Waiting (37 page)

There are words of cheer among the regulars, the blokes who do the nags and talk footie, but inside and held back and waiting, they sit with their wrists on the edge of the beer towel.

Sammy needs the room to have anyone to be with. Even if he sits in the corner and is all things Silent and Absent. By some inner switch he loses the withdrawn blank-face, he sits forward and listens in, pretending the jokes are his own, or that by laughing along (once started hard to stop) he can pretend to know what the punchline is, and by their grace the men will not ask him to explain it. He is safe with them in the banter and good humour. Until he sits back frowning and far-away in the land of Blank.

Around this time the ghost-who-walks Julia comes back from her recent absence. Or embarrassment. She who is wasting her money paying for a room when she's out on the town for days. Who cares? she says, it's her business. And they lay off her and her waste or want. When she hears about the lounge crisis she goes very quiet, remembering her boyfriend-of-the-tatts and The Sheriff's blood on the floorboards.

Later, as they are sitting around talking about it she comes in grinning her big Pretty Woman smile and says rather richly that she has the solution: get hold of a digital movie camera and film a few days in the hostel including the good times the talk and the jokes around the TV in the lounge with interviews and comments just like a real fucking doco. Yeah! Yeah, they are saying. Yeah, they are witnessing, she says, their own lives.

By God. She's right. The village pump, in Big's words, when he hears of it. Once again Julia soars in his estimation. Why had he ever thought otherwise? And why not do their own lounge of hard knocks? Even so, it's soon overlaid with grumbling and pessimism. No one has any hope of getting a camera, or lights, except by theft, or knows what to do with them if they did. Things falling off the back of a truck? Because she has come up with a winner and if they can't follow-through it will look bad. They could, Tom suggests, give a copy to St Vinnies and to the Government bodies involved in homeless and outreach accommodation. What about SBS?

Bugger that choir-singing crap under the thumb of a half-trained singer full of tears, no, they are stars for being themselves, rough diamonds. Not Struggle Street and bogans, no, inner city grunt. On the telly, hey, along with the News from Kazakhstan and the soft-porn European movies and the earnest shirt-and-tie Turkish soaps. Yeah – the Big Lights.

Big Lights sounds good.

At first, Angus cannot pick the voice. She has rung and is speaking without giving her name. This usually indicates a narcissistic call of It's-me-who-else? you-have-to-pick-my-voice-correctly and that sends him into paroxysms of annoyance. This voice is neat and diminutive. Little! By now Angus is her big, supportive cousin; he listens to Little's request with due patience. A good idea, but a camera? He doesn't know. Not his field, but he'll ring Jasmin. Better still, he'll give Little her number and they can call her office. She won't know either, he says, confidently, however there are media and communication people at Uni and they should be able to help.

Except Jasmin usually sets her office phone to silent, which drives post grads crazy when they cannot contact her. Which is why she does it. Without knowing who is calling, and keeping her supervisory presence or absence intact, she doesn't check her messages for a few days. Then she finds Little's message and she texts Angus a serve because she does know how to help.

She has used a film group for a political stoush her fellow undergrads had with the Kennett government in the 90s. They organised a group of parents and a film crew and gatecrashed a high school gung-ho going-corporate meeting of the school council. This lot were trying to cheat the community – and they filmed it. Channel 9 and extended coverage on the ABC.

There is always Channel 31, she adds. Community TV. They want social issues. It's what they do. There are freelance crews at SKA TV, they might be the ones. Trades Hall, Union side and Labour Party if the party is doing its proper work, no guarantee of that nowadays, but still, perfect credentials. Good on you, Little. Can't let the bastards grind you down and all that. You should ring, say SKA, Channel 31 and then the young geniuses of any film and TV schools as a last resort. Dunno if you could trust them, whether they're reliable. But get the right ones…

Little isn't even sure what she is rambling about. Or if she is. Why's that? she asks.

Why's… what?

Not trusting them. Not being reliable.

They are young and rich, isn't that enough?

Fancy you saying that. Don't you teach at a University?

That's how I know.

Are they?

