by Philip Salom
Just a few weeks ago he had learnt that a real estate salesman called at the house and she invited the man in. His wife was having an affair, or trying to have an affair, with that man in his uptight black suit. If she was – he wasn’t saying she was, just it looked a bloody hell lot like it, yes it looked bloody bad, and the neighbours, the dirty-minded neighbours, they must have been thinking terrible things.
And so the shouting ramped up, he told Trevor what a weak excuse of a boy he was, what a feeble boy. ‘Don’t take your mother’s side!’ he yelled. ‘You look while I’m away,’ he insisted, ‘you tell me what your mother is doing. You are my eyes and ears.’
The morning after this outburst – and there were many outbursts – his father would be remorseful like every other violent and indulgent drunk: ‘I’m sorry, my boy, I drink too much. It’s the booze talking, not me. You forgive me, don’t you? Here,’ (hug, hug) ‘you do, go on, you forgive me. Your mother, she is a good wife and mother. I am a bad man.’
When Elizabeth bought her house the adverts described her kitchen as featuring a recent renovation with Smeg appliances and that it was compact. Clever, really, modest, too; downbeat; and small, simply out of the question. Her kitchen is tiny.
Standing behind Trevor as he prepares food. She admires the co-ordinated handling of meat and vegetables as he trims and dices, or peels and slices, each phrase rolling from her editor’s phrasebook. She is narration, he is verb. Several times now she has worked with food writers but only on the words, in the head space, never in the kitchen. No smells and spatters and elbows. No things falling on the floor. Whatever Trevor does she smells in situ, and sees plated up, the cutting and swearing; she knows him through her senses. Something he cannot know she knows.
Handling fish or chicken, he wears a plastic glove on his left hand. Now with three stitches in his right hand he gloves his right, too. Just squeezing in. A reverse image of the butcher with the chain-mail glove.
He settles a long fillet of rock ling on the plastic cutting-board and, holding the tail end of the fillet with his left hand, slithers the knife flatly underneath to the right and thus separates the white flesh from the weirdly mottled skin, pink and somehow disgusting, which he lifts and drops into the bin. She would never bother, just ask at the market for skinless fillets.
It surprises him, her standing near him while he works. Pleasant, though a problem if he needs to turn suddenly to the sink from the bench. She is expelled when cooking proper begins – too dangerous. In fact it began as her attempt to remind him how small the kitchen is and that she would like some of it.
He imagines the tactile woman behind him, distracting really, for various reasons: her kitchen and equipment, her rules of engagement, her heat almost, in the confined space; and of course her being bare-armed and smiling the innocent charm of genuine interest. It is a curiosity, this: his forearm and wrist and hand skills and her lithe limbs in repose, one assumes, arms warmly folded, and the weight of her leaning on the dishwasher.
An attraction. The honest man knows.
So here they are. Lodger and watcher.
At times Elizabeth feels these roles reversed. Having a stranger living every day and night in your house makes self-consciousness unavoidable, the lack of privacy acute. Even with those you like and whose company you enjoy. Even a relative.
Elizabeth has not been living alone by accident. Quite apart from her annual, intermittent fatigues, or whatever they were, when she lay in bed and imagined delirium. Loneliness is unchosen, a deep, undercurrent state; because aloneness as a relaxed and openbreathing independence, by the hour, by the day, trumps it. Do aloneness and loneliness shift one into the other? All the time.
‘There should be something for the lonely,’ she says to Trevor, who agrees.
‘A saint? Get the Pope onto it. He needs more saints to catch up to his predecessor but one. Yet another pushy man from Poland.’
‘Yes, a patron saint of the lonely. In the meantime, the lonely earn their keep every day.’
‘There are more people living alone in the Western world,’ he says, ‘than ever in history. Because of age, widows usually, more divorces, men who can’t get over divorces, less family cohesion, more people choosing to be independent.’
‘For me there’s something extra,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Just think about this, all these people I see in my life who are nearly familiar but none whose faces warm me the way anyone feels about someone close to them.’
