The Returns

by Philip Salom

  Jesus, he thinks, did I say that?

  ‘Mum knows all about tradies,’ says Yvonne. ‘My absent father for a start.’

  ‘Yes. And your grandfather. Women in your family have a thing about tradies.’

  ‘What? You knew?’

  Afterwards, Elizabeth tells him he would have enjoyed having kids. The sudden shift in his expression says, Do not repeat this.

  Trevor decides to drive the small distance to the shop to collect a book on first aid he recalls being on a lower shelf near the desk. Just in case. A random pain in his leg has been pinching overnight. The night before was the cause: he drank too much, slept dead under the doona. Trevor tried to make himself sleep with his leg up, or down, or on the left his side or on his back. But his self-alerting tricks were as drunk as the rest of him. He had returned to the pub Lester kept in business. There were things to laugh about, including the father idiocy. The man was there, drinking alone as usual and filling in the sudoku.

  ‘It’s more like my kind of work,’ Lester said. ‘I mean when I had work. As for your father, well, fuck me, I remember you saying he’d buggered off, how no one quite believed he was dead. And the law has to say yes or no, eh, and did! So it was dead dad. It’s pseudocide then, him coming back. Did he – I mean does he – owe people?’

  ‘I bet he does. You can’t tell with him. It’s bloody jarring seeing him at all as my father. Anyway, debts or the like, he hasn’t said. He’s hardly a reliable witness. I can’t ask him until he comes back, if he comes back.’

  ‘How about his tax?’

  ‘Not sure, probate would get that, wouldn’t it? Lester, he’s as cagey as he ever bloody was. I could only go on what other people said when I was young. He was strange, even I knew that. Psychologically he owes me, and emotionally I mean. My mother was left in nowhere-land. Depressed and left suspended there, not knowing a thing. He was God knows where, laughing and carrying on. When I was older she told me every time he went on these trips up north he gave the impression he mightn’t come back. To do that to someone. He was a complete shit.’

  ‘You know he could be jailed for this.’

  Whether Lester is trying to or not, he looks as if he’s scheming. Once a detective, and a superannuated one at that, he weighs up the proceeds of a crime in a way ordinary citizens might not. Even if an acquaintance is party to the case, and not a beneficiary of the scheme. In Lester’s past were many schemes, and schemes to him meant outside the bright light of fair play. Stare down the crooks for too long and they will stare back out from your eyes.

  ‘You’re a strange man yourself, Trevor.’

  ‘You can talk.’

  Then far too much to drink. Back home he hardly said more than hello to a wide-eyed Elizabeth before stumping downstairs. Little point acting otherwise, and no acting at all inside a hangover in the morning.

  It is all very well for the detective and his sudoku, no one else is involved.

  At the last intersection he waits for a red light and feels pained then pathetic. How difficult would it have been to walk, using his stick and taking his time? Does gym-work sometimes exacerbate internal injuries?

  Then from these shallows he feels a spike of anger. There’s no chance of parking in the alley beside his shop because of more cobble-lifting and black-dirt digging up by City Water. The alley and pavement are wet with mud and slop. Again! And they have taped off the entrance. This makes it the third time in a month. Are they absurdly incompetent, or are hydraulics always a problem; as Freud suggested, prone to recurrence? Like his leg pain.

  Haven’t they homes to go to, AFL teams to get pie-eyed over? Something strange about this group of men, too, in navy blue overalls and orange visibility stripes, the way they ignore him at first, then stare in unison at this big man in his little car stationary in the left lane. Their chin-lift smiling as he drives off.

  He has to limp with his stick 100 metres from the nearest parking area back to the shop and enter through the front door.

  ‘G’day, mate,’ one of the workers says. ‘Are ya getting’ any?’

  ‘Jesus, it’s Sunday, mate,’ he answers.

  Trevor moves straight through to the rear room to make some tea and as he pours water into the jug he sees the hole. A rectangular hole with a rough chalk-line scratched around it.

  Or half a hole. Three bricks wide, sawn one course of bricks deep into his common wall with the jeweller. Someone has cut and gouged the mortar and simply removed the loosened bricks. Dust and red brick fragments are scattered over the floor, there are even footprints in them.

