The Returns

by Philip Salom

  It must be the adrenaline thumping fast in Trevor: the guy hesitates. When he clears his throat, a few decades of smoker’s cough leap ahead of him as sound effect. To Trevor it sounds like aggro.

  ‘Keep off!’ shouts the man, and jerks up his fists, seeing it now.

  For years Trevor worked with hard men. All that futile roleplaying to diminish their aggression. How they set that deadly stare on a man. As he stares now, and all the skinny length of the bloke tilts away until he almost falls over.

  ‘Fark!’ the guy whines. ‘Jesus, lay off.’

  He fends off the blows he’s imagining.

  ‘I’ll show you something, you stupid prick,’ growls Trevor. ‘My fucking bills. The MRI on my leg and knee, the osteopath, my sub at the gym. You owe me thousands.’

  The man tries to scramble off but Trevor blocks the doorway. Trevor may have shed a few kilos in his time at the gym but he can still be a wide man if he needs to be.

  ‘Fucken hell, mate, I never come in here to fight. In fact it’s fucken hard but I – was goin’ to – say sorry for knocken ya about. I mean ya went down pretty easy, I wasn’t tryen. Ya were bein’ a cunt, I’m not takin’ that back but I shoulda just left.’

  ‘What? You expect me to believe that? And I’m not a cunt. … I might be a smart arse.’

  ‘Same fucken thing. I gotta do this so there ya go. The Salvo bloke told me I had to come in and apologise.’

  ‘The Salvos.’

  Trevor stands there. This time, silence is the intimidator. He is aware of the man’s reptilian legs. That overpowering use of spray deodorant. The man has probably been rehearsing his speech for as long as Ken Warne spent on his.

  The man looks as if he means it, even if he doesn’t.

  ‘You admit you came in and assaulted me. I ended on the floor.’

  ‘Nah, you tripped.’

  ‘Is this still part of your apology or have you forgotten how an apology works?’

  ‘Mate, you think someone like me can’t be serious, don’t ya.’ He tries to move away. ‘You’re not used to people like me bein’ serious. The Salvos said it was important. For me, mate, for me. Not you.’

  ‘For you. I’ve heard everything now. Then admit it.’

  ‘I said it once! I didden come in here ta start a bloody friendship! I come in because he said I should do the right thing. And all I get is a shirtfronten.’

  ‘You have to pay a price for doing the right thing. It’s a privilege.’

  ‘What a load of shit.’

  Some silences are stranger than others. Trevor cannot resist stereotyping the guy, nor is the guy any more admiring of him. The guy thinks the bookseller is someone who sits in his safe world, in a permanent state of the warm and fuzzies, making money out of people who read friggin’ books and never watch the footy. Women, of course, who blokes like the bookseller suck up to all the time.

  The bookseller looks his “apologiser” in the eye.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘None of your business. … Dwayne.’

  ‘Dwayne!’

  ‘Yeah, fucken Dwayne, what’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Right, OK.’ Trevor is shaking his head. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘That’s mighty bloody big of ya. I’ve been called every fucken name under the sun, by evil fuckers using evil fucken insults you wouldn’t fucken believe.’

  Trevor looks at him in his floral shirt and, despite the weather, the garish synthetic jacket. The Salvos have no taste.

  ‘Anyway, what’s your name?’ asks the bloke.

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I said, so what is it?’

  ‘Trevor.’

  ‘Trevor! Ha ha ha. That’s no fucken better than mine.’

  The two men could almost be drinking mates. Whether or not he can define the term “irony”, Dwayne is more accustomed to the reversals and absurdity of life than the so-called ironist who reads and sells books for a living. Trevor looks at the tatt on the guy’s wrist, three barbs on a strand of wire.

  ‘As long as you’re here,’ he says, ‘do you want that DVD?’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Ya mean ya got it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Nah, fuck it. Sell it to someone else.’

  And with that the man shuffles out. He won’t be back.

