Читать книгу Waiting - Philip Salom - Страница 7

Big and Little

Their two figures move up and down, and onwards as always. Habit and walking and still a hundred metres from the automatic doors. Little is saying remember we must get tomatoes. Big is thinking of the calendar they want, how time divides neatly into numbered boxes, and how in those boxes, on other people’s calendars, there are notes about holidays, and birthdays and appointments. Holidays! Except in his life and hers there are no holidays, or even notes on the days passing. Just the days, then more days. Every moment is itself.

They are two characters walking uphill, Big with his long steps and Little with many shorter steps. But why so dishevelled and why so muttering? How to avoid the projections, the cliches we indulge in when two odd people are walking? Which foods are the right foods when so many foods are the wrong foods. Big knows his foods. He is not a nice man to walk so forcefully but she is a whinge to do the quick quick slow slow. Mumble and mutter:

And pies. Tomatoes and pies.

These two characters are like their shopping items, as inseparable as they are in syntax: Big and Little.

She has small tears in her eyes. Big prefers to call them Little tears. Little walks on a tilt forwards and up to the shops, she is a skier leaning through the wind and the cold, like the pain in her kidneys. Her kidneys are not funny, her kidneys are as dark and unhappy as a cruel poem, all present tense and no story and cold as snow. They are Loopy, her own name for the Lupus that assails their shape. Lupus erythematosus.

Little is just that – diminutive, somewhat withered – but Big thinks she has a nice round bottom and has been known to say as much, in private, of course. Beside her, inseparable, he stamps in his big-legged big-calved way and from a distance someone might look at them and see two women, a small woman and a big woman… or a very large man in a faded dress. Sometimes he wears skirts but mostly he wears dresses. His man-boobs are bigger than Little’s, they are more than considerable, they are alarming, and he dresses them tightly outlined. He is a 60 year old show-off.

Last time we went shopping you forgot the tomatoes and you know how much I like them, you know…

Not so good for the joints, Little.

With her tight-bottom jeans and his waddle way of walking Big seems to be kicking her like a Little football, whingeing her way along the pavement. It is uphill, after all, downhill is much worse: when he wades downhill she looks to be pedalling a tiny, invisible bicycle. Today he is carrying a yellow handbag. His shins are tucked into tight pink socks and his feet are shod in green flat-heels. No one knows where he found them but the one thing to get right is: he is not the woman to ask. Big of the huge gut and hairy Popeye forearms. His long hair trails out in the breeze, exposing his friar’s tonsure, lovely word, he says, the very Roman look of his tonsure and his large head.

Outside their IGA, squatting against the wall, is a daft-looking bloke who is everywhere on his edges blurry and roughened, as if from head to foot his once-ordered body has been shaken hard by storms. As people walk in and out of the IGA he tries it on with his whining voice and his almost saturated staring. Big stares back at him.

Do I look like I’m made of money? Big growls, and swings his handbag past the guy’s knees. Little follows him like a pup in blue denim and looks back over her shoulder.

Don’t stop and stare, come here, in here, get away from him, growls Big. The man’s a swamp.

But I remember him.

She jumps in through the electric doors.

Remember him?

And you remember, she says to Big, tomatoes, sauce, calendar.

I know, I know, he says, I have a memory on my poor shoulders. Having started growling he continues growling.

Little has a smirk: I thought you said you had a memory for shoulders.

His are the shoulders of a womanly fireman. Except he used to be not a fireman but a chef. Not an effing chef or a scripted TV wannabe, but a growling against the clock singlet-sweating cook. There is no money for this lack of glamour, but they labour behind the walls of thousands of cafes and restaurants, rushing or stalling to keep the rest of us averagely fed. Before that he was way out, he was a shearer’s cook. With no room to swing a handbag in, he had to wallop out a steak and veg or a chicken parma, mate, you betcha, and hack up carcasses for those cliff-sided roasts. A crash-bang of a cook.

He selects a red, plastic carry-basket and carries this on his right hand and his yellow handbag in his left. Trots along like David Suchet’s Poirot. They shop to a set plan: cut left into the cross-aisle and then right alongside the meat in the first long aisle but then down and back like ploughing for the turn-both-ways ploughs. Because the old ploughs, Big has more than once told Little, the old trailing discs and mouldboard ploughs, could only turn right, and so you cut out a paddock in sections turning back on yourself by always turning right. Big announced this to a thin old lady once, in front of the cereal shelves. Little is the usual audience. She remembers ploughing every time they come in.

So they plough and bicker over the breadstuffs, the meat in packs, and handle all the fruit despite the staff staring at them. He chooses and she selects it from the shelf. Big discusses food and life and rarely stops. She selects more than he chooses. Today he raves just a bit, though, less than usual, he raves just enough to be himself, raving, but that is all. Methodically and thoroughly. They squint at calendars before choosing one with dogs and big squares for each day. And then, with the actual shopping done as slowly as possible, but disappointingly soon, they head for the check-out. It could be worse. Big sometimes get stuck in the IGA for hours. Sometimes he makes trouble with the floor staff, which embarrasses Little. The things Big and Little discuss are not ideas, they are urges, words of arousal, he insists on saying, urges, from down where all our little food folds move about.

Little is trying to work out if the check-out boys are old enough to shave when Big, who is and doesn’t much, turns to her and says:

Did you see that beauty who just waltzed in?

No, she tells him, but spins around just in time to see a very attractive women turn into the first aisle.

Ah, yes. She’s beautiful.

Nothing of the sort, he says. That woman…

Big has forgotten. He raises a fruity English accent:

… that woman… was never born to wear that face and nor that… set of tits. (His tits are ogreish.) No woman was. Surgery and surgeons are responsible for it. (He has forgotten the word surgery makes Little feel unwell.) Did you know in South American countries, where a few are rich and the rest are poor, the poor cannot resist wasting their saddest dollars on boob jobs and lips. Lipo fat is literally sucked from their bellies and their bottoms! They shed gallons of it, they yield, yes, gallons of it, like butter. Whole tanks of fat. Urgh! Ipso facto.

