The Returns

by Philip Salom

  ‘Doctors have it in for slim women who come to see them,’ Martina says. ‘And they are not a sensual people, the Chinese.’

  ‘I’d keep that one quiet. Anyway, Dr Chen isn’t. She’s very serious. I call her The Chen. Did I tell you her first name is Elizabeth? She calls herself Eli. My previous doctor smiled a lot and that has to mean something. Though exactly what I’m not sure. It was reassuring. Just as well, given all the places she looked.’

  ‘I usually prefer doctors who don’t have Caucasian backgrounds. I never went to your Indian doctor. What happened to her?’

  ‘Oh, I felt like a change.’

  Martina tilts her head and says nothing. Elizabeth pretends not to notice.

  ‘Now I can’t even remember her name. Pria something something something. Sort of sensual.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ says Martina, ‘if it’s true. I heard somewhere that Indian people are way more uptight than their erotic forebears. As far as I can see, Tantra is for women’s magazines.’

  ‘Or in those New Agey bookshops where the incense is enough to kill you.’

  Somehow this conversation has digressed, which seems to suit both women.

  ‘And they don’t eat meat,’ says Elizabeth.

  ‘They do eat meat, sweetie, they don’t eat cattle. They love big brown eyes, like yours and mine.’

  Martina knows what Elizabeth knows and between them they know men fall for their eyes fast. Her own face is curvy and fleshy now, quite different from Elizabeth’s strikingly straight features. If anyone tends to the bovine and sacred it is herself, and given her olive skin she could, almost, look Indian.

  ‘We are fine women, Elizabeth,’ she adds. ‘So what if you are slim and I am plump? Well, good for us. All the same, you should listen to this new doctor.’

  Martina has always seemed so strong. All that regular diet of facts. And working with writers, she has said to Elizabeth as a tease, who are not simply making it up.

  ‘I meant the religious orders don’t,’ adds Elizabeth. ‘Eat meat. Hindus, Sikhs. After years of me worrying about food, The Chen is saying, or she implies, that I have some anxiety issue. I am either neurotic and have turned it into my diet, or my dieting has turned me into a neurotic! Jesus wept.’

  She realises this is the bind.

  ‘Fish, olive oil, red wine,’ Martina sighs. ‘Lean meat, salads and carbs, and pickled things too, maybe. Healthy food, beans, not spiritual enlightenment.’

  ‘OK, OK, I will try adding more carbs. The Chen says if I don’t my system will crash.’

  ‘You’re not a computer, darling.’

  Trevor smiles at this. Listening in is a skill he has practised equally upon the whispering customers who are hushed and churchlike in the shop and those who proclaim their erudition at length. While the shopkeeper sits behind his counter. Given his retentive memory, he is his own CCTV.

  On a whimsy Elizabeth imagines a laptop and staring into the screen of herself staring back, a scream forming on the face. It doesn’t crash. Diets. A hard drive of lists and “Do nots” with barely a like or a just for the hell of it in sight. Change this and you will change your life, or some such psycho-babble is running down the column beside her. But is that an opportunity or a threat?

  She stands up to look for a plain old unenlightened apple.

  ‘Trevor,’ she calls, ‘stop hiding in the bloody kitchen. Oh, he’s not here.’

  At which point Trevor emerges from below and enters the lounge.

  ‘Hello,’ he says to Martina. ‘I’m … Trevor.’

  ‘Well, well, so you’re her new man about the house. Popping up from nowhere.’

  ‘No, no. Just the lodger. Which sounds pretty old-fashioned.’

  ‘It does. Don’t you have a home to go to?’

  ‘I’m a lost soul. My wife asked me to leave, or maybe I asked myself. Elizabeth has taken me in, at a price. So I’m more around the house than about the house.’

  ‘You like talking, I can see that,’ Martina says, with a kind of sexy smile. She stretches out a dark leg. ‘Of course, Elizabeth has told me all about you. You’ll be good for her. She loves talking, too.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed,’ he says, looking over at Elizabeth, who is still standing. ‘We, um, have a drink and analyse the world most workdays. After the day’s work, that is, not before. Though that might be interesting. And I feed her. I am her feeder.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Martina and Elizabeth laugh differently at this. Martina looks him over.

