The Lost Dog

by Michelle De Kretser

  He thought about the moment when his mother must have realised what had happened. Iris, whose knees made it impossible to stoop; to pick up a coin or a pill, to scrape her own fi lth from the carpet.

  ‘She’d been sitting there for an hour.’ Audrey, on the telephone. ‘You’d think she could have told me sooner, instead of just sitting there with it all around her.’

  Tom thought of his mother trying to come to terms with the disaster; preparing the words in which she would have to confess what she had done; the moment when the shameful evidence of age and incapacity would be made public, when it would be clear that she had lost control of her body and couldn’t hide the consequences.

  He made tea-bag tea for Iris, instant coffee for himself, carried the mugs into the living room. His nostrils identifi ed chemical lavender.

  ‘The biscuits,’ said Iris. ‘Where are the Tim-Tams?’

  In adolescence, Tom had devoured packet after packet of chocolate biscuits, unable to desist. He no longer liked the taste. But his mother went on buying them, and he could not deny her the pleasure she derived from being able to offer him this small indulgence.

  He sat on the wooden-armed sofa-bed, on which he had slept for six years, and ate a biscuit.

  On the wall was the starburst clock Iris had bought on lay-by with her fi rst wages. Every time Tom saw it he remembered the passions it had ignited. He had sat at the card table in the corner, a book about the First Fleet open before him, while Audrey remarked that in her opinion, it was nothing short of robbery to squander money on ornaments while living on charity. For did Iris imagine that the pittance she paid would rent her two rooms and the use of a Whirlpool anywhere else in this day and age?

  ‘The amount was agreed,’ Iris cried. ‘The rent was set by you. When my husband was alive and you were ashamed to try this highway rookery.’

  A week later, Bill presented Audrey with a starburst clock for their wedding anniversary. He was a heavy, peaceable man who sold surfaces; on the subject of laminates, he approached eloquence. The clock was larger, more elaborate than Iris’s, about which nothing further was heard.

  Australian history for Tom would henceforth be inseparable from economics, high dudgeon and the sense of entrenched moral positions.

  His mother sat in the straight-backed chair she preferred, her walker within reach. Tom’s earliest memory of Iris placed her in an armchair beside a wireless, with her legs in a bag made of flowered cretonne. It fastened below her knees with a drawstring, protecting her calves from mosquitos.

  The bag disappeared when Tom was very young, and for the rest of his childhood a table fan and Shelltox kept the living room mosquito-free. But he could still see the large red blooms on the creamy cretonne; the ivied trellis against which they climbed.

  Iris was eating a biscuit with the audible, laborious mastica

  tion of those who no longer have molars.

  ‘Ma, is everything all right?’

  His mother sucked melted chocolate from her front teeth. ‘Knees are bad today. This weather.’

  ‘Audrey told me what happened in the morning.’

  ‘I knew she would ring you and carry on. There was no need at all.’

  ‘But Ma, if you can’t manage…’

  ‘I can manage,’ cried Iris. ‘You-all want to get rid of me. You-all want to put me in a home.’

  ‘Ma, be reasonable.’

  ‘It’s hard to bear when you’re rejected by your own child.’

  Tom jumped up. He walked to the kitchen door and back; a short distance. His gaze fell on an arrangement of dried thistles he had always detested. The room, unchanged in thirty years, returned him to the helpless rage of adolescence, the sensation of being trapped in poverty and irrational argument and ugliness.

  ‘How can you say that? I see you regularly, I do everything I can. How can you say you’ve been rejected?’

  ‘No need to get worked up,’ said Iris.

  Tom had decided to say nothing about what had happened the previous day, telling himself that the dog would be found and that there was no need to cause his mother unnecessary grief. Yet now he resented her not enquiring after the animal.

  With her talent for irritating her son, Iris asked, ‘So how was your holiday?’

  ‘It wasn’t a holiday.’ He was shouting again. ‘I was working-’

  Long-past Sunday afternoons: ‘I’m not reading, I’m studying. Why can’t they wash their own car?’ And so Tom Loxley still leaped to defend the life he had chosen against the imputation of idleness; the reflex as immutable as arithmetic.

