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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 and small steps forwards and breathing the same air day and night.

The fact was, he told her, he couldn’t work in the city or even in a town, cooking at a hotel, say, and sit down every night with a wife and house and a threesome as she wanted, of children, let alone a brace of kids on a scale of taller to shorter like the old 50s photos or like those ducks on the wall. Those sickly ducks! He is happy now being half of this binary of Big and Little.

He is happy to be Big not because he is especially or uniquely big, or that she is ditto little, but that beside her he is ‘Big’ and beside him she is ‘Little’.

Who could have guessed, among the marriage counsellors and dating services, such a sensible if eccentric accommodation? The lonely meet sometimes; compatibility is indeed a strange thing.

He is her Big but he annoys her sometimes. The way he goes on about things, just now about those running-on-the-spot stamping-at-standstill machines. Being gawked at. Head sweatbands. That gym near the IGA playing doof-beat or almost as bad – ballet music. He wails:

Tchaikovsky in lycra and bloody headbands!

They don’t, she says curtly, wear headbands.

He pauses to study her. Then continues: Always was a soppy composer, that bloody Tchaikovsky. Worst of the Romantics, swooning, self-pitying sop-opera and no soul…!

She can’t help sighing. For, loudly, tired of him, his talking.

Outside, the day is pomegranates, lemons, apricots. Leaf and green lifting to the sun. Another day. Sammy emerges from the side alley with a bucket of water and pours it in equal division between these trees. Now here is a simple sum that school gave him strife over, when all it needed was summer, trees, water in a bucket – and the idea of thirds is solved.

In the lounge-room watching TV one night among the many gathered there, the semi-fallen and the semi-risen, Sammy announced: my IQ is really low, that’s what they told me at the centre and they’re prob’ly right. But I’m OK with cars.

It was during the ad break.

Mate, The Sheriff looked at him. It has never once occurred to me, never once gave it a thought. I reckon you’re smart enough, mate, I mean it.

Yeah, came a chorus from the others. Farken oath.

But he doesn’t mean it. No one means it.

Even now, much later, The Sheriff much thinner except for the paunch – along with Big and Little they are the stayers at this place – Sammy has kept a happy feeling regarding his unlocatable intelligence. It is a pleasure as satisfying as the water seeping down into the soil and reaching the good places.

Sammy stands in the sun. He looks up at three cars driving by, a yellow-top taxi which stops in front of the apartments on the opposite side of the road. At one of the apartment windows a man is looking down into the street through binoculars.

The taxi stops but the man ignores it, then stands back inside his apartment. Whenever The Sheriff sees this man looking at them he gives him the finger. But some things just are the way they are.

There is no room in their rooms for anything extra. Storage is always a problem. Different if you have a computer, where every­thing inside is compressed, large realms in small bodies. Tardis. There is one old computer, a Mac, for Little’s elbow room when it comes to ambition. Still, the Mac takes up more space than Big is happy about, in their small room otherwise overloaded with very second-hand books, paperbacks, hardbacks, dinosaur uncut or knife-cut tomes for the autodidact Big to rummage in. So with Big making suggestions she found difficult to counter, they have set her Mac back against the corner furtherest from the door. It is a gap that Big could not sit in. It is a man-hole, a slit opening in a castle, a Mac aperture in their crammed room. In no secrecy at all therefore she has written a page or two about Sammy and three other people who live in the hostel, as she calls it, The Sheriff obviously and Tom the Saintly the know-all, and also the old woman who has no teeth and barely any gums just a long nose then a chin and collapsible middle region, who when she stands still is more like a wobbegong shark than anything else.

Little is never keen on walking further than the IGA but she likes to look at other people’s walks. So this wobbegong woman features in walks: the way she is always leaning forwards from the hips, and walking with both arms loose behind her, not helping, not waving, not even swimming but her palms facing backwards in a very strange walk, of chest forwards and her arms like wings, a walk seemingly unassisted by ergonomics – the latter word care-of Big in lecture mode at the time. When she walks she is not a small shark she is The Winged Woman.

To test his theory Big asked the woman if she suffered from lower back pain but she stared at him and said she suffered from PAIN fullstop.

Drama! Tonight Little is tittering away at her keyboard, the sounds of her keystrokes annoying but not enough to damn someone for wanting to write the letter she must, to reply to the letter she has just received.

