The Returns

by Philip Salom

  Now he says he is trying to stay calm about his father, as if fathers die, are invisibly buried and then walk back into your shop through the front door wanting your money every day of your life … How the one man he had wanted in his life has returned as a bastard.

  Now, though, showing how normal he is, he collects a bottle of vinegar, two tea towels and the dog-piss spray, and goes back to the shop.

  Under the studio lights, he reaches down for a small canvas at the back wall of the shed. Obscured by his big shadow, he grabs it and catches his hand on a sliced-back section of galvanised iron.

  He cries ‘Fuck!’ and ‘Fuck!’ as he holds up his hand, the gash white and pink along its torn edges, his opened flesh shocked into a faint. Then blood overflows like a dam spill. Blood runs over the canvas. Onto the floor. A turps rag, nearly clean, is all he has close, so he wraps his right hand with his left, winding it around, feeling reversed.

  Damn it, a trip to the doctor. If he washes it now, opens it to cold water, salts it, fills it with Savlon and wraps it in clean cloth – or sterile cloth if she has any – his tetanus shot can wait till tomorrow. And stitches? It doesn’t even hurt yet but it will, it will, when the cold water pushes it open.

  Inside he flushes out the flesh trying not to look, feeling faint, pain focussed in this one sliced moment. The depth, the length, actually not as bad as he’d thought. The pain alleviating in his relief. Not a serious cut.

  There is still daylight in the sky, just. With his left hand he flicks away a rubber toy, or what’s left of it, and watches Gordon race off, fetch it (‘Fetch!’) then rush back like an office boy, dripping dog love from his chops and dropping the sodden thing at his feet.

  The fence is still open, nothing of the neighbour recently, just dog love in the form of needy play. Dogs are so single-minded, the routine a panting bliss. Throwing, returning, his left hand wet, his right wrapped, the double-happy dog, when Elizabeth re-appears. After a minute of silence she says:

  ‘Poor old Trevor. Been in the wars, one thing after another. And still up to throwing toys for Gordie.’

  ‘And,’ she adds, ‘it was very good of you to put up with my mother recently. I’ve suggested Yvonne come down for a few days and we drive up to see Mum. You know, it all helps. She’s by herself, just in-home care visits, all that. So …’

  ‘I have a feeling you’re going to …’

  ‘… say my daughter will be staying for a few days. It’s no fun for me, either. The gods have decided I’m on the bloody floor again.’

  ‘Why not make her go on the floor? She’s not collapsing from tennis injuries like your mum.’

  ‘Very funny. No, I don’t want her taking over my workroom. Trevor, do you know anything about daughters?’

  ‘But she’ll be good company, won’t she? Does she help out with cooking and cleaning up?’

  ‘God, you’re naïve. She’s not staying here to do the housework! Other than the trip to Ballarat I’ll hardly see her. You really have no idea,’ she laughs.

  ‘If it’s only for a few days,’ he says lamely, and shrugs.

  He means, No more. He hopes it’s less. Her old mother staying was tolerable, because in some odd way she was eccentric and rude without being awful, entertaining in a way. And … it was only for a few days. He’d not thought of these things before moving in.

  More time in his room, in the shed. Right hand, left hand?

  ‘She can be quite a lot of fun,’ admits Elizabeth, ‘especially when she doesn’t mean to be. Thinking of cut hands … She had dressed up for a party in a bar in the city, and when she got home – here, that is – she was so pissed she couldn’t get out of her onesie. She grabbed the scissors from the kitchen drawer and cut it down the front from neck to crotch. In the morning she freaked out seeing what she’d done. It was a very expensive onesie.’

  His laughter is gratifying.

  ‘Now that,’ she adds, ‘is a story that has been around the block a few times.’

  ‘She’s lucky she didn’t cut anything on the way down.’

  ‘Trevor.’

  ‘Well, I’m half serious, cutting downwards, sort of backhanded. No, it’s funny, isn’t it, Gordon! Just lock the scissors away.’

  He holds up his bandaged hand.

