by Philip Salom
‘Oh, talk, talk, talk, and what a wonderful person she was. But she can’t remember the name of her street. She called me Osho. She thinks I’m her old dead guru in India. She thinks her father is still alive. On and off she makes sense. Then she says really strange things. She’s back to wanting God again.’
‘Old Catholics. What was it the Jesuits said? Give me the boy until he is 7 and I will give you the man. Or woman. Your mum’s over material things. She’s hoarding her chances for an afterlife now.’
‘She asked me about a throw for her bed, then described how it was folded over the rack in the spare-room wardrobe. You can’t get into the room, let alone open the wardrobes. She’s flipped. In her mind the house is like Tidy Town. Unlike her actual mind. If you can imagine it.’
‘I can’t unsee what I saw.’
‘So I’ve been throwing everything out. Anything that stinks goes first. There’s stuff stacked up like another house inside her house. If I’m quick I can chuck most of it into a skip. No need to tell her. She lapses then she recovers to a lower level each time. She’s forgetting more and more.’
‘That memory redaction thing I mentioned,’ he says.
‘It’s a bit frightening, Trevor. Even if she seems fine she eats, drinks, walks around with eyes front. It’s full care she needs, and … Oh God. I mean, once it’s started it only gets worse. The cranky old mum I knew is disappearing. And it costs now, those bloody accommodation deposits. Or RADs as they call them. Have to sell her house to do that. They make you pay until you bleed, just to get a room with a toilet and a TV.’
‘Yeah, and then you die.’
‘She’ll kick on for years.’
‘You could find an aged-care residence down here. Old people going starey-eyed and gurgling at the lunch table. You could visit her regularly and keep your own house.’
‘You’ve been thinking this through.’
‘I can stay on. You’ll keep my tax-free rent and my lively company.’
‘I suppose aged care is much the same anywhere.’
‘Of course it is.’
‘It’ll be a challenge for her. No need to turn my life upside down.’
‘It will anyway. You’ll work it out. You’re good at everything, you are.’
‘Oh, you’re pissed. But it’s nice to talk,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Nice hearing your voice, you know, just your voice.’
‘That way you know it’s me? You don’t have to check my gammy leg.’
‘Trevor.’
‘You too,’ he says, aware her voice is lower, quieter. ‘I’ve been a bit down and out here. I hate to admit it but – you don’t mind, do you, me saying, um, I’m sort of missing you?’
She is silent for a few seconds. She clears her throat like an old Lake Wendouree duck. Then coughs again. What he won’t say is how his heart relocated when the phone rang. He couldn’t.
‘Me too.’
She is not going to say anything more. Doesn’t want to add to his words going as deep as they have. Doesn’t want to speak in case the feelings of either of them slump. And what will she do then? Remember to breathe in.
She realises that, whereas she knows herself as an inner voice and being, other people not only look the same to her but, in her perception of them, they are overwhelmingly physical beings. Is it just her, related to her neurological deficit? And now, limited by this phone call, Trevor’s voice is him; more accessible as him than when he’s standing in front of her.
‘When not visiting Mum,’ she tells him, or trashing her trash, ‘I’ve been re-editing Newman’s ever increasing manuscript and removing her ever increasing use of ands. She seems to spawn ands, she has androgyny, and I’m going through and … killing them off. And I’m sick of it. It sort of blinds you mentally. After a while you stop seeing more important things, good and bad.
‘You’re saying “and” all the time.’
‘Then I’m going nuts – I’m cutting them out of her manuscript and they’re coming back in my head.
‘That’s your guilty-conscience recurrence.’
Trevor’s turn to be normal.
‘Didn’t Freud say narrative is formed of … and then … moments?’
‘Did he? You’re full of surprises. The thing about Newman is that some of her off moments are better than her overall work. She’s a contradiction. Actually I mean that literally – a contra- diction. A kind of very stylish noise. Even sort of great. Her power comes through piercingly, with less rather than more. Perhaps it’s me, my editor’s red pen. I don’t like her style as much as she does. As her editor I have to merge with her.’
