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