  But only one course! The second course, on the jeweller’s side of the wall, is intact. With as much time again they’d have been all the way into the jeweller’s, the gap just big enough to crawl through. They must have been disturbed, or spooked by something.

  Gentle Jesus! They really were trying to use his shop as access. Allen will be spitting keys. Or swallowing them. When he implied precisely this, Trevor assumed the man was being pompous. What about his claim of a sensing apparatus, with warning systems jangling or whooping as uniformed men sit staring left and right at CCTV screens, or at ganglionic banks of lights like nerve endings from all over the city? Lights suddenly flashing like diamonds. It is so top-secret not even the security firm can see it.

  When Trevor goes into the back room he sees his side door is broken but holding in place, just. When he pulls it open the door sags inwards like a drunk, the wood splaying and splintered, the metal locks intact but hanging uselessly in the open space. He pushes it back to a closed position. The water workers never saw it as they prised apart the cobbled laneway?

  He returns to the rectangular hole in the party wall. Bending closer, he sees a chisel-sized hole through to the other side. There is a small draught of jewellery air coming through. Mission impossible it’s not, just two ageing courses thick, a bit of noise overnight where no one lives, no one to get annoyed at the grinding or tearing or whatever sound a drill or cutting machine makes revving into solid brick. It would have been gravelly music.

  A man could wriggle though on his belly. Unless he was fat.

  It is almost funny. The prat from next door with his combinations and secrets, the deadbolted door to his panic room. Except someone has gone straight through the wall behind it, the doors still locked. Or nearly.

  Trevor rings the police. This time they sound interested.

  ‘Don’t touch anything,’ they say. Sure. They’re on their way. Well, given he’s inside his shop does that mean, Don’t move? His entrance through the front door has kept the main area of the back room clear. The side-door area clear, ditto, but the wall …? No, he even bent down to peer through the small opening. His footprints will be in the mix. Surely the crooks will have thrown away their shoes after the job (size-10 Burglar-series Nikes).

  They must have known Trevor wouldn’t be there on a Sunday, and after two days with the shop closed. He waits. The dark hole looks at him like a malevolent and damaged eye.

  Wait till he tells Lester. A bit of light relief for the man.

  Let the law ring the jeweller and announce the first premise of burglary – the point of access, and, in this case the same, point of exit. He listens to the City Water men thudding and cutting open the innocent vault of the alley. Damn. They may have erased evidence. It’s probably too late to tell them to stop work. Would they even listen? Still, he thinks he should, so he leaves through the front door to explain the situation to them. Then he sees what he has overlooked.

  By breaking through the side door the crooks have gouged their way through the Galilee Basin. The mural shines in defiance, the door the only clue.

  Slow cops … if they even bother to come, given they didn’t last time, though suburban jewels are known to be worth more than great books. Generally considered. He gets up and inspects the books by his front, not bashed-in door display, noting the new title by a local author: Waiting. Yes, quite. He waits.

  It occurs to him that
Allen the jeweller will probably try on a new security trick no normal person would think of suggesting and no law could impose on anyone. Trevor hopes. Something odd yet logical if you think about it: Allen the jeweller will insist Trevor the bookseller replace his broken wooden side door with deadbolts and monster bars because nothing less is secure enough to provide protection – not for the books but for his bloody jewels.

  Imagining the hole staring at him makes him think. A man with a wall-eye. The sooner this bloody hole is bricked in, the better. And think next of Elizabeth’s eyes and yes/no laser operation. And of William Blake, who saw more clearly than most:

  This life’s dim windows of the soul

  Distorts the heavens from pole to pole

  And leads you to believe a lie

  When you see with, not through, the eye.

  Though it is well understood that at times the poet and painter Blake also saw what no one except William Blake saw. He wrote it and painted it. They thought he was mad. He probably was. But he was right. He was a visionary.

  Two men enter the shop. Trevor knows they are detectives because they are dressed like detectives. Before they ask him anything significant they inspect the wall and its strange brick-breakage.

  ‘We have an opening here,’ says one of them.

