by Philip Salom
‘You’re frowning,’ he says.
‘Yeah, look, this is all good but you need something more. Some marketing would help. A website is really only cool if you have traffic. It’s no good by itself. Who even knows it’s up? Coolness is customers lining up like at the Auction Rooms café in Errol St. You need a hook to bring new customers in to the website. Make it work on social media. Think of digital devices, that sort of thing. Think of them as online people who think it’s cool looking for books they know about and especially trendy new books they haven’t heard of yet. You have to attract them.’
‘I seem to be attracting every mad bugger in the district. None of them buy books.’
‘Ha ha. Readers are cool. Make them want the stuff because it’s cool. Are you on Facebook?’
‘Me?’
‘No, dummy, your website. Don’t be so frigging old.’
It makes him laugh. He can hear Elizabeth sighing from her study.
‘Yvonne, don’t be so rude.’
Her daughter ignores her completely. Yvonne stands and Trevor sits down, scrolling through some of his more likely reviews to show her. They are, he says, somewhat Trevorised versions of book blurbs, textual teases he thinks up during quiet stretches in the shop. As if to excuse his brain being naïvely in the state he’d once desired, of days passing as regularly yet as differently as weather.
The way darkness and light are portrayed in this noirish novel by Stephen Allers will make you look twice at your friends. The victims pile up and detective Don Talisker is hard pressed to find the connections until a dramatic detail exposes everything. The prose in Midnight by Menace is a revelation of here-ness and has the pace of Usain Bolt.
All he can say is that blurbs are mysteries of hyperbole and bad taste. They are a minor literary form all their own, worth much to the publisher and the reader but worth nothing at all beyond that. ‘Yeah, well,’ she says. Then he shows her a counter-version which is not viewable on the main site:
While Seating Arrangements hasn’t been written with any insight into the reading experience, the style itself is entertainingly beyond rescue – vertiginous without solid ground and flippant about humourless monsters. The family should sue her till the blood runs.
And:
This book on tattooing and its modern resurgence is well titled Extreme Tattoos because it has been written by an author who either smiles too much or who has had a smile tattooed over his mouth. Either way, it’s a pain.
Yvonne laughs faintly even if she only half gets the parody of style. They seem to be written by an evil wordbot, she says. Even as he explains the parody, of hackneyed phrases and grab bags of clichés, he knows he is being stupid. The parodies are not viewable. By now Elizabeth is standing behind him, reading them. Trevor sits back to look at her.
‘Those blurbs are …’ she begins, then spreads her hands like a preacher.
‘The public can’t see them. They can’t read them.’
‘Don’t ever show them.’
‘I’d thought about movies,’ he tells Yvonne. ‘They might sell. DVDs. For instance, Holy Motors by Leos Carax, with the actor Denis Lavant being driven round Paris in a stretch limo which is his change room. He emerges from it in different clothes and appearances and performs as ten utterly different personae. From dawn until late at night. All these crazed characters. He’s a lover in one; a lunatic, flower-munching weirdo in a cemetery in another; a … A novel couldn’t do that.’
They look at him to see if he’s finished.
‘Yeah, sure,’ says Yvonne, ‘sounds great but … in a bookshop?’
‘Like I said, crazy characters come into my bookshop.’
‘Trevor,’ she says, with a patronising grin to Elizabeth. ‘Maybe books about movies? Do you show online ratings for books?’
He explains the review app he was trying to develop, how he thought it should work and how the design company his good but erstwhile wife Diana shared the idea with faffed about, criticised it, then stole it and developed it under their own name. How the ex never chased them up about it.
‘What a bitch,’ says Yvonne.
He is surprised.
‘Oh, shouldn’t I have said that? But, Jesus, you mean she let them steal your work? So, make another one.’
He is even more flattered. Her directness. In his favour.
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘you need something.’
Several days later Yvonne texts him a link to a website about websites. She says it specialises in selling online. For his bookshop. ‘And Trevor,’ she adds, like a patronising little git, ‘you should be using a website to attract interest in your paintings. Galleries are so last-century. You can sell internationally online. She knows the drill: lure them in.
