Tom is big on original sin. It is also possible he cannot really tell that despite his overt anger Big is suppressing a deeper rage.
Pig’s arse we are.
Except I found Jesus.
Eventually.
Better late than never.
You took your time. You took your bloody time. And strictly speaking Jesus is only one third of God.
I found Jesus when Billie Graham called to Jesus within me.
Ha! OK, so you have thought about it: you needed to be interfering with boys in order to become a good man. Is that a fair trade?
I was a drunk. I wasn’t in the gutter, I was the gutter.
Tom has been reading. A big sigh escapes the Big body.
Just give the Braille a bloody miss for a bit will you?
No. I can’t.
Big is an inside man: his thinking and talking are all he seems aware of, this talking to himself or, whenever possible, to the world. But even he can see Tom’s face is serious; worse than merely pale, he is unhappy.
Then why not at least (Big in his most exaggerated English accent) shut your bleeding door!
And he slams it shut regardless.
In the rooming house they have a shared lounge-room where they can sit around and talk. They love it. They talk jokes, TV, gossip from the street, even listen to Tom, anything. A common room. Where they chase starry or earth-bound ideas around like mis-bred sheep. In stinking cash-cow houses the landlord more likely uses every pocket of airspace, makes a room out of two cupboards, and so this common room of theirs is a luxury. Their only.
Big has been saying how the mysterious house down the street that always has renovations happening, concrete is being glugged through thick hoses and steel joists are carried through the side path, all without visible result. They must be building an observatory at the back.
And now the observatory idea has come up again.
Nah… I’m not with you on that one, Tom begins. Tom is shaking his head at the idea, which is new to him. Tom arrived a year or so ago and he is not always present at silly-conversations. His mouth opens so widely Big gets in first and expands his reasoning, as if placing the idea there on his tongue and blowing out his cheeks. The outlook, the time, the night lights. Observing the night from this earthy promontory, this unseen jetty… the otherworldly joys of nightwatch and astronomy.
Big calls it again. Nightwash. Even the sound of it… lovely. It is a theory. In science, he reminds them, these men of the world, and Little, that if the theory is beautiful and the facts don’t agree, the facts are wrong. Einstein.
No, no!
This from a very impatient Tom.
It’s not an observatory, it’s a granny flat. Anyway, I hear it began as a granny-flat, he says, his head shaking like a symptom, and it was going well until rising damp…
Rising damp? Here? Have you not noticed the drought?
Then someone notices Dazza is gap-mouthed. Gazzer has had his teeth kicked in and not said anything. And the Kangaroos have lost yet another AFL game. Life’s a shit.
At least they weren’t Dazza’s real teeth. Dentures don’t often go walkabout, if they do they’d do better than to choose a piss-ridden alley on a dark night. Lost they are, though, because Dazza, though a larger man than Big, was pushed from behind as he legged it home one evening from the 7/11, and he never recovered enough to get up again. He was, once down, a turtle type of man, heavy and maybe rocking very slightly, back and forth in a heavy shell. Arms and legs useless. A couple of young thugs saw they’d done the wrong bloke and were so annoyed they kicked his face to punish him. It was his own fault.
It is amazingly rare for the very dysfunctional men inside the rooming house to get over-violent, in a place where the lost is the real and the poor is the everyday, where the future does not look the same as it does in the other houses of the street. Apart from the odd blow or curse, a cuff in the kitchen over stolen food, a fight over TV programs, a drunken stoush soon bruised and ended, the occupants’ lives in this house are lived… if not in exemplary peace then in a roughandtumble tolerance.
They have fought hard to keep this unique (for a rooming house) roominess with its common room. Rooming houses are more usually reconstructed on the basis of a high compression ratio like a car engine. Now there is a threat which remains: to divide the common room into two more bedrooms.
It is a myth to assume people need wealth to be happy, they simply want both. Or that the poor are necessarily violent, even if they reach breaking point. Here, money isn’t visible, health isn’t reliable, happiness isn’t madly obvious but that elusive funny-drug, that smiling neurotransmitter from ideal societies, is not entirely absent. Happiness is the residue left behind when people are not unhappy.
These men do not work, they exist. Work for most of them is a memory, a thing they are surrounded by and which they, those who ever did work, have learnt not to feel guilty about. About not doing.
Though some do. Tom does, sitting in his room thumping his Braille for God’s blind followers. Thumping the Bible and thumping the Braille and thumping his foot on the floor in time to Billy Graham’s famous bass-baritone, George Beverly Shea, the man whose Southern crooning and larynx are tuned for Jesus. The man has a beautiful voice and yes, even athiests think so. But how sentimental and old-fashioned these Jesus people are. Gentle Jesus has a deep voice.
A ship is booming into the harbour. Its foghorn or boomhorn, it sounds like cigars, like deep colourful and flavoursome movement in the air. It doesn’t sound like Jesus.
Jasmin
She and another lecturer are running through their course introduction for their first year classes. Both are dressed in black, as they must. She explains to the students that while some fields of study are hardly esoteric, the general public (this term meaning nothing sensible) hasn’t heard of them. Their own, for instance.
The faces this early in the year are facing the front. Two women taking turns to speak with energy and conviction. All these eager faces. She knows how quickly this will change.
Simply never spoken of. Not even given a populist treatment like Alain de Botton’s choir-boy philosophy. Baldy Baton, or whatever his name is, passing on the ideas of others. (A few nervous chuckles.) Yet Jasmin feels everyone is capable, if they only think about it, of understanding the various layers of semiotics she and Jill are about to springload this course with.
They show just how applicable the ideas are. How everyone is ‘reading’ signs and symbols every day, in books and TV programmes, on blogs and Facebook, in the works of genre in film and entertainment, popular culture, everywhere. How celebrity ‘icons’ like Beyoncé or Miley Cyrus – through their constant PR stunts – are providing signs we the public, but especially the fans, are reading all the time. That is, we are doing it whether we know it or not.
What is a man who wears a turban? Well, perhaps he’s a Sikh and thus the slippage when a Sikh is attacked and bashed in a northern suburb because he is a ‘terrorist’. Meaning Arab/Moslem/Al-Qaeda/etc etc.Words and their thrown-down relationships to things, to meanings, the patterns of judgment, and reaction, hatred even. The students are dazzled and worried. They applaud because they know it’s a great performance and don’t know you don’t applaud at University.
After the lecture she leads Jill back to her office. The trick is to say as much as possible in the lecture then clear out fast. First lecture especially. Further questions can be asked in the tutorials. Otherwise some sticky students rush to the front and do not detach easily. Some people will not take a hint.
I think that went pretty well, Jill announces, easing herself into the chair on the student side of the main desk. She is Jasmin’s new PhD post grad, already lecturing and tutoring since the year before when she was rounding off her Masters. Jasmin opens a