The Returns

by Philip Salom

  While he waits he sees the red spine painting. When he brushed in the first bloody line it made him think of the red scar on Lester’s throat. The man’s own paintings made Trevor shrink, the entrapment of the netting, its lines covering every square centimetre of the surface. Outsider art is self-referential and therefore weird. A cult of one. If that’s a test for authenticity, then … all other art is derivative.

  Trams are forgiving, though, trams suit Trevor’s natural disposition to have mind and matter as one, the bulk of him and the sensual pleasure of tram rhythms, the wheel and rail sounds, the stopping and starting, acceleration from electric motors something he forgets until the driver pushes the pedals or levers or commands the lightning, whichever it is, his back jerks into the seat frame in pleasant forcefulness and the steel carriage rushes towards the next stop.

  Earlier, instead of going straight into the party, he had moved out of time somehow, moved by a strange light over the city. And now, back out on the street near home, he remembers and looks up to see something vaguely like it still up there, down here. Again he is lifted by it, by that light over everything. It is a light effect after rain, light without lines, a wet paper-wash diffusing cloud-light back down onto the buildings, lighting everything equally. No one surface is favoured by it, no roof is highlighted, no new or old buildings or façades shine any less; and nothing as knee-jerk as ‘Oh, it’s surreal!’ occurs to him. But something has changed, shifted, from banality to beauty.

  Part Three

  STUCK IN THE emotional ore of his father is the grind. The antagonism Trevor has always felt towards mining. His father made his money in WA from mining companies aided by politicians. He read the book about Noonkanbah in WA when the Premier Charles Court sent in the police – would have sent the SAS had it been possible – to push the Noonkanbah Station people off their land so drilling rigs could have access. Some miners were cartoon bastards, like Lang Hancock, who declared he’d mine iron ore by nuclear blasting. White bastards, a shameful era, the forefathers of people like his own father.

  And the era continues. In Queensland the Indian Adani Group is resisting Indigenous groups, or paying some off, ignoring the farmers and the majority of people in Australia, to gouge out the Galilee Basin for the biggest coalmine in the world. Bugger the extensive Artesian Basin’s groundwater. Bugger the Barrier Reef. Bugger the people. But make the people pay for it. Billion-dollar handouts, roads and rail, royalties negotiated down the throats of submissive governments. If this were sex it would be Sadist. Massive clean-ups walked away from in other countries, wreckage and poison that will leak (as they still leak in other countries) into the soil, the water, the sea, the coral.

  Under that thick, smiling moustache of Gautam Adani lies the contempt Trevor’s father approves of.

  Time for some public art, then, time to paint that mural. A 50-year-old graffiti artist. He has a wall, he will paint it. His largest canvas yet. Already measured, on the alley side of his shop he has roughed out a horizontal image to fit. The only interruption is the side door and even that seems ironically appropriate. Walk in, walk out.

  That night, anger and disruption annoying him, he carries a backpack of brushes and spray paint up to the shop. After midnight on a Monday night there is nothing happening, almost no traffic, no one on the pavements. Even the homeless men and the blonde woman have disappeared.

  As a student Trevor had decided to paint a mural on the lounge-room wall of a share-house. Not wanting to waste his expensive paints and unsure of whether they’d wash free from the high-gloss surface, he completed the mural with something dramatic and washable – soya sauce. It was a jumble of images, great apes with the faces of the occupants of the house. Naked, naturally. Domestic objects, snakes and ladders, Chagall-like levitations. It was a mess.

  You need a plan.

  As he works he uses his wide house-painting brushes to move litres of acrylic paint back and forth across the horizontal space of the wall. Over this he sprays and sprays, walking from the pavement end to the top of the blind alley. What a joy, he thinks, if only canvases were this big and he wasn’t some obvious dickhead trying to win the Archibald Prize by size alone, he could do this all day as well as all night. He thinks of Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth. He sweeps spray and paint across the wall, walking sideways to expand his image across the wall’s size and scale, his face under the mask cheeky with smiling. Stands back, adds, adjusts, squirts a highlight.

  Spray, spray, spray …

  Wearing his white face-mask for safety he would, if seen from across the street, look like a ghost spitting vapour trails of colour in the darkness and onto the wall.

  Then he constructs the letters.

  This mural-making is like really strong dope. As long as you don’t inhale.

  The next morning he tells Elizabeth what he has done. They walk Gordon around the park and before going home walk up to the shop with him. There it is. He mutters something about touching it up (later that night). Some extra highlighting is needed to make better contrast in the daylight.

  The wall is a wide-open plain of brown earth and green vegetation. Twisted round in a right-hand-side downward curve, bent away from any realist sense, is the Queensland coastline and the bright underwater jewels of the Barrier Reef. In the sky above all this, painted in the protest font and colours, is STOP ADANI.

  ‘Trevor, you are naughty,’ she laughs. ‘Though should we be seen looking at it?’

  ‘Do you think people will talk?’

  ‘I bet. Did you get permission to do it?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Ha. Thanks for showing me, I’d better get home but let me know what happens if anything happens.’

  She notes his pavement sign:

  The return of the repressed is true. Recurrence is true. It is all true.

