by Philip Salom
How much more invasive can the man be? Ordering him. What he won’t have realised is that Trevor’s shop is only leased. The rest of the money is invested. The shop was never up for outright sale, the all-new book stock cost a fortune.
Every one of the books bar those with swearwords blotted out. His father is trying to force his way out of the blotted word for “father”. Dzzzt. He is the worst swearword of all.
Diana inspects the woman in the doorway. Their height difference is obvious. And weight. Having only just knocked, waited, said hello and introduced herself doesn’t stop Diana saying what she says.
‘So, Trevor likes his women tall and slim now.’ She doesn’t add older and plainer.
It nearly makes Elizabeth snort.
‘I’m not his woman – and nor are you any more. I hope Trevor never said we were anything else. He has an ensuite room, he is a lodger. If you want to see him, he’s not home.’
Hears herself utter “home” with a possessive Trevor-shaped bump in it.
What she would like to do, Diana explains, is inspect his paintings. She has always admired him as an artist, regardless of his – apostasy. She says this, “apostasy”, to Elizabeth because he used to say it of himself.
Elizabeth is stalling.
‘He said it was OK,’ Diana says. ‘He wants me to look at them. He knows I’m his biggest fan. I’m really curious. Now everyone says they are passionate about … this or that. Something he hates by the way, that saying. He is, though, again, at last. Passionate, I mean. My God, it has taken him long enough.’
So they walk through the house, Diana stickybeaking at everything. She says of course Trevor can be ingratiating, even when he’s being selfish. Yes, he’ll take over her house unless she’s careful. ‘He’s a homebody and, frankly, a bit of a bore,’ she says. And he’s getting fat.
‘Fat? Not any more, he isn’t.’
‘Unlikely!’ Diana laughs in disbelief. They have stopped near the back door. Elizabeth looks at Diana, the rather fulsome but bitchy woman who is still his wife.
‘You clearly don’t know he’s become a gym junkie.’
‘What? He has always laughed at gyms.’
‘Except it’s working. He is slimmer, and he’s stronger, fitter. You’d be surprised.’
Somehow, despite not wishing to, Elizabeth is thinking how this woman gives off a sense of easily assumed judgement. She has none of the melancholy that surfaces in Trevor. Whereas Diana is still doubting. Who is this woman and what’s going on between them?
Despite her good clothes and high heels, an essential for her height, and her business-designer suit, Diana drags the paintings out from the wall and faces them into the shed.
‘Wow,’ she says. ‘Fucking wow!’
Hardly art-critic-speak. Perhaps it should be. She stares at them close up and then from across the open floor space. She looks over the older pieces at first, looking for what she recognises, then takes her time to inspect each of the other as she realises what they represent.
‘Restless bugger,’ she sighs, ‘even in what – five or six months? – he’s gone through these different stages? See the way his composition has changed from this one to this one, and then here. And the way he’s handling paint. The surfaces. In the earlier ones he painted everything from scratch.
‘Here,’ she points to several big canvases, glowing and darkening in house-painting brushstrokes. ‘He’s changed from ’30s collaging to photomontage, a bit like Daniel Pitin. The Czech artist? Media images painted over so some it shows, all shaky and nightmarish, but the rest is distorted and parodied by him painting over them. I like them! The doom of it! It’s cool.
‘The modernist styles keep coming back,’ she says. ‘In writing, too.’
While saying this, Diana has stepped around the various paint tins and rags towards the back wall. There are three more works that have been turned away, facing the wall. Diana turns all three round.
When the cry comes from her it shocks Elizabeth who is expecting more words and comments. It is the same cry Martina made all those years ago at the café in Fremantle when she heard the flamenco singer call out on the CD. A release of emotion. Diana has both hands to her face.
Then, with one hand over her mouth, the cry mouth, she reaches out and touches the red paint, its wild drama, rubs it and sees the faint colour on her fingertips. Now she is silent. Stands there, staring, for a minute, more than a minute.
‘Has Trevor said anything,’ she says finally, ‘about us losing a baby?’
