by Philip Salom
An hour or so later he stands and walks back into his tearoom, fills the kettle with water, then clicks it on. He feels embarrassed by his half loving, half leaving behaviour with Diana. His collection of ironic acts. The manner need not be heavy but the matter must at some point be heartfelt. Every clown knows pathos.
The day drags on. Customers. Most are quiet and purposeful even when they browse and delay and do or don’t buy. When they pester and preen, show off or patronise him then leave empty-handed, that’s when the man behind the counter is a genre: the murder novel. But he knows most customers will buy something rather than waste, or seem to be wasting, their coming in spending time. How human to want a result, something to carry from experience. Given that most books bought remain unread, or at least unfinished, and many never even opened. His custom is now his usual experience but not his nourishment. From now on he works within five minutes of the house and wants to get back there. He wants his new life to begin.
Not over at all, the past, but now the time comes – simple to say, complex in feeling – to unpack the rolled-up canvases, boards, painting materials. Study them. Wait for them to want him, not taunt him. To join time.
These objects have gravity; and challenge. The shed is redefined; it is a studio. They make him feel very sober. Stacked on the bench are his boxes of paints. Eager to save his pride he has arranged the used tubes of oils on top of the unopened ones to give Elizabeth the impression he has been working at these canvases for years. Mess equals serious practice. These squashed tubes of paint, so beloved of artists and their voyeurs, are surely proof enough, covering for the many others that are embarrassingly pristine. His brushes, though, who could argue with them? They are clearly old, most of them soft, some of them hardening, and wrapped in stained rags. His turps, being turps, merely stinks.
In a different way, everything looks old. He feels old. Old and unrelated.
He once spent several weeks renovating, re-painting and then setting up a studio only to prowl in it like an angry cat. Finally he slumped in a corner in the single armchair, unable to work. Sitting for hours, days, in the armchair. It was a disaster. Nothing much came, and nothing of the work that came worked. No narrative, not images. He was half the Coen brothers, not a whole film in his head.
Then he fixed it. Or by chance he woke from it. He raided offcuts from the carpet bins and laid them on the floor, three wooden bookshelves not from IKEA propped against the walls, two standing lamps. This is how he broke his emptiness – by making the outside well lit, and comfortable, with places to sit, and read, a shelf for books. It was not him, it was the space. It simply began to exist in its own sense: to function, that is, by making itself welcoming for his work to emerge into.
Looking back on this he wonders if this hiatus was a precursor to the breakdown of his talent, not its breakthrough as he’d once thought. Now all that matters is his own feng shui. He is moving more than house, he is moving the unseen shapes of himself. He must find an armchair for this place.
Elizabeth is watching him now, curious to see how he is setting up.
‘I don’t know anything much about painting,’ she sighs. ‘Just the usual portraiture, which in my case is a joke, given I can’t even make out actual likenesses, but it is interesting … forensically. And, of course, creaky old landscape painting.’
‘It is creaky. I like that. Reminds me, when I was at art school one of the students was absolutely obsessed with painting landscapes. You know, realist ones. The painting lecturer kept telling her not to. In the final student crit he stopped in front of her sunny eucalypts and screamed: “Fuck it! No more trees!” After that we called it the Fuck It, No Trees School.’
Before he fully wakes the next morning, his right leg is numb and inert. Not cramped, just leaden. It feels profoundly the wrong weight and shape. Like the heavy door to the shed. As he stands to get dressed the first shocks of hot nerves rush down from hip to foot. In the darkness of his leg is a sudden, contained lightning. He recognises, and feels, his right leg collapse under sudden weight.
What comes now is what has stopped him before. The problem will ease and go, as long as he is careful. He knows it. His memory and his body. The accident when he was nearly 30, breaking his leg and hip when the car rolled. Usually young men with leg injuries have been dragged under motorbikes. The joints break down and the vascular system hardens.
The trauma returns internally. It can make him feel catatonic, but in mind only. The leg works.
