The Returns

by Philip Salom

‘Good thing you rang,’ she says. ‘I thought you were going to weasel out of it.’

  ‘Me?? I thought you were.’

  She makes a humph noise and says she’s merely vague. And that she has no liking for weasels. Or ferrets. Or any of that toothy lot. As a kid she saw them tearing into rabbit burrows, and rabbits. They’re not sentimentalists, those creatures.

  He can’t imagine anyone resisting her for long. She might have considered another tenant for all he knows. Nothing will make him ask, even if he feels the pressure to do so. How did they get on to ferrets?

  ‘My full name is Trevor Novak, by the way.’

  ‘Like Djokovic? I’m a tennis groupie.’

  There is simply no way for him to avoid this. ‘15-love.’

  ‘Novak translates as new man,’ he tells her. ‘I’m trying to be New Man before I’m an old man. In that shed of yours. Even if moving’s a pain.’

  ‘Is it the problem with your leg?’ she asks, walking up the shed and peering through its filthy window. Not seeing faces makes her especially observant of the body. She has to be. All the same, she knows she doesn’t have to be so blunt.

  ‘Being metaphoric. I mean just the bother of moving. My leg’s just a left-over limp. I scare children.’

  She laughs, uncertainly, sounds unsympathetic. The birds are making a din above her.

  ‘About your back fence,’ he adds. ‘I’ll help you with your Creep. I can be extremely insincere when it’s called for.’

  ‘Um? What?’

  ‘I will smile at him then make threats. Most people weaken at that point.’

  How, she wonders, does he know she is outside, thinking about her busted fence?

  ‘By the way,’ he adds, ‘about your prosopagnosia. Talking of metaphors. I was thinking the other night how the Labor Premier is tall and stooped, like a big black beetle with a face and ears.’

  ‘And glasses.’

  ‘Yes, and glasses. Whereas the Liberal stands there like a moneysuit – with a Modigliani face where the man should be.’

  ‘Similes, Trevor.’

  ‘And no eyes. Well, similes then.’

  He can already see himself in the mental move unloading items from a hired van: a virtual table here, a rug there and, hmmm, one too many toasters, beds and mattresses … making a house with two of everything. Divorce’s Ark.

  If Elizabeth has been bothered by a mature-aged man gazumping any potential young woman (in truth she had vaguely thought Asian again, her stereotype for polite) she shows no sign of it when he rings to arrange a moving-in time. She finds herself accommodating. And so he moves in. If he gets too much he will have to go, it’s that simple.

  Over the weekend he keeps making trips, with bags, cases, boxes and that face. A face she also knows as him when he’s there and forgets when he’s not. She will have to do more than that, she must memorise his walk, his outline, his clothing and especially the deep timbre of his voice. The shiny pate. She will enjoy regular payments and less of the generational differences of her daughter, now interstate, thank God. Meaning the man is housebroken, of conventional appearance and has no speed-gabbling incomprehensible friends.

  Just hope he isn’t a disguised sad sack. The wife stories. God, no. Scratching over things like a self-obsessed chook. Like her own ex became, what a carry-on that was.

  She will invite Martina over to get a second opinion. She hasn’t signed anything yet but will get him to. Besides, if Trevor is going to live here it will mean contact between him and Martina too, given she is Elizabeth’s friend. If anyone can tell a suss bloke, it’s Martina. Any sniff of inconsistency.

  Sometimes she has just woken up and is already out raking her verge. She is in the world. Crisp air, light, mess. Beautiful leaves they may be, falling daily like gentle fractures from colour, but they dampen overnight and are a bastard to rake up.

  As if by Newton’s law of equal and opposite, as Trevor moves in at the back of her house, two people move out of a flat across the street, leaving stacked neatly tied bags of domestic items plus oddments of furniture on the median strip. Normally a bunch of crows patrols this area, crows and those vicious little Indian mynah birds, but overnight more human crows got stuck into the bags, untying them and sorting through the items by dropping them on the ground. A mirror is broken in several nasty pieces showing green angular reflections of the foliage above them, boxes of loose paper have been spilt on the grass, furniture is scattered. After the wind gets up, the place looks like a tip.

