No, my big problem is stopping. When the hour is up and the next lecturer is scowling at me from the doorway!
I bet you smile sweetly and have the last word – or sentence.
Angus feels a pleasure quite free of the regret each over-zealous response brings on when a man is trying too hard to impress, to see which words might work. He imagines sitting in her lectures, eyes closed, listening as she speaks with such deep pleasure about… crayfish? He has always imagined female academics as a very indoor species dressed in men’s shirts, and with buttons. He hates buttons.
Are you following any of this? She is staring at him, a frown just about tangling in her hair.
I am, I’m in there with you and the students and the crayfish and… your… forthcoming book?
She grins. Looks down at the ridiculous cigarette butt.
Yeah, my book. Some people think were are all nerdy, if not nutty. You know, I heard a nervous first-time lecturer refer to himself as part of acadamia.
So, nutty then?
When she laughs he feels her energy swoosh towards him. Nothing buttoned about her.
While she is not pretty, striking perhaps, strong he thinks again, it is her voice that keeps surprising him. Regardless of his gabbling (whenever it is his turn for gabbling) he wants to stay silent. Silent, as many of his days are, working alone, outside.
He confesses that he knows nothing whatsoever about pedagogy and what was it, poetics? and the ways texts, as she called them, made meaning? None of it. And reading public design? It made sense not as a text but as a tactic. Of? Semiotics?
Well, of course you won’t know about such things, she replies, and gently claps her hands. I wouldn’t expect you to.
He is taken aback. What has she clapped for?
Even she can’t tell anymore. She had begun her study in diagnostics, she tells him, in medical science, and how symptoms operate as a language… and the odd vice versa effect of this… but then she sort of sidestepped into signs more generally, just plain old semiology.
You went from the inside to the outside, he suggests.
She hadn’t thought of it like that.
Just don’t say anything about anything not being rocket science, he adds. Or hipsters.
Hipsters! We have lots of them.
Then she laughs unexpectedly, knocks her dark glasses up and the wings tangle in her hair. His grin turns practical and he reaches forward, standing close in front of her, and carefully disentangles a slim metal wing and its sharp hinge from her brown hair. Taking longer, it seems to them both, than is strictly necessary.
Stay for a while, he says.
The hills are turning lyrical, she thinks, more pastoral poetry than romantic. More Czerny than Beethoven. The wine is getting to her too. Susan’s place is close enough.
On the slope below them are fifteen or so vehicles, more than the usual proportion of 4WDs, and all of them silver except for one red, one black.
Which is your vehicle? she asks Angus, gesturing to the line-up.
The silver one.
Ha ha. Mine is the silver one.
Alright, then. The red one. Actually, mine is the red one.
Behind her in its metal frames the house sits there like a lift destined for the upper air, a box built into the side of a valley facing east, so the late light shines through the re-growing eucalypts and bleached grasses and into the dark native scrub roughening the valley opposite.
Angus!
They look up to see Stan leaning over the verandah with a glass in his hand. He grins as if pleased beyond measure and raises his glass in salute. Angus responds with the same.
Jasmin! This time Stan ruts up against the verandah railing and laughs again before turning away and disappearing.
Is he always like that?
Oh yes.
Stan, their host, another tall, sandy-haired man like Angus, but thinner, and noisier. He is known to be clever and very generous and he has taken endless trouble in times of trouble to help many people in the hills community. He is a prominent local member of the Greens. Compassion has not made him any more subtle.
Angus explains how he lost his own two-level house in the South Australian bushfires. Burnt to a ruin, the lower rooms left standing but the roof gone, the rafters black and distorted. It had blown its brains out. He was lucky to be here talking about it, given his panicked escape late in the fire-path. Not his idea. Not his house design either, just a house he’d purchased with his ex-wife in a difficult time, her choice and his… for going along with it.
Do you have a partner? he asks her.
Urh, yes. Well, I think so.
She ‘thinks’ of Richard, far away on his travels overseas and, like the Universe, disappearing towards that wall of pixels. Perhaps right through it.
She can’t read Angus’ reaction, or his lack of one. To be fair, nor can he.
But he’s in the UK at the moment. He’s a bit of a prick, if you want to know. He’s an academic too.
He raises his eyebrows (he wants to go huh and he hears it, silenced).
Right, he says, after a pause. Anyway, though I never lost friends to it, my house was lost in a bushfire, so I’m part of this lot. Except from another time and place. The experience is the same, regardless.
His face is grave again. He is going to add something but doesn’t, or perhaps he can’t. It is slight and slow and yet she catches something in this slowness. And she remembers this afterwards.
Now Angus has re-built the SA house to make it as fire-proof as possible. Because he couldn’t sell a conventional house he’d never wanted, to pay for the divorce settlement he’d never wanted, to someone who most likely wouldn’t want a house in a fire zone. Unless it was safe. Crazy.
How safe is safe? she asks.
It’s hard to test an experiment like that, to test it with real danger, and he smiles at her, the opposite of her own work in research, housed in the safe world of ideas.
He has experimented. There is a lot going on now, where before there was nothing. So when Stan contacted him from Victoria to ask for help in designing his own ‘fire-proofed’ house, it seemed an extra-ordinary deliverance.
Angus takes her arm, gently, to direct her around to the side of the house. He helps her clamber up against the rear walls then explains how they began. How without taking more than a wink and a tinnie from the local experts, he and Stan had set about finding slow but beautiful fire and river-coloured bricks then mortaring them into double-brick walls with brick and block interior walls. Then, their big trick, insetting one course of bricks and wrapping the outside walls with steel bands, flush. And inside too, but hidden from view within the wall cavity. Surrounded by the most intense heat these walls should never burst open, nor implode. Inside, the vaulted ceiling is made of fire-proofed wood, again, banded with steel so the roof can never blow open like his own insanely blown-open house. No eaves to catch the embers. No maintenance either. And windows with shutters.
We could be in Italy! he says, a bit pissed now, opening his arms like a tenor cracking on a high note.
He slips on the crumbling clay surface and skids away from her and down the slope like a kid, or a long man in the luge. It takes more than wind out of him. She is laughing as she looks down. The man-genius reduced to stumbling legs. His left trouser leg is streaked reddy-brown from the clay. And his elbows.
Jasmin lowers herself towards him and gently brushes the clay from his arms. He sees her trying her best to hold back laughter and has to nod, and nod.
I’m as dusty as an old book.
Or