Read Online Waiting by Philip Salom - Free Book Online

too much for Little. Medication can do wonders and Little was at first able to rise from it. Then Anxiety won. Never again such grand ideas, and sad that she’d had them in the first place, sadder then to see her inner teacher lost forever.
    Later, Big would emerge beside her, his faux-University old-style lecturer a kind of consolation, a warm inner room for words and pedagogical sounds without any of the disastrous faces of any, let alone other people’s children. Even in the street these faces just beginning to savour hormones and raw-ness scare her. They have no limits.
    She is all limits.
    Nor had her mother been one for praise. It spoils them, she used to say, in the plural of the plural, her only child merely one of a multitude, a generalisation. She herself suffered from that very syndrome – the syndrome of generalisation. A sufferer who cannot see the particular in others, in other situations, who sees in front of her a spreading collectiveness, the group the populace the race the species. Sadly not her own flesh and blood.
    And so, little does Little know: when her mother dies she will inherit not some but all, the lot, the residue, as they call it. Her mother in finding some extraordinary late style, not Beethovenish but fractured like quartets of guilt and money, shame and retri­bution, has decided enough is enough and the girl shall have the lot.
    She felt the bright sunlight and the warm air and overwhelming rush of relief to be free of it. The grace of her selfless self. Finally.
    All the family had stayed in South Australia, most of them in wretched Gawler, except for the two offspring, her own and her sister’s, the wicked witch’s boy, Angus, though he had left the state under some kind of cloud, some where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire kind of drama after the Adelaide hills bushfires. She can’t remember what.
    Then, now, next, she can’t keep it together.
    Who cares what happens next? As long as her daughter inherits she is at peace, her sins absolved. It is an epiphany, as she waits there is the blue light with the windows open and the nursing home verandah bathed in the bliss of final decisions, but looking more like starlings in full tweet among the crumbs and cars, their rooves of overheating metal in the carpark. All this, expanding into a new innocence in the sunny afternoon like heaven in her thoughts.

Angus
    Driving the bobcat is a big boy’s pleasure: its fast and fussy lifting and turning adds to the toy-like appearance, until you feel its working grunt, that heavy urgency of engines gouging through dirt or lifting and bearing large stones and rocks. It is manic but muscular. Each lift and slow roll as he wedges stones into the retaining wall fronting a small mansion. Rocks everywhere. A growling bobcat twisting and swivelling. In South Australia you find moss rocks, gloriously dark boulders with lichen and moss growths rooted in their surfaces. People pay a fortune for rocks. Well, they pay Angus a fortune for rocks.
    Everything is heavy on a job like this. The rate, the pay, the irksome waiting for materials, the badgering with councils… This plan he is implementing is close to being black-listed. Not, as it happens, yet. As for rocks, it would appear Melbourne has less moss and more granite. This, from a city built of colonial bluestone? – the cobbles the kerbs the capable walls? Whether kerbstone or churchstone, the same blue ageing, darkish grey to black.
    But in gardens there is also the illusion of weight. He may choose sandstone and slate and as long as it looks like a mountain-side it pays well by merely having volume and vastness. These stones bear no public weight but their own, and they do not wash away even though he insists on trickle irrigation, the most economical watering system and vital to prevent chlorinated water spoiling the stones. Sprinklers are deadly, worse, in some areas they are sourced from bore-water, they spray