  Sod them, thinks Elizabeth. She the neat and tidy.

  Until she realises from his shape the man approaching along the pavement is her cantankerous neighbour. The Creep. Over her back fence. In his case she can discern his profile and the face which she likes to think is so angular it must have been broken then reset, but is in fact annoyingly handsome; mostly, she recognises the way, oddly for a man with a narrow face, his paunch spreads around his hips like a woman’s. Perhaps that’s his irritant, because something is.

  And he is always dressed in black.

  ‘I see you’re good for something, then,’ he says, as he walks past. ‘A coolie, ha.’

  This time Gordon is growling his judgement, and his judgement is good: she has to hold him back or he will leap at the man as he walks past.

  ‘And keep that dog of yours on a leash, why don’t you.’

  ‘Right,’ she calls out. ‘I see you’re one of those people that my dog distrusts. Dogs can always tell.’

  He stops, without turning, then walks on.

  Men, she thinks. Having just accepted a new one into her house. It has to be said that Gordon trusts him. But you never know, dogs can be wrong. During the rest of the day she and Trevor talk about the room, the shed, the weather, the parking restrictions in her street. From such casual conversation she can tell he won’t be a problem. But people can be wrong, too.

  When the last of Trevor’s clothing is lifted out of the boxes and dumped-if-not-hung in the wardrobe, and his books are arranged, and his CDs clacked into rows on the IKEA shelving he has bought, he stands back and looks at it. The old room in the basement had seemed like a forgotten space, dull as an empty caravan. Fading fabrics. He has draped a dramatic throw rug over the spare chair and the narrow desk glows under the reading lamp he always uses. Even the bedside box has a small lamp on it. Trevor is not a man for a ceiling fluoro. It has to be his room now.

  A new place, where he is alone, seems to have a thinner atmosphere. The room spaces, the specific smells, his hyperconsciousness. It is not that the light is less, it is somehow not fully present, unused to him being there. Spaces feel empty even though he is in them.

  With Trevor occupied in his room, Elizabeth transforms into a manic worker – entering and cleaning the shed, waking its interior back from sleepy anonymity. She wears a cloth around her nose and mouth like a mask, she works like some people who don’t enjoy regular gardening but every twelve months rush in like attack troops to shoot and burn everything in sight. While he is tamely carrying belongings into his room and arranging them, she is ripping down the dusty bags covering windows and dragging into daylight the cracked and long, curling layer of heavy linoleum. It groans and aahs like an animal trying to put off pain. She has filled her two wheelie bins. She is relentless.

  When the rubbish is swept up and shovelled back outside, the doors open, and the windows cleaned, you can actually see the back wall from the front. Amazing. She looks up. The roof iron is somewhat thin towards the rear. No signs of water damage on the floor.

  What a sharp and exhausting job she has done. Cathartic. She will tell Dr Chen, her latest GP, how good this has made her feel. Until twenty minutes later she clutches at the dining-room table and sits in a hurry, bright speckles gathering in her vision.

  On his final trip he is caught in traffic by a slow tram which eventually stops. It takes the queue of cars a few minutes to begin passing. Only then can they see it’s an unmarked terminus and the driver is standing outsid
e at the front smoking a cigarette. And it’s school pick-up time: parents’ vehicles cram the roads and some jump out into the traffic like rabbits rushing from a gunshot.

  As he parks in Elizabeth’s street he remembers he must apply for a parking permit. All those houses of continuous frontage and no rear parking. Even the expensive terrace houses, with bedrooms going all the way back, so handsomely renovated, so two-million-dollarish. But no garage.

  He’s used to managing for himself, he says to her. Diana more the salary worker than DIY at home. He says his father was a geologist working away from home. He had been born in Poland and was a charismatic but very selfish man mixed up, they later discovered, in suspect mining deals. He disappeared decades ago and therefore Trevor had to help his mother at home, a strange legacy of helping and independence. His mother died, without them ever being sure about his father. Except his father, officially lost in the desert, or possibly murdered – no one knew – was eventually moved from being a Missing Person to being declared dead. There was no body.