‘Oh.’ (This is so unexpected.) ‘He …’
‘This is new, the paint’s wet. He’s painted it: the blood, all the blood – a kind of radical Rothko. Only now’ – a small sound escapes her – ‘ he is painting it.’
There is nothing Elizabeth can say. Diana’s voice is quiet, deliberate.
‘I know it’s subjective – another term he hates, but I know it. Like those earlier paintings, like the Weimar artists, women too, you know, not the men; and, unusually, Dada women. But there’s so much feeling in the new work. My God, this is really going somewhere.’
Elizabeth now knows the bond still there between them, and would almost be jealous except now she, too, is feeling Trevor’s artistry coming through. Its intimacy tangible, and red.
‘Then why did he stop painting? What actually happened?’
Hesitating, Diana nods and then folds her arms. As if covering herself for having been so open.
‘He used to see himself as a wayward out-of-town boy who moved down to the city. He said his father always told him when he was a boy that arty things were shit, they were pointless. Only facts mattered.’
‘The philistine father. God help us.’
‘And making money. You can count it. Trevor was in a car crash with some friends, ex-uni students. He has to have told you about his limp?’
‘Well, yes, a bit. He seems pretty reluctant.’
Standing out in the studio among the blood paintings and the directness of Diana is making her disoriented. Yet Diana seems unwilling to leave.
‘They were drinking all afternoon,’ says Diana, ‘and they drove off in two cars taking forestry roads to the local weir, one of those places to have a barbecue and snags-and-beer dinner. But they never got there. They were probably pissed when they crashed, that’s what they were like. Trevor was a bit of a ringleader like that. Unfortunately. That’s why the accident got to him so much. His fault.’
‘I know,’ says Elizabeth, ‘he mentioned an accident. Not in any detail. More that he hurt his leg and how it still causes him grief. His leg, I mean.’
‘The accident was terrible. He went off a corner and smashed his car up, and damaged his right leg pretty badly. But that’s only the half of it. A mate of his, driving flat out behind him on this shitty gravel road, was blinded by the dust from Trevor’s car and crashed right into them, then into a fence. The two of them. Bang bang. It’d be traumatic enough dragging yourself out of your car, but then to have another car crash into you and end upside down on a fence? His mate was far more badly injured than Trevor. Trevor never forgave himself. Nor did his friend, according to Trevor.’
‘He never said anything about that.’
‘I think, well, I’m not sure he’s right about his friend. I was there, I mean we were together at the time, and the accident was only part of what happened when …’
Eventually Diana continues.
‘They were in the middle of nowhere on gravel roads somewhere out of Upwey. Not sure where, it was twenty years ago. No one around. Their cars wrecked, one of them was upside down. He said he kept seeing its wheels.’
The two women stare at each other, so removed from the events they are shaken by. The young men, their screaming. Diana explains: they had to wait for a car to arrive to drive off for an ambulance. No mobile phones back then. Trevor said he stayed slumped in the car, his leg bleeding and hurting; the other guy they thought would die.
‘My God. What happ
ened?’
‘Eventually some bloke turned up. A farmer.’
‘It was the crash that made him stop painting?’
‘All that. Two operations, a slow recovery, lying in hospital for weeks doubting himself, feeling he had made it before he knew who he really was as an artist. Also – I was pregnant. But – then I lost the baby.’
She shakes her head, simply runs out of words.
At which point Elizabeth almost gasps. She sees him watching TV and wiping away tears. How he sometimes stands in the one place for so long.
‘Anyway,’ says Diana, ‘you weren’t to know. You just said you don’t talk much.’
‘No, we do.’ She stares at her wrecked lawn. ‘We’re sort of mates, but he doesn’t go on about himself. Unlike most men.’
Diana’s expression is suddenly cool.
‘Oh, he can. Don’t worry about that.’
When Elizabeth is this concerned she makes small fists under her chin and leans forward. A more direct response than Diana expects. Elizabeth is thinking only about him.
