The Returns

by Philip Salom

  Turning his back on the bloke like that, he must be losing his touch. Even if it was a man who looks like many others. Only a few of whom take down booksellers from behind. He didn’t anticipate it. He wishes he could have hit the guy. Still, it was a hard fall. It’s a Saturday, he should have stayed at home. What was it Bruce Lee said? If a mad guy wants to bite your nose off, you won’t be able to stop him. Short of killing him.

  He can’t remember the exact book or the DVD. Oh yeah, he can, fuck it, he always remembers. He wishes he didn’t, to make a point, to refuse the bloke that small concession but no, it was 300 by Frank Miller. Spartans vs. Athenians. One reviewer called it a piece of shit. Trevor hears the words. Bragging, is he, to himself?

  Except Trevor is a fallen Spartan, or Athenian, lying on the floor with his armour crooked and a leg so damaged he cannot rise. Completely vulnerable. So displaced he feels as much an idiot as the idiot who shoved him down.

  No, no, no. His father, now this. After years of calm routine and slow dissolve. He could laugh if he made an effort. Limping. Gordon and Trevor together limping around the park, no, it is too ridiculous. Trevor is variously a shit, an arsehole and now a dick.

  Jesus, Elizabeth had only just mentioned Schadenfreude. He must get up. He rolls onto his knees and pauses in a Gordon position, oh how pathetic he is, shifting from Spartan to dog. If he were a dog, people might take pity on him and offer him biscuits.

  Even if he normally walks like an ungrammatical sentence, he is not disabled. He stands up, gets himself into the armchair behind the counter.

  At least he has ibuprofen. The Spartans didn’t. Maybe they didn’t need it.

  With every movement more bad memories come to him. Murky thoughts and not imaginings, they rise and wallow to un-nerve him physically, like waking from a night’s heavy drinking or feeling faint after standing too suddenly.

  It is guilt and recurrence, the old bad lore come back to get him.

  They are driving flat out on the gravel and the dust ahead of them means another car they have to catch. When you are young you see the extra possibilities of speed. So you speed. No much wind to blow the dust aside. The road is flying towards them like a driver-view video on YouTube, air rushing past the windscreen in through the open window as he slides the car left enough on the long curving road to hear gravel fly up underneath the wheel arches and behind them, and now he is not ordinary any more, he is speed: he is more alive, more alert, more like the swooping eagles across the open paddock. It is pure power in him, better than Buddha. Until the dust, a wall of stationary dust, and suddenly on the other side of it a bloody right-angled corner. He slews the car in a half circle but it kicks back on a crossing gutter, lurching onto its side then head-jarringly into a tree. Trevor’s right hip is rammed against the door and his leg crunches. Dust fills smothering inside the car, his navigator mate is screaming. All that dust, thick, choking and slowly thinning around him, his left arm angled through the steering wheel, his hand gripping the protruding edge of the dash. Seconds, minutes? A second car, its brakes on hard and grinding the gravel, smashes into them. They’re thrown up against the dash as the second car somersaults into the fence.

  How many years of trying to repress this dread have failed him.

  His mate’s car, upside down on the fence, steel posts, barbed wire. The navigator’s side. He can forget, until he sometimes sees the same car on a street, a white Mazda 1800 designed by Bertone. Whenever he leans unexpectedly fast into a left-hand corner. Whenever the vehicle tilts down to the right. There is a long silence, memory has lost the soundtrack, the other men are caught under the white car tilted on the shitty unforgiving fence, the brownish underbelly and the four wheels with gravel-stained tyres.

  When a local farmer drove up, Trevor’s passenger was holding a cigarette – he was still dazed, he was a smoker – so the farmer was as worried about him starting a fire as he was about the two cars crashed against his boundary fence. It was summer. As the media say, bone-dry.

  The cars were dead, but there was, he can still remember it, petrol leaking from one of them. He thought of it when the cars crashed outside his shop not long ago. The smell.

  He reaches up for the counter and manages to stand. Manages a few painful steps. His neck hurts. There is no option: he rings Elizabeth. Because he has no option he rings until she eventually answers. Faffing about in the backyard, she tells him, and not that she has been walking back and forth examining his paintings. ‘I’ll tell you why when you arrive,’ he says to her, not wanting to alarm her or put her off either.

