Corner walked down the hill to The Castle. Black was outside on the cement driveway entrance with the Balloonettes in the sun.

Corner wanted something.

Black was himself wondering what he should do about the day. He looked straight up at the sun.

“Oink,” Corner announced. Hardly customary. “Oink,” rejoindered Black and added an oink. “Oink!”  To be fair. To be fair, Corner needed to be given a lot of field. He wouldn’t get it if Black was suddenly off the jokes. Like a lot of night club operators and day-time saloon frequenters, Black was good for the jokes. Corner was an isolate.

“Seen the other boys much?” This was Corner at his best. Corner was a drama queen short of a John Paul Young. Mind you he had one in the old vinyl record hold-all at his mother’s place. Love is in the Air. “Mind if we go in?” he enquired looking meaningfully at Black. They went to school together.

“Naah,” stretched Black and uncurled from where he had dropped into a half-crouch position with his arms resting lightly over his blue denim knees.

“Those jeans aren’t tight,” laughed Corner. Black growled and laughed an easy laugh. “You never can resist, Corner,” he said, stretched, scratched and yawned. “They’re spray-on these days. Left me short a week’s.” He followed Corner through the entrance to the house. The bare wooden boards without any treatment and no finish on their surface to make a conventional floor looked like a consignment of recycled and untreated timber. Freshly delivered and stacked dusty. The sound they gave off when walked over was a strangely comforting subdued tread. Evidence the plain room, empty other than for a couch, had begun with considered design. Love. Money. “Get on with it. You here because you’re a space or here because you want something to do. You can get these girls who live here some help. Dunno what you blokes do.” Black, lean and tense could look pretty well annoyed when he was useful and he flushed angry. It was all a game.

Corner saw the keg and acknowledged it by walking over to it and giving it a slap. ‘Nice to see you fellers are into the good stuff, eh?” Here was ritual. “Do y’want a taste,” scowled Black. “I’ll get you a glass. Spose y’re gonna tell me y’re on the day.”

“I’m on.”

A women’s voice, tired, slurred and floated in a whine from somewhere above them. “You black egg, don’ give arse sucker any of piss.”

Black ignored the directive. “C’mon,” and he got a glass off the bench that was covered in a towel and on it a batch of clean glasses from various hotels. “You don’t want one of these?”

He poured the glass full to its top and, extending his tongue out of his opened mouth, licked the rim in a seductive circle like a lover offering the first challenge of a new partner, never taking his eyes off Corner.

“Pffftt, not me, is the woman here?”

“Who and why? Dammit, don’t… .” Black was looking as if he would reach out and take hold of Corner like a wriggling piglet and carry him outside around the belly. Black never looked threatening to anybody other than his enemies.

Corner responded quickly and stepped backwards towards the door he had entered the premises through. “The woman with the Australian accent.”

Black was on the tips of his toes and moving almost like a cat when a cat scampers sideways in war play. His legs were stiffened in a manner he adopted to sustain his athletic balance and momentum in a challenge directly aimed at the man who had become, again, his adversary. “Why!” he demanded, startling, his face suffused with the characteristic black of the experience of his rage. “You don’t want to make any mistakes, Simon.”

Corner had exited the door and was on his way off the property. He was no equal to Black. He hesitated, eyeing the Balloonettes. The young women giggled. One was braiding another’s hair. The third painted their client’s fingernails on a hand extended at flat rest on a river rock. Where the women had moved to sit cross-legged by it on the ground. They had been able from there to witness something of what happened in the house when Corner and Black had gone inside.

“Come back here,” demanded Black. He was taking off his silver skull ring and sliding it with one hand flattened into the fob pocket of his jeans. Corner whirled. “Keep your hair on, Black” he managed to hiss in time as his opponent drew close enough to hit him, “She telephoned the Station she left that black leather coat in a phone booth.” Black pulled up sharp. He rested back at ease on the heels of his sneakers,

“Whaa, man? O, you’re a sleaze. Phone booth. Why didn’t you say so. She’ll be looking for that. Gee, that was stupid. Here. Give me your details so I can get her to ring you. Geez, you should say.”

“Don’t worry, Black, it was you I came to see. She knows where we are. You know she knows where we all are.”  He smirked, cocky again. “That’s all, but tell her I came to see her.”

Black didn’t say anything. He was surrounded by the women and fussed to join them by the rock so he could braid the hairdresser’s hair. Corner swung the height of the drive. He had a distinctive lope.

“What would you be?” Siratha, the talented beauty artist now having her hair braided asked Black. She had sat as pretty as a picture on the rock and was still. “What would you be if you had not been… what you are?”

“When I went to Sydney I was running that brothel in a week, it was when I first realised what I wanted to really be. It doesn’t matter now. Give me the band. Here. Have mine. I never got around to it. Business. I was only 16. It doesn’t matter.”

Siratha stood and faced Black where the sun was a rivulet of sheening over the face of the bodice of her gown. Tiny metallic trinkets sewn by her into the fabric played at the sun. She lifted the hem of her skirt and extended it in a drape as a dancer would to make a curtsey. She bobbed. Straightened. “Say what would someone be if… they weren’t a bank robber,” she giggled in a rush of infectious laugh and stood closer in response to being waved by Black to him so he could tidy a strand of hair. “I will tell you as long as you don’t laugh,” he said, grave. He stepped back.

“I won’t laugh,” she giggled, and he frowned so she stopped.

“A florist. I would have liked to have been a florist. That seems to me to be a perfect, lovely way to make a living.” The pealing laughter of the three women as they scampered and rolled on the excavation dirt to collect it in their hair and rough house each other as they rolled caught an eventual echo that was returned them by their play. They lay entwined sharing the liberation of their philosophy and the warmth of the earth on their skin and in the dirt in their hair. Black had left to go to the shop.

Sandshoe

21/11/10