by Philip Salom
‘The neighbour is a fuckwit,’ she explains, which is not council internet or telephone terminology. The man is a bully. He is standing there now, eyeballing her from her own fence-line. What can she do if he insists on building the fence then billing her for the bigger half? (‘That’s an ironic joke,’ she explains.) The man is scary and aggressive, and she thinks he won’t fix the fence at all (his solution to the problem so far) after having pulled the bloody thing down. Then what does she do?
‘Like I said,’ says the voice …
Elizabeth’s face is what one might call strong. The cheekbones, the full lips, the way her head is held (her mother going on about good posture, and her early gymnastics training) and the confidence this signifies. Some people prefer women who are manly rather than pretty. Even with her big glasses and vague degree of make-up she has a face that attracts attention. If she were to speak at a meeting. If she stood. If she had a Facebook page. Likes arriving every time she changed her profile picture.
Except she doesn’t believe in this stuff any more than her mother’s religiosity, and she knows how they are related. Privacy is her friend and it plays hard, stubbornly, as private people know. She listens to the secrets others have, the editor privy to an author’s early and less disguised imaginings. Her mind, so free to relax, is also free to stew on things, yes, to dwell as her mother says.
The man has disappeared. If only he stayed that way.
She finishes the call and sits down to humph. This she does by staring into her bookcase for solace. The bookshelves were made by her father and have absolutely no more religious affiliation than he did. They cover an entire wall of her lounge room. Her father liked to read, though, unusually for a carpenter, and this was another bond between them. He would have sorted out the guy at the back fence.
The novel she is editing is mercifully removed from daily reality. It centres on two eccentric characters called Berra and Box. Berra and Box are voices without bodies or careers and, to be honest at this stage of her reading, page 57, no identifiable gender. Berra and Bex worry about food. They laugh about men. They cry over TV series. They are wordy voices without apparent occupation or physical representation in the world, thus the anonymous archetypal feel of Berra and Box, regardless of a vernacular that is ribald and barely middle-class. She notes in the margin: They sound suspiciously like voices derived from Samuel Beckett.
It has struck her before that un-gendered names and voices are suggestive of the male, not only through male as a default but also from their lack of gender-specific conversation and exchange, something more likely with women. Their conviviality, their shared emotions. Food concerns in a text are not really man talk. There is something female and enlivening and very un-literary about food talk, something like a happy neurosis which connects people.
Berra and Box are not very real, they are schemata like much else in literature and this, conceptualising it thus, satisfies her. They are embodied in words she can recognise because she recognises their characters not their faces. There is no possibility of meeting in the street or at a social event where Elizabeth will almost certainly blank out and embarrass herself and offend them. B and B, she is already convinced, are a lesbian couple with close-cut, whitebleached hair.
Alongside the food-talk para, Elizabeth writes a question in the margin regarding gender. Just in case the author is unaware. Editing like this fills her with a double version of the present tense. Sometimes she feels double as a consciousness, as if her dreams live on during the day.
Sometimes she wakes and there she is sitting, editing, at her desk. Oh, she thinks, Here I am, the world is happening, life goes on. Then continues reading.
For the next three hours Elizabeth stays with the manuscript. No lunch. Until B and B get onto end-of-life thoughts and Elizabeth is sent veering back to her ridiculous mother and her euthanasia talk. She can’t unhear it, even though she knows her mother will forget about it within a few weeks. During her publican years her mother decided she was an astrologer. Talking Pisces and pouring pints. How could she? But, like the sannyasin she had been, she treated the eating body as the temple. No alcohol! Decades of vegetarianism.
Elizabeth walks into her back garden to light up an evil ciggie. Relief, the neighbour man isn’t to be seen. Her backyard is brightly lit by afternoon sun whereas the neighbour’s yard is as dark as a bat cave. It is always dark on his side. There is nothing colourful, nothing that looks alive, just a tree with black limbs hanging low over the space between the broken fence and the back wall of his house. Sometimes she hears children, followed by the sound of him shouting.