  He made himself breathe in slowly, feeling his ribs move sideways. He breathed out again. He said, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  A three-inch step led down from the living room into the passage. Iris approached the brink; then stopped. ‘I’m falling,’ she cried, and clutched the handles of her walker still tighter. ‘Tommy, I’m falling.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘Hold me, darling, hold me.’

  ‘Ma, you’re fi ne.’

  ‘Easy for you to say, child.’

  ‘Be sensible, Ma. I’m right here. You’re not going to fall.’

  The front wheels clunked into the abyss. ‘I’m falling, I’m falling.’

  They shuffled up and down the passage, between the entrance to the annexe and the door that led to Audrey’s part of the house. Rain kept up its steady gunning on the tin roof. On the other side of the wall, there was the shapeless noise of TV.

  Tom was thinking of an almirah made of Indian calamander that his mother had once owned. Now and then Iris had unlocked its single drawer, lifted it out and placed it before her son. The child was allowed to look but not to touch. Naturally, he disobeyed. He turned his grandfather’s ivory teething ring in his hands. He examined a thermometer, and a tiny pink teacup painted with fiery dragons. An empty, redolent bottle with an engraved label and the enigmatic legend Je Reviens. Three glass buttons shaped like tiny clusters of purple grapes. A satin-bowed chocolate box with a basket of fl uffy kittens on the lid. A jet and diamanté earring. A cardboard coaster stamped with a golden flower. A leather case in which a satin-lined trench held a silver biro; when the case was opened, a puff of cool, metallic air was released into the world.

  At random moments, the child Tom would shut his eyes and call up these items one by one. It was his version of Kim’s Game. The almirah was doubly implicated in remembering: there was the memory game, and there were the stories attached to each object, the past glimmering into life as Tom pondered the provenance of a foreign coin or a small brass key.

  In Australia Iris had a wardrobe, utilitarian as equipment. History sank beneath the imperatives of the present, its kingdom conquered by objects with no aura, by bulky blankets and woollen garments that spoke only of household management and the weather. Who transports coasters and old chocolate boxes over oceans? Practical considerations had ensured that Iris was no longer the custodian of memory. But there was worse: within her new setting, she appeared archaic. It was as if a malevolent substitution was at work, so that she had begun to assume the aspect of a relic herself.

  Iris moaned, ‘I’m tired. I want to sit down.’

  ‘Five minutes more.’

  ‘My knees are paining.’

  ‘Just up and down twice more. Exercise is good for you.’

  ‘Oh, I’m tired. I want to sit down.’

  Side by side, they carried on.

  When he kissed her goodbye, he said, ‘Ma, if it happens again, call me.’

  She peered up at him. Fear moved in her eyes, a rat scuttling through shadows. ‘I was good up to eighty.’ Her hand tightened on his arm.

  ‘Tell Dr Coutras about it when you see him, OK?’

  ‘He’ll say it’s cancer and want to open me up.’

  ‘No, he won’t.’

  Iris’s perm, the thin hair in airy loops, stood out from her skull like petals; like a child’s crayoned sun. ‘All right, I’ll tell him,’ she sa
id.

  The docility, the large, nodding head: Tom thought of beasts, waiting to be killed or fed.

  While he was still on her doorstep, Audrey said, ‘I draw the line at nursing.’ There were many such lines, existence taking on for his aunt the aspect of a dense cross-hatching.

  ‘It must have been awful. So humiliating.’

  ‘Yes, well.’ Audrey patted the back of her hair, hitched up her cardigan at the shoulders. ‘I’ve got the professional training, of course. And when I think what I went through with poor Bill.’

  ‘I meant humiliating for Ma.’ Tom knew he was being foolish, as well as unfeeling. His aunt, too, had had a bad day; and he could not do without her. Yet it seemed important, at the outset of the discussion he knew would follow, to establish Iris as a distinct being; before talk took away her particularity, positioning her as the object of sentences.

  He said, ‘What a terrible shock for you. You’ve been tremendous.’

