The Returns

by Philip Salom

  Today, to his right, a man sitting on a crate has been playing sets of blues harmonica without pause for fifty minutes. Old-fashioned work ethic. The man’s musical endurance is helped by sleight of hand, or mouth – having no teeth he clamps on the harmonica like a wobbegong and is able to suck on the in-notes without pause. This appeals to Trevor. Once as he saw the man approaching, he simply held a $5 note out behind him. As the man passed, he saw the gesture, took the note, said ‘Fanks’ and went on his way.

  From the kitchen he hears Diana arrive.

  ‘Now today,’ she sighs as she walks in, ‘I had to discuss book covers with crazy bloody writers. God they’re a pain. You’d think they would just be grateful to get into print, the otherwise luckless sods, but no, they are experts in design, every one of them. I tell you, our designs are pretty bloody cool and dramatic and eyecatching one way or the other and there are lots of ways, from tonal patterning to print and fonts, to images, and combinations more sophisticated than these know-alls know. Sometimes you meet one who does but by Christ that’s a rarity.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ he says, ‘some cover designers never read the books.’

  ‘Author No. 1,’ she says, ‘wants his name in lettering an inch high and nothing less than his own original photography in the background. Author 2 wants a total ban on images like a bloody Muslim and insists on having ornate letters, her name, the title and a prominent blurb saying how fucking wonderful she is. Where’s that bottle of wine? Is this one yours or mine? They don’t like the font, they don’t like the composition, don’t like the semiotics, one said. They don’t like colours and they do want red, or they don’t like colours, full stop, they want white. White covers, I ask you. Jesus. You of all people know what happens to white covers. They get shop-soiled before they even get to the shop.’

  She is so annoyed she leaves her bra on.

  It’s not anger that makes her attractive, she just is. The pang in him. The irritation. She kicks off her shoes and laughs at him standing there with his hands on his hips and grinning.

  ‘What are you smirking about?’

  She walks over and gives him a peck on the cheek. He tries to wrap his big arms around her.

  Trevor has a conspicuous head, as Diana has termed it. Everyone notices because it is shaved, and shines, and at some moment when he is close in they realise it is … Diana once told him his big face is reassuring, full of protection, which is a strange compliment, lacking the frisson he would have preferred. At least, thank God, he is not pasty. If anything, his complexion is the kind they once referred to as olive. Nothing Mediterranean, nothing indigenous, nothing even obvious, and just a small degree sexy, so perhaps Diana was withholding something from her compliment.

  Now he is hoping and knowing it’s hopeless.

  ‘A day with nothing quite as it should be,’ he says into her hair.

  ‘I don’t think that tops mine,’ she says, pulling away.

  Since Trevor and Diana have been living in separate rooms this kind of static neutrality has been undoing them both. So the two-voice thing in his head is becoming insistent.

  It’s sort of comfortable. You could stay, people do.

  You have to go.

  Something he has known before: once the break has occurred the two beings turn their attention away from each other, not exactly off, though off it can seem – when they lose the suspension of disbelief over each other.

  He’s checked the figures: 38,000 people in Australian do live, estranged, under the same roof. This is cognitive dissonance in human form, one of his inner voices announces, and then it says:

  You can’t go on living like this.

  He wonders what happened to the dog.

  After several years working at design firms, Diana had never quite settled in. Too many jobs under the cynical managerial style of pitting one worker against the other. A Rupert Murdoch technique. The shark pool, they called it, used for promotion or redundancy, a blood-in-the-water metaphor for management keeping its hands clean. Survival of the most brutal.

  At night Trevor amused her by acting out the bodily turmoil of her worst imaginings: her revenge soap opera and his deliberately overdone role-playing. He pulled faces and bent into silly shapes and performed melodramatic role-play of her two senior designers getting horribly pissed, then glassed inside a nightclub and losing their looks (not easy doing this, splayed fingers gripping his face) or whatever looks they once had (even harder doing a before-and-after). He invented another boss collapsing with a stroke, as she narrated – in a dirty, vengeful voice – that his face was as purple as a fat cock. Left alone now in a stroke home, unable to tie his tie. Sitting on the floor grappling with his shoes, dribbling.

