Waiting Read Online Free PDF Page B

Aryan-style blue-eyed picture of Jesus nailed to the wall. His own eyes are brown. Tom who has been born-again so thoroughly he’d make up whole footie teams of Jesuses (as The Sheriff said, who barracks for a different team). Tom accepts that as the compliment it isn’t. The rest of the occupants play for the team that has no name.
    Some rooming houses are worse than others. Many are just tolerable, halfway from the working-world and a quarter of the way from bedlam. Some are hell-holes, that other team The Sheriff knows all about but protects this house from, or so he imagines; while it is tolerable, this rooming house remains an underworld open to men and women but mainly caters to troubled men the nineteenth century (Big said this) called down on their luck and the twenty-first calls losers. A useage without moral upliftingness. And only The Sheriff at the door smoking his hourly cigarette comes close to a counterforce. Good on him for being there, their self-appointed sheriff. There is something hard about him. Pentridge most likely.
    The Sheriff looks at the world like this:
    Two types I can’t take. Good lookers and these skinny friggin emos. Good lookers need the paint knocked off ‘em, he says. As for those wussy little emos… if they get on the wrong side of me I’ll turn ‘em into organ donors.
    Probably, he hasn’t, but plainly he would like to. You do not argue with The Sheriff. You can see he is just waiting for it. Short, shaved hair rising (just) on the sides, his head is a bollard, and his face is tanned from real sunlight, and the muscles all over him are stringier now than years before. Stringier. A handsome but hard face, or scary but fair is perhaps the better way of putting it.
    Down in the shade behind him are the winos and junkies, the addicts, active or inactive, the so-called personality disorders, the divorced who were never truly married, the dispossessed who were never in possession, and others who are lost from the sane or the compulsory world, the compulsory, not cheaty or loser-ish, though liver-ish, and sad. Sometimes there’s an overdose of something chemical, which might be existential or in injectable form. Mostly they come and go. The building is dug in below ground level, its basement a descending layer of single rooms, and down there, more than merely lost, are the very lost. They have given up waiting.
    Like young Mister Tourette’s among them, who crashes on a filthy mattress in a back room most nights, wakes at uncertain times on uncertain nights, and stumbles out to the street with were­wolfishness shouting out of him fucken fucken and cunt and fucken cunts and fucken shits shits arse fuck. The fouler words they are the more his mouth likes them. Out on the median strip under trees and streetlights glowing orange, his poor nervous system is given a volume lost and found in amplification, from hissing to outright barking. It washes his mouth in a gasm of swearing.
    It is not romantic. The neighbours if not understanding are at least tolerant and in saying nothing are speaking volumes for his poor buggeration. Tourie, the inmates call him.
    Tourie come inside!
    In front of the television something quietens the axons and neurons, and his poor, clichéd synapses from going like the clichéd cicadas out there in Australian poetry…
    At the rooming house they come and go. Someone called it the House of Broken Teeth. A weird family. Happy family, it’s hard to say, as they often don’t know each other. Stayers cop a nick-name, like St Thomas and The Sheriff and, of course, Big & Little. And poor Sammy who is dim, no meat in his sandwich, and all the others you read about. Some like extras from Awakenings, slumped in the catatonia of encephalitus lethargica, starting up only when the St Vinnies chicks arive with warm food and thermoses and ooo arrhh their very happy bodies. Otherwise, this village of theirs inside its four walls moves