by Philip Salom
The car’s engine still running.
The night, streetlight, rain.
The silent drive home. That in his thoughts he must face leaving and not avoid it through anguish and utter difficulty. He doesn’t even know how to leave.
Some people have firewalls in their minds which silence the drama, some dream stories anyone could interpret, and others wake to jagged imagery which taunts like an ugly schoolteacher. Trevor dreams of a dark room where several animals are calling out, some of them bleeding, some wet from no obvious injury, others hiding and whining, all of them distressed. It wakes him shaking and he cannot return to sleep. It isn’t a nightmare, he isn’t scared or disordered, what beats through like bad adrenaline is a kind of self-loathing. Anguish born of desertion. And the end of summer.
The following morning, he pauses under the awning as he opens the shop. The fainting woman’s handprints are still visible on the front window. The woman who never came back. He returns with a dampened tea towel and wipes at the prints. They resist. He wipes again. The prints are still there. He stares at them then goes back inside and ignores everything he possibly can.
From outside comes a terrible thump, another thump, glass falling onto the bitumen. Two cars crash without screeching tyres, without people screaming, into a parked car. If the car behind didn’t brake, it didn’t see the car in front. It can now. The car in front sees the parked car all too well.
Jesus, Trevor thinks, not again.
A radiator sighs. Water pools beneath the car and a rivulet heads off towards the gutter. This water is what bad luck looks like. Also what mobile-phone driving looks like. Until a few people gather there is stasis in the cars. Eventually one of the drivers shoves open his door. A black BMW. The prestige of the car and, by association, its owner is completely reduced by the absurd white airbag pressed against his face, and then pushed aside as he crouches and edges out. Other drivers are slowing to rubberneck speed. A few on mobiles go right past without noticing.
Two women, perhaps a mother and daughter, remain in their small white car, the older woman crying and the younger one shaking her head as if disentangling cobwebs. Her eyes, when she turns to stare at the onlookers, are huge. The BMW has tail-ended them.
A man all but canters into the bookshop and breathes out audibly. It makes Trevor think of stables. The man says there’s a bloody crash out there. Trevor nods and continues checking through his online lists. Crashes un-nerve him.
‘I mean that’s three cars in a row,’ the man insists, staring through the window.
‘The Beamer driver,’ he says, ‘looks like that shifty deputy-mayor bloke in Sydney. Auburn. Ex-, that is. You know, the Narcissistic idiot who stopped the traffic to hold his wedding.’
‘Well, this guy certainly stopped the traffic,’ says Trevor. ‘It’s a stupid intersection, it tricks drivers all the time. The number of minor prangs I’ve heard out there … and near misses when I’m crossing the street.’
‘But what about the lights?’
‘Drivers go straight through them. And I don’t use them. I have a jaywalking gene in me. Luckily there is some other kind of gene that allows drivers to miss me.’
Selling rule No. 1: don’t scare the customers. So Trevor asks the man what he is actually looking for. In the way of a book, that is. Or books.
The man wants to browse. Or recover.
Settling down into browsing does calm a person. Eventually, the man asks for The Hypochondriacs.
‘Ah,’ says Trevor, ‘great choice.’ The book is faintly medical or psychological but it’s also Schadenfreude, the famous are brought down to be laughed at. Still, who wants to read of ordinary old next-door neighbours turning their underwear inside out to protect against divils?
‘It’s not in stock,’ he adds. ‘But I can have it here in a week or so.’
‘I was worried it would be months.’
‘Ah, you see, you’re feeling better already. Placebo effect.’
It is possible the customer thinks the bookseller is strange.
Trevor steps outside to watch the aftermath of the accident. Drivers and cars, at least, are cause and effect. How sad and old the left-over debris seems, pieces of glass from high-tech halogen and xenon lights, bits of plastic bumper and other fragments scattered on the bitumen. They have no identity.
