The Returns

by Philip Salom

  ‘You’re going to be cold!’

  ‘I have a taxi.’

  And off she goes.

  He thinks about it. It’s her night. Good. She’s a professional unseen. Editing, the job that disappears itself. Like a father, or his father. And his own efforts, out in the shed painting canvases no one will ever see. The ironies dissolve the paint in him.

  He raises his arm and the imaginary champagne again. The imaginary bubbles rising up and emptying.

  As soon as she has gone he walks downstairs and sprints across the lawn. When he pulls open the door of the shed and turns the lights on he has to stop and look again to make sure it’s real. The roof iron at the rear is peppered with holes. Rain is falling through and tinking onto the lids of the paint tins and several of the acrylic paintings are in rivulets from water dripping down their surfaces.

  The main shed is dry, the rear of the shed is raining. It has its own weather.

  An hour later, rain over, wanting to be doing anything but this, he unpacks the plastic tarpaulin he had used as a drop cloth in the apartment and, on the stepladder, slowly drags it over the gable, covering the damaged roofing. He throws two ropes over the tarp and ties them down to four garden stakes he has found against her side fence. She must have been growing tomatoes in the abandoned bed.

  Her anticipated literary night is not the old-style deal: one of the hyper-nights of dress-up and dinner. Not like the Oscars. Not any more the long nights of pre-dinner drinks, a big dinner, awards announcements and waywardly witty speeches from writers, sometimes catty speeches like Why the fuck hadn’t they won the prize before?

  ‘It was my chance to eat and drink at their expense,’ she had told Trevor.

  ‘But you don’t like eating,’ he replied.

  ‘A means of expression. It’s the attitude that counts.’

  ‘So what happens at these events now?’

  ‘Now it’s fucking canapés and bubbles.’

  ‘I want a full report.’

  Still, it’s her chance to drink at their expense. And she does. During the presentations a right-wing historian no one had ever heard of is given a prize (when a politician intervened) and then stands and rants for twenty-five minutes without even being drunk. Elizabeth sees a so-called senior novelist who isn’t shortlisted for anything so must have been a judge. This man is welcoming and witty, sure to impress with anecdotes of things literary and famous people who … he’s a name-dropper. This famous figure had impressed her when she first met him, or met his charming manner, until she realised he was a younger-woman player.

  There are many younger women.

  This famous man is no longer, if he ever was, a conventional seducer. It’s reciprocal advantage: he fawns upon them and promotes them, and their fame keeps him in public view. Meanwhile, his books appear every few years, polished to the limits of his considerable facility, heavily mannered, because by now it is locked in, a personal style he cannot escape from. His characters all sound like him. Even his punctuation sounds like him.

  The best work of fiction is by an attractive young woman for her debut novel, a startling new talent according to the Judges’ Report. She is writing about landscape and identity, a white person’s version of Country. Very topical, very young, very likely.

  As a shortlisted writer who hasn’t won, Richard is ghosted at the exact moment the actual winner is announced. Years ago if writers and editors won they drank to celebrate, and if they lost they drank to drink. Now it sobers his publisher. It is all very well for poetry publishers to be impressed with a shortlisting but in the real world of fiction the author must win.

  It had been a year between drinks with Richard, when he attended without having a book eligible. Part of seeing her. Now the way to transcend the night’s disappointment is with some lively and affectionate sex. They aren’t even in bed before she begins to make joking references to a recent US novel called I Love Dick, which Richard puts down to her natural warmth and sense of celebration at recognition by her peer group. It is nothing about boy slang of loving dick but Elizabeth is teasing him. Richard is easily flattered, so why not a bit of flattery and play-acting? Use of the mouth.

  He is a lawyer after all.

  Once in his room she pulls the pillows out of the awkward bedcover pouch they so annoyingly fold them into, then drags the cover onto the floor. Richard smiles, remembering this from other times. She undoes the zip of her dress. When she turns back to face him he caresses her from her shoulders, down her waist to her thighs in her sensual tight-fitting dress. She knows he wants to see her skin, he wants to pull the red dress up and reveal her long body. She lifts her arms above her head.