Now she is silent. He confesses he enjoys returning home each day.
‘I look forward to it’, he says.
To talk and not to sell. This is what he’s thinking. And to see her, yes? Does it count as living ‘alone’, for them, given the relationship, whatever it is, of sharing only the house?
She tells Trevor he is a pleasure to have around. She’s glad she accepted him and in fact … she never thought not to.
This, he thinks, is a compliment people would rarely put in raw form.
He places the knife down.
‘Are you surprised?’ she asks him.
‘I’m pleased. No, I mean, um, flattered. But why do you feel like that?’
‘Because I get lonely, you silly bugger. I like seeing you arrive home.’
Suddenly her mouth is turning down in the corners as she says it. He feels his heart shift, he wants to hold her. He has not been listening well enough. Not for the first time he wonders what it feels like to see a current lover and not recognise them immediately. It had always seemed to him a stranger’s face made the first exciting impression, which then became deeply familiar, admired, and that love with its profound fondness grew from this familiar. She would have to adjust anew each time. The proverbial gamut: she would rush through exciting, familiar, loved in fast forward every day.
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘you understand, you’ve joined the sorry club, too.’
‘Ah, the sorry club.’
‘I’m just young enough to get fellas without having to sit in the front bar like some toothless old sheila.’
‘Oh, Elizabeth, don’t exaggerate.’
‘Oh,’ she mimics, ‘is that flattery?’
She is not good at accepting compliments, even neutral ones.
‘Test yourself on Tinder.’
‘Ha. And would you swipe me?’
‘Trevor,’ she says before he can answer, ‘don’t talk about me using Tinder, please. Just because you’re wondering about it. By the way, you pass the main criterion but fail the next one.’
‘Touché. Sorry. The criterion …?’
‘Above 183 centimetres. And below 40 years old.’
‘Fuck, what kind of world is that?’
As if he doesn’t know. Still. Above 40 you aren’t sexy but you are sentient. During quiet time in his room is he moping like a teenager as life passes him by, or is he simply a loner after all? By nature? There are many such faces. And as for swiping?
‘I would swipe you,’ he says. ‘If I wasn’t over 40.’
‘Thank you. You are a tiny bit gentlemanly.’
He eases back his chair and walks down towards the back door. She says quietly after him:
‘I like a man who apologises.’
Whether or not he has heard isn’t important. She said it to say it. To remind herself, like a self-administered pat on the back for something done well. A certain amount of self-consciousness is good. Living alone there is no one to reflect you. No one to see you.
He sees other things too, not personal. Trevor knows the location of everything. As in the shop, so too in the house. She is hopeless at this. If she is on her way out, already late, wailing about losing her keys or her bag or her mobile, or the books she had fetched earlier, ready to take with her, or … Trevor obliges. Under the front window. On the kitchen counter. On the second shelf near the phone. Anything, anywhere, lodged in his brain as surely as he is lodged in her house.
They drive over to Martina’s house for the meal she has promised them.
Elizabeth double-parks, suggests Trevor go in while she finds a parking space. With that done, she locks her old car. Those plastic stalks on each door that require the manual click-down of finger prods. She enjoys this old engineering, its particular tactile reward, like the click of light switches.
How she loves her 1965 EH Holden, steely grey and shiny. To think they are of the same vintage, she and Trevor and her car. … And Martina at a squeeze. Within ten or so years, anyway. When she was a child the EH was everywhere, the handsome car that made Holden proud, the Bathurst winner. Now the EH is parked on the street, and she is standing beside it, and he is nearby, inside the home of her best friend, and Elizabeth is content somehow, even as time is moving away from all of them.
If Martina had stated a choice when she had them, she would have let her adult children fly away and ring home on occasion, which is more or less the way things turned out. The umbilical cord lives for nine months, she says, and not for eighty years as some Mediterranean love-them-to-death mothers insist.