People are staring. They always do. But now they are shuddering.

Worse still, oh, way worse, all that fat is rendered down for cosmetics – can you see how ludicrously comic this cosmetic surgery is? Their poor arse fat goes back onto the faces of the rich.

He pauses.

That and dynamite.

His voice is booming.

Yes, they turn fat into nitroglycerine, or so I understand, human glycerine is that fine. One hopes their faces do not explode.

Had the manager heard this they would have been thrown out in seconds. Big realises too late, unable to help himself – this outrageous monologue has been wasted. At the checkout she pays and he carries. Out and in silence onto the pavement.

The shabby, begging bowl of a man still there. This time Big stops. The man is holding a stubbie behind his back as if hiding it from general view.

Yes, Little remembers him. He is the man who once stammered out his plan for personal wealth to her and how she should help him, because the guy at the 7/11 wouldn’t. She starts reminding Big but he has remembered too. The man had approached Little last year and told her he knew a bloke who knew a bloke who could get his hands on lotsa, you know, lotsa ice, yeah, enough ice to divvy up and sell for a bloody killing. All he needed was enough money to buy the main lot. She thought his silly brains were showing through the side of his head.

You just walked in and asked the guy at the 7/11 if he’d give you money?

The Idiot had stared: yeah, nah, only to borrow it but. I asked him if he’d lend me a thousand from the till. He’d get it back pronto. I had a fifty I’d nicked from me mate and I was askin’ this Indian bloke, he looked alright for an Indian, eh, asked him if he’d break it into two twenties and a five so no one could say I’d nicked a fucken fifty, and then I just reckoned yeah why not cut him into the deal too, you know. Is what I was really thinkin about.

At more or less this point Big had returned from the ATM. He was not happy. He wanted to kick, he said, this miserable blot on the pavement. Instead, they went around the block to the 7/11 and asked in there if it was true. Yes yes, the Indian guy told them, yes they are free to do what they liked these alcoholics, and he did not like that, no. They are free to do anything with their fortnight pension, no worries, no, all the free money they have and yet asking me such crazy stuff, he told them, pointing to the door then the till then the ceiling, not buying anything, while I work all night, you know, he told them, I work all night and have to put up with drive-offs and knife attacks and then foolish men like him who can do anything they like because they are alcoholics.

Now Big liked this and so he liked the Indian guy.

The government, why won’t the government do something about alcoholics and knives, boys with knives, and how we Indian people work so hard and in here it is dangerous, but no, no, they don’t do anything for Indian people.

That’s what they remember the 7/11 Indian guy saying, with both hands waggling everywhere under the flattening whiteness of fluorescent lights.

So here is this idiot guy again, begging. Déjà vu. Little pushes Big away past him and they get up some momentum, and only later stop to listen because Big quite suddenly wants to stop and listen – and puts a hand on her arm to shush her – to the awful noise of fitness and aerobics flying from an upper window.

Aerobics my arse. Big makes his pronouncement in a boom to the cars and pedestrians in the tram-divided street, the night air in his thin hair. It’s a beautiful night, Little says.

Nearly.

Nearly what?

Well, it’s not night-time.

Oh, you. (Romantic even, she doesn’t say.) Big isn’t listening:

Maybe I should join a gym? Me, in short skirt and bloomers, though I could make it a singlet opportunity… Taking on the machines for a bit of authentic weight reduction, blood detox­ification. I like the sound of that: if-i-cation. Effing-cation!

His big voice releases the sounds again.

Ox! Effing-cation!

For years Big has concentrated on shopping as his means of losing weight, he says shopping is the best walking, twice a week, bag-laden.

However, once, he and she had trammed down into the city and joined in early-morning tai chi at Fed Square. They joined in the white T-shirt and black tracksuit enthusiasts who were falling back into Blown Down by Wild Hurricane more than Grasp the Peacock or Wave to the Mountain. Free-of-charge sessions aren’t restrictive, anyone can join and so they did, and so there are nutters galore in the classes.

Big and Little doing Tai Chi! Big got the stares and Little got their sad smiles, Fair Wave of Chinese Compassion, and she liked it.

A young man at the back kept looking at her bottom, said Big to her afterwards. Her largest attraction, Big said, and he stared, Big said, for longer than Advance and Overwhelm the Monkey would have required. Little was never big in the bosom, her mother always told her, and Big has said her small boobs are more dumplings than steamed duck, and silky rather than firm tow fu. But she knows that in any large enough group there will be a young man who has the flushes for her big round pumpkinos.

Because he is just a bit jealous, but could never say so, and because Little is a few years younger than him, in her thirties perhaps, Big decided it was fairer to keep the fat than lose the lady. So. They never went again.

She knows Big is coming down quickly from his brief IGA monologue. Relaxing. In the moonlight, on a clear night, the weather is so good they lift their bags but let their discussion drop.

In no time they are leaning on the well-worn rail, waiting for the tram. They face the Post Office. On the ground floor of this grand building they, every second day as a rule, enter by their personal key, go into the corridor of post boxes: the wall of numbers. Once inside, they inspect their souls as if before the grotto… Because Little’s mother, who is ailing (her mother is attached to the word ailing), ailing for a year or so now, has told Little to expect ‘the call’ in the form of a letter – her own call coming more directly – of her demise. Silence ever since. Maybe she’d forgotten.

Little carried the last letter around until it was worn out along its fold lines. And it stated that Little, just Little and no one else in the family, “her little daughter”, will inherit the home in Adelaide.