The police are taking statements: from the driver of the black BMW SUV, a man who for the sake of impressing them has pushed aside the airbag to retrieve and then wear his suit coat; and from the rather shattered women in the little white car which is seemingly without its boot, and looking more like a football, deflated. Crumple-zones may save lives, but they sure make a joke of a small car.
It’s true the driver looks like the crooked ex-deputy mayor of Auburn, Salim Mehajer. He is raising his voice, trying to be important. He is not behaving like the driver at fault, which in the case of one car driving up the back of another he surely is. From a distance it appears his expensive car and suit are making a claim – on that basis – to higher status and lesser culpability. He is complaining about his neck. He is over-groomed, with gelled black hair and shapely stubble, a young man whose trousers are too tight over his thighs and crotch and who wants everybody to see how unimpressed he is.
The parked car, a poor third, is deeply concave on its street side. It hadn’t been five minutes earlier. No one is shouting and swearing over this damage yet. They will be inside a shop, or posting a parcel, unaware.
There is a faint smell of petrol.
The policewoman makes soothing talk to the two women and they are relaxing somewhat, tears finished for the time being. A tow truck appears for their car. The big BMW is barely scratched but enough to infuriate the young man. It is the women who will check for possible whiplash, whose car needs repairing, leaving them carless for a week or more, whose vehicle will bear the signs of crash repair for those who know how to look. They will have to fight for insurance cover from the obnoxious other.
Not for the first time Trevor shudders over such damage. The idiots who cannot drive but can crash. Is it likely a car could career under the awning and into his front window? A car wedged halfway through the front wall, its bonnet covered with books, and the floor with glass all the way up to the counter.
One of the cops, the older bloke, closes his notebook and walks over to him.
‘Hey, don’t I know you?’
The past, in a police uniform. It feels as if someone has walked across a time zone. It makes Trevor feel freaky and sci-fi.
‘Yeah, I remember,’ says the cop. ‘Those groups you ran about the African kids and our not so bloody useful prejudices. Can’t say I’ve improved much, and it’s not from trying. It’s bloody difficult changing. As a cop you have to trust your instinct, and if someone tells you that instinct is wrong, I mean, whatdoya do?’
Trevor used to tell cops how prejudice masquerades as instinct. The cop hasn’t forgotten. He looks at the shop again. A bloody bookshop? It seems Trevor is one of the few who have changed: then again, he was never one of them. The cop gives him a thumbs up and turns away, before turning back.
‘Once it was idiot fucking drivers, and now it’s fucking idiots on their mobiles. Did you see it happen?’
Trevor says he heard it from inside. He had a customer, so he only came out a minute or two ago. The cop looks at the bookshop again and raises his eyebrows without comment.
Because Diana is a designer and works long hours he usually makes the evening meal. A simple standing pleasure after a day of sitting surrounded by ideas. Cooking became his hobby without him quite noticing. Which means he enjoys cooking the meals that in many houses are made grudgingly. Tonight he is three glasses into a bottle of shiraz. He keeps remembering the poor old dog, and the car smash outside the shop.
‘Hello honey,’ she calls, arriving home close to 9 pm, and then:
‘Trevor, open the windows, you’re stinking the place out.’
The house is filling with oven
fumes from the square of pork belly he is trying to crisp up. More to blame than his special spice rub is the smell of crackling and fat simmering into smoke on the tray under the meat. The end result will be excellent, he knows, the fatty meat and crunchy skin tasting of salt and Sichuan pepper. Ah, to have a house with a separate kitchen.
‘Jesus,’ she adds, winding open the windows near the table, ‘I should have come home much earlier or much later.’
‘Thank you for cooking dinner, darling,’ he says.
Diana is a medium-height woman with dark hair and brown eyes. Almost his favourite colour scheme in a woman. Right now she is scowling.
‘I had a shit of a day. Shit and more shit, bullies and idiots.’