  It takes a few minutes for the irony to arrive in Trevor’s mind. Because the guy knocked him down he began his gym routines and made the effort to get fit, which means he’s bulked up enough to intimidate the man who, thanks to the Salvos feeding him, is healthy enough to be pushed around.

  A strange nothingness comes into him, occupies him. He feels affectless, thoughtless. There but not there.

  Only after however long it is – fifteen minutes, forty? – does he begin to relax. His life is a churn. Even this silly bastard and the fuss over a DVD Trevor never in fact bothered to order. Which was meant to be his punch line.

  Why, when he should have been feeling like shit, is he beginning to feel so good? On top of that, the guy has made three visits. He counts as a regular customer.

  Trevor looks at himself in the bathroom mirror. Elizabeth was thrilled when he confronted the guy over the back fence. From the left-over adrenaline in him, he feels the urge to scare him off again. Naked, his muscles are defined where the padding had been smooth. He has quite a lot of body hair for a man with a shaved head. He lifts his shoulders and makes two fists at his side. His police days had edges he has not admitted, and will not admit, to Elizabeth.

  She has let him stay.

  That night he dreams of the studio with white sheets hung over it, from roof gable to ground level. Covered on all sides as well as front and back with white sheets that have some kind of faded pattern on them, creased from hanging against the frame. Even if they don’t quite resemble it they remind him of the mausoleum of Sir Richard Burton and his wife, Isabel, the marble tent where they reside in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. Richard, the old devil.

  Over the next few days his father calls repeatedly on his mobile. He makes it painfully clear he wants to sell the shop. ‘How unique,’ Trevor points out, ‘a dead man claiming back my inheritance.’ Count Dracula. Had he left big debts when he disappeared? He’s changed his name – obviously somebody is still after him and it isn’t over probate. His father like the man behind the back fence. Remember I have friends, he wants to say.

  A little bastard of a voice keeps telling Trevor he is compromised. The business. Couldn’t have afforded it without the money. Still, he had super to use. Money still in the bank. His much younger father had been naughty-minded and fun. Sometimes. The wilder times they’d had, the long fishing trips in the country. Trevor, mind and muscle-bored in the gym amongst the lifting machines, hears these nagging demands heavier than weights – he can’t lift them. If his father had returned a year ago? He may not have deserved it but the money might, legally, have been his. Or not.

  It’s churning in him. Do the right thing, borrow, or sell out, split the money with the old crook? No, do not. Fuck the old man. Selling a business with a lease is chaos. Demand Diana sell their apartment now, free up his 50:50 or buy him out? Buying him out is better. Keep the shop. Amicable until the money discussion. Some say that about divorce. But inheritance – stranger things possess people. A cosmic demand for themselves. The old man is a bullying bastard.

  How to kill this parrot-like voice when there is no neck to wring?

  Next day his father shoves his way into the shop. No niceties now, no more My boy and Trevvy and your-dear-old-dad stuff, no wonderful baritone, just ‘Get off your arse, I need the money.’ He must be slipping, because for once he doesn’t say my money. This time Trevor, with customers inside, shuts the till, pulls the old man out onto the pavement and gives it to him straight: yes, his father might be in trouble – only might – but lives won’t be thrown under the bus again, his life now that his mother is dead. The whole thing was pr
obably what killed her.

  The old man tells Trevor he’ll get half the apartment when he gets divorced so he should hurry up and do it.

  The son, the father. The gall.

  ‘Ken,’ he says. ‘You’re finished. Run before the bad guys get you.’

  ‘Don’t call me Ken. I’m your father, call me Tatus or Dad! What would you know about bad guys?’

  ‘The last time I called you Dad you were a dad and I was 15.’

  The old man is white whiskers again, white hair, red face, like an old alcoholic, standing in grubby trousers, asking for spare change.

  ‘Look,’ says Trevor (the idea has just come to him), ‘some guy has been ringing me, asking about my father. Does that sound like you? So they know!’