  She knows she must sneak down to get another look at his paintings. She has seen him standing in front of roughly scraped canvases, stationary, seen him sitting in his armchair holding a house-painting brush, just inspecting it, feeling its bristles, sitting there, doing paintings in his head perhaps. What she has noticed is how long, apart from time at the gym, he has been spending in the shed. This thing of standing still, or moving hardly at all, returning to the one position for what seems an hour or so. It would drive her loony. She has to move, move, keep the energy flowing through her meridians, unless of course she is sitting at her keyboard hearing the long speaking of a manuscript.

  The mural has surprised her. So bold. He had mentioned his father often enough. She has never seen him so energised, intense, angry really. It can only be confusing. It would make her weep. Perhaps it has shifted something in him. At night he has been grumbling over the news.

  She drags open the studio door. The canvases and boards are now dirty with art. He has been working all right, making things, maybe even making progress, not that she would know. Cleaned up after every session, she guesses, his brushes are wrapped in cloth like tiny mummies. Scattered over the workbenches are painting knives and dinky, springy little tools that seem to her more like puppet props, implements for gnome gardens. And pliers, bolts, trowels of huge size and powerful-looking duct tape, the type you see wound around the wrists and mouths of the innocent by villains in films. All that.

  Canvases, surfaces, roughened then painted-over surfaces of wood, or is it metal? Scattered images, colours and textures.

  Suffusing sepia and texture, the material of flatness this drugged imagery is dragged over or dragged from, it’s hard to say which. Each of these faces is side-on and rushing to the left like the workers in John Brack’s Collins St., 5 pm though here the place is placeless, more in the mind than the street, a reddish-purplish blur of media images she can recognise, collages from magazines and tabloid newspapers (good for something at last) destroyed by all this rubbing, rubbing back, and rendered indistinct. One face is turning towards the viewer. It is half blinded by paint.

  She can’t see what she is used to
imagining, happening slowly over time in a manuscript, as narrative unfolding; she sees immediacy, a state, the all-at-once of paintings and it mostly gratifies but at the same time confuses her. The feeling of rawness and achievement undermined by a lack of … Not his paintings, any paintings. Too much abstraction? Too much explanation, or not enough? Even so, many novels only give surface observation, surface as the main frisson. For some, surface is the only frisson.

  But it is shocking.

  It is painting.

  She prefers photography.

  Still. The tone and intensity of these pieces. Or the suggestion? He makes no particular claim, or counter-claim, for his work, having no public to demand it of him.

  Further back in the shed she finds his end-on series, which has now clearly morphed into the beginning of the side-on series. It makes her laugh. Painters, printmakers, how they push an idea in several directions, if they’re any good, if any of the directions work and warrant the visit. For years. Entire lifetimes. She knows novelists who write the same book over and over. Working with the same publishers, editing the same writers for several books in succession.

  She prefers writers who shift ground, not shift around. The kind of creative writing Creative Writing workshops might be named after. As if. The term “Creative Writing” annoys her as much as it does most writers. And Richard, the always-author but only sometime lover, loathes the name, if not the money: he teaches Creative Writing.

  She is still looking at the paintings when Trevor walks across from the house. She is astonished to be caught. Why isn’t he at the shop?

  ‘Another art critic!’ he says, waving his arms in a silly fashion. Clearly unconcerned that she’s there.

  He says the shop smells of spray paint. Not a lot but enough to worry people. He needs something like old home remedies. Vinegar, was it, they used to spray around? She has some urine ordure eliminator, she says. It works for dogs. And must work for neighbours, too. She hasn’t seen him lately so perhaps he knows better at last. She hoped it would come to a confrontation and a fight he’d lose, though of course she shouldn’t want that, but …

  He says nothing. She turns towards his paintings.

  It would be surprising if she didn’t look at his work. At home alone. Considering he has been telling her his overall and bitty insights. Which rattle around like a box of loose type. Then the spray job overnight. She admits there is something she cannot quite get in these works. Nothing tangible.

  ‘Loneliness?’ she wonders. Aloud, to him.

  ‘Loneliness. … This one?’ he indicates the faces to the left, the single full-frontal.

  ‘No, Trevor. All of them.’

  This is serious. All of them? Or does she mean aloneness, not the same thing at all? Affect, what someone feels. The paintings stare back at them. Unrelenting. Loneliness. Some kind of Grief she isn’t articulating? That big space open between Love and Death.

  He is worried now, he says, that his paintings may have a repressed father-lack in them. It’s simplistic and what else is there to say? He would not have thought that a month ago. Or just a dumb everyday and garden-shed melancholy. Who gives a fuck anyway?

  It is not a problem to be solved, he had thought, as he painted the face.

  It is the man who is desperate to return.

  It is the man watching customers amble around his shop while he waits for 5.30.

  It was the man speeding along country roads during summer with the air miraging and the approaching cars bubbled and distorted. Driving along straight roads in crooked heat. It is also the man in the other car that crashed.

  It is the man who has left married life behind him.

  It is a son.

  It is all these men as one man.

