The Returns

by Philip Salom

  ‘What kind of accent?’

  ‘I don’t know, it wasn’t a long call because I hung up. It wasn’t Americanised Filipino, more like a movie version of a Russian.’

  Diana. As he undresses he is thinking of her. He stands in front of the bathroom mirror and sways so his penis moves left and right. This strange pleasure of watching your own genitals and that feeling which is visual, and the visual that feels of the very thin skin of the penis. His own, his hanging shape. Filling with blood and becoming heavy. Below it the puckered scarring down his right leg.

  She can hear the downstairs shower running. Her own shower is also a grooming session, removing the outlying fuzz of her pubes in preparation for her night with novelist and sometime lover Richard. For him? Trimming a panty line is fine, but how much to trim after that? She is not a young woman waxing or shaving, the skin left bare. The goose bumps left after depilation. Funny, though, that they shower at much the same time, often. Often enough.

  Standing, naked, under the water, aware she is in the top shower and he is standing, naked, under the water, immediately below her in the basement shower. Like two lifts in the same lift well. Standing, facing forward, in the passive stance of showering, the in-between moments where new ideas form. Though it couldn’t be two different lifts in the same shaft, they must be in the one, together, passive, he behind, she standing facing the doors as the moments pass.

  In bed Elizabeth is annoyed by the conversation with Trevor. There’s no denying the subtle exoticism Martina gives off. Even her name. Elizabeth has been thinking of her friends and colleagues, her inner worry-list of too few friends. If she must make more effort, at this moment she is dropping into sadness. Above the doona her bare arms are crossed more in containment than in easeful pre-sleep. The bedside lamp gleams on the bedding, its light tending more to white than gold, better for reading under.

  She will be seeing Richard soon. Perhaps it will be better not to mention the new writer and her own involvement. She will see her colleagues again, too; some huggable, others cool; the dramatis personae at one remove, friends at work only. Except, as per Richard, she will be seeing them dressed for pleasure not work, at the literary prize night. The writers she knows better than others, those she has edited, others she enjoys meeting every so often. Talented, witty, grumpy, or these combined in mordancy.

  She wants to feel young and sexy.

  She also knows in the morning she will wake and think: I am still here. It is still happening. The little we actually know of it. The world, its beginnings, all the things that begin to happen here … then finish, if they finish, somewhere else. Whether we know it or not.

  During the night another hailstorm swathes the street. It wakes Elizabeth, she hears the heavy sound arriving, the surging then diminishing to a light toccata, then suddenly crashing down, she thinks, like truckloads emptying. It is a strange cold music. Again she frets about her car, the damage, the old un-reinforced glass windows.

  Downstairs in his basement Trevor hears little of this, having no roof above him. But he wakes alert and shocked by a powerful fall of hail clamouring outside on what must be the metal roof of the shed. It is taking a beating.

  Most of the time, even if he is head up in selling or talking, or head down in his sales accounts, Trevor notices his customers arrive, but sometimes they enter like air or light. Sometimes they leave in the same way.

  This time an older man has come in looking to left and right at the shelves in a way that suggests he has no interest in books whatsoever, is just wasting time until … a table becomes available at the coolest café on the street? Not by the look of him, so Trevor stops what he is doing. If anything, the man seems energised postcoffee, not in need of. … Then he walks up to the counter and inspects Trevor so closely he might be a dermatologist. What is this, yet another crazy, more proof of Trevor’s charisma for attracting customers on the wrong side of the status quo? The man is not classy but too well dressed for crime and too old for the cool café. He is white-haired and bearded, he looks like the author pics of Irish novelist Dermot Healy when he was sunk in his cups.

  ‘Trevvy!’ the man shouts at last. ‘It is you. My boy is all grown up!’

  His father? No, no. It’s impossible.

  ‘Trevvy, it’s your old father. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe but here I am.’

  ‘What?’ Trevor coughs at this. ‘No.’

  Trevor stands so abruptly his big chair bangs against the wall. Fathers don’t shift from young and dead to old and alive.

