by Philip Salom
If ever she came into his own room, after a faint, too faint, knock on his door, she would engage in conversation with him while studying herself in his full-length wardrobe mirror. This made for a strangely otherworldly kind of dialogue, her voice not merely averted but wistful, he thought, for the young woman of her past speaking from the image of her present.
Eventually he asked if she had ever married. Oh no, she said, she’d never met a man good enough. He thought she was being arch or self-deprecating (ironic?). She wasn’t.
Then again, why not remain independent if you prefer it? The alternative would be intolerable, as many well know. Eventually his company was too much and even his money not enough, and she asked him to leave.
Now the thing he doesn’t want to think about comes back as it must. It is himself. Not the shop, its orders and accounts, its visitors or lack of them, the break-in, if that’s what it was, or his tenuous running margin, and not this strange Elizabeth with the room, not his cousin and his gripes, not even his own view of the world, his own sense of a life lived waywardly, no, none of these. Diana. Himself. That spare room in their own apartment where guests have slept and where he now sleeps.
Sometimes she has just woken up and is already out raking her verge. Therapeutically this morning, trying to erase the voices of the endless never-listening talk, Elizabeth’s inner track runs with characters not horses. She is using her rake as a baton to the ground, she is conducting them into silence. … Someone in the street has ordered a skip and very generously, like the local scavengers and like the old cockney song, spilt some on the step.
Pieces of plastic and ugly wooden boarding. Too lazy even to load the stuff into the steel hull and have it chug off into the Ocean of Waste Items. The whirlpool of plastic etc. Whether it’s the droll blokes from the rooming house or students or hipsters or good citizens in German cars and well-appointed houses, the result is careless scatter and drift. Frayed chipboard stained from something old and damp and cut in semi-circular shapes you don’t normally see, perhaps as a fitting around something flue-like or ducted, removed carelessly and just left as geometry in the sun, and of what possible use to anyone?
She realises a man is standing beside her. She just wakes. He might have been there for an hour or so.
She doesn’t look up, she uses her peripheral vision. He is large and overcast and standing near her like weather.
It seems he is about to say something, and yet no words arrive as her rake hesitates then moves, under some rhythm of yes-no-yes-like accompaniment, then who cares, as she herself stays silent. Is this an eccentric invitation perhaps?
‘Excuse me,’ he says and now she straightens up, as if surprised.
‘Ah, good,’ she says. ‘Do you think you could help me load this stuff into the skip? You look as if you could lift a fridge …’
Gordon waggles over from the gate towards the man. The man nods, amused, and helps her lift and drop the wood into the skip.
‘Nice day,’ he says, ‘and for walking about with a dog.’
‘Yes. Good exercise. Not that I care for goody-two-shoes health advice. I’m more of a fidget, and according to the experts that’s meant to burn calories.’
‘Fidgeting?’
‘It works for me.’
The man laughs, looks at her, then at Gordon.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Hello then.’
‘I know it’ll seem odd that I’ve come,’ he says, bending to pat then push away the dog jumping around him. ‘I wondered if I could see that spare room?’
‘Oh good. You saw my ad in the bookshop?’
‘Yes, of course …?’
‘Good, you noticed it, the guy in the shop said people just walk right on past.’
‘That was me,’ he frowns at her. ‘I told you.’ (That’s twice now, he thinks.)
‘Oh. Oh, of course, your voice! I’m so sorry. What is your name again? How embarrassing.’
‘ Trevor. Look, I just helped you with …?’
He points to the skip but is asking much more.
‘Trevor, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I have this ridiculous condition that I’ve spent my whole life apologising for. Prosopagnosia, weird as that sounds.’
‘Face-blindness …?’
‘You know it then? Yes, I’m sorry. Oh, there I go again. Most people make horrible expressions when I say it. I’m incapable of remembering and recognising people by their faces.’
‘Oliver Sacks had it.’