Her son lives in sweaty and glary Brisbane; her daughter prefers London to anything remotely Australian. He is silly about money and the beach; she is a fashion blogger. It has an element of loss, coming after the funeral experience.
‘It takes all sorts,’ she admits to Trevor. For an empathetic person she is caring, not clingy.
Elizabeth laughs as she sits down, given her own position midway between her old hippie mum and her Gen Y daughter. The fearful symmetry, as Blake might have said.
‘In between,’ she says, ‘is not an easy place to be. Or it is too easy.’
Now they know that loss is his only form of parentage, Trevor listens to these two friends who are parents, and the big thing so central to the books he sells every day – family. As always in conversations, Elizabeth’s mobile rings. She hisses to them ‘It’s the newbie!’, meaning the invisible novelist, and leaves the room.
‘I have been reading,’ Trevor says, looking over to Martina, ‘that according to some scientists there are cells from the foetus which pass through the placenta into the brains of their mothers. They call them microchimeric cells. The chimera of their children.’
Only now does he dare look into her eyes.
‘It’s creepy, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Yet in a funny way it’s almost intimate, if you think about it. The one flesh. It gets creepier: they think the cells of these older children pass through the mother into the younger children through gestation and breastfeeding.’
‘Now you have to be joking.’
‘So any mother will have cells in her brain that came from her mother, her siblings and her children.’
‘This is very strange. Are we not ourselves??’
‘Not entirely …’
‘I have to admit I can’t stand the idea of this thing they are saying,’ she says, suddenly sounding very un-English.
‘I bet the neurologists who claim this were so excited they never thought about incestuous misgivings. The smudge of biology in us.’
At which point Elizabeth returns from outside. She stops and pulls a strange face.
‘I don’t really know what you’re talking about, Trevor, but it sounds pretty dire.’
She stands there looking healthy.
He explains, and they watch her face shift as these cells move from her mother into her and back, and then from her to her daughter and back. It’s enough to make her put on weight.
‘God, that’s weird. Talking of mothers, I had another call when I was coming back in,’ she says. ‘My mother’s had a turn or something. She’s in Ballarat hospital and wailing for me to see her. I’m sorry, Martina but I have to go, have to save the staff. She will be complaining about everything that’s wrong with her and at the same time telling them her history of excellent health.’
They all look at each other as they laugh.
‘Trevor, do you mind? Can you make your own way back?’
By now there is a twist of anguish in her voice. She knows, regardless. Her mother has been less steady on her feet. If she is less sharp at times, she is therefore less consistent, confused about things she should not be.
‘I’ll drive up to see her straight away.
‘It’s those bloody cells calling me, Trevor, my internal SIM card. I mean just now, about my mum. Family, protection, care. Tribal stuff. Whatever.
‘Perhaps they’re all the same thing,’ she adds, waving her arms sannyasin-style.
‘But, Elizabeth,’ says Martina, ‘you should eat before you drive that far. It’s already been a long day.’
‘I’ll eat hers,’ suggests Trevor.
‘You look as if you already have,’ Martina smiles. Silence. They are trying to ease Elizabeth’s worry, if not very well. Elizabeth is holding her mobile tightly against her chest.
Then Martina nods and hugs her, kisses her briefly. Elizabeth grabs her keys and is gone.
Martina knows her friend – missing a meal is normal. She turns to Trevor. ‘Now when Elizabeth is talking to her mother,’ she says, ‘and holding her hand, she will be thinking about your silly cell theory.’
‘It’s not mine.’
Martina is still shaking her head at the idea.
Once the meal is over they sit on her balcony looking out across the street. Cars are moving slowly towards the one-way intersection which controls the traffic. A row of vehicles builds up as the lights glow red.
She is tapping the side of a glass of Australian fizz. The bubbles are tiny glistening cells rising up and bursting. Simple cells.