  There is something erotic about the clinical design of hotel rooms, their poor-man bedside fittings and plain paintings or photos, the heaviness of the curtains and the wardrobe with its fridge cupboard and glary white fluoro. The mirror. The room is generic, tacky and scented, for having sex in. Elizabeth always thinks so, unless she is crashing alone. This room has a globe blown in one bedside lamp, which in her rare hotel moments seems to be de rigueur, and there on the wall beside the TV set is a wild scar in the paint where someone has thrown a bottle at it and missed. Perhaps.

  Richard is a quiet well-behaved man; in her experience most writers are quiet and well-behaved, introverts, dull even, nothing like the off-the-wall stereotype, unless they are like the poets who take too many drugs, as proof of their authenticity, and lack house-training.

  Richard is her tipsy indulgence, sex without tomorrows.

  Halfway or thereabouts through their happy fucking his mobile rings. In such situations he might let it ring and to his credit he tries but, he knows who it will be. Given it is after 2 am he has to be in his room, so his wife assumes he’ll answer or else he isn’t in his room, meaning he is in someone else’s room. Or that he’s fallen over in the street.

  He answers. It goes on too long, the empathy and understanding, the consolation and how she suggests they have a romantic meal out when he returns, to make up for the stupid judges. What happened during her workday, the kids.

  Luckily he finishes the call before Elizabeth’s phone rings. That would have been hard to explain.

  Elizabeth’s mother is ringing out of late-night neediness.

  After that their night of sex is rather slower. But in the morning, well, come the morning.

  The following morning Trevor does the right thing and takes Gordon out around the damp Royal Park circuit, busy every morning with doggers and joggers and overfed magpies singing in groups like a family of gleaners. Some birds remain in the trees beside the track singing about the many things clever magpies know, or just imagine, while they inspect and recognise every face among the regulars walking around the track. Even if Elizabeth can’t. Others stalk, head to one side, then the other, listening for insects and grubs just below the surface of the ground.

  Little else is black and white. His father, the man in the shop. A madman. So like his mad father, the man who maybe never played but actually was a clown, loud most of the time, scary when he felt like it.

  Un-nerving now. The reappearance – and, unless he’s lost his intuition entirely, Trevor is sure it’s about his money. Having both Gordon and the walk to himself feels, despite this, surprisingly enjoyable, even if the mornings are colder now and thoughts of his father aren’t exactly warming. He should do it more often, he should do any kind of exercise more often. Gordon treats him like a true owner. It is quite touching, and wet. Trevor even half tolerates the talkative man with tattoos who walks with the three women and their dogs. Oh so bloody jovial, he is.

  Under the trees on the west side of the track he notices someone. It looks like the woman from outside the IGA with her little dog, her bleached hair and real tan. Even if he’s not her mate, a bloke with grey hair and glasses who sells The Big Issue outside the IGA is standing with her. Trevor has watched this man wavering on the pavement like a grey tree in the wind.

  One day he as
ked if the woman was on ice or anything, and whether he should give her any money. The Big Issue guy stayed silent, eventually saying it wasn’t up to him to say anything: Trevor would have to decide for himself. Commendable loyalty, Trevor thought. The Big Issue guy did say she’d just been kicked out of her accommodation. Into the weather. The hail.

  Gordon rushes at the magpies, which ignore him. At such times conscience and circumstance make Trevor feel bare. He promises next time he’ll give her something more. Say something. But not impose. Then the talk-talk man and women approach again and the man grins and nods, suffering perhaps from happy amnesia, or even prosopagnosia, and provoking Trevor and his dog to break the pattern and head away towards the tram track and the walk home.

  By the time he has changed and eaten something, Elizabeth opens the front door and enters. She is still wearing her contacts.

  ‘Just look at you,’ she says, ‘looking healthy for once. Off to work? You can sit against your blue wall and meditate for the day.’

  He supposes this means she had a very lusty evening. It doesn’t make him happy.

