The Returns

by Philip Salom

  But the problem of establishing the shop has nothing to do with where people stand or where books are located, only which books are there at all. If Trevor is confident there are good readers, he is also confident of this: good books are always changing, and give more. A good reader, he said to his accountant, is flexible and finds more, good and bad, in every book, good and bad. Uptight readers read everything the same. The trick is to provide for both.

  The accountant sucked lemony air from this. His books are binary – they are simply good or bad.

  Customers will gather in front of self-help shelves like groupies. It does something to their breathing. Breathe, stop, sigh, breathe, pause … Trevor stocks these books not because he believes they help people change but because they have the biggest miracle you can sell – placebo effect. They become addictive. Like naughty books, except as clean books about naughty thoughts. Not for him, though. Too much reason – or unreason – disturbs him. His own tendency is to abundance and eclecticism and a kind of demented largesse – his mind is too wide, too catholic.

  Trevor is a wide man.

  In the narrow room behind the bookshop a kettle shrieks. It is a soprano and he is a bass. The highest he reaches is for the leaf tea on the shelf. He spoons out a generous serve, empties the rough-cut black tea into a coffee infuser and fills the glass with water, then balances the plunger in the un-plunged position. He reseals the jar of leaves and lifts it back into position on the shelf, placing it exactly where it had been. A habit. He places the spoon beside the kettle as he always does. He is as orderly as a single conventional sentence.

  Like anyone with minor addictions, he considers them habits. He cannot smoke inside the shop, he cannot smoke outside the shop, and he shouldn’t smoke at all if his customers, when they arrive, are to be free of his smoky-stuffy clothing near them. People are so judgemental.

  Yet here he is now, standing outside, drinking from his mug and having a cigarette. He is admiring his new chalkboard sign on the pavement outside the shop. It reads:

  Knausgård is fascinating even when he’s boring.

  A woman in her early 20s, tending roundish, olive-skinned, with a dramatic face, is peering at the display of books in the front window. Eventually she looks up at him.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, and indicates the front door with his mug hand. ‘Can I recommend you a book, or is there something in particular …? Family sagas, latest fiction, Marxist theory?’ (It is student territory, he sells more of those than the jeweller next door sells jewels.)

  Inclining his head in a dated gentlemanly way.

  Her make-up startles. Her eyes shine. But not at him.

  ‘It’s this memoir,’ she says, pointing to it. ‘I read it recently and I totally love it. I’m recommending it to everyone I know. It changed my life. After I’d finished crying I realised I had to make up to my family. And turn vegan.’

  ‘The power of literature is always surprising,’ he smiles, drawing on his cigarette. ‘And did you?’

  ‘Did I …?’

  ‘Change your life, go vegan.’

  ‘I did, I did. It was the best thing I’ve ever done. Books are so totally true.’

  ‘Well, true, um. You didn’t buy it here?’

  ‘No, no, I bought it online.’

  ‘You should definitely see our shelf of memoirs,’ he says, stubbing his ciggie and then opening the door. Thinking that our is a bit much, which he only said because online is worse.

  ‘One shelf of books,’ he adds, ‘and whole new ways of life are there for the taking. I have life stories here you wouldn’t believe.’

  Meaning she probably would. She’s one of the elect. She knows reading is a gift unlike any other, and she lives it. Other people might live in money. And regarding money a real estate man once told him bookshelves in houses lower the asking price. All that wasted space. Before Trevor could say anything the man asked, How often have you been in someone’s house and not seen a single book? (Cookbooks not included.)

  As the two of them stand outside the shop, the strongly seductive smell of roasting coffee beans drifts over from the auction rooms. Ambience. Cars, trams, pedestrians and the ever-present aroma of coffee beans.

  Trevor tries imagining a world where anything that moves us changes us.

  The woman moves in close behind him and he waves his hand towards the Memoir section, every bookshop’s second biggest seller. Fame, celebrity, anything about celebrities. Every inspiring truth – and illusion – under the sun. For non-readers it has strangely slipped into reality TV, the reality swap that takes a healthy mind and undignifies it.

