by Philip Salom
Perhaps it’s the smell of too much turpentine. At least turps thins out his oils, better than adrenaline ever could. It was satisfying, though, pretending to be the hard man. Real hard men are different. They are like Lester.
Normally Trevor walks home the same way every evening. Lunchtime walks are different. If it is sunnier walking around the block, and cold in the shadows, he walks in the sun. If it is hot and he is carrying food, he walks in the shadows. Walking off the workday’s cabin fever he enters a pub he hasn’t visited before. A bloke sitting alone by the window. Lester. Well, well, the cop turned outsider artist just like the crims in Maximum. The deeply lined face. The ambiguous person he is.
It seems Lester drinks in a fancy pub, gentrified, young, innocent staff in white shirts, shiny surfaces. To contrast with his state of mind.
‘Trauma,’ says Lester. ‘Yeah, I copped a bit of that. As you well know. We always said you used to look as frazzled as we did. Frontline trauma, though, that’s something you never got.’
‘Did it come from crims or from your own higher-ups, that’s what I couldn’t work out. You’d never say.’
‘Mate, I had a job at the time. I wanted to keep it. But being shot at, that’s takes top position. Being shot at does leave you traumatised, if you’re a breathing human. If you’re still breathing afterwards, that is. Takes a while for anyone to adjust to. Imagine if some fucker is staring straight at you and lets rip with a big fucking hollow-point. Bang. It was after you left, mate.’
He pulls his collar aside and shows Trevor a horizontal scar deep on the side of his neck near his collarbone. He swipes with his hand like a front-to-back version of cutting his throat.
‘Jesus, Lester. They nearly got you.’
‘Nearly! They fucking got me, Trevor, just didn’t kill me. An inch to the left and I’d a gushed blood for half a minute then carked it. The slug would’ve torn half my throat out and left it hanging over my shoulder. A bit further over and it’d have blown my head off. OK for you in your fucking desk job.’
‘Yeah, no guns in the office. Some people don’t need them. Like your boss.’
‘Yeah, he was a right cunt. One of many. I might well have ended up down an alley with a big hole in me because of him.’
‘Do cops shoot each other?’
If Lester knows, and he must, he isn’t saying because not saying is the best act for a man who has been tough until tripped up by his own mind, let alone by crooked cops with or without big calibres. Or as he had always said: it’s like small cocks and big cars.
‘Well, you could say,’ he says, ‘that some of my wounds were selfinflicted, by a self beholden to no one and to nothing. And a lot of bloody good it did me.’
‘I’m almost as bad,’ says Trevor, then downs his drink. ‘Do you have any undercover work or are you just painting strange little things and reading John Silvester in The Saturday Age?’
‘Funny bastard. I was superannuated out, and on a disability gig like a great many people in this suburb. Some of whom look selfinflicted too. I’m just more burnt out and that’s saying something. At least I earned it. Ha.’
‘How’s the painting going?’
‘Huh.’
Though why is he asking the old cop and not the other way round? As he leaves he feels the sunlight lean across from the west. The wounds we all carry sometimes go cold in him and, it being unusually warm today, he walks on the sunny side of every street for as long as possible. He needs it. Instead of walking through the house he walks along the side path Elizabeth uses for the wheelie bin. There he sees her, lying on the lawn with Gordon, her face in the last sunlight, eyes closed, her wide lips in a huge and private smile. Sunlight is holding her blonde hair in a loose bob around her face, but it is her wide smile of happiness, even satisfaction, that entrances him.
He stands there watching her, then quietly retreats.
After thinking about it for a few days, Elizabeth asks him a favour.
‘It won’t be for long,’ she says, ‘it’s just that I get bored driving up to see Mum by myself and then back by myself. If you potter about in the garden that’ll be OK, Mum won’t mind and, as I said, it’ll be a quick trip.’
A division is happening in him: to go because it is different and he likes her and driving up to Ballarat like this might make a change – and the deadening thought of being trapped in conversation with an old parent who will ask him all sorts of clichéd questions expecting their clichéd answers, while he sits on the edge of an ergonomic nightmare of a lounge chair made in the early ’70s.