‘You merge with her greatness and not with her …?’
‘I merge. Writers sometimes deliver kilos of manuscript without any convincing line through it. Like some talented public speakers great at a prolonged outburst, weak at the decisive statement. Yes, she might become a great writer …’
‘If she loses the bits you’ve suggested?’
This kind of sense flies through him like (only) a flesh wound, as they used to say. If he wrote a novel he’d want to keep posing the same doubts in different masks, turn over and over recurring terms and phrases, alternate appearances with disappearances then ending on questions never answered. The nots. His paintings are nots. They answer nothing of the pushed-about shapes of his questions. Can you ask anything of a surface? Can you ask on a surface questions without surfaces?
Not that he says this, he knows it’s silly and possibly drunken …
He has his right leg stretched out and raised on one of her chairs. Strong man or not, aiding the circulation. She is confined and upright in her mother’s kitchen, which is almost bearable after the foul bags of rot have been removed.
‘I know,’ she says, ‘that writing has a personality, a being. What makes it mysterious is … this being recurs in the reader. A sensibility that sits right with me yet isn’t me. The characters think and talk in me … without me thinking “No, they don’t.”’
‘You make it sound like some internal parasite.’
‘Fuck off, you.’
Their voices are very quiet and she realises they are confiding, almost like lovers. Or people who are quietly boozy.
‘So … Shia’s writing isn’t like that?’
‘Look, she’s very good, no question. People will love it. The manuscript is finally finished, I think. They will want to sell translation rights in Europe.’
‘That’s great.’
‘If. …’
Perhaps it’s the mobile-phone disconnect effect, the distancing, acting on her like a good Catholic in the confessional. She is admitting things. She seems to awaken from it.
‘Trevor, I’ve made an appointment to have laser surgery on my eyes and I wonder if you could drive me there – it’s in East Melbourne – then pick me up an hour or so later. I’ll need to stay home overnight because I have to go back and have them checked the next day. I can always get a taxi but …’
‘Of course I will.’ In fact he is flattered, even if it is a very ordinary favour.
‘… I’d prefer you took me. Thank you.’
‘As long as I can drive the EH. By the way, how’s Gordon taking to Ballarat?
‘You’ll have to ask him when I come down.’
‘By the way,’ she echoes, ‘can you go to the calendar? I put a yellow sticky on it with Newman’s address. You can probably see it in your mind.’
Despite his memory of it there is no sticky on the calendar.
‘Are you going to visit her? Will she like that?’
‘Probably not. That’s why I’m not ringing first. Given she lives up here, given she might meet me face to face. Depends how many people are to know who she is. Maybe she has cabin fever, I bloody well have. Can’t stand my bloody mother every day and when it’s not her, it’s her fungal bloody house. Yuk. I know the number was 65 because it’s the year of the EH. But the street. … Was it something starting with F?’
‘Um. Forster? No, Foster.�
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‘Foster, that’s it. 65 Foster. Thanks Trevor, you’re good for something after all! I think I know Foster. Am I too old to be excited?’
‘You looked around the F’s. Ferrante. Remember I said that the first time you came into the bookshop? There’s something in this anonymity.’
Yes, she intends to see if Shia is in the flesh as clever as her offcuts or just her basic text. Surely she is superior to her sometimes charmless emails?
As soon as he places his mobile on the table Trevor feels happy and, at the same time, a bit hollow. Oh yes, he thinks. He’s not being the person he is either.
Only he knows that in the studio all his paintings have been scrubbed back to nothing like the paintings and sketches of Frank Auerbach. Nothing is ever finished, it starts and starts again and in between it is scraped off …. Then he has painted the canvases white. They are as blank as the old couple under the shadowy branches in the park. Their negative. Every face or representation has gone. What he knows is not always why he knows. Only one painting is left untouched, his bloody red one, the paste of his new agency. If that’s what it is.