  She tells him which book won – no, not the boyfriend’s. It prompts Trevor to say he hasn’t sold a single copy of it. She says she will text that news to Richard. That isn’t what Trevor meant. ‘Ah,’ she says, ‘but Schadenfreude is the one bit of German all writers understand. And can’t get enough of.’

  So he tells her about his father. He trims his voice like a piece of paper.

  How his father went to WA for work, up in the North West on a mining survey. He was a geologist, working for mining companies of the kind Gina Rinehart descended from. He went to the North West so often he had a postal box up there for mail. Back in the ’80s when there used to be mail.

  ‘I wrote to him when I was little,’ says Trevor. ‘Every week. He never replied.’

  Trevor is staring out through the front window as if, through this clean, clear glass he might see further than the empty street with its trees and tidy median strip, to his father standing beside a Land Rover, to his right the straight road in the crooked heat, to his left the ocean. In the heat shimmer over red dirt, the man is reading his son’s hand-written letter.

  Then, he tells Elizabeth, his father never came back and no one ever found him. The aliens got him.

  Out in the heat-shimmer. Then more shimmer and no man.

  There were shonky people doing shonky deals, he tells her. Over mining leases and payoffs. Iron ore. Nickel. Fortunes being made, potentially billions, and – that’s what happened. His father had a knack for getting into trouble. So when he disappeared no one knew if he had died or was killed or had done a runner.

  ‘That’s horrible,’ she frowns. ‘How did your poor mother take it?’

  Trevor turns back and looks at Elizabeth, her large eyes naked with amazement.

  ‘We both … cried … I was 15, at high school, I didn’t want to be crying over anything, but if your own father dies … Crying is something real anyway. More than he was. Otherwise it was all endless and empty. He was larger than life, but someone who couldn’t care less. Like most “characters”, it’s never much fun living with them.’

  ‘I left my husband,’ she says, ‘because he couldn’t care less. And he wasn’t much fun either. I did it the other way around.’

  Trevor walks into the kitchen out of habit.

  ‘You read accounts of clothes being left on the beach,’ she says. ‘Suicide.’

  ‘Not him.’

  ‘So what happened next?’

  ‘Without a body and a death certificate it’s up to the courts. You have to wait for decades. The coroner said there was no reasonable likelihood that he was alive, that there was a low probability he intentionally remained in the wilderness – ha, very dramatic – but, given the lack of any contact with family, or with anyone else for that matter, he concluded that death had been established to his satisfaction, i.e. on the balance of probabilities.’

  ‘My God. There you have death in prose.’

  ‘My mother worked in her parents’ bookshop. She hated him and she missed him and … she never quite believed he was dead. It was like some smart-arse game he was playing. Unless the person is found, dead or alive, or fugitive, you have a story without an ending. Whereas fiction promises a neat ending and usually provides it.’

  ‘Except tragedy.’

  He nods. In the silence before he responds they watch the people walking past the window. The other-end-of-work rush. Everyone is walking to a destination. A neat ending.

  ‘In tragedy,’ he adds, ‘you have a body. Or bodies. Grief has a body to farewell. His was a book with a character disappearing at the end, like an abruptly ended dream. You wake up. You can’t go back to see what happened.’

  ‘But this bloke claims he’s your father. No wonder you were so worked up yesterday.’

  ‘Yeah. I can’t tell if I’m happy or bloody furious. Yes, I can I’m both.’

  ‘Sorry I was in such a hurry before. I did wonder about it. Well, a bit, anyway. After that I was lost to self-indulgence. As maybe Mark Twain said, “Too much of a good thing is never enough.” Or was he talking about whiskey?’

  At work, the next day passes slowly against the blue wall.

  It occurs to him that Elizabeth’s hair seems to have settled down. It usually has the nature of an excited teenager. Maybe it’s sexual. This thought happens concurrently with his standing as he likes to do immediately in front of his electric kettle, the place in the back room where the counter is worn down in a casual curve, as if someone for many years used this area as a cutting board for bread or tomatoes or … There is something wordless and consoling about this worn area. He hardly waits to stands there, but when he stands there he waits – until the kettle has boiled. Then he never thinks of it again, not once, until the next time.

