by Philip Salom
When is her husband returning? he asks and she laughs, saying he’s overseas on yet another business trip. Pleasing Trevor, this, no husband to come home and make everything conventional.
Then she stands, upright, head back like a dancer.
‘Oh, I should be going,’ he says, standing.
She immediately sits down again.
‘There’s no need to rush home,’ she says. ‘I’m sure Elizabeth would want me to drive you home. You can stay.’
So he stays.
In fact, Mrs Sermon is stacked against the linen-service pillows like a bag stuffed with old clothes in a corner of her house. She is not leaving her hand out to be held. Whatever it was that came over her has left behind a terrible malaise. ‘Malaise!’ she exclaims. ‘Not a stroke, thank God.’ It seems she is safe from that one, not a drooping lip and a damp area on her blouse.
What use is astrology if it hasn’t warned her off this ward of smelly food and other people? To her annoyance she has even seen some of her old astrological clients, one of whom is looking much healthier than he should. The people that want to live past 90? … are the people who are 89. Life has made a mistake and kept adding years to her life, dammit. It is meant to be her life. Except she can no longer decide if she wants more years or not.
Her Boundless Lustre is long gone.
And to be humiliated by her own daughter arriving in the ward and swivelling around staring at all these old ducks in turn, including herself, then turning away again, unable to recognise her own bloody mother until she calls out ‘Elizabeth!’ And then – even then – has to wave her arms to be seen. What a weird thing her daughter is with that ridiculous condition.
It must be a punishment for some wrong in a past life. But whose – her daughter’s or her own? It is she who suffers the ultimate indignity. Her own daughter, blind to her.
Back to being Mrs Sermon, she is frowning. She feels more than usually exposed, not just to the medical, the forensic, but to the frighteningly empty space she lies in, with no protective towers of newspapers or avenues of plastic bags, boxes, supermarket items, JB hi-fi cables and appliances – her endless, unadulterated and beloved junk.
Can’t complain, thinks Elizabeth. The old ladies do look the same in their hospital garb, crocheted covers and hospital beds, side by side against the pastel wall.
They are doing what conventional medicine does, her mother is grumbling, ‘Tests, tests, more tests.’ Every few hours, she can’t get enough time for sleep. Then she manages to laugh. Whatever was wrong with her has gone. Now she is suffering from tests. What will she die of? Testness. All right, she has had a turn, an untestable saying her own mother was fond of using; and in the moment of echoing her mother’s idiom for her own condition, annoyingly, she likes it.
If there are no worse signs Elizabeth has been told they will discharge her mother, so long as she doesn’t drive or handle machinery. Fat chance of that. Like taking older-generation antihistamines. The “drowsy” warning was always a small pleasure for her because in all the years of taking the little pink pills she never once felt drowsy. Then again, the pills hardly ever worked.
So by now Elizabeth is calm and the various scarier imaginings she had while driving up from the city are on hold, at least. There is the first time. Then everything else is more, and worse. Her mother has always had extremely low blood pressure without any corresponding ailments. Her pulse is eerily low. If she has any kind of operation the machines go off signalling she is nearly dead. Now, who knows, she may simply have let herself become dehydrated. Unable to find the tap amidst the junk.
Elizabeth worries: if she is to stay the night she will have to sleep in her mother’s bed because by now there is not a square metre of space anywhere else. Full of rubbish. She has always driven back to the city at night. Free of the suffocations come of the endless garbage in her mother’s house and upwards of an hour’s drive from home, she breathes her own fresh air and returns to the sanity of open spaces the way a station-owner stands outdoors without a fence in sight.
Her mother sits forward and glares at her.
‘It seems I must expect you to look after me, Elizabeth. Who else do I have? I am all alone. I need you to be more careful, to call me more often’ (so she can talk forever, in other words) ‘and here’s the proof: you should have been here this morning. But no. Doing nothing as usual in the city. Haven’t even managed to keep a husband and now God knows what you do. Yvonne never rings me regardless of you saying she will, or that she has.’