  The stepladder is in her way so he places it under the section on Home Improvements. People love this section, too: they sigh and frown and think about TV shows like The Block and Grand Designs and how life will be shiny and new once they’ve renovated it. Then they proceed to wreck the little that worked and never finish the job.

  He watches the woman turn several books to the back cover and read before replacing them and wondering which. She consults her iPhone, looking perhaps for email. Or what to do next. If she moves towards the door he will make a recommendation. It pays to realise: many people do not read their purchases to the end, and surprisingly many don’t even distress the pages beyond 100.

  To explain his sign, he relates the outrageous success of Karl Ove Knausgård whose novels have sold millions even though one of his books burdens the hand at 1000 pages. His epic My Struggle is in six volumes, nearly 4000 pages. She hasn’t heard of him. Trevor says he watched the author speaking on British TV. At a bookshop. He tells her the author is a lanky and likeable self-deprecating man who exposes endless, humiliating personal details. His books are a 100 per cent energetic monologue with grabs of dialogue. He admits to being a cry-baby and a masturbator and a dud in bed. It’s crazy: an author who bullies himself until readers adore him. ‘I think,’ says Trevor, ‘his teeth are made of the same stuff as Richard Branson’s.’

  She is only briefly alarmed. She purchases a copy of Knausgård’s A Death in the Family. Why not? It lies ahead for everyone. She offers her card to his cordless Eftpos machine, they exchange her receipt and a final moment of talk. He hopes she enjoys it and becomes a happy customer. She says she’s sure it’s true. She pulls her hair back and up and ties a band around it, says her name is Kathy. As she leaves, her smile undoes him. Sometimes the simplest of things are absolute.

  Except she turns back and stands in front of him, feels as if she is expanding. She realises he is smiling at her, is waiting, so she begins.

  She was older, her siblings were much younger and her father was a butcher. He worked every morning in the abattoir and spent afternoons in the shop. Her mother ran the shop, and even played the stereotype: the jovial, jokey, extroverted bloke who sells chops and sausages to the ladies. Her mother was funny, whereas her father was silent, almost passive, but he slaughtered the animals. He did all the boning work, wearing a steel-mesh glove on his left hand, and the sweaty suffocating glove made his fingers and fingernails grotesque, soft and wet. They were like toe infections. She began to find this physically repulsive. She dreamt his hand had changed into dry rot like the wood under houses. In her teens she realised she was ashamed of both parents: she had become obsessed with celebrities and glamour and the beautiful people. Except she was trapped with the weirdly back-to-front parents, the blokey mother and the half soft animal-killer father. The silent children. After some ugly arguments, her own doing, she left home. They were heartbroken. Anyway, the book, the memoir she read, was about a woman who scorned her own family and finally, after years of shame and guilt, reconciled with them. The author said she had to do one thing for the family and one thing for herself. What she did, in turn, this shining, now teary woman standing in Trevor’s gaze, was apologise to her parents and her brother and sister, and never again eat meat. She accepted them and released herself from them. Properly.

  Assuming she has finished, Trevor smiles.

&nb
sp; She lifts her right hand with the book in it, looking suggestively like swearing an oath.

  ‘A few days later,’ she continues, ‘my mother rang me. She said my father’s hand was changing. It was healing, after all those years. Can you imagine, by the end of the week his hand was normal. Whatever he had wasn’t natural, something was wrong. And now … it was cured.’

  (Well, thinks Trevor, that sure beats placebo.)

  ‘Thank you,’ says the woman, ‘for listening. You know everyone has a story inside them.’

  ‘It has elements of the Brothers Grimm,’ he adds.

  ‘No, it’s …’ Then she smiles, shakes her head and leaves.

  Bookselling day in and day out is not what he expected. It is more like dreaming of love and waking on the wrong side of the road. Then stumbling back. A bookseller is not a stranger, but a familiar. There are strange sounds. Just now he isn’t sure if the shop is lit up or sinking into shadow, whether he has been elevated or embarrassed. Just briefly, he leans forwards onto the counter and holds his head in his hands.

