no thanks, Stan, not tonight. Got some washing to do. Embarrassed for him this time.
My beautiful genes?
Naff off, she does say, they get it from their mother.
If you change your mind, Jasmin, adds Stan, I mean, there’s more where they came from.
And he even grabs his crotch. At least it isn’t hers.
Jasmin.
Angus nods his head to indicate she move away with him. After a pause, she does. They walk downstairs again, into the quiet, where Angus immediately apologises, obviously annoyed.
Bloody Stan, he grunts.
She says she is leaving anyway, not to worry about it. She has become used to men who don’t do sexual and sexist humour, men who changed their ways years earlier, or had never learnt. It is odd to encounter it again.
Angus has grabbed a torch as they leave but instead of walking down to the cars he veers around to the back of the house.
Um, Angus? My car’s this way…
I want to show you something.
Come on Angus. No, you’ve been talking about it all afternoon.
Not… everything.
Perhaps he is going to smooch. He guides her briskly almost pushing her outside then unexpectedly around to the back of the house.
There’s a thump from inside the house, a toilet flushing. When he turns to the house he points above them.
Because the house is darker we cut three skylights into the roof, see, there and there. Nice, aren’t they?
At night she can see three glows on the roof, as if each bleb of glass had dropped intact from his finger-tips, and one over by the flue stack, where they constructed fitted lids which can be closed like the large shutters, and swung open again, manually in case of power outages, from the glass windows on the east side of the house and verandah.
Thank you again, Angus. Have I missed anything?
For a while longer than is comfortable he stands frowning.
Well, never mind, he says. We can go inside now. No, you’re leaving aren’t you? I should leave too.
She puts her hand on his forearm.
Forget I said that.
They must been looking at each other for too long. It is more complex than hugs and silly music. In her mind it is wonderfully silly music.
Maybe you could go into business with this house design, she suggests. Patent your designs and get them through as government regulations. That might make another line of profession.
Nah, I could, I could. However… there are serious risks.
Financially?
Yeah, sure. The money side of it. Very. But I was really thinking about…
The designs?
People always argue about new initiatives, and danger, but we reckon this house is unique, and some locals have looked at it and agreed and we’ve let them copy it. So the risk… is their own.
Angus, you have to be more savvy. You lost a house and this is what you’ve gained. Sell it. The design, I mean.
I dunno why, you know, but I can’t.
She has no idea where this will lead, as he continues:
People say things like that, that after someone’s died, oh if they fix up the road, or the crossing, or the laws, then their death will have meant something…
I don’t follow. Are you saying the design…?
I’m saying it doesn’t make a death worthwhile. An essential improvement after a disaster means something, of course. I suppose… what I’m trying… it sounds like the thing you say if you want to say something deep. It ends up on the TV news, it just trivialises the death, or whatever the loss was. There are some very bad places for cliché.
He turns around and rubs the blackened edges of the house:
This house has real meaning, a serious design based on traumatic experience. Nothing less. And so, the cliche may even be true.
That’s because you earned it. The truth of it. You put your mind to the problem and here’s the result. You turned the cliché back into a truth again.
Suddenly his face seems lighter.
I couldn’t have said that, he adds.
Ah, but you made it. I’m just an academic so I can describe it.
It makes her smile, a kind of oddly skewed understanding going on.
No wonder he feels lightheaded. Then he stops and thinks about it, looks up into the canopy of trees on the eastern side of the road. But I am, he says, changing. I’ve lived out here but I work in the city. I thought I couldn’t live in town again. Now I think it’s about time to move, to see Melbourne close up. I’ve earned it the hard way, but still…
Still…?
Earned it. As you said.
Suddenly it seems the table of good tidings must lighten a little.
They hug each other and kiss goodbye, full lips kissing and arms around each other. Neither lets go. What a night. Maybe the emotions and even grief have effected her emotionally, even (could it be?) carnally. Jasmin is certain she can smell smoke all over him. Smoke in his hair and on his collar and smoky sensual heat rising from his throat and neck. She offers her lips for one last kiss, and then holds onto him for a few more moments. He is smoky and leonine. And silent. They are both tall and they stand like trees moved together by wind.
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