  The next time he throws for Gordon he chooses the chewed fetch toy he bought especially, the one Elizabeth batted into the kitchen. Gordon remains standing and refuses to play. Silly when he wants to be, he can stare down silliness in humans without weakening. It’s his chewing toy, not his fetch toy. Now he walks away, looking back over his shoulder at Trevor.

  Gordon is one of those dogs that make people look stupid.

  Trevor is trying to imagine this wild daughter of hers. Onesies, what a term.

  ‘Yvonne. It sounds odd now,’ he says.

  ‘I named her after Evonne Goolagong. But with a Y.’

  Out there on the Royal Park track there is no ragged Australia of droughts and sweeping plains, there are no broken sand dunes and stubborn scrub, not even a river or two flooding from Cyclone Mildred or thin as a snake now, brown and still with small fish dying on their hegemonic banks. Not that kind of nature at all. Not even a small town with one pub and a standing crew of drinkers in dusty work gear.

  According to Elizabeth the walking track is close to a full 800 metres. Intrinsically part of Royal Park, because it is within the park’s wide and undulating acreage, with three slatted benches and a few trees around it and a wide pancake of grass within it. But he thinks of the track as something other. It’s an idea, a narrow zone laid not into so much as onto the park, a neutral place for walkers and joggers, the tall and the tubby, and dogs of all sorts. The lolloping, the little-legged, the flat-out racing dogs of any and every breed extending their thirty minutes off the leash by speed and sudden changes of direction. He sees a comic threesome in black coats of scratchy Chihuahua, dachshund and barrel-bodied Lab and knows the woman loves them the way someone loves their karaoke voice when all around are grimacing.

  It feels very different at night. His eyes have adjusted to the darkness. And it is dark, a low cloud-cover blankets even the radiant glow from the city towers. No one else out there, not a dog or human. Sometimes on his night walks he hears voices from the middle of the grassy area and, walking across on the unofficial cycle short cut through its centre, he has smelt cigarette smoke for some way off then eventually found two or three twentysomethings drinking and talking quietly in the open space. Too dark even to see their faces, if they have faces, or his. They take not the slightest notice of a large man striding towards them, which always makes him wonder.

  This is part of the park’s nature. A time to limp if you must, or walk that rejuvenated body freely, tonight without effort. Cool air on his face, sometimes jogging but mainly walking, enjoying the discipline and pleasure of maintaining rhythmic strides, of muscles leading and following and this fluency as sound – his shoes beating evenly on the track. The night is dark but the track is even darker.

  On his third lap he is surprised to see sitting on the bench ahead of him a couple obscured by the shadow of a large overhanging shrub. As he approaches they neither move nor speak. Passing them he glances peripherally and cannot see their faces. He is a dozen paces beyond them.

  ‘Trevor,’ a voice call out.

  As if shot from behind, he staggers a few paces then stops. Turns.

  Now he becomes acutely aware of them: a man and a woman in nondescript but dated clothing. But as he walks back he cannot see their faces in the shadow. Even when he stops in front of them he cannot.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Trevor,’ says the woman. ‘It just broke my heart when he left, even if he was a man who cared little for us, who was hardly ever at home, who left me like a faithless lover who thinks he can get away with anything, over and over again. Then went off and we never saw him again. Now I’m dead I want to apologise …’

  Her blank face seems to move but there is only a blur not a mouth.
She has no features.

  ‘No,’ says the man, ‘I always came home. You can’t say I didn’t come home. Only the once, the last time. You know I had to get away and couldn’t get back.’

  No faces on either of them.

  ‘Poland is so cold in winter,’ he says. ‘They have snow more than before when I was a kid. The streets are like Winter Games.’

  ‘… I should have told you,’ she continues, ‘but for a long time I didn’t know. He was so heartless. Then I knew, and then I made sure he couldn’t come back for his money.’

  ‘You killed me off,’ curses the man. ‘Murderer. Trevvy, she killed me, that’s why I come and see you. I am dead, the law says I am dead. Seriously, I beg them but they say I don’t exist. I can’t prove I’m me, so legally I am dead. It happens, I read about it, a man in Romania, he’s dead too. He asked them to change the law – but for one man? Impossible. And if they did I go to prison.’