I have them in all my classes. They talk from the back of their throats like this: Of course I toured through Europe for three months over summer. My parents thought it would be beneficial and they totally paid for everything. I know more about France and Germany and all that than they do – it's embarrassing how parochial my parents are.

She coughs. The voice is hard to maintain. (She realises she has mounted the horse.)

Some of them are very good and very political. I'm not saying they're not, just they go for big political issues not smaller social things like (Jasmin realises she can't say poverty, dole, rooming house) yours. Well, I suggest SKA or Channel 31.

I never heard of them. Do people watch them?

What, Channel 31? Loads of people, but better still you get them to sell the footage on to the commercial channels or ABC or SBS.

Oh. Yes?

Yes. What SKA or 31 will do is shoot the footage and cut it into useable shape and then offer that to the big channels so they can use it in their News reports or current affairs features if they want, and they might film their own stuff to go with it. That's how Kennett was brought down over the schools, if you ever saw it?

Not really.

Never mind. All the footage came from school council meetings… The commercial Channels used it. The ABC used it and followed it up with interviews. It was bloody brilliant.

Little is becoming overwhelmed.

It sounds… OK, she replies.

You just have to start it off.

Except rooming houses have been a big story of the moment, if anyone will actually bother to film anything. They are a scandal, a disgrace, dodgy, run by rogue operators… so anything that shows them as properly functional is potentially hot. Violence is what the commercial channels trade in, not civility, and aggro and junkies and dead-voiced drunks, not community, not social cohesion. But they go for sentiment. Even poverty-porn as it's now called (as Jasmin remembers, after the phone call). This could be a coup.

Tom thinks of of the real Jesus and of Lights and of Real Achievers and Big thinks of Politics and Affectation and the Jeff Kennett story Little has relayed. TV. The occupants are agreed.

But who will make the actual calls.

Little finally suggest it has to be Big. No, it's not favouritism, and neither is it to his liking. But she has a clincher: as a Christian Tom does have a taste for getting off-topic and onto-Jesus, and Big is waffly and and (sententious is the word that will not arrive) intellectual? Tom and Big stare at each other. Considering this as uncalled-for and quite unexpected character analysis.

You used to be a school teacher, says Big in his defence.

Ah, says Tom. Then she should do it. If you won't, that is, but you…

After a few seconds he adds: Crazy places.

What? Schools?

Yeah.

Mad-holes.

Next day Tom asks how the phone calls went. Um, says the big fella, scratching his neck and adjusting his orange blossom special with the long strands and the coil on top of his head. It still looks like sisal, like a coiled rope on a deck, anything but a wig. He is standing with his not-so-funky trolley on its small wheels, all prepared to head off on the shopping routine.

You haven't made any calls, have you?

It's the look on Big's face. Tom starts laughing:

Well, Big, think of it ha ha as Christ among the money lenders. Ha.

Very funny. I suppose I can talk Little into doing it.

Thus: a detour to the the library and Little looks up the SKA TV phone number which she writes down on a small piece of paper. It is clenched in her hand until they are standing in the phone binnacle.

It is easy. Not Little, Big. He blusters a bit then introduces himself as an occupant of the hostel, then he explains the general problem: the rooms, the other occupants, the change of intention by the council authority, the devastation – this plan to subdivide their lives. On the other end the bloke sounds enthusiastic, in prin­ciple, what with homelessness a big issue now, especially. Rooming houses are seen as the right thing done wrong. Leasees screwing the occupants. Mad people. Perhaps, though, he is backing off a bit.

Big quite suddenly sees the Big Idea. Of course.

Now you're right about that, mate, he tells the guy. The mad. What's more they've been closing down mental health services. You know that means loose and lost men and women wandering about. In, shall we say, considerable despair. Unloved is what I mean. Unloved. If they are lucky enough to get into our hostel we look after them. That's it. The common room. Community. It's our family room. Civil respect, mate.

(He doesn't mention the bout of civil respect between the boyfriend and The Sheriff.)

