The Returns

by Philip Salom

  Sometimes it is emergency services. Heavy rain, a broken roof. Clearing the kerbside mess. Pulling bodies out of wrecks.

  The subdued dawn light above the long park and the trees is quietly amazing and seeing it is humbling without any search for meaning, it might be said. Magpies warble their counterpoint in the branches. An occasional crow sounds lazy even this early in the day. Elizabeth and Trevor are taking Gordon to his usual Royal Park track and to meet, as always, the neighbourhood dogs. After the first weeks she has talked Trevor into accompanying her. ‘Think of it as exercise. As a way of getting to know each other,’ she said, ‘without sitting down and drinking anything.’ For his company, in fact. She is taking more liberties as she becomes more used to him. What a quickly accepted habit, she thinks, on her part at least, meaning she was lonely after all.

  By now she even knows Trevor’s body smell. Sharing a kitchen, handing him a drink, brief but olfactory moments. When clothes at certain movements are further from the skin and the now familiar scents waft out. Which most people don’t notice. She does. Occasionally, inevitably, they bump together, reach across each other, touch. It can happen showing a stranger a map on a mobile phone, so in a shared kitchen the floor size of a double bed it is routine.

  Walking the dog, to be fair, means only if he wants to, but in these windless autumn mornings what could be more beautiful? The sun, the cool air, sounds of dogs and calls of conversation, a walker’s laugh from a hundred metres away, the grunts and footfalls of a woman running up behind them then passing, the material of her tights shining. Elizabeth and Trevor, two uncoupled adults, then, are playing a twosome as they walk around the park, and who would think otherwise, as they talk or don’t talk, and as the brown dog keeps racing far away from them, then back, like the arguments and agreements of couples? Their worthwhile and slightly uncomfortable joke. On the way back home he lets her get slightly ahead and observes her.

  She walks as if the sunlight moves with her down the path and the shadow stays well behind. Only then does he become aware of the smile on his face, as if nodding his head in agreement to some unasked question.

  What Trevor has been adjusting to – after their initial and mutual awkwardness –feeling less than free wandering anywhere at any time in the house, in any state of undress. This is especially the case in summer, his season of walking unclothed or in a longyi as the body thrives on skin-to-air contact. At first Elizabeth was nervously territorial. Comic, really, he thinks, given it was her idea, that she has advertised to have a complete stranger enter her world. ‘Enter her fold,’ she once said. You don’t have to be a linguist to know that sounds a bit Freudian. His grin was smothered just in time.

  He finds himself sitting on the edge of his bed, considering a room when once he had a house. At least he has all of the basement floor. He still feels a dullness which he puts down to grief for a marriage winding off its centre. Or off his centre. It is heavy and embarrassing, the irrevocable shame of it.

  On and off, then, he is feeling estranged. Then becalmed. On these same tree- and bird-lined streets. Lorikeets and fruit bats, day shriekers and night flappers. If not exactly bird flights, then winged possums, flapping mammals in the darkened streets, so very odd to think about at night. He is now an inner-city dweller and cohabiter. It is a new form of self-consciousness. Being with Elizabeth prevents him becoming an isolate.

  So, after closing the shop at the end of each day, he comes home and they sit and talk. The days pass regardless. He becomes accustomed to living in her house. There is an invisible space he moves into and it calms him, at times he feels like a tourist skimming effortlessly along pavements on a Segway, moving and talking, seemingly unreal.

  Trevor is sitting on her back verandah – he has a chair now, beside hers – when the phone rings. She goes inside briefly then returns with a large bowl of crisps and the cordless phone pinched under her right ear and shoulder like a tiny violin.

  She points at Trevor then at the chips, then nods and murmurs and says words such as ‘Is that so?’ or ‘Amazing’ or even the extended ‘Really, he didn’t, did he?’ The caller is obviously her mother. Mrs Sermon can provoke ‘Yes, Mum, I completely agree, Mum’ by punishing at a mundane level, preaching the beauties of a flat life. Her calls are one-directional – they feature the weather and the nice neighbour with little kiddies, not the awful neighbours with the boat and the welding machine and what the little kiddies wear and what they were thinking of doing on the weekend. But whereas most phone hogs gab on without listening, Mrs Sermon will stop without warning, to ask Elizabeth her opinion, checking she is still there and following this eccentric waffle.

