by Philip Salom
She knows her mother might be in fear of dementia. Given that her poor balance and confusion are not unique, and that she is diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, her fear of Alzheimer’s is already a displacement. If she lets dying happen she will die from her glands or, like most people, from her tired old heart.
So much life, so much resistance. A few weeks earlier she had told Trevor how she worked hard during her marriage, wanting to live and work and keep ahead of the accidental Yvonne. So many women fell behind. Her fear of what could happen to their daughter. At any moment. But Ian was too easygoing, he was being rubbed away by her energy and concentration, he left before she rubbed him out. Some people just want to amble along.
After sharing a ciggie with Trevor, they drive back to the city in silence. Like a real couple. There is no way he can drive after his drinks barter has been consumed. Full of the black stuff he is. For all his curiosity about the car he sits there as passenger, more the passive than the passing, ambling along, so relaxed he hums to old songs in his head as she eases the old car through several corners and on to the road out of Ballarat until they are free-riding down the highway to Melbourne. Hoping it won’t rain, though that isn’t likely – clouds too pale and grey, more light in them than water, more stage design than downpour. The odometer shows 198,000 and this, he realises, is miles, a long past which means one major engine reconditioning, gallons of oil blacker even than Guinness and boxes of all-but-obsolete linings for the old drum brakes.
Watching her drive is his consolation. And she can drive, no doubt about it, a car that many people couldn’t or wouldn’t. The gears aren’t easy, having long throws and a jolting movement which she makes smooth in two barely perceptible movements: out of one gear into neutral, pause, then up or down into the next gear. Smart. Pausing just enough to allow the leverage and gearing to align, then on to the accelerator. On to the gas, as the Yanks say, but never would of this iconic Aussie car. From the back of the car he hears the familiar Holden sound of the diff whining. It is sending him to sleep.
Trevor arrives home from the gym in his sweaty singlet and black tights to find the room-shuffling in progress. In the house there is almost as much lifting and stumbling being done as in the gym, just nothing lifted is shiny steel and instead of musclemen it features auto-vocalising by Elizabeth as she mumbles and grunts and bundles doonas and pillows in her arms until she can barely see over them. She hasn’t noticed him. He attempts the joke he has thought of a few minutes earlier, putting on a high-pitched US accent.
‘Hi, honey, I’m home …’
Elizabeth turns and looks at him without reaction, still holding the doonas. She has been setting up her room and not listening to the monologue of her mother’s, now suddenly ended.
‘It’s me,’ he says, ‘Trevor. You can tell by my smile.’
She moves into the room, returns pushing a swivel chair on castors all the way into her study. Of course she knows it’s him. His body is changing shape, enough to discern, more to admire. His arms, his freer movement, or is she just imagining? That he is here in her house. At least she hasn’t told him she recognises his body scent, the warm bread of his skin. Not that he alone smells like this. She is aware of several types of body scent whether she wants to or not, from bread or yeast and earthy and fruity all the way across to wet towels, and sharper heat stinks of people like coalmines as she once told Martina. Or gymnasts.
She drags a small mattress and some blankets into the study and scrapes the chairs on the wooden floorboards. This time she stops, lets him see her appraise his relative nakedness. She raises her eyebrows, then continues.
‘What do you think of my public legs?’ he says.
‘Huh.’
What she sees is the extensive scarring. He is bright and lively and going to keep talking. It’s as if he has forgotten, unable to see the leg for the limp.
‘I’ve been going to the Fairfield boat shed. I hire a rowing boat – notice, Ms Editor, my use of the -ing ending – and row an actual boat on the Yarra. Didn’t I tell you?’
But she has disappeared again.
During this little ceremony of accommodation, Elizabeth’s mother has been sitting in the lounge like a proudly feathered chief. Watching him. Very upright. Her walking frame, ugly thing it is, beside her. She is not unattractive, Mrs Sermon, even at her age. More Red Cloud than Sitting Bull, judging from her ruddy features. Too much sun in the hippie days and a raddled later life of the skin. A scarf is wrapped untidily around her head. Hardly feathers, let alone full dramatic headdress, yet it does suggest qualities of repose, dignity, even wisdom. Three things her daughter claims her mother went in search of but came back without.
