by Philip Salom
‘Oh, I don’t know. That purple hair colouring and how bloody awful. Even at my age those batty old ladies with thin, pink and blue hair, the fairy-floss brigade I call them, you’d think they and you …’
She directs a long, mad stare at Elizabeth.
‘Look at you. Time you learnt to eat properly, too. I can’t work you out. You’re starving! Don’t they make you eat at work? You have a lunchtime, don’t you? Don’t you go out and eat like everyone else?’
‘Mum, how many times do I have to say it? I work from home.’
‘Were you sacked?’ Mrs Sermon leans forward in her chair. ‘Was it because of the way you looked? Or your strange ways with men?’
‘Jesus, Mum. You of all people.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Mum!’ (Her mother is used to this by now. The Bhagwan approved of swearing.) ‘You gushed over any halfgood-looking guru who came along. Every one of them the only true guru, of course. At the time. Gurus are always a bloody man, too, with your hardly-there cheesecloth with your tits hanging out for them to snicker over. You were fortysomething girls and you threw yourselves under him! Professional women. Well, the others were.’
Mrs Sermon is good at ignoring people.
‘Mum, I gave up full-time professional work because of low-level bullying, not my looks, nor for being a weirdo, thank you very much. I work at least three or four days a week, in the same job, and at a high level, but from home. I resigned from full-time. It almost rhymes with … Alzheim.’
Her mother winces.
Elizabeth gets up and squeezes past the unwieldy paper stacks and the almost religious mess, slightly fearful of spiders legging it around the corners, or leaping onto her from above, until she manages to enter the kitchen. She pushes aside coloured bags of plastic containers which make the plinky clatter of Tupperware. So useful these, so handy, one always needs containers, you never know when you might need them, the mantra of hoarders, and they are never once removed from their bags. They are the lightest items of hoarding but most awkward and most empty, just taking up space. Like her mother’s incessant talking.
The kitchen counter and stovetop, the sink. A rare space of sanity. Clear, or near enough. Books to the sides, everywhere, and clips of recipes cut from magazines. But the bloody magazines still on the table.
She fills the kettle. Before she can return the jug to the base there’s a slew of recipe books covering it. She pushes them aside and switches it on. There are several cups out but she washes them anyway, to make sure the old eyes haven’t missed soup gobs or porridge over the last weeks. You can’t see bacteria but they fill up a house. Any house.
Once, years ago and before hoarding became a public TV event, she met a man who had collected so many comics and journals in his rooms and corridors his old weatherboard house collapsed on its stumps.
‘Mum,’ she calls from the kitchen. ‘It’s hard to think you were once so anti-Establishment. All this,’ she sweeps her arms out in melodramatic arcs, ‘is a great big diary of … capitalist consumption.’
When she comes back out again she says:
‘Did you know hoarding is now considered a mental disorder?’
‘Don’t talk such nonsense. I just keep a few things I maybe shouldn’t.’
‘A few things! You’re a hoarder. It’s in the DSM. And anyone entering your house must be petrified. If your stacks don’t crush them the air will infect them.’
The keyboard.
Elizabeth sighs, it was half the reason she came and she has nearly forgotten it: time to get polite again. Her return trip will yield not her mother’s forgotten dreams of Dr Nitschke but the keyboard. Her mother will understand her needing it for the choir, surely. Such a diligent thing to do, getting a few steps ahead of the required rehearsals, offering her lead to the choristers who need it.
‘What,’ asks her mother, ‘is the DSM?’
‘The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual … for, um, mental disorders.’
‘Elizabeth! I really wonder about you. You’re saying I’m mental?’
‘It’s in there, Mum. Hoarding is now officially considered a disorder. And it’s not of the body, is it?’
‘Huh.’
It draws Elizabeth across to stand beside her, one hand on her shoulder.