  Her mordant fantasies. His theatre. Back when she thought he was fun. Back when they used to fuck a lot.

  She crunched the tactics and dollars and applied for new jobs. Quite soon she was re-employed. To her surprise she began to rise rapidly into a double position of hands-on design plus management of design staff. The cake and the cutlery. With no one ordering her into blank corners and her ideas increasingly hitting the brief, her corporate contracts became successful projects.

  There were few women in the firm, which was a problem, perhaps, when male colleagues saw her striking qualities extending beyond the brief. They were doers too, and doing sometimes took place on in-service retreats in the hills. On full bonus pay, of course. After a few years of running her design department she discovered the level above her was in fact a boys’ club and, despite its sophisticated vocabulary, its trendy design terms, its gung-ho hold-your-game concepts, the glass ceiling was just as unbreakable as anywhere else.

  This was a conundrum. Form raised her and function kept her at bay.

  Yet after one weekend work retreat it changed. The man was too important to ignore. He wanted her, he wanted to fuck her as much as Trevor did. He ran another design firm. Lust, so much sexier if you’re getting ahead.

  Back at work it was still in her, not anything fluid, a lightheadedness. She was distracted enough to spend too much time and at home, Trevor noticed, emailing someone. He heard her typing, he couldn’t unhear it, and she was typing to someone. He asked her. Did she have a lover? Or was she becoming a novelist? A new job, a new company, she told him.

  She wasn’t becoming a novelist.

  Then came his anger phase, like dying, but a grief all the same. He was never a company, he was a bodily person. Eventually she told him she no longer loved him. When the emotions had died down, over several weeks, a dull, bloodless understanding happened between them, the body became a metaphor, exsanguinated.

  Time is a trickster: being nothing, it promises everything. For Trevor and Diana it is passing between them differently. Their time lines are uneven, unaligned.

  Diana recalls getting home half out of her mind with the tension of working with colleagues, when he asked her if they were, these colleagues, reacting to the fault she had described her old bosses of having – a dismissive attitude. Too bossy. But she is rightly proud of her tolerance, her willingness to lead and take the blame if her team makes mistakes. It made her furious.

  ‘The only trouble facing you,’ Trevor once said, ‘is growing into the likeness of your old bosses.’

  Back then it was simply a joke. But when he said it again he meant it.

  ‘Bullshit!’ she yelled at him. ‘Really?’ he said. Disingenuously. No, she said, he was intolerant and couldn’t even wait to hear what she was saying. She screamed and he said, ‘Don’t go nuts at me, I was just doing what …’ She widened her eyes in aggression: ‘I’m going nuts, am I?’ And rushed for the door before he could answer.

  She left like this so he, her once-lover and her friend, couldn’t answer.

  Someone must receive the daily fallout. This is a ritual relationships take on faith.

  If the colleagues at work are to be lived with, the anger necessarily comes home. Or the bosses will tell an over-reacting worker she is
out of control. She can’t win without damage somewhere. They may be right. It doesn’t mean she is wrong. What they forget in Diana’s case is how conscientious a boss she really is. If she is awful she is also a saint.

  But at night there is that liver-killer of the immediate glasses of white wine, escape from the hierarchy in her work mind and then, in time, it is projected onto him. She admits that.

  When the fainting woman comes into the shop he remembers that she hadn’t earlier. What will she say this time? She turns to her left and looks at the corner of his window display he has left for public ads. Or it might be shyness making her turn left while moving forward, like a diffident horse. He is the one with the limp.

  Trevor is standing beside a man who is a big fan of Irish fiction and especially of Dermot Healy and the new star Eimear McBride. ‘A man of good taste,’ says Trevor. They have been discussing linguistic tangles and how and when or if they are appropriate in the novel and how this book by McBride was thrown aside by umpteen publishers, umpteen meaning for nine years, before it was finally taken, sold and immediately made her famous. A very French outcome for an Irish book.

