If only, while away, some power informed her of the words needed, of the knowledge required, to show them she knew. But nothing ever came back with her… Reading was better, she could read alone and she passed exams and tests, and best of all she wrote strange stories the teachers always said showed ‘imagination’, but even she could tell the teachers were too silent just before, and especially just after uttering this, their single word, of praise.
The shop assistant ambition, though, wearing make-up and being looked at by men, now that was intoxicating, to think anyone would, but men did look at shop girls. Men had different expressions for shop girls.
Little knew she wasn’t bad looking, in her mousy kind of way, but with a faded blue dress and her black hair (which she kept near her face) and lipstick, her one device her one trick, they would lick their lips, and these husbands and young men and not the boys, would give her the secret look that men give shop girls.
It made her shake, down in the places she had become curious about, shake and feel this was real enough to stay in the room for.
Looks carry their own pain. In the rooming house it is even expected. Strangely, living among them, is a tall and very striking brunette. She is quite unfairly a ‘good looker’ who sometimes goes (commercially, she says) blonde, then black again, something to do with her ferocious moods and following depressions, but it must be said her funny and uplifting cheerfulness is everywhere in between. In the house of nicknames, they initially called her Pretty Woman. They are suprisingly interested in celebrity. They are also showing their age in this dated film-whore reference, and yet celebrity wins again. They settle on the actress: Julia.
No one can quite believe her. Advantage Julia.
Yes, and for all her seeming youth, at only 35 or so, still the smudge of hard-life has appeared at her eyes, and no tricks are going to re-train her forehead to live in Nicole-land, that blond who cannot (to quote Julia) act or do anything except con creepy but influential men into thinking she can. And that was something Julia should know about, more than a bit of that in the inner Julia, and inner being the place, she once hinted, nudge nudge, for sealing such deals.
Listen mate, she once said to Little, being blokey-girlie, I’ve tried everything and believe me there’s not much about blokes I don’t know.
When she says mate it doesn’t sound like the more usual ma-a-ate, the ingratiating kind of mate, the special pleading. Like the mate men use in this house. Her mate, even when she is down, is crazier.
Of course when she is down she tells them things she really shouldn’t. Here it hardly matters and she seems to find relief in this, her unlikely talking cure. The men are half in love with her, she is their light and dark together, she is their free upper. If her beauty is beyond their experience, her sorrows are all too familiar. She is a torch-song in a club of lined faces.
She never confesses to Tom. Never, not likely. They are opposites and only she truly understands how. He is a sinner who pretends to Jesus. She sins and enjoys it. She said to him once: come-on Tommy, I’ll give you a blowjob. His body shook like malaria as it retreated.
Tom the born-again. Tall, long-lank Tom. Stooping, sanctimonious, in his long grey hair and bearded like Jesus, Tom, wearing glasses and being too unexpectedly a bloody know-all for a down-and-out world. No sex. He is cheery though. Not just about Jesus, which would be bad enough. No, he is a cheery expert on everything, staring right past your face or over the top of your head as Big does, so alike in this, all grinning joviality, talking and sometimes shouting as the expert on everything, roses even. It wears you out, this kind of cheery. There must be something serious behind it.
He is thin to Big’s thick, lacking Big’s charm in skirts, and handbags, and erudition of a more scientific kind. Tom is more a hat and T-shirt all-year-round man; he is the ears on the street, he can tell you the history, who lived where and the buried bodies stuff, but even he likes to do the small goss too. Amost feminine in this, if not in couture. He leans into a story. His skin too is feminine, he is glabrous on arms and legs and he is roly-poly on the face. Oddly enough, his face shines like silk with shaven and shaven-again cleanliness-close-to-Godliness in discrete areas above his unshaven Jesus-ness.
Especially when he tells them yet-again how he is a born-again. Yes, and that he used to… he is quite precise about this and will happily repeat it, too happily perhaps… he used to bugger boys. Drink himself into the gutter and pull the pants down of any lad he could get his hands on – and with his long arms he had quite a reach.
It made him a real threat in the Scouts and boys clubs, years ago when they had such things, and then, THEN, he was dragged along to an evangelical football-ground shindig with the great Billy Graham, shiny-skinned son of Jesus, and he heard the Old and New Testament.
He heard the Trumpet.
No joking no joshing, no he heard the big fanfare of his sins and the even bigger volleys of Jesus. No one in his past life could believe it when he stood up and walked in his lucid daze down to the yankee dramatist for God and gave up his booze and the soft bottoms of boys for the Almighty. Ah yes the Everlasting.
Never touched either of his indulgences again. Now he is pure-of-heart but a bloody know-all and a smiling but unfunny nuisance and a smug as all get-out Jesus-freak. He is without double-thought, he is not one to laugh at a joke unless he knows it is a joke, and what he knows is more usually the goss and the gladness.
There is a little blue For Sale sign on the house next door. It can’t be helped, when Sammy or Tourie start yelling, or when some of the dreary drunks shout and fight or when crack-heads kick doors, or someone comes into the building without a name or visa and moves out backwards as the Sheriff advances down the corridor towards and then through them. Neighbours don’t stay long.
This particular neighbour is two parts retired. Having cursed the halfwayhousers as ruffians and drunks and the like, on another day he’s as friendly as fat, talking about their pomegranate tree, and the grey-water possibilities with Tom. Tom knows a lot from Jesus but the neighbours are more forthcoming.
How’s it going Tom? the man from next door asks, staring retirement in the eye and Tom in the stoop. Tom is on about bloody police tardiness and the drug dealer sleeping at the back of the house, junkies arriving all night shouting and shaking. Not a good morning for Tom.
With little choice once Tom has begun, the neighbour knows to interrupt, telling Tom they have, himself and Mrs etc, for several months now been imagining a small comfortable house nearer the water and further from neighbours. Country town with river or lake or ocean close to the skin, in the morning a seawind bracing and noisy in the ears, in the cold seasons a buffeting wind against your chest. And so they found one. City real estate is burgeoning.
Still, money before madness. The agent reckons their house will sell for way more than they imagined six months ago. It’s intoxicating to think of it.
He looks at Tom for as long as he risks a silence.
Sea change…! Tom has barely begun.
Sort of, sort of. There is a… problem.
Ah!
The agent is worrying how to clear the um let’s be frank, Tom, off-putting sight of some of the men. Not your good self, Tom, but some of the… others.
Ah! Pack off the riff raff during the auction! I’m with you.
Days of inspection, you know, and the big day itself – of serious bidding.
I’ll sort em out, Tom grins. No worries, mate. He is booming, and assuring: I’ll sort em. You’re talking about money.
The retired look in the neighbour’s eye is as trusting as it’s possible to be under the circumstances. He laughs and goes back inside. What else can he hope for?
And for all this, Tom still wears his hair long and lank. It hangs like the soft