door smoking his hourly cigarette comes close to a counterforce. Good on him for being there, their self-appointed sheriff. There is something hard about him. Pentridge most likely.
The Sheriff looks at the world like this:
Two types I can’t take. Good lookers and these skinny friggin emos. Good lookers need the paint knocked off ‘em, he says. As for those wussy little emos… if they get on the wrong side of me I’ll turn ‘em into organ donors.
Probably, he hasn’t, but plainly he would like to. You do not argue with The Sheriff. You can see he is just waiting for it. Short, shaved hair rising (just) on the sides, his head is a bollard, and his face is tanned from real sunlight, and the muscles all over him are stringier now than years before. Stringier. A handsome but hard face, or scary but fair is perhaps the better way of putting it.
Down in the shade behind him are the winos and junkies, the addicts, active or inactive, the so-called personality disorders, the divorced who were never truly married, the dispossessed who were never in possession, and others who are lost from the sane or the compulsory world, the compulsory, not cheaty or loser-ish, though liver-ish, and sad. Sometimes there’s an overdose of something chemical, which might be existential or in injectable form. Mostly they come and go. The building is dug in below ground level, its basement a descending layer of single rooms, and down there, more than merely lost, are the very lost. They have given up waiting.
Like young Mister Tourette’s among them, who crashes on a filthy mattress in a back room most nights, wakes at uncertain times on uncertain nights, and stumbles out to the street with werewolfishness shouting out of him fucken fucken and cunt and fucken cunts and fucken shits shits arse fuck. The fouler words they are the more his mouth likes them. Out on the median strip under trees and streetlights glowing orange, his poor nervous system is given a volume lost and found in amplification, from hissing to outright barking. It washes his mouth in a gasm of swearing.
It is not romantic. The neighbours if not understanding are at least tolerant and in saying nothing are speaking volumes for his poor buggeration. Tourie, the inmates call him.
Tourie come inside!
In front of the television something quietens the axons and neurons, and his poor, clichéd synapses from going like the clichéd cicadas out there in Australian poetry…
At the rooming house they come and go. Someone called it the House of Broken Teeth. A weird family. Happy family, it’s hard to say, as they often don’t know each other. Stayers cop a nick-name, like St Thomas and The Sheriff and, of course, Big & Little. And poor Sammy who is dim, no meat in his sandwich, and all the others you read about. Some like extras from Awakenings, slumped in the catatonia of encephalitus lethargica, starting up only when the St Vinnies chicks arive with warm food and thermoses and ooo arrhh their very happy bodies. Otherwise, this village of theirs inside its four walls moves unexpectedly. Even the walls move: people kick them when they are dazed, insane, drunk, angry.
The kickers have ailments usually. Like Little. Her connective tissue, her unhappy joints. Sometimes she needs crutches to walk, but for now she is a limper. Little and her kidneys, says Big. Fatigue and pain and sometimes a fluffy butterfly rash across the bridge of her nose. Her wolf visitor, the lupine rash she tries to cover with makeup when she’s outside.
Big considered calling her Wolfie, as in canus lupus – but she’s no Wolfie. Big is the one with hairs in his nose and expressive ears. He trims them in the tiny magnifying mirror he has positioned as close as possible to the low sunlight the window allows into their room. Wolfie – he likes it, it is affectionate and… But when he mentioned lupins, her little leguminous kidneys podded quietly inside her, it seemed organically and affectionately right. He’s funny and he’s a diabetic and sometimes he hears voices saying big, unhappy trannie and too dumb even for insulin. No, he isn’t a trannie, but he is Type 2.
Diabetes may make a married couple of us, Big suddenly says. And you know what I think of the perilous contrivance of marriage, let alone dialysis machinery, hospital beds, boiled cabbage, nutrition in general. I shall have to take evasive action, lose weight, join the gym and make a spectacle of myself.
She knows Big had a wife and even a son years ago. How his physical, if not financial absence from family, while working and boozing around the sheep country from shed to shed, led to a slowing of the financials. That and the cards, poker, rendered him absent on both counts. His compulsion to skirts was never in the closet, though in those years mostly happened behind the counter, in the kitchens and under the aprons, on the canteens or messes, and no-one cared as long as he was clothed and kept cooking.
None of this is the worst of his memories, the divorce having that position. And the cards. Poor health being what it is, and some degree of fault, but family was its own dark achievement. He joined the many who see too late the child going silent and feeling hurt and changing from sunny to sullen, as the wife rightly stops the lies and lets the truth happen, like a great hose. Only later does anyone realise it’s not the adult but the children they married and who needed honouring, the children who at birth took vows to be loved and be held, and when the father breaks those vows enough for divorce, fathers are perhaps forever outside the vows that deep within them were all the truth they needed. But couldn’t keep. Lost.
Big does not talk about this except on binge nights. His uppermost turns upside-down and secrets collect in his eyes and spill down his cheeks. His cheeks tell the truth, they are wet. He has Little. He has no Jesus figures or icons for his failure and his guilt, he has the one person he has met who wants to forgive him with little noises and small steps forwards and breathing the same air day and night.
The fact was, he told her, he couldn’t work in the city or even in a town, cooking at a hotel, say, and sit down every night with a wife and house and a threesome as she wanted, of children, let alone a brace of kids on a scale of taller to shorter like the old 50s photos or like those ducks on the wall. Those sickly ducks! He is happy now being half of this binary of Big and Little.
He is happy to be Big not because he is especially or uniquely big, or that she is ditto little, but that beside her he is ‘Big’ and beside him she is ‘Little’.
Who could have guessed, among the marriage counsellors and dating services, such a sensible if eccentric accommodation? The lonely meet sometimes; compatibility is indeed a strange thing.
He is her Big but he annoys her sometimes. The way he goes on about things, just now about those running-on-the-spot stamping-at-standstill machines. Being gawked at. Head sweatbands. That gym near the IGA playing doof-beat or almost as bad – ballet music. He wails:
Tchaikovsky in lycra and bloody headbands!
They don’t, she says curtly, wear headbands.
He pauses to study her. Then continues: Always was a soppy composer, that bloody Tchaikovsky. Worst of the Romantics, swooning, self-pitying sop-opera and no soul…!
She can’t help sighing. For, loudly, tired of him, his talking.
Outside, the day is pomegranates, lemons, apricots. Leaf and green lifting to the sun. Another day. Sammy emerges from the side alley with a bucket of water and pours it in equal division between these trees. Now here is a simple sum that school gave him strife over, when all it needed was summer, trees, water in a bucket – and the idea of thirds is solved.
In the lounge-room watching TV one night among the many gathered there, the semi-fallen and the semi-risen, Sammy announced: my IQ is really low, that’s what they told me at the centre and they’re prob’ly right. But I’m OK with cars.
It was during