Something has become clearer to him. For the first year of disappearance his mother had been full of grief. Then she wasn’t. It was never like her lost child. Her mood became resigned and, looking back now, perhaps it had hardened. If she hadn’t known she would surely have remained upset; her hardening must have been her knowing, at last, that he was alive. The bastard had felt nothing for them. No thought of her feelings, nor his son’s. And still none.
Had he, in the second letter, intimated to her that he would return for his money? He may have been telling the truth, that she wanted him certified dead so he couldn’t access it. So she instigated the official process. He lost his own trick.
Trevor looks into the stillness, the silence.
Then he looks at the back fence, stops and laughs.
He had thought Elizabeth might, well, just might have left Gordon behind. How the hell can Gordon rush about in the floorless, rubbish-strewn house? Nowhere for him to sit, let alone live. And in any-weather Ballarat, his routines broken and homesick for his usual sniff-and-runs and poohing all over Royal Park?
He remembers Elizabeth correcting him on human-dog love. That animals allow humans to love them back. He … is nearly 50, has no home, no wife, no family, his father is not a father or a con man but a father and a con man – and off his head about the inheritance.
He will begin again. He wants new paintings to go on these blank white surfaces, and thinks he can, then worries he can’t. It’s never as simple as the idea turned into paint, a process without process, as the public thinks it is. Nike it’s not. But so many people want art to be romantic gestures and a clutch of the bowels, a dazzle born of insanity (first), suffering (second) or heroin, or beautiful lovers or genius from the fucking stars. Oh, art! Our body is made of stardust!
No, it’s not.
As soon as the door opens Elizabeth sees Caveman, not Cavewoman. He is pale, unshaven and has long hair, which he might have considered washing more often.
Knowing how oblique this visit is and out of nervousness she gabbles her hello and, yes, she knows she never emailed, never rang, but she would like to talk with Shia. They have been emailing for several weeks and hey, her own mother’s a Ballarat local –How about that, eh! – but in hospital right now so here she is, yes well, too good an opportunity to miss? (Rising inflection.) ‘Is Shia at home?’
No, she thinks, don’t tell me this is Shia.
Elizabeth’s thoughts race ahead of her tongue. A writer who types his thoughts and lies about his gender would have a better reason than most to guard his anonymity.
That’s why he won’t use the phone. And then, caught out: Shia is also a boy’s name.
Behind him she sees the house is a mess. Why had she imagined Shia would be neat, in all probability obsessive about order, as close to OCD as – or even closer than – any highly intense novelist whose writing races but always on tight rails, not a word loose, just many, many of them. This place looks more like her mother’s.
‘I have a problem,’ he says, in a high-pitched voice, and rather loudly for someone a metre away. They might be on opposite sides of the street.
‘With names,’ he says. ‘You are …? Who shall I say …?’
‘Oh,’ she realises, embarrassed. ‘Sorry. Elizabeth. It’s OK, I have a problem with faces.’
‘Elizabeth,’ he grunts. ‘With faces, well, that’s new. Is she expecting you?’
Only now does she stop seeing what she expects. This is all wrong. His face is not going to help. It never occurred to her. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Her back seizes.
‘I think I’ve made a mistake,’ she says. The voice is wrong.
The man’s face is as bland as a white carp. Her question makes strange movements on it.
‘Yes, do you want to know my name?’
‘Your name? Don’t tell me you’re using a pseudonym. I just need to …’
‘Why not,’ he scowls, ‘come inside first?’
In the pocket of her jacket she fiddles with her mobile. Does he look anything like the out-of-date portrait she’d been shown? If it was genuine. A brother or …? He must be about 40, which is too old. If any of the details are true. If …
‘Nice car,’ he says. ‘Is that yours? An EH Holden. Circa 1965. Is it a 149 or a 179? I think I can see the …’
He likes her car? Then, as he turns to go inside, she hesitates.
‘Does Shia live here?’
If there is a feral trickster writer then this man is its drab exemplar. He speaks well enough, his enunciation. His voice, though, in her voice detector, suggests nervousness, which is not a good thing. Her mobile plays a waltz.