‘Mum, you …’
‘I’m all alone.’
‘So am I!’
‘That’s your own silly fault.’
So this is her mother’s best appeal for compassion. They know you must provide for them. Just do it.
Every dutiful daughter knows the bind her mother places her in, that society places her in, and how tightly it seizes you by the conscience, that part of the anatomy even more sensitive than the throat. Struggle is pointless. Escape is temporary.
Therefore Elizabeth does not stay over at her mother’s. Instead she drives the relaxing eventual 120 or so kilometres back to Melbourne, drinks three armfuls of blood-red wine and is in bed asleep even before Trevor arrives home from Martina’s. Whenever he does.
‘Her own silly fault.’ Her mother. How these sharp words bang in her head all night. At moments, waking from this shunt of sensations, she even wonders if Trevor has returned, or not, this quite unexpected worry, then nervousness, as she listens and eventually hears a faint snoring from downstairs. Reassured she is not alone, admitting it feels good, even right, that he is downstairs. Relieved he isn’t still at …
The only worry she has been trying not to consider is whether her dream image of the neighbour meant anything. A few days ago she felt she’d seen him in the meat section of Queen Victoria Market and he – if he it was – kept looking up the aisle towards her. He seemed bothered. His face had a smudged, sort of knocked-about look like some of the men begging on Errol St. Then a different guilt came with her own words returning, that the man needed talking to again. Talking to, not … Trevor doesn’t pretend to be an angel, but would he really do this? It worries and then, admittedly, surprises her. He said he knew people – a retired cop or something?
Next morning she strides around Royal Park by herself, unbothered by the light rain. There was no sign of Trevor when she left home. He doesn’t volunteer as often now, after saying he would. Cold weather, rain, warm bed. It bothers her, the image of the neighbour’s bruised face, her shitty neighbour, and the illicit thrill in her that Trevor confronted him.
She is trying not to think, just be a breathing and moving bubble of one woman and one dog, except Gordon keeps breaking off to rush among dogs all free of the leash and back in touch with their inner lunatics. When he was a pup Gordon was avid for the variety of life, as long as it was chewable: mainly hoses. Then into the backyard to lift a leg and ease his thoughts out onto the grass. He knows how to make the most of his public walks. He’s rushing rushing. At anything at all, whereas at home only barking at the neighbour helps.
She has opportunities to join the other walkers as they move around the circuit, alone like her or in groups, on this early-morning series of repeated passing and approaching and encounter. One group is always out there, the man whose exercise is a variety of verbs: he talks and gesticulates loudly and wildly, while laughing to the others in the group, so keen to maintain eye contact with them that he walks sideways, turning away only and always to say a big Hello, good morning and how are you? to anyone walking towards him. The same again on each re-encounter a lap later. His arms are tattooed and he sounds educated but his manner is needy.
Or the tall, middle-aged women with a large poodle each, big intelligent dogs and classy ladies who never say hello or good morning to anyone. No second life there. The girl with the bouncing chest, always a worry; the aged man who for all his forward years, his stoop and garish trainers charges around t
he walking track faster than Elizabeth. All the dogs have a sheen of rain on their coats, shiny for the longhairs, speckled for the shorthairs. Poodles look as if sprinkled with flour.
The slim woman who lives several houses away from her is striding around the track with a jolly expression on her face and swinging her jolly arms like an old-fashioned toy soldier or the Little Drummer Girl. Her floury poodle – everyone has a poodle out here – runs ahead and slows and runs ahead again, keeping an average lead of about 10 metres. The woman looks like a caricature, the dog like – a dog.
Oh, how good this walking in the morning is for everyone with its goody-two-shoes look and feel, which is why she has asked Trevor if he’d accompany her and why he probably doesn’t. Up to him. It’s a curious feeling knocking gently on his door on the sunnier mornings, which is his condition for a yes, maybe.
Though not today. She isn’t sure what time he got in. She keeps thinking about it when she really shouldn’t.
