The Returns

by Philip Salom

  He shoves the accelerator and hears the old six under the bonnet noisily sucking in air. Those carbies, the Strombergs on the famous red engine he has already seen under the bonnet, mean something she might not realise. Column shifts are archaic but he has used them before, and the mechanical clutch, brakes and steering, none of them power-assisted.

  Once he gets a break in the traffic he floors the thing and the old EH surges, air gasping down the throats of the carbies. They hurtle from the lights grinning like bogan kids before “bogan” was a term.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ laughs Elizabeth. ‘What’s that noise at the front?’

  Then the car is speeding where it shouldn’t, downhill on Flemington Rd towards Victoria Street. If the engine isn’t silent, he is – chastened at having to stomp repeatedly on the brakes, those hard and nearly useless drum brakes, or back-end the car in front. Stopping was less of a virtue back in the ’60s.

  ‘I have never,’ she says, ‘ever felt her go like that.’

  Then she remembers Diana’s visit, the country boy and his car, the drink-driving. The crash.

  Stationary at the lights, and safe, he tells her she has the higher-capacity engine, the 179, plus high-performance tuning and carburettors that open only by flooring the accelerator. Well, she’s not going to play the girl and admit she never knew this, like hell she would. On the way back to Ballarat she will try it for herself.

  For now, she just says, ‘I think you should slow down.’

  When the staff check Elizabeth’s blood pressure before the op, which has been elevated by Trevor’s driving, they see no significance in how pleased she is to hear it’s 121/79. They lead her to the chair. There are shiny surfaces, the same eye expert featured in the glossy advertisements, his young assistants: it’s like a TV series. Now she has only to relax, think nothing, worry about nothing and try not to see replays of Trevor’s bloody DVD again and again. The clear tissue of the cornea as the blade in the dinky little guillotine slices it, and steel tools like tiny Korean chopsticks peel it back, smear it with water to hold it, the laser beam drawing hieroglyphics on the eye’s surface – and this eye is not his but hers. They are now of the same eye-flesh.

  What a shame it won’t fix her prosopagnosia. A surface operation only, her literal sight. No wily operator can move along her neurological pathways, except perhaps Trevor in his lyrical and slowly-seeing way towards her, gently, intimately, to be recognised. Like a piece of writing.

  Like a studio full of blank canvases.

  While he waits outside, Trevor keeps thinking about Dwayne the so-called apologiser. In contrast to the Foster St. Creep, who might have done anything, or The Creep over the back fence, who bullies a single woman, Dwayne seemed happily benign. Just a bit violent. Accidentally. So it’s not all depressing and tragic, it’s just weird. Differences of class, differences of social fate, differences of character. In no class is a woman entirely safe. Rich men never hurt women, do they, nor anyone else. Sure, try selling that to someone.

  If only he knew. Perhaps he should write a book about what he doesn’t know and doesn’t understand and therefore has no answers for. It would take the rest of his life, and no one would read that either. All he knows about life is that it’s not what people think it is.

  It has to be said that when Trevor offers his arm she slips hers through his without hesitation. She looks like a long-legged fly. Each eye has a plastic shield with small holes in it for aeration. Her oversized dark glasses, beachwear, just fit over the silly shields. She feels his arm, his careful smaller paces beside her as they walk to the lift, stand as it descends, then move through the car park to her Holden. He feels her right breast firmly against his arm. Her quietness. Without a word they both feel married again.

  The surgeon has told her she cannot drive herself back to Ballarat the next day. Instead they must check her eyes. She will have to wear the plastic eye-shields overnight though they’re not essential after that. Dark glasses, they insist, wear dark glasses at all times when out of doors. And rest. Allow time for the tissue and the eye to adjust. Healing begins from day one. Somehow she is not surprised. It will be midday before she is free.

  ‘I have a surprise for you,’ announces Trevor. ‘Tomorrow, after they let you go (he can’t resist this one), I’m going to hire a boat and row you up and down the river. A sort of poor man’s punt. No lovely Cam, flat as an aristocrat, just the shifty old Yarra.’

  That night, every few hours, he squeezes the drops onto her blinking eye, makes her stop still long enough between laughs for them to land on her cornea, eye drops like little delicacies of light.

  In the morning she grabs the nearest book and opens it, eases her eye-covers aside. She can read perfectly! It was her only worry – that her close eyesight might be lessened in trying for the overall improvement. Just then Trevor knocks on her door. Yes, she can focus on the door. That too. He asks her to come outside – test her long-range eyesight. Her eyes won’t be affected by the mild morning light. She pulls on jeans and T-shirt. He leads her down into the garden and she completely removes both her dark glasses along with the eye-cap protection.

  ‘My God!’

  She can see. What? She sees the back fence – completely repaired. It is evenly and handsomely filled in with new pickets. And has been painted white.

  ‘Trevor! You …?’

  ‘No, not me,’ he replies. ‘I came out this morning and it was – there. I haven’t been painting, I’ve been going crazy at the gym, and I have been eating out, making up for cooking dinner every night.’

