The Returns

by Philip Salom

  The man explained: when he had driven off from the eighth tee his shot hit the women’s tee marker and the ball flew straight back into his eye. His good eye. Now he’s truly worried.

  Elizabeth finds it hard not to laugh at this weirdly absurdist drama, which makes her eyes well up.

  ‘Now,’ says the optometrist, ‘that is anxiety. Elizabeth, wipe your eyes’ – he hands her a tissue – ‘and don’t blink. Good. Again. Good. Sooner or later everyone needs glasses. Now, sit over here.’

  Elizabeth sits under the testing frame as he swaps lenses.

  ‘Is it better like this? Or like this?’

  Slide and click, slide and click as the lenses are rotated in the frame.

  ‘The man looked more like a Francis Bacon,’ he says, ‘than a man.’

  ‘Great story, but should you be telling me? However, (she points at her eyes) how are mine?’

  ‘Yours are fine. If you’re happy with glasses you don’t need surgery.’

  As if optometry isn’t worrying enough, Elizabeth knows she must convince her new doctor. No, she is not a hypochondriac. Her previous doctor thought so. There is something wrong with her system, something she judges or intuits, nothing specific. Fatigue. Then manic energy. Uncertain digestion. On her walk to the local medical centre her thoughts are rolling over in variations of I can’t be sure and I can’t recall and Yes but … to avoid incriminating herself, her own Fifth Amendment, as if she were facing a committee. The day is sunny, without warmth unless you’re a lizard on a fence. By the time she is there it has become overcast and the southwesterly starts blowing off the Bay. Cold as calamity. Nothing like a cold day in Melbourne, she thinks, as if the cold is a harbinger of this malaise she is worrying over.

  In the waiting room she sits and reads a silly glossy magazine of Photoshopped women pouting, and more pouting, or with diamonds and coffee and pouting. Has she been bitten by one of those white-tailed-spider things during her burst of shed clearing? No, she can’t feel any bites on her skin. Has she succumbed to a food allergy? Her bowel habits haven’t changed – they are always odd – so that’s ambiguous. Lyme disease? Malaria? Are there bloody mosquitoes in the neighbour’s backyard, in the pools near the taps where even tadpoles wouldn’t procreate?

  Above her the TV channel describes how women recovering from endometrial cancers do better on placebos than on universally ingested herbal cures. In fact they don’t do anything on the herbal cure. Except lose their money. Why, she thinks, doesn’t the herbal cure have at the very least its own placebo effect?

  She is to see Dr Eli Chen. Not as young as Elizabeth expected. Being Chinese, Dr Chen asks about everything her patients do from walking to shitting. She is thorough and what she perceives sitting in front of her is a strangely controlled woman. Blood pressure very low but variable and, given the “white coat effect”, as she explains, this is very unusual. Diet?

  And so the saga begins.

  Elizabeth leans into it: describes her food, its presentation and when she eats, how much and the difficulty of sticking to this tested and, she is certain, excellent regimen. Healthy, happy, almost wise. Her wild dietary history. She means her diet before Trevor arrived. Eating his food in the last weeks is just an indulgence and she isn’t going to any more.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ says her doctor, ‘you may have an adrenal problem. Or thyroid. Have you been gaining weight recently?’

  Her patient is unwilling to say so at first, then admits that she is, she cannot understand why, putting on weight. It makes her feel, er, guilty. Since when is doing the right thing the wrong thing? Or is this the Trevor effect?

  ‘Have you,’ asks Dr Chen, ‘ever heard of anorexia nervosa?’

  ‘Come on, I don’t have anything like that. I’m not like that. I’m careful – OK, determined, not demented.’

  ‘Yes, I see, yes, however, I asked because there is another somewhat related condition or syndrome. Known as orthorexia nervosa.’

  ‘Ortho- as in …’ she almost coughs ‘… orthodox?’

  ‘Quite so. Perhaps you obsess over the correctness of your diet and then worry if you can’t keep up. You feel you must at all times be eating the right food? Do you ever feel like that? Ah. You do. Lapses aren’t like sins, unless they make you feel that way! Elizabeth, you might be worrying about healthy eating so much it’s making you unhealthy.’