  ‘Now look,’ he says with a tight mouth, ‘my father died years ago. OK, maybe you knew him, maybe you worked with him back then, because it was back then. But my father is dead. He’s been dead for thirty years.’

  ‘No, it’s me, Trevvy, your old tatus come back from … being away. Of course you’re surprised, it’s confusing and I should have come earlier. I search for you on the internet and I find you. Here you are. You saw my emails and every one emails these days. I told you to expect me. Ha ha.’

  ‘Being away! Don’t be bloody ridiculous. Didn’t you hear me? My father’s dead.’

  He sits down again. The man is behaving like a clown. An old clown. He is short. And Trevor has had enough of these continual intrusions by people who are not customers, who are suddenly there in front of him, his counter not enough barrier or authority to make them behave. Yet this man, still smiling at him and somehow familiar, is giving him the half fright and awfulness of being trapped in a dream.

  ‘No, it is me, Trevvy. I’ve come back from hiding, yes, I admit it. I’m getting old and not very well, I had to see you again before I … you know. Come here, my boy, and give me a hug.’

  ‘You’re crazy and you’re making me …’

  ‘I am not crazy, please no, don’t say that.’ (His tone is suddenly pathetic, or is it wheedling?) ‘I’m your tatus.’

  ‘My tatus. My tatus was crazy.’ (Though this logic hardly helps.) ‘Yes, I saw some pretty confused emails that said nothing. They were your emails? Oh, God, it was you, wasn’t it, who rang my wife?’

  ‘I tried to ring you. Some woman answered.’

  What survives of a fly-in, fly-out black-haired father from thirty-five years ago? Trevor’s brain is falling a long way down the recognition spectrum. Off the spectrum altogether for a child who has lost a father – and had an old pretender return as if from a prank. Then again, his father had been a pretender, he’d been every sort of weird.

  ‘Yes, I email you for weeks. You never answered. Rude,’ I thought, ‘you are not a good boy.’

  Why would I answer emails that say nothing and are probably from internet crooks in Russia? Or Nigeria?’

  The older man steps in around the counter and reaches at Trevor for a hug and there is an embarrassing tangle of push and pull like a punchless tussle in the pub but with one man awkwardly seated.

  ‘Jesus, get off me, will you!’

  The air is ringing in Trevor’s ears with as much tinnitus as Tatus. Jesus Christ, is it his father come back for redemption?

  ‘Listen to me, my boy I show you. I tell all about you.’

  He does. Trevor stays sitting in his armchair and so the old man stands there beside him rambling through details of life in the family home. Back in sleepy Upwey, almost-country Poland, he says, peasant town. Making big gestures and then with un-nerving hoots of excessive laughter. The bookshop his wife’s parents owned, his many trips away on mining exploration. The disappearance. Trevor listens, dazed, remembering his father’s antics always had been crass and theatrical. Then the man is talking about his wife as if he had been her great love, ah yes. Her great love, not his.

  Not once does he acknowledge that she is dead.

  ‘Mum’s dead, she died years ago. She probably died because of you.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ The man puts on a sad face. Trevor sighs back at him, the bathos ridiculous. It must be his father. He feels sick.

  ‘You knew we’d think yo
u were dead.’ Trevor grinds this out. ‘You are that cold-blooded. You were never going to tell us. Except now you’re back and it’s all OK, right? Like hell it is.’

  ‘Ah, don’t get so angry, don’t worry about that,’ his father says. ‘I will explain it. They were going to kill me.’

  His shoulders lift in mock vulnerability. The man can’t act.

  ‘You know, body left out in the desert, yes, yes, dead of thirst, you see how easy it was. You know what was happening. They were bad men. I had to escape.’

  Trevor tries to interrupt, but the old man has been rehearsing for too long and nothing will stop him now. So much running around in Europe, back to Poland, yes, yes. He lays it on, he weeps and sighs. Different jobs but nothing as cushy as good old Oz. Until he came back in Australia. Work in Queensland, more crooks there than under the stones in WA though who cares if you have work. Some work, not enough work. No money. Now, though … he is old, he has come to see his boy.