  ‘Do you see any hope in them?’ He is asking her. Suggesting. (Hoping.)

  ‘Hope?’

  ‘Yes, hope.’

  At first she isn’t sure if he means hope in doing them or hope within them. What does hope look like?

  ‘It’s me,’ he adds, ‘this sombre feeling isn’t all there is to me, because I feel hopeful, it’s a personal trait, and I’m certain I feel hope is in the making, when I’m painting, when I’m the person creating them. Sort of detached and positive. Is it coming through in the paintings or is it dying in the brushwork? Very likely something else is painting.’

  ‘You’re all over the place!’ she grins. ‘But I see what you mean, I think. They’re unsettling, and sad … but hopeful?’

  ‘Techniques. Craft. These don’t have emotional labels. An artist is working his medium before anything else.’

  ‘Her medium.’

  ‘I don’t want them to look dismal.’

  Elizabeth can only smile at his openness. It reminds her of something Shia has written:

  This is a strange world

  And impossible to tell

  She’s shouldn’t let on that she sees less hope than he … hopes. She doesn’t see dismal. A wound of some kind will open and out through her will rush the words of doubt. He says he just wants to push and pull without any demand to conceptualise it, unlike artistic practice within universities. That way intention disguises itself.

  ‘Why did you ever stop?’ she has to ask.

  ‘Work took over,’ he explains. He did a double degree in Art Practice and Psychology, met Diana there and then moved into Design. A doctorate in Design Psychology. What Trevor used to call implausible theory and unemployment. Except while he theorised about art she landed a solid job.

  He took his paintings to several galleries and brought them all back again. He gate-crashed art openings and tried to network. But he wasn’t any good at networking. He wasn’t sure how it was done. He never wanted to be an Aussie Damien Hirst, sawing dead things in half, injecting formaldehyde and being a complete wanker. Then a gallery took his first exhibition and three paintings sold. No one knew of the Dada artists he most admired, the women Hannah Höch and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, their montages and constructed patterns. And yet he got really good reviews.

  Then he recalls removing the unsold paintings from gallery walls and laboriously laying them out (so funereal) on bubble wrap which cost more than unsold paintings were worth (nothing) and folding each parcel of them, pulling the tape out into lengths, that rarking sound of tape tearing free of the wheel, of itself, cutting or biting it, wrapping it tightly and finally stacking each anonymous and bubbly rectangle against the wall. Bubble wrap, he can hardly bear to touch the stuff.

  After all that work, he tells her, nothing happened. A vacuum. He had no style of his own, even though he knew better than to believe in “originality”. If you don’t sell, don’t bother. There is no private life the artist has tickets for. Then it happened: he had a car accident. His leg had to be rebuilt over two operations. Life ran him over.

  One thing he doesn’t feel: hard done by. It just happened.

  But, he says to Elizabeth: nothing is over until you’re dead and buried. Events recur, in one form or another. Even after you’re dead and buried, who knows?

  She can never tell him, then.

  He’s gabbling again. Remembering the messy British artist Frank Auerbach. Trevor Novak. Raw paint daubed everywhere. Even if it’s deemed old-fashioned, he paints. If it’s retro, he paints. He still paints. He wants to repeat, and repeat not the past but the medium, because he knows the difference between repeating into oblivion and turning repetition into ritual. And from ritual to discover new forms.

  His words are rubbing like his rags and turps over just-painted canvases, the edges smudging the consonants inside the smudges, hardly resisting erasure but remaining there, words, just. He could be drunk for all this slurring. Call it passion. Or absinthe. Or fathers. One thing his father never suffered from was lack of self-belief. The man could talk all day, like a dictator.

  ‘Trevor. I hate to be the dog biting your ankles. I hear what you’re saying, I just want to say it’s not easy to begin a public career in your 50s.’

  ‘Yo
u think I don’t know that? I’ll have enough good work.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter about being good.’

  ‘Why not?’ (He can hear the gallery owner in her words.)

  ‘Maybe it’s not about being good, it’s about being important. Even for writers. Being topical, engaging with the issues. There are so many issues you …’

  But he knows. Relevance. It isn’t the quality.

  ‘So someone can be talented and their work excellent and still … not be, arrgh, I hate the word, relevant?’

  It sounds too awful not to contain some weak and terrible truth. It calls up the other issue he squirms over – at what point does an amateur become an artist?

  ‘I’m making a pot of tea. Do you want some?’

  ‘No, thanks, I’d better get back.’

  After he has gone she remembers a night she had come out of her room to see him watching TV and wiping tears from his eyes. At first she thought it was a soppy romance he’d been caught by, an emotional backwash from his separation. The program was a documentary, several women were crying about something. Trying to explain the horror of finding their young boy after a car accident, they kept breaking into grief, crying in gusts of weeping and saying sorry as if they must apologise for honest emotion.

  When he noticed Elizabeth and wiped his eyes he seemed apologetic, too, just like the women had been. ‘Being a sook,’ he said. Deaths get to him. A lot of things get to him. Instead of watching any more he went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. Five minutes later she saw him exactly where she had last seen him, head down, unaware, standing in front of an open kitchen drawer.