As if he'd know.
Later that night Big is staring at the calendar with its big red ring around the date of the solicitor. And he says the unexpected.
I do hope, says Big, I do hope she means it, and dies soon. Better for everyone if she does. This time. All this waitingâ¦
What are you talking about?
Waiting, for your mother toâ¦
My mother!
It is nerve-wracking.
How dare he. It's her mother he is talking about. But she leans over:
waiting for her to to d⦠to d⦠(Oh, Jesus, her old stutter).
Die?
Die.
Mens rea, says Big. A guilty mind. Hers. All the help your mother couldn't be bothered giving when you needed it won't allay the guilt of having her dosh. Her house. Well, she isn't eating is she, it's not hospital cuisine that's holding her back. Bloody-minded delay is what it is. Trust her to. Still, quite understandable.
It is the look on his face. His cheeks are puffy, owly, unshaven, nothing unusual there, no, it is the frown of wanting it done. Wanting it over. She is really worried now.
Anyone would think he knows first-hand the kind of sorrow in the body this is.
Perhaps he does.
In his own way.
The Ugly Sisters
On the other side of the country, or half-way to be exact, a new morning means an old grudge for Little's family. The older and slower Little's mother has been getting, the more her aunts have waited for her to slow to a⦠standstill. Without its implications of sitting for longer near a window, of recollection, and tranquillity (even some kind of grace?), then death.
The aunts like things faster: they wish for the demise of two-at-once, the mother and the irrelevant daughter, that weak girl lost somewhere in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, alone and gone. They, after all, are the lost girl's aunts.
It is quite simple, they out-rank Little. They growl because they know when it concerns the money issue there is another issue, the only issue; the next of kin. Little is the only issue. Literally. Single child. Inside the grudge rooms the worm is turning, and Little is the grit in the worm's intestinal tract, there being no teeth. Dentures perhaps. This acute indigestion has been increasing quite without Little's knowledge, and if she were to meet her aunts she would make an obvious fool of herself by deferring to them, playing not courteous (she lacks standing enough for that) but over-respectful, subservient.
Precisely what they want, and resent. They want to fight.
Mrs Little has thought of Little training all those years ago for the unlikely task of teaching primary children, the first weeks following painfully into months, and the finality of her crash. Fear is something Little still feels, and it was put to the test back then. Teaching small children is pretty easy but they rise to twelve years old and they were too much for Little. Medication can do wonders and Little was at first able to rise from it. Then Anxiety won. Never again such grand ideas, and sad that she'd had them in the first place, sadder then to see her inner teacher lost forever.
Later, Big would emerge beside her, his faux-University old-style lecturer a kind of consolation, a warm inner room for words and pedagogical sounds without any of the disastrous faces of any, let alone other people's children. Even in the street these faces just beginning to savour hormones and raw-ness scare her. They have no limits.
She is all limits.
Nor had her mother been one for praise. It spoils them, she used to say, in the plural of the plural, her only child merely one of a multitude, a generalisation. She herself suffered from that very syndrome â the syndrome of generalisation. A sufferer who cannot see the particular in others, in other situations, who sees in front of her a spreading collectiveness, the group the populace the race the species. Sadly not her own flesh and blood.
And so, little does Little know: when her mother dies she will inherit not some but all, the lot, the residue, as they call it. Her mother in finding some extraordinary late style, not Beethovenish but fractured like quartets of guilt and money, shame and retriÂbution, has decided enough is enough and the girl shall have the lot.
She felt the bright sunlight and the warm air and overwhelming rush of relief to be free of it. The grace of her selfless self. Finally.
All the family had stayed in South Australia, most of them in wretched Gawler, except for the two offspring, her own and her sister's, the wicked witch's boy, Angus, though he had left the state under some kind of cloud, some where-there's-smoke-there's-fire kind of drama after the Adelaide hills bushfires. She can't remember what.
Then, now, next, she can't keep it together.
