Waiting by Philip Salom Page B

that bloke, he says to Jen, has the kind of build the blokes in the bush have. The build, I mean. Not the skirt.
    Your country boys don’t wear skirts?
    Only if you’ve been on the moonshine. Maybe he’s a local bunyip, says Angus. In skirts. And don’t laugh, I’m going to follow him. I’ll explain when I get back.
    The man is ahead of him by a few minutes yet hardly more than 50 metres away; Big, as we know, is a ponderous walker. He is a man who uses ambulatory as a personal adjective, not that anyone he says it to is likely to register. Angus has no trouble following him around the corner and then, at what seems to be the mid point of the uphill street, the man turns and enters a shabby, un-renovated terrace house.
    In the garden, in the space where a lawn normally is, the ground has been cobbled over like a Melbourne gutter, and three rather derelict men are standing there smoking. They sway like shades from the Underworld and stare at Angus through the foliage of the pomegranate tree.
    Like something Biblical.
    By the time he returns the job is done: Jen has finished, so they pack their equipment alongside the heavy clumps of grass-and-root-sod in his ute and drive across town to the next job.
    The freeway isn’t busy and while they drive on the low side of the speed limit Angus explains the bit about his cousin. Their ute load is hardly stony but tussocks still retain a fair amount of damp soil and Jen tells him the back of the ute is sagging like a broad-hipped mama. The front wheels hang low in the suspension, the bonnet high, the steering dreamy.
    Very convenient, if unplanned, then to transplant the bulky tussocks of disgraced grass into the slopes on the waterway along the sides of the redundant pond, as Jen calls it. Very neat. Nothing wasted. Very happy on the face of Angus. Redundant because his two-pond design features two flat, scooped-out surface shapes of water on the banks of the Yarra River in Ivanhoe. They are a stone’s fetch from the river. Water above water. Even a joke: a clod job, so satisfying to dig (in, out and in again) at his own firm of contractors, the architects who know even less about plants than him, the plants he knew less about. Some jobs lose a lot of time and plants and when this happens something sags in Angus quite as much as the sullen plant beds and the dying plants. Mortal moments. They surprise him. He this work-hardened bob-cat of a man.
    Nothing still alive is wasted, then, or lost, except the hard-to-estimate workday of their lives, and the skin from hands when they tired of wearing gloves. More Angus than Jen, this. They would never let her into straight bars if she had his hands. So, after the day’s work moving grasses he looks down at his hands and wonders about his foolishness, or forgetfulness. Before he knew better – well into the unaware but active phase common to most young men – he had imagined his work-hardened hands were sexy, meaning manly. It was also manly to show them off. Not realising there were parts of a young woman both hidden and very hidden that did not appreciate the stone-rough touch of a monster, smile or no smile.
    He mentions to Jen his desire to move house, suggesting he’d like to find something close-in. Not that he has seen Jasmin’s house, or spent any time in the area. It’s the fresh air, constantly re-newed from the south-west, and the elevation of the suburb above the bay in the distance. As for Jasmin, he wants to make himself go and grab her, but how? She seems to be interested in his work, now he has emailed her jpegs of the highlights, but…
    Take her there, to the lakes, suggests Jen.
    What for?
    Show her what you do. Let her see it up close. Doesn’t matter how much of an academic she is, if she gets the hots over wussy city squares and shopping malls the earthiness of your stuff will knock her socks off.
    Or not. You reckon?
    Angus, you’re a dope. She’ll love