  They turn to look at her.

  ‘Hello,’ she says. ‘Do you remember me?’

  The fainting woman is addressing the customer.

  Because no one is sitting in the armchair behind the counter, Elizabeth is forced to guess. She hadn’t thought to ask his name before and, though he doesn’t know this yet, she is bereft of any facial recognition. She is responding to bulk, which she remembers. And his bald head. Then she looks at the second man. They are both big. They are both bald. She recalls his voice is deep.

  ‘Hello. Well, you look happier than last time,’ Trevor says, thinking she is still a little strange. ‘You recovered from whatever it was …?’ He recalls her using that phrase.

  ‘Oh hi, it’s you. I was wondering if I could place an ad in your window,’ she says.

  Which isn’t the answer he expected.

  ‘An ad. For …?’

  ‘And yes. I’m fine thank you. I have been feeling a bit … you know.’

  Being men who are confused, they wait.

  ‘I have a spare room I want to rent,’ she says, holding up a sheet of paper with bold printing on it. ‘Well, it’s a basement, but I’m keener to have someone apply first rather than put them off with boring details. It’s a good room, ensuite, very neat and tidy. And I won’t be charging them like a landlord and I won’t start bothering them like a sudden mother.’

  It makes him think. Why not? Why not, then?

  He nods (he likes the mother bit) and fetches some Blu-tack from a drawer underneath the counter. She is ash-white today and shorter than before. It suits her. Her glasses have lime-green frames, fashionable, not to his liking. As she positions the A5 page Trevor decides she had been a dancer. Who gave up dancing because of occasional but uncontrollable fainting. And getting on a bit. How old was Margot Fonteyn when she removed the smelly pumps and told Rudi to bugger off, which in Rudi’s case …? A woman of her size living alone probably eats very little, lives on wafers and sunlight like old Saint Thérèse.

  Her kitchen will be spotless.

  He asks her address and she hesitates, looks down at her sheet of paper – her ad only has a mobile number, a perfectly reasonable precaution – until he suggests it may help if he can let customers with rental interests know roughly where the place is, or the street at least. Especially if it’s nearby. He won’t be exact.

  ‘And if it’s not?’

  ‘I can always lie. How keen are you to rent it?’

  ‘It’s nearby.’

  She tells him and he writes it down, writes her name, Elizabeth, her number, and slips the paper into the drawer.

  ‘Done it, finally,’ she laughs. Without looking at him. Pleased with herself.

  ‘I have a shed at the back, too. Near the back door, quiet there. It’s not liveable so I can’t advertise it as such. But it’s weatherproof.

  ‘OK, yes,’ she adds … ‘and I’m sorry I nearly fainted on your doorstep. You were very chivalrous. Took me in like a knight, etc.’

  She is tilting towards him as if he is one. Then she laughs, loudly.

  ‘Glad to help,’ he says. ‘Good luck with the window ad, though people tend to walk past without reading them. My name’s Trevor.’

  ‘Ah, Trevor. I’m Elizabeth.’

  He smiles and she turns to leave.

  ‘Have a look at this,’ he says, following her to the door.

  And he shows her the two handprints on the shop window. Right next to the STOP ADANI posters.

  ‘I have your ID,’ he laughs. She looks back at him, uncertain. Then walks up to the main street.

  Anyway, he thinks as he watches her, she is too tall to have been a ballerina.

  As soon as she has left, Trevor reads her Room To Let note. Very neat, readable, bold, well-spaced printing – and the room sounds good. It mentions extras. Now what might a person make of that? Was he being too intrusive showing her the stubborn handprints? He goes inside and returns with a tea towel.

  This time as soon as he wipes them they disappear.

  The shop is doing reasonable business. Which means he has been thinking of his painting again, needing more space for that and much more space, like it or not, for himself sans Diana. To fetch back the wayward artist of his 20s. To fetch back the bachelor, too. Yet again he worries over the interaction between accidental and deliberate. How he had deliberated over his desire to paint, become a student and exhibit, and how, accidentally, his life changed and he stopped.