  Ken is taken by surprise. And that his son has refused him. A look of hatred returns to his face, a face pinched in with its eyes clenched small. Then his bully’s face – which Trevor saw in that of a man thirty years younger – looks scared. Inside it there is no one Trevor wants to know.

  ‘You are a crazy boy,’ he spits, ‘you are schizophrenic, turning on your father like a snake. You betray me. My fucking son, who won’t call me Tatus, my son won’t even call me bloody fucking Dad! Now talking about me to people who you don’t know.’

  He regresses. And he bloody well regrets.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell Mum you were alive?’

  ‘You know nothing! I wrote to her. Twice I wrote to her.’

  They are standing on the pavement, people are walking past as traffic mounts up before the lights, tram cables stretch above them like the lines in Lester’s weird paintings.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ha, she didn’t tell you then, and why is that? Because she wanted the money for herself, eh? When she started to make them certify me dead. That was after my second letter. She died, and so she was guilty woman and it made her sick.’

  He turns away, swearing in Polish. Trevor assumes it’s swearing: normal speech doesn’t sound like that, even Polish, where the landlocked vowels are squashed between consonants.

  Trevor shouts at him:

  ‘You ruined her life. If you had been a real man …’

  But the unreal old man is stalking towards Errol St. Something makes him stop and turn around to stare. The huge STOP ADANI mural on the side of the alley wall. He raises both hands above his head like an opera singer nearing death.

  ‘She knew,’ he shouts back. ‘She didn’t tell you! You never earn the money for the shop, just wasting my money.’

  People are watching them. Yelling insults at old men in the street will not sell books. He is shaken in a way he’s never felt before. As soon as the adrenaline subsides he falls into ghastly hangover, depressing and dispiriting, and with it sickening guilt.

  Lester hasn’t been answering his mobile. Typical of a man, of a loner. It means a visit to Lester’s usual. The man will appreciate the two break-in stories by the dim crims, as Trevor now refers to them, in Chinese tea-house style. And Dwayne. The apologetic angel from the Salvos. And especially, as Lester calls him, his dead dad.

  Lester will be reassuring. Over the next few days Trevor walks across to the man’s house, fairly sure the terrace is the one he visited. There’s no doorbell so he clatters the iron knocker. Then again. Pigeons flutter up and land again on the upper balcony. He waits for a minute then raps the old metal knocker again.

  Still nothing on the mobile number.

  At Lester’s usual haunt, Trevor asks the bar staff if they’ve seen the man who sits by the window alone, doing the sudoku in The Age. No. At any time over the last few weeks? No. It’s a shock, a sudden emptiness. It begins to look as if this man who left the force, left his meaning, left his salary for his super, and was himself left with all the scars inside and out, has left again.

  His father had stayed quite sober for one more week and took young Trevor into town, then for a long drive along the coast. No school when your tatus is home, he declared, as he always declared. Trevor remembered his primary-school days like this: driving, camping onsite in caravans, meandering like tourists for a week of unworried days along the coast.

  While Polish might be landlocked, his father always enjoyed coastal fishing and the two of them sat on jetties and flung their lines out over the water, hoping the prawns baiting these tiny hooks would bring something to bite. Or even better, as a special treat, they returned to remembered bridges where lower platforms just above the water were dark and bright with dried fish guts which had been trodden down into crust formations for decades, where fishers had in the past hooked up tailor, those clean silver fish almost too easy to catch as schools rushed against the pylons to escape the aggressive salmon at the river mouth.

  To reach some of these fishing spots his father drove into logging coupes and hooned along forestry tracks, throwing the car into lunging slides around the corners and braking hard, drifting sideways, churning gravel, sometimes spinning the car in handbrake turns of 180 degrees, all for the sheer hell of it, he said, the sheer hell of it – good Aussie saying, he said – loving every second. His father wasn’t especially skilled at this wild driving but he was frighteningly fearless and laughed as the car swayed and lurched in the dust.