Trevor hasn’t noticed her. Until she resumes talking.
Apropos of woollen blankets, perhaps, begins telling him of the sheep they saw, thousands of sheep in the paddocks on the way down and how, astonishingly, some had escaped onto the highway causing havoc, she says, havoc, as they, the newsreaders, always announce it. ‘Havoc,’ she repeats. ‘What a great word.’
She likes his legs, it seems. Yes. She thinks legs are important and is proud of her own long pair, shapely as they used to be. Long they may be, but she refuses to admit they are no longer reliable. Either that or her hips have let her down, something she will almost accept.
In Elizabeth’s roomy and better-lit rooms he sees she is not so old after all. Inclined to play old when it suits her, he suspects, watching as she calls to Elizabeth and asks for confirmation about the sheep. ‘Remember, the sheep?’
‘Oh yes,’ she adds, ‘we used to roast sheep on a spit during my childhood, when we lived in the country, on sports days you know, when the football teams had finished up at finals, or after show days. The men did all that and the women fussed about with cakes and salads on long trestle tables, all very divided worlds back then. Parents. That is before I grew up and became a vego with the Rajneesh organisation. Women were meant to be freer there, too, but it was the men who had it best, sex and more sex and the power, too. We were left, like women in communes the world over, with babies.’
‘I don’t recall you worrying about babies, Mum,’ shouts Elizabeth from the other room.
Her mother pauses.
‘Sheep. All those fat sheep. My goodness, what a roast they would have made. We nearly brought one back for you. Elizabeth says you are a carnivore.’
Elizabeth walks past, eyebrows raised. This is a revelation: her mother going at it with a young, well younger, man? Maybe not the walk, but the talk. ‘What is this about sheep?’
‘Nearly brought one back? A baby or a sheep?’
‘That one you almost drove over.’
‘Mum, you are exaggerating. Something you always accuse me of.’
‘Yes, well, my exaggerations are more interesting than yours. Have you ever eaten sheep on a spit?’ she says, looking at Trevor.
When Elizabeth returns he notices her skin is shining. She, too, is wearing a singlet. Her arms and shoulders are lean but there is smooth muscle tone there. Work suits her and she is aware of it, looking at him looking at her, and feeling the cloth tight against her upper body, her jeans the stretchy ones they now warn women not to wear if doing much bending and working or sitting for long periods. Cutting-off-the-circulation jeans. It’s good to have a man around, for her sense of proprioception as much as her self-esteem. Her posture. She likes the way he notices her, that he is surprised by her. He has even enticed her mother to have a conversation, not a monologue.
To celebrate feeling good about herself and self-sacrificial, before the actual discomfort of a night on the floor, she goes into her room and returns with a bottle.
‘Heathcote shiraz,’ she announces, ‘for everyone except you, mother dear.’ And then she opens it and pours two glasses.
‘I think I’m a bad influence on you,’ Trevor says. ‘I’m making you a red-blooded woman. Where previously you were gin. Resveratrol is good for the heart.’
Influence or
not, he is soon relaxed. And yet how easy it is, making him feel slightly sheepish, old and fuddy-duddy. Recently it seems Elizabeth is fresher in appearance, she could pass for late 30s and that’s, um, young. Except when she makes no effort and like him, like men, like many women beyond Instagram, why should she?
She throws half a biscuit to Gordon and misses him by miles. Then she is fumbling a plate. Her home pair of nerdy glasses, which she has taken off and clearly needs.
‘If you’re so short-sighted, Elizabeth, why not get your eyes fixed? When you go out on the razzle you wear contacts. When you were trying to get Richard going.’
‘When I’m being a red-blooded woman, you mean? Trevor, you’ve noticed. It’s to stop my eyes glowing red.’
‘You could chuck the glasses altogether.’
If he is trying to be helpful she is trying to make him smile. And make him take an interest in her, not her weak eyesight. She knows, she knows.