‘I’ll shout you a couple of pints afterwards,’ she adds.
‘Let’s see. How about before?’
Elizabeth explains that, yes, although her mother was a publican once, she doesn’t approve of people drinking during the day. Daft as that sounds. Her mother knows Trevor is the lodger and will worry if her daughter has a lodger who drinks during the day.
‘Now,’ he laughs, ‘why would that sound daft? A publican who opened at 10 am to sell booze to customers she didn’t approve of because they drank during the day?’
There is no answer to this, as Elizabeth well knows.
‘How about you leave me at the pub while you see her? I’ll sit in the beer garden with a book until you pack me into your car for the drive home.’
‘She wants to meet you.’
He returns to the kitchen and stays there. His chilli-and-ginger sauce is ready. After simmering the pork belly in his six-month master sauce the day before, he has kept it overnight in the fridge, a slab of dark something. He adjusts the gas under the oil and as he waits he stares at the rice cooker and inspects the broccolini for blemishes. His life is all inconsequential ands.
Then Elizabeth leans on the other side of the bench. And smiles at him.
The introductions are over quickly. Trevor sits down in the spare chair in Mrs Sermon’s lounge. Not that anyone would seriously describe it as a lounge. The chair presents a posture hazard, as expected, but he is also at risk of being crushed by cliffs of newspaper collapsing on him. Every surface in the house is sticky. The woman is kind of crazy. She has been talking about him without once addressing him.
‘So,’ says Mrs Sermon, ‘has your lodger been settling in comfortably?’
‘Yes, Mum. Trevor, that’s his name.’
Trevor clears his throat. Elizabeth has remained standing; there isn’t room for a third chair.
‘Um, Mrs Sermon, I am only, ah, renting the room for a few months.’
Elizabeth shakes her head at him.
The old woman isn’t very old-biddy-like, and she smiles the smile of conspirators throughout history. Without once looking in his direction.
‘It’s all right, dear, I practised free love as only the Orange People could do it, I went off to live in Poona with everyone who was sexually enlightened, so there’s no need to be discreet.’
‘About … what?’
‘I’m very pleased Elizabeth has found someone. It’s been so long.’
Trevor is peering at Elizabeth now, who is nodding at him like someone on happy pills, smiling and doing something fussy with her hands. God, how slow is he? What a set-up. This is worth much more than a few pints. Elizabeth is looking so cheerful and yet desperate he feels tempted to hold her to some of her own implications. Jump into her bed?
‘What happened to your father, Trevor?’ asks Mrs Sermon. ‘I know fathers are as weak as piss, excuse the expression, with hers (she flicks her head towards Elizabeth) clearing out years ago and, from what I’ve heard, yours did too.’
‘It was Yvonne’s father who left,’ says Elizabeth, ‘not my dad. You left.’
‘No, no, you’re wrong.’
‘My father died,’ says Trevor. ‘Or he went missing, presumed dead. A death without a body, it confuses everyone. For thirty years. Then, a week or so ago, he re-appeared.’
He stops. She is looking past him rather than at him, unfocussed. She begins rubbing her nose and keeps it
up for longer than usual. She has been inspecting Trevor as closely. His rounded stomach and his shaven dome. Perhaps he has been something powerful in an earlier life before falling back. There is something unfinished about him. But he is strong, he sits still, he is a good man.
‘Oh,’ she says, finally. ‘Well, that’s … bad luck.’
It makes him laugh. Bad luck is the least of it.
‘What was your name again?’
‘Trevor.’
‘Ah yes. Trevor,’ she says. ‘You should eat less. You’re fat.’
They are travelling in the grey EH across Ballarat to the shops and what Elizabeth still thinks of as Dan Murphy’s as if denying to herself it’s actually Woolworths. The lure of cheap booze quashes any deeper principles. Her mother shuffles on the red vinyl bench seat in the back and complains about its lack of support. Trevor is in the front. If he could, he’d project himself completely out of time and space altogether. Elizabeth owes him.