Because there is one eccentricity or impure clause in her mother’s hoarding: while Mrs Sermon never throws anything out, she will sometimes try to give things away. As if the item remains, by proxy, in the extended family. Not lost, not abandoned, and albeit immediately forgotten … until she needs it, which of course she never does. So over their cups of tea Elizabeth convinces her mother the keyboard has a home to be out-hoarded in.
Strangely enough they cannot find the box the keyboard came in. This is a paradox because it must be in the house. At least they have found the adaptor, the block-heavy item that is more often lost, even in carefully contained households. The box dilemma takes her mum up a level of oddity and takes Elizabeth another hour to resolve downwards. Up against the laundry ceiling on a box full of tinned soup she finds two rolls of bubble wrap. Thus the Casio returns to the world in five layers of green bubble wrap and looking like a 3-D bubble bath.
Or a coffin.
Elizabeth is wistful about her health. She knows it, she is as strict about her diet as a girl of 19 might be, and at times just as careless. Whereas she has by now staggered across 40 worry-years, is within sight of the scary 50 and doesn’t like the sound of that. The sound of age is terrible. Luckily, she looks younger. Eat well and you’ll age well, meaning slowly.
She is standing in her garden. Beside her is the abandoned bed where she grew vegetables. Ate them and left them.
None of this health-think stops her having a guilty ciggie. High up in the night-blue darkness of the sky she sees white summer clouds gathering like a model’s bony chest and ribs, even sees collarbones and a single trailing arm, briefly, until the slow upper winds drag all shape apart.
Despite her mother’s comment, her pelvic bones, her hips, no longer show and a small pinch of flesh has developed on her belly, the kind an Egyptian lady would be proud of. At other times, she is surely lighter. Thinking of, and then deciding against, making a doctor’s visit. Then, prompted afresh by her fainting moment, her embarrassing window-pressing experience at the bookshop.
Back inside she fossicks through her boxes of has-beens. Years ago, her ex had left behind a blood pressure monitor, which is a fact though not sufficient to explain why it’s still here. She pulls it out from the bottom shelf of her shoe cupboard, and then stands. Is she swaying slightly … or is it the power lead swinging underneath the machine? Over their final years she had watched him place his bare arm through this sleeve and pull the Velcro around to wrap and clasp, then press the button. She recalls the electric pump whining up to its pressure limit. Then begin beeping, the low hiss as it released. A healthy cardiovascular system should operate at systolic and diastolic pressures – it’s written on the outside of the casing – of 120 over 80.
She sits at her dining table, pushes plates and papers up against the wall to clear some space and arranges the small machine. Irritable. The rubber air-tube isn’t perished (she thinks, after a quick inspection). It feels oddly engaging to be attaching the sleeve, as he had done, and relaxing, briefly, before pushing the start button.
The thing hums uphill busily for several seconds then stops. She waits for it to beep and hiss. But it begins humming again and the sleeve tightens on her arm until it hurts. Then stops, then silence, then the release. That unexpected pain will have driven her blood pressure up, her few seconds of panic.
It blinks and shows 85/62. No, it can’t be, she’d be dead.
‘Fuck!’
Gordon comes waggling over.
‘Fuck.’
It could almost be the dog’s name for all the fuss he’s making.
Trevor is daydreaming until level with the alleyside door of hi
s shop, which he checks now every morning. A week or so earlier the dark green paint was gashed near the lock, exposing raw wood. Why some silly bastard would try to smash his door down he couldn’t fathom. The damage looked out of date: burglars with a hessian sack and a jemmy? They should have used a portable drill.
Then he noticed a thick chalk line drawn on the brick wall around the doorframe. It looked like the white outline drawn on the floor after the body had been removed.
Then he couldn’t get his key into the lock. It wasn’t until he entered through the front door and came out the side door that he was able to insert it properly.
When he rang the police he received the laconic accent as Aussie as it was doubtful, or indifferent. Female um and er noises and possibly mate and When we have time, mate. There was a sound that he discerned as the policewoman drinking from what was no doubt a take-away coffee in a cardboard cup. He knows cops well. He could see her drinking it, and rolling her eyes at a fellow cop on the other side of the desk.