‘Oliver Sacks! The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. … Really? I didn’t know that. What a great big happy bear of a man he was. So sad he died.’
‘Yeah. He was as odd as his patients. Which is pretty endearing. I often hear his phrase in my head: neurological deficits.’
‘Neurological deficits,’ she smiles at him. ‘One of my favourites.’
‘Most people,’ she adds, ‘think prosopagnosia is some kind of brain rot. Or a twisted spine, like scoliosis, or worse – something to do with the uterus.’
‘Did you know,’ he says, ‘that magpies have facial recognition? Of humans.’
She sags slightly.
‘Is that meant to make me feel better?’
But then it occurs to her:
‘Why do you want to see the room?’
If he suggests he can recommend the room better for having seen it he will look silly taking it himself. She might even think he’s stalking her.
‘I might want it. For myself, I mean. My wife and I have been living together but we’re separated. If that’s any way of putting it. There, I’ve said it, embarrassing.’
He is relieved to have said it.
Only now she realises her ad hasn’t specified a preference for a woman. She had thought maybe some younger man, hardly more than a boy perhaps, might just be possible, but a woman is what she has imagined happening and, as she thinks about it again, younger. And Trevor is Paul Robesonish, only white.
‘And the shed studio thing too,’ he is saying, as they walk inside, ‘could be very interesting. I used to paint, a long time ago, nearly twenty years or so, I was certain I’d be an artist. Then I stopped. But I’ve kept working at it on and off. I’ve decided to go crazy and push it again. I have to … give it a year or two. If it works out, well …’
‘Gordon,’ she calls. ‘Come on!’
So the dog rushes past him as she turns back inside, hoping the man is not hitting a midlife crisis. Which he probably is. Then Gordon reappears, looking at this new man, watching with the right degree of wariness.
‘I wondered why you commented on the blue wall in my shop.’
Opposite the window and behind her lounge and armchairs is a wide blue expanse, as if the sky has leant down and entered by camera obscura. Did she comment on his wall? She can’t remember. It wasn’t her best day.
The room, when he sees it, is downstairs, something he hadn’t anticipated, thinking the house was instead a single storey. Still, she had admitted it was a basement. Being lower than the ground level of the street he would, in effect, lie there half buried. Many houses in the street have basements, hers the modest variety, she adds, just a room with its own bathroom and toilet. Otherwise she wouldn’t be renting, on her own floor, would she, people in her personal space. Sharing her bathroom and toilet.
They look at each other in silence. It makes sense. The room is easily large enough, with robes and a desk under a double corner window onto the side lawn and fence, and a decent bed. All this takes him back. Student days. Except better. The toilet and bathroom, best of all.
He wants to see the studio.
She says it’s just a shed but, yes, it could be converted into a studio.
First, there is a smaller room across the way, which they move towards, only she uses it for storage. They stand there at the doorway looking in at boxes and cobwebs for longer than necessary. He is big, she thinks. He occupies a doorway. Rodin was a big man but he used hammers.
As if attuned to her thoughts he su
ddenly steps away.
They walk outside, down the small lawn area to the shed, as rusty now as an old farm shack.
‘What’s happening to your back fence?’
They stare at the wreckage of tall pickets, the left and right sides still up, the centre gone, the wood strewn on her side of the border, the horizontal timber frame between the posts left as is.
‘Arrrgggh, my neighbour’s a bit of a bastard,’ she says, biting on the words like a dog chewing fence pickets. ‘I shouldn’t call him my neighbour because that suggests some degree of affection … I call him “The Creep”. And he is. Apparently he has the right to insist on a new fence but he wrecked it before asking. You can see he’s chucked the old wood on my side of the fence, not his own.’
‘He sounds like a complete shit.’
She smiles with relief to hear it.
Inside the shed Trevor is impressed to see solid benches and a clean space lit from above by three corrugated acrylic roof panels. He checks for power points.
‘Does it have power?’ he asks, still looking. This place has every potential to be a studio or a workshop or just about anything – if it has power.