At the front, under the tree and just above the grass no one trims, is a pathetic mailbox for people no one writes to. It is full of spider mail. But that doesn’t stop Tom the Saintly standing there occasion­ally, the back of the box dangling open and the long hand of God sorting through the spiders and junk (most of it junk), the out-of-date letters to men long gone to other streets and other falls – because sometimes there’s a letter for him. From his Christian group. The choir group he doesn’t sing in.

Being at the front nevertheless risks another kind of arrival. Amazingly, given he is so Christianised, Tom dislikes other kinds of Christians if it means having to listen to them. To the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the various missionaries who busy themselves along this street, he says No, no. Go away, I am already saved.

When they stay – they always stay – he tells them he has asked Jesus what to do about the particular problem of JayDubs (they see they have come to a man who likes to talk a great more than they do) and Jesus has answered very precisely: JayDubs are religious wimps, they don’t know what they talking about, they should shut up and go home and bake cakes.

So, says Tom all smug (beginning to sound like Big, who in truth he secretly admires), leave the soul-searching for men who shake uncontrollably while staring through the Gates of Hell. They run.

Three days ago, however, letters all sorted and junk thrown in the communal bin, Tom knocked on Big and Little’s door and when Little opened up he announced:

Right royal post for you Ag… Sorry. Little. Looks offficial if you don’t mind me saying. Not religious. Not from charities. Properly official.

She grabbed it and turned back. He stood there as if expecting a tip. She shut the door.

Her mother! The Letter! Her ailing mother. How long she has been worrying about this promised letter. Her estranged mother’s demise. Little has insisted her mother address everything to their PO Box.

But no letter arrived.

Yet here it is, grubby from the street box – they might never have found it. They might not. She keeps repeating this nonsense to herself.

Except it is not from her mother at all. She re-reads it yet again. It is from the family solicitor in Adelaide announcing that Little’s presence is required for a reading, not of the will but of what he as executor regards as the terms and conditions of it, a preparation for such a moment as, and when, her mother either requires more serious medical care, or passes on.

What strange wording. And then… a discussion to consider the interests of the various parties involved. It will require a solicitor of Little’s choosing in Melbourne for the Adelaide solicitor to communicate the details through.

Now Little can hardly think. She bites the fingernail of her favoured typing finger and looks over at Big as if to delay the words of death and loss and the ever-rising thought of money. No, she shoudn’t, but there it is…

Big is sitting on the edge of his bed, holding his pate with both hands as if showing it to her. The palms are flat on each side of his baldness like a ten-tasselled cap. His shoulders hunch, he grimaces and his face stays squinty and peculiar as he squeezes out the words. Little looks at him and just thinks about his huge oddness.

He is slumped like a big fat toad.

Which reminds her of her mother, so old and unwell, yes, but how unwell? Is it really time to consider the death of the mother before she has died? And her off-putting hints of money. Is it just a cruel tease? Mothers do not feature in Little’s or Big’s lives. Big had confounded utterly his very own mother years earlier when he said he was not going to live in the real world in a suit and a tie but waddle down easy-street in a dress and small heels. Green preferably.

In truth it has always shocked Little to think of the physical stuff, such as small Mother-Big giving birth to Big and then swaddling him and feeding him from the breast and sending him off to school. Long ago Little, long ago after putting it off and pretending otherwise concerning her life and loves, introduced Big to her own mother. While the mother’s social standing stood and ran from the room Big stayed put and Little insisted she too was no longer living in the land of the real.

It has taken them two days to ask the caretaker person and carefully inquire among the other men, who may or may not be reliable but who always have an opinion. Tom being the likeliest when it comes to opinions. He suggested Legal Aid was their man or woman. Free more or less, cheap certainly, for those on pensions, of limited means. He has heard about it down at the local soup kitchen, some blokes there have been to Legal Aid and swear by it. Little wanted to think about it and put off calling for a few more days until she got used to the idea, her nerve coming and going like an attack of indigestion. But they did, they found the Legal Aid person’s number by walking up to the community centre with Tom. Using a telephone is not easy for a nervous Little, yet the worry made her make herself do this. She rang to contact a Mr de Silva, Lawyer, and Mr de Silva’s secretary suggested they make an appointment immediately.