Today he relaxes into his leather chair, the upholstery shining like a much-held wallet. As he goes through the rest of his new orders onscreen he hears a strange bird-call, a rhythmic squawking outside the shop. He realises he has heard it before, maybe on Friday. But what sort of bird makes a sound like that, so high and regular? Perhaps it has been caught by a cat or run over like the poor dog he hit that terrible night. That poor dog, the shame of meeting the owner.
Outside on the pavement he looks both ways, then as he walks towards the sound it stops with a clunk. The bird he has been worrying about has jolted up into its fixed position for the day: it is a roller door. Pinched and tight from the cold. Unless it is oiled it will cry out every morning of autumn and winter. His mind has been tricked by a door. On his way back he walks past the shop next door to his own. The jeweller’s window displays of necklaces and rings are not convincingly real to a man like himself, living in his undecorated universe.
The jeweller looks like a cassowary. His high forehead is peaked, his black hair is pitched upwards and gelled. He is tall and his black beard, shaved to pencil lines along his jaw, makes him appear vain and hard-hearted at the same time. On his ring-finger is a large diamond. (A tax deduction – advertising.)
Trevor decides to tell him about the door-gouging incident.
The man is not happy to hear this, even less so when he realises it was weeks ago.
‘Well, have you had any break-ins?’ Trevor asks him.
The jeweller shrugs in the manner of a Yes, no, I’m not saying, I have a reputation to protect. His name is Allen, he has a smile that operates his lips independently from the rest of his face. He can sell things looking like this?
‘Every jewellery shop has attempts,’ he says. ‘It’s a basic reality, and that’s why we have sophisticated detection and alarm systems. You hardly need worry.’
Trevor looks up into the corners at ceiling level. Some small sensors with opaque faces. Plastic aliens, eyeless eyes. He supposes they are pretty good if they work. If they are connected to the system.
‘I don’t have anything,’ he says.
The man is appalled.
Trevor says all he has is books. How that in itself usually puts people off.
The man shuffles inwardly and almost coughs as he accuses Trevor of risking the security of his jewellery shop by having none in his.
‘You don’t have anything?’
‘But, Allen, I keep the lights on all night!’
They stare at each other across more than just the jeweller’s overelaborate counter and sense of taste. Against his side wall there is a kind of vault bricked into the corner and against the back wall in battleship grey a steel safe as big as a fireplace. A digital pad and a handle, and a combination lock, just like the movies.
‘My jewels are high-quality,’ says Allen, ‘and I keep exclusive items in the safe and the vault. I’m telling you. I’m not an amateur. If you had anything of value in your shop you’d have security too.’
‘Allen, you are such a charmer.’
Trevor meets all manner of philistines.
‘Let me say, my shop is connected to a highly sophisticated system. And the fewer people who know the better. The best security is a set-up no one can anticipate.’
‘Well, Allen, seventy years ago the local North Melbourne jeweller showed his security to some crooks – by shooting at them with a revolver. In the ’30s. He fired half a dozen shots up Errol St. Blam blam. That’s the way to do it.’
‘He shot them?’
‘Nah, they got away.’
‘Very funny.’
‘I’m sure you’re very up with high tech.’
When the man smiles the jewelled ear-stud glints more than usual.
‘The safe weighs two and a half tons, Trevor. It’s simply not going to be carried away. Or cracked in situ. No one is capable of fiddling their way through the combinations in less than a week.’
‘Then why are you so bloody worried about my security?’
Trevor leaves feeling more pissed off than before. What a pompous prat. His face like a manicure. That pencil-line beard. Narcissism and anal retention gripped so tightly they’d need an Allen key to unscrew them.
The chalk line around the door is still on his mind. The oddity remains. The cops haven’t rung back to check the complaint. Then again, he knows what cops are like. Avoid trivial matters. That used to include domestic violence, unbelievably, once the lowest rung on their ladder. Even car collisions rated higher.
