Just keep a low profile can you, fellas? We owe it to the vendors.
The what?
The bloody vendors, our neighbours who are selling and who want the best price. Think how much money they’ll lose if you berks stand outside looking like the neighbours from hell.
The entire idea of money is not something they think about long-term. They are the house of short-term. Money calls out like a sad person. They know this. Like a left-hand thread in a right-hand world, like a desolate Tourettie in the street when the goodwill has flown and fuck and shit words go round and round in their pain.
Money. In the rooming house money is a stranger. Pay them off and consider it well spent, it could save tens of bloody thousands. Tom heard the sound of money first. Never one to be left out of the loop, out of the loop (he liked the sound of it).
When Tom had moved in, arrived, as he thought of it, vaguely Biblical, vaguely special, he walked slowly up their side of the street tapping each gateway and front fence of each house and each block of flats, slowly tap tap stop tap tap stop (for the sound of it). Until he knew everything was in order. That the neighbours houses were properly numerical.
And the neighbours knew here was another nutter.
So Tom sounds sane and prays sane but he is not sane at all.
He insists the boarders know all the details of the street-goss and house-sales he can wring from the neighbourhood. If they miss or forgot it themselves it hardly matters because he will tell them again the next day and the next. You get the picture. Until he has new news Tom keeps telling the old.
Money in hand, he says. It’s what any re-tired people need, and I mean tired, have you looked at them, they make me look like a young lad all daydreams and getupandgo. Nah, I’ve talked to them. They’re going off to die on the coast or the countryside.
They’re not elephants, mate, says The Sheriff.
No, I mean it. Not the best way of putting it perhaps but there you can’t have any worries if you’ve got a bit a land in a quiet spot on the edge of town down south somewhere. Like a bit myself. Prices haven’t gone up in rural places like they have here.
Their neighbours are good and tolerant people who have run dry.
During this next door talk Big and Little have been quiet. They have been quiet because they hold in their odd hearts a strange waiting, or is it a fear, held down and sat on? Sharing the sale of Little’s mother’s old house in an expensive Adelaide suburb. Sharing with her mother’s sisters, or being left the house outright. Her mother has hinted at outright but also that her sisters, the Ugly Sisters as she calls them, are bitter about that. They want the house and its up-market postcode. Admittedly, Mother Little drank champagne with the best of them when she could and smoked her reedy voice down to a baritone; she voted for the Coalition whenever called upon, even if she had forgotten why. Something about her sort should be in charge, that lawyers and smiling smarmy born-to-rule faces, were the barrier between herself and the sheer stupidity of the mob. Which too many Australians fall back on.
So talk of money is exotic. Erotic. Even sad. Like talking of holidays. Holidays! This lot don’t have them. Money that is not debt money, as if the word meant your own free money, moneyinthebank and lucky and easy and a sufficiency of. Even if Little is also scared a little (Big says that is only appropriate). The Sheriff cannot fathom this fear, he’d like a fear of this sort himself. Nothin’ to it, he says, if you invest it briefly and inspect the market which is, and he even agrees with Tom on this, not very bloody illuminating at present.
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 waiting…
What are you talking about?
Waiting, for your mother to…
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 – 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,