  Then he sees the blood on the floor. It surprises him, he hadn’t noticed the guy’s face but he must have cracked his mouth, or nose, against the floor. Or a bookshelf. The jolt eases into an unforgiving laugh.

  By the time Elizabeth parks outside the shop he has locked up and is sitting carefully on the steel-rung bench on the pavement.

  ‘You’ve hurt your leg again,’ she says as he drags the door open and arranges himself, wincing and grunting, on the bench seat of her Holden.

  ‘Sorry, Trevor, but it is pretty obvious. Do you want to go home or to Emergency?’

  ‘No. Home. Thanks. I slipped stepping down from the ladder. Which ended up with me on the floor.’

  ‘It wasn’t your father?’

  ‘No.’Jesus. What a thought.

  As Elizabeth works the old column shift through the gears it keeps taking him back to the accident. In his foul mood and pain he had forgotten her EH Holden is circa the years of his mate’s car and the accident. The dust that never settles.

  ‘Why the EH?’ he asks her.

  ‘It was my father’s, talking of fathers. He renovated it years ago and I have a good garage looking after it. The mechanics want to buy it. They put the word on me every time I take it in. That’s why it’s in such good condition. The buggers. They helped me find a replacement back window after a hailstorm shattered it. I love it too much to sell it.’

  Car love. At some point Trevor will need to tell her what happened. All he wants to do now is swallow ibuprofen and strong drink, and blot out everything.

  ‘Anyway,’ he asks, ‘anyway,’ turning way off the pain track, ‘how did your night with the author go? This morning you looked (he is about to say shagged out)…’

  She makes a high-pitched humphing sound, like a dog dreaming and barking with its jaws shut.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not hurt?’

  ‘It really fucking hurts, so tell me, how did it go?’

  ‘I spoilt things a bit over the meal,’ she says, ‘by telling him how excited I was about this new manuscript and author. After the prize letdown it was the last thing he wanted to hear. I forget how competitive writers are. I only see them one to one, if I ever see them at all. It’s always about them, so they’re happy. I sometimes edit the whole thing without meeting them face to face. It was tactless of me.’

  ‘Sounds more like …’

  ‘So I had to seduce him.’

  They both laugh. He so much wants to laugh.

  ‘He’s a bloke,’ he says, ‘which means after sex he’s all smiles.’

  ‘Except his wife rang and he had to answer …’

  ‘Sure, but then …?’

  ‘Yeah, then my bloody mother rang …’

  He tells her about the roof of the shed, how he threw a tarpaulin over it. She hasn’t been outside to notice. Once home, he sits on the lounge while she fetches water and painkillers and makes him a strong coffee.

  He shouldn’t really drink but to make matters worse she pours far too much whisky into his usual glass and brings it over.

  ‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’ she asks. Unsure of why he is staring at the drink as if there is a hair in it, she bends to see.

  He looks up at her and smiles. She’s there beside him, it’s night-time, the mood is calm, intimate even, in a way they are both relaxed with. He is not going to spoil things by telling her what really happened w
ith his leg. Or embarrass himself.

  ‘Is Richard your only boyfriend?’ he asks. He knows he shouldn’t. Surely he’s vulnerable enough tonight to be unthreatening. Not the actual question, which is simply the prompt; having to answer at all. There are several lines forming around her eyes, and lines curve on either side of her mouth like a pair of brackets. When she smiles this makes whatever she says seems gentler and softer and more endearing.

  She says she has occasional boyfriends. She isn’t concerned about the casual sound of this. After all, her mother’s frenetically sexual days as a sannyasin were an early model: they were also an indelible one.

  ‘When you’ve watched your naked mother,’ she says rather dramatically, ‘fucking a man in the open while other people are walking past, you don’t forget. You’re forced into a frankness that is not like other people’s. The sex cult they half denied and half boasted of being was all around us, they wanted us to see. You do know what sex is, from very early on.’