Little manages two fingers in the great tradition of hopeless typists and slowly puts together the sentences acknowledging receipt of the letter, comprehension of the contents of, and arrangement to meet the Legal Aid solicitor and could they please send the legal information to that address, i.e. care of Mr de Silva, LLB. Done! She feels a rush of pride, or panic – she has done it after all, this wordy formal thing.

They mark the day of this leter to the solicitor on their other­wise pristine calendar. She tells Big it is a bit sad – to have only this one mark on its bare days. Even if it is a very neat Little mark. There is something intimate about calendars. Rendezvous. Assign­ations. Other people can stand in front of the month and read the ink and lettering of these hidden meanings and wonder at them and their hearts open but the brain stays closed, it is almost religious and afterwards they remember nothing. Intimate, but ephemeral.

Revelations, thinks Big, lying back on his bed. And to think there is money in it for the two of them. The meeting that is the gathering to divide the crusts, the who and why questions over Little’s mum’s house.

So they decide to mark the day that is today, too, and appraise the gap… And wait to hear when the day of the appointment must be, to connect this day to that day. Equals a proper job done. The hanging of the calendar.

And both their birthdays while they’re at it. And hey… they’ll think of other days tomorrow.

On their next trip they visit the library. For the computers. Little loves to skydive in GoogleEarth, she loves the way she can type in a city or a valley and then hurl herself down from such crazy heights through the darkness into suddenly coloured streets and treetops. Bungy jumping into GoogleEarth, it is her sex and her drama and her self-annihilation in one hit, better than anything real. She does it again and again. Pixel-jumping. Setting it up, feeling in her stomach the map veer from one side of the world to lumpy bumpy Australia and then hovering over Melbourne, then plunge. The intoxicating plunge.

It is the pleasurable other-side of her encounters just outside the morgue, the ex-morgue, when or if they walk that way up to the shops. There she has to stop and stare at them. The airy things. Not a plunge so much as a fall.

Big beside her. Big does not admit of the supernatural. Tom of course is beholden to historical ghosts only. Big thinks Jesus is the biggest boogey of them all. No, when Little stops at the end of the shadowy street it is not exactly pleasurable, but she must pay them her moment of respect. Life and death is a worry out on the real streets.

Big waits. Whatever Big thinks he tends to say aloud, and what he said when they saw once the the house-for-sale sign on that street of Little’s ghosts, Rue de la the Morgue, Big said to the house inspection crowd. There was a famous actress in the crowd. He said the adjoining house was once the city morgue. In the 1880s.

He said it to the famous Melbourne actress with the famously gaunt face frozen now, after years of smiling at her cosmetic surgeon, into smiling. Her surgeon must have had a sharp sense of humour. The strain of making her lips steady and straight added a peculiar gravity to her appearance, so the public, who loved her, their favourite famous actress, thought her especially moving. Gravitas.

To return. They must find the said solicitor. GoogleplainoldMaps. The address, the tram route. Little can do this kind of thing by herself, so Big stumps across to the small chairs at the newspaper table, thinking if it is not a children’s library why are the chairs so bloody small? He occupies himself with the news.

Just for now she sits there breathing. Her body is not so good today. Kidneys and other things and this secret list from medications taken some time ago thank God when. When. She hides it away all the time certain it and it and all the its are standing out on her skin like blisters, saying look see yeah yeah her, this one is really and truly loopy not merely lupy, and still breathing. Sometimes she thinks the Google falling stands in for all the other things in danger of jumping out, shouting and plunging, the slurring in her mind no longer her speech, here where every second boarder slurs from something.

Where Big is her rock her mountain her madwoman.

Occupants of their rooming house are familiar with Legal Aid. They have been much in need of it. As well as legal matters of far more intimate nature. Their bodies and souls. Some have been criminals once, maybe still are – or compromised in ways we don’t mention. Innocent, of course, just caught up in the moment. Got involved with a bad crowd.

They get pissed on remarkably few stubbies and one whines about the ways X bashed him, well, not X but X’s side-men, some of whom are hardly shaving yet but hard, fucking hard all the same, nasty little fuckers, who kicked his ribs in for what, for nothun, just maybe lettun on some trick to someone whose business it wasn’t. Spare ribs and anger and no joy in that, not when you’re down on the cobbles, your cheekbones raw from footwear and grit, nothing to see when you’re looking into the dirt.