  ‘No we don’t,’ says the other. ‘We only have half an opening.’

  (They must get incredibly bored on the job.)

  The second one, the half-opening one, is shorter than the other but behaves as the senior. He is heavier and looks as if many years of sizing up crims and dimwits have sent him to sleep. Or is it posttraumatic stress disorder, something Trevor used to see much of? Police who have shot or been shot at. Bodies seen in all states, sometimes more blood than body. Children, women, heartless actions.

  This is just a hole in the wall. They can have a laugh.

  The older detective explains to Trevor, and the other detective, how this crim used a tool of some sort, probably something small and quiet. He says, ‘See these bricks, our fucking crim has been up all night grinding out the mortar like a confused termite. Yes, it might have been a hand tool with very sharp gouging edge or even, crims being so fucking lazy, something electric. Therefore’ – he walks over to the nearby power point and inspects it – ‘this here, just in case the rechargeable battery pack had run out. Or it wasn’t that kind of tool, it was old-fashioned AC, not DC. Then he definitely tapped into your bloody power supply, mate. Don’t think it’ll whack your bill very much.’

  ‘You probably haven’t heard,’ he goes on, ‘of the “Drywall Burglar” in the US. He used a fucking knife or something crude – a tungsten screwdriver, I’d guess – to scrape through the wall into an apartment which he then proceeded to rob and pilfer.’

  He says pilfer with exaggerated p’s and f’s and -er as ‘aah’.

  ‘Not content with apartment No. bloody 1, he scraped through the wall into the adjacent apartment. And robbed that one too. And kept going. They were up for sale but only being inspected during the day and this crook, being a crook, of course only worked night shifts. Dunno how he covered his tracks but he did and then like one of those ear-wig stories – of the bloody thing poked in someone’s ear and then eating it’s way across the brain until it comes out the opposite ear – this guy went through ten apartments in a row. A whole fucking row of apartments, you gotta hand it to him.’

  He stands back to eyeball Trevor, and his workmate.

  ‘Fucking crazy, eh? True but.’

  His accent changes into something unsuccessful.

  ‘Yeah, the Drywall Burglar they called him. Not a lotta people know that.’

  Jesus, thinks Trevor, the guy is doing a Michael Caine impression.

  ‘Then there was the Hatton Garden Mob, you know, the old guys in London. They bought a diamond drill on the bloody internet and cut through a metre of concrete into a London bank vault. Confused a great many people, they did. But they got caught. Funny buggers, thieves. The public like ’em. They become heroes by the time they’re old and grey. Or are already, that mob.’

  After they have gone Trevor walks to the non-fiction bookshelves and pulls out A Burglar’s Guide to the City by the American author Geoff Manaugh. Yes, the Drywall Burglar is in it. Along with amusing accounts of crooks and safe-cracking, and every kind of burglary, all within one set of covers. The anarchic pleasures of theft for safe readers who imagine being safe-crackers. His shop is a pleasure zone of vicarious experience and not for the first time Trevor wonders what proportion of vivid human experience is vicarious – that is, imagined not lived. Ronnie Biggs and the Great Train Robbery. As the detective said, the public have a soft spot for thieves.

  For fun, he rings Elizabeth and tells her, firstly, about the jeweller’s likely lament and then of the Michael Caine impressionist. She laughs just like the workmen had, she’s all squawking and excitement as he hears her pass on the information to Yvonne. Whatever happened to people feeling scared or concerned? Then concerned she becomes, and apologetic, as if reading his mind after all and wanting now to console him. Then just as suddenly laughs again from what is clearly the real her, then calms down. What a woman! He says if she and Yvonne want to come and see the damage for themselves, the police may not be happy with that until …

  ‘I’m driving,’ she says.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And the EH somehow missed out on Bluetooth back in the ’60s.’

  He hears Yvonne giggling.

  As he waits he realises this is what his life is: there’s a hole cut through one side of it and things keep blowing out the other. Wives, friends, safe-breakers. Trepanned. Not a migraine. Not, as he sits there in the shop, feeling it right to left, as he looks in on it, like someone entering the shop from the front. Even the way the broken fence looked like an open gate.