  Talking like this with Trevor is good. She holds his gaze. Her reaction to open sexuality, she explains, was to become frank in action but reserved in discussion. Therefore, in her own estimation, she remains prone to embarrassment.

  ‘Me too,’ he says, ‘mainly by not getting enough. Anyway, look at me. I’m hardly up to clubbing with you tonight. Unless you changed into something …’

  ‘Naughty,’ she says, laughing. ‘You’ve had too much of your remedy. You should go online, do Tinder.’

  Though she is less than convincing. She rubs her bare arm as if swiping back and forth over some impossibly good-looking face.

  ‘Tinder? Online seduction?’

  ‘Until you’re able to walk again.’

  ‘Ha. I’d end up feeling like an ex-cop I know, he says. Everyone seems to use it, and that one with a losing name – Bumble?’

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ she shrugs.

  ‘How does it work with your condition?’ he says. ‘Suppose you swipe someone a week after you’d decided never to go with them again. Because you didn’t recognise them.’

  She takes a deep breath before not answering him.

  Not long after the fall Trevor’s body starts entering returns in its pain diary. Reality. Where, after the date of onset, it demands appointments. It is not seducible. If no painkiller is ruthless enough to defeat it, not reducible either. Nurofen being half fake anyway.

  He is forced to close the shop for appointments, limping through a sequence of diminishing sentience: from GP to specialists to joint and tissue scanners. Old territory, old route, very old in fact, back to the car crash, back when X-rays and CAT scans ruled, whereas now the MRI reigns over all, and costs a car crash of its own to prove it.

  When not waiting for expert advice and its expert invoice, he stays for hours reading in his room. It doesn’t help to remember his bloody father, or the shame of the fall. By now he has told Elizabeth what really happened, and watched her alarm. She can see he is still angry.

  Then he lets go, and she sees he is depressed.

  His leg hurts while he sits in the shop and it hurts every night. Like a guilty conscience. Humiliation. Pains enlarge in the dark and govern the weak body of sleep. His leg is like a character: it hurts and makes him vulnerable. Waking, he feels pushed down by the windowless walls and the ceiling above him. When he sits up and turns on the bedside lamp it hurts. And again when he twists over to turn it off.

  Nothing to be done, or denied, or left for another time, he has to get well again, he has to get fit.

  He dreams from inside the car. For some reason the person in the passenger seat hands him a lolly of some sort in such a way as to hide it from someone sitting in the back. As he puts the lolly in his mouth the car seems to drive itself off the road to the left and then quite effortlessly begins to roll. Quietly and without fear, he sees outside on the hillside, in great detail, the earth banking has been cut open and the extensive root system of a tree has been exposed. The roots are bulbous and huge and covered in red earth, though some have been sliced open by excavation equipment. Then the car rolls over and he is awake again, shaking.

  The next morning Trevor stands on the pavement outside her house. The air is cold but quite still, beautiful in its simplicity. There is a faint smell of wood smoke in the air. His head clears. This is perfect, as close to eternity as any moment gets. As long as he doesn’t move. As long as he remains still, feeling the crisp air on his face and his bare head, and smelling the easy woodsmoke. If he doesn’t move, his leg doesn’t hurt. Just stand here all day. He notices how rough the surface of the road is. The silence, which means the lorikeets are in some other street.

  He has emerged, he is lucky.

  Thereafter, for three evenings a week instead of walking home with a continual limp, and sometimes arriving wet through and feeling weak, he goes to the gym for physio and customised exercises and, with their possum-screeching sounds in his head, he pushes and pulls and bends against the weight machines. The relief when it stops. The sweat. The possums. He’ll never be the same.

  Before his next few months of rent or probation arrive he should be – and will be pissed off if he isn’t – expansive of lung and muscular of limb. His chest can do with some work, for a start, and the muffin problem, from face to the dark fleece of his stomach, obviously needs improving. One day he will be a betterlooking man so, yes, let vanity drive necessity. In his 30s he was a much tougher and leaner unit: not all of his days were lost behind a desk.

  That bastard who pushed him was a wreck. The man had jumped him from behind. No pity for him. Resisting empathy, then. Probably a man much worn down by a shit life worse by far than anything Trevor could imagine.

