Free Waiting by Philip Salom Page B

retired he’s not writing his fucking memoir, no, (dickheads, bullshit artists) he’s the ageing tom in the yard. His eyes do most of the brawling for him but he does like to keep his action up from time to time, has to, a pity for any dumb bugger who misreads the invisible but stubborn signs of his lurking.
    There could, in thinner futures, on colder days, come a stand- off when a thigh muscle cramps or a shoulder slumps and that Sheriffy stance weakens a tad, just enough, to reveal pain no one has elbowed into him. Or someone will land a couple, that is, kick his shins out, see him drop. The Sheriff thinks as little as possible about the future but he knows it will come, damn it, fuck it. It’s time he worries about, and winter, the birds impossibly alive in the trees, how you never see dead ones anywhere, so what happens to them, where do birds go to die?
    So, he is rolling a spare cigarette, the paper shakes like feathers in the wind. Plumage but not much underneath. Had a parrot once, he did, he thinks, they live for bloody decades but pat them and there’s nothing there. They are empty fuckers, full of laughs. He almost lets a wet eye happen (or is it smoke from the rollie in his gob?) when he stares up into the gum trees along the median stretch, full of lunatics in green suits, blue suits, orange and red, their beady crazy eyes, birds full of lunacy and bluff. All the same there’s nothing in them. Parrot pie’s a friggin joke, for Christ’s sake, how many would you need? So he lodges the spare fag behind his ear to replace the one he’s smoking, turns inside and listens to the men talking, his being in every business his own man, as long as he is The Sheriff.
    He stands there. And that head of his like a bollard.
    Many hostel-dwellers self-medicate but only Tom self-allocates – that is, he takes upon himself small acts of goodness such as tilting the reekers: wheeling out their bulky green bins full of waste and the gaudy yellow-lids full of clink and rattle. Tom parks them on the kerb, their lid-lip-side facing out. A day later, he grabs the handle side and wheels them back in. Tom is the self-appointed caretaker of the bins, he even does the neighbouring houses and the set of flats nearby. Were it not for his unstated but actual stomach condition he would wheel out onto the pavement every rubbish bin in the street.
    This guy wants to go straight to heaven.
    Bins are better than suicide missions, let’s face it. And he can be seen doing it. And stay in one piece. When Tom returns he sits down in his room with Jesus’s door open and begins his latest act of self-righteousness: he starts clattering away on his strange, mechan­ical typewriter and because he is God’s man on deck he continues to keep his door open for all souls to have a chance to hear the sound of Christian charity. He is dedicating the rest of his life to volunteer work for the church and through this noble typing out, very slowly, of hymns and psalms and such-like, he is converting not water into wine but words into bumps onto pages for the finger-readers.
    The noise gets worse. He may be busy but St Tom is, all the same, waiting for Jesus. And who can say when He might come in. To bless Tom, very recognisable in his long Jesus beard and long Jesus hair, in fair copy of the Aryan print of Jesus he has nailed on his wall.
    So until then he has found this new trick to pay his way: he types out prayers and hymns on a noisy Braille typewriter, preparing the way of the Lord. This is new, this is probably why he has waited till everyone is nearby to get up to speed. Two finger speed, but Christian noise is good noise…
    Before Little can stop him Big swings their door open and stomps down the corridor to bang his big fist on Tom’s open door. From the doorway he tells Tom by Christ he’d better give it a rest. Noise is a bloody sin.
    Tom can’t resist this one and stops, looks up from his