  Trevor rushes towards them. But they are gone.

  Above him the possums are strangling their young, or that’s what it sounds like. On and on. In each of the trees as he goes downhill on the exit tracks he can hear this terrible sound.

  One of the last times he saw his father Kazimierz was the occasion of his mother’s fortieth birthday. To celebrate she had been cooking all day, preparing for her own party. Not so unusual, this, her ’70s hopes of liberation pushed aside by the Polish character she married. Trevor was helping. His father had driven off to buy drinks. If he can’t have a lot to drink it’s no use having a party, he always said. Ignoring the fact it was hers. At least his father was at home. For a few weeks he made trips into the city for work meetings, otherwise he locked himself away working in his study. This study, more often empty than occupied.

  The family knew most of his life, like surveying and assaying, was performed elsewhere.

  Trevor’s nerdy 10-year-old brain had once nicknamed his father “Elsewhere”. By his early teens calling his macho dad Elsie was subversively appealing but never a possibility. He had certainly called him Gone, because if people asked him if his father was home he’d say, No, he’s gone. Gone up north, meaning the northwest of Western Australia usually, where much of his mining survey work was done. Gone – to Queensland, gone – to northern NSW; occasionally gone – to or into Papua or Bougainville. His mother’s family were local to the area, and with his father being so peripatetic Upwey seems wonkily central. A wonky rural axle.

  That early studiousness long gone, Trevor was now 15 and trying mostly to act tough. The gangs in town were made up of apprentice butchers and sparkies and they were tough bastards so he was trying mostly to avoid looking soft. A few months earlier one of them had slashed his hand with a knife.

  Helping his mother prepare dishes made him uncomfortable.

  She was a good cook and because his father was away for so many weeks of the year they had spent more time over the dinner table than most mothers and sons. They got on. Thin and with prominent cheekbones, her face and figure were more resigned than satisfied. In physique as well as loquaciousness, Trevor took after his father: the barrel chest, the Polish nose. His mother was never talkative at home and even when serving in her parents’ bookshop – where customers in a small town were often locals, even “friends” – she kept conversation on the simmer at best. Modesty, attention to detail, a sequence of repeated actions. He knew she was forever susceptible to the charms of his father; mysteriously, it seemed to Trevor, given the long intervals of absence.

  Kazimierz wanted borscht for her party because he likes it (he could have had buckets of it if he’d come home more often) and his mother has refused, which has annoyed him. Her birthday was his big day. People to entertain, and impress. ‘Borscht,’ as she told him, ‘is staining, and in bowls for people who are standing around talking? The deep beetroot colour would end up down people’s fronts.’

  But he likes it! And it’s healthy!

  And he wanted those roasted chicken pieces, her oven version of paprikash. So she returned to inspecting the small burn on her left wrist from when she checked them. The quicks of her nails quickly stained purple. Her body was a marker of his enthusiasms.

  With his father’s help, Trevor had arranged several tables on the back lawn, draped now with white tablecloths, and they rigged up a line of lights above head level. No BBQ for this family occasion, no, she was also cooking a long beef roast, trussed and done Sauerbraten-style, plus the chicken paprikash and even a fish-and-prawn stew. All kitchen-hot food. Plus salads, a selection of processed meats, Polish sausages, mustard, horseradish, sauerkraut. Crusty bread.

  First to arrive were his grandparents. They were still managing their bookshop despite the supermarket, of all things, selling bestsellers and biogs etc. Coles! Trevor liked his grandparents. People amiable from long years of serving customers. Soon they would retire, his mother had told him, and he would no doubt see more of them. His father was not the dill pickle; he was the cuckoo in the nest.

  By now his father had drunk several glasses of wine and a few shots of vodka, his favourite warm-up for show time. As people arrived he topped up with whatever drink seemed close by. He mixed things together that would make most people sick. Until the guests had gone he was happy. With no one left to impress, his persona darkened. Telling his wife she was looking too made-up, that the neighbours laughed behind his back because of his accent, how his own son had become a stranger.

  Being forever absent had no purchase in this.