  Every few minutes Elizabeth walks over, picks up a crisp, crunches it noisily and with her mouth open. God only knows what powers of self-absorption her mother has not to notice the acoustics. As the bowl of crisps empties, this casual mischief becomes very funny, then annoying, then funny again. She doesn’t always do it.

  Elizabeth places the cordless on loudspeaker, while she checks something on her laptop. Lately her mother’s memory has been haphazard, she spoke in non sequiturs before recovering. It was unexpected and sudden. Now she complains she has mislaid her Casio, the lovely Casio keyboard she wanted for singing something the other day and went searching for and couldn’t find it anywhere and, do you know, for the first time she realised just how hard it is finding anything amongst the carefully collected items, not clothing, not in boxes but among the appliances otherwise not musical. If Elizabeth has seen the Casio on her visits could she let her old mum know where …

  Elizabeth is silent. The constant brand name is annoying her.

  She tells herself: My mother is a talkbot.

  Silent, but not from duty or boredom as usual, from this question regarding the keyboard, its worrying amnesia. Nor does her mother remember when Elizabeth reminds her, she borrowed (the bloody Casio) and wrapped it in green bubble wrap – she makes much of the colour, her mother likes colour – such an elaborate parcel, like a coffin, remember? She had said it looked like a green coffin … and it’s now here. Wasn’t this memorable? Unforgettable? Nothing.

  Maybe her mother is losing her grip. Old people can wake one morning feeling much the same as the morning before, unaware that during the night the bureaucratic sidekick of Death has come to their brain and left a permanent black redaction. Elizabeth blows air through her lips. She has full lips and would never make this exasperated pout in public even if she can do it almost silently. It is for her relief alone.

  In ten minutes her old mother (so long ago née randy sannyasin) has forgotten she rang about the keyboard and begins going over the little kiddies again and her sciatica corns irritable cough and how there is nothing there really is nothing worth watching on television any more. This universal complaint by old people.

  Someone is knocking at the house next door. Barking from Gordon. Saved by the chance to tell a fib, Elizabeth says she has a visitor and her mother, who is annoyed to be interrupted so soon, changes her tone (hearing ‘Shut-tup … Gordon!) after a bump (‘Gordon!’) and (I’m coming!) keeps talking. Elizabeth is forced to stall her, say ‘Someone is here, Mum’; she has to go, she will ring back tomorrow. Intending nothing of the sort, she shuts down the call.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she calls out to Trevor, when she resumes her seat. He has gone back into the studio.

  ‘Oh God. Over for another week. The old fucking tyrant.’

  Which makes him jump with laughter.

  ‘A world of dissatisfaction,’ she explains. ‘The state of the weather. You know that saying “All good”, for her it’s “All bad”. It’s this or that or this and that … Even the way the locals drive too close to her when she wanders down to the shops.’

  Trevor looks around the edge of the studio door at her, then walks back to the house.

  ‘They drive too close to her?’ he repeats. ‘On the pavement?’

  ‘Oh, no. The road. She always walks on the road.’


  ‘What?’

  ‘She thinks pavements are too uneven, she might have a fall and be lying there for hours before anyone finds her.’

  ‘Worse than someone running her over? How old is your mother? She sounds ancient.’

  ‘Yeah, she does. Oh, I don’t know.’

  Her resistance to admitting ages. Her daughter’s. Now her mother’s. Therefore, by simple calculation, her own. Journalists called it being triangulated, a word she cuts from any manuscript.

  ‘Mum carries on like a nervous goat sometimes and I get confused,’ she says, vaguely. Eightysomething? Seventysomething? She’s probably about 75.’

  Trevor’s eyebrows lift and stay lifted.

  ‘That’s a ten-year difference. I’ve been picturing a batty old hoarding kind of woman with pressure stockings and worrying teeth. I thought she must be nearly 90. Didn’t you say she is contemplating euthanasia?’