Walking upstairs from his new basement room is easy: it is regular legwork against gravity, the focussed resistance of climbing, co-ordinated muscle shifts from one leg to the other. Choose the right position of his foot on the step, the lift, and the muscles will choose themselves. He knows walking downstairs is the problem. It is un-supported, it requires foot-eye co-ordination and the reading of distances. It should be automatic, as reflex as catching a ball, but his mind has lost that faculty and now he must think his feet into position. He might think of this as proprioception.
For Trevor, walking downstairs is controlled dropping.
Before he leaves their apartment with a last box of books, Diana holds his arm, snuggles up against him. She can hardly keep a huge smile from her face, her mouth exaggerating enough to pout. This is our goodbye, he thinks, softer than expected. Much softer. He can feel her plush body against him.
‘Why don’t we,’ she says, ‘have one last fuck? Would you like that?’
What can he say? That he’d like to? That the offer sounds patronising? That he thought they’d had their last fuck a few weeks ago.
She led him into the bedroom (her bedroom now, she thought but never said) as if he were no longer Trevor but a lover. Where they did what they had over the years found they did best, this time warmly and slowly, savouring it, each other, then fervently, knowing it was their last-ever fuck, she was surprised to feel huge waves of erotic feeling. The illicit urge to have him inside her when they were estranged? But still, what? In love? ‘Ooh Trevor,’ she said, ‘this is good. Ooh yes, you should move out all the time!’
Not quite regretfully, but she was enjoying it more than him. Her legs were shaking. He went for it like a sweaty racehorse and came, through her slippery and coming, finally, finally. That was then.
‘Why not?’ she says. ‘Eh? The sex still works.’
‘Yeah. A lot of good that’s done us. So maybe not?’
A kind of anger reddens her, like a sudden rash.
In his shop the following day he sits under the glowing overhead light, in front of the striking blue wall, feeling deathly still but empty. Not anything like Buddha. The brutal, patronising irony of it: parting intimately, erotically, only when they know there is no return. Just an ego trap that he set off. He, both bait and prey.
When they achieve the independence they’ve worked so hard to get, some people feel useless. He will not let this happen.
A few customers arrive and leave. With a smile and a nod and a few words he goes through the motions of greeting and selling. (Buy some books!) Seated and annoyed now, he begins thinking about his return to painting as something quite different, less intimate than interrupted, less calm than angry: that you don’t become an artist to test the hypothesis of talent, or some expected aesthetic, or a kind of public sexiness. Such things are sentimental, Romantic, there only at the beginning, if at all; thereafter, you work with your art to discover its trust, because then the practice itself morphs into results, and torments even. Intensities. Heat. These things change you. The practice will make you an offer. You take its white drug of Otherness.
Perhaps. Always perhaps.
Today’s chalkboard sign is longer than usual:
When you read Extreme Tattoos your skin will scream but you won’t be able to put the book down until it’s over. Pauline Trove explores the fashions and the cult of tattoo expression like a woman brandishing a nail gun.
Trevor walks from the back room with a box of books. Cuts around t
he edges with a Stanley knife. Deciding earlier against DVDs, Trevor has instead been visiting second-hand bookshops looking for bargains – interesting books in good condition, only editions with modern print and design, with pencilled prices he thinks he can erase and improve on when shelved in his own shop. A modest collection has resulted from this enterprise, plus he has picked up a small box of books from a garage sale.
Now, opening the garage sale box, he flips through one book, then another and another. Then, with increasing amazement, all of them. Someone has neatly, in black texta ink, scribbled out the swearwords. The words are guessable but gone. The scribble is in cramped up-and-down wiggles, as if a tiny lie-detector arm has travelled through the book finding the naughty bits. Obsessive censorship. Words never intended as swearing get similar treatment. In one paragraph the mushroom word shitake has the shit scribbled out, the ake remaining. The “texta censor” has gone through every book.