  There is an unpleasant edge to this only Trevor could detect. The Narcissism. The unnecessary intensity. A man capable of turning nasty.

  But Trevor is a head taller than the old man. His father was always a big man, a character, a show-off, who never played small or short or … Now Trevor stands again, towers over him. From the old man’s expression he is no less surprised to see this tall son. Of normal height at 15 years of age, Trevor grew rapidly in his late teens. And it’s not as if the old man can open his shirt and display a tattoo across his chest saying: I am Trevor’s father.

  Trevor is shaking his head. He cannot hear past the sound of the man’s Polish accent to where truth might actually be. To where he does not want to meet it.

  ‘I have to leave again, my boy. I’m sorry. For a few weeks, have somethings to sort out. Legal. I just wanted to see you first before I go again but I’ll be back in a … maybe a month? I had to … I’m most impressed that you have a shop. Very good to be in business. You own it, of course?’

  ‘You’re leaving? After just arriving? So much for saying hello to your long-unseen son. Just a hug, eh? Then after thirty years you’re leaving again?’

  ‘No, but I mean do you own the shop?’

  Trevor can only stare. He places his palms flat on the wooden counter. Something real.

  ‘You see, my boy, you won’t believe it, those official bastards have told me something horrible. You remember I always hate authorities. They say I am officially dead.’

  ‘Who? What are you talking about?’

  ‘The authorities, they say I am dead and I can’t apply to be alive again. It’s madness. Officially I am not standing here in front of you, my own son. It was too long ago, they tell me. I don’t exist.’

  ‘But you must have a passport.’

  ‘Polish passport. I was born in Krakow.’

  He bangs his fist on the counter, making Trevor pull his hands away.

  ‘I went to see them, I said’ “Look, do I stand in front of you like a dead man!?” Those bastards. So much money I left for you and your mother, if I died, yes, yes, but I’m here and she died before me. Well, sad she died, but now you know. You have a duty to your old dad.’

  Like a man being confronted with a gun, there are people who don’t always run, they freeze. Trevor freezes. Until the absurd ruling insults his intelligence:

  ‘You can’t apply to be alive again,’ Trevor mimics him, and then his shock pours into laughter.

  ‘You must think seriously, my boy,’ says his father, looking serious. ‘I will be back soon.’

  The old man turns to leave.

  ‘What is this STOP ADANI poster in the window?’ he scowls. ‘I see these things everywhere. Not up in Queensland, too smart those people to behave like this. When I came everyone says Australia was built on the sheep’s back, eh, all the time. When I come back the sheep is iron and coal. Anyone can sell this stuff you have so much of, and here you are, you don’t even want to sell it.’

  For a few seconds it seems he is going to reach across and tear the poster from the glass. As he leaves he wrenches the door back so hard it jams open.

  ‘My own son!’

  Trevor hesitates then follows the man out, sees him get into a car parked nose-first in the alleyway beside the shop, blocking the entire pavement. Pedestrians have been walking out onto the street to get past.

  Impossible to think when his stomach is cramped, when his father is like electric discharges in his brain. Who else could know the trivia and the detail of what the old man has recounted? His outrageous behaviour. Anyone pretending, any impostor, would surely be all charm itself, they wouldn’t dare be aggressive and contrary. No, it is his father all over.

  His father can’t apply to be alive again. It couldn’t happen to a worthier man.

  Just before dusk there is sometimes a particular lack of colour in the sky above the houses, and in the shadows seeping under houses, which makes Trevor think of a Beckett character low on words, uncertain of location, hoping onwards into the hopelessness. Cold. His father. Not as a father, as a force. The man had not seemed very interested in him, just the money. This tightens his skin. It is blanching.

  Mostly he is angry. Then the awfulness of everything returns and pushes mere anger aside. His father. He has begun Googling the man and found nothing. Of course. He doesn’t exist. The whole thing is grotesque. Not any kind of sweet return, nor the spooky not-quite-right return of a changed child, no dissociated person come back sane and too-frightened-sober to believe the worst of whatever it was.