‘Bloody nuisance,’ she adds, ‘except I’ve had them all of my life.’
‘Laser surgery is perfect for short-sighted people. Once it’s done, no more glasses needed for anything. Go and see the optometrist in Errol …’
‘Trevor, I know all about those laser operations.’
‘OK. Well, not all. Otherwise you’d probably have it done.’
‘What? I can’t bring myself to have them cutting my eyes.’
‘Or crossing your t’s?’
Mrs Sermon interrupts to say she’s had it done and to stop being such a wuss. It isn’t the first time they’ve had this conversation, with its I have/I can’t commentary. The old woman has the nerve to roll her eyes at Trevor. She didn’t, he thinks, even if he’s wrong.
‘I’ve had it done too,’ says Trevor. ‘I can show you the DVD of my operation if you like.’
‘That’s grotesque,’ growls Elizabeth, then makes a nervous laughing sound.
The following night Trevor again suggests she watch the DVD. Her TV sits in the lounge like a black blank because she rarely watches it. He has a small screen downstairs he occasionally uses. With an Apple TV he can watch On Demand from SBS.
Tonight her mother is sitting there watching without much interest.
So Elizabeth lets him slide in the DVD.
It’s a silent movie – she has not expected that – which makes it even creepier. Even some mumbling between surgeon and assistants would provide some work-rumble to neutralise the slicing and replacing. At least there are no graveyard sutures.
The cornea is washed and wiped and then a stainless steel slicer is placed over it and positioned like a soft-boiled egg-cap remover. Trevor’s slicer in close-up looks crudely constructed, hardly a Fabergé in finish – and is clearly numbered 140. Then it slices and withdraws and a small prong enters the image from the side, lifting the transparent eye flap back to the left where it is pressed flat and washed, wiped. A red light, which must be the laser, maps the clear surface exposed by the slicer, and in no time a section is presumably lasered off. The eye is washed, wiped, the slicer removed, the flap of cornea lifted back and carefully pressed into its home position, and again we see washing and wiping. In complete silence. Ghostly. Then the same with the second eye.
His blue eyes look grey and could in all truth be anyone’s. Patients could have a collective film night and discover that their DVDs – for each eye colour – are all the same. That they are the same DVD given out to everyone according to team colours.
Anyway, his eyes reacted in reverse state: the long eye shortened and the short eye lengthened, and that was not the intention but he does not tell Elizabeth this as the operation is more truly designed to help short-sightedness and not lopsided sight like his was, and now is again, except reversed.
Mrs Sermon doesn’t make it to the end of this eye-slicing discussion. The DVD bores her. Or perhaps she has fallen asleep with all the sheep talk. Delayed reaction. Yes, he does want to impress Elizabeth. Even if only by this modern and tamed version of Dali’s film of the eye and the razor. It always sounds worse than it is. She has taken her glasses off now, turns to look at him, is very close. Except this isn’t intimacy, it’s an outburst of irritation. No, she does not want his eye operation and why did he insist on showing her? Her face is reddening.
He feels the hot water passing over his skin. The showerhead in the bottom bathroom delivers an impressive flow, newer in design than hers, the luxury of the recent renovation. Not that he has ever been in her shower. When he turns the taps off he hears her water running. Standing there, naked, water dripping from him as he listens, suddenly aware she is standing, naked, under the water, immediately above him in the upstairs shower.
As above, so below. Perhaps she will be his better consciousness. If she calms down.
Before he turns off the light the days shuffle through him as they always do. His leg is aching a bit and this will increase, he knows. The extra gym-work. Perhaps any single person lying half asleep at the end of any day is compressed on the other side, the dead end, of the achievement spectrum. Lacking recognition, of selves not faces, is all through it, and social awkwardness, lapsing outages of empathy, the kind in favour not of another’s feelings but of having their feelings favour you.
It seems to him now, just now, that Diana is not very good at pleasure. Even sexually, between them it had become a routine she was content to let happen, not because it was exciting, or different, or unexpected, and therefore because she desired it. Whereas her work is important. She needs focus, purpose, and that is her meaning.
