exploding outwards, he says. It’s a unique idea which I… Well, I designed it for Stan. He built it.
When she frowns, disbelieving, he tells her: really, he’s not making it up. He has, he insists, no qualifications whatsoever, just a lot of nerve. But he knows about fires. And what happens to houses.
A woman approaches them and tops up their glasses. Angus smiles and she says something to him Jasmin doesn’t quite hear. Then he laughs, the house story apparently forgotten.
Well, it must be damn good wine he’s drinking. She in turn sees him like his rafters, standing above the roofline, an image of frames and happy angles. But he is up and down; there is something lost about him. He too seems banded, like the walls. Even his conversation has bands around it. But it has bright blue eyes. Light among the darkness of the mood and the eerie burnt-out landscape.
Glancing, warily perhaps, when she is looking away, Angus sees she has a sensual face and dark eyes. She has visible cheek-bones, her lips hold a generous and now, he guesses, a wry smile for those close to her. He can’t see (he will later realise) that the woman is always worrying over books and complex meetings with her students at University. Her academic face.
As they continue talking Angus’s guard is relaxing into unexpected anecdotes she tells and he laughs at, and in her eye contact, and at the way she refers to Melbourne as a design city, and he likes that. Design. Not his kind of design, more her kind with the de and the sign parted with a hyphen. Designate. As a place of signs. Signs? Is that what she does, something to do with signs, he asks her. Well, she excuses herself, she is a semiologist. She lets him get away with What, a seismologist? after his images of stones and earthquakes. (Once, at a performance of Coriolanus, she heard a dragged-along bloke say to his girlfriend, this Cornelius had better be good.)
Where has everybody else been? There were people hugging their awful secret. There were a few people yelling. There are always a few people yelling.
I hate parties, he groans.
Everybody hates parties, she says, I mean everyone says they hate parties.
Teasing him maybe – yet here they both are.
Not today, he adds. Today is an exception. This, he means to say, is based on strong feelings. Remembering the destruction and the need to move on. But he means her. Anyway, he likes the rush of social drinking, the excitement of it beats the hell out of a glass of something in silence at home. Searching too hard for the flavour of the wine. This is his confession of being single. And philosophical.
Except when driving home is too far and… though not today, I live close by, just down the road, he adds. He gazes across at the troubled pastures in the opposite paddocks, at the three brown horses stationary after their earlier galloping. The horses may or may not be happy but people at the party seeing the horses are happy to see them.
After a fire you see all the usual devastation, the kind that TV cameras can show, but there are odder things that show up, like skulls of kangaroos and things you thought lost which are suddenly visible. Old bikes, wheels, anything metallic really. Glass. Though sometimes glass is simply a blob with charcoally stuff solidified into it. Once, I was walking through burnt out bush and found the skeleton of a snake. It was white and the bones were still intact, which is remarkable because they are very fine bones. It looked like a metre-long comb of some kind.
She smiles and keeps eye contact with him, the newly arriving silence of eye contact. And says nothing.
It seems reasonable, he tells her, that so many locals still experience fear, and enough anxiety for sudden panic. No, not a panic-attack, that’s media-speak, but a state of panic, feelings that are the same as panic, or accompany panic, but do not rush about like someone panicking. Dread of a kind.
She is humbled by the gravity of what he is saying. And the plain-ness of his clothing, his calf-length shorts over tanned legs, his sandals - and his strikingly pale feet. A man who works outdoors?
He says he always wears boots, and laughs to be distracted from being, as he had been, stuck yet again in fire talk.
In fact I always wear safety boots. With all the years of outdoor work you might think my feet are hard but they’re not. They are probably as soft as yours.
She finds this surprisingly intimate.
My feet may not be as soft as you think, she says, smiling. I go barefoot whenever I can. I supervise my students barefoot, in my office, where no one knows or cares. In tutorials when it’s not too cold.
She is embarrassed; she has never said this to anyone before and as mild as it is, she feels now self-centred to confess it. She coughs.
And in good weather I run.
This he can guess. Her tights pay her a very shapely compliment.
They keep talking. They watch the kangaroos grazing across the paddocks below the house. Grey and plump at last, like card players in the shadows. It has taken this long for the grass to return and now it is green and lush from the ash and the potassium, the natural potash. Over in the valley it grows in patches beneath the trees that remain black and are scattered like crochets on the hillside.
After wandering off to get another drink, a bottle, Angus returns to see her in a glancing-over-the-shoulder conversation with a man in a checkered shirt.
He ambles closer as if wanting to stride but worried it will look like the striding male returns. She is smoking a cigarette.
You smoke? he says,
No, I don’t.
She looks at him.
I just borrowed one from a bloke over there. She smiles and shows her hands, palms up, as if to indicate she is not concealing anything, cigarettes included. She’s catching something in him. She is the hook and the fish of him is dragging. Old river cod. Perhaps it is nothing more than the awareness of her tight-fitting singlet. Opening his sometimes dour brain. Her singlet and the slim, neat shape of her words keep surprising him. Is he so obvious?
The other man smiles at Angus and says nothing. Then changes his mind and thrusts out his hand.
Mike, he announces.
Angus does the usual.
No, it is her voice. It is deep and confident and comes directly towards him like openness or friendship. Now she returns to telling him how her work involves teaching semiotics to dazed undergraduates and writing her own research on the languages and meaning, in other words, the way she can read public spaces (she reads public spaces?). In her lectures she uses the ideas of semiotic theorists but references her own hands-on research as often as possible. Anecdotally, that is.
She says all this to Angus, as if the other guy, Mike in the check shirt, isn’t there, and soon enough he isn’t.
They understand you? asks Angus.
I could throw boiled crayfish at them and they wouldn’t know the difference, she says. It’s like all teaching and learning – some of them understand.
She drops her cigarette and grinds it, twice, in the dirt. In this loaded fire-world and atmosphere it seems an odd thing to do. She bends and picks it up, looking around for something. Proof she isn’t a smoker.
Do you know Stan from long ago or more recently? he asks.
Um, I met him through Susan, a Uni friend of mine who lives in the foot-hills not far from here. I say she is half city, half hilly. On the border. Being a literary person, she says she is marginalia.
She sounds like jam.
She left before you arrived and I am just about to go, too.
Oh. Hang on. You can’t go now. Tell me about this lecturing stuff you do. I’ve hardly ever spoken in public, or in front of a crowded room. They say it’s way up on the stress-list, one of the things people most fear doing. People crap themselves over it.
Not me, mate.
No?
Never!