  ‘You know you don’t have to do that.’

  They both stare at the fence.

  After the eye surgeon has approved his own handiwork and assured her all is well, Trevor drives them out along Hoddle St. and through Clifton Hill, home of neat cafés and a gay community as big as Tasmania, before executing a U-turn, struggling with the EH’s paddock-wide turning circle and its tractor steering, then heading left into the Fairfield boathouse car park.

  This time she lets him support her as she steps from riverbank to rowing boat and onto the seat in the stern.

  As he uses one oar to shove the craft away from the bank, he tells her they are hand-built rowing skiffs, made in Portsmouth from clinkers of real wood, or so the boathouse claims in its advertising. They are not tinnies – no, that means aluminium – nor are they remoulded from piles of molten outdoor furniture.

  She is impressed, by his enthusiasm if not his gab.

  As he rows she becomes aware of the co-ordination and power of his stroke. Rowing made to look easy: the graceful plunge of both oars into the water and his drawing back on them to lift the boat forwards. Then he lifts them free of the water and as he leans forward the oars reach back, water trailing from their tips. And then plunge and lift, plunge and lift, plunge and lift. The rower always facing the stern.

  Because it is Saturday there are many inexperienced rowers out on the river. Skiffs are jerking and zigzagging more like water-beetles than waterbirds.

  Trevor continues rowing with the current, turning to check on the others, then eventually reaches clear water and ships the oars.

  ‘Move over to the side,’ he says, ‘but do it slowly.’

  ‘Eh?’

  He gestures to her and as she shifts to her right he moves in a balancing crouch across her on the left, then turns and lies flat on the slatting, his head on the rear seat. She slides down with him. They lie side by side in this quiet rowing boat and the leisurely current carries them forward.

  She giggles, impressed and feeling like a teenager.

  Above them they can hear magpies sing and mimic, and see herons sitting on high branches. Even a white crane sweeps overhead. At this time of the day and year there are no other boats moving this far downstream, the few people hiring look like tourists and are still whisking their vessels around within 100 metres of the boathouse. They are alone.

  There is no closer sound than the kiss of water along the hull
, either side of them, underneath, enclosing them. Silence, birdsong, water against the hull, peacefulness. Her dark glasses make everything strange, but the scene is strange. The timelessness of water spreads beneath her, and equally timeless, it seems, are the closer and more distant sounds, the birdcalls, the man lying parallel beside her, their arms and legs touching, as if lying in bed. Nothing said at all.

  ‘I have learnt something important,’ he says eventually, as they glide past the bank. She can see overhanging branches only 10 metres away, their green foliage reaching out and overshadowing the understorey like all those river paintings.

  ‘About …?’

  ‘My father. Him being such a vexatious prick. It’s been really bloody painful. Then the money thing and my sense of obligation and guilt. But. Obviously I thought he was dead. But that if he ever returned it would fill a psychological gap or loss. That isn’t what happened. I think it has freed me. Because now I can reject him. You can’t reject a ghost any more than you can bury one. It makes a ghost of you if you try. It haunts you. As a child I was half in thrall and half appalled by him. It’s been coming back to me a lot. At last I’m able to throw him out. And I have.’

  ‘Trevor,’ she says, as her new eyes fill with tears. She holds his arm as they glide along in this very ordinary boat.

  After a while he returns to the central seat and begins rowing them back. The oars drip and plunge, as their leather cladding squeezes and releases from the rowlocks in the same back-and-forth motion, again and again and again.

  When they return he drops her off at the end of the street and drives on to the IGA for shopping. While waiting at the lights he idly looks over at his shop. Someone has blacked out the words STOP ADANI on his mural. Like the swearwords on the garage-sale books. A job for tonight.

  Inside it is silent. She calls him. She stands in her bathroom, facing the mirror. He moves in behind her, which she sees afresh with the clear focus of her face, and behind, slightly to one side and over her shoulder, his face, clearly. He places his hands gently on her shoulders.

  ‘I think I can see where I’m going,’ she says as she smiles at his face in reflection. Her loose straps are under his fingers, her shoulders are bare.

  Returning from a walk in her exaggerated sunnies, Elizabeth sees a white-whiskered man standing inside the front yard of her house. In the yard. Immediately she knows that this must be the lost-and-found father. Somehow he has discovered her address dug it up, perhaps, given his past as a geologist.

  When she approaches he steps onto the pavement, grins a big welcome and makes a silly bow. He reaches for Elizabeth’s hand, playing the part of the Polish count he is surely used to performing.

  Except she can read the old fool a mile off and moves both hands behind her back, which makes him frown. She stands front-on, as if hiding a gift from a child.

  ‘What are you doing on my property?’ she says.

  ‘Oh, yes. I have come to see you, Miss Landlady,’ he says, all smiles and with a waggle of his head.

  ‘Miss Landlady? My God,’ she says. ‘There’s no one of that description here.’

  ‘Yes, yes, this is the address. My son gave it to me.’

  ‘No, he would not have given you this address.’