  ‘Yeah, well, she faffed around when she was young, refused to act her age – then got old quickly.’

  She peers into the crisps packet, which is now empty. She explains the memory glitch about the Casio. Then says nothing, preoccupied with the thought of sudden decline. Aged care.

  This mother-complaining amuses him. He likes to listen to Elizabeth complaining and the dutiful anarchy of her saying unkind things she both means and doesn’t mean about her eccentric, bothersome mother. His own mother had not provided much conversation or eccentricity and had become increasingly cynical. And fat. This he found alarming as he too grew larger than expected. He couldn’t complain: hypocrisy is ugly. All the same, why isn’t there a label, a warning, on the wrist? You will get fat.

  Still, Trevor admits one-sided conversations like Mrs Sermon’s, which customers indulge in, make him feel like a taxi driver as the doors open and the mad, bland, garrulous, tall, short, fat as bean-bags, sit there raving, and the some who stay silent and seemingly disassociated are, some of them, drunk. At least he never has to hose out the back seat.

  ‘Well, Trevor,’ she says, ‘now you know what women feel like most of the time.’

  She moves back inside, stepping to one side and over the opportunist Gordon who is lying flat in the doorway for maximum attention and nuisance. She returns, stepping neatly back over Gordon while balancing two bottles and a tray of dips. She is so fast on her feet, at handling things, at everything. Hand-eye co-ordination. She must have been …

  So finally he asks her if she had been a dancer.

  ‘Not bad,’ she says, ‘pretty close, most people think so.’

  ‘You’re so light and fast and co-ordinated.’

  ‘Not thin and nervy and fussy, then?’

  ‘It’s OK by me if you want to be thin and nervous. Just as long as I can be fat and slow and you don’t ask me to run around the park chasing Gordon.’

  ‘God, the last thing Gordon wants to do. He’d prefer to stay out here and chew a bone. Eating. Anyway, you’re not fat and slow. You’re … stocky.’

  They laugh at the euphemism.

  ‘Well, Trevor, thinking of the male gaze: when you’re young they call you girlish, or willowy, then in your 30s they say slim, by your 40s it’s skinny, but a skinny older woman is fast on her way to being a scrag.’

  ‘I like you as you are.’

  ‘You’re being very gracious, Trevor. No, when I was young I was a gymnast.’

  ‘Ah. I never even thought of that.’

  ‘No one does. It’s much the same. Training and training and more fucking training, and calluses and broken toes and frightening bruises from hitting things and falling off things. And the constant stink – you, them, everyone. Just like ballerinas. They get you young. My mother was off with the bloody Rajneeshees so I got nothing but discouragement from her. My father was a tradie, more physical, and he sort of pushed me. At least it wasn’t pole dancing.’

  ‘Your guru-susceptible mother married a tradie?’

  She liked sexy men, she tells him. Charismatic men even more than sexy men because the charisma was of a higher level, her mother would say, with such a man she is as perhaps at no other time, able to relinquish her ego. A man like her wonderful bloody Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. She said he was as smooth as honey but he promised wildness. He talked non-stop and made people’s teeth chatter. It should have been from irritation but she said and they all said it was from nervous adoration. Their Kundalini rising. Elizabeth thought it might have been more basic than that. When she was young a sannyasin told her the Bhagwan mentioned love and the Sufis all the time, not the real Sufis – who were famous for rejecting personality worship and spiritual hubris – but the virtual Sufis he projected from his “inner Sufi” over the swooning sannyasin. Her father was more acerbic: he said it was bullshit, they wanted gorgeous gurus, not Sufi tough guys. She had fallen for the wild side.

  ‘She is the colourful one, then, your mum?’

  For a while Elizabeth isn’t sure if this means she is not. But he is smiling at her like a friend, not a sannyasin. He meant to use the indefinite article. She tells him again about the new manuscript she will be developing and how it merges with her own past. Though some sannyasin remained parental and considerate, many of them were so pre-occupied they were guilty of neglect. How she escaped then was only a matter of age and changing circumstances. No authoritarian obedience. Hard to think about it now. In fact her mother could be very loving when she felt like it, and her irreverence made her a lot of fun when other parents, not in the cult, were so po-faced and conventional.