‘No wonder, then …’
‘Well, no wonder what?’ Diana says. ‘Compared to a pile of wreckage, and this guy nearly dying, and then losing our baby – his paintings. That’s what he said. He said whatever talent he had wasn’t real or he wasn’t. That he felt like an impostor. It’s a syndrome. He felt like that.’
‘I wondered if his father …’
‘Oh, his fucking father. It’s a great big old-fashioned guilt, of course. His father has to be a problem, too, all a bit Freudian from my professional viewpoint. A lot of grief but also a lot of guilt and blame. It’s a kind of self-harm.’
‘Has he told you his father turned up recently, living and breathing?’
‘He told me. Which means decades of having lost his father are …?’
The two of them stare at the various paintings, the assorted images refusing easy answers, and the Rothko surfaces now so suggestive of blood, and birth, the collages of a lost world. Apocalypse. Elizabeth dazed, Diana suddenly restive.
‘Look at these. Anyone can see Trevor has loads of talent. I read what people said about him back then. Maybe his success was too easy. He just couldn’t keep hold of it: he lost the meaning of actually being an artist. I was grieving, he had to find work. But fancy getting a government job after all that! He made the wrong decision.’
‘What sort of job did he have?’
‘Huh, he never tells anyone. Maybe I shouldn’t either.’
‘He’s living in my house. And after what you’ve been saying?’
‘Well, you won’t believe it. The police force.’
‘He was a cop?!’
‘Not quite, he had a desk job, sort of, in the psychology unit. He talked a lot of bullshit and he got the job. He’d done a double degree, Art and Psychology, like me, that’s how we met. Using roleplay and discussion groups to make cops stop and think about racial prejudice, domestic violence etc. Reading groups, ha, imagine it. He was part of a team to keep plods human. But he mixed with them socially too, sometimes. They’re a hard lot, cops. And he’s a strange man, Trevor. Very undecided. Obviously.’
‘A lot of us are.’
‘That mate of his who was injured, he died a year or two ago. In a car crash. Would you believe it!’ She shrugs. ‘I think that’s why Trevor started painting again, he was free, and I bet he never told you that. That and getting the inheritance so he could leave work. He was painting at home in the apartment to begin with, no room to swing a cat, but now – he’s with you. He’s the happiest he’s been for years.
‘I’m going to make him approach some galleries,’ she adds, ‘otherwise he’ll put off doing it himself until he’s old and decrepit and hungry for a bit of recognition before he carks it.’
Elizabeth is about to say, but doesn’t.
‘I will,’ Diana continues. ‘I’ll nag the shit out of him. I can nag, I tell you. This is about him, not me. I will pay for it if he can’t. Oh, by the way,’ she adds, ‘don’t tell him I’m thinking along these lines – he’ll just clam up and do nothing, just out of … Could you do that?’
Elizabeth cannot promise anything.
‘Aren’t you selling the apartment?’ she says instead. ‘He’ll have plenty of money.’
Diana’s head jerks slightly.
‘Did he say so?’
She looks down towards her bag, shuffles things around and removes her phone.
‘Oh, that reminds me. Tell Trevor his bloody father fronted up at the apartment the other night. That’s if it is his father, because how would I know? He played all sweet and charming, trying to be witty, trying to flatter me. The old perve said I had a nice voice and a nice – figure. Can you believe it? He wanted to know if the apartment was in Trevor’s name. When he left he tried to give me a kiss and a cuddle. I had to push him off! “His lovely daughter-in-law”, he said, meaning I owed him a grope. He’s a shocker.’
Elizabeth’s mother is getting worse, a relapse into whatever it was. Another wobbly fall, possibly infection, pain and painkillers, hospital, her immune system not up to much any more. More worryingly, a slow, too slow, return from confusion. In the Respite Care unit she occasionally forgets names, the staff are saying, at her worst she’s had speech lapses that were not digressions. It sounded more like the unlearning of a mind facing nowhere – they didn’t say – with her syntax garbled, words unrecognisable. Elizabeth will have no excuse this time, she must return to Ballarat and stay there for as long as it takes to transition her mother into home life again. That or a nursing home. At least she has forgotten Dr Nitschke.
