Waiting by Philip Salom Page A

your chest. And so they found one. City real estate is burgeoning.
    Still, money before madness. The agent reckons their house will sell for way more than they imagined six months ago. It’s intoxicating to think of it.
    He looks at Tom for as long as he risks a silence.
    Sea change…! Tom has barely begun.
    Sort of, sort of. There is a… problem.
    Ah!
    The agent is worrying how to clear the um let’s be frank, Tom, off-putting sight of some of the men. Not your good self, Tom, but some of the… others.
    Ah! Pack off the riff raff during the auction! I’m with you.
    Days of inspection, you know, and the big day itself – of serious bidding.
    I’ll sort em out, Tom grins. No worries, mate. He is booming, and assuring: I’ll sort em. You’re talking about money.
    The retired look in the neighbour’s eye is as trusting as it’s possible to be under the circumstances. He laughs and goes back inside. What else can he hope for?
    And for all this, Tom still wears his hair long and lank. It hangs like the soft tree in the neighbour’s front yard.
    Being a man of his word as well as God’s word, he tells the house-lot something along the lines of next-door’s auction. He is naive enough to think they’ll do as suggested and not stand on rude display. No one can think that far ahead.
    Just keep a low profile can you, fellas? We owe it to the vendors.
    The what?
    The bloody vendors, our neighbours who are selling and who want the best price. Think how much money they’ll lose if you berks stand outside looking like the neighbours from hell.
    The entire idea of money is not something they think about long-term. They are the house of short-term. Money calls out like a sad person. They know this. Like a left-hand thread in a right-hand world, like a desolate Tourettie in the street when the good­will has flown and fuck and shit words go round and round in their pain.
    Money. In the rooming house money is a stranger. Pay them off and consider it well spent, it could save tens of bloody thousands. Tom heard the sound of money first. Never one to be left out of the loop, out of the loop (he liked the sound of it).
    When Tom had moved in, arrived, as he thought of it, vaguely Biblical, vaguely special, he walked slowly up their side of the street tapping each gateway and front fence of each house and each block of flats, slowly tap tap stop tap tap stop (for the sound of it). Until he knew everything was in order. That the neighbours houses were properly numerical.
    And the neighbours knew here was another nutter.
    So Tom sounds sane and prays sane but he is not sane at all.
    He insists the boarders know all the details of the street-goss and house-sales he can wring from the neighbourhood. If they miss or forgot it themselves it hardly matters because he will tell them again the next day and the next. You get the picture. Until he has new news Tom keeps telling the old.
    Money in hand, he says. It’s what any re-tired people need, and I mean tired, have you looked at them, they make me look like a young lad all daydreams and getupandgo. Nah, I’ve talked to them. They’re going off to die on the coast or the countryside.
    They’re not elephants, mate, says The Sheriff.
    No, I mean it. Not the best way of putting it perhaps but there you can’t have any worries if you’ve got a bit a land in a quiet spot on the edge of town down south somewhere. Like a bit myself. Prices haven’t gone up in rural places like they have here.
    Their neighbours are good and tolerant people who have run dry.
    During this next door talk Big and Little have been quiet. They have been quiet because they hold in their odd hearts a strange waiting, or is it a fear, held down and sat on? Sharing the sale of Little’s mother’s old house in an expensive Adelaide suburb. Sharing with her mother’s sisters, or being left the house outright. Her mother has hinted at