  ‘Mind you,’ she adds, ‘my mother kept talking about Bhagwan’s love. Then she said I was a disappointment, just a boring kid doing bar exercises.’

  ‘Whereas she might have admired your discipline, rigour …?’

  ‘If I had been a Buddhist in a cave, maybe. It’s too straight. You are so young when you begin. Then your hormone system goes out of whack. Hardly exploring my sexuality. I didn’t even start getting tits until I was 17.’

  He tries to keep focussed on her eyes.

  ‘Yes, I know, I hardly got them when I did. But I kept growing taller.’

  ‘I don’t especially like big tits on a woman.’

  ‘Are you saying my tits are small?’ But she is laughing.

  ‘No, they’re very nice, probably, just not big.’

  She laughs even louder.

  ‘How about your wife?’

  ‘She’s got really big tits.’

  They are laughing like drunks. Elizabeth bumps back and forth in her chair and her eyes run with tears. They know what her mother said wasn’t about love.

  She realises she looks forward to Trevor’s arrival at the end of each workday. It is satisfying, even flattering. After his shopping beforehand in the local IGA with its ferocious prices for meat and its unhappy girls on the checkouts, walking home and cooking their meal most nights.

  Nor, by now, is he in her way, nor she in his. As far as she can tell. Sometimes they hardly see each other after they talk and he has cooked dinner. He stays downstairs, painting. Elizabeth is usually in her study reading through the manuscripts her several publishers send her. Work is never done for the freelancer, who must always say Yes to ensure there is never No. Years ago she learnt that sad truth. The professional parataxis: availability, reliability, slave.

  The tenancy deal is working. They get on, they talk, there is no worrying attempt to go further.

  Even better – though she doesn’t know it – each night, if he gets the chance, Trevor emerges from his studio or the basement, walks over the lawn to the broken-open fence and, checking the neighbour’s house is in darkness, empties his bladder in looping streams of piss onto the man’s backyard.

  Over the next few days Elizabeth is feeling unwell. Low blood pressure again. There is something wrong with her. Surely. Like last time, unless she bothers to think about it, when she slumped from internal mysteries, viral probably or, worse, amoebic. Yes, they must have been amoebic.

  She begins to worry about the wa
ter, the sprinkler she has briefly used in the back garden, inhaling the spray perhaps. Water sitting in the hose warmed up by the sun. Was there something she contracted in the shed when she cleaned it out for Trevor? Her balance is off, she begins to wobble like her glossy setter, like Trevor, which is truly unsettling. If they walked around the park they would all wobble. Again, she worries, she will have to go through her doctor giving her that doubting look and hear those doubting words. GPs are such a pain, they are so incredulous.

  To blur the indignity a little, she makes an appointment with the optometrist first, doctor second. The optometrist is an optimist, he’ll make her feel better. She has to decide whether she will eat something before her appointment or after it, or not at all.

  Down in the optometrist’s gloomy eye-testing room there is little that is new. The cream-coloured machines are latent with age, hulking, poetic things which suggest nostalgia rather than pain, so never as bad as the brightly lit tools and structures in a dentist’s. Which she finds alienating. It is her first visit to actually discuss laser surgery. Normally she shunts this question aside but given this visit is itself a displacement …

  Elizabeth tells him she is pretty anxious about the whole laser surgery thing. She only has two eyes, she says.

  He says anxiety is pretty normal – over eyes or teeth, it makes little difference – and her situation hardly compares with those of some patients he’s seen. No, he shouldn’t be telling her but … A particular patient has been seeing him for years. Since the man’s right eye is all but useless from the rubella he’d suffered as a child – his dud eye, he calls it – his visits are half the work for the optometrist, but a double anxiety for the patient: rubella predisposes people to early-onset glaucoma.

  Recently the man made an emergency appointment to see the optometrist. He was led in by his wife. His good eye was completely plastered over and a bandage was wrapped around his head. He looked like a man from a bombed-out village.