  ‘So, Trevor, and you’re an artist.’

  ‘Well, I was. I am trying to resurrect it. Back then, and it was way back then, I was young enough to puff myself up and stupid enough to ignore advice and, even if it sounds too biblical, I lost my way.’

  ‘Me too. I thought about writing. I fell for a ridiculous man. I discovered I was better at editing and then I found a better man. Sounds easier than it was. Mind you, editing isn’t about making but it is about finding. It’s not unusual for writers to make but not find.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ he says.

  He is a bit smitten.

  ‘Oh, good’, says Elizabeth. ‘Now that we’ve solved that.’

  She sounds annoyed.

  He watches them leave – up and gone in a rush, it seems.

  They drive away in Martina’s newish car, a Mazda. It may not have car-collector value but it does have a suspension. If only to tease Elizabeth, Martina delays referring to Trevor and concentrates on zigzagging between the constipated little chicanes traffic planners get their kicks from in the 40 zone – left-right-straighten, then left-right-straighten except clearly some vehicles don’t bother and have bent the steel dividers over into sorry signs.

  ‘Martina, you promised.’

  ‘OK, what do I think of your new indoor plant? I hope you water him well.’

  ‘You know what I’m like with plants.’

  ‘That’s why I said it every time I’m in your house I remember that lovely, and I have to say, virile dracaena you ruined by overwatering. Or under-watering.’

  ‘Both, I think.’

  ‘It didn’t even recover when you took it outside. I can still see it out by the side fence, drooping.’

  ‘My God, girl, can you drop the innuendo?’

  Martina’s car is an automatic which she drives smoothly, almost indifferently, certainly without apparent effort, in contrast to Elizabeth in the EH, whose style is more a shove and twist and low-level fighting. The invisible favours of power-assisted everything over manual madness. Having working steering and brakes makes the fifty-year age difference proof of some kind of progress in the world. Which is just as well when the rain sweeps over the highway.

  ‘I like him,’ says Martina. ‘He listens, he seems amused, anyway he smiles a lot. He’s not exactly handsome but he’s OK-looking. I bet he’s a pushover. And not a Narcissist, that’s the thing. Or a bully.’

  ‘Well, he can be a bit of a prat.’

  ‘He’s a man. But it’s good to have a bit of man smell around the place.’

  She sounds somewhat whimsical saying this. Her own man so often absent. Elizabeth looks at her and laughs.

  ‘And now he’s nagging me about eating more – of his meals. They smell too.’

  ‘Well. Lucky you.’

  ‘Yeah, but you know, he’s boring. He goes to work in his boring shop and then he comes home and stands there for a while staring at his bloody paintings, comes back up to cook dinner, then goes outside and stands in front of his paintings again.’

  ‘But he must be painting?’

  ‘God knows, all I ever see is him standing.’

  ‘It is likely Martina is unimpressed by this or simply thinks her friend isn’t being serious. Not that it really matters. The trip takes nearly an hour and the queueing takes nearly an hour so they are full of bladder and empty of stomach by the time they get inside. The racecourse area where the festival is set up looks small in displays and stalls but h
uge with people. A success, then, even as it starts raining again, a lighter fall this time, as they stand waiting for the bratwurst stall to pump through its endless orders.

  Each display is a craft made true: beauty has many forms. Leatherwork and plaster-form and letterpress … wood-turning, tool-sharpening, shingle-splitting from wood blocks … Most traditional crafts seem to be hyphenated practices. Making garden walls with dry-stone techniques, where the shape and the interlocking position of stones triumphs over the need for mortar; wooden sheds where the boards and rafters are connected by dowel-joints to avoid the need for bolts or brackets. One stall is hung with tanned materials, from traditional leathers to large swatches of fish skins tanned and dyed and ending soft despite the enduring impression of scales. Even more amazing is to see the young woman wearing these and soft thin leathers as her only clothing.