For the last few days he has been receiving emails from someone. He should log these. The email account name makes no sense – [email protected] – one more of the ubiquitous Gmail accounts that might be a robot, a code, a kid, a mistake, a person hiding or even a person who is simply (the apt adverb) an idiot. More likely it is someone after money, or a data scam. The messages are not revealing:
You are Trevor Novak? You were living in Upwey? This is urgent, we must talk about the money.
I see you have a shop. Books? Why are you selling books? Anyway you let me know. I will explain about the financial situation. Urgent.
Things are safer these days. Not so many crooks out there. They’re all in the city! They used to be … Contact me now.
If the sender is sentient, probably Russian – they sound Russian – they must know a sane person will not answer these cryptic approaches. Not even any sexy pics. Money. The suffix on the account is generic. Though why Upwey? An old schoolfriend?
As he dims the night-lights and locks the shop it comes back to him that the woman’s handprints are still on the window. He decides to leave them. What was that all about? Starving, by the look of her. Diet, she’d said, or had she said it wasn’t her diet? Making her hair thin out, too. Warfarin? Or some other scary medication he can only guess at. The stuff from Big Pharma.
After he has deposited the daily cash in the bank deposit box he walks to the pub for a quick pint. Another of his habits.
A friend once said Trevor walked with an invisible limp. It annoyed Trevor, who isn’t romantic, or poetic, like a damaged type for films and novels, well, as long as they are upper-class. As long as they don’t dribble. His is a genuine limp, though, because sometimes it gets much worse, visible like a hop, as Diana likes to say. Gout pain hurts the foot in one big toe so the good leg makes a big stride to protect the other one, which must always be following, like the woman in a waltz. But Trevor’s good leg over-compensates in its lift so the forward movement is closer to a hop. It comes and goes. As the worst ghosts do, it re-emerges. Nerve damage done long ago.
There are people with damage. Along the street a few men sit against the walls of shops and banks. They sit there for hours. When you look back they are still there. At some point they all leave, like birds from a tree at sunset. Mostly they are gaunt and down in the gums. Half of them wear drab or garish clothes that do not fit them. No hours spent in front of the mirror. If these men are walking they yell to each other across t
he street and carry tinnies and saunter down laneways, emerging lanky and forlorn and asking in registers of twitch and pathos: ‘Could you spare some …?’
When walking in two and threes beyond the main street they talk in voices held together by the word “fuck” and without the begging tone. They sound much happier and moderately better off.
The word “fuck” might just do a lot of good in the world. And it’s free.
What to make of the young woman who mumbles and stares at everyone as she sits on the pavement outside the IGA wearing shorts (denim) skimpy enough in summer to expose her shapely legs? A thin gold chain on her right ankle. Sometimes her hair hangs and she wears pink trackies, sometimes her hair is tied up and she wears a variety of clean, fitting clothes; and she swaps between smoking, drinking and mobile-phone calls and intervals of ducking into the TAB. His conscience travels around in zigzags when she is there. Never outside his shop, of course: too few people. Beg where the traffic is. Her face blotchy from exposure.
Months ago a gaunt black-eyed man with a hanging shoulder grabbed onto Trevor as he was jaywalking and grunted for money, and Trevor thought for seconds they’d both be run down. He shook the man free. Later he saw the man hold a woman against the post-office wall until she found the dollars he wanted. The man had fallen out of a Dostoevsky novel and was never seen again.
Sometimes the street stops. No one moves. Perhaps they feel the presence of others among them, or perhaps they have been given time to reconsider. Sometimes an everyday street is so everyday it feels unreal.
Never mind. What would he know? He contemplates his Guinness. This may not be what he works for but by God it helps. Drinking alone doesn’t worry him. Divorce, money, aloneness, drinking. It’s a sequence. When he was young he enjoyed driving too fast, hence the limp. Now he is older, his inner dialogues rush through him like cars around corners, not much control but much churning up of the dust. He hates the glib statement “If you think things are bad just look around, there is someone worse off than you.” The heartlessness of it.