Waiting (11 page)

Your country boys don't wear skirts?

Only if you've been on the moonshine. Maybe he's a local bunyip, says Angus. In skirts. And don't laugh, I'm going to follow him. I'll explain when I get back.

The man is ahead of him by a few minutes yet hardly more than 50 metres away; Big, as we know, is a ponderous walker. He is a man who uses ambulatory as a personal adjective, not that anyone he says it to is likely to register. Angus has no trouble following him around the corner and then, at what seems to be the mid point of the uphill street, the man turns and enters a shabby, un-renovated terrace house.

In the garden, in the space where a lawn normally is, the ground has been cobbled over like a Melbourne gutter, and three rather derelict men are standing there smoking. They sway like shades from the Underworld and stare at Angus through the foliage of the pomegranate tree.

Like something Biblical.

By the time he returns the job is done: Jen has finished, so they pack their equipment alongside the heavy clumps of grass-and-root-sod in his ute and drive across town to the next job.

The freeway isn't busy and while they drive on the low side of the speed limit Angus explains the bit about his cousin. Their ute load is hardly stony but tussocks still retain a fair amount of damp soil and Jen tells him the back of the ute is sagging like a broad-hipped mama. The front wheels hang low in the suspension, the bonnet high, the steering dreamy.

Very convenient, if unplanned, then to transplant the bulky tussocks of disgraced grass into the slopes on the waterway along the sides of the redundant pond, as Jen calls it. Very neat. Nothing wasted. Very happy on the face of Angus. Redundant because his two-pond design features two flat, scooped-out surface shapes of water on the banks of the Yarra River in Ivanhoe. They are a stone's fetch from the river. Water above water. Even a joke: a clod job, so satisfying to dig (in, out and in again) at his own firm of contractors, the architects who know even less about plants than him, the plants he knew less about. Some jobs lose a lot of time and plants and when this happens something sags in Angus quite as much as the sullen plant beds and the dying plants. Mortal moments. They surprise him. He this work-hardened bob-cat of a man.

Nothing still alive is wasted, then, or lost, except the hard-to-estimate workday of their lives, and the skin from hands when they tired of wearing gloves. More Angus than Jen, this. They would never let her into straight bars if she had his hands. So, after the day's work moving grasses he looks down at his hands and wonders about his foolishness, or forgetfulness. Before he knew better – well into the unaware but active phase common to most young men – he had imagined his work-hardened hands were sexy, meaning manly. It was also manly to show them off. Not realising there were parts of a young woman both hidden and very hidden that did not appreciate the stone-rough touch of a monster, smile or no smile.

He mentions to Jen his desire to move house, suggesting he'd like to find something close-in. Not that he has seen Jasmin's house, or spent any time in the area. It's the fresh air, constantly re-newed from the south-west, and the elevation of the suburb above the bay in the distance. As for Jasmin, he wants to make himself go and grab her, but how? She seems to be interested in his work, now he has emailed her jpegs of the highlights, but…

Take her there, to the lakes, suggests Jen.

What for?

Show her what you do. Let her see it up close. Doesn't matter how much of an academic she is, if she gets the hots over wussy city squares and shopping malls the earthiness of your stuff will knock her socks off.

Or not. You reckon?

Angus, you're a dope. She'll love it. You have to take her out of her comfort zone. Warm her up with the others, then take it up a gear.

Do you know you talk in stock phrases?

Have you remembered you're shouting beer after work today? Mate, I guarantee a lakes trip will set you up with her. Yeah? And you'll owe me another beer after that.

The Lakes and the Bees

First off, Angus says he will show her the stone and cannon-ball terracing work he has just finished – the large river stones are called cannon-balls in the game – where the camera-lady with the Merc has taken him to the insurers after all and might just win a payout… Where his ideas and the vegetative edits are still showing. Then drive her further south to skim the ‘hips and ponds' (which are merely ponds) and the sensual contouring, and finally, picnic on his pride-of-all-jobs the landscaped Lakes and stones adjacent to the council's new offices.

