conversation with a man in a checkered shirt.
He ambles closer as if wanting to stride but worried it will look like the striding male returns. She is smoking a cigarette.
You smoke? he says,
No, I don’t.
She looks at him.
I just borrowed one from a bloke over there. She smiles and shows her hands, palms up, as if to indicate she is not concealing anything, cigarettes included. She’s catching something in him. She is the hook and the fish of him is dragging. Old river cod. Perhaps it is nothing more than the awareness of her tight-fitting singlet. Opening his sometimes dour brain. Her singlet and the slim, neat shape of her words keep surprising him. Is he so obvious?
The other man smiles at Angus and says nothing. Then changes his mind and thrusts out his hand.
Mike, he announces.
Angus does the usual.
No, it is her voice. It is deep and confident and comes directly towards him like openness or friendship. Now she returns to telling him how her work involves teaching semiotics to dazed undergraduates and writing her own research on the languages and meaning, in other words, the way she can read public spaces (she reads public spaces?). In her lectures she uses the ideas of semiotic theorists but references her own hands-on research as often as possible. Anecdotally, that is.
She says all this to Angus, as if the other guy, Mike in the check shirt, isn’t there, and soon enough he isn’t.
They understand you? asks Angus.
I could throw boiled crayfish at them and they wouldn’t know the difference, she says. It’s like all teaching and learning – some of them understand.
She drops her cigarette and grinds it, twice, in the dirt. In this loaded fire-world and atmosphere it seems an odd thing to do. She bends and picks it up, looking around for something. Proof she isn’t a smoker.
Do you know Stan from long ago or more recently? he asks.
Um, I met him through Susan, a Uni friend of mine who lives in the foot-hills not far from here. I say she is half city, half hilly. On the border. Being a literary person, she says she is marginalia.
She sounds like jam.
She left before you arrived and I am just about to go, too.
Oh. Hang on. You can’t go now. Tell me about this lecturing stuff you do. I’ve hardly ever spoken in public, or in front of a crowded room. They say it’s way up on the stress-list, one of the things people most fear doing. People crap themselves over it.
Not me, mate.
No?
Never! As soon as I get started… and that’s the hard bit… I love it. No, my big problem is stopping. When the hour is up and the next lecturer is scowling at me from the doorway!
I bet you smile sweetly and have the last word – or sentence.
Angus feels a pleasure quite free of the regret each over-zealous response brings on when a man is trying too hard to impress, to see which words might work. He imagines sitting in her lectures, eyes closed, listening as she speaks with such deep pleasure about… crayfish? He has always imagined female academics as a very indoor species dressed in men’s shirts, and with buttons. He hates buttons.
Are you following any of this? She is staring at him, a frown just about tangling in her hair.
I am, I’m in there with you and the students and the crayfish and… your… forthcoming book?
She grins. Looks down at the ridiculous cigarette butt.
Yeah, my book. Some people think were are all nerdy, if not nutty. You know, I heard a nervous first-time lecturer refer to himself as part of acadamia.
So, nutty then?
When she laughs he feels her energy swoosh towards him. Nothing buttoned about her.
While she is not pretty, striking perhaps, strong he thinks again, it is her voice that keeps surprising him. Regardless of his gabbling (whenever it is his turn for gabbling) he wants to stay silent. Silent, as many of his days are, working alone, outside.
He confesses that he knows nothing whatsoever about pedagogy and what was it, poetics? and the ways texts, as she called them, made meaning? None of it. And reading public design? It made sense not as a text but as a tactic. Of? Semiotics?
Well, of course you won’t know about such things, she replies, and gently claps her hands. I wouldn’t expect you to.
He is taken aback. What has she clapped for?
Even she can’t tell anymore. She had begun her study in diagnostics, she tells him, in medical science, and how symptoms operate as a language… and the odd vice versa effect of this… but then she sort of sidestepped into signs more generally, just plain old semiology.
You went from the inside to the outside, he suggests.
She hadn’t thought of it like that.
Just don’t say anything about anything not being rocket science, he adds. Or hipsters.
Hipsters! We have lots of them.
Then she laughs unexpectedly, knocks her dark glasses up and the wings tangle in her hair. His grin turns practical and he reaches forward, standing close in front of her, and carefully disentangles a slim metal wing and its sharp hinge from her brown hair. Taking longer, it seems to them both, than is strictly necessary.
Stay for a while, he says.
The hills are turning lyrical, she thinks, more pastoral poetry than romantic. More Czerny than Beethoven. The wine is getting to her too. Susan’s place is close enough.
On the slope below them are fifteen or so vehicles, more than the usual proportion of 4WDs, and all of them silver except for one red, one black.
Which is your vehicle? she asks Angus, gesturing to the line-up.
The silver one.
Ha ha. Mine is the silver one.
Alright, then. The red one. Actually, mine is the red one.
Behind her in its metal frames the house sits there like a lift destined for the upper air, a box built into the side of a valley facing east, so the late light shines through the re-growing eucalypts and bleached grasses and into the dark native scrub roughening the valley opposite.
Angus!
They look up to see Stan leaning over the verandah with a glass in his hand. He grins as if pleased beyond measure and raises his glass in salute. Angus responds with the same.
Jasmin! This time Stan ruts up against the verandah railing and laughs again before turning away and disappearing.
Is he always like that?
Oh yes.
Stan,