  When she had brought out the last box of serviettes, Trevor’s mother smiled at him, said thank you and had her first glass of white wine. By now several couples were eating and drinking, the noise level was enjoyable and his father was, as always, circulating and talking to the ladies as he liked to announce it. And them.

  ‘I came down from North West especially for my lovely Susan,’ he had said, ‘she is 40 years young and I have to kick myself to see we still love each other. Yes, we do. I am all the time up in the desert, you know, but when I come home: phwar!’

  She’d had to laugh.

  ‘He’s a real case,’ she’d said, now that everyone was listening, ‘as you all know. We’re hoping he’ll get work down here at head office. It will civilise him at last.’

  ‘About bloody time,’ shouted someone.

  ‘Now it’s her birthday so we sing Happy Birthday!’ His father began quietly, then as others joined in he sang louder and louder. He had a high baritone, a strong, trained voice and everyone knew he liked showing it off. Then he sang, alone, his version of Sto Lat, the Polish birthday song. The flow of notes ringing clearly in the night air. Across the street neighbours heard him and no doubt made knowing responses.

  (There he goes again. Still, the bugger’s got a great voice.)

  ‘My friend Yuri,’ he said to the woman beside him, ‘he was good enough to sing in Polish opera, but the Russians wanted him. They wanted me, too, to train in the Russian opera. The Russians ran Poland, so we used to say Poland has the car but Russia has the steering wheel. Until, of course, Polish hero Lech Walesa. I wasn’t even 20. Opera, you know, big voices, very Romantic and very sad. Anyway, I have no rhythm.’

  He started singing the Prologue from the opera Pagliacci. Si può? Si può? Everyone stopped and listened dutifully just as they had stopped and listened the year before and, for some, the year before that. Oh how the man likes to sing, but why always the same aria? He extended his left arm, palm open. Playing the full parody. But he was good. Really good. They knew he was good.

  Then he stopped and broke into Happy Birthday again! And everybody toasted Trevor’s all-too-resigned mother. She had an actual gift, where the rhythm was hers and carried as it should. These were her friends, not his.

  ‘Wait,’ his father said quietly to Trevor. ‘I have a surprise.’ And he walked back up to the house. Trevor had almost forgotten, and managed to collect a second helping of the food, when there was a shout from behind him. There was a clown! As an act,
a singing telegram? No, he could hear the voice. It was his bloody father again.

  ‘Wait, everybody,’ the man called out. ‘Wait, wait, I’m doing more. Yes, I’ll sing the clown! I am Canio the clown. I am like Caruso, see, Caruso the baritone who became a tenor.’

  The guests stared at him, startled. For God’s sake! Because this was new, Kazimierz mad as a cut snake in a hired clown costume. He launched into Canio’s famous aria. Amazingly he strained the rising tessitura and hit through the maudlin climax. Sobbing in big melodramatic gulps as he finished.

  Then stared at them, overjoyed with himself. This clown who couldn’t abide a party for someone else. His wife forgotten once he got going, except by the women, who were not taken in, who paid her especial attention when he eventually shut up.

  If his father preferred the company of adults, and women, and his own voice, he was still affectionate and walked over again to place his arm around Trevor.

  ‘My boy,’ he said and to the few people near the table, ‘my boy is a good lad, he just needs a job in something that makes lots of money! George, have you a place for him in your business? No, just joking. He’s a good boy,’ and before Trevor could avoid it – and awkwardly in this situation – his father planted a huge kiss on top of his head. ‘My boy!’ he repeated.

  Then he whispered: ‘Make sure everyone has enough food, they must eat, eat, is Polish to eat as much as you can! You’re a skinny boy, so you eat too. You must eat more. Your mother starves you.’

  It was only later, when his face contorted, that he said there were people there who spat on him, thought him beneath them, because he was a foreigner. A wog.

  ‘I make more money than any of them,’ he said. ‘I break the rules, I am not a fucking sheep.’

  Then he cursed his wife for being too friendly with the man from a few doors down who was always staring at her, and he saw her, bitch, she was making eyes at that stupid public servant man who works behind a desk, a desk boy not even a man, in his white shirts, and anyway he …