Sheriff shuts him down with a mimed shot between the eyes.
Ya not listnun. This is not a fucken hostel it’s my fucken home, ya got it. I live here. If you want to visit you visit my home like anyone else’s bloody home, you stop and call out or you knock and wait. If I catch ya doin anything else I’ll show you why they locked me in Pentridge for fourteen fucken years, mate, do you understand? People like me aren’t scared of weak fucken people like you, mate, people like me aren’t scared of any fucker who breathes air, mate. As you found out ya weakaspiss shithead I’m older and smaller than you but I can kick the shit out of ya in two seconds, I’m the hardest cunt you ever will see, mate, and if you come here again and don’t treat this house like my home you’ll be many teeth less and a few fucken bones crookeder. Mark my fucken words.
His favourite expression that, mark my words, especially with fucken included, and his favourite way of using it is after a knuckle sandwich. What a day, what a great (fucken) day, he hasn’t had the pleasure of punching some guy’s lights out for yonks. He’ll be losing his touch if he doesn’t keep in training. Have to hand in his badge. Like fuck.
Now mate, he says, all sweet and tolerable. Who were you lookin for?
He steps aside and lets the dusted-off man walk into the house. The Sheriff pulls a neatly rolled ciggie from behind his ear, and lights it. No wussy lighters, no, he lights up with a match and he draws in the unfresh air, the air of his own personal space.
When the man comes out a few minutes later he walks onto the pavement before saying:
Mate, you’ve got anger-management issues, you need to see someone!
The Sheriff is so flabbergasted he can only shake his head and then, unexpectedly, he laughs and laughs, as the man skedaddles down the street. And The Sheriff is not a man who laughs very often.
They don’t know if The Sheriff has ever held down a job, but suspect not; it isn’t easy to imagine him doing another man’s trivial work, or accepting anything less than punching rights. He is not the desk or office kind. In matters of law he’s more the documentary type, not the planning sort. Real-life action. No Monday to Friday for him, and now he’s retired he’s not writing his fucking memoir, no, (dickheads, bullshit artists) he’s the ageing tom in the yard. His eyes do most of the brawling for him but he does like to keep his action up from time to time, has to, a pity for any dumb bugger who misreads the invisible but stubborn signs of his lurking.
There could, in thinner futures, on colder days, come a stand- off when a thigh muscle cramps or a shoulder slumps and that Sheriffy stance weakens a tad, just enough, to reveal pain no one has elbowed into him. Or someone will land a couple, that is, kick his shins out, see him drop. The Sheriff thinks as little as possible about the future but he knows it will come, damn it, fuck it. It’s time he worries about, and winter, the birds impossibly alive in the trees, how you never see dead ones anywhere, so what happens to them, where do birds go to die?
So, he is rolling a spare cigarette, the paper shakes like feathers in the wind. Plumage but not much underneath. Had a parrot once, he did, he thinks, they live for bloody decades but pat them and there’s nothing there. They are empty fuckers, full of laughs. He almost lets a wet eye happen (or is it smoke from the rollie in his gob?) when he stares up into the gum trees along the median stretch, full of lunatics in green suits, blue suits, orange and red, their beady crazy eyes, birds full of lunacy and bluff. All the same there’s nothing in them. Parrot pie’s a friggin joke, for Christ’s sake, how many would you need? So he lodges the spare fag behind his ear to replace the one he’s smoking, turns inside and listens to the men talking, his being in every business his own man, as long as he is The Sheriff.
He stands there. And that head of his like a bollard.
Many hostel-dwellers self-medicate but only Tom self-allocates – that is, he takes upon himself small acts of goodness such as tilting the reekers: wheeling out their bulky green bins full of waste and the gaudy yellow-lids full of clink and rattle. Tom parks them on the kerb, their lid-lip-side facing out. A day later, he grabs the handle side and wheels them back in. Tom is the self-appointed caretaker of the bins, he even does the neighbouring houses and the set of flats nearby. Were it not for his unstated but actual stomach condition he would wheel out onto the pavement every rubbish bin in the street.
This guy wants to go straight to heaven.
Bins are better than suicide missions, let’s face it. And he can be seen doing it. And stay in one piece. When Tom returns he sits down in his room with Jesus’s door open and begins his latest act of self-righteousness: he starts clattering away on his strange, mechanical typewriter and because he is God’s man on deck he continues to keep his door open for all souls to have a chance to hear the sound of Christian charity. He is dedicating the rest of his life to volunteer work for the church and through this noble typing out, very slowly, of hymns and psalms and such-like, he is converting not water into wine but words into bumps onto pages for the finger-readers.
The noise gets worse. He may be busy but St Tom is, all the same, waiting for Jesus. And who can say when He might come in. To bless Tom, very recognisable in his long Jesus beard and long Jesus hair, in fair copy of the Aryan print of Jesus he has nailed on his wall.
So until then he has found this new trick to pay his way: he types out prayers and hymns on a noisy Braille typewriter, preparing the way of the Lord. This is new, this is probably why he has waited till everyone is nearby to get up to speed. Two finger speed, but Christian noise is good noise…
Before Little can stop him Big swings their door open and stomps down the corridor to bang his big fist on Tom’s open door. From the doorway he tells Tom by Christ he’d better give it a rest. Noise is a bloody sin.
Tom can’t resist this one and stops, looks up from his darkened window and pale table lamp. His grin would clear bars. Even the Salvos would leave.
I know all about sin, my friend. I was the sinner in the gutter.
A kind of spluttering enters and leaves Big’s mouth.
So you bloody say. And here you are clattering in the middle of the bloody night. What the hell are you typing anyway?
Tom explains and only gets snorts in response. Standing there Big notices a small piece of meat on Tom’s floor…? There are more things in heaven and earth…
(Self-righteous prat… ) So you’re sucking up to Jesus, is that it? Being holier than us. (Another snort.)
Not hard to do, says Tom.
How do you type anyway with so many bloody fingers missing?
That’s a bit ripe, isn’t it? says Tom. Coming from a chef.
(He is missing the three outer fingers from his left hand. Weirdly, the three outer fingernails on his right hand have been left to grow as if in compensation. Or vanity. The nails are long and curved, and they make Big shudder.)
If you really want to know, says Tom, I look upon it as God’s punishment.
God’s pun… Bloody hell! You’d be nothing without this sin stuff. You can’t get enough of it, can you? Mr Gody goody, after being down and out and a bloody sinner, you unholy bugger?
Not any more.
Not any more what?
Not a bugger. The boys are behind me.
Jesus, that calls for a joke. But where would you be now if you hadn’t been a bugger?
I am a reformed man, my sins are in the past.
Pedophilia isn’t a sin, Thomas, it’s a bloody crime. I’m telling you, you’d be inside like half the knockers in this house have been. There are longer sentences for it than you could ever type into… nobbly-arsey Braille.
He is upset.
I don’t think this tone of yours is… quite appropriate.
Stuff being appropriate. Stop making this bloody noise Thomas or I’ll commit some sins of my own on your bloody hide!
We