  Some shops put a cat in the front window. Maybe he should even have cats on the shelves. Everyone loves cats. Unlike dogs, who beg to go outside, cats and reading go together. Or, yes, sell bloody coffee. Gather a single-origin crowd. Where’s this book from? The northeast coast of South America. Guyana. Wow, it smells great.

  His accountant simply wants results. His only question to Trevor: ‘Why would a public servant sitting on a firm salary (no innuendo intended) quit to … be a bookseller?’ To this only question Trevor gave an only answer: ‘It was change or die.’ This was met with silence. The accountant is a finger tapper, unless he hears the money coming in – and then he grins. I believe you up to a point, his tapping says, and absolutely, say his grins.

  Anyway, no one pays an accountant to be a wit.

  Trevor told him the money could go into a shaky share portfolio, and he knows nothing about shares except how financial managers diddle their clients over them, or into a slow-running-profit-and-low-tax business like a bookshop. He will never lose the shop like a share fiasco. 2008? The shop is a good investment, meaning it costs less than expected. Then he can get on with his real passion: art. Painting. Talk of literature and painting makes no sense in the greatly indifferent land of accounting – where the only book is the one of red and black.

  Painting? (This time the accountant had laughed.) ‘Well, you won’t need me for that. I only deal with money.’

  The truth is, the money that changed Trevor’s life was not his superannuation. The shop was funded from the substantial estate of his long-disappeared father. Real money in sober bonds, not capricious shares. His father, a self-regarding man who made a fuss every day of his life then was never seen again and who, after three silent decades, was finally declared dead. If he’d been famous his disappearance would have been a legend. But he wasn’t. All he left was money. For Trevor, no ordinary money, but that shameful inheritance money no one refuses yet everyone is cagey about receiving.

  Gifts never come clean from the gods, they have repercussions.

  Trevor is watching the TV news, a large glass more than half full of shiraz in his left hand, the remote in his right, and his mind holding less than either. Diana still not home. The meal still not cooked. He is the cook.

  Budget time. Wincing at their statements: conservative governments hate giving money to people who aren’t doing well in life. The Treasurer’s breathless logic. The people at the bottom should help the bottom line.

  Something bangs outside on the street. A dog begins barking and Trevor stands up to see why. There is nothing obvious on the road or pavement nor in the buildings opposite, other than above their roofs the stupid observation wheel at Docklands is colour-lit like a kitschy glass bowl from the ’60s. Its patterns change silently in sequence. A dumb chameleon.

  Trevor should cook dinner. Put gentle food in the grouchy stomach. Habits must be fed. Instead he watches a story showing vaguely river-type scenes and the tiresome dialogue between the studio and the riverbank. ‘What is the latest from this finding, Graham?’ ‘Well, Peter, the police have found a body or, more correctly, several parts of a body, assuming the parts were from the same person. The arm or leg is tattooed.’

  Christ, thinks Trevor. So much for the afterlife.

  He has no tattoos to be identified with. It isn’t this that makes him stare into his red wine for a while. The things that come back on the tide. How to identify a failed marriage? It’s obviously not a forensic problem identifying the difference between an arm and a leg and a battered head, just the person involved. Wounds. In the news it’s whoever sat under the ink-gun. To cap if off:

  ‘Their teeth, Graham?’

  ‘No teeth, Peter.’

  This puts him off thoughts of food. He sits on the lounge thinking of Diana and for more reasons than the dietary his empty stomach continues to be unhappy. Their marriage is over.

  Eventually Diana answers her mobile.

  ‘Where are you?’ Trevor is asking, a very long way off.

  ‘I’m at a pub having a drink with workmates.’

  ‘Again. Why are you doing that?’

  ‘Because that’s what workmates do. You wouldn’t know, sitting by yourself all day in the dark like a book. Like dust on a bookshelf!’ she laughs.

  ‘Are you trying to be poetic or is that an insult slipping out?’

  ‘Make of it what you will,’ she says, her consonants sluggish. ‘Bookman. You’re an antisocial, angry sort of … boring man.’

  ‘Well, books aren’t boring, so what or who … is boring me, eh?’