Jesus, he thinks.
Allen is inconsolable. The break-in attempt came so close. It is making him ugly. He is animated enough to blame those fucking itinerants and fucking lame dogs who hang around the streets begging, and he blames Trevor for existing as a hollow shop with two unsecured walls next to his beloved diamonds so close to lost forever; he even blames the poor old Melbourne weather for being a misery. Yes, with Melbourne’s skies being so cold and awful he decided to leave the shop briefly and visit Tasmania, as if Tasmania were a better sibling of Melbourne when it comes to fine weather.
No, none of this makes sense to Trevor either.
Insurance?
Trevor knows and Allen must know that men who plan robberies, who have the specialised equipment, and who succeed are not the same loose men who make abjection their business model outside the IGA. Don’t blame these guys who have, at best, only one knowledge of the kind required – they might have observed the shop being closed on said days.
‘Were there no motion sensors inside the locked vault?’ In the teasing vault of his thoughts Trevor considers this. Coming from the man who criticised him for lacking security.
Before leaving, he inspects the new side door and approves the carpenter’s work. The bloke has been there all afternoon, said almost nothing. Eye contact, smiles, straight face. Silent work being good work. Now the door to the lane is solid timber, no panels, hung on four recessed hinges, secured by two deadlocks – one above the centre line, the other below it.
On the other side, of his brain, he thinks again. The brickie has inserted the few extra layers of bricks onto fresh wet mortar and, until it sets, the wall feels weirdly wrong. As if a body were bricked up behind a wall. Crime performed slap-bang in the middle of the detective books.
He should get out more.
Trevor locks the front door of the shop. This is considered secure enough and is visible from the street. That is the risk he will take. Just as he turns away from the door the man formerly known as his father is there, calling to him from across the tram tracks, arms wide.
He and his father look across the glary street at each other.
How ridiculous. Trevor’s discomfort is equalled only by his father’s insouciance. The white hair and bristles of white beard, and his old-man’s large ears.
The prosopagnosia Elizabeth is afflicted with is momentarily Trevor’s.
His own dad, Kazimierz Novak; or simply Ken for those simple Aussies. In the years after his father had gone missing, Trevor checked the meaning of this name.
‘Well, you’re back again. Again,’ says Trevor. ‘Thirty years, and now – the intervals are getting shorter. Are you all right?’
‘The what? No, I’m over 70 years old and I want to see my son and see what he does in the world. And he makes these comments.’ The man might as well be addressing an audience. ‘I want to hear the sound of your voice! I’m here, you don’t have to worry.’
‘Worry?’ Trevor is more confounded and upset than worried. His big father, the overbearing father of his childhood. Now so small.
‘I am strong still,’ says his father. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘I haven’t seen you since I was 15. You’ve … changed completely. You
could be anyone. You implied you were dying.’
‘No. I call you “my boy” and “Trevvy” and I know everything. No one else would know that, and the money, yes, who knew about the money because I bet, eh, I bet you didn’t tell anyone.’
‘Where were you for thirty years? And why didn’t you contact Mum?’
‘Ah, yes. Not good. Here I am to explain. I travel everywhere like always. I told her what had happened. Like I said to you, I was in trouble with bad men over money.’
‘What do you mean, you told her? That you planned to disappear?’
‘It was best you not really know where I was, know nothing, then you couldn’t accidentally say it to anyone. I had to disappear. A lot. Completely. I went back home. Better than when I left, my boy. There was a Polish Pope. There was Lech Walesa, Polish hero.’
Poland!
‘Hey, my boy, it’s so good to see you after all this time. I thought I live with you for a while! My own son.’
‘You can’t stay with me. After thirty-five bloody years you can’t just … Anyway, I don’t have a home. I am renting. I have a landlady.’
‘You have a landlady? Eh? You are renting a room like a student?’
‘I have a wife. We’re separated. You should know all about that, you had a wife you didn’t live with. Remember?’