  The paradoxical absurdity of this sinks in. She is a food moralist?? She eats with an overly strict sense of the right and wrong ways of foods, ways of eating, when and how much and …? What a ridiculous thing, let alone a ridiculous thing to suffer from. She is both puppeteer and puppet?

  ‘So, do you blame yourself if you aren’t keeping to it?’

  ‘I might do.’

  If no one had suggested this of Elizabeth she might have considered other people weird enough to have it. But not herself. Is she inclined to feel bad after breaking her regimen? No. Well, yes. Could this be deemed a form of … self-loathing? Guilt, maybe. Guilt comes from where?

  She bends forwards and puts her head in her hands. She is making herself sick? Jesus Christ, no faffing about with this doctor.

  ‘I feel pretty up all the time,’ says Elizabeth, sitting up to prove it. ‘Bouncing, in fact. I have, someone said, a bounding insouciance.’

  Her working-with-it doctor has never heard of bounding insouciance. It makes her smile. She types it into Elizabeth’s file then turns back to her.

  ‘Yes, that’s a danger sign.’

  ‘You’re joking. Of what?’

  ‘Excessive adrenaline in your system. You’re high. I strongly suggest you add more carbohydrates to your meals. No, no, don’t shake your head. Paleo, for example, is not a proven nutritional diet even if celebrity chefs spruik it. The Chinese have been eating healthily for millennia and – we eat anything! But in balance. Yin and yang, yes? Not God and certainly not any caveman nonsense.’

  ‘It’s not God with me. Or caveman.’

  ‘OK. You’ve never had a, um, religious attitude to food? Has your family?’

  ‘Not recently.’

  Why, oh why, must the adrenalised image of the Bhagwan leap into attention, or is he a guru with thyroidal brown eyes? A long white beard. Beads and beans. Platters of vegetarian food. Beans, grains, the ’80s pre-cooking show offerings plated without any gritty piles of ancient grains, exotic grains, South American grains. Her mother’s life and the current editing. This will keep on recurring now, she supposes. Flashbacks. Returns.

  On the way home Elizabeth walks around the corner of the hotel with serviced apartments. A young couple are shouting at each other.

  He: ‘You care more about a photo of you now than you did about a photo of my brother who was dying.’

  She: ‘But he didn’t die, did he, so it’s not the same.’

  He: ‘That is so selfish. I still feel so bad about that.’

  She: ‘It isn’t the same.’

  He: ‘You just want to make an argument out of everything.’

  She: ‘What? You started this by jumping back in time to your brother. Two years ago! We’re here, Joe, in the street. It’s fucking Friday!’

  Elizabeth hurries away, still hearing the crossfire if not the words. The scary unseen things. For some reason she begins seeing the dark leather pouch she dreamt of recently, and inside it tiny chains, or were they lengths of the finest necklace, links like golden quinoa? To be walking in the fresh morning air and see this shadowy, intimate image. Quinoa!

  Not that she tells anyone. She has many dreams like this. She is sure the imagery represents the fine interlocking worry of editing. Pouches and delicate chainwork are not for sharing, they will fall apart upon speaking.

  Elizabeth turns and looks at Trevor without reaction, her arms full of books. She places them in two piles on a swivel chair. Trevor is standing there after closing the front door. She looks blank. His arm goes back and he throws a plasticky dog toy across to her, but instead of catching it she bats it away int
o the kitchen.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ she shouts. ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  ‘It’s me,’ he says, waving his hand. ‘Trevor. It’s a fetch toy I bought for Gordon on his walks. Is your face thing still happening?’

  ‘Jesus, Trevor! You could have given me some warning before throwing the bloody thing at me! You, I could recognise you anywhere. You’re easy.’

  Not for the first time he isn’t sure if she is being affectionate or belittling him. He is aware of simply standing there, watching her, looking away, looking back, as she shoves the books on the chair. The dog toy is abandoned in the kitchen. Where is Gordon when you need him?

  ‘How?’ he asks her.

  She makes a hand gesture like slurring Auslan down towards his leg.

  ‘And you tilt your head to the right. You smile too much.’

  ‘I what?’

