him. Many of the blokes in the rooming house world have lost their cheer.

There are Eeyores everywhere, Big concedes. Sad but true. And of either gender. When he was a chef he saw dozens of them to the bloody door. Nothing like working to the crush hour with shit-faced kitchen staff to turn a low tolerance into a reflex. They were dead on their flat feet. No juice in em, no humour. He hit one youth with a backhander, his left from memory, he was holding a knife in the other… when the dope stood going Dorh instead of plating up… and went all the way through the doorway without any follow-up. More or less air-borne. For a moment or three Big was proud of that. Then he wasn't. Almost an Olympic sport, except he felt… He bet The Sheriff struck a few holes-in-one like that.

I have, says The Sheriff. But never a woman.

No, me neither. Not a woman.

Some of mine were pretty close to being women but had balls I'm told. I never checked.

It occurs to The Sheriff, and not for the first time, just how bizarre it is to be talking like this with a burly great fucker dressed in a skirt and cardigan.

Little has told him about the times the predictable happened and someone of fewer brains than a Centrelink staffer said the wrong thing and saw before their eyes a man who talked like a crazy professor and dressed like a queen happily shirtfront them onto their beetle-backs. And sometimes kicked them. Never more than once, she added.

As they sit there eating and talking the common room goes very quiet. Another night and it could be hooting and howling, the country and western soul one hopes not to see outside of private celebrations and footie crowds. Cats singing. Nasal aliens with extra emotions. Tonight it is silent.

Not Dolly. On the TV between the ad breaks is a brief program of girls in brief clothing. Australia's Next Top Model flickers from one pretty overmadeup talent on legs to another, but this one particular (Dazza reckons it perticolour) woman is simply stunning without a call or a cry to say so. They stare as she sways across the screen. She is a weeping willow, she is divinely proportioned, she is more than any adbreak can break.

No one hears anything she mouths. Even when she answers questions with insouciance beyond her knowing. Silence is not an easy emotion. It may not even be one. It should be. Silence is an emotion for anyone capable of feeling silence. Thrall.

Little stands in the doorway amazed, as well she might be, and even more so when Danni the case-worker nudges her. Little hasn't even noticed her arrival. She-who-arrives at odd hours and intervals to check on a few of them, their health, their paperwork, their being alive in some cases. This after-hours call means Danni is witnessing a truly Beauty and Beast moment.

Not a beauty herself, she can let this moment linger only so long, before she will call Dazza from the pack. She calls and Dazza, well, Dazza is such a big fella it means them all being disturbed, it is hardly a rugby game but he ignores her until the vision has gone and the usual intros begin, then he ploughs through the men like a slow-moving memory of a big man grasping a rugby ball, his momentum needing to be maintained. The distance has been no more than eight metres, and yet his emphysemic lungs are put to a small test. He wheezes when he reaches her and utters monosyllabic answers to her questions, not a nonchalance, a technique for saving breath.