‘I have grandchildren!’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘Hopeless boy. You can’t even do that properly.’ The man looks genuinely distressed. Then revives.
‘But you do have a wife. I go and stay with her!’
‘Fuck,’ Trevor groans. ‘You really are nuts.’
There is a fuse shorting out in his ancestral head. He wants to turn back inside and sit behind his desk. He wants to go up in smoke. Ken sways in front of him.
‘Hey, don’t call me names any more. I know I’ve been a strange man, yes, yes, all that. Still, no need. Why can’t I stay with you? Or … my daughter-in-law?’
‘Dad!’ (Even after thirty-odd years Trevor is enough of a son to say the word.) ‘Your daughter-in-law has never met you … I hardly know you, Mum died thinking you were dead. What sort of man are you?’
‘I’m a new man! Novak, you know what it means. I’ve returned from the dead. I am like Jesus!’
‘No, you’re still dead.’
What else to do but laugh and hit the man …?
‘It’s not funny.’ The old man is suddenly angry. ‘No! Laughing at me because of your stupid government is full of shit.’
If people mood-shift like this, they are nutters or thespians. Or his father, who is both. Trevor stares at the bookshelves. Where to locate this inept memoir, a book even the shining woman customer who urged him to go vegan wouldn’t want to read? It is compressing his nerves.
‘Do you know what Kazimierz means?’ he says. ‘ “Destroyer of peace”. I’ve been Googling a lot recently.’
He might say more but his father is silent, looking out the window into the street. Caught in hiatus or, possibly, indifference. He sits in the chair beside the counter, palming his hair back with both hands like the old Brylcreem ads from his youth, and then smiles.
‘Destroyer of peace? I never knew that. Ha.’
‘Sinner, more like. Aren’t you a Catholic?’
‘Catholic? Ha ha. We must have a drink to celebrate me coming back,’ he says, suddenly standing. ‘Remember, it’s good to be kind to your father.’ He pulls a face. ‘It’s Polish. We have a drink. Where do you go?’
And he opens his arms, again, renewed. Trevor feels, as he always did with his father, bereft of options.
So, reluctantly, the Town Hall Hotel it is, nearly full at the end of the day. They drink for a desultory half hour while his father talks about the brilliant Polish Pope, about the fucking Soviets and the shitty Russian mafia and, abruptly happy again, sexy Polish women. If he talks he’s happy, he cannot seem to listen. He is getting drunk very quickly, the old man.
‘Listen to me,’ he says, pushing back his chair and standing up. The alcohol is turning his face red underneath the white whiskers. This is the main street and people are walking past. He is becoming excessive.
‘Listen!’ he says again, loudly, ordering everyone in sight. ‘This is what I nearly was, yes, opera singer.’
He starts off in a high baritone, the Prologue from Pagliacci. People stop. Si può? Si può? He stands and extends his left arm like a parody of opera singers, except he is serious. He knows the effect his voice has. It is stunning, out of nowhere from a stranger, an old man, this big voice ringing out against the buildings.
People immediately lift their mobiles, take pics and video of him singing. He will go viral!
No one has heard anything like it except Trevor, who is suddenly a 15-year-old boy again. It falls on Trevor like sudden dread. Recognition betrays him with goose bumps up his back. His father stops.
‘My friend Yuri Mazurok,’ he announces now that everyone is listening, ‘yes, Yuri he was good enough to sing for Polish opera, but the Russians wanted him. But me, I wasn’t even 20 years old, the Russians they wanted me too. They said. “Come and train in Bolshoi!” The Russians everywhere in Poland, so we used to say Poland has the car but Russia has the steering wheel. Then Polish hero Lech Walesa. Ah, yes. But I have no rhythm.’
Trevor has heard it all before. Depressingly, exactly the same words, the unchanged anecdote; and depressingly, too, because the only deep pride he feels for his father – and this is, beyond any doubt, his father – is for his voice.