‘I’ve found the yellow sticky,’ says Trevor. ‘The address is 65 Foster Road, not Street.’
She walks straight back to the car. The man is behind her immediately. She keeps moving as she explains over her shoulder.
‘Have to go, my mother’s just called. She’s had a fall. I have to go.’
‘You’re bullshitting me,’ the man says, suddenly voluble. ‘I know your sort, you bitch.’
She runs to her car and he turns his back, slump-shouldered, but stays in the exact spot. Even as she drives off she can see him standing there as if his batteries have been removed.
As soon she opens her own front door Gordon bundles across the room and leaps up at Trevor, who stands back from the table to give him a big hug and say nice things to him. She had thought her dog was rushing to be nose first into his home smells, not back with Trevor. Unfaithful bloody animals.
Driving home she had broken the mobile rule and rung Trevor to express as much as explain. It was the wrong house, obviously. It has shaken her up. When she gets home she wants a strong cup of coffee and big shot of whisky like the night he hurt his leg. It’s her turn for his remedy.
She drops her bag and walks over. When he opens his arms she moves in without hesitation, huddles against his chest like a child as he hugs her, then just before he has released her she lifts her arms up around his neck so he can move in closer, enfolding her.She rests her face on his arm, smells his neck and hugs him as hard as she can. At which point he thinks she’ll let go; at which point she thinks she’ll let go. But they remain like this. She can feel his big body against hers, the hardness of his back in her arms.
Stepping back she is all smiles but turns immediately towards her room, picking up her bag on the way. She will not show her tears. They haven’t said a word. Now Gordon waggles up against him, his tail beating the chair leg. They have all missed each other. How good it feels. Better than good. And why Elizabeth insisted on driving back in the dark, something she prefers not to do.
When nearing home, she says, driving through heavy traffic, and perhaps because her adrenaline had at last slowed down, she became overwhelmed by a terrible shame, a plunging rift, not just over the creepy awfulness of the man – a creep who thou
ght he had a woman on a plate for that brief moment, an opportunity she is sure he was going to take. But over her own stupidity. She felt as if she were underwater. It was not a tangible feeling, it was a smothering one.
Shaking her head helps in the telling. Trying to break the surface.
‘I invited my way in,’ she says. ‘I just assumed.’
‘A normal man would have explained the mistake,’ he consoles her. ‘He was yet another creep. Anyway, you’re right, it’s normal to be scared.’
‘I won’t tell Shia, she’ll write something. I do not want to read some kind of entrapment of a woman, I mean she is a bit like that. I think she’s drawn to sects in a spooky kind of way. I’ve asked her if anything like that was in her background. No answer. Who knows? Anyway, what is it about that bloody town? Paedophile priests, one with a gun on his hip, an alt-right group that fights against a mosque, domestic violence behind doors and high-class Melbourne foodie cuisine in the restaurants.’
‘You have a knack for this sort of thing,’ he grins.
Not that Elizabeth looks in any way comforted. She sighs and slumps.
Trevor urges her to have a shower. He’ll make her that coffee. Pour her that gin and tonic she never had. He’ll sit with her if she would like him to.
Later, after sitting together on the lounge, after drinking her drinks – and he his, because he had poured himself the same medicine – she asks if he would do something for her, exactly as she says and no more, and he agrees. He collects his doona from downstairs and sleeps fully clothed on top of the bed beside her. His shoes on the floor.
The following day, while the shop sign says CLOSED, not BACK IN 5 MINUTES, he takes up position behind the wheel of the old grey Holden. He has always wanted to drive one of these famous cars. The Bathurst races, cornering with the front inside tyre completely off the ground. Or both inside tyres. What a thrill! Enough to forget, almost, why he’s sitting there. He turns the key.
She can hardly interrupt him, his grin as it starts is like nothing she has seen anywhere near him. The little boy is here and can’t be shifted.
‘Um, I do have to be there early, Trevor. Forms to sign and all that. Have to allow time.’