The Returns

by Philip Salom

  Resistance training begins with resisting.

  ‘I’m off to a club tonight,’ says Lester. ‘Instead of using Tinder. Old-school. Why don’t you come?’

  ‘C’mon, Lester, you do the night-birding. I just can’t do the talk: “Hi-beautiful-wouldya-like-to-come-home-with-me” kind of spiel. Anyway, I’m too old …’

  He means he is not like this.

  ‘Bullshit. You wouldn’t know. It’s all about bluffing. How can you sell books if you can’t sell yourself?’

  ‘That’s so bloody American.’

  ‘Come to think of it, you are looking a bit shopworn. A night out will do you good.’

  ‘I’m tired. Being tired is good for me.’

  Trevor thinks nightclubs are like Paradise, where biffo St Peters stand shouldering the Gates, but inside all is Hell in high heels and pills and fools in flashing lights. Getting wasted on industrial cocktails before trading migraines in the back seat of taxis. Lester has a different and wilder way about him. He can change places. And Lester has a bit of Koori blood, which he claims when he feels like it. Dark brown eyes, a certain look. His own man. He doesn’t suffer fools.

  A man approaches the tables. He is tall and, despite his walking stick and an alarming lurch to the left every few paces, is casually dressed, and his dog seems well fed. (If the man is gaunt and the dog is fat, so we see fast dogs paired with slow owners.) He stops beside one of the tables where a man is drinking alone and he cackles hello, then leans hard on his stick.

  ‘Didja see the fucken Roos on the weekend, mate?’ he says, a genetic utterance for all Roo fans as they stagger from the weekend in bitter delirium.

  The other man laughs and sucks on his ciggie.

  ‘Too fucken right, I did.’

  ‘Couldn’t believe my fucken eyes seein’ those useless fucken bastards playing in the rain, it wasn’t footy it was shit and fucken mudslides, mate, kiddie stuff, that greasy turd of a ball they couldn’t get a grab of, the limp bastards, Jesus, they woz tryen to fucken kick and tryen and fucken trying but where woz the kicken?’

  The two men smile in sad agreement. Even in the IGA between pale Aussie customers and the brown Indian staff it’s not community and it’s not world music that unites, it’s bloody football. The man keeps on.

  ‘Yeah. What an arse, what in gentle fucken Jesus was I doin watching it, eh? I never seen any fucken playen as fucken bad as that. And that big cunt with the fucken contract, millionaire bastard, fucken what’s-his-name, ah shit, what a waste a space, him … you know him, mate.’

  ‘Johnson?’ the other man says. ‘Useless bastard.’

  ‘Nah, that’s the other cunt, nah, I got it, fucken Geoff Hollins, that fucker, me head’s on back ta front since I seen him with his moneybags in his eyes and not a fucken ounce a talent in his hands. Or feet. Arse-about kicker, gentle fucken Jesus.’

  Lester is squinting. How many silly buggers like this has he seen in his shortened professional time? The motley lot.

  ‘Now that,’ says Trevor, leaning towards him, ‘is gift of the gab.’

  ‘Yep,’ Lester says. ‘Shit and fucken mudslides. And arse-about kicker and gentle fucking Jesus in the same sentence? The man’s a bloody poet.’

  ‘Oi,’ calls the man, ‘you two over there.’

  He is pointing at them with an angry finger.

  ‘Think footy’s funny, do ya? Yeah, well, you’re probably arse-end Collingwood fans. On the piss like a coupla fucken alkies. Yeah, mate,’ to Trevor, ‘I seen you smacken ’em down by ya sad self. Got a another pisshead friend with ya just for the day?’

  His moment and he hits it. If he knew his stuff he might see the look in Lester’s eyes. He doesn’t. Lester doesn’t mind him. He leans on his stick and moves off down the street. His fag is almost out but, tight-lipped now, he is sucking from it like a lord.

  ‘Local colour,’ says Trevor. ‘Whatever that guy thinks comes straight out of his mouth. Most of it unpublishable. Talking of which …’

  He tells Lester about the blotted-out words in the books he has found.

  ‘I should show you. Each blot is a kind of dzzzt,’ he says. ‘Our friend here would be all dzzzt, non-stop dzzzt. He would sound like a tattooist.’