One whiner had teased Little about her own whingeing when Little was silly enough to think he’d listen, silly enough to think anyone down listens to someone else who is down, with good cause, even better cause to be down, but he took the piss.

Then down he went, again, because word got out and in no time Big pushed him harder than expected against the solid wall of the corridor and the guy fell again, ah, down into déjà vu on the floor. There in the grit one sees nothing. Big is not a violent man, he may look like Obelix but he never hits anyone, that would frighten him.

Big never hits and he never says fuck. One word you will never hear me use, he says, is fuck.

He can look like Obelix and he manhandles people on a supply and demand call, but he never punches them. He never says fuck to them. Big lifted this guy, became impassioned and thus impatient and simply lost the will to hold him up. The man fell, like the junkie guy who stole the jam fell.

Little felt pleased then felt weak for complaining and for her lack of understanding. It was her fault that the man got silly and mocked her, and was thumped for it. Then she guiltily enjoyed her first-ever experience of cruelty. Thanks to her Big. A gloating, sort of. And breathing.

Little had been so habitually nervous as a child she thought it would be bold beyond measure to one day work in a shop. Behind the counter! Maybe sell batteries or paper or… at the end of the day sweep the floors and feel grownup. At school she was incapable of staying in the room mentally. A daydreamer. Teachers were always calling her back but why return when there was always a Question waiting there? Questions were like the side-men the whinger was scared of, standing there on her return and ready to get her. Guard dogs, teeth, and not kicked ribs but failure to answer with the answer they insisted on asking her for…

If only, while away, some power informed her of the words needed, of the knowledge required, to show them she knew. But nothing ever came back with her… Reading was better, she could read alone and she passed exams and tests, and best of all she wrote strange stories the teachers always said showed ‘imagination’, but even she could tell the teachers were too silent just before, and especially just after uttering this, their single word, of praise.

The shop assistant ambition, though, wearing make-up and being looked at by men, now that was intoxicating, to think anyone would, but men did look at shop girls. Men had different expressions for shop girls.

Little knew she wasn’t bad looking, in her mousy kind of way, but with a faded blue dress and her black hair (which she kept near her face) and lipstick, her one device her one trick, they would lick their lips, and these husbands and young men and not the boys, would give her the secret look that men give shop girls.

It made her shake, down in the places she had become curious about, shake and feel this was real enough to stay in the room for.

Looks carry their own pain. In the rooming house it is even expected. Strangely, living among them, is a tall and very striking brunette. She is quite unfairly a ‘good looker’ who sometimes goes (commercially, she says) blonde, then black again, something to do with her ferocious moods and following depressions, but it must be said her funny and uplifting cheerfulness is everywhere in between. In the house of nicknames, they initially called her Pretty Woman. They are suprisingly interested in celebrity. They are also showing their age in this dated film-whore reference, and yet celebrity wins again. They settle on the actress: Julia.

No one can quite believe her. Advantage Julia.

Yes, and for all her seeming youth, at only 35 or so, still the smudge of hard-life has appeared at her eyes, and no tricks are going to re-train her forehead to live in Nicole-land, that blond who cannot (to quote Julia) act or do anything except con creepy but influential men into thinking she can. And that was something Julia should know about, more than a bit of that in the inner Julia, and inner being the place, she once hinted, nudge nudge, for sealing such deals.

Listen mate, she once said to Little, being blokey-girlie, I’ve tried everything and believe me there’s not much about blokes I don’t know.

When she says mate it doesn’t sound like the more usual ma-a-ate, the ingratiating kind of mate, the special pleading. Like the mate men use in this house. Her mate, even when she is down, is crazier.

Of course when she is down she tells them things she really shouldn’t. Here it hardly matters and she seems to find relief in this, her unlikely talking cure. The men are half in love with her, she is their light and dark together, she is their free upper. If her beauty is beyond their experience, her sorrows are all too familiar. She is a torch-song in a club of lined faces.

She never confesses to Tom. Never, not likely. They are opposites and only she truly understands how. He is a sinner who pretends to Jesus. She sins and enjoys it. She said to him once: come-on Tommy, I’ll give you a blowjob. His body shook like malaria as it retreated.