‘Well, your father had taste,’ he does say, ‘maintaining a car like this. You have to let me drive it one day.’
From the back seat he hears the old woman muttering.
‘He was a loser,’ she says.
Elizabeth turns around to address her mother.
‘Now, now, towards the heart, remember. Love and compassion.’
‘Oh, shut up.’
‘By the way, Mum, changing the subject, did you see the news item about a hoarder dying in a house fire? It was horrific.’
‘Never seen a house fire. The pub I had burnt down after I’d left. They said bikies lit a barbecue in the front bar.’
‘The hoarder shouldn’t have died. The fire crew couldn’t get into the house to save him, they had to break windows to get access. It was his own fault.’
The old woman clears her throat and says:
‘No one was fooled about that fire, they knew he wanted to collect the insurance. The place never made a profit after I left.’
‘Because of all his rubbish, Mum,’ stresses Elizabeth. ‘Being in the way of access, and then catching fire. The firies couldn’t find a path through the house. All those stacked rows of newspaper – just imagine it – a maze of flames inside the house.’
‘A house fire, dear? Some people are so careless.’
‘Another man was found in a mummified state hidden under his junk inside his house. He’d been there for ten years.’
‘Obviously he wasn’t a nice man or someone would have found him.’
Trevor finds the old woman’s obliqueness amusing. The fire image is pretty good, all the same. But then so is the mummy.
‘He was on the floor,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Under piles of junk,’ she adds. ‘By the time they found him they were lucky to be alive themselves. He wasn’t. He inhaled all of his rubbish in the form of toxic smoke. God, what it must have been like …’
‘And your point is?’
‘Mum, you must be joking. You’re getting worse at collecting. You’re out of control.’
‘What are you telling me this for?’
‘You want to know why? You, a hoarder of newspapers?’
Another minute passes before her mother responds.
‘Well, it would save me fumbling around with the good doctor’s do-it-yourself kit. Would it not?’
‘Would it not,’ says Elizabeth.
She drags at the heavy manual steering to enter the car park, this lack of power assistance the only gripe she has with the car. That and the turning circle from here to the footy boundary.
‘Your house is a firetrap, that’s what. And then, then, it’s a person trap. You’re simply not mobile enough and if your place went up it’d be a fiery maze too. You’re my mother and, though you’re as stubborn as (she grunts at the wheel), I’d prefer you … alive.’
‘Very kind of you, I’m sure.’
Despite her minimalism her mother’s head is nodding and, while it might be from the heat, it’s more probably with suppressed emotion.
Which mustn’t be on Elizabeth’s mind when she curses the old man who has nearly reversed his car into her beautiful car doors. ‘Fuck you,’ she shouts out the window and bangs the horn. Trevor wakes up, straightens beside her. From the back seat they hear her ex-publican mother.
‘Yeah, fuck the old guy,’ she growls. And Trevor laughs. They all laugh.
The old guy pulls back into his parking space then, unbelievably, begins reversing again. They are still behind him. Elizabeth doesn’t just toot again, she holds in the horn inserts on the steering wheel. The old mechanical device keeps blaring and people stop, stare, until the old guy drives in again. ‘What an idiot!’ Elizabeth can handle herself. And doesn’t the old man wish she wouldn’t.
Her mother can walk unaided, just. The walking frame is something she loathes even as she leans on it to keep her balance. It is better that she suffer this and stay conscious of her balance than stumble and fall. Broken hip, end of life. Sign-off for the good or bad doctor. Death in Dan Murphy’s.
Instead, as she wheels herself in slight wobbles, Mrs Sermon waylays the customers with aisle rage.
‘Come on, let me get past. Do you mind? When I was your age I let older people have right of way and I never gave it a thought. Don’t you scowl at me, it looks terrible, if you could only see yourself. What is it with people nowadays?’