Who cares what happens next? As long as her daughter inherits she is at peace, her sins absolved. It is an epiphany, as she waits there is the blue light with the windows open and the nursing home verandah bathed in the bliss of final decisions, but looking more like starlings in full tweet among the crumbs and cars, their rooves of overheating metal in the carpark. All this, expanding into a new innocence in the sunny afternoon like heaven in her thoughts.
Angus
Driving the bobcat is a big boy's pleasure: its fast and fussy lifting and turning adds to the toy-like appearance, until you feel its working grunt, that heavy urgency of engines gouging through dirt or lifting and bearing large stones and rocks. It is manic but muscular. Each lift and slow roll as he wedges stones into the retaining wall fronting a small mansion. Rocks everywhere. A growling bobcat twisting and swivelling. In South Australia you find moss rocks, gloriously dark boulders with lichen and moss growths rooted in their surfaces. People pay a fortune for rocks. Well, they pay Angus a fortune for rocks.
Everything is heavy on a job like this. The rate, the pay, the irksome waiting for materials, the badgering with councils⦠This plan he is implementing is close to being black-listed. Not, as it happens, yet. As for rocks, it would appear Melbourne has less moss and more granite. This, from a city built of colonial bluestone? â the cobbles the kerbs the capable walls? Whether kerbstone or churchstone, the same blue ageing, darkish grey to black.
But in gardens there is also the illusion of weight. He may choose sandstone and slate and as long as it looks like a mountain-side it pays well by merely having volume and vastness. These stones bear no public weight but their own, and they do not wash away even though he insists on trickle irrigation, the most economical watering system and vital to prevent chlorinated water spoiling the stones. Sprinklers are deadly, worse, in some areas they are sourced from bore-water, they spray out iron from shallow aquifers and veil everything in a filthy not a flirty red. They rain unsightly stains as if the stuff came hurtling from the massed backsides of a hundred hippos. Those grumpy animals that like to spray to further seed-life and to show they do not suffer fools.
An irregularly-shaped block of stone will not be forced into the gap. Whether it is a stubborn block or an unwelcoming gap, it has to be done. Angus leaves the engine running, like a good diesel should be, and tramps over to his ute to grab the pick and sledge hammer and his heavy steel chisel. The sky is clear and blue above him, as he pulls on gloves, then the unlikely safety goggles. Roughened hands were once the sign of a macho worker, a type immediately ruined by an eye-patch. Health and Safety is in capitals everyday now, as it never was then, with workers whose first action was to remove the annoying safety guards from machines, and who mocked anyone who worked with obvious care for their hands.
Several blows of the pick knock a small sparking gap in the stone, enough for him to swap the big attacking steel and shoulder-high blows for the chiselling. The hammer is heavier than some blokes could lift with one hand, let alone swing against the ball-end of the steel chisel. It takes slow, determined blows, one, and one, and one. And rests. Then again. Nothing happens fast with this material. No obvious grain like some rocks, or those rocks that give nothing then shatter at your feet. The blows must be judged carefully, given the blunt imprecision of the tools, and to avoid the jarring that kills the wrists and does little to the rock-face.
I'm breaking rocks in the hot sunâ¦
How he wishes he didn't keep remembering this.
Then a section sheers off and falls beside the block.
He eases the clutch on the bobcat and nudges the boulder forwards into position, against, then into the gap between the other blocks. He pulls back and it stays. Not bad, not bad at all. He feels the satisfaction from making small adjustment to very heavy masses.
From uphill he can estimate the visual design by measure â the slope is cut into two by equal terraces made of stone â but from below he will need to judge it as the neighbours and the passers-by will see it. By eye. On paper it may seem perfect but from below its proportions look utterly wrong. Some might say, as the kids say, whatever. He is not ever, and never ever, a whatever person. He wants it right.
Playing with the stop-start and the left-right dynamics of his bobcat has made him slur with pleasure in the face of the greater powers. The bobcat pushes blade-first into a large ramp of stones. As it lifts the square-ish block he wants, a rounder stone tips awkwardly and the gods seize it, this spherical boulder, they bowl it straight downhill at the most expensive car they can see.
