Waiting Read Free Page A

empathetic, not just analytical. She makes eye contact with him and holds it, so it’s personal. His blue eyes. The burn she knows she sees if not how she sees. She believes his strange words of loss, the semiotic not on the outer, as she is used to, but inside, in the reach of intuition. She is the real stranger here, not him. She has known students for whom even Twitter cannot quash the grief. For many others, yes, oh yes, so totally is Gen Y putting bad news out of their busy minds (Whatever, she asked me, and I’m like: I’m real hot tonight for Jason. He’s such an idiot ha ha. The girl I’m after tonight I want to get her pissed and then… LOL). She knows how many other people in the fire fronts crouched and lay down in tears and burnt. How survivors had no choice but to return, saw past the house in brick-pile and ash, to their loved ones in white frames of bone.
    Angus. His name sounds like a stone, she can hear in it Ingres, Angst, Angastura, Anxious… Anger? Or, here, in the fire-shadow, as he puts it, saying Angus she hears Sadness.
    He makes a confession. When he told her he worked in land­scape design that was his party version: his actual job carries more stubborn weight – landscaping, gardening – and way less kudos. He designs public places with lawns and waterways. He moves mountains, and then he builds them up again.
    He says his profession has added to the surface tension of the world: heavy cities, and now massive landscape constructions that might sometime (yes, he has dreamt it) plunge below the earth’s surface when a critical mass occurs. Think of it: so much concrete and stone in one place. Jasmin does. He has blue eyes. He is responsible for earthquakes?
    He was apprenticed years earlier with dusty carpenters and holds as a precious memory the elegant wooden frames of houses before they are covered over with tiles or tin. He appreciated the pine wall-frames and the window battens and later the rafters, the way buildings waited, open to sunlight like something made for sun worship, their pinewood skeletons a kind of poetry of rafters.
    Until bloody roof tilers clamber over a house and darkness spreads within the rooms below. The slab goes slug-cold in winter.
    Look at Stan’s house, he says, pointing to the walls. This is one good thing borne of adversity. Which I…
    He thinks better of saying it. Instead he refers to the strange metal framework of the external walls. How the lawn is a generic lawn but the house is clasped in unconventional metal frames. The outside walls are steel-banded like coopers’ bands around a wine barrel, but square, not hooped. Jasmin has been wondering when to ask someone about this. It’s not something she has ever seen before. Why then? she asks him.
    It stops the walls exploding outwards, he says. It’s a unique idea which I… Well, I designed it for Stan. He built it.
    When she frowns, disbelieving, he tells her: really, he’s not making it up. He has, he insists, no qualifications whatsoever, just a lot of nerve. But he knows about fires. And what happens to houses.
    A woman approaches them and tops up their glasses. Angus smiles and she says something to him Jasmin doesn’t quite hear. Then he laughs, the house story apparently forgotten.
    Well, it must be damn good wine he’s drinking. She in turn sees him like his rafters, standing above the roofline, an image of frames and happy angles. But he is up and down; there is something lost about him. He too seems banded, like the walls. Even his conversation has bands around it. But it has bright blue eyes. Light among the darkness of the mood and the eerie burnt-out landscape.
    Glancing, warily perhaps, when she is looking away, Angus sees she has a sensual face and dark eyes. She has visible cheek-bones, her lips hold a generous and now, he guesses, a wry smile for those close to her. He can’t see (he will later realise) that the woman