In books of little dialogue most of the narration remains intact but whenever the characters speak, dzzzt dzzzt dzzzt goes the ink. Who? Why? However many books Trevor takes from the box, they are all marked like this. Then they were offered back to the public at the garage sale, probably dropped on the pavement to clear a deceased estate, the texta censor dead now, gone off into the black texta land of the dead, not a single voice raised in bad taste. They are reasonable books he might otherwise have placed on his newly cleared second-hand-books shelf. When he bought the box it was the titles and the age of publication he looked at. What a brilliant find, even if he can’t display it! Who, he can’t stop imagining, would be deranged enough to do this?
He is behind his counter and still thinking about it when a lanky man with Keith Richards cheeks pushes the door open and sniggers at the shelves of books.
‘Jesus,’ the man says.
He swivels around like the turkey-throated man of a month earlier, scanning the entire shop as if it is the most extraordinary thing he has seen for years. His mouth hangs open, his hair dangles. Amazement is not a drug you stay addicted to, but it has its moments.
Eventually he sees Trevor.
‘Mate,’ he says. ‘Mate, I’ve never seen anythun like it. How long you been here? Shit, all these books. You must, fuck me, have books on every fucken thing.’
Trevor is imagining the pen and neat finger movements inking out the man’s speech … dzzzt me, have books on every dzzzten thing …
‘Hey, you can’t smoke in here.’
The man is about to light a cigarette. He stops, spreads his arms in appeal.
‘Fucken hell. Jonesy never minded. I …’
‘Mate,’ says the bloke, still holding the unlit ciggie, ‘you’re looken at me as if I’ve never read anythun but you’d be dead wrong. I read books like Sin City by that Yankee guy Somebodyorother. They made a film about it with Bruce Willis in black and white, with freaky white blood when people got shot. Have ya any by him?’
‘I can’t check if you don’t know his name.’
‘So it was sorta literary, eh, if you get a film made of a book?’
If Trevor is surprised he is probably showing it. He thought the film was gratuitously violent – and he enjoyed every moment of it. An older customer over near the biographies is staring. The man ignores her.
‘Do a fucken search, then, ya dumdum, you know, just look up Sin City the movie and Whoverheis I’ll come runnen. Nah, sorry mate, sorry mate, I don’t mean to tell you ya job …’
The man wanders off to look at the books displayed with their front cover showing. He walks a circuit, saying ‘G’day, love’ as he passes the woman, and returns to the counter.
‘Frank Miller,’ says Trevor. He is not looking at his laptop, his memory as usual cutting the mustard. Graphic novels.
‘That’s him! You got the guy.’
And only then does a screen search.
‘It says here … (Trevor measures it out like dried poison) that Miller’s work overall is … misogynist … homophobic … fascist … and that 300 is a Spartan vs. Athenian battle with spears and arrows and more blood than … In its film form, at least, it’s racist and … he denigrates disabled people.’
The guy moves across to the counter and shows his teeth in a grin. A few teeth, a hollow grin.
‘That sounds great. I dunno what some of those words mean but order him in for me, will ya, eh?’
‘You want me to order a book or a DVD?’
‘Yeah. Jesus. Isn’t that what you do?’
‘But which? One of the books?’
‘Yeah. Yeah. Nah, the DVD.’
‘Can you leave a deposit? Or pay for it now?’
The man frowns.
‘Is that what everyone does?’
‘I mean, are you going to come back for it? I don’t want to … make an order only to be stuck with it.’
‘Are you havin’ a go at me? That’s discrimination.’
The man is disgusted. While he is trying for eye contact, Trevor looks up at the ceiling mirror to avoid him.
‘You’re an arsehole, do ya know that? A real shit.’
The man glares at him now, his arms spread wide, and then he makes a my-head-is-exploding gesture. Happy to mix his metaphors in every way. As he leaves he drags a row of books off the New Books shelf and slams the door. The books lie in a heap on the floor. Old Books now. Outside, he lights his cigarette and walks casually away.
The woman turns to Trevor, her face like a frightened spider.
‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘The man probably learnt to read in prison.’
Maybe he shouldn’t say that but the man is a complete dzzzt. Trevor could, while it was happening, texta out the man’s swearwords and see him standing there with a black scribble coming from his mouth every few seconds.