Although she was sceptical about late careers, Elizabeth is curious to see Trevor’s newest paintings. How long has it been? She wants to be more of a stickybeak. What he does concerns her. Painting in here all night, possibly punching the neighbour, pursued by a dead father. What a strange man he is!
The hinges sound guilty as she drags opens his studio door. It isn’t his diary she’s going through, for God’s sake. Her local lorikeets are screeching above her like art critics full of opening-night champagne.
Two large boards propped against the wall but from the range of spatter and spillage on the floor she knows he has been painting them flat down Jackson Pollock-style, and the un-spattered areas are exactly the size of his boards. One board seems to be a collage with the point of view from below: a fragment of wheel of some kind, a screen, broken walls, branches? Rows of shadowy spikes rising towards a limited area of what might be sky except it’s purplish and looks like a haematoma or an illness.
Garish. Disturbing. Hard to look away from, though. All that rubble and gash of edges. The energy of bold brushstrokes. Inside this sort of blustery cross-hatching are several small windows or boxes of busy street scenes, ploughed paddocks, untidy house interiors worryingly like her own lounge room of papers and scattered books.
Flattened images from newspapers and magazines. Posters she has seen in his shop window, here, plastered onto the frame. The collages she’s seen before. Last time.
The second board is the reverse, an aerial view: contained in boxes or windows, occupying as much surface as chaos was in the first, are the top floors of skyscrapers with fans and masts and air-conditioning units, even rooftop environmental gardens. Cars in ant formation in streets far below. Shopfronts, people, graffiti. Streaks and spikes imbedded in the surface of the board as if it were a screen and very like the spike shapes in the other painting. In the thin spaces between boxed images are the sloppier stuffs of soil and riverbanks and sluicing bodies of water seen from above, and roads, and shorelines. Tranquil. Hell. Heaven. Fallen. Risen.
This interpretation doesn’t satisfy her. Are they any good?
Several more. Each surface is a flat colour overlaid with one or two colours in a kind of coupling presence. They are to varying degrees viscerally flattened, scraped, ridged, scumbled and – in hairlines of nervy intensity – scratched. There is no representation. All the texture is colour in shapes of application and or rearranging. The paint is thick and serrated, almost dropping back to flat and relaxed. He told her he was painting Rough Rothko. Barbwire Rothko.
She is astonished to see so much new work. They are more striking than the paint-stricken floor. The ultimate test, which many artists fail. She senses in them an unexpected energy. The paintings she saw weeks ago now seem like forerunners. If there were questions in her mind, these are impressive answers.
One last painting is still sketchy and trowelled over with thick paint in the centre. A more conventional work, a squashed and halved image of a face. Whiskery. Is this the man claiming to be his father? With her condition it would hardly matter if she had seen him before. Nor can she interpret, except to think of a trickster.
His face is like a reservoir of colour.
It returns while she is back working in her study. The imagery, the paint. For an unknown artist entering his 50s to be painting in 2-D. Too conventional? Though who is she to say, or not say this? There is something to do with mortality in them. Ageing. The gap between attempt and achievement … one of pain and possibly dread. ‘To feel it in your organs,’ he’d said, ‘the proverbial pit of the stomach.’ If the mind can stay supple long after the body has slowed and stiffened. Then again, she has read that older martial-arts masters bring their chi into play and can for short periods leap and strike like cats.
And climb walls. Sure.
All the same, his paintings have made her remember things.
Yvonne arrives a day later and immediately leaves to see friends at her favourite bar in town. Of course she does. Even if she is only staying for a weekend or so. But not before meeting Trevor.
Elizabeth has called him up from his room to meet Yvonne. ‘What time did you get back the other night?’ she asks him. He looks surprised and shrugs.
He shakes Yvonne’s hand and they smile at each other, she at him with a rather sly expression, he thinks. A vernacular sly, which knows the silence between generations.
‘What’s this Trevor guy like?’ she had asked her mother.