Love to, Jasmin tells him, agreeing straight away. Why not take a packed-lunch (with wine, she thinks, and cold duck, that way she can have a duck, and a gander. She knows her humour is verbally correct if not exactly funny). She will bring her camera. Digital means foolproof.

So it hardly matters when Sunday turns out to be grey and casting no shadows, better perhaps for the objective recording of images. No rain is forecast. The air is quite still. She will think of it like Werribee on a warm day. The Sculpture Park not the Poo Farm.

While they drive to the first site he explains his work.

Hips and Ponds is Jen's nickname for the second site, and which she sometimes calls Tits and Ponds. That he named his stone and grassy water-garden The Lakes. His biggest and most ambitious work, it has been settling into itself nicely since he walked away and left its maintenance to the council. It is two years old now, was begun eight months overdue, handed over past completion date, and is somewhat flawed. I.e. his masterpiece. Cried over, a work of nights-of-cursing and bank-account-unbalancing costs, weathered by sunlight and storms and overgrown by everything he planted and much he didn't: which the wind and water carried in as natural invasion, the water and the rain and chance-effects making their own kind of natural-ness. Flawed? Yeah, by process. By vandals. By the shit-among-the-rocks-artists. Homeless occupants.

By real life, she says. Sad but true.

He shrugs a sad but true shrug. A ‘what can you do' shrug that might have been both palms uppermost if he wasn't driving.

There is no one home at the first site, no sign of the businessman who doesn't own anything, nor the neighbour who said exactly that and then called the lawyers. He reminds Jasmin – it was the story he recounted when she and Sue visited him. The crazy woman. They walk around the block. Jasmin looks a bit shocked to see the reality. There are times when Angus feels like the hapless character in European comedy films. He shifts back to basics: inspecting the terraces from below and then above and then by walking between them, a stone here and a stone there revealing scrapes and slight damage from the bobcat blade, the lawn and the grassy thatchwork still somewhat artificial. It takes time to settle.

The actual house is block cement and glass, high in resistance. Like a beachfront edifice.

It's aggressive and self-conscious, he thinks aloud, retrospectively shy. His stone as complement. But it's what he and the client wanted at the time. Like a teenager wearing clothes that are too obvious, which don't go together but fit in with some clichéd fashion.

It seems familiar enough to Jasmin:

Yes. A stony version of brutalism.

I could, she adds, do an academic riff and read your reading of your client, Mr Angus. It might sound a bit weirdy, mind you.

She is making him nervous.

You might find it interesting… Straight off, brutalism aside, I was joking there… the stones are like the old idea of castle, as in my home is, etc. Yes? So, stacked in two vertical walls, hardly much above ground level but visually suggesting height. Stone is solidity, money, state, authority, and permanence, of course. Which is ironic if as you say the bloke's here-today gone-tomorrow.

That's him. Cheap money.

Part of his act, of wealth, pretending to be big and staying put. These sorts of guys often don't. In Perth after the first mineral boom in the ‘70s had blown over, there were ostentatious mansions left empty along the prestige river frontages. Roman and Greek-style palaces and palisades, pink as kitsch. Empty.

Yeah. Awful bloody things. I saw the images of Alan Bond's place and…

The signs of Classicism are empty, she continues, then they're filled by the nouveau riche, then they're empty again – literally – so the sign of wealth is hollow, there's nothing behind it. Does this bloke even live here? The curtains are down, this dusty driveway.

Well, he's paid me. I haven't seen him since the job was half way done.

Maybe this one's empty too. Even when it's occupied. Once these round stones are lined up… she points along the walls… they look as if they can't roll away. They anchor themselves, and are grouped as equal… and I'd guess he doesn't believe in equality one bit. Stating the bleeding obvious, this guy is an egocentric show-off.

He is not asking her to stop, yet… this is becoming comic. She is head down like a dog, kicking up dirt behind her. All over him.

Seriously. It does sound weird.

Weird? She looks surprised, she has forgotten.

You see or think like this – all the time?

