Free Waiting by Philip Salom

indignation. They want the kill.
    Come to think of it, he’d better check through the details of his third-party insurance too. Make sure it’s up-to-date. Everything legal keeps changing but insurance liability is like taxes and death.
    Then someone is knocking at his front door.
    There haven’t been more than a dozen visitors in all the time he’s lived here. Not a salesman, surely? Angus gets up and wanders through the house to the front and opens the door.
    Surprise!
    Standing there is Jasmin and another woman.
    Hi! he says, dopily, shocked, and in a high voice, just to make it worse.
    Well, she laughs, aren’t you inviting us in? This is Sue, my friend from Uni. I told you about her at the party, remember, you said she was like jam.
    Well…
    I can tell you’re really pleased to see us.
    His heart has jumped into cliche. He realises how starved of female intimacy he is. Sue is shorter than Jasmin and rounder and is smiling at him – the two of them, smiling at him. He could hug them and keep them forever.
    They stay for a drink and they wander through his rental home, inspecting everything, including the bedroom, he notices, and when they are all sitting on the verandah Angus tells them about yesterday’s encounter with the crazy woman.
    They debate crazy, they are academics after all, but concede something close, like the woman is over the top self-centred? So Angus tells them (he tells them because his mind is so fixed on Jasmin he over-compensates and talks to Sue) about his mother.
    It is his mother who is the model for things self-centred, yet she is pessimistic. Is that a common double? The Mercedes woman kept reminding him of his mother, a Mediterranean version. He tells Jasmin and Sue how his mother went a bit hippie in middle age and once over that went very embarrassingly New Agey, the land of Me for her generation, and how after that she had lapsed into obesity and competitive bitterness.
    At least she wasn’t an alcoholic, he says.
    They drink to that, and Sue asks if she may, then lights up a cigarette.
    In his early 20s, Angus says, when he was house-sharing with two alarmingly dysfunctional psychologists, he had taken one of those silly Myers-Briggs personality tests. To their credit, The Two Shrinks, as he called them, did not take Mr and Ms M-B especially seriously. They said what a travesty it was to take the 400,000 or so words of Carl Jung and reduce them by omission to this limited and changeable so-called personality test. It was T20 cricket in duration but Test cricket in its chance of result.
    Well, Mr Work Boots, asks Jasmin, what did you come out of that as? What kind of man are we drinking with?
    Angus says he was labelled as an Extroverted Sensation Feeling type…
    The women look at him.
    Is that good? he asks.
    Yes and Sounds good, they answer, almost in unison.
    I thought I was more of an introvert. Look at me living alone up here.
    (Starved for company, he doesn’t add.)
    God knows what my mother would be. She is a Narcissist. Something I’ve missed, luckily.
    They do very well in the world if they are disciplined, says Sue.
    And in the corporate world, adds Jasmin, and in University administration!
    He tells them in more detail than necessary how the Two Shrinks were also a bit hippie-ish, how they smoked dope, all three of them, and with their friends, they played music and were all a bit bloody obvious. One of the shrinks suggested he make the most of his psychological typing, try more often to stand in the centre of the world, to feel the elements of him merge with the elements themselves. To feel this in his torso, his chakras, the other one said. Angus agrees, now, belatedly, now that the two embarrassing sets of advice have long faded, that he is in some sort of way a low-key pantheist… Perhaps he has waffled on for too long.
    The two women stand and thank him for the wine and tell him they have to get down to the plant nursery