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Angus

Driving the bobcat is a big boy’s pleasure: its fast and fussy lifting and turning adds to the toy-like appearance, until you feel its working grunt, that heavy urgency of engines gouging through dirt or lifting and bearing large stones and rocks. It is manic but muscular. Each lift and slow roll as he wedges stones into the retaining wall fronting a small mansion. Rocks everywhere. A growling bobcat twisting and swivelling. In South Australia you find moss rocks, gloriously dark boulders with lichen and moss growths rooted in their surfaces. People pay a fortune for rocks. Well, they pay Angus a fortune for rocks.

Everything is heavy on a job like this. The rate, the pay, the irksome waiting for materials, the badgering with councils… This plan he is implementing is close to being black-listed. Not, as it happens, yet. As for rocks, it would appear Melbourne has less moss and more granite. This, from a city built of colonial bluestone? – the cobbles the kerbs the capable walls? Whether kerbstone or churchstone, the same blue ageing, darkish grey to black.

But in gardens there is also the illusion of weight. He may choose sandstone and slate and as long as it looks like a mountain-side it pays well by merely having volume and vastness. These stones bear no public weight but their own, and they do not wash away even though he insists on trickle irrigation, the most economical watering system and vital to prevent chlorinated water spoiling the stones. Sprinklers are deadly, worse, in some areas they are sourced from bore-water, they spray out iron from shallow aquifers and veil everything in a filthy not a flirty red. They rain unsightly stains as if the stuff came hurtling from the massed backsides of a hundred hippos. Those grumpy animals that like to spray to further seed-life and to show they do not suffer fools.

An irregularly-shaped block of stone will not be forced into the gap. Whether it is a stubborn block or an unwelcoming gap, it has to be done. Angus leaves the engine running, like a good diesel should be, and tramps over to his ute to grab the pick and sledge hammer and his heavy steel chisel. The sky is clear and blue above him, as he pulls on gloves, then the unlikely safety goggles. Roughened hands were once the sign of a macho worker, a type immediately ruined by an eye-patch. Health and Safety is in capitals everyday now, as it never was then, with workers whose first action was to remove the annoying safety guards from machines, and who mocked anyone who worked with obvious care for their hands.

Several blows of the pick knock a small sparking gap in the stone, enough for him to swap the big attacking steel and shoulder-high blows for the chiselling. The hammer is heavier than some blokes could lift with one hand, let alone swing against the ball-end of the steel chisel. It takes slow, determined blows, one, and one, and one. And rests. Then again. Nothing happens fast with this material. No obvious grain like some rocks, or those rocks that give nothing then shatter at your feet. The blows must be judged carefully, given the blunt imprecision of the tools, and to avoid the jarring that kills the wrists and does little to the rock-face.

I’m breaking rocks in the hot sun…

How he wishes he didn’t keep remembering this.

Then a section sheers off and falls beside the block.

He eases the clutch on the bobcat and nudges the boulder forwards into position, against, then into the gap between the other blocks. He pulls back and it stays. Not bad, not bad at all. He feels the satisfaction from making small adjustment to very heavy masses.

From uphill he can estimate the visual design by measure – the slope is cut into two by equal terraces made of stone – but from below he will need to judge it as the neighbours and the passers-by will see it. By eye. On paper it may seem perfect but from below its proportions look utterly wrong. Some might say, as the kids say, whatever. He is not ever, and never ever, a whatever person. He wants it right.

Playing with the stop-start and the left-right dynamics of his bobcat has made him slur with pleasure in the face of the greater powers. The bobcat pushes blade-first into a large ramp of stones. As it lifts the square-ish block he wants, a rounder stone tips awkwardly and the gods seize it, this spherical boulder, they bowl it straight downhill at the most expensive car they can see.

It tumbles out onto the driveway and, as he watches, it bounces heavily down the hard long path and thumps into a parked Mercedes. Black, glossy, German enamel. Quite beautiful. Deeply indented.

It bleeds silver. What to do? The shock of it, his error, embar­rassment in full view. When he manages to get down to the car Angus tries to lift the stone by himself. Using the black and yellow bobcat would look like a bumble bee attacking a black car. Instead, staggering, he feels like a crazy Scots tossing boulders. He thinks of his entrails exploding through the fibrous walls of his abdomen or, much worse, his scrotum.

Hey you!

The feeling of this sound is heavier than the boulder. Or hernia. Hate. He can feel its vengeful eyes.

I have just taken a photo of you, shouts a woman. I have caught you red-handed.

As she wobbles fatly down towards him, still holding her mobile, the world’s newest weapon for law-courts and YouTube. She lifts it higher to prove her point and as if she is comparing their held objects: her little iPhone and his cannon ball.

Is it… your car? I guess it is. I’m sorry. We can…

Can you indeed? Well, I have one of you at the car and I have another one of you lifting that thing up to get away with it.

No, look, I suggest you contact the owner and we can see what his insurance…

Insurance! Think you can get away with it do you? NO. That is my car and you’re done. You’re done.

Done? He would laugh if he could. She has been watching too much television. He suggests as much.

That is offensive. That is offensive. I heard the tone, that is very rude. Very very rude, I will see you punished. How dare you, how dare you, you are in no position to…

The stone is too heavy to hold, and too heavy to have to pick up again.

She grunts and pants, and bends awkwardly towards the dented door – legs splayed and belly down, she really is very fat – she is a Sumo for a moment, she is challenging the car – and he sees the flash whitely against the black duco as she takes shots of the dent. Much worse than a dent, the metal is nearly cut open. She could almost cry if she wasn’t so happy to have caught him.

Here, she calls, evidence. Evidence! You cannot say you didn’t when I can show you did. Yes, I have it here.

