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