  But she shrugs. Then she pushes the swivel chair on castors all the way into her study and begins unpacking the books. She isn’t well. She tends to be blunt. She is woman enough to admit it, without deciding if perhaps she shouldn’t do it. People can’t see themselves much or are blind to the little they can see. She didn’t say his head was big and shiny.

  ‘Did you know there are super-recognisers?’ Trevor says to her, rather loudly to make sure she hears, and to recover some balance. ‘Like supertasters in the wine business.’

  No reaction.

  ‘Who remember every face they’ve seen. Even decades later. Even from passing someone in the street. Even out of context.’

  ‘It’s a spectrum then?’ she says, emerging again.

  ‘Facial recognition? Yeah. Must be.’

  ‘Like autism.’

  ‘Well. Yes, I suppose so. It turns out – funny, eh – that you’re at the bottom end and I’m at the top end. I seem to have high visual retention.’

  ‘So do I, Trevor. Just not for faces.’

  Her voice is as edged as the hardbacks she has been shifting.

  ‘And what’s this thing about top and bottom? I don’t like hierarchical metaphors. A spectrum is horizontal and it’s about time people – you – realised it.’

  He looks at her for a few seconds, her expression fierce, then nods: her voice was as sure as her distinction. His own silly fault, she thinks, trying one-upmanship and this time it’s worse than his comment about magpies having facial recognition. Fucking magpies? And super-bloody-recognisers? Is he trying to be funny by making some point?

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘We are … at opposite ends.’

  ‘For faces.’

  Downstairs he is uncertain what to make of this. It matters that he does. By the time he has re-emerged Elizabeth is unconcerned, trying to arrange some flowers in a vase for her room. Over the days he will learn her better, and consider his place in this. That she is tart at times means little, he comes to see that she is quickly buoyant, melding into equanimity as if nothing has happened. Just carry on, Trevor, says his keeper self.

  Within days he is pestering her about eating more. Perhaps she shouldn’t have told him what the doctor said. Now there is someone to cook the meals she might as well succumb, as against crunching her rye bread and tahini paste or green salad and nuts and/or a sliver of steamed fish, or splurging on too much steak. He has been cooking every night and joshing her to eat as much as she likes, playing the TV chef ‘Come on, you’ll love it, mm, mmm, delicious if I say so myself’.

  ‘When I first saw you, you were weak from hunger.’

  ‘I was not.’

  ‘You were in a faint. You collapsed against my shop window like one of those poor starving women in Dickens’ London. You were a waif.’

  He looks her up and down.

  ‘I am suggesting food, not salvation. You have JWs doing their endless door-knocking around here if you want that. Mind you – they might be wowsers but even they look well fed.

  ‘And,’ he adds, ‘remember you told me you didn’t drink.’

  ‘When did I tell you that?’

  ‘When you collapsed on my window.’

  ‘Stop saying I collapsed. I said I didn’t drink brandy.’

  She knows if she eats more of his meals she will enjoy it, even if it is the wrong food, and therefore she gets annoyed with him. Feeling guilty is something she will have to get over. It tastes of weakness, a niggling sense of being trapped.

  With him cooking every night the kitchen has become territory – his – and he behaves as if she must queue to use it. Insidious usurpation. Something as chemical-sounding as that, the chemistry of ooze. He complains about her ladles, or lack of them, her knives. The new Dick knife she has bought.

  ‘Why did you buy another vegie knife?’ he said recently, testing the blade for sharpness against his thumb. ‘Instead of something useful.’

  ‘Because you keep using it to cut up garlic.’

  ‘I do not – it’s for fruit and nothing else.’

  ‘Nonsense, I cut a banana recently and it stank of garlic. Garlic and fruit do not go together and it’s my kitchen.’

  ‘You probably cut it on the garlic corner of the cutting-up board.’

  ‘On what? The garlic corner ? On my cutting-up board? I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.’

  ‘You like things being done your way?’

  ‘Trevor, I have lived alone for … years. With no one else here to do things, they are done my way.’ (She knows she is fudging it.)

  ‘You hardly use the board. I cook most of the meals. By now.’

  In fact he keeps all the knives in a high state of sharpness. Like his tricks.