I am going to carry this rock back uphill. Or do you want to take another photo? Here you go, how’s this? He does a half squat and lift and staggers back still holding the bloody stone against his chest, both his forearms under it, the rocky colour of exertion filling his face.

Aha! Stealing the evidence. Yet she stands there doing nothing.

Reality passes very quickly madam, you’ve got to be quick.

Automatically, just in a time-lapse, she takes his advice, she raises her iPhone and her hand blinks.

I have you again. Yes. I have you again.

He tries to carry the stone uphill. He drops it. No. The thing starts rolling back, so he has to rush back and prop himself against it. He is puffing. Even he has heard of Sisyphus. He is vaguely aware of her screaming and feels like letting the bloody thing go. Eventually he hefts it, then staggers uphill and clicks it down against the stack like a monster lawn bowl. She is walking stubbornly towards him.

Uh uh! Puffing. He points to her feet. She stops, then starts again. Now she is walking on his side of the driveway.

Madam, (panting in fact) you’re trespassing. I can’t let you stay on the property.

You what? You you… I’m not moving until you take responsibility for the damage to my car. You are so offensive, so offensive. That is an insult and I won’t take it, no I won’t, I won’t take that from you.

Ha (he can’t believe it). Now look, on behalf of the owner…

The owner! That man has his name on things but he doesn’t own them. His kind don’t own anything.

… (she might well be right)… just for my own peace of mind and … in accordance with workplace safety, you cannot be on this property. I am going to get into my bobcat and carry on working and I can’t be held responsible if anything should happen…

That’s a threat, that’s a threat. He’s threatening me, she shouts this last rather oddly at Angus. Perhaps Angus is supposed to do something about it, take her side and tell himself off. A voice is coming from his mouth without him even thinking.

The more you shout and get angry and say stupid things in the third person…

How dare you!

Long after she has gone he feels the shrill tones of her voice, the raucous edge to it making him think of some Mediterranean soprano, less Callas and more Souliotis, a once-big voice so wrecked it is ungainly.

The next day, Saturday, Angus is sitting on his verandah looking at the trees when he remembers, guiltily, the woman was in the right. He had better ask the absent ‘businessman’ for his contract payment right away. Hope his insurance forms will shut her up. Insurance never satisfies the aggrieved though; they want to shout and accuse and scream indignation. They want the kill.

Come to think of it, he’d better check through the details of his third-party insurance too. Make sure it’s up-to-date. Everything legal keeps changing but insurance liability is like taxes and death.

Then someone is knocking at his front door.

There haven’t been more than a dozen visitors in all the time he’s lived here. Not a salesman, surely? Angus gets up and wanders through the house to the front and opens the door.

Surprise!

Standing there is Jasmin and another woman.

Hi! he says, dopily, shocked, and in a high voice, just to make it worse.

Well, she laughs, aren’t you inviting us in? This is Sue, my friend from Uni. I told you about her at the party, remember, you said she was like jam.

Well…

I can tell you’re really pleased to see us.

His heart has jumped into cliche. He realises how starved of female intimacy he is. Sue is shorter than Jasmin and rounder and is smiling at him – the two of them, smiling at him. He could hug them and keep them forever.

They stay for a drink and they wander through his rental home, inspecting everything, including the bedroom, he notices, and when they are all sitting on the verandah Angus tells them about yesterday’s encounter with the crazy woman.

They debate crazy, they are academics after all, but concede something close, like the woman is over the top self-centred? So Angus tells them (he tells them because his mind is so fixed on Jasmin he over-compensates and talks to Sue) about his mother.

It is his mother who is the model for things self-centred, yet she is pessimistic. Is that a common double? The Mercedes woman kept reminding him of his mother, a Mediterranean version. He tells Jasmin and Sue how his mother went a bit hippie in middle age and once over that went very embarrassingly New Agey, the land of Me for her generation, and how after that she had lapsed into obesity and competitive bitterness.

At least she wasn’t an alcoholic, he says.

They drink to that, and Sue asks if she may, then lights up a cigarette.

In his early 20s, Angus says, when he was house-sharing with two alarmingly dysfunctional psychologists, he had taken one of those silly Myers-Briggs personality tests. To their credit, The Two Shrinks, as he called them, did not take Mr and Ms M-B especially seriously. They said what a travesty it was to take the 400,000 or so words of Carl Jung and reduce them by omission to this limited and changeable so-called personality test. It was T20 cricket in duration but Test cricket in its chance of result.

Well, Mr Work Boots, asks Jasmin, what did you come out of that as? What kind of man are we drinking with?

Angus says he was labelled as an Extroverted Sensation Feeling type…

The women look at him.

Is that good? he asks.

Yes and Sounds good, they answer, almost in unison.

I thought I was more of an introvert. Look at me living alone up here.

(Starved for company, he doesn’t add.)

God knows what my mother would be. She is a Narcissist. Something I’ve missed, luckily.

They do very well in the world if they are disciplined, says Sue.

And in the corporate world, adds Jasmin, and in University administration!

He tells them in more detail than necessary how the Two Shrinks were also a bit hippie-ish, how they smoked dope, all three of them, and with their friends, they played music and were all a bit bloody obvious. One of the shrinks suggested he make the most of his psychological typing, try more often to stand in the centre of the world, to feel the elements of him merge with the elements themselves. To feel this in his torso, his chakras, the other one said. Angus agrees, now, belatedly, now that the two embarrassing sets of advice have long faded, that he is in some sort of way a low-key pantheist… Perhaps he has waffled on for too long.

The two women stand and thank him for the wine and tell him they have to get down to the plant nursery before closing so thank you again and goodbye Angus. At the front door Sue puts out her hand and Jasmin steps in close and kisses him fully on the mouth then turns immediately, and they walk to the car, get in, slam the doors and drive away, all within half a minute. Angus is still standing there five minutes later.