Waiting Read Online Free PDF Page A

chance, he tells her, a real test arrived. They wouldn’t have wished it on anyone. And it did, the bushfire swelled over the house – and nothing happened. There are black charring-marks on the corners and gnawings into the wall plates under the roof where eaves would have been and these and other things Angus shows her, a signature of the fires.
    He tells her very quietly, this building is one of the survivors.
    Not to be overheard, she suddenly realises. That he and Stan had felt triumphant, their house had survived, but then felt a more compromised elation. Many houses with people inside them were not standing after the fireballs passed. There had been broken outer walls and lone chimneys and heat-bleached tiles on the floors and nothing else. Exploded house-frames. Metal roof-iron whacked out of shape by thousand degree heat, the fiery caul which went over everything as the people who waited, the people who stayed, as it was called, become nothing more than ash.
    The evening is warm and windless on their side of the hill but the hours are adding up just as the guests are adding the numbers of drinks and subtracting the hours, knowing the equation was reducing their chances of staying for as long as possible and still driving home safely, that is without being stopped and breathalysed out on the highway.
    None of this Underbelly drama, no big music. Just a cop sitting there under a tree, seatbelt still on, chomping through a packet of crisps like a man waiting for the last tick in his numbers book.
    Angus has just gone off to talk with Stan and the two of them are leaning on the verandah posts staring in a comfortable old friends manner out across the valley where darkness is filling in the eerie paleness between trees. When Jasmin walks up to say she is leaving and thanks and all that, Stan’s two children run to them, all excited and wordy and blonde. Their small faces look tender and flushed.
    They are beautiful boys you have, Jasmin says, though she makes it sound off-hand. Then embarrassed.
    Stan steps towards her and places his hands on her shoulders.
    You can have some just like them, if you want. And he laughs, delighted, though she can tell it’s a line he might use whenever a woman gazes at the kids.
    Um, no thanks, Stan, not tonight. Got some washing to do. Embarrassed for him this time.
    My beautiful genes?
    Naff off, she does say, they get it from their mother.
    If you change your mind, Jasmin, adds Stan, I mean, there’s more where they came from.
    And he even grabs his crotch. At least it isn’t hers.
    Jasmin.
    Angus nods his head to indicate she move away with him. After a pause, she does. They walk downstairs again, into the quiet, where Angus immediately apologises, obviously annoyed.
    Bloody Stan, he grunts.
    She says she is leaving anyway, not to worry about it. She has become used to men who don’t do sexual and sexist humour, men who changed their ways years earlier, or had never learnt. It is odd to encounter it again.
    Angus has grabbed a torch as they leave but instead of walking down to the cars he veers around to the back of the house.
    Um, Angus? My car’s this way…
    I want to show you something.
    Come on Angus. No, you’ve been talking about it all afternoon.
    Not… everything.
    Perhaps he is going to smooch. He guides her briskly almost pushing her outside then unexpectedly around to the back of the house.
    There’s a thump from inside the house, a toilet flushing. When he turns to the house he points above them.
    Because the house is darker we cut three skylights into the roof, see, there and there. Nice, aren’t they?
    At night she can see three glows on the roof, as if each bleb of glass had dropped intact from his finger-tips, and one over by the flue stack, where they constructed fitted lids which can be closed like the large shutters, and swung open again, manually in case of power outages, from the glass windows on the east side of