Waiting by Philip Salom Page A

girls like herself, muscled up and shaped from farm work done since they were kids. Bigger towns, though, are Bogan land. Fat.
    As they work across the garden area they leave behind rough craters where the grasses have been been ripped up. Angus swaps his fork for a rake and begins evening out the soil and smoothing it over. When they had changed this garden from its original, introduced species to the current native plants, they had removed a fragrant row of jasmine. As he rakes through the soil he can still sense the small white flowers the yellowish rush of perfume – lust of the shrub. Daydreaming at work. It’s that kind of day.
    They finish unplucking the rough and scratchy armfuls of grass and begin replacing them by nip and tuck with smaller sprawling plants. Plants without fever. He hopes.
    Idler varieties of daydreaming he does in his lone ranger self. Angus is overtly Mr Independent, even at school preferring to apply himself, against his parents’ and his teachers’ insistence, to physical things, not academic. Though he later completed one tatty year at the University in Adelaide. He had thought about wine-making, enrolling at Roseworthy Agricultural College and majoring in oenology. Even as a boy he was keener to feel the scent of things, the world of sensation. He liked the wind the sun the rush through his nostrils of seasonal aromas, the sweet scented gum of gumtrees in afternoon heat, and leaf-fall and blossom, and pasture grass curing after cutting…
    He had been a country boy, after all, and his parents on the land. He still thinks of himself as physically and psychically among the elements. Here, at the apartments, he is aware of the several concrete steps down to the pavement where his ute gapes like a steel hollow – he can practically touch this physicality, and likewise feel the two-story beige walls behind him above, and across, his back and shoulders. When his mood is full, as it is now, he is inclined to feel blessed. Body and soul. Fulsome. All the old phrases.
    Today he is also thinking about inner city living, and whether he might, himself, take it up. The Jasmin effect. Or just the awakening of his more social self at last, hibernation post-fires probably over and done now, and the Adelaide shadows lessening.
    A man is walking past the apartments wearing a dress of tight-fitting cotton. A summer dress for God’s sake. The man, it’s definitely a man, is also wearing a shocking orange wig, the colour clashing with the blackly pepper-and-salt stubble on his jaw, and the dark hair of his fat calves. Angus signals to Jen, who immediately stops work and stares at the man.
    Back in South Australia, Angus’ mother has told him he has a cousin living in North Melbourne, a nervous ninny that is, his mother says, a girl of something age, except she is in her 30s by now, poor thing. Except this otherwise colourless and inconse­quential cousin of his lives with a huge, cross-dressing man in his 60s. A very strange kind of father-figure, indeed, a weird (for his mother weird is the end of the world) gay man who parades around in full public view thinking he is a woman. When Angus had told her cross-dressers are not necessarily gay or even trans-sexual his mother had winced at both words, at both possibilities, and changed the subject.
    More recently she has suggested something else, he should find this cousin, who it seems is likely to inherit her own mother’s estate unless someone more deserving does. Angus needn’t guess who this more deserving someone might be. His mother and her sisters have been rivalrous since childhood and remain so despite being in their 70s. And he is used to his mother’s implicit conversation running quietly underneath the spoken. Worse, much worse, she wants Angus to visit the cousin and see what she’s like now and well, have a word to her about family obligations and so on. Inferences he can hardly bare to consider.
    Now