Tom the born-again. Tall, long-lank Tom. Stooping, sancti­monious, in his long grey hair and bearded like Jesus, Tom, wearing glasses and being too unexpectedly a bloody know-all for a down-and-out world. No sex. He is cheery though. Not just about Jesus, which would be bad enough. No, he is a cheery expert on every­thing, staring right past your face or over the top of your head as Big does, so alike in this, all grinning joviality, talking and some­times shouting as the expert on everything, roses even. It wears you out, this kind of cheery. There must be something serious behind it.

He is thin to Big’s thick, lacking Big’s charm in skirts, and handbags, and erudition of a more scientific kind. Tom is more a hat and T-shirt all-year-round man; he is the ears on the street, he can tell you the history, who lived where and the buried bodies stuff, but even he likes to do the small goss too. Amost feminine in this, if not in couture. He leans into a story. His skin too is feminine, he is glabrous on arms and legs and he is roly-poly on the face. Oddly enough, his face shines like silk with shaven and shaven-again cleanliness-close-to-Godliness in discrete areas above his unshaven Jesus-ness.

Especially when he tells them yet-again how he is a born-again. Yes, and that he used to… he is quite precise about this and will happily repeat it, too happily perhaps… he used to bugger boys. Drink himself into the gutter and pull the pants down of any lad he could get his hands on – and with his long arms he had quite a reach.

It made him a real threat in the Scouts and boys clubs, years ago when they had such things, and then, THEN, he was dragged along to an evangelical football-ground shindig with the great Billy Graham, shiny-skinned son of Jesus, and he heard the Old and New Testament.

He heard the Trumpet.

No joking no joshing, no he heard the big fanfare of his sins and the even bigger volleys of Jesus. No one in his past life could believe it when he stood up and walked in his lucid daze down to the yankee dramatist for God and gave up his booze and the soft bottoms of boys for the Almighty. Ah yes the Everlasting.

Never touched either of his indulgences again. Now he is pure-of-heart but a bloody know-all and a smiling but unfunny nuisance and a smug as all get-out Jesus-freak. He is without double-thought, he is not one to laugh at a joke unless he knows it is a joke, and what he knows is more usually the goss and the gladness.

There is a little blue For Sale sign on the house next door. It can’t be helped, when Sammy or Tourie start yelling, or when some of the dreary drunks shout and fight or when crack-heads kick doors, or someone comes into the building without a name or visa and moves out backwards as the Sheriff advances down the corridor towards and then through them. Neighbours don’t stay long.

This particular neighbour is two parts retired. Having cursed the halfwayhousers as ruffians and drunks and the like, on another day he’s as friendly as fat, talking about their pomegranate tree, and the grey-water possibilities with Tom. Tom knows a lot from Jesus but the neighbours are more forthcoming.

How’s it going Tom? the man from next door asks, staring retirement in the eye and Tom in the stoop. Tom is on about bloody police tardiness and the drug dealer sleeping at the back of the house, junkies arriving all night shouting and shaking. Not a good morning for Tom.

With little choice once Tom has begun, the neighbour knows to interrupt, telling Tom they have, himself and Mrs etc, for several months now been imagining a small comfortable house nearer the water and further from neighbours. Country town with river or lake or ocean close to the skin, in the morning a seawind bracing and noisy in the ears, in the cold seasons a buffeting wind against your chest. And so they found one. City real estate is burgeoning.

Still, money before madness. The agent reckons their house will sell for way more than they imagined six months ago. It’s intoxicating to think of it.

He looks at Tom for as long as he risks a silence.

Sea change…! Tom has barely begun.

Sort of, sort of. There is a… problem.

Ah!

The agent is worrying how to clear the um let’s be frank, Tom, off-putting sight of some of the men. Not your good self, Tom, but some of the… others.

Ah! Pack off the riff raff during the auction! I’m with you.

Days of inspection, you know, and the big day itself – of serious bidding.

I’ll sort em out, Tom grins. No worries, mate. He is booming, and assuring: I’ll sort em. You’re talking about money.

The retired look in the neighbour’s eye is as trusting as it’s possible to be under the circumstances. He laughs and goes back inside. What else can he hope for?

And for all this, Tom still wears his hair long and lank. It hangs like the soft tree in the neighbour’s front yard.