  How accident and coincident also interact. Most people won’t believe in coincidence but an ensuite basement and a shed are throwing waves of sunlight and shadow through his brain. It’s not impossible.

  A customer once asked him about Patrick White. ‘The curmudgeon,’ she said. She was holding a big hardback reprint of The Eye of the Storm. She liked Geoffrey Rush in the film of it.

  ‘White’s very mannered,’ he told her, ‘but poetic in a roguish way, so if you play along with his bossy narration he can be a real pleasure and a dry old comic at that.’

  ‘You mean he’s funny?’

  ‘Yeah, very deadpan. He’s an ironist.’

  ‘So you rate him then.’

  ‘He’s a great writer, full of ironic insight. That can seem curmudgeonly, and as a person he was. What I respect most of all is, he’s not just after beauty. He’s old-fashioned enough to want truth. Capital T.’

  She waggled her head. And stood breathing.

  ‘I owe Patrick White,’ he said. ‘When I was about 20, just drifting about in the country, someone gave me The Vivisector to read. Because I’d begun painting, or was trying to. The novel knocked me out. Hurtle Duffield is a rough artist-loner. Old-school expressionist, Romantic at dark heart, looking for transcendence, all that … It changed my life.’

  God, he thought, I sound like that eager young woman who went vegan and whose family … the father who worked in the abattoir. Now there was an unlikely link to vivisection.

  ‘It convinced me to pack up drinking and dole-induced boredom and move to the city, enrol in art school. I began to think like an artist, not just a viewer.’

  ‘You made that up,’ she laughed.

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘But now you run a bookshop.’

  ‘Yes. I …’

  She was waiting. Or reading her bullshit meter. She might not buy his story, but she bought the book.

  She’s not wrong, of course, he might have made it up. He told a story with a romantic beginning and a humdrum end. His humdrum end, he’s desperately hoping now, is only the middle.

  For the next hour or so he watches the time on his laptop. If he had a wall clock his head would turn to it by habit like a schoolkid waiting for the bell. Like his old job, where the days were Public Service and always 9 to 5 – unless they were longer.

  When he looks up he notices two people standing on
the pavement inspecting his window display of books. The man is balding and whiskery, a big man wearing a long green dress, and his hairy wrists protrude from the sleeves of a stretched cardigan. She is slightly plump and wearing tight blue jeans and a shirt buttoned all the way to her throat. He is pointing to the books, each in turn, and talking to the small woman beside him like the clichéd man explaining “art” to his female companion in a gallery.

  Except this man is clutching a shiny red handbag.

  In the storey above the shop there are two rooms but no facilities for domestic camping. A man would go feral very quickly, especially through lack of hygiene. There is arguably enough available space for a camp bed of some kind among the boxes of books and the left-over shelving and the nagging corners of bits and pieces (or crap as he calls it) he hasn’t binned.

  People are greedy for rooms and forget space, an architect once told him. When their mansion is built, the five bedrooms are so tiny they can’t open the built-in robes unless the bed is a single. To check the floor space Trevor clears the clutter back and lies down on the floor like a corpse. That chalked outline of the body in old crime movies. That chalk line around his side door.

  Measure for measure, just enough. Pathetic as it feels, sleeping in his shop might be preferable to the shame of sleeping in the doghouse in your own home. Think about it. Sadder, lonelier, more despairing, check. Or this really would be taking Hurtle Duffield too far. Next, brushes, turps, tubes of indigo … shitting in the corner like a possum.

  As he stands there he remembers when he left home to attend university he boarded with an older woman who struck him as having the demeanour of a model. Meaning she couldn’t walk past a mirror without stopping to touch her hair and admire her face, her figure, her posture. A private smile always came to her lips. There was something approving in her expression before she moved on to do whatever it was she was doing. There was a wide mirror in her lounge room, which was form for that era, and another one in her dining room, which was not.

  Silly as it seemed, he found her agreeably mysterious. She was the first person he met who was entranced, who would stand for minutes without moving.