‘Um, I don’t know. I think it’s still connected. I can check.’
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I really like the place. And your dog, was it Gordon?’
As dogs go, as dogs who live with single women, Gordon is a good canary: he knows men. And he immediately wags his way over to Trevor. No Bogart behaviour from him today.
‘Yes, Gordon. He has a bit of a limp.’
‘Hello, old Gordon with a limp. I feel onside with Gordon already. A car accident, I suppose.’
‘He’s not really that old,’ she says, ‘about 8, I think. Yes, it was a car. It’s always a car.’
‘Cars,’ he says to the dog. ‘A car got me, too, except I was driving it.’
Crouching down and gently stroking Gordon’s head. It reminds him of the dog he ran over. Gordon immediately sits and gazes from the depths of that melancholy brown world of dogs.
She is surprised to see this man looking sad. Not being Oh dearish and making sorry noises like most people, but empathetic. He is a surprise.
‘He wobbles,’ she says, ‘but I love him, wobble and all.’
He says he understands that she must love her limpy dog, maybe even more so for his vulnerability. He feels the same; and ‘as everyone says, and it’s true, isn’t it, dogs give unconditional love?’
‘Well,’ standing over him, Elizabeth lifts a finger to make a point, briefly the pedant, ‘yes,’ she says, ‘they do – more importantly, animals allow humans to give unconditional love back. No neuroses or anxieties to get in the way. No human obligations. If you are even halfway selfless you can love a dog … absolutely. Or a cat, any animal.’
She knows without animal love a person might not have love at all. It’s the selfless bit that matters. The worrying thing is that people let you down. They have failings, plural. A dog might only have one, like eating the hose.
So they both look at Gordon and Gordon feels twice the love.
Trevor is also feeling estranged. Continues patting a dog in a backyard of rusty roofing and busted pickets, staring into the empty shed and hearing his own voice asking about the power. It is a complicated pain. This place feels right, even if he cannot for the life of him work out why it should.
Serendipity. He needs it, it is here. He’d be a fool not to.
Even if Elizabeth cannot recognise this man’s face as the face-of-Trevor she can recognise shifts of feeling on his face. Any face. Recognition is not allowed her but empathy is. Time is moving slowly. There are some big feelings going on within him: they are imbedded in his surface.
Back inside, he inspects her kitchen and the newish appliances, the clean uncluttered surfaces. (Elizabeth is never her mother.) So he was right about her kitchen being spotless.
‘Ah, what a great kitchen. No,’ he says, ‘I’m not recommending your place to anyone.’
She is startled.
‘No,’ he adds, ‘I want it for myself. I would like to move in, if you’re happy with the idea. I have money and I’m self-sufficient and my wife is encouraging me to move. Yes, and that studio … it’s ideal. Just what I want. What do you think?’
Her shock rises. And so she suggests some time to think it over, for both of them that is, a day or two, and to be fair if anyone else comes around and wants the room … he asks her – he tells her in fact – to ring him. Please let him have first option. If they want to offer more (they have wealthy parents …) he will counter their offer. As long as she is happy with him.
From within his thin wallet Trevor plucks a business card and hands it to her. Business cards have always appealed to him, and now he has one. A minor vanity. Respectability.
‘You said you were a book editor,’ he says. ‘Do you work into the city?’
‘Freelance,’ she explains, ‘so work comes directly to me, sans office and tea lady. I am text-bound not desk-bound. I am my own boss and timekeeper.’
‘Good for you,’ he says.
Then she relaxes and says she has her eye on a new manuscript which she has just heard about. Martina, an editor friend of hers, has broken house rules and texted her the details of what could eventually be a very interesting book. A young new novelist. Something about sects – and Elizabeth had been brought up in a sect.
Trevor is impressed. ‘A sect?’
‘The Rajneeshees.’