She is standing out there in her garden. Above her she can sense the weather changing.
One cigarette. As a uni student she supplemented her diet with cigarettes. Her diet was black coffee, fruit and vegetables. In that order. Her mother had tried years earlier to make her a vegan. Her diet was performed as a morality test. It never occurred to Elizabeth until years later when she became gluttonous then bulimic that her erratic then overly purist eating not only failed her body, it made her appallingly guilty. But she could not live out a vegan’s grainy strictures, its worthy lack of pleasure. All these years later when the Paleo diet hit the TV screens and magazines she leapt into the cave mouth. Besides, she had been slicing up fresh meat for Gordon all along. Nothing like putting the blade into something.
Yes, but then it went the other way. No grains at all? No legumes and pulses? No cheese! That isn’t eating, that’s getting paranoid. How can she live without ever again swooning eyes shut in bliss over indulgently buttery and salty mashed potato? Why are diets so joyless? Why do diets carry such impressive black holes? Still, as a parallel black hole, she can eat all she wants and it stays down.
Still, that fainting episode, how awful. Lizzie must be sickening for something, her grandmother used to say. Despite positive moods – she has recently thought of taking up running – she is ending her day tired and dull before mealtimes. Instead of yet another singular activity she has thought of something more social: and decided to sign up for the local choir.
From inside the car Elizabeth hears the roar of wind approaching through the trees, the closest trees swirling with it, until sudden hail volleys over the street and is striking hundreds of rooftops in cold swathes. The hail falls like a sheet of white atoms, a street-sized window breaking over everything. It scares her by its otherness, its unstoppable fury of white and bouncing everywhere. The car roof above her is deafening and dinting, her early-model car all sheet steel without soundproofing.
Hail is bouncing on the roofs and smacking against the windows hard enough to worry the glass.
And the traffic. She is blinded and in panic. Unable to clear her windscreen with the old Holden wipers clunking across and back, and dulled by the dark light, she veers to her left until she bangs into and bounces from the kerb, stalling the car. Just hopes it hasn’t blown the tyre.
The house numbers are just visible. The choirmaster’s place must be nearby.
Just then her rear window smashes in.
For Christ’s sake! She puts her hands over her face.
The street is speckled white and bouncing. Then she turns to see tiny cubes of glass falling onto the back seat and the clumpy hail collect among it and spread over the upholstery.
It being Melbourne, this storm of energy flails then finishes. Gone. A brief scattering of tiny hail returns for an echoing minute, a shifting afterthought as the sun cracks open the sky and the street shines in front of her car. Utterly amazing is all she can think, hard to believe how beautiful it looks.
Car roofs and bonnets will be dinted, one thing her steel panels will not be. She can see a smashed rear window like a fist-hole and feels a momentary sense of community. Not that it lasts long. There are geometrical shapes of glass crystallised on the pavement, cubist and shiny among the opaque balls of hail.
When the choirmaster opens his door she is standing there completely dry but looking drench
ed. The look on her face, the slump of her shoulders. Then again, Jackson the choirmaster is a nerd. He won’t have noticed. Even before she enters he is telling her what has happened here. The sky has fallen in. He was watching it all the time from his balcony. The Pastoral Symphony. He is wideeyed, still worried his windows were going to burst.
‘Mine did,’ she says.
They go both outside with his brush and pan and she leans into the back of her car and collects the loose glass. The pan full, she steps back out of the car and he surprises himself, actually comprehends her mute question, runs back inside then emerges with a double plastic bag. Nothing makes the job anything other than awkward, though saying Fucking hail seems helpful (she thinks swearing is cathartic).
The sopped-up damp is going to leave pale watermarks everywhere, depending on the salt content of the rain and the porosity of the old upholstery. Few people have ever sat in the back of her car. Gordon has vomited in it before, a suspect sausage or two sluicing out of his mouth onto the vinyl and sliding over the edge. To his great surprise. Who did that? It wasn’t him.