  Two bearded hipster lads, one tall and one short, display and demonstrate their hand-made kitchen knives. These are beautiful, especially beautiful, sized in each step from short and delicate vegie knives up to 16-inch blades of major cheffy menace. Because Trevor is a kitchen nerd, Elizabeth stops to inspect the way these men have carved the wooden handles so smoothly, the metal studs finished and polished flush with the surface so the knife rests in your hand like love. It is more natural than anything natural.

  Elizabeth notices the blades are very thin and taper to their edge without apparent bevelling. She asks the shorter men about this, explaining that she has recently bought a Dick knife and, when comparing it with her much older Dick knife, noticed the new blade is distinctly bevelled.

  The man looks at her, his expression asking the question.

  ‘The old blade is thinner,’ she explains, ‘it’s sharper. And it slices even if it isn’t sharp. The new blade is thicker and requires more pressure. Is it the bevelling?’

  ‘What do you mean, bevelling?’ he asks. Water is still dripping from the edge of the awning.

  ‘The blade is thicker but the cutting edge is forged at an angle. Isn’t that a bevel? Yours aren’t.’ She holds up his vegie knife and points to the taper. ‘I really, really like these. Your blades are thinner …’

  Martina has been watching this young man. They are surrounded by a wall of noise from the equipment kept running all afternoon, the music box’s pretty melodies on wind-up from the waistcoated and top-hatted men, and the endless blabbering crowd noise, and yet she cannot tell if the Craftsman of Knives cannot hear Elizabeth clearly or simply, oddly, doesn’t know the term.

  ‘These are crafted on the Japanese model,’ he explains, ‘with very thin steel so they slice through anything as if it was butter.’

  ‘Lovely. How much are they?’

  He explains and her mind immediately wanders to the next stall. She could buy a TV for that.

  ‘Thin blades feel gorgeous but they do chip, don’t they?’

  ‘You shouldn’t ever,’ he says, ‘cut anything hard … with such a knife.’

  They leave him to his knives and move on. But they do chip.

  Just as the two women are walking back towards the exit and designated car park Elizabeth notices a well-known publisher and his wife and three children arriving.

  ‘Nothing much for the kids here,’ she says, ‘but there are animals. And wind-up music boxes. Are you a crafty sort of person, book deals excepted?’

  ‘Not much.’ The man is tall and clean-shaven and wrapped in a long rakish scarf arrangement. He never once looks her in the eye.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘We had a great time. There’s even a hand-and-foot-operated printing press.’

  When he doesn’t respond she continues:

  ‘I see your new latest imprint has sold well. ‘A good idea having this line of international authors. I’ve enjoyed some of them but I haven’t seen many reviews.’

  ‘It doesn’t need them. Reprints of the canon sell themselves.’

  ‘This is my friend Martina,’ she adds. ‘She works for your rivals.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Hello,’ says Martina.

  The man looks at her, nods, then looks at his wife but doesn’t reciprocate. He stares over her head at the crowd, at the restored steam-driven carousel, at the food stalls, at his kids already standing in the hot-chips queue.

  ‘Yes,’ she admits, ‘the carousel, your kids will enjoy that. How old …?’

  She hadn’t taken much notice of them.

  He stares at anything except her, or even Martina, and that must be a first. If nothing else, he is facing two very attractive women. Elizabeth makes another pointless comment or two, until he very obviously tries to walk away without saying anything. Then does.

  ‘And that,’ she announces to Martina, ‘is how our lovely literary world operates. Look past you for a better option, for any option, then leave.’

  ‘The man has a mental problem. I’ve heard about him.’

  ‘Nah, he’s just a shit.’

  The car is hotter inside than expected. Martina smiles the way a driver can when the passenger is twisted to her left, looking at the late angles of sunlight across the paddocks. Elizabeth is saying how much she’d have enjoyed a hands-on craft of some sort. Something mute and physical, not words. A structure you can actually see, as against imagine. ‘Carpentry, pottery, quilting … OK, maybe not quilting. You,’ she says to Martina, ‘are more hands-on because the book has to make sense, be testable in a way, fact-based, and only then opinion’.