  You’re a naughty boy!

  Your father is here.

  He is dead.

  He remembers the woman who came into his bookshop desiring a memoir, and change, whose father was a butcher with softened, disgusting hands and the sullen children. Then his hands healing after she has made her peace with him. Possessed by the apparent clarity of a fairytale. How much of a person is a child, and how much a set of puzzles? Trevor is closing in on 50 years old. He feels it like accessing another world. Like recalling dreams, some people remember each moment in high resolution while others live and die as if very little is clear.

  How absurd, too, that he is living in a house with a woman who, if he were to stand still in front of her and remain silent, would not recognise him. Making him a ghost. Father. Son. Artist who stopped being. Now his blank father stands in front of him.

  The world has other kinds of prosopagnosia.

  No, Trevor has no love left for this old man. It isn’t biology, it’s choice. He will not recognise him.

  The rain is falling vertically through the purpling sunset. Melbourne rain without wind, the soft side of the gusting hail of the night before. No sooner has Trevor arrived home from the shop and removed his wet coat than he meets Elizabeth, bag swinging, with her going-out face on. She is wearing bright red and actually showing some cleavage in a classy, tight-fitting dress. No more green-framed glasses, she must be wearing contacts. And, amazingly, she has applied a very exact liner of kohl around her eyes, and is wearing lipstick. Her hair, bleached blonde since the day before, is brushed and loose. She is looking young and fresh and sort of sexy. It startles him.

  ‘Elizabeth, you’re looking … great. Where are you off to?’

  ‘Oh, great? Do you think so?’

  She hoists her bag over her shoulder as deliberately as her phrasing. He is smiling, in that way, and she knows she has succeeded.

  ‘Everyone scrubs up well if they make the effort, Trevor.’

  She is trying to balance suggestion with press-down. It’s all in the tone. (That he was so obvious when Martina was here …) Then she grins at him. She is feeling good.

  ‘I’m meeting my publishing people at the pub,’ she says, ‘then, while everyone is upright, on to the awards night. We have some books in the running, and we must be there if they win! A celebration with staff, all gratis, hey, and with our shortlisted authors.’

  ‘Right. OK.’

  ‘One of whom is sort of a boyfriend.
’

  ‘A sort of boyfriend?’

  ‘Kind of a boyfriend. Richard. I really hope he wins. Either way, I probably won’t see you till tomorrow night. Could you feed Gordon for me? Maybe take him for his morning walk? Talk to the magpies, grin at the happy chappy who carries on with the three women?’

  This is all provocation. Her newly blonde hair glows on her, and without her glasses, her brown eyes … She may not be immediately attractive, but she is … something … He is staring, and she is smiling as if such things happen every day.

  ‘And, and, today I read through that manuscript, the one about sects I told you about. It arrived this morning and it’s mine. Martina just rang to ask me what I thought of it. Lots of work to be done on it, I can’t wait. This is big, Trevor!’

  Suddenly she grabs him, and almost hugs him as she had Gordon.

  ‘I’m, ah … What do you mean?’ he says, meaning the author but feeling the pressure of her body.

  ‘That manuscript by Shia Newman. I’m sure I told you about her, rising star, young but talented, looking into cults and sects. It’ll be a good book when I’ve finished with it. Trevor, they appointed me.’

  ‘Congratulations, I have something too …’

  ‘I’ve been told she’s a bit strange. All good. Most authors are.’

  Trevor raises an imaginary glass of champagne.

  ‘Huh, strange? That’s nothing. My father has reappeared from the dead, or someone claiming to be him has.’

  She tilts her head like a bird.

  ‘From the …? I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘He just walked into the shop, this afternoon, as if it was a completely normal thing to do, after thirty bloody years. I told you, didn’t I, that my father is officially dead.’

  ‘Ah, you did. That is surreal. Sorry, I have to use that word … Bloody hell. I’m sorry Trevor but I really have to go, I’m late and it’s important so, sorry, it’ll have to wait. Don’t forget to feed Gordon. Bye.’