Diana doesn’t even know where he lives. And Elizabeth doesn’t know who he is. Or what he intends. Still, if she can get that close and that annoyed over the eye stuff it’s actually a good sign. There is a new sound in the house. The old mum is snoring from Elizabeth’s room. He hasn’t heard snoring before. Unless the old woman has left the door open. Yes, that must be it. He is quite impressed to know this. Or she is regressing to childhood and feels more secure in a new place if she can see some dim light from the lamp Elizabeth leaves on in the kitchen. The glow of long-gone parents. Safe traces of one life left in another, the next, and the next.
Continuity.
Sleep.
For several weeks now Elizabeth has been emailing Shia. For all her fascination with communal sects, Shia is a recluse, unusual for her age. The publishing staff call her “The Cavewoman”. No one has seen her, there is only one image in the public domain, no presence whatsoever on social media (the marketing people will pester her about that). She only has phone contact with Elizabeth so only Elizabeth knows what she sounds like. Shia says little. This suggests something high-pitched about control. Either that or she has been watching the Elena Ferrante drama too closely. Perhaps she is Elena Ferrante, whoever she is.
Shia’s emails, however, are over a page long and sometimes longer, including comments about the weather, her health, why she has been reluctant to trust editors – all of which make her sound like a grumpy male – with amendments and attachments full of unseen new paragraphs and their position in The Collector, details she might include if Elizabeth approves, though they are sudden and stylistically inconsistent. Is she testing her? A woman strange enough to improvise her ideas through thousands of words for no other reason than to challenge?
At times she departs from the manuscript entirely, digressing into a discourse on #MeToo and issues like land use or Indigenous rights. For a while she had considered comparing sect life with community life in central Australia. She knew that would tax her, she, the go-nowhere and probably well-educated middle-class white person, heading out to the central desert in a small Hyundai? She hates politicians and emperors like the loathsome Rupert Murdoch and barbarian Trump. But who doesn’t? Her riffs carry something wild, and angry, some of it un-nerving.
The working title is a worry. When Elizabeth tells her John Fowles wrote a famous novel called The Collector in the ’60s she doesn’t respond (she’s too young, she doesn’t know, she doesn’t care?) not
even if Fowles’ main character imprisons a young woman, pins her as if she were a butterfly, in his perverse collection. Still nothing.
Sects do collect and they do imprison, their killing bottles are sometimes drugs, like Hamilton-Byrne’s doses of LSD injected into 12-year-olds who were then locked in a darkened room. Sometimes it is wildly gaseous rhetoric.
So Elizabeth has nicknamed the manuscript K’lector as in Hannibal Lecter. What she has uncovered in K’lector is a twisting contradiction in the characters. It has made her feel unwell. Though the contradictions are real enough, especially among manipulative personalities, sometimes the characters are impossible to disentangle. Her suggestion is to pull apart the structure and reorder the time line. And to let more of the character arise from the action, cathartically, finally, without so many unconvincing claims made by the author. It had to come clean, earned, like her own desire to see the book triumph.
Eventually she sends Cavewoman – in a hard-won bit of writing – a light-hearted scolding over her refusal to leave her hideaway and discuss her text face to face. No reply for at least a week. Elizabeth is worried enough to check the dates. Has she offended (please, not that again) another novelist? She emails a question mark.
It’s ALL bullshit, replies Shia a day later, and forgive me for being non-sequiturial. The book publishing scene looks likes property management sometimes. Safe books in safe suburbs. I’m uncomfortable with all the bland media promotion of each literary darling as if they were celebrities. I am so far off liking any of that. Maybe I’m too dark for a writer, I feel stuck in this spiritual trap I’m trying to express. All those serious people reading every bullshit starofthemoment and festival directors and literary editors wanting to schmooze with them. Everyone in fact, so deadly earnest. But you’re only an editor, so chill.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ Elizabeth shouts, eyes to the ceiling. The presumption of this hurts her breath. The one advantage of email: no body language. Also its disadvantage.