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.
Jasmin
She and another lecturer are running through their course introduction for their first year classes. Both are dressed in black, as they must. She explains to the students that while some fields of study are hardly esoteric, the general public (this term meaning nothing sensible) hasn’t heard of them. Their own, for instance.
The faces this early in the year are facing the front. Two women taking turns to speak with energy and conviction. All these eager faces. She knows how quickly this will change.
Simply never spoken of. Not even given a populist treatment like Alain de Botton’s choir-boy philosophy. Baldy Baton, or whatever his name is, passing on the ideas of others. (A few nervous chuckles.) Yet Jasmin feels everyone is capable, if they only think about it, of understanding the various layers of semiotics she and Jill are about to springload this course with.
They show just how applicable the ideas are. How everyone is ‘reading’ signs and symbols every day, in books and TV programmes, on blogs and Facebook, in the works of genre in film and entertainment, popular culture, everywhere. How celebrity ‘icons’ like Beyoncé or Miley Cyrus – through their constant PR stunts – are providing signs we the public, but especially the fans, are reading all the time. That is, we are doing it whether we know it or not.
What is a man who wears a turban? Well, perhaps he’s a Sikh and thus the slippage when a Sikh is attacked and bashed in a northern suburb because he is a ‘terrorist’. Meaning Arab/Moslem/Al-Qaeda/etc etc.Words and their thrown-down relationships to things, to meanings, the patterns of judgment, and reaction, hatred even. The students are dazzled and worried. They applaud because they know it’s a great performance and don’t know you don’t applaud at University.
After the lecture she leads Jill back to her office. The trick is to say as much as possible in the lecture then clear out fast. First lecture especially. Further questions can be asked in the tutorials. Otherwise some sticky students rush to the front and do not detach easily. Some people will not take a hint.
I think that went pretty well, Jill announces, easing herself into the chair on the student side of the main desk. She is Jasmin’s new PhD post grad, already lecturing and tutoring since the year before when she was rounding off her Masters. Jasmin opens a cupboard behind her desk and pulls out a bottle of whiskey.
This is called Starward, she says, reading the label then turning it to Jill. It’s distilled in Essendon.
Essendon, you’re joking? A single malt?
They look at each other, then at the bottle. Jasmin laughs.
It sounds crazy, I know, but it’s not bad. In fact it’s better than not bad.
Good enough for a minor celebration, she adds, as Jill’s eyes widen. But I’ll have to nick some of that ice I saw in the staff fridge. Just a bit.
She walks outside and after looking along both reaches of the corridor she sneaks into the tiny staff room where a fridge and kettle are set up.
When she comes back she closes her office door.
Don’t want anyone watching this, she grins, not at 11.30. My expert status will be shot and I don’t want that.
Expert?
As an academic she gives public talks whenever the suggestion comes up. She loves being part of the University’s ‘Expert on call’ campaign, not because the Uni is flogging its staff as a community resource, which it is, but from a desire to make her field more widely understood. This term ‘expert’ loaded with University authority and male power now also means flunky (no public capital letter) of the Institution, and this duty is obligatory.
Give me a break! she explains to Jill… I tell them what I have is expertise. As for what I am…? Jesus, who knows what I am?
She pours them both a shot and then takes a sip.
Of course, one of my male colleagues told me not to rock the boat. They always say that.
And what did you say?
I said I’m not in the bloody boat.
Jasmin invites herself around beside Jill and pulls up a second chair to consult the pages of notes her thesis might pursue.
They talk for half an hour and Jasmin swings her arms about and points and laughs and cannot hold back one jot from her own field of mockery to the field of genuine objectivity. Already there is forming an idea she might put to Angus, the man of public spaces. The party gardener.
Jill’s new thesis isn’t formed fully and she needs a case study… As usual, Jasmin says too much, shoots off a monologue of opinion backed by theory which, in better balance, Jill should be discovering for herself. Even so, Jasmin will return to re-writing her first lecture – on football – within seconds of the student leaving and forget the content if not the context of what she has been saying.
Jasmin is overwhelming. She gets passionate. She is impossible, and impossibly generous; when so many academics guard their thoughts, she supervises like an open aorta.
When she closes her door after this session she stands there dumb with fecundity. Briefly. Jill, on the other side, stands in a daze stronger than anything brought on by single malt.
Then the door opens and Jasmin walks out, locks it and says:
I’m coming downstairs with you. She holds up a cigarette and lighter.
I didn’t know you smoked.
I don’t. Just feel like the occasional ciggie.
That night, as she watches the TV news, Jasmin is more subdued: no interaction for an interaction maniac means silence, even faintly calm. The 7.30 Report and some right-wing prick of a leader comes on to infuriate her again. And when water and land-use interviews begin and some patronising dill rants on… It all gets too much for her and the weather changes in a flash. Talk talk talk.
Stretched across her lap is her black Burmese, sleepy beyond purring. Moss. If she moves, Moss holds onto her with his claws extended, to let her know getting up isn’t allowed. Even her cat talks too much.
She is so thoroughly used to being alone now that Richard the partner (that dull word) has all but faded from the rooms. She has laboured