  This takes Elizabeth by surprise. Amazed. It’s a book!

  As usual Trevor is unable to explain any man disappearing like that. Going, going, gone. Whereas the Freudian father must live on: the symbolic figure remains even if there are no human remains.

  She says her father was a practical man and he looked after her. In her case it was her mother who disappeared. And remained. Because she was still alive and kicking. She had joined the Orange People. Her desire for enlightenment and rampant sexual “sharing” pushed ahead of banal routines. Like school lunches, dropping off and picking up, weekends … Her mother was a selfcentred crowd-pleaser.

  ‘We have something in common,’ he says. ‘We are the offspring of Narcissists.’

  Sitting on her tiny back verandah they watch the shadows collect over the shed. It is a mild evening. Elizabeth is smoking the second, she states, of her two, at most, ciggies a day. Her reward for clearing out the shed after earlier having read and then correcting or tweaking several thousand words by the next big thing. She says they are all the next big thing unless they already are the big thing. He is sampling his newly purchased wine.

  ‘My wife,’ he tells this woman who is now his landlady, ‘drinks white wines and has joined the trend to pinot gris and peenoohh greegio. It’s not wine, it’s cat widdle.’

  ‘And acidic,’ she tells this man who is now her lodger.

  ‘She can be that, too,’ he says. ‘But she is very sociable at work. Whereas I’m turning into a stay-at-home.’

  ‘Does your wife warrant a name? It will get pretty tedious if we keep referring to your wife as your wife. Given you seem to want to talk about her.’

  ‘Diana.’

  ‘More to the point, Trevor, are you over her?’

  ‘I only left her at lunchtime.’

  ‘Ha. You said you’ve been living in separate rooms. Healthy to get out of that, much healthier. Feel more yourself. Frankly, I say the less of exes the better.’

  They view each other through long and short durations of separation. Hers and his, respectively, marital. The temperatures are not the same. There is a skin-coloured light above his mind’s horizon, no light at all near hers.

  After a short pause she says:

  ‘Let’s ex the ex.’

  It makes her laugh her bigger-than-a-ballerina laugh. But Elizabeth has always been embarrassed about her drinking tastes. How she must now admit to preferring the tired old gin and tonic. Cliché. Unadventurous. She admits it.

  ‘And yours?’

  ‘Anything alcoholic that isn’t Southern Comfort – or overjunipered gin. Shiraz mainly. A single malt sometimes.’

  She says gin is back in fashion, it’s distilled locally, albeit by hipsters. What could be cooler than that? Trevor tells her he only ever uses Aussie olive oil. Because it is olive oil, and true as labelled. Italian and Spanish, many are not, as they claim, cold-pressed, not virgin and, frighteningly, not even olive oil.

  Trevor is suddenly happy. She too. Unexpected, contingent. Words. She was right about bookish. It wouldn’t have happened with a 20-year-old girl from Guangzhou.

  ‘If I drink more than my usual few glasses,’ he begins, then pauses for a count of four, ‘I get the urge to go and do something. You’ve seen the STOP ADANI posters in my shop window. I’m going to paint a mural on my side wall, the alley wall. A landscape of the Galilee Basin and STOP ADANI. After a few drinks.’

  ‘And when Adani gets the axe?’

  ‘I’ll replace it. Protest is never out of date. As long as there is a future, and bloody mining companies. My real painting, though? Well, we’ll see.’

  She concentrates on him, trying for a mug shot, if there is one. Front: quite large head, shaven. Nose, um, noticeable. Big upper body yet normal legs in tight trousers. The time will come when this looks absurd. That voice.

  ‘I have a daughter,’ she announces. ‘She usually stays in the basement.’

  ‘Like a demented cousin? I haven’t noticed her.’

  ‘Ha. When she stays here. Not sure what to do next time.’

  Before he can ask the question Trevor considers it several times for the plain factualness of it, the biological.

  ‘Did you only have one child?’

  ‘Yes, one. Only? What’s wrong with one? I have replaced myself. If she comes anytime soon,’ says Elizabeth, ‘she can have my study. It used to be her bedroom when I was full-time.’