The customers know what to do. Like seeing an erratic driver on a highway, people mostly dodge lanes and avoid them. She’s lucky there is such decorum around un-drunk alcohol. The old publican in her knew better when the stuff was flowing. Stern hand needed.
‘Elizabeth. Where are you? Don’t go so far ahead. Where’s what’s-his-name?’
As soon as they walked through the shiny bar entrance Trevor had veered away to the whisky shelves. As he inspects the single malts he can hear her voice carrying above the aisles. Booze may make people excessive and noisy but when they search for it among the shelves they remain modest and quiet. She is wearing loose slacks and her favourite green cardigan, her hair as pinched up as Elizabeth’s used to be and carrying on like a regular, which is no doubt what the customers think she is.
A woman in the shop’s khaki uniform asks her if she needs any help, which means placating the normal people in the shop. Except she accidentally bumps the walking frame and it digs into the old woman’s shin.
‘Ouch!’ she cries, ‘Oh oh!’
And she sits down on the floor to examine her leg. The staff woman bends over her. By now Elizabeth is pushing back towards her mother with her trolley in front of her. Trevor is approaching from behind. It looks like a traffic accident.
‘I want my daughter to come back and … ah, there you are. This stupid woman has hurt me,’ she says. ‘Look, I’m bleeding. She pushed me down.’
If Elizabeth is ever worried about her mother it doesn’t show, or perhaps she dare not show her pleasure as these out-of-kilter moments occur. Her mother’s obstinacy shines on and off like a wonky beacon.
‘You’re showing off in public again, Mum. I bleed more than that when I brush my teeth.’
Her mother squashes her mouth down like an old woman without any teeth.
‘It’s stopped now. I’ve been holding my shin so tightly my hands are hurting. Don’t just stand there,’ she says to Trevor, ‘help me up.’
First he was set up as the new boyfriend (she didn’t say he wasn’t) and now she has another scheme. Monitoring the elderly. Therefore the long way through her debt is via Guinness. It’s far from over. She is sitting opposite him, or in front of him, a single glass of white wine in front of her.
‘Do I think your mother is demented? Let’s see: she can’t remember names, she’s tactless.’
‘She always has been.’
‘Do I think she’s a bit on the crazy side? Or just old? Or undernourished? You are a family of dedicated starvers.’
He is on his third pint.
‘And you want her to stay in our place for a week, while you study her. While we
study her …? For what? Symptoms?’
‘More or less. It’s no good asking her, she’s full of crap.’
‘Like her house. I’ve heard of hoarders but, Jesus, it’s a nightmare. All that rubbish on top of rubbish, like a cave full of bat shit.’
‘Would you believe her sannyasin name was Amitabha, which means Boundless Lustre. She thought it made her sound tubby, so she shortened it to Amit, which still dignifies her.’
‘How?’
‘It means Endless Infinitude.’
‘And she bloody well called me fat.’ He takes another gulp. ‘She behaved like an ageing drama queen in the booze barn. That poor woman she berated. If she stays with us for a week …’
This may encourage more sympathy in Elizabeth. Or less, which he hasn’t thought of. In truth, the “fat” comment has been more useful than hurtful, or useful and hurtful: in the gym he has been pushing his pain threshold, something he used to consider neurotic in others.
Elizabeth has driven her mother home and left Trevor at the pub with some money, before returning to sit beside him looking out across the street and the large median strip to the shops on the far side. Ballarat is so wide. All the subterfuge has made her tired.
She had thought of bringing her mother down to the city several months ago before he arrived, thus the room problem. That is, Trevor. She can’t ask him to move out of his paid room to allow an old woman to sleep in it for a week. (She’d like to.) Where would he live? Her daughter was different. If she came for a few nights she could sleep on the roll-out mattress in the study, but she hasn’t. Then if Trevor volunteered his room it would only make it worse, but he hasn’t. Elizabeth will leave her room for her mother and sleep in the study herself. It strikes her again how the pleasure of giving or yielding can be that person’s indulgence. Almost sinfully so. Altruism is an open pit.