  It makes his head hurt just to think it.

  Even the surly bugger who pushed him over on Friday approached from the right side. Perhaps it’s something to do with right-brain activity, not words, just where the bloody doors are. He thinks of Elizabeth on the right, her daughter on the left, sitting on that pleated bench-seat in the EH.

  In his early 20s, when house-sharing with the alarmingly dysfunctional psychologists, Trevor had taken a Myers-Briggs personality test. The psychos, as he called them, did not take Mrs M and Mrs B seriously. They said the M-Bs were a joke to take 900,000 or so words of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung and reduce them to this simplistic and changeable test. It was a T20 match in duration but Test cricket in its likely scores.

  Trevor had emerged from the test as the Introverted Sensing Feeling Judging type, and it concluded he must be …? Was he really Judging? Trevor’s sensory self-absorption had gaps either side of its hyphen: he took in the world so he could stand in the centre of it.

  But he was an outsider, surely.

  Outside the IGA the woman is sprawled with her back against the wall, legs in front of her like a rag doll. Her face is dusty, uneven. Trevor asks how she is, if she’s all right. Empty questions. When he hands her $10 she starts crying. Like last time. It looks like an act but it’s spontaneous. Sudden.

  Around the aisles he goes, distracted. On his way out the woman looks up and asks him for money again.

  Elizabeth and Yvonne are home when he returns. They have already forgotten about his burglary drama, in favour of preparing dinner. Or Elizabeth is preparing dinner – taking advantage of Trevor’s absence to reclaim her kitchen – and Yvonne is standing nearby, reading something on her mobile.

  ‘The medium-sized pan,’ says her mother.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘I mean now.’

  Her daughter makes exasperated noises, glares at her and places her phone on the bench.

  ‘Not there!’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Mum.’

  ‘And don’t get all sweary and petulant just because you’re …’

  ‘Hello girls,’ says Trevor, all cheek and inappropriate cheer. Much
as he thinks it, he does not say Domestic Goddess and Kitchen Princess.

  Soon enough he’s updating them. Yvonne, who at first stood listening, almost unknowingly begins to help her mother. How a couple of detectives arrived and took details and photos and prints from both doorway and wall. Funny buggers. They were thorough, precise, even if the gab surprised him. Trevor shut the side door and eventually relocated the bolts. The lock would have to wait. No one was after his bloody books.

  Apparently Allen was still on his way back from a weekend in the locust isle of Tasmania. Asking himself: How, how, how? Trevor does the funny faces, the pert mouth and the campy hand-wringing.

  ‘Trevor, you are enjoying this too much,’ says Elizabeth.

  ‘I’ll say,’ adds her daughter.

  ‘Your shop life is Dickensian, Trevor. Either that or Freud is sleeping on one of your shelves.’

  ‘The jeweller’s a dickhead. Did I mention he has vertical, gelled hair? He’s my age.’

  ‘Urrgh, uncool,’ says Yvonne, then smiles at Trevor. ‘I’m glad you don’t do anything like that. All you do is have a shop full of weirdos and out-of-it blokes and creepy fathers. That’s cool.’

  Trevor can’t help himself, he feels flattered. In a backhanded kind of way.

  Elizabeth looks up from the stove.

  ‘They should have mugged him and stripped his ear. Is he a big bloke?’

  ‘Nah, he’s a prat.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ says Yvonne, ‘about ways of marketing your book business. You’ve got to do it online.’

  ‘I already do. I have a website.’

  ‘Well, that’s a start. Do you have summaries and stuff other people have said about the book on the back cover?’

  He heads off downstairs and returns with his laptop. Yvonne nods through the website material with her Gen Y confidence there to suggest it’s OK, it’s a website, it’s ordinary and yeah, nah – doubting it all.

  She sits down and begins checking through the site. He can hear her breathing shift. It fits with his theory about reading and breathing – how reading alters the diaphragm between suspense and pathos and even just enjoyable narrative. Is it emotional, is it the tension? She looks up at him. Her eyes are brown like her mother’s, something he’d not noticed. Never been so close to her before.