We're not angels, it's just us being ourselves. Much better than frigging angels. Eh? These people have no counselling and comm­unity without us. No one who loves them. There's a young bloke here. Fits the bill exactly, he is none too bright and none too balanced but with us around him he is as happy as a pig in shit – excuse the French. If he is forced to be alone in his room he will go loopy and bloody die. I promise you. That's the story.

The guy simply says: You've sold me.

Recording Lives

Jesus Christ. Whose fish is stinking out the bloody fridge? Do I have to count the bloody cockroaches again to tell ya there's too fucken many?

Straight onto film. Well, the soundtrack.

The Sheriff is shouting from the kitchen and then is strutting through the lounge-room door looking ready to arrest.

Two thoughts strike the SKA camera-man instantly: he's called The Sheriff and no, please, not a cardiac-arrest! God, the man has high blood pressure, look at the high flush in his face. The Sheriff, silver of hair and red of face, a feature of his excited capillaries. Please, not on film, the guy thinks, bent over the viewfinder, please not on film, not my second death.

The slow man stands slowly and shuffles past the red face and out to the kitchen, remembering only now, prompted by The Sheriff's question, that he was given a fish. Probably not fresh even then. A week ago. He has been sustaining himself on warm beer in his room. He's not made the return trip to the fridge for… how long? But inside the lounge the others are laughing, it is being shared.

Big is telling his fish stories. The first from Anna Karenina where a grumpy character they'd well recognise, is critical of a magi­strate whose famously pathetic sentencing was described as “like punishing a pike by throwing it in the river”. Old Russian saying. Da. Bit like Melbourne, eh? Then the fish he'd heard about from a story he read in a Pommie paper, a fish with an Arabic inscription along its side saying something from the Koran about etiquette to remind the faithful that Allah is the one God and is everywhere and uncharacteristically immanent, written on a fish…!

Big is warming to this camera thing: he tells of another fish in South America with the Virgin patterned on its scales like pixels and when he says her face he means the details of her Virginal face being that of the Catholic church, of course, being a Catholic continent. Therefore, by extension, the waters surrounding South America are Catholic waters with Catholic fish in them, and yes with Catholic icons pixellated on their scales. The entire cast of the Bible might be swimming around down there.

How this fish did not decompose. Believers and tourists came from around the world to file past the shiny creature on its bed of velvet inside a glass-sided cabinet. The fish was a saint!

Tom bites the ends of his long hair like a teenie.

Not at all happy with this burst of camera-hogging from the Big being too happily sacrilegious. But how to challenge him without seeming unChristian. This a problem he's having with Billy Graham and the evangelicals. So smiley smiley nice. The rooming house is turning him angry. Should he say that?

He says all this only to himself.

So Big continues: where is the Jewish fish I ask you? And no one mention Jewfish. The Old Testament doesn't do fish half as well as the New. The later prophets have hogged the fish. In a manner of speaking. The Hindu has every kind of animal in the pantheon of Gods and tricksters but despite their ancient inclusiveness they have not done much for the fish. It must be a modern phenomenon.

Modern?! giggles Little hoping he has meant this as jest but given Big's expansiveness with conversation she is by no means sure. He stops and looks at her.

Ah, of course, since the last two thousand years.

Who can say what kind of footage this is, or how it will look after the crew get their editorial cutnpaste tools into it? They interview Tom and The Sheriff and then guess who turns up for her showing, and all made up, her big lipstick, her low-cut top popping with cleavage, showing the works as she calls it. How like Julia to have intuition of this kind, though not the kind that sniffs out the kindness in men to keep them, instead of keeping the unkind kind. The camera-man and lighting bloke really take notice now, stop and stare, prompting cheesey poses from her, and yet she tells the camera sharp things.

The boys look after everyone, she says, and this lounge makes the rooming house the best I've been in. Yeah, me, I have standards, I won't stay just anywhere. Remember folks (she turns full on to the camera, her tits high and glorious and her smile equal parts come-on and listen-here) we pay rent. Every fortnight. None of your slack old monthly payments. We're not freeloaders. Right? We're clients. We have a right to say no to this crap about making two pokey little pigholes out of… this.