She slumps into the lounge and looks as if she’s there for the rest of the week, then she stands and walks to the fridge and pulls out the bottle of wine left from two nights earlier, unplugs its vacuum seal and pours herself a large glass. Hers, not his, a pinot gris. She and he are similar and different: his wine red, her wine white; her figure roundish and his figure dumpy; her satellite of discontent, his centre of gravity.
Back on the lounge she says her boss has begun acting out the blame game, giving everybody reason to feel challenged, humiliated and even exposed, accusations made in front of other staff. The power of under-estimation. She is waiting for this pattern to spread far enough for the CEO to sack the man. But CEOs are too used to letting shit behaviour prosper until they get what they want. And who knows what they want?
That said, she stands, loosens her blouse and then reaches inside to undo her bra and slip it off her left shoulder, stretch it down her arm and then off, repeating this on her right side until she pulls the limp thing out and drops it onto the lounge. Her prominent breasts sag into comfort. She looks over at him.
‘Oh Trevor, it really does stink.’
‘So you said. Perhaps the word “stink” is …?’
‘No,’ she laughs. ‘ “Stink” is the right word.’ And she gulps the rest of her wine.
‘What is it you’re cooking? Oh, let me guess, something completely unhealthy – crispy pork belly?’
‘Pork belly it is. The problem is the oven.’
‘It’s the oven’s fault?’
‘We need to think about getting an oven seal. In which case, I could be cooking seal belly. They’re equally fatty.’
Despite herself she laughs.
‘Like the Inuit?’ he adds. ‘Can you imagine the stink inside igloos?’
In discussions of this sort cholesterol and longevity are as mysterious a couple as the couple having the discussion. At least Trevor’s culinary smoke is successful. It has taken her mind off the bastards at work. (He knows she loves her work, and her bastards.)
There he is, scooping out the cooked rice and thinking of his and her likes and dislikes. And how angry he sometimes gets just thinking. The two clenched fists of his brain.
After dinner she comes back into the lounge room. She watches him rise from his kneeling position on the floor where he has been sifting through newspaper images, which he has been cutting out very carefully with a large pair of scissors. He makes getting up look awkward.
‘They can gauge a person’s fitness,’ she announces, ‘by the number of times or points they lean on or push on to get themselves up. You have just used both hands on three points of contact.’
‘Jesus, Diana, are you serious?’
‘You should only use one hand at most.’
‘But who does?’
‘Huh.’
‘And how do you allow for a person with a leg injury?’
This makes him sound more personal than ergonomic. He is. Her not answering doesn’t help.
She reminds him he has mentioned renting closer to the bookshop, that he has done a reconnaissance of the area in his lunchtimes while trying not to smoke. Has he found anything yet? she asks. First good opportunity, he tells her, and he’ll be off.
She smiles, as they say, she thinks, winningly. And strokes his forearm.
‘Do it. Last time you said it you didn’t.’
‘Um …?’ Meaning he doesn’t know what this means other than Move Out Now.
‘Oh. You’re hesitating over the answer.’
‘No, I’m hesitating over the question.’
‘My God, you sound like a philosopher.’
But he is serious.
‘You want me to do it … now?’
She is aware of how withdrawn she has been, so this flush of connection, more, actually stroking him, is worrying. She has decided to cut him off, yes, overboard and adrift. For him, her acting by design is the old joke at her expense, or her occupation, long past any use-by date. It has been too loaded with irony: Trevor very past present and Diana frustrated by future absent. Infuriating to be in the middle. Unable to respond to either.
So, with that decided, small intimacies have resumed.
‘Go on,’ she says. ‘Go and find a girl.’
‘I’ll find a girl like you, except younger, and prettier, and with poor eyesight … That what guys do.’
She laughs, moves in for a kiss, at the last moment offering an averted cheek. Stupid habit, and/or vestigial feelings. Pathetic really. She shouldn’t. But they are both like this – they keep forgetting they aren’t together.
He holds her around the waist – she will one day be more than plump but now she still has a waist – and he says he might, why not? Inevitably, her remark about his physical awkwardness has stung him. Especially given her own fitness is roundish.