  ‘You know,’ he adds, ‘I read somewhere that wharfies are introducing a non-swearing policy at meetings.’

  ‘ The wharfies? It’ll be the cops next. Of course, you know I prefer the company of well-spoken crims.’

  They sit for minutes without talking. Lester goes through the texts on his phone. From the sidewalk table they can inspect the locals. Given our two men are sedentary during the day, perving counts as exercise. By nature they see the world differently – one as a detective, one merely voyeuristically. The pub’s customers, the alms-gatherers. Sleek-haired men in black Maseratis up by the cafés, who they both think are probably crooked.

  Customers are constantly entering and leaving the door of the gym. It looks so easy, they go in cool and come out hot, sweaty in patches and clutching towels. Not one of them is fat; some are slim and shapely. Some are muscle-trucks, NRL monsters who spend hours shaking off beads of sweat like flies.

  In complete contrast, a group of African women in long dresses and head coverings wander down Errol St., swaying like fine giraffes above most people, who can’t help looking as they pass.

  Lester is someone Trevor has met again only recently. A male voice growled a hello while Trevor was deciding if the IGA’s runner beans were fresh enough to buy in handfuls or needed to be chosen. ‘Don’t tell me you select green beans one at a time,’ said the voice. It was Lester. Now retired. It seems Lester lives close by, so he can walk over to Errol St. instead of feeling historical over a bottle of whisky at home. That kind of retired, he once said, takes it out of you.

  He is an ironic man behind his trim beard. Too old to be a hipster, too young for a bearded hippie, too ironic for either, Lester displays a beard all his own, sui generis, the lower edge of which is cut squarish on the chin. It is dark and cut … like a tiny boxing glove. Between blinks he looks like Robert Downey Jnr, though his beard is beginning to show a dash of white, like splits in the leather. Within ten years the effect on Lester the hard man will be decidedly unusual. He will look like a doctor.

  He has a sober temperament, come of long drinking practice and a habit, akin to a tic, of sizing everyone up. For men as much as women, this can be obvious and unsettling. He’s a Tinder sans Tinder.

  ‘How’s your new home?’ he asks. ‘Though I think it’s a bit strange, Trevor, you living with a woman young enough to be your missus. Or old enough.’

  ‘Did I tell you I was moving? Come on, you and Sherlock.’

  ‘It’s the house dust all over your sleeves.’

  ‘Unlike yours. She’s smart, good sense of humour, agreeably weird. What more can a lost soul ask of his landlady?’

  ‘Breakfast in bed?’

  Across the street Trevor notices the blonde woman begging as usual outside the IGA. Her voice will be in dying cadences or everywhere in a rush. She converts alms into fast or slow slur. Sometimes she stands, and jitters about, more usually sits on the pavement, abject and blotchy-faced from the weather. Dressed in black, she is without her little fluffy dog. The man who plays harmonica hasn’t been around for weeks. He was last seen carrying a battered little amplifier to boost his appeal, blues harp all the way down the pavement.

  So today the woman has the street to herself. Trevor sees her whirling down the pavement towards them. He never saw her stand up. Despite her weathered face her hair is freshly streaked and curled and she wears a long black dress. Closer now, he sees it is a black fabric trimmed with gold, surprisingly striking on her hardly fed figure; except the woman is berating people and shouting. She sounds ludicrously Russian in conversation with someone or something unseen, impossible to understand. Drunk. No, she is high, or manic, or all three. Is she even the same woman?

  She is taking very small steps but swings from s
ide to side like someone taking large ones. She almost falls on the back of Lester’s chair and as he turns she sweeps her handbag just over his head then calls out to the other side of the street where nobody is taking the slightest notice. Then she’s off on her downhill lap of the street, until several minutes later she sways back past them still mumbling and calling out in Slavic whatever, as fully preoccupied as before. She may be falling into something but doesn’t land in it.

  ‘I had my DNA done,’ announces Trevor. ‘The results show a group of red dots over Poland.’

  ‘Your invisible father is showing up for once.’

  ‘They look like a tight grouping in shooting practice, which seems appropriate.’ Gunshots into Poland. His lost father.