  ‘You have no interest in factual writing, Elizabeth. …’

  ‘Maybe I do. Really.’

  ‘Apropos of which, then … That young writer I mentioned to you a few weeks ago: she has accepted our offer. She is writing about sects, and has decided to bring much more research into it. Most of which she has already done, which we didn’t quite realise. Because she wants her book to be a novel. You were brought up in a sect, weren’t you?

  ‘It wasn’t quite a sect and I wasn’t …’

  ‘Well, that Orange People mess you talk often about, and your wanton mother. So, what do you reckon, your money where your mouth is? … Shia has asked for you. We have to confirm it.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Why not? We haven’t appointed an editor yet. It’s all about men with ideas and power controlling women. Then, sadly, how women play into it. I think she is wanting as an adult child to find some absolution, maybe. When I was young my mother was terminally ill but my father was the charismatic man who had grand ideas and made the rules. He ordered me to look after her so I did. Women’s business, you know, these Mediterranean men. They love their women but they love their manliness more. It took all that for me to accept that it’s up to women to care, up to women to forgive. Not that they should, that they can.’

  Elizabeth keeps forgetting that Martina is a Catholic.

  When she arrives home, Elizabeth tells him of their encounters with the short knife-man and the tall publisher. Trevor pulls open the drawer and checks the two knives. It had been his observation regarding the edges, the bevel. And the chipping, a known drawback of finely bladed Japanese knives.

  ‘It was wet but not cold,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Still, the publisher looked as if someone had just taken him out of the deep freeze. And his bloody wife. Jesus, what a fun pair they are. Martina called him a retiree. From humanity. He’s about 40.’

  Back in the kitchen he calls out, asking what kind of editing Martina does. He has been thinking about her during the day. While he waits for Elizabeth’s answer, he starts trimming runner beans for the evening meal.

  ‘She’s been editing non-fiction for years – and she sits on the editorial board too. She can influence decisions.’

  Elizabeth tells him about the new writer. How she and Martina have been discussing hands-on sort of work.

  He knows. The chillies he has begun de-seeding are stinging his fingers. He washes then wipes his hands, steps around the corner towards her.

  ‘She’s sort of beguiling.’
>
  Elizabeth is staring at him. She lays her reading down on the table in front of her. Trevor is leaning against the doorframe, the paperwork is on the table, Gordon sprawled beside her chair.

  ‘Trevor, she’s only a few years younger than me.’

  ‘Yes, but she …’

  ‘But what?’

  Even he knows he’s said the wrong thing. Anything he says now will only emphasise it. Yet again, a moment crashes after a but.

  In this situation, sharing the house, the kitchen, the conversation and her friends, her work talk, his vagaries, they hardly know each other. It feels as if there should be rules, but there are none. Unlike a real relationship, they can’t say what they want to. And what does she want? It’s her house.

  ‘Look,’ she says after a while, ‘I may have this bloody face-blindness, but to make up for it I’m a great listener. I listen very carefully to people, so when you say …’

  ‘OK, OK. You think I’m being disparaging about her?’

  ‘Of her. No.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I hear that you fancy my girlfriend. Well, you can’t. So stop it.’

  ‘I had the impression she liked me. Or was she only teasing?’

  ‘You? Such a blokey thing to say. She’s married.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He’s a troubleshooter in the corporate world, so he’s often interstate or overseas. Someone who comes in to sort out businesses that aren’t performing. He’s like a fixer without a gun in his bag.’

  ‘Lops off heads in one company before moving on to the next? With a bonus. A tough guy.’

  ‘Mmm … something like that. Look, for all that, he’s a very urbane man. She doesn’t mention his work, or him, very much.’

  He lifts both hands to express, what? Her substance, allure, presence, the soulless fixer.

  ‘Uh huh.’

  Just before he showers, his mobile rings. It’s Diana, saying hello briefly before saying she has just received a strange call on the landline. A man with an accent asked if Trevor lived there because he’d like to speak to him. When she asked, the man wouldn’t explain himself, no power-company talk, or telcos, or charities, none of that, he tried to charm her. ‘He was like a perve at a seedy pub.’