Diana is right about his recurrent glooms. It makes him a mordant humorist and she likes that in him. That essentially is his full case. Full, which means it furthers nothing. They are in the friendly, dead place where nothing matters. Until something hurts.
On Elizabeth’s next trip to Ballarat there is something different to talk about. To help her practice for the choir Elizabeth will take back her electric keyboard, the Casio. Her mother, old Mrs Sermon, had loved singing when she was young. She found the only regular place for singing she liked was in the church, where mid-voice tones and easy tunes were carried by eager faces. She was reassured by Christian emotions – nothing too worldly and nothing too Godly. But she lost her love for God, until she met Him again, years later, as a bearded, brown Hindu among the Orange People and His holy exercise of free love. That sort of singing. Now her voice is old – no breath control, an irritable cough. So she cannot sing but, God, can she talk.
The problem will be finding the Casio. Mrs Sermon is a hoarder. Nothing that enters her house ever leaves it, whether once important or hardly noticed, however briefly or superficially, nothing is allowed to leave. The two of them always sit surrounded by newspapers in unsteady stacks two metres high. All that keeps them vertical is their leaning on the stacks alongside, like trees in a densely vertical forest.
The only thing Mrs Sermon doesn’t keep is silence. Between the stacks of hoarding and the constant talking there is no room in the airspace for anything else.
Every time Elizabeth visits her mother’s home the floor space is noticeably less. Logically, a time will come when she rings the doorbell and will not be able to open the door. Or must squeeze in sideways like a cartoon character flattened by a roller. Those architectural drawings of floor plans with a semi-circle to indicate a door and its sweep are already incorrect, the truth more a thin slice of the pie chart. If front and back doors end this way, even her mother’s kitchen mess will be trapped inside and left to rot, which is not hoarding, or retaining, or keeping, but colonising because bacterial creep will be catastrophic and take over completely. The world of invisible bugs will grow all over her home.
As if the clutter is somehow disconnected from her, her wayward mother shrugs and dissembles, the hoarding seems to have occurred all by itself, the result of some obscure law in the soul of an ageing person.
‘Now listen, Mum,’ says Elizabeth, ‘it was bad enough when you began, and that was years ago. You at
least used to do it neatly. Now the place looks more like a paddock after a tornado has dropped its load … All you need is mud, and a few branches, and a currentaffairs film crew …’
‘I am always neat, you can fit more in if you fold. You just have to be careful.’
‘… and broken fences and a few hundred sheep. Then an entire supermarket is emptied in here. And then everything is compacted by bulldozers. Where does all this crap come from?’
Her mother is not listening. Listening is not one of her qualities. Why bother, when talking about her past is so dramatic, so full of names, and herself, of course, so revealing of her charismatic self, through all those well-lit years of mysticism and undressed days … of Kundalini rising? She hoards objects like she once hoarded gurus.‘Mum,’ but she has to laugh, ‘you’re chucking it into rooms like a madwoman. There’s no room for anything else. It’s beginning to stink, Mum. The only thing stopping you being worse is you have a girly throwing action. God, what the place would look like if you were built like Dani Samuels!’
‘Like who?’
‘She’s a shot-put champion. And discus. You could hurl bags of junk into every high corner, you could aim rubbish into that gap under the ceiling and beside the shelves and wedge in it there like a slagball.’
‘A what? Why do you insist on talking in that funny way?’
‘A spitball, you know, like kids chew paper into a wet blob then splat it onto a wall or the ceiling. Just as well you can’t do that – or you would do it. Everyone would think you lived in a cave with a colony of bats.’
Batwoman, she thinks. She wonders if since her last visit her mother has forgotten all about dying and the nice Dr Nitschke.
‘Why is your hair that awful lolly colour?’ asks her mother. ‘You were never a pretty girl, Elizabeth, but then again …’
‘Thanks, Mum. Then again what?’