His father bellows the rest of the Prologue. It is ridiculous that anyone would do this, anyone, totally without self-consciousness. Yet here he is, an old man, mouth wide open, building the drama, his voice rising and hitting the high A almost perfectly. Of course, as he holds the note he cracks. But he cuts it short, to disguise it, like a pro.
Everyone is yelling and applauding. Even the gaunt guys wanting money are shouting. Everyone keeps on shouting and he stands with his arms wide, accepting the bravos and the filming. A man might well return to life for this.
‘See,’ he says to Trevor afterwards. ‘Is my same voice. The same.’
It is devastating. The years in between, the same, brilliant show-off.
‘Just how many times in your life,’ asks Trevor, ‘have you done that – he mimics – “My friend Yuri, listen-to-me I-was-nearly-an-opera-singer”?’
But the old man has turned away.
‘I could sing the clown, too,’ he boasts to the crowd, ‘the tenor part, yes, my voice is nearly that high. I could, I could, when I was young. The great Leonard Warren could sing a high C. Not bad for baritone, eh? Yes, a high C.’
He begins the opening phrase of the famous Vesti la giubba: ‘Recitar …’ but stops and bows.
‘Hey,’ he whispers to Trevor as he sits down. ‘I forget to say, I’m not Novak any more. Had to change my name for, you know, so I’m Ken Warne. Don’t tell anyone Novak.’
But he pronounces it Wone. Trevor laughs, almost knocking over his drink.
‘You sound like that dopey Sydney Harbour artist.’
‘No, not any artist. After the cricket player. What could be more Aussie than that? And he likes the girls.’
Trevor looks for signs of distress or sadness in the tanned face. If there are any he can’t see them, the man must have been incorrigible all his life, the kind who shouldn’t marry and have kids. And always does. How apt: this father, the new man, or new face, and the bowler of flippers and wrong-uns.
With alcohol loosening his ageing system, the old man admits he amassed windfalls of money from his geological business. All the money accruing interest in the banks, bonds, term deposits rolling over every year like silent birthdays. ‘The interest rates were crazy back then. In 1989 it was 17 per cent! For nothing!’
Of course he got into trouble, financial and with women, the Warne in the man; and with business partners, ventures sidelined, investments lost, mining claims mysteriously changing hands.
All predictable. He is melodramatic yet vague in telling it. Hard to discern which was the worse offence, the women or the wealth. It wasn’t criminal but the threats he received were.
Yes, he says more than once, the Pilbara was run by cowboys. Wearing suits and ties in air-conditioned offices, but cowboys. Don’t follow the rules, make new ones. So he did a runner. Poland for twenty years, almost forgot his English which was never fluent because he learnt it from his mother, who had taught herself. When he returned he had worked in Queensland: ‘Nice tan, eh.’ Doing the job, drinking all hours after work. Polish men can do this. ‘Cast-iron constitution’, his favourite English expression.
And here is his son behind a counter selling books. My God.
Telling this, he is eyeing off one of the women at a nearby table. Nothing a 70-year-old can’t try. Or 80. He calls out and winks at her. His right eyebrow reaches for high A. In a few minutes he will be singing Don Giovanni. She looks embarrassed but laughs among her friends and simply turns away.
‘Hey!’ says Trevor, he almost hisses it. ‘Stop ogling. The world has changed a lot since you boasted of being a ladies’ man.’
‘Not boasting, I was a ladies’ man. Everybody said. More than you ever were, ha! That talent you never got.’
‘You haven’t seen my wife.’
‘I want to see your wife!’
‘She’s gorgeous.’
‘Ha, now who’s boasting?’
And he is, he is, pointlessly. He feels terrible. But it’s worth it, his father has gone quiet. Briefly.
‘Money, my boy, that’s the thing. Now this shop of yours. You can’t make a profit selling silly books. Amazon, yes? I know, I looked that up. If it was me, yes, I could sell anything.’
‘You think you could sell books?’
‘Yes. No – we sell the shop. Buy a house for me. You live there, too, if you like. Father and son! The money, some I have to give back to a businessman first but … Go back to your old job. Better paid, much easier. Be invisible the way you like.’