  His pavement notice today says:

  When you have finished reading Seating Arrangements your family reunion will never be the same. The best memoirs are often of the worst families. This book is not for the ethically faint-hearted.

  Exactly. To think he typed up this flash review three days ago. What ironic timing. Seating Arrangements allows for several family members to be present at the same table, something far from Trevor’s experience, and yet the irony of his thoughts remains. Under no circumstances will he let this stranger sit for a meal. This day of all days he wants peace and quiet. Sometimes the thought of customers reduces him to a catlike aversion. Of having to be so fucking polite to everybloodybody. It’s the love-hate dependency comedians speak of. It growls in the shadow of the spectrum and won’t come out to play.

  Just when the evening is becoming dark the door is swung open and stays jammed open against the threshold. Cold air blows into the shop. A bloke strides towards Trevor at his counter. He is Keith Richards without the grin.

  ‘Well, mate,’ he says, ‘have ya got my DVD then?’

  He is alarming, gaunt cheeks and outdoor tan and bone from his skull to his elbows. He is a hammer.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Don’t tell me ya forgot. I was in here about a month ago and I ordered that cartoon-book novel thing, the DVD of it, you remember now, eh? You were bloody rude to me.’

  The Frank Miller thing. The man who swiped his books onto the floor. How to tell or not tell the man he never ordered it, never meant to order it, then forgot about it completely yet stayed angry with the man? On principle. A shop is open, as in family: you can’t choose your customers. He’d never thought of that. This bloke was all snarl and snap and now he is back amazingly like a real customer.

  ‘Ya think I don’t bloody read but ya wrong,’ says the man. ‘I’m kinda professional.’

  ‘What in?’

  ‘I specialise in taking the piss outta fuckers like you. Ha. Anyway, didja get my fucken DVD for me or not?’

  ‘It was out of stock,’ Trevor lies.

  They stare at each other, given it could be true. The man hasn’t thou
ght of DVDs or books being anything other than for sale. Sort of all the time. It doesn’t make sense otherwise, does it? The tattoo on his neck and throat seems to be alive and feral.

  ‘So can ya order it from a second-hand place?’

  ‘No. I only sell new items.’ (Also not true.)

  He stands and shows the bloke his nearest shelf. The neat spines and clean-cut edges of the pages. The man is taller than him.

  ‘New books. Are you paying for the books you damaged last time? No. So the answer is no.’

  ‘You dick,’ the man says. ‘You fucken …’

  Seeing the man turn to leave, Trevor returns to the counter. But the man, suddenly angry as all hell, reaches for Trevor’s neck then pushes him hard against the shelves.

  ‘You never fucken ordered it, ya bastard!’

  Trevor’s foot catches on the stepladder and his leg buckles, he goes down hard on his right side, and the ladder and books hit the floor. Then nothing. Both of them freeze in the silence and the loud shunting of nerves.

  From out of his depth to such a decision. The man’s act has a kind of warped grandeur. Which ends as he suddenly slides down a bookshelf. Trevor has kicked out with his good leg, knocking the man’s feet from under him. For several seconds they are both struggling on the floor, then both are scrambling up together; they are as clumsy as two crabs on a glassy floor. Until the man clambers up, gets to the door and is gone.

  Of all things, Trevor’s bad leg. Without moving from the floor, now that it hardly matters, he uses both arms to prop himself against the counter. Then eases the leg out from under him and into an outstretched position. Jesus. The leg. An object it may be, but the pain is all of him.

  Emotions can hit without escape routes, the less dramatic, unkind ones: like humiliation. If never as big or as hopeless as grief, being belittled is a loss. The shame of it. Thank God no one was in the shop. Better than having a witness, because Trevor can do that, his facial scanning like a magpie’s. The man’s colour and staring face inside its bone. The cheap deodorant as embarrassing as the hurt.