  ‘Yes, well.’ But her heroism acknowledged, Audrey favoured the version of herself that was selfless and uncomplaining. ‘It’s second nature to me, rendering assistance. Remember when Shona did my personality on the Internet?’ She drew her nephew into the house, ignoring his murmured protest; she had been waiting for this conversation all day.

  A glass-fronted cabinet held a harlequin, a corsair, a ballerina, a drummer boy, a Bo Peep with a crook wreathed in fl owers and a lilac dress bunched up over a sprigged underskirt. Once a week Audrey murmured to small porcelain people of love while holding them face down in soapy water.

  Tom turned the flowered mug in his hands. He couldn’t bring himself to drink another cup of bad coffee. A plump tabby left her cushion by the heater and crossed the room to rub her ears against the visitor’s legs. She sprang up, a warm purring weight.

  Tom thought of how wolfish creatures are tolerant of cold but dislike damp. He tried willing himself to believe that the dog had made his way to the ridge road, and was lying safe, dry, sated, in a trucker’s kitchen. At this minute a woman might be reaching for the phone, while a child read off the number on a tag.

  The picture was overlaid by another: night and bedraggled fur, a thin wind blowing.

  Audrey was given to summary: the review of offences that confirms authority and justifies punishment. Cushioned in crisp chintz, she outlined what she called ‘the situation’. Iris would not venture into the passage alone. ‘What if the heater bursts into flame when I’m out? She’ll be burned to a crisp.’ Audrey had lately begun providing her sister-in-law with dinner as well as lunch, Iris now being capable of no more than tea and toast. ‘And even then, I don’t like to think of her with electricals.’ Audrey knew for a fact that Iris no longer risked the shower, making do with washbasin and facecloth. ‘You have to ask yourself about hygiene.’ It went without saying that Audrey was happy to do what she could; nevertheless, she said it. ‘But I can’t be bound hand and foot.’

  She had a genius, this woman upholstered in rosy fl esh, for conjuring bodily abuse. ‘She’s got her nose out of joint.’ ‘I was running my head into a brick wall.’ Images that recurred, scenes from a censored film, on the bland screen of her talk.

  ‘I told her, I made it clear: If this goes on, you’ll have to go into a home.’ She looked at Tom with small blue eyes, the sapphire chips he had first seen in his father’s face. ‘No one can say I haven’t made it clear.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see my Berber? Ruined.’

  ‘If you could arrange steam-cleaning, I’ll fix you up, of course.’

  But that was too simple an outcome.

  ‘Well, if you think I didn’t do a good enough job on that carpet.’

  ‘Of course not. I could hardly see the stains. Steam-cleaning would get rid of them completely, that’s all.’

  ‘I work my fingers to the bone for your mother.’

  Driving home, his mind glazed with fatigue, Tom thought he should have offered his aunt more money. But for Audrey, money was a subject veiled in elaborate rituals; best approached, like a god, by cautious increment, face down in the dust.

  There was her resentment that Tom should be in a position to offer money. On the other hand, if money was not offered, there was resentment at being taken for granted. And then, there was the question of how much; settled by indirection and insinuation and inspired guesswork, a process strung between accepting the figure named by Audrey and exceeding it by too wide a margin, either error occasioning tightened lips, silences charged with grievance, oblique accusations and small, roundabout acts of revenge.

  The rain had stopped. At a traffic light, Tom lowered his window; a cold breath arrived on his cheek.

  Audrey and he both knew he would rather write cheques than confront the devastation time had worked on his mother; as a man will make donations to charity the better to turn his face from the misery of the world.

  This shared awareness diminished him in all his dealings with his aunt. It was Audrey, after all, who prepared meals and washed clothes, who drove Iris to the doctor and the hairdresser, who arranged for non-slip soles to be attached to shoes, who shopped for chocolate biscuits.

  On Punt Road hill, Tom saw the city laid out before him like a parable. The sky was clear but blank, its lights obscured by electric galaxies. The hubris of it always thrilled him, that jewelled fist raised nightwards in defiance. Age brings increased delight in the natural world; or so tradition holds. But Tom was all for artifice, for the resplendent, doomed contrivances of his ingenious kind.

  Towards morning he snapped awake, his mind on the loose. He drained the glass of water beside his bed; burrowed back down into warmth.