  He thinks of his jeweller tease: of two men running up Errol St. towards the pub, one man running some distance behind them blasting shots from a revolver.

  ‘There’s another grouping over in the UK, my mum’s lot, but there are patches in the Middle East and Italy … like little grubs on my grapevine. We hatch out everywhere. Think of those eugenics fuckwits around the country. Even with bits of European DNA flying about, Indigenous kids are the purest race on the planet. More evidence every year.’

  Lester sighs and nods. But he is old-school. Which is why psychologists are necessary in the police force. The daily world, even in the streets of Melbourne, is more various than pies and policemen.

  ‘DNA is scary,’ says Trevor. ‘What’s inside our bodies is not us. Biologically, from conception until death, we are packed with flat-out genius on the inside.’

  ‘I haven’t seen much of it.’

  ‘Yeah … That’s because we’re dopey fuckers on the outside.’

  ‘Nurture. It’s a joke,’ says Lester. ‘Talking of dopey, I had a crim who’d lived in shitholes half his life, came into the station so often he’d lost all the molars on the left side of his face – logical given most police are right-handed. Which meant he had to chew on his right, and maybe if people are right-handed they chew righthanded so chewing on the right felt normal. But then the bloke said’ (Lester puts on the guy’s voice) ‘ “I got that Bell’s fucken palsy on the right side of me face, didn’t I, so I couldn’t fucken chew any fucken thing on any fucken side.’ ”

  The street is changing shifts, the dead phase between shops closing for the day and others opening for the evening. The two of them decide to walk back to Lester’s place for a sundowner – well, sans yacht – a glass of single malt with a glimpse of sunlight through it. Before he changes to go out. As they pass his shop Trevor explains his Big Idea.

  ‘Imagine,’ he says to Lester, ‘a phone app that customers could use to check book reviews, in real time, and then be linked to my bookshop. Come in or order it immediately. A Yes or a No. A Tinder for book readers, meaning book sales for me.’

  ‘Sounds good. Bloody do it.’

  Due west, the two men walk, slap-bang into the sun. At the intersection they squint into the circular glare at the end of the long street. The tram cables overhead follow down the slope then disappear to the right like thin black air trails of birds sweeping out of view.

  ‘I did. I discussed the app idea with Diana. She’s the designer. I made her promise to take the idea to work and see about developing it.’

  The cables keep sweeping above them. The staves. When he’s talking like this Trevor fails to notice real birds let alone metaphoric ones.

  ‘They paid me a basic rights fee, like film rights for a book. Nothing happened. Months later I heard of an app that reviewed books and gave a star rating to each title, as up to date as the search engines were. The company made shitloads.’

  ‘Crooks whatever the colour of their shit.’

  ‘Yeah. They said it wasn’t my work, it was the form the app operated through, which was their invention. They had patented the form, not the function.’

  ‘They cheated you, all right. You should have rung me up.’

  ‘They ripped me off and hardly took breath. A different sort of crim from the kind you fronted. Hardly great for a failing marriage, though, is it?’

  ‘Fuck the bookshop and that app stuff,’ says Lester. ‘Settle in with your landlady like that old Pommy artist Turner, and just paint. I saw some of your paintings years ago. It was,’ he grins, ‘good enough to sell.’

  ‘I never showed you anything. Why would I show you, a hard-arsed cop?’

  ‘You bloody did. You, the guy with the great memory.’

  Lester’s home is a rundown terrace with an iron filigree frontage above the porch and the first-floor balcony. It is Gothic, as in rusty, unpainted and untended. Unlike any other in the street. Inheritance, he says, his parents. How about that! That it looks more like a rooming house than a terrace makes Trevor unexpectedly happy. It belongs to someone he knows. Usually these buildings are so renovated they are rounded up to the extra million by some hateable stranger who strides from the front door and drives off in a BMbloodyW.

  Inside, the house is warm but empty. Heat not homeliness. Trevor stops in surprise. The corridor is hung with paintings: contemporary work, some of it. There are more in the open lounge area.

  ‘Lester! Do you collect art? You sly bastard. You of all people, it just doesn’t … You were playing me.’

  ‘Jesus, Trevor, and here I am thinking you’re the one who reckons there’s more to people. Not just black and white, like most coppers.’