1965 rear window, what’s the bet it’ll cost! Is she insured by Shannon’s?
Back inside she resumes the purpose of her visit: he is Jackson, social choir- master, and she is signing up for his choir. Can she read music? She can. Has she sung in a choir before? She has. Can she sing longer passages unaccompanied? Only in the shower.
Will she be another guess-and-gasp style of singer always following the lead of someone who can? Each voice group needs at least two people who can actually sing, who lead in on cue, on correct pitch and who once started keep going. Elizabeth is an alto, like most women, but can also sing the tenor line so Jackson is glad she bothered to drive across town. ‘Tenors are always in short supply,’ he tells her, and most who claim to be tenors are mere whisperers.
Afterwards, when she fills in the form and writes down her email, she notices her handwriting is as shaky as the others on the list.
‘That hail,’ she says, ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. Absolutely frightening. Like being stuck inside a timpani tuned high. Do you, by any chance, have any aspirin?’
He does. She watches it fizz in the handsome square-based glass, its white particles and bubbles like gently reversing hail. She doesn’t drink it down until it has fully dissolved. Placebo choruses start playing in her brain.
On the way home she acknowledges that this is ‘Elizabeth’s next dabble’, the choir. That she may or may not continue. She tends to collect ventures, beginning with a rush then forgetting why she bothered. A book she had edited several months earlier made reference to The Dice Man, a big seller in the 1970s. US author Luke Rhinehart proposed a daring method of breaking through the repression and habits of your everyday self. Create six outrageous options every day, choose one by a throw of the dice, then do it. Elizabeth is not that stupid. She has, instead, decided to do two things. Take a lodger, again, to … help with the bills and, if she can just admit it, for some company? And join this choir. She knows Luke Rhinehart doesn’t even exist, the book was written by a novelist called … George Powers Cockcroft. Who ever heard of him?
With a name like that. Enough to make your day.
She finishes her day by dragging out the wheelie bin – along the side path, past the darkened porch, its front light defunct for weeks, through the front gate and then bang, setting it down behind her car. Time to stop and not think about anybloodything.
Over towards the city the blueish shadows are even and windowed yet a full moon has stalled and is pressing down on top of several tall buildings, their stems like pale asparagus.
P-T-S-D were four letters he hated. Leaving his government job provided Trevor with superannuation and sanity. Peace. He has set up a bookshop like his grandparents had. It skipped a generation – God knows what his over-emphatic father would have thought. Now he is attracted to easeful commerce. He leans back in a shop where the days pass as regularly as weather and as differently as weather but where the environment stays warm and well lit. He loves books. He loves the sitting as much as the reading. Sitting is the easiest thing in the world, but sitting and continuing to grow is more difficult.
As a business, that is. Judging from Trevor’s shape, he has done it literally. In the last year his waist has widened, his features become muffin-like. His face had been normal in his 20s: he had cheekbones. He is surrounded by shelves of books selling diets, and more diets but different diets, and torturous detoxes, and liver-flushing rituals or devices, even the appalling colonic irrigation, where the suckers sit on a sucker they will never forget. Not once has he practised any of these cures.
Curing what exactly? His life had stalled and doing more of a stalled life is a very ambiguous option. Many people take that option or, rather, avoid the worrying option of change. How do you cure that? By bringing a sudden but emphatic end to the years of running workshops and role-playing and talks about cultural (multi-)practices, prejudices and, worst of all, attempting to lead front-line men and women through this devastating trauma of the workplace. His main problem now is a bell.
When the next customer opens the shop door the bell tinkles. For weeks he thought he liked the tinkling sound of customers opening the door. Then, accustomed to it, he failed to hear it. Now it is becoming annoying. He pulls back the long drawer under his counter and removes a new screwdriver.
Leaving the door wide open, a man with a very long neck has entered and is staring at the walls, at central bookshelves, at the trendily designed covers of the latest fiction and non-fiction and usual bookshop books.
