He is slumped like a big fat toad.
Which reminds her of her mother, so old and unwell, yes, but how unwell? Is it really time to consider the death of the mother before she has died? And her off-putting hints of money. Is it just a cruel tease? Mothers do not feature in Little’s or Big’s lives. Big had confounded utterly his very own mother years earlier when he said he was not going to live in the real world in a suit and a tie but waddle down easy-street in a dress and small heels. Green preferably.
In truth it has always shocked Little to think of the physical stuff, such as small Mother-Big giving birth to Big and then swaddling him and feeding him from the breast and sending him off to school. Long ago Little, long ago after putting it off and pretending otherwise concerning her life and loves, introduced Big to her own mother. While the mother’s social standing stood and ran from the room Big stayed put and Little insisted she too was no longer living in the land of the real.
It has taken them two days to ask the caretaker person and carefully inquire among the other men, who may or may not be reliable but who always have an opinion. Tom being the likeliest when it comes to opinions. He suggested Legal Aid was their man or woman. Free more or less, cheap certainly, for those on pensions, of limited means. He has heard about it down at the local soup kitchen, some blokes there have been to Legal Aid and swear by it. Little wanted to think about it and put off calling for a few more days until she got used to the idea, her nerve coming and going like an attack of indigestion. But they did, they found the Legal Aid person’s number by walking up to the community centre with Tom. Using a telephone is not easy for a nervous Little, yet the worry made her make herself do this. She rang to contact a Mr de Silva, Lawyer, and Mr de Silva’s secretary suggested they make an appointment immediately.
Little manages two fingers in the great tradition of hopeless typists and slowly puts together the sentences acknowledging receipt of the letter, comprehension of the contents of, and arrangement to meet the Legal Aid solicitor and could they please send the legal information to that address, i.e. care of Mr de Silva, LLB. Done! She feels a rush of pride, or panic – she has done it after all, this wordy formal thing.
They mark the day of this leter to the solicitor on their otherwise pristine calendar. She tells Big it is a bit sad – to have only this one mark on its bare days. Even if it is a very neat Little mark. There is something intimate about calendars. Rendezvous. Assignations. Other people can stand in front of the month and read the ink and lettering of these hidden meanings and wonder at them and their hearts open but the brain stays closed, it is almost religious and afterwards they remember nothing. Intimate, but ephemeral.
Revelations, thinks Big, lying back on his bed. And to think there is money in it for the two of them. The meeting that is the gathering to divide the crusts, the who and why questions over Little’s mum’s house.
So they decide to mark the day that is today, too, and appraise the gap… And wait to hear when the day of the appointment must be, to connect this day to that day. Equals a proper job done. The hanging of the calendar.
And both their birthdays while they’re at it. And hey… they’ll think of other days tomorrow.
On their next trip they visit the library. For the computers. Little loves to skydive in GoogleEarth, she loves the way she can type in a city or a valley and then hurl herself down from such crazy heights through the darkness into suddenly coloured streets and treetops. Bungy jumping into GoogleEarth, it is her sex and her drama and her self-annihilation in one hit, better than anything real. She does it again and again. Pixel-jumping. Setting it up, feeling in her stomach the map veer from one side of the world to lumpy bumpy Australia and then hovering over Melbourne, then plunge. The intoxicating plunge.
It is the pleasurable other-side of her encounters just outside the morgue, the ex-morgue, when or if they walk that way up to the shops. There she has to stop and stare at them. The airy things. Not a plunge so much as a fall.
Big beside her. Big does not admit of the supernatural. Tom of course is beholden to historical ghosts only. Big thinks Jesus is the biggest boogey of them all. No, when Little stops at the end of the shadowy street it is not exactly pleasurable, but she must pay them her moment of respect. Life and death is a worry out on the real streets.
Big waits. Whatever Big thinks he tends to say aloud, and what he said when they saw once the the house-for-sale sign on that street of Little’s ghosts, Rue de la the Morgue, Big said to the house inspection crowd. There was a famous actress in the crowd. He said the adjoining house was once the city morgue. In the 1880s.
He said it to the famous Melbourne actress with the famously gaunt face frozen now, after years of smiling at her cosmetic surgeon, into smiling. Her surgeon must have had a sharp sense of humour. The strain of making her lips steady and straight added a peculiar gravity to her appearance, so the public, who loved her, their favourite famous actress, thought her especially moving. Gravitas.
To return. They must find the said solicitor. GoogleplainoldMaps. The address, the tram route. Little can do this kind of thing by herself, so Big stumps across to the small chairs at the newspaper table, thinking if it is not a children’s library why are the chairs so bloody small? He occupies himself with the news.
Just for now she sits there breathing. Her body is not so good today. Kidneys and other things and this secret list from medications taken some time ago thank God when. When. She hides it away all the time certain it and it and all the its are standing out on her skin like blisters, saying look see yeah yeah her, this one is really and truly loopy not merely lupy, and still breathing. Sometimes she thinks the Google falling stands in for all the other things in danger of jumping out, shouting and plunging, the slurring in her mind no longer her speech, here where every second boarder slurs from something.
Where Big is her rock her mountain her madwoman.
Occupants of their rooming house are familiar with Legal Aid. They have been much in need of it. As well as legal matters of far more intimate nature. Their bodies and souls. Some have been criminals once, maybe still are – or compromised in ways we don’t mention. Innocent, of course, just caught up in the moment. Got involved with a bad crowd.
They get pissed on remarkably few stubbies and one whines about the ways X bashed him, well, not X but X’s side-men, some of whom are hardly shaving yet but hard, fucking hard all the same, nasty little fuckers, who kicked his ribs in for what, for nothun, just maybe lettun on some trick to someone whose business it wasn’t. Spare ribs and anger and no joy in that, not when you’re down on the cobbles, your cheekbones raw from footwear and grit, nothing to see when you’re looking into the dirt.
One whiner had teased Little about her own whingeing when Little was silly enough to think he’d listen, silly enough to think anyone down listens to someone else who is down, with good cause, even better cause to be down, but he took the piss.
Then down he went, again, because word got out and in no time Big pushed him harder than expected against the solid wall of the corridor and the guy fell again, ah, down into déjà vu on the floor. There in the grit one sees nothing. Big is not a violent man, he may look like Obelix but he never hits anyone, that would frighten him.
Big never hits and he never says fuck. One word you will never hear me use, he says, is fuck.
He can look like Obelix and he manhandles people on a supply and demand call, but he never punches them. He never says fuck to them. Big lifted this guy, became impassioned and thus impatient and simply lost the will to hold him up. The man fell, like the junkie guy who stole the jam fell.
Little felt pleased then felt weak for complaining and for her lack of understanding. It was her fault that the man got silly and mocked her, and was thumped for it. Then she guiltily enjoyed her first-ever experience of cruelty. Thanks to her Big. A gloating, sort of. And breathing.
Little had been so habitually nervous as a child she thought it would be bold beyond measure to one day work in a shop. Behind the counter! Maybe sell batteries or paper or… at the end of the day sweep the floors and feel grownup. At school she was incapable of staying in the room mentally. A daydreamer. Teachers were always calling