  ‘Most people.’

  ‘Yeah, as it happens, I collect paintings.’

  ‘What about this triptych? I’ve never seen that style before. It’s really strange. Who’s that by?’

  ‘Not really a triptych, mate, more a naughty threesome. Yeah, well, what do you think of them?’

  Trevor stands where the three paintings are hanging together. They are dark, almost grimy from a profusion of lines criss-crossed into their surfaces, with a mosaic of sudden colours somehow escaping or nearly escaping from this net. It looks like a Bacchanalian orgy. Bodies, tables, faces?

  ‘Hard work doing this, obsessive work. Such a small scale, almost miniature. The detail, though, not so much tight images, as … tight.’

  ‘Intense focus, almost primitive in style. They work together.’

  ‘You might be surprised, or maybe not, to know that I painted them.’

  ‘You what? You did?’

  ‘Yep.’

  If Lester is unexpectedly pleased with this bit of entrapment, wrong-footing Trevor, he is also displeased to have his talent questioned. Except it isn’t, and the unexpected, which is, is its own reality.

  ‘Come on,’ he says.

  He walks through to the rear level overlooking the garden and they stand in the sunlight. Next door he hears and sees what looks like universal family chaos. Loud voices, as children run around and complain and call out for food and yell at Mrs Next-door who is just audible, too, wherever she is and someone explains something with great irony and impatience and a radio begins and a girl with black hair says ‘Hello Dad’ and rushes into another room.

  ‘Bit of an orgy been happening here, too. I can’t remember if you had any children, Lester?’ Trevor asks over the lessening din. He sees for the first time that the man’s face is quite lined, oddly noticeable in this late sunlight.

  ‘Don’t need ’em, I’ve got a dozen next door.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Oh, one or two, somewhere about. Lost contact. My biggest sin. Par for the course in cop work, as you know. If someone does a Koori genealogy around my line a few names will pop up.’

  And that style of painting. … ‘What do you mean about, why does everyone say about about children, I mean the specific numbers? My landlady’s daughter is about 23, and she lived with her husband for about … You can’t have about one or two kids. Sin? You’re not a Catholic.’

  ‘Why? I’m not, as you know, a stay-at-home kind of man.’

  ‘Well, your neighbours are. They need these multi-storey terraces just to house them all. How
many children do they have?’

  ‘Nine, I think, from 16 all the way down to 3.’

  ‘It’s a rabbit hutch.’

  ‘Yeah. Depressing, eh?’

  Lester checks the glasses by holding them up to the sunlight. The back door opens next door and a boy in high-school uniform saunters into view, backpack slung over one shoulder, mobile in his right hand.

  On his walk back Trevor passes the pub he’s never been to: a UFC pub, with loads of patrons dressed in singlets and swearing and music way louder than his head likes. None of it being what he likes. Two kids the size of dining-room chairs fly round the corner as if someone has chucked them, and after stumbling into him run back to where they came from.

  ‘Carm’ere, you bloody kids,’ yells a female voice. When Trevor turns the corner he sees a woman in white slacks rising awkwardly from a pavement stool which looks like a toadstool under her massive bottom, and she big all over, hunched forward with a bag strap pressing between two vast breasts in a shrunk-on mauve T-shirt. She stands with legs planted apart like a bloke drinking a stubbie with his mates.

  ‘Carm’ere, you little brats, you bloody well do like I say. Hey!’ she shouts as one boy runs past her towards the cul-de-sac beside the pub. Trevor continues on. It is in fact perfectly safe there, few cars appear except occasionally to do a slow T-turn.

  ‘Keep ’em in order, will ya,’ says a bloke sitting near her, half in a growl and half in resignation, his belly large with beers and issuing sundry ‘G’day, mate’s.

  Up to her then. She smiles at Trevor as he passes, sucks heavily on her fag. Oh, suffer the little children.

  Today there is no one eating inside the pub, just UFC posters on the windows showing absurdly aggro faces, and advertisements for gambling nights repeated alongside him for the twelve paces it takes him to walk past the four windows. Trevor knows there is disproportion in the world or else no one would know anything. Comparisons, his head says to him, are decisions. Not always good ones.