‘Ah yes. Haven’t heard anything of them lately. Well, you’ll have to move fast, then,’ he says, ‘invent something, anything. Don’t let anyone else get it.’
When a stranger moves so quickly to your defence he is either genuine or astutely insincere. His voice, Elizabeth’s main register for discernment, sounds genuine. Not breathy, not the lower-case tones of a liar.
‘Yes, you’re right.’
‘Good, then.’
He is leaning on the counter as if it were his kitchen. Then she simply stops talking. He straightens up.
‘I like to cook,’ he says. ‘If you don’t object. I could cook for both of us sometimes. Asian, European. A bit of everything. What do you eat?’
What to say? With her strange habits? She is still thinking about the manuscript. Her mother. The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Nothing comes to her. It has only been half an hour since she opened her front door and let this man in – he’s befriending her dog, giving her professional advice and already seeing casseroles on the table and a bottle of wine.
‘Er … can you do Japanese?’
‘At a pinch. Yes. Crispy tempura batter. Soya and sugar. Salty raw flesh, or black sauce and white flesh.’
‘Put like that, Japanese cooking sounds a bit kinky. Like geisha make-up.’
‘In the Realm of the Senses. And think of the writers. Mishima in a white nappy committing hara-kiri. Or seppuku. Kawabata writing about old men very like old Kawabata, staying awake alongside the geishas who were drugged to sleep by the mistress, and how the old men can do anything, anything, except put their fingers in a girl’s mouth. Moths bunting against the lampshade.’
My God, she thinks. They are both silent, the moment to leave.
When Trevor has gone she sits in the lounge and watches the very normal, very unsurprising light fade across the blue wall they now have in common.
Her last lodger was a Chinese accounting student who made endless cups of tea, smiled desperately when asked anything and only ate take-away pizzas. While making no demands of Elizabeth, she seemed to consider the house her own. The pizza boxes she stacked in the kitchen. Never in the wheelie bin. The girl had to be told.
It is her home, after all. Sometimes she wonders who lived in it all the years before. She wonders what they looked like, and how they used the rooms, whether there had been children running around and shouting or being surly and untrustworthy and hating their parents. It is so quiet with just her and Gordon and if there is one stranger living with them, one lodger
, that hardly makes a family and most houses are made homes by family, however noisy or fractious or goody-two-shoes they might have been.
After waiting several days for Elizabeth to ring him, and with rain appearing on the horizon if not yet in the street, he is climatically worried. Maybe it was stupid to delay after immediate liking her, and the room, and especially the vacant shed he has ever since been imagining as his studio. Stupid of him to have talked too much. So he is ringing her from the shop.
A pause. It could be a telemarketing company pause, no reason except the delay of connection when they ring over the internet, except this isn’t the internet.
Then her voice. He asks straight off, and adds:
‘It’s ideal and it’s so close to my shop. I hope you haven’t seen many other applicants yet.’
‘Any others.’
‘What? Oh good. I really want the room.’
He can hear lorikeets chiacking in the background at Elizabeth’s place. She must be outside as the birds wind up the volume in the late afternoon. Another plus for the place, the birds. They screech and whistle at multiple intensities, they sound like their colours. Some trees are already looking bare, so the birds are brilliant.
‘I suppose so,’ she says. She can see rain is about to fall in the street: the trees’ sudden wavering, the screeching unstoppable. She is standing by the partially dismantled fence. She nods, wasted on the mobile. And makes a noise in her throat.
‘Is that a yes? Elizabeth?’
‘Yes. A few months, let’s see how it works out. Then more, if …’
‘Good! All right, yes, but it has to be long enough for me to bother moving out of my place and into yours. Six months, please.’
‘Three, Trevor. If you like the room, take it. Look at it this way, I’ve never had a man staying in my house before who wasn’t a you-know-what and most women would never take the risk, so three months it is. I have to be honest, and,’ she laughs, ‘you’re a try-out.’
Probation, he thinks. Fair enough. He likes her and he wants to get on with her.