  She hangs up. The mobile version of. …

  From the balcony Trevor can see three then four cars driving up the street. They look ominous in some ridiculous way, a cavalcade, a cortege, a gang … as the first car jerks over the speed hump its headlights flash blueish-white. Xenon bulbs, he thinks. He imagines wearing a black suit, sitting alone in the back seat looking out at the houses and apartments, the day over and, later that night, something terminal yet to come. He turns to face forward. The driver is a head-and-shoulders target at the range.

  A minute later the street is empty again.

  Inside the spare room, fortunately large, he is working on a metre-square painting. He is gluing photo images from a magazine onto a square canvas. The left half satisfies him, not yet the right. The gouache he then paints onto them shimmers at first, the surface providing no grip. Eventually enough paint dries and thickens, and his smudging and colouring lift and subdue areas of the given images until he finds the random, then controlled meanings he wants. Highlighting, and obscuring. Noticing, and ignoring.

  Like not noticing the single bed on the other side of the room. Trying, anyway.

  Later still, his mobile buzzes. Diana. He volunteers to pick her up from the city (insists, more like) after she has missed the last tram and would otherwise rely on a cab, expensively, or a male friend from the group she had been with. So he pockets his keys and leaves.

  Given the hour is late, and the streets are darker than usual from the last hour’s heavy rain, it might seem normal there is no conversation between them in the car. Just two people driving home after her night out. The air is winey but without poetry.

  So when something flashing from the left side of the street hits them with a dull bang the two of them are alarmed. A howl is it, or a shriek? It could be a child, a drunk (Jesus, how much has he drunk?), it could be … he has struck and probably injured someone. Trevor pulls over to the kerb, then runs back to where it might be. Rain falls over his face and he keeps wiping it clear of his eyes to see better. Nothing.

  Behind him he hears the car door thump shut. He walks across to the vehicles parked on the other side of the road in case the impact has … Heart slowing, his clothes rapidly becoming sodden, and half blinded by the constant rain on his face, he hears a whimper. Jesus, it’s a dog, he has hit a dog. A light tan golden retriever or some such breed, the kind
one associates with the open fire and the kids, the carpet glowing, happiness all round, not soaked and bloody in a gutter running with stormwater.

  The dog has a tag with his name and address: Adam, 37 Harcourt St. This is Harcourt St. so Trevor searches for numbers on the side he was driving. No. 37 is where? – he stares at a letterbox seeing even numbers – but of course it has to be the other side of the street – panicked, the dog was running home. Just then his mobile rings. Who could it be at this hour?

  ‘Trevor, are you coming back to the car or do I drive myself home?’

  He looks down at the dog, its eyes are open, it is breathing, he looks down at his shirtfront dark with water still dripping from his pate and his forehead onto the dog’s coat, the street surface bubbling with rainwater and wet leaves. It cannot stand. A feeling of hopelessness comes over him.

  Should he pick up the dog? Or knock on their door first? What if the dog, if Adam the dog, tries to get up and escape from him? What should he do? In what order? Still undecided until he realises No. 35 is visible from the streetlight so he picks up the dog, carefully, holds it with its spine as straight as possible and carries it across to the house and knocks on the door of 37 with his foot. Then again, for longer, kicking the door, the poor animal in his arms. A man comes to the door looking obviously wary. Trevor explains as quickly as possible and the man, frowning and angry, stares down at the dog.

  ‘It’s my daughter’s dog,’ he says. ‘She isn’t here.’

  They see a car in the street U-turn and approach then stop beside them. It is Diana. Tooting him. But they ignore her even as she is watching them and shouting out that if he doesn’t fucking well hurry up, pissed or not pissed, she will drive home.

  ‘Christ, is that ya missus?’ says the man. ‘She’s gotta lotta heart.’

  She has her reasons, says Trevor. Then realises he hasn’t said anything at all.

  She won’t drive off, though, he knows that. Nothing to do with being half pissed. She hates driving. He knows why she will stay in the car. She imagines the animal is dead. He passes the animal across to the man. It is alive. The man shuts the door.