‘The ultimate catch-22,’ Trevor says. ‘When you discuss euthanasia you probably don’t need it; when you need it you probably can’t remember.’
He is drying the dishes. Wiping the tabula rasa.
She says Respite is full of people who complain of being sick, and if they’re not sick they complain about when they were. Which sounds more like her old self.
Elizabeth is talking from inside her study.
Then she tells Trevor she will have to stay in Ballarat for some time, so what to do about him? Under the circumstances, perhaps he should, perhaps, she’s really sorry … consider finding another place. Trevor living alone in her house for however long – months, maybe – would be a bit odd, wouldn’t it, her lodger? What can she do?
He is devastated.
‘You can let me stay.
‘No notice, no fault?’ Not that he wants to criticise. Quite the reverse, he wants to stay. Is he only a lodger and not adjudged a tenant? A friend?
‘My paintings. Fuck. I’ve only just got it all moving again. Jesus, you can’t kick me out like this, make me go. I might never find anywhere like this …’
‘Now don’t lay a guilt trip on me, Trevor, it’s hard enough already. I don’t want to do it but what choice have I got?’
His reaction is proving her the betrayer she knows she is. It hurts her more than she thought it would, she doesn’t want to. Her thinking is stuck. She squints into her computer screen as if in pain.
‘If I leave,’ he says, ‘the house will be empty. Lights off, leaves on the porch. Burglars look for that – places that are vacant. Who knows what that fucking neighbour of yours might do? If you’re not here he’ll dump all of his rubbish in your backyard, probably burn it on your lawn. Hold barbies here with his scungy mates. You wanted him warned off, and he’ll be angry. He is angry.’
She emerges from the study and he sees her face.
‘Trevor. You’re trying to scare me.’
‘You think I’m being unrealistic? You know the guy. I’ll put out the rubbish and bring it in again, empty the mailbox. I could even learn to rake the verge and gossip to the neighbours …’
‘I hadn’t thought of The Creep next door. (But she remembers him at the market.) Mum’s going downhill. It would have to happen just when I’m head first into Collectors.’
‘You can work in Ballarat. What
difference does it make where you are? You could even go and see the woman. Didn’t you say she lives up there?’
She drops into a lounge chair. He’s right, she cannot go through with it. Obvious reasons – now they’re obvious. And. Not wanting him to disappear.
‘You never told me if they caught anyone about your shop,’ she says.
He tells her they haven’t solved anything, and probably won’t, how actual policing suffers from rotten storylines and absent characters, i.e. the crooks. It’s not like fifty-minute TV shows. People get attached to crime stories, for the cathartic endings, but it doesn’t happen that way.
‘So,’ she sighs, ‘the break-in was just another event that begins here and then slips through to the other side.’
‘Except in this case they didn’t get through.’
She can hear the city scraping along outside. On the other side of the wall.
Trevor has his back to the door, listening to a customer talk about his cats and his dog and how his missus loves those Irvine Welsh books full of foul-mouthed rants and violence. She finds them exciting. Ha ha. Then the old fella turns for home, carrying a copy of the novel Trainspotting 2 is based on, which is called Porno.
The closest the new shop has come to being the old shop.
Trevor realises there’s someone behind him. It’s the Frank Miller (Where’s my fucken DVD?) bloke. He can smell the awful deodorant. It makes him step back. The man looks better fed, better dressed, meaning that instead of his clothes having been dragged at random from the bags at St Vinnies, they almost suit each other – and they fit.
Trevor is angry. Is there a mental or karmic app drawing the crazies through the front door? A warp app?
He jabs his finger at him.
‘Nah, nah,’ says the man. ‘It’s not what you’re thinkin’ …’
‘Get out of the shop,’ says Trevor.
This time he’s prepared for the worst. Assuming, that is, endless sessions at the gym have made him stronger, even if the dash of vanity is slow. At first the man can’t see the anger in his eyes. The garish tattoos on the man’s neck and throat seem to flare like bravery.