seems lighter.
I couldn’t have said that, he adds.
Ah, but you made it. I’m just an academic so I can describe it.
It makes her smile, a kind of oddly skewed understanding going on.
No wonder he feels lightheaded. Then he stops and thinks about it, looks up into the canopy of trees on the eastern side of the road. But I am, he says, changing. I’ve lived out here but I work in the city. I thought I couldn’t live in town again. Now I think it’s about time to move, to see Melbourne close up. I’ve earned it the hard way, but still…
Still…?
Earned it. As you said.
Suddenly it seems the table of good tidings must lighten a little.
They hug each other and kiss goodbye, full lips kissing and arms around each other. Neither lets go. What a night. Maybe the emotions and even grief have effected her emotionally, even (could it be?) carnally. Jasmin is certain she can smell smoke all over him. Smoke in his hair and on his collar and smoky sensual heat rising from his throat and neck. She offers her lips for one last kiss, and then holds onto him for a few more moments. He is smoky and leonine. And silent. They are both tall and they stand like trees moved together by wind.
Home and Everyone
Home for Big and Little is a many-roomed rooming house. Or hostel. Or boarding house. Old terms for the same thing never quite nailed by a name. The many mansions of which are blatantly un-spiritual except for the presence of St Thomas. Thomas is their resident born-again, as he never stops reminding them. In his small room with its single window glued over with brown paper – farken Jesus, the others have said, without noticing the blasphemy, we haven’t got a window and you lucky sod you’ve papered yours over, you mad bastard. Tom with his Aryan-style blue-eyed picture of Jesus nailed to the wall. His own eyes are brown. Tom who has been born-again so thoroughly he’d make up whole footie teams of Jesuses (as The Sheriff said, who barracks for a different team). Tom accepts that as the compliment it isn’t. The rest of the occupants play for the team that has no name.
Some rooming houses are worse than others. Many are just tolerable, halfway from the working-world and a quarter of the way from bedlam. Some are hell-holes, that other team The Sheriff knows all about but protects this house from, or so he imagines; while it is tolerable, this rooming house remains an underworld open to men and women but mainly caters to troubled men the nineteenth century (Big said this) called down on their luck and the twenty-first calls losers. A useage without moral upliftingness. And only The Sheriff at the door smoking his hourly cigarette comes close to a counterforce. Good on him for being there, their self-appointed sheriff. There is something hard about him. Pentridge most likely.
The Sheriff looks at the world like this:
Two types I can’t take. Good lookers and these skinny friggin emos. Good lookers need the paint knocked off ‘em, he says. As for those wussy little emos… if they get on the wrong side of me I’ll turn ‘em into organ donors.
Probably, he hasn’t, but plainly he would like to. You do not argue with The Sheriff. You can see he is just waiting for it. Short, shaved hair rising (just) on the sides, his head is a bollard, and his face is tanned from real sunlight, and the muscles all over him are stringier now than years before. Stringier. A handsome but hard face, or scary but fair is perhaps the better way of putting it.
Down in the shade behind him are the winos and junkies, the addicts, active or inactive, the so-called personality disorders, the divorced who were never truly married, the dispossessed who were never in possession, and others who are lost from the sane or the compulsory world, the compulsory, not cheaty or loser-ish, though liver-ish, and sad. Sometimes there’s an overdose of something chemical, which might be existential or in injectable form. Mostly they come and go. The building is dug in below ground level, its basement a descending layer of single rooms, and down there, more than merely lost, are the very lost. They have given up waiting.
Like young Mister Tourette’s among them, who crashes on a filthy mattress in a back room most nights, wakes at uncertain times on uncertain nights, and stumbles out to the street with werewolfishness shouting out of him fucken fucken and cunt and fucken cunts and fucken shits shits arse fuck. The fouler words they are the more his mouth likes them. Out on the median strip under trees and streetlights glowing orange, his poor nervous system is given a volume lost and found in amplification, from hissing to outright barking. It washes his mouth in a gasm of swearing.
It is not romantic. The neighbours if not understanding are at least tolerant and in saying nothing are speaking volumes for his poor buggeration. Tourie, the inmates call him.
Tourie come inside!
In front of the television something quietens the axons and neurons, and his poor, clichéd synapses from going like the clichéd cicadas out there in Australian poetry…
At the rooming house they come and go. Someone called it the House of Broken Teeth. A weird family. Happy family, it’s hard to say, as they often don’t know each other. Stayers cop a nick-name, like St Thomas and The Sheriff and, of course, Big & Little. And poor Sammy who is dim, no meat in his sandwich, and all the others you read about. Some like extras from Awakenings, slumped in the catatonia of encephalitus lethargica, starting up only when the St Vinnies chicks arive with warm food and thermoses and ooo arrhh their very happy bodies. Otherwise, this village of theirs inside its four walls moves unexpectedly. Even the walls move: people kick them when they are dazed, insane, drunk, angry.
The kickers have ailments usually. Like Little. Her connective tissue, her unhappy joints. Sometimes she needs crutches to walk, but for now she is a limper. Little and her kidneys, says Big. Fatigue and pain and sometimes a fluffy butterfly rash across the bridge of her nose. Her wolf visitor, the lupine rash she tries to cover with makeup when she’s outside.
Big considered calling her Wolfie, as in canus lupus – but she’s no Wolfie. Big is the one with hairs in his nose and expressive ears. He trims them in the tiny magnifying mirror he has positioned as close as possible to the low sunlight the window allows into their room. Wolfie – he likes it, it is affectionate and… But when he mentioned lupins, her little leguminous kidneys podded quietly inside her, it seemed organically and affectionately right. He’s funny and he’s a diabetic and sometimes he hears voices saying big, unhappy trannie and too dumb even for insulin. No, he isn’t a trannie, but he is Type 2.
Diabetes may make a married couple of us, Big suddenly says. And you know what I think of the perilous contrivance of marriage, let alone dialysis machinery, hospital beds, boiled cabbage, nutrition in general. I shall have to take evasive action, lose weight, join the gym and make a spectacle of myself.
She knows Big had a wife and even a son years ago. How his physical, if not financial absence from family, while working and boozing around the sheep country from shed to shed, led to a slowing of the financials. That and the cards, poker, rendered him absent on both counts. His compulsion to skirts was never in the closet, though in those years mostly happened behind the counter, in the kitchens and under the aprons, on the canteens or messes, and no-one cared as long as he was clothed and kept cooking.
None of this is the worst of his memories, the divorce having that position. And the cards. Poor health being what it is, and some degree of fault, but family was its own dark achievement. He joined the many who see too late the child going silent and feeling hurt and changing from sunny to sullen, as the wife rightly stops the lies and lets the truth happen, like a great hose. Only later does anyone realise it’s not the adult but the children they married and who needed honouring, the children who at birth took vows to be loved and be held, and when the father breaks those vows enough for divorce, fathers are perhaps forever outside the vows that deep within them were all the truth they needed. But couldn’t keep. Lost.
Big does not talk about this except on binge nights. His uppermost turns upside-down and secrets collect in his eyes and spill down his cheeks. His cheeks tell the truth, they are wet. He has Little. He has no Jesus figures or icons for his failure and his guilt, he has the one person he has met who wants to forgive him with little noises