Being a man of his word as well as God’s word, he tells the house-lot something along the lines of next-door’s auction. He is naive enough to think they’ll do as suggested and not stand on rude display. No one can think that far ahead.

Just keep a low profile can you, fellas? We owe it to the vendors.

The what?

The bloody vendors, our neighbours who are selling and who want the best price. Think how much money they’ll lose if you berks stand outside looking like the neighbours from hell.

The entire idea of money is not something they think about long-term. They are the house of short-term. Money calls out like a sad person. They know this. Like a left-hand thread in a right-hand world, like a desolate Tourettie in the street when the good­will has flown and fuck and shit words go round and round in their pain.

Money. In the rooming house money is a stranger. Pay them off and consider it well spent, it could save tens of bloody thousands. Tom heard the sound of money first. Never one to be left out of the loop, out of the loop (he liked the sound of it).

When Tom had moved in, arrived, as he thought of it, vaguely Biblical, vaguely special, he walked slowly up their side of the street tapping each gateway and front fence of each house and each block of flats, slowly tap tap stop tap tap stop (for the sound of it). Until he knew everything was in order. That the neighbours houses were properly numerical.

And the neighbours knew here was another nutter.

So Tom sounds sane and prays sane but he is not sane at all.

He insists the boarders know all the details of the street-goss and house-sales he can wring from the neighbourhood. If they miss or forgot it themselves it hardly matters because he will tell them again the next day and the next. You get the picture. Until he has new news Tom keeps telling the old.

Money in hand, he says. It’s what any re-tired people need, and I mean tired, have you looked at them, they make me look like a young lad all daydreams and getupandgo. Nah, I’ve talked to them. They’re going off to die on the coast or the countryside.

They’re not elephants, mate, says The Sheriff.

No, I mean it. Not the best way of putting it perhaps but there you can’t have any worries if you’ve got a bit a land in a quiet spot on the edge of town down south somewhere. Like a bit myself. Prices haven’t gone up in rural places like they have here.

Their neighbours are good and tolerant people who have run dry.

During this next door talk Big and Little have been quiet. They have been quiet because they hold in their odd hearts a strange waiting, or is it a fear, held down and sat on? Sharing the sale of Little’s mother’s old house in an expensive Adelaide suburb. Sharing with her mother’s sisters, or being left the house outright. Her mother has hinted at outright but also that her sisters, the Ugly Sisters as she calls them, are bitter about that. They want the house and its up-market postcode. Admittedly, Mother Little drank champagne with the best of them when she could and smoked her reedy voice down to a baritone; she voted for the Coalition whenever called upon, even if she had forgotten why. Something about her sort should be in charge, that lawyers and smiling smarmy born-to-rule faces, were the barrier between herself and the sheer stupidity of the mob. Which too many Australians fall back on.

So talk of money is exotic. Erotic. Even sad. Like talking of holidays. Holidays! This lot don’t have them. Money that is not debt money, as if the word meant your own free money, moneyinthebank and lucky and easy and a sufficiency of. Even if Little is also scared a little (Big says that is only appropriate). The Sheriff cannot fathom this fear, he’d like a fear of this sort himself. Nothin’ to it, he says, if you invest it briefly and inspect the market which is, and he even agrees with Tom on this, not very bloody illuminating at present.

As if he’d know.

Later that night Big is staring at the calendar with its big red ring around the date of the solicitor. And he says the unexpected.

I do hope, says Big, I do hope she means it, and dies soon. Better for everyone if she does. This time. All this waiting…

What are you talking about?

Waiting, for your mother to…

My mother!

It is nerve-wracking.

How dare he. It’s her mother he is talking about. But she leans over:

waiting for her to to d… to d… (Oh, Jesus, her old stutter).

Die?

Die.

Mens rea, says Big. A guilty mind. Hers. All the help your mother couldn’t be bothered giving when you needed it won’t allay the guilt of having her dosh. Her house. Well, she isn’t eating is she, it’s not hospital cuisine that’s holding her back. Bloody-minded delay is what it is. Trust her to. Still, quite understandable.

It is the look on his face. His cheeks are puffy, owly, unshaven, nothing unusual there, no, it is the frown of wanting it done. Wanting it over. She is really worried now.

Anyone would think he knows first-hand the kind of sorrow in the body this is.

Perhaps he does.

In his own way.