  You don’t choose empathy. Every day some heartless sod wants to rake you over. Empathy is for loved ones, isn’t it? But who are his loved ones?

  He watches a small plane echo across towards the city. Propeller engine, sightseeing. That agreeable sound of props churning through the air when in fact it’s the bite of heavy engines. Combustion. The upper floors of thin buildings are glowing in whitish sunlight, the sky behind them frigate grey. The city is a flotilla of kitsch.

  Diana has told him there is something wrong with him. She has told him (she is not one to merely suggest) that he is still grieving. She refers to the era of Gestalt psychology and Fritz Perls, whose acolytes suspected everyone of having holes. Holes in their whole, and that such holes were the carryover of unfinished grief.

  His father was emotional but it was normal for him, he was Polish.

  When he gets home that night he walks straight through to the house and downstairs and out to the studio. It’s very satisfying, navigating the house like a warm breeze. He is wondering what next, where to shift the balance of the painting, or not, with his latest colours, or not, or paste more images … when he hears clapping sounds like wooden boards being dropped. Outside he sees the back fence leaning inwards. The neighbour is breaking pickets off the crossbars and dropping them onto the pile on her side. The man has a wide, soft stomach and a hard face. There are bags of his rubbish, too.

  It is the first time Trevor has encountered the man directly. His mobile is in his pocket so he walks down and takes several pics of the rubbish. And of The Creep.

  ‘And what do you think you’re doing?’ says The Creep. ‘Entering a photography exhibition?’

  Trevor stands near the fence-line. The pickets to the left and right sides are like gateposts, the gate wide and bare and open, and the man is standing in the middle of it.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Trevor, ‘inner-city ugliness.’

  ‘The fence is a heap of shit and that’s why I’m pulling it down.’

  ‘I wasn’t referring to the fence.’

  ‘And who the fuck are you?’

  ‘I’m renting a room here.’

  ‘Oh right, poor woman. Poor you.’

  ‘Poor fucking neighbour you are. Stop chucking your crap on Elizabeth’s lawn.’

  ‘No one woul
d call that a lawn!’

  The bloke starts breaking off pickets. Then he turns to look at Trevor.

  ‘It’s none of your fucking business, buddy.’

  Trevor hates being called buddy. Americanism. Heat rises through him and his jaw clenches.

  ‘Now look, mate,’ (his voice low and angry) ‘just leave this shit’ (he points to it) ‘on your side. Is that too complicated for you?’

  Pudgy though he is around the middle, the man’s angular face through the gap in the fence is disconcertingly good-looking.

  ‘I’m not discussing this with you,’ says the man. ‘I’m not even discussing it with her. I might come over and kick your wonky leg so you’ll never dance again. Tell the woman this fence is gunna cost her …’

  Trevor shakes his head at the gall. He thinks of Good fences make good neighbours – and feels like throttling Robert Frost.

  He takes a few steps towards the man, stares at him hard.

  ‘I get it,’ he says to the man and the fence and the hole in the fence. ‘I think you’re a crim. I know the look and the attitude. And …’

  He adds a few more words. Then a few more.

  The bloke grunts and, heads off inside. Well, Robert, bad men make bad neighbours. He heaves the bags back through the fence.

  Elizabeth has been watching the end of this. So much for diplomacy, she thinks. She prefers the aggro or whatever it was; it is thrilling. She feels like whooping.

  The man does not return.

  The gap in the fence darkens like lights turned off, and Trevor sees Elizabeth has been standing outside.

  ‘What did you say to him at the end?’ she calls out. ‘I couldn’t quite hear.’

  ‘Nothing much.’

  His face is like a road. She raises her eyebrows.

  ‘The man is reasonable,’ he says, ‘so we talked and he went away happy.’

  Back in his studio he knows he’s just had a delayed reaction to the Frank Miller bloke. Arseholes. He is like that, some things rinse him out like the yearly event when the mother in Duras’ The Lover swashes out the house. He inspects the images he has been painting. Barrels, drums, boxes, objects with swirling centres and a complete lack of foundation. They stagger but are still. Yes. The man has made him angrier than he’d expected.