  The dog’s muzzle was scattered with liverish spots, darker than the rest of his fox-red markings.

  Animals do not suffer as we do. They do not live in time, they are not nostalgic for the past, they do not imagine a better future; and so they lack awareness of mortality. They might fear

  death when it is imminent, but they do not dread it as we do.

  So Tom Loxley reasoned, and tried to believe.

  He thought of the stray dogs of India: question-mark tails raised over the lives they witness and endure.

  He thought of the clearing he had seen on the hill, the tyre holding charred wood, the soggy remains of activity, and was visited by brief, lucid images of things that can be done to animals.

  Thursday

  Tom checked the weather for the hills on the Internet: heavy rain with intermittent hail and a gale warning.

  Straightening up, he was conscious of stiffness in the small of his back. As a student, he had worked part-time as a storeman; had set himself to heft cartons with the casual aplomb of the muscled boys beside him. Now he spent too many hours reading, or in front of a computer: the scholar’s hunched existence.

  Palms on the desk, he stretched, relishing the voluptuous ache along his spine.

  He wondered how his mother was faring that morning. Age, he thought. The undistinguished thing.

  Less than a month earlier Osman had said, ‘I’m forty-seven. I won’t die young.’ He had been allowed to go home at the beginning of November, the cancer in remission; although, as he told Tom, the respite would almost certainly be brief. A hospital bed filled the living room, where chairs had been pushed against walls and a new flat-screen TV set up on the sideboard.

  ‘My welcome home present,’ said the effigy on the bed. ‘We watch DVDs. I can’t read any more. And who can bear the news? This election they will win for leaving people to drown.’ He looked at Tom. ‘Tell me a poem.’

  ‘Yet might your glassy prison seem / A place where joy is known, / Where golden flash and silver gleam / Have meanings of their own.’

  When Osman closed his eyes, the curve of the ball was prominent under the lid. Cancer had made him thin-skinned. His face was in the process of being replaced by a skull, an ancestor stepping forward to claim him. Yet his ability to bring ease into a room remained.

  Afterwards, he sai
d, ‘So many poems. How come you know so many old poems?’

  It was a question he had asked before, but the medication had made him forgetful. So Tom told him again about evenings with anthologies; seeing a vein-blue binding in Arthur’s hand. ‘My father taught me to read a poem aloud, and repeat it line by line. You learn without noticing that way.’

  Tom could still hear entire poems in Arthur’s voice; a good voice, clear and unaffected. Arthur Loxley had been an indiscriminate reader. He had pages of Keats and Browning and Hardy by heart; also much his son would learn to call third rate. In resentful moods, Tom saw his mind as an attic crammed with an incongruent jumble. Groping for treasure, he was just as likely to come up with a gimcrack oddment.

  Nevertheless, what had stuck was delight in words arranged well.

  On a chair wedged between bed and bookcase, he said, ‘Even the Gatling jammed and the colonel dead is a lesson in rhetoric.’

  ‘You know, a thing that astonishes me. How quickly poetry has slipped from the culture. I mean what lives in memory. The remembering of poems: a collective inheritance, vanished.’ Osman shifted, trying to raise himself against his pillows. Tom sensed Brendon, squeezed in beside him, grow tense; watched love fight itself down to grant its beloved the dignity of struggle. ‘I have seen this happen in my lifetime,’ Osman went on. ‘In democracies, with no dictators to burn books. So many centuries of poems, and then-’

  He looked at Tom. ‘There are people when I say this who think, how come this Turk lectures us about poetry?’ His eyes were black olives, now and then still shiny.

  On his way out, Tom came to a halt in front of a picture. ‘It’s one of Nelly’s.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s from last year’s show.’ Brendon said, ‘I’ve only just got round to having it framed.’

  The image had the depth and richness of painting. You had to look closer to see it was a photograph. Then you realised it was both: a photograph of a painting.

  ‘The way the paint’s laid on, you can see it even in a photo. Nelly can get these really amazing effects with brushwork.’ Brendon’s hand moved out to an abacus of railway tracks depicted at the blue hinge of evening. ‘It really gets to me, you know. I can’t bear to think of her destroying work like this.