‘If I were a neurologist,’ he says, ‘I’d be looking for ways to boost language learning and playing the violin without years of practice. Smart pills, except I don’t like Big Pharma. Elizabeth is right. Being with her mum so often is like the rituals of tribes rather than sects. Empathy and flesh. She says her mum never stops talking. Perhaps she developed the habit so her face-blind daughter always knew who she was. Voice recognition.’
‘You are a very strange man, do you know that?’
He smiles.
‘You have been good for Elizabeth,’ she announces, in her particular Martina way: intimate, somehow bossy.
This sort of comment makes him curious.
‘She is happier,’ Martina says, ‘and she’s put on weight. That’s good for someone who has, if her GP’s correct, orthorexia. Well, as an explanation that’s as good as any other. She has been eating.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘You are too close to see it but I know Elizabeth. She improved the moment you moved in. It was odd really.’
‘Is that a backhanded compliment? Odd?’ But he knows what she means and it pleases him.
‘She has been looking,’ he hesitates ‘… healthier. I cook every night. She has stopped worrying and started eating.’
Since Trevor’s arrival, she explains, Elizabeth has been unable to lie in bed complaining of viruses and strange inner symptoms. In Martina’s opinion the reason she left full-time work was not problems with authors, or bullying, as she dramatised it, but to be unwell whenever she felt like it.
‘Have you noticed her hair is thicker, and longer? She’s growing it out. She’s brushing it instead of clipping it back … ugh, those awful clips. And no more of those silly colours she was hurting herself with.’
‘Well … I agree.’
‘Even her boobs are growing. Trevor, I’m sure you have noticed that. It’s where the weight goes on last so that’s a good sign. Sadly, it’s where the weight is lost quickest, you know? A woman loses two kilos and her boobs flop around in her bra.’
There is no chance of Martina’s going anywhere.
Although he says nothing, he has noticed. Elizabeth has leant across him in the kitchen, where body contact or touching, as the tabloids have it, is acceptable, and he has felt her breasts against him. Fuller and firmer.
‘Yes,’ he says, eventually.
Only when he has acknowledged this does Martina look directly at him.
&
nbsp; ‘And you, you have lost weight.’
‘You’ve caught us out, Martina. It’s all the sex we’re having.’
Martina’s eyes truly open wide, until he laughs.
‘It might be a good thing,’ she says. ‘But you have lost weight, a lot of it. It must feel good when you tuck everything in and do up your pants in the morning. Your belt position. Or when you weigh yourself, which you should do naked, of course.’
He wonders if she talks like this to everyone.
‘Elizabeth,’ says Martina, ‘has a body equal to her profession, trimming a shapeless manuscript into a slimmer thing altogether, for economy rather than excess. But she had been editing herself and gone too far. Having a man to cook meals, more often and more varied than she’d have ever prepared for herself, is relaxing her.’
‘I have to eat less,’ he says, ‘and she has to eat more. Imagine this stretching to infinity – me so thin I can’t get up to cook and Elizabeth so fat she can’t get out of bed to eat.’
‘It’s a kind of symbiosis,’ she adds, possibly ignoring him. ‘For Elizabeth it’s the best kind of approach.’
‘Yeah? And what’s the worst kind?’
‘Oh, I don’t know if I should say. Anxiety?’
So he admits his three-a-week gym visits, how he isn’t merely losing weight so much as losing fat and bulking up with the serious stuff. He shuffles around as he says, placing his hands on his arms and chest, that he is getting muscles under his clothes. ‘A man knows this,’ he says, when his initial attendance at a gym shifts from embarrassing to quietly trying to impress. ‘Male, female, the same.’ Along with his osteopath visits and fighting the weight machines at the gym, Trevor the muffin is no more.
Even his cheekbones have emerged.
He has continued driving out to the Fairfield boathouse every week to row real boats and do real work. A change from the gym with its Lycra and its awful carpet and alien machines, the egotist radio DJs loudspeakered from every corner, and the admittedly lovelier sweaty people. The river is a living resistance, not the serial mass of cables and steel blocks.