‘Fark me,’ he says, head jerking back on its stalk. He leans on the shop step-ladder then sees Trevor behind the counter and waves his arms at him.
‘Jesus Christ, what’s happened to the bloody shop? Cookery books!’
The man is frowning.
‘It’s a bookshop,’ says Trevor, walking over to him.
‘Yeah, but what happened to Jonesy? What the fuck is all this stuff? It’s looken like a fucken library.’
‘You know, it’s a funny thing: a bookshop is a shop that sells books.’
‘Ha ha, yeah, nah, it sort of was before too, but different sorta …’
The man has a throat like a turkey and swivels around in alarm.
‘Hey, what are ya doin’ with that fucken thing!?’
Trevor lifts the screwdriver as if surprised to be holding it. The man relaxes a bit.
‘Do you have any videos and DVDs? Nah, you don’t, I can tell. What happened to bloody Jonesy?’
‘I’m pretty sure he’s ash by now. On someone’s shelf.’
A few seconds before this sinks in. The man gapes.
‘Jesus, you mean he died and never told anyone? Farkin’ hell.’
The man turns around, bangs the door as he walks out and leans into a skinny, uphill kind of walk, even though the pavement is flat. Trevor watches him reach the lights and stop. Well, you can’t keep all the customers happy. He slides the stepladder under the door and aims the screwdriver up as if to draw blood. He unscrews the offending object and lobs it into the bin. He performs a test: the door opens with a faint clicking sound and shuts firmly.
Most customers do shut the door behind them. It’s a small shop and he thinks that quietens people down, library rules, especially if they walk in by themselves: in a small shop they are made selfconscious. Crowd control. Maybe book fans are better house-trained.
He has many theories now. He has the time for it in the long hours of waiting for customers, then watching customers, as they browse, as he asks them questions, noting how they ask him questions, how they talk about books, which books they want or do not want, how and when they read, and then these same customers leave without buying this, or that, or any other kind of bloody book.
There are supersellers, somewhere, who get into the minds of ordinary people and turn them into customers. Trevor is more the sort of man who puts his hands in his pockets. He is a man of loca
tion. It’s all in his head: he retains the title of any book and its location on the shelf. He remembers what a customer looked like and where they stood and what they asked for. His memory is freakishly retentive.
‘Yes, we have a copy of that,’ he says, then walks straight to the book. People are impressed, and impressed people are impulsive. Showing off pushes his sales. And yet his gift is that of a savant: uncanny accuracy without attachment to the actual book. He can find any book immediately but some customers notice he doesn’t follow through with details about said book. He’s a bluffer. He’s a fox not a hedgehog.
Otherwise, his mind sits in alert emptiness; is collective not analytical. He would be just as good in spare parts. When he was young he had worked in bookshops, so a bookshop it is. He is introverted but isn’t anxious and does not talk to himself excessively. He may be wrong about this.
The shop has a small rectangular floor plan. Shelved high up on both side walls. And dividing it from the front door to his counter at the rear is a large double-sided shelving stand which obscures the counter so no one entering can see him sitting behind the counter, nor he them. Except he can, he sees all from above – in the circular mirror perched near the ceiling like a shiny eagle. He sees them from the top of their heads down. They stand for hours, sometimes he thinks they stand there for days. He looks up and sees their hairstyles, their foreheads, their vertical standing selves. Their tiny feet.
The rear wall, behind the counter, is painted a rich dark blue. This colour, this blue, he considers his magic touch. He keeps the lights on above it so the wall is beautiful and harbour-deep like John Olsen’s mural of Five Bells around the Opera House. Trevor sits there with the light gleaming on his pate. He might almost be a Buddha figure, the effect one of warmth and welcome. People find themselves turning towards him and approaching his Eftpos machine.
A girl of about 5 is staring at him through the shop window. She tilts her head and he tilts his. Someone grabs her hand and pulls her sideways out of view.