He wonders what she makes of him, what she has been seeing of him all along.

No, you silly bugger. She backhands his forearm. I can turn it on or off like a tap.

There's no avoiding the way she looks at him. He can't decide if she is a tease or quite mercurial.

A tease, then. He is admiring her full lips. Yes, he thinks, what would it be like to be intimate with this woman? What then? Though the psychology of this shift doesn't occur to him. She smiles a lot and her mouth widens but this is what it says:

OK, I admit there's a low level of analysis going on most of the time. I'm not beholden to it. It's a kind of meaning but I can see through it. It's a discipline not a dogma. Though it has a kind of analytical music I can hear even when it seems so descriptive it's forensic, or too serious. Like those TV shows. Dour.

He gets to thinking of cold-case TV shows and CSI and the gratuitous display of naked corpses made watchable and acceptable by the way-too-earnest forensics team. For seconds she says nothing and he stalls. Teams headed by a woman, he remembers. He con­siders this thought. He tells Jasmin he finds these programs hard to take seriously, which is the very thing they want of their audience.

You're right, which makes it ironic. Like this (waving towards the landscaping) – it's not about visual effect, it's the semiotics.

And aesthetics?

Oh, no. I'm not interested in aesthetics. That wobbly stuff.

But what you're saying is sounding a bit wobbly to me.

Don't knock it.

You said it might sound weird.

Angus turns away and starts walking back to the car, wishing he'd begun to move a little earlier. Her demonstration has confused him and he can't decide which one of them is dafter.

How do I know when you're serious or joking?

I beg your pardon?

She is serious this time. He says nothing. Then he says:

I beg your pardon?

He realises he is beginning to lose track of her unexpectedness.

She laughs, and instead of opening the passenger door, fumbles in her bag for her camera. With it in her left hand she drags her right fingers back through her hair, angling her face to the grey sky. Trying to relax.

You're smart, Angus. You've read your master's mind. As you should. Posturing. But really, your stonework makes his actual house look crude. Angus, that side garden… was it a later addition, not part of the original plan.

She takes several shots of the site. There has been no mention of the garden until now.

Yeah.

It was? I thought so. The garden is more you.

Angus finds her ambiguity after all, and doesn't know what to do with it. He stays standing beside her.

To show her more aesthetic side she leans in and nudges him, like a schoolgirl with her lad, then kisses him. He responds to her tenderness. Her actual kiss, though, is firm. Something from this gathers its unhappy feeling in him. Her role of judge?

She paces up towards the stones with her small digital camera and stops to frame shots of the landscaping. She is slow, particular, and with no role in this Angus begins worrying the woman from next door will appear and makes things unpleasant. His own fault. Jasmin is taking too long, fiddling around and searching for some­thing. Surely she is only recording the images not composing fine art photos. He is becoming slightly exasperated.

We should keep moving, he suggests, to make it across to the ponds and out to The Lakes.

Mmm.

More twisting and bending, as she ignores him and keeps angling herself over the stones, squinting, frowning, the camera at her face like a hurt nose.

All the same, her talk of signs has reminded Angus of a man he'd known in the Adelaide hills. So as he drives them to the next stop he tells Jasmin how this man had built a cluster of villas on his bush property without applying for any building permits, then bullied his way around the district with seemingly constant threats of legal writs for anyone who tried to obstruct him. He was a maniac, a man with an aggressive sense of entitlement.

To keep people off his property – in his mind anyone not family was a trespasser – he constructed a huge stone wall in a curve around his corner entrance road and split it with a huge steel gateway. On the wall he fixed two terracotta pumas, teeth bared, one on each side. As if these signs weren't enough, underneath each puma, at the hinge ends of the tall steel gates, he attached a sign with wording half a metre high saying Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted and to balance that, on the lock side of the gate: A.S.I.O. Surveillance Used Here.

Only one good thing he ever did – was threaten a few guys the locals thought were CFA volunteers and arsonists. He found them in the bush near his property and he fired a few shots at them. Or so he said.