  ‘Ah, I can see why my son is staying here now, with you. You are a beautiful woman. He is my son and I love him, of course, but perhaps you are wasting your time on him. What I suggest is …’

  ‘You have no idea,’ she laughs, ‘no idea at all, have you?’

  She can hardly stop laughing. He is immediately annoyed.

  ‘Somehow you have emerged, unchanged,’ she says, ‘from a lot longer than thirty years ago. You really are like Rip Van Winkle – it’s hard to believe.’

  And then more seriously:

  ‘Things have changed. You even tried to grope Diana. How could you?’

  ‘Grope?! She’s my daughter-in-law. I just give her a hug. Every woman,’ he boasts, ‘likes a man who knows what he is. And what a woman is, yes?’

  ‘You’re way out of order. Miss Landlady. Daughter-in-law!’

  She finds herself saying words she couldn’t have anticipated.

  ‘You think Trevor is a child you can manipulate. You don’t know anything. You don’t know what he’s like at all. You probably never did, you abandoned him when he was a child. Don’t expect any money, you old creep. He is much stronger and much smarter than you. On top of that, he’s a good man.’

  ‘Huh!’ says the old stager, in an unexpectedly high voice. ‘What use is a good man?’

  She has a terrible urge to say Fuck off and die. As he starts talking again, she watches him and sees every bristling whisker on his face as if magnified. She can see everything with clarity now. There are features he and Trevor share – the nose perhaps – but they are unalike in every other way. She turns and goes inside.

  Acknowledgements

  I want to thank Transit Lounge and Barry Scott for accepting The Returns for publication, with a special thanks going to Ken Haley for his meticulous and good-humoured copy editing of the manuscript. My gratitude also goes to Ed Wright for his thoughtful reading of two early drafts and for the suggestions which led to essential streamlining of the later ones. I suspect the book’s air-speed has been much improved.

  Praise for Philip Salom’s fiction

  Waiting

  (Puncher and Wattmann, 2016)

  Shortlisted for 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award

  Shortlisted for 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

  Shortlisted for 2017 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

  ‘Brilliant and unsettling … There is a calm to Salom’s prose that speaks of unobtrusive craft and compassion, as when we read how “the lonely meet sometimes, compatibility is indeed a strange thing”. This is an accomplished and absorbing novel.’

  Peter Pierce, The Australian

  ‘Towards the end of the book, things change gear, as the strands come together: the two couples, the house, the long-awaited Adelaide denouement, fears, hopes and loves acquiring a kind of critical mass that dictates change, however modest. The book becomes heavier and heavier and then as light as air, and all the poetry is still there, waiting for you.’

  Peter Kenneally, The Age

  ‘Waiting is a richly rewarding story, with characterisation and plot that made me see the world differently. Salom has an astute poetic sensibility that makes his sharp observations politically deft and often very amusing, but it’s his empathetic portrayal of misfits that stole my heart.’

  Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

  ‘Waiting is a tour de force of sustained and affectionate wit. It constantly dares the reader to undervalue its characters. It does not romanticise poverty but nor does it impoverish romance. It suggests that there is no such thing as the end of the line.’

  Michael McGirr, Australian Book Review

  ‘This was a beautifully executed novel and I was sad to have finished it.’

  The Saturday Paper

  ‘Waiting is a laugh-out-loud, poignant novel about the struggle of individual mortals to relate to themselves and each other in a brutally capitalist, godless world. This novel explores the very real differences between people even as it reveals the universals that unite them. Our culture needs writers of this calibre to challenge not only how we see ourselves and Others, but how we use language to enable or blinker that seeing.’

  Helen Gildfind, Text

  Toccata and Rain

  (Fremantle Press, 2004)

  Shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal

  Shortlisted for the WA Premiers Prize for Fiction

  ‘The phantasmagoria of disintegrated personality are one of the perennials of literature and cinema. Reading this book, you are put in mind not only of films such as David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive or Bergman’s Persona or Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but all the bizarre and fascinating characters who have populated European writing since the 19th century: Heathcliff and Ka
thy, Miss Havisham and Bradley Headstone, half the people in Dostoevsky.’

  The Age

  Playback

  (Fremantle Press, 2003)

  Winner of the WA Premier’s Prize for Fiction

  ‘Salom’s rich, suggestive prose … has an arresting, dreamlike quality which ultimately finds truth in abstraction, the landscape, eroticism and … reminiscence of the common man.’

  The West Australian

  Philip Salom lives in North Melbourne, Australia. In 2017 his novel Waiting was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, the Prime Minister’s Award and the Victorian Premiers Prize. His novel Toccata and Rain was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal and the WA Premiers Prize for Fiction, and Playback won the WA Premiers Prize for Fiction. His poetry books have twice won: the Commonwealth Poetry Book Prize in London and the Western Australia Premiers Prize for Poetry. In 2003 he won the Christopher Brennan Award, Australia’s lifetime award for poets, acknowledging ‘poetry of sustained quality and distinction’. His fourteenth collection Alterworld is a trilogy of Sky Poems, The Well Mouth and Alterworld – three imagined worlds.