It tumbles out onto the driveway and, as he watches, it bounces heavily down the hard long path and thumps into a parked Mercedes. Black, glossy, German enamel. Quite beautiful. Deeply indented.
It bleeds silver. What to do? The shock of it, his error, embarÂrassment in full view. When he manages to get down to the car Angus tries to lift the stone by himself. Using the black and yellow bobcat would look like a bumble bee attacking a black car. Instead, staggering, he feels like a crazy Scots tossing boulders. He thinks of his entrails exploding through the fibrous walls of his abdomen or, much worse, his scrotum.
Hey you!
The feeling of this sound is heavier than the boulder. Or hernia. Hate. He can feel its vengeful eyes.
I have just taken a photo of you, shouts a woman. I have caught you red-handed.
As she wobbles fatly down towards him, still holding her mobile, the world's newest weapon for law-courts and YouTube. She lifts it higher to prove her point and as if she is comparing their held objects: her little iPhone and his cannon ball.
Is it⦠your car? I guess it is. I'm sorry. We canâ¦
Can you indeed? Well, I have one of you at the car and I have another one of you lifting that thing up to get away with it.
No, look, I suggest you contact the owner and we can see what his insuranceâ¦
Insurance! Think you can get away with it do you? NO. That is my car and you're done. You're done.
Done? He would laugh if he could. She has been watching too much television. He suggests as much.
That is offensive. That is offensive. I heard the tone, that is very rude. Very very rude, I will see you punished. How dare you, how dare you, you are in no position toâ¦
The stone is too heavy to hold, and too heavy to have to pick up again.
She grunts and pants, and bends awkwardly towards the dented door â legs splayed and belly down, she really is very fat â she is a Sumo for a moment, she is challenging the car â and he sees the flash whitely against the black duco as she takes shots of the dent. Much worse than a dent, the metal is nearly cut open. She could almost cry if she wasn't so happy to have caught him.
Here, she calls, evidence. Evidence! You cannot say you didn't when I can show you did. Yes, I have it here.
I am going to carry this rock back uphill. Or do you want to take another photo? Here you go, how's this? He does a half squat and lift and staggers back still holding the bloody stone against his chest, both his forearms under it, the rocky colour of exertion filling his face.
Aha! Stealing the evidence. Yet she stands there doing nothing.
Reality passes very quickly madam, you've got to be quick.
Automatically, just in a time-lapse, she takes his advice, she raises her iPhone and her hand blinks.
I have you again. Yes. I have you again.
He tries to carry the stone uphill. He drops it. No. The thing starts rolling back, so he has to rush back and prop himself against it. He is puffing. Even he has heard of Sisyphus. He is vaguely aware of her screaming and feels like letting the bloody thing go. Eventually he hefts it, then staggers uphill and clicks it down against the stack like a monster lawn bowl. She is walking stubbornly towards him.
Uh uh! Puffing. He points to her feet. She stops, then starts again. Now she is walking on his side of the driveway.
Madam, (panting in fact) you're trespassing. I can't let you stay on the property.
You what? You you⦠I'm not moving until you take responsibility for the damage to my car. You are so offensive, so offensive. That is an insult and I won't take it, no I won't, I won't take that from you.
Ha (he can't believe it). Now look, on behalf of the ownerâ¦
The owner! That man has his name on things but he doesn't own them. His kind don't own anything.
⦠(she might well be right)⦠just for my own peace of mind and ⦠in accordance with workplace safety, you cannot be on this property. I am going to get into my bobcat and carry on working and I can't be held responsible if anything should happenâ¦
That's a threat, that's a threat. He's threatening me, she shouts this last rather oddly at Angus. Perhaps Angus is supposed to do something about it, take her side and tell himself off. A voice is coming from his mouth without him even thinking.
The more you shout and get angry and say stupid things in the third personâ¦
How dare you!
Long after she has gone he feels the shrill tones of her voice, the raucous edge to it making him think of some Mediterranean soprano, less Callas and more Souliotis, a once-big voice so wrecked it is ungainly.