  This was the father Trevor adored, who returned from his work trips and broke the rules just for him, to have simple pleasures with his son. Outrageous pleasures at times. Sometimes on their fishing adventures he let the boy drive, let him drink beer. Often they pitched a tent by a river and after fishing, then cooking on an open fire, they sang songs. Until the mosquitoes tried to kill them. ‘They don’t like your singing, my boy,’ laughed his father, ‘but even mosquitoes like mine.’

  They were mates, if only for these special days, mates without his mother or family obligations, and without the unpredictable father who was a show-off, a bombast, the angry, pinched-faced thrower of tantrums and paranoia.

  And yet his father was endowed with something less reassuring than even this. To the people he met in public he was all smiles and charm. No opportunity was overlooked. Down at Lakes Entrance on one trip they stayed in a motel within walking distance of the boat jetty and the water, those briefly unmoving levels of lit cloud on the horizon and their reflection in the gentle movement of water and light in the inlet. A kind of bliss.

  His father had been sweet-talking the woman at the motel reception, telling her she was as charming as the lovely scene outside, that she reminded him of a famous German actress, What was her name? A beautiful middle-aged couple dance in a house in Prague during World War II. They are backlit, the film is in black and white, the floor-boards have a slight shine as the couple dance in silence. They know the Germans are encroaching on them, their lives will change, or be lost, but they have just, after years of delay, admitted their love for each other. They dance as slowly as they can, with grace and elegance, they dance celebration and defeat, one into the other …

  And another movie, the man and the woman, down by the lake – and they still smoked in movies then! Yes, they smoked and talked in low voices, but soon they were kissing. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the music was so beautiful, the light was ravishing, they were only kissing but it was as if they were alone in the world and soon they would be making love’ … and Trevor knew, knew as his father was telling this story or some other that was complete invention, that his eyes were glistening.

  Yes, his father said to the woman at the motel, she reminded him of this actress by the river, if only he could remember her name.

  They were lucky no one overheard him. The woman was enamoured, no man had ever spoken to her like this. He was spinning magic. By the time they had returned to their room his father was grumbling about the poor reception on the TV set and complaining that the food in small towns was always crap.

  Elizabeth has been going through the dizzying tranches of her mother’s junk, dividing the personal from the plastic, the value from the trash. It is disgusting. Her mother is catholic right enough – n
othing remotely to do with the Pope, but in her taste. Mouldy clothing, fine silver, a kitschy painting, a small Wedgwood teapot crusted underneath Ballarat Show bags and oozing packets of God knows what.

  Among the old photographs are too many of her mother from the Orange days, among the vividly similar sannyasin, and several of a young girl who – unbelievably – must be herself. She looks like a boy. Her long body is so narrow, with such slim, androgynous limbs. Then others where her limbs are strong, defined, her gymnast days when she was a teenager but still looked like a child, sexless and narrow-hipped, flat-chested, but oh what balance!

  She is keeping these.

  Days and more days, scraping off and down and out from unexpected places her mother’s rotting food and rubbish and all such mush – or mush now – and packing up solid things (they surprise her, these things, by being that: solid, and themselves) cleared from amongst the surrounding waste. Record players, radios, small boxes of jewellery, food blenders, toasters – Why so many toasters? It’s not as if she’s forever getting married! – vacuum cleaners and spare parts for anything and everything.

  They are made solid by extraction, like a complete molar removed from the jaw and the complete shape of cap and body and roots, when inspected, found to be stained, bony, shiny, and somehow both familiar and completely alien. Like a found-object sculpture. Duchamp was right about found-objects.

  A week later Elizabeth rings her over-exercised lodger-tenant again. Is everything OK with the awful neighbour? His vexatious father? Or should that be the other way about? Trevor explains the last few days of standoff, the walkout.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she says. ‘What a pain. He should have taken up with the Russians like he said. Singing for his bowl of borscht. For the oligarchs. If any of that was true.’

  ‘At least your mum’s just eccentric. Or is she losing it?’