  It occurs to Elizabeth she hadn’t thought this through. Her daughter will only stay for a night or two, preferring her friends’ houses to her mother’s. What she does enjoy is being picked up from the airport and saving the $50-plus taxi fare or whatever it is Uber-ing into town, the EH Holden with its retro coolness and wide bench seats encouraging a kind of movie-star gesture, her body draped sideways, arm over the vinyl and her big sunnies like black code in the pale interior. Even if no one she knows sees her, it feels fantastic. And a bed when she wants it.

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Well, she’s, um (lots of arm-waving and general vagueness in a very Ab Fab manner) – look, I had her disastrously young. It was an accident, some sort of passive sex and pregnancy hangover from my hippie mother. I blame her.’

  ‘As in passive smoking?’

  ‘She’s about 23. Despite all her anti-family melodramatics my mother was thrilled to her tits when Yvonne was born, until she realised some maternal help and support might be required. Let’s face it, she could hardly be bothered looking after me. Yvonne’s father hung around for longer than I expected.’

  ‘How long is longer?’

  ‘Oh, about ten years?’

  Again, Trevor hears this word “about”. Is knowing numbers a lost skill? Relativity does not extend to time, unless you’re Einstein.

  ‘It could have been worse,’ she says. ‘His name was Ian, a carpenter. He was completely indecisive. Not sure where he is now, and I don’t have to care, as long as he calls Yvonne. Sometimes. I had to make him leave. He had the boringly proverbial sevenyear itch, but it took him three more to do something about it. My father looked after me and my mother didn’t, then I looked after Yvonne and her father didn’t.

  ‘You know, I love her and everything,’ she adds, ‘it’s just that I’m not … the cluckiest woman on the planet.’

  ‘Besides, men are always leaving.’

  Ah yes, he thinks. Or being pushed.

  (Big inhalation on her third cigarette.) Of course she still thinks about Ian and in some ways still misses him. Or the home life of couples. Those times of the year, like birthdays and summer holidays and Christmas or New Year when the old emotional system goes wanting. She lifts her feet up onto the bench in front of her. Such a casual woman, he thinks, imagining Diana sitting there with them, her back straight, her hair in place, still sexy after their ten years together, but so … well-comported.

  He had wanted to believe he loved Diana enough for her to say something reconciling, even if he has f
elt forced to leave. If he could hear her. If he is that man.

  Families. ‘I gather,’ he says, just for the fun of it, ‘that family photo albums don’t mean very much to you, though?’

  She looks at him, not following.

  ‘I mean you wouldn’t be able to recognise anyone in the photos?’

  ‘You’re a funny man, Trevor. No one has thought of that one before.’

  ‘Similarly, selfies would be a waste of time.’

  ‘No, no, even I like doing selfies! That’s fun. I just don’t look at them afterwards.’

  ‘Like most people, then.’

  It makes him remember. The days of Diana resting her head on his shoulder are past; his days of remembering her head resting are not. One thing he knows, though, his feelings are slowly subsumed into a conversation like this one. They are fading, they are losing form, like a bunch of old colour photos.

  ‘If your daughter is about 23,’ he says, ‘how come you haven’t returned to full-time work?’

  What can she say to this, this time with this person, the question she often puts to herself? She sighs and considers it.

  ‘Something happened. Me being me. I was working on a manuscript with a major novelist, a man – I’m not going to name him, shouldn’t have said man, let’s say it was a person – a person with a big readership. I told him the manuscript wasn’t working. It had one great character but not much else going for it. I suggested they keep the character and … start all over again.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yeah. I got in the shit, of course. That’s the only way to put it. The person complained to the big boss and things were never the same at work. It was overreach on my part.’

  ‘They sacked you?’

  ‘No. A few colleagues just made things uncomfortable. It affected my health, I think. But – and it’s a monumental but – the author took my advice. Without telling me and without me having any further contact with him, he re-wrote the book as I had suggested. It became a major success.’

  ‘Bloody hell. That deserves a monumental wow. So in fact you had the last laugh, and they knew. They couldn’t un-know it. A case of gainsaid.’