Читать книгу Waiting - Philip Salom - Страница 12

The Sheriff

Outside the hostel – the stage, and the cast, and the Sheriff is right into it.

Do it like this, fuck ya! shouts The Sheriff, then quieter and scarier: Do it like I say, mate…

He is the Director.

Backing away from him, his steps unsteady, is the much younger man addressed as mate, but no one has seen him before. In his black pants and brown shirt he looks bigger, and fit, but he’s not arguing or not any more. The Sheriff has dusted him once, but gets him down and punches him twice in the face. The Sheriff doesn’t wait for any finer points of analysis, intruders don’t qualify. There is no argument in his nickname. And this bloke, who walked into the corridor and never for a second thought there would be anyone waiting, knows that now. The Sheriff is a man who hits hard and then shouts, and only then threatens.

So, whatdayado? advises The Sheriff. You walk slowly to the front door, if there’s no one out here, and you knock, but if we are out here you very politely, from the pavement you got it, the pavement, you ask for one of us by name and say what ya here for. If ya come as far as having to knock, you just fucken well wait. What ya don’t do is walk in like it it’s some fucken hostel…

The man glares at him

It is a hostel. I was looking for…

His fist like a gun. The 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 are all sinners. Please don’t call me Thomas.

Tom is big on original sin. It is also possible he cannot really tell that despite his overt anger Big is suppressing a deeper rage.

Pig’s arse we are.

Except I found Jesus.

Eventually.

Better late than never.

You took your time. You took your bloody time. And strictly speaking Jesus is only one third of God.

I found Jesus when Billie Graham called to Jesus within me.

Ha! OK, so you have thought about it: you needed to be interfering with boys in order to become a good man. Is that a fair trade?

I was a drunk. I wasn’t in the gutter, I was the gutter.

Tom has been reading. A big sigh escapes the Big body.

Just give the Braille a bloody miss for a bit will you?

No. I can’t.

Big is an inside man: his thinking and talking are all he seems aware of, this talking to himself or, whenever possible, to the world. But even he can see Tom’s face is serious; worse than merely pale, he is unhappy.

Then why not at least (Big in his most exaggerated English accent) shut your bleeding door!

And he slams it shut regardless.

In the rooming house they have a shared lounge-room where they can sit around and talk. They love it. They talk jokes, TV, gossip from the street, even listen to Tom, anything. A common room. Where they chase starry or earth-bound ideas around like mis-bred sheep. In stinking cash-cow houses the landlord more likely uses every pocket of airspace, makes a room out of two cupboards, and so this common room of theirs is a luxury. Their only.

Big has been saying how the mysterious house down the street that always has renovations happening, concrete is being glugged through thick hoses and steel joists are carried through the side path, all without visible result. They must be building an observatory at the back.

And now the observatory idea has come up again.

Nah… I’m not with you on that one, Tom begins. Tom is shaking his head at the idea, which is new to him. Tom arrived a year or so ago and he is not always present at silly-conversations. His mouth opens so widely Big gets in first and expands his reasoning, as if placing the idea there on his tongue and blowing out his cheeks. The outlook, the time, the night lights. Observing the night from this earthy promontory, this unseen jetty… the otherworldly joys of nightwatch and astronomy.

Big calls it again. Nightwash. Even the sound of it… lovely. It is a theory. In science, he reminds them, these men of the world, and Little, that if the theory is beautiful and the facts don’t agree, the facts are wrong. Einstein.

No, no!

This from a very impatient Tom.

It’s not an observatory, it’s a granny flat. Anyway, I hear it began as a granny-flat, he says, his head shaking like a symptom, and it was going well until rising damp…

Rising damp? Here? Have you not noticed the drought?

Then someone notices Dazza is gap-mouthed. Gazzer has had his teeth kicked in and not said anything. And the Kangaroos have lost yet another AFL game. Life’s a shit.

At least they weren’t Dazza’s real teeth. Dentures don’t often go walkabout, if they do they’d do better than to choose a piss-ridden alley on a dark night. Lost they are, though, because Dazza, though a larger man than Big, was pushed from behind as he legged it home one evening from the 7/11, and he never recovered enough to get up again. He was, once down, a turtle type of man, heavy and maybe rocking very slightly, back and forth in a heavy shell. Arms and legs useless. A couple of young thugs saw they’d done the wrong bloke and were so annoyed they kicked his face to punish him. It was his own fault.

It is amazingly rare for the very dysfunctional men inside the rooming house to get over-violent, in a place where the lost is the real and the poor is the everyday, where the future does not look the same as it does in the other houses of the street. Apart from the odd blow or curse, a cuff in the kitchen over stolen food, a fight over TV programs, a drunken stoush soon bruised and ended, the occupants’ lives in this house are lived… if not in exemplary peace then in a roughandtumble tolerance.

They have fought hard to keep this unique (for a rooming house) roominess with its common room. Rooming houses are more usually reconstructed on the basis of a high compression ratio like a car engine. Now there is a threat which remains: to divide the common room into two more bedrooms.

It is a myth to assume people need wealth to be happy, they simply want both. Or that the poor are necessarily violent, even if they reach breaking point. Here, money isn’t visible, health isn’t reliable, happiness isn’t madly obvious but that elusive funny-drug, that smiling neurotransmitter from ideal societies, is not entirely absent. Happiness is the residue left behind when people are not unhappy.

These men do not work, they exist. Work for most of them is a memory, a thing they are surrounded by and which they, those who ever did work, have learnt not to feel guilty about. About not doing.

Though some do. Tom does, sitting in his room thumping his Braille for God’s blind followers. Thumping the Bible and thumping the Braille and thumping his foot on the floor in time to Billy Graham’s famous bass-baritone, George Beverly Shea, the man whose Southern crooning and larynx are tuned for Jesus. The man has a beautiful voice and yes, even athiests think so. But how sentimental and old-fashioned these Jesus people are. Gentle Jesus has a deep voice.

A ship is booming into the harbour. Its foghorn or boomhorn, it sounds like cigars, like deep colourful and flavoursome movement in the air. It doesn’t sound like Jesus.