After waiting out the hours he closes for the day. Only when he’s inside the car park and searching for his car does he remember he walks to work now. His memory is stressed. At this rate his inner passwords are probably jumbled.
Back on the street somebody’s dog has run free. It runs towards him as he heads into the right street. He cannot tell if it wants his love or his leg. Gordon is different, being a setter he is simply floppy ears and running and eating, then more running and especially more eating.
At Elizabeth’s he is ready to knock as if merely visiting. He pauses, then uses his key and tries to convince himself this is where he lives now, walking through the short corridor into the shadowy lounge room; and more, not merely where he lives but what he must call home. This, meant to be the least strange of words, estranges him.
She isn’t there, or is in her room working on a manuscript. Probably out, given his recent noise and her silence. Either way she doesn’t appear. But when he calls her and asks if she wants a yardarm drink she says no from inside her study. Too much work to do.
Surprised by this, more by his disappointment, he stays for twenty minutes or so before convincing himself that what he really needs is a drink with someone to tell his daily absurdities to. No more Diana rituals at end-of-day. He wastes some time by stumping downstairs to his room, staring at himself in the bathroom mirror and seeing a man who looks to be simply him/ not him, the familiar image with an unfamiliar background. How many hours of any day, and any life therefore, do we stand or sit un-occupied? Living vacantly, daydreaming, blanked out in front of TV or screen information, or waiting, and waiting as always for a desired intervention, a gratification, for God’s sake …?
So he walks back to the main street. He will order a drink then ring his friend Lester.
Lester is an ex-detective. They don’t usually drink in the same pub. Trevor’s favourite pub is not gentrified, or retro, it’s dark and sticky, as lacking in coolness as sticky pubs have ever been. Plus a bit. Not a dollar has been spent on its appearance since the dollar came into existence, 1966. A few posters of recent concerts have been glued to the wall, though it’s hard to tell given the gloom and the walls being completely obscured with old vinyl LP covers
. A section of carpet has been prised up from the floor – probably with a crowbar – not to reveal some trendy floorboards but to expel the circular burn marks that date from some years earlier. Nothing has been laid down as replacement. The bar area is beer-hard underfoot, is shadowy and poky and many locals who are not hipsters but who are perhaps hip and love old heavy-metal bands and Sunday afternoon guitars, collectively, have found, like a German verb in a grimy sentence, it’s this pub they love.
Despite these no-nonsense attractions, Trevor finds a table outside. When he reaches the bar, Lester is standing there. Two pints of Guinness are lined up in front of him.
‘About time,’ he says, without looking up.
‘I never rang you.’
‘No, you didn’t. Have your bloody pint.’
Once outside, Trevor recounts his meeting with the bony-faced man in his shop. And mentions Frank Miller, the novelist, and the film of his novel Sin City shot in stark black-and-white graphics, some frames almost fully blacked out. Bruce Willis as the hard/soft man like a cop, an ex-cop even, a kind of Lester.
‘I’ve never had any trouble with my customers,’ says Lester, ‘except return fire.’
‘They were probably afraid of the dark.’
Lester had been famous for night work.
‘It probably won’t surprise you,’ says Lester, ‘that I have a DVD of that film. It’s great action, it’s kinda nuts and it’s melodramatic. The vigilante prostitutes are some guys’ fetish of hard bitches in black leather with automatic weapons! What’s not to like?’
Trevor has to laugh, this man of the night likes dark action scenes in make-believe movies. Lester has a long nose with a friendly bend in it. Peaceful as it looks, when the man was off-duty someone swung a left hook at him and made contact with the nose. After that, Lester made considerable contact with the man. He’s not really friendly. He belongs in a DVD of Sin City.
One thing he has maintained is his fitness; Trevor not. He knows he must address his very average physical state. He must take on his own rehabilitation. Possibly with resistance work? Weights. More than active exercise, real weights, pressing, pushing, the boring battle against inert muscles. He could, but again he has been saying to himself: not yet.