Elizabeth knew to be vague but unworried (and was aware she was hiding her feelings) so she said, ‘He’s fine, he’s no bother, nothing to be concerned about.’ She said he cooks and does the dishes, too; the first being unusual, the second – if following the first within the same twenty-four hours – rare.
‘It’s fucking rare!’ she added, and laughed at this rarity.
‘So you like him then,’ asked Yvonne. Or stated.
And now here Trevor is. She thinks he looks OK at first viewing. She thinks her mother is pretty cool and, of course, she’s cool. It’d be disappointing to have some guy here who was a dag, totally embarrassing.
That he is, at his age, living and paying rent in the house of a woman who is hardly younger than him is the oddest thing. Or just younger or maybe not, hard to tell without asking. To Yvonne they are both old. Though with Elizabeth’s hair maintained as a respectable light blonde, no grey hair. None in his, anyway. No hair at all.
It can be cool, thinks Yvonne, to be so off the norm. He’s big. And reasonable-looking, in an older way.
A collection of tradies has gathered at the modest house three numbers up from Elizabeth’s. It is being renovated by young men who dress like older working-class figures. Except two of them wear hipster beards and hairdos, and one even drives a European, meaning very German, car. At lunchtime if it’s fine they unfold collapsible chairs and sit under a tree on the median strip eating their packed lunches and speaking quietly. None of them smokes, none raises his voice and they speak in polite, middle-class ways.
Trevor has been talking with them. Just being curious.
Over breakfast the following day, Yvonne tells Trevor about the tradie she used to drink with. An electrician.
‘Makes a change,’ he says. ‘I keep hearing about young women who are hitched to a bloke in IT. I don’t get it – sexy, slim women in their prime living with overweight nerds.’
‘I happen to like tradies,’ she says. ‘They’re down-to-earth, you know, good at physical things.’
She is teasing Trevor. Why not amuse herself while he’s there in the house? She quite likes him, the very little she’s seen.
‘Tradies, or desk types, or complete crooks, we’re all the same,’ he says, ‘we work during the day, eat, drink, fart, and when we sleep at night our skin flakes off around us and settles on the bedding or we inhale it. Then we wake up and get moving and do it all over again.’
‘Funny to think,’ Yvonne laughs, ‘that you’re downstairs sleeping in my old skin.’
‘I vacuumed,’ says
her mother.
Obviously her mother feels relaxed with him. Enough to have said so every time Yvonne has spoken to her. It was important that they talk about it, after all. Apparently Trevor has even taken her side a few times, on the sidelines of these phone conversations, though it occurs to her that might be for other reasons.
‘Not all tradies are up to my standard,’ she admits.
Her mother hoots at this.
‘Do you mean,’ asks Trevor, ‘in their professional standards? Or their manliness?’
‘For being dickheads, you dickhead.’
She laughs at her nerve. So does he, which makes them both laugh.
‘I met this guy at a bar and he was pretty hot and we hooked up straight off. He came around the next day in his SUV. I was all for him and then I saw the sign he’d stuck in big white letters on his back tinted window. It said MissiBitches.’
‘That man is a bit confused.’
‘Yeah. But the really uncool thing about them is they’re no different from the up-themselves boys who live in the city and take selfies all the time.’
‘Right. You see me nodding.’
‘They used to be tough, or that’s what I thought. Hard workers, you know, muscles, tattoos – but now even private-school boys are into ink. And if something goes wrong? Woo woo! They’re as wussy as hipsters.’
‘How did I miss all this? Who would have guessed?’
‘Are you serious?’ But she laughs.
‘I’m someone who worked around,’ Trevor says. ‘Doesn’t matter what they do, if otherwise healthy people can’t stand on their own two feet I have little time for them, tattooed, bearded, green-haired or drawling from the back of the throat. Or not.’
‘You make people sound weak.’
‘No. I mean self-centred. Most people are weak but they push back enough to get through stuff. I mean entitlement. That’s what makes the rest of us want to slap them.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, embarrassed parental slap. Don’t you? Ask your mother!’