Waiting

Waiting Read Free Page B

Book: Waiting Read Free
Author: Philip Salom
Tags: Fiction
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is always worrying over books and complex meetings with her students at University. Her academic face.
    As they continue talking Angus’s guard is relaxing into unex­pected anecdotes she tells and he laughs at, and in her eye contact, and at the way she refers to Melbourne as a design city, and he likes that. Design. Not his kind of design, more her kind with the de and the sign parted with a hyphen. Designate. As a place of signs. Signs? Is that what she does, something to do with signs, he asks her. Well, she excuses herself, she is a semiologist. She lets him get away with What, a seismologist? after his images of stones and earth­quakes. (Once, at a performance of Coriolanus, she heard a dragged-along bloke say to his girlfriend, this Cornelius had better be good.)
    Where has everybody else been? There were people hugging their awful secret. There were a few people yelling. There are always a few people yelling.
    I hate parties, he groans.
    Everybody hates parties, she says, I mean everyone says they hate parties.
    Teasing him maybe – yet here they both are.
    Not today, he adds. Today is an exception. This, he means to say, is based on strong feelings. Remembering the destruction and the need to move on. But he means her. Anyway, he likes the rush of social drinking, the excitement of it beats the hell out of a glass of something in silence at home. Searching too hard for the flavour of the wine. This is his confession of being single. And philosophical.
    Except when driving home is too far and… though not today, I live close by, just down the road, he adds. He gazes across at the troubled pastures in the opposite paddocks, at the three brown horses stationary after their earlier galloping. The horses may or may not be happy but people at the party seeing the horses are happy to see them.
    After a fire you see all the usual devastation, the kind that TV cameras can show, but there are odder things that show up, like skulls of kangaroos and things you thought lost which are suddenly visible. Old bikes, wheels, anything metallic really. Glass. Though sometimes glass is simply a blob with charcoally stuff solidified into it. Once, I was walking through burnt out bush and found the skeleton of a snake. It was white and the bones were still intact, which is remarkable because they are very fine bones. It looked like a metre-long comb of some kind.
    She smiles and keeps eye contact with him, the newly arriving silence of eye contact. And says nothing.
    It seems reasonable, he tells her, that so many locals still experience fear, and enough anxiety for sudden panic. No, not a panic-attack, that’s media-speak, but a state of panic, feelings that are the same as panic, or accompany panic, but do not rush about like someone panicking. Dread of a kind.
    She is humbled by the gravity of what he is saying. And the plain-ness of his clothing, his calf-length shorts over tanned legs, his sandals - and his strikingly pale feet. A man who works outdoors?
    He says he always wears boots, and laughs to be distracted from being, as he had been, stuck yet again in fire talk.
    In fact I always wear safety boots. With all the years of outdoor work you might think my feet are hard but they’re not. They are probably as soft as yours.
    She finds this surprisingly intimate.
    My feet may not be as soft as you think, she says, smiling. I go barefoot whenever I can. I supervise my students barefoot, in my office, where no one knows or cares. In tutorials when it’s not too cold.
    She is embarrassed; she has never said this to anyone before and as mild as it is, she feels now self-centred to confess it. She coughs.
    And in good weather I run.
    This he can guess. Her tights pay her a very shapely compliment.
    They keep talking. They watch the kangaroos grazing across the paddocks below the house. Grey and plump at last, like card players in the shadows. It has taken this long for the grass to return and now it is green

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