  When cooking an Indonesian rendang he always browns the meat in dazzling oil before adding it to the mix, always cooks the garlic/onion/ginger and a knob of intensely smelly belacan shrimp paste (his optional addition) for twenty minutes to remove the raw flavour which home cooks leave behind in curries.

  Thus he makes the house stink. He always does. Just a different house.

  He places the casserole in the oven, lid on at first, then off, then reduces the sauce on the stovetop. Down to a rich palm-sugar pleasure. The other meals he cooks are Chinese-style or European. He has restocked her cupboards with spices and bottles of sauces, different kinds of soya.

  ‘I knew someone who called their dog Soya Sauce,’ she says, watching him select a bottle. The colour. ‘It ended up as Soyuz, like the Russian rockets. Which means “union”, apparently …’

  It’s just the dodging around him in her small kitchen that tires her. He is always cooking something. Worse than having a mother or an in-law take over. Her own mother calls her a caterpillar. No wonder: she tends to eat raw and green. Grab it, eat it. Otherwise the stupid guilty feelings.

  He makes her his Sichuan variation on Hainanese chicken rice. To a pot of water he adds sliced and bruised ginger, garlic, a cinnamon stick and a handful of star anise. Lovely little star anise, he always thinks, so geometrical he is reluctant to use the neatest ones – but what else are they for, craftwork?). Finally he adds soya light sauce, rice wine, spring onions, a shake or so of five-spice powder. And several dried chillies. He loves these dried chillies even more than star anise, less perfect in form but far more sensuous: the depth of their reddish colours, the full curve of the seed case. Rubies.

  Once the liquid has simmered for several minutes he reduces the temperature, eases a whole chicken into the liquid (or a portioned duck if he feels like duck) and simmers it for twenty minutes before turning the heat off, covering the pot and leaving the chicken to take in all the flavours. The proteins cook without firming, the flesh is succulent yet safe.

  Waiting to one side are his chopping block and heavy steel cleaver.

  For the meal he serves the chicken brushed with sesame oil then chopped through Chinese-style, with rice and a bowl of the chicken broth. Greens steamed on the side. He makes his own chilli sauce and a ginger, spring onion and rice vinegar sauce. A dash of sugar.

  Too awkward to be on opposite sides of t
he table, she sits at the end and he on her left. As it’s a chopsticks-and-bowls meal the table is set with the chicken in the middle alongside the steamed greens, and rice between them. He positions the ginger sauce near her and a small bowl of his chilli sauce in front of him.

  It looks simple and smells too beautiful to feel trapped – ‘The broth alone will cure you of everything!’ he says – so Elizabeth has agreed to eat. Only half coerced, only half trapped. Yes, Doctor. (But what will she feel like in the morning?)

  This is where my life is, she thinks, a point halfway?

  On Sunday Martina stops off to pick up Elizabeth before they drive up to Trentham for the traditional-crafts festival. At Elizabeth’s suggestion, Martina has come inside to inspect Trevor. She is a colleague, an editor of non-fiction books for one of the big publishers. They have known each other for years. She can run her editorial eye over the man, thinks Elizabeth, looking for fact not fiction.

  From his basement room Trevor has heard Martina’s arrival and the sound of voices. He moves up the stairs then stops and sits. They are in the lounge discussing a friend they have in common, a journalist dying from some kind of brain cancer. Too many stressful overseas postings, in his case. How long has it taken for authorities to recognise that foreign correspondents and city journalists may suffer from – Elizabeth has already uttered the words “posttraumatic stress disorder” – that condition again?

  ‘Diet can’t help him now,’ she adds. ‘There are tumour-like tiny headphones in his brain.’

  She is ignoring the possibility her own kind of stress might originate in her eating regimen. It’s a wayward kind of contrast. Orthorexia nervosa. Brilliant. She might be in the next DSM!

  Elizabeth is dodging in and out of denial.

  No, she doesn’t over-control her eating, not really, not for a minute did she think Dr Chen ate “just anything”. Dr Chen was, and it suited her, slightly plump. Controlled not obsessive eating, her body was saying to Elizabeth. See, I am what I eat, happy happy cliché. Her previous doctor was Indian, and plump. She explains all this to Martina, whose body has softened with early middle age. Which is sexy, not skinny and not fat. What does she eat?