The Lost Dog

by Michelle De Kretser

  Tom ate breakfast while loading clothes into the machine. Then he scattered the contents of drawers, searching for a photograph.

  Meanwhile, his mind busied itself with this production: he was making his way down the farm track with the dog snuffling ahead on his rope when a wallaby flashed out from the bush. The dog sprang forward. But Tom kept his grip on the rope, using both hands to wind it in. The dog twisted, barking furiously. They walked on.

  He had begun sketching in this scenario within hours of losing the dog. Each replay introduced a detail: his shoulder wrenching as the dog lunged forward, his skidding half-steps in the mud before he mastered the animal. An ancient corner of Tom’s brain insisted that if he could bring suffi cient intensity of imagination to this sequence, it would in fact be true.

  At eight he began calling animal shelters. ‘Hang in there, mate,’ said a ranger. Tom put the phone down, and found tears prickling his lids.

  There was an odd spaciousness to the morning: a dreamlike drawing out of time. At some point he realised it came from not having to walk the dog.

  The campus jacarandas were staining concrete pathways blue. Exams were over; deserted courtyards and empty corridors lent the university a shifty, malingering air.

  Tom settled down in his office to read a late essay from his seminar on the modern novel. ‘It was Henry James’s ambition to break with melodrama and romance and establish himself as the master of the new psychological novel. Discuss with reference to at least two works by James.’

  This had elicited the following response:‘Henry James failed completely in his ambition to be a modern writer. For example he invented point of view but could not always rise above omniscience. His problems are demonstrated in his last work called The Sense of the Past. There are the implications of the title. Furthermore the novelist provides many juxtapositions of melodrama in the text, ie when Ralph, a modern character because he is American visits a family house in London (old world) that is haunted. A ghost is one of the most well known symbols of romantic discourse. Similarly the protagonist travels back in time and meets his ancestors who are dead. Time-travel is a modern device (for the time), however-’

  But Vernon Pillai was rolling through the door. ‘Thomas, Thomas, how I have missed you. No one to scuttle with, claw in ragged claw.’

  Vernon was a small circle balanced on a large one; an anomalous black snowman. He wheeled hither and thither, turning his round head sideways to decipher a spine, picking up letters and perusing them with frank interest. He tapped a photocopied article lying on Tom’s desk. ‘Have you read this?’

  ‘Not yet. Have you?’

  ‘Terrible. But short.’ Then Vernon pointed to a mug beside the computer. ‘That is a disgusting object.’

  It was the survivor of a set of four once presented by Iris to Karen. Tom had felt the shame of it when the wrapping paper came away: his gleaming, expensive girl with a lapful of supermarket china. His agitation was accompanied by a fi erce protective surge. If his wife were to betray, by word or sign, what she must think of the gift, he would have no choice but to leave her.

  Karen’s impeccable manners brought her safely through the peril, as manners are designed to do. But the mugs remained in a cupboard. Iris, visiting some months later, enquired after them, choosing a moment when she was alone with her son. Her little finger, with its salmon-painted nail, flew like a fl ag from the handle of a cobalt-rimmed cup. They had lunched off the same service, a wedding present from Karen’s godparents.

  Tom said, ‘The mugs are great. But I needed some at work and Karen said I could have them. So now at last I can offer people a coffee in my offi ce.’

  He saw Iris’s satisfaction in picturing his clever friends sipping from her mugs. Whatever she gave his wife was in any case an indirect offering to her son.

  And so her gift ended up in Tom’s office. The mugs were patterned with white hearts on a red ground, or the reverse. Three quickly broke or vanished. The last persisted, with the stubbornness of the unwanted. Time scoured the hearts closest to its rim, leaving a row of pinkish smears. Recently the mug had acquired a chip. Stained with coffee, it was indeed sordid. Tom was helpless before it.

  Vernon inserted his plump buttocks into the most comfortable chair and scrutinised Tom. ‘Where have you been darkly loitering?’

  ‘I took a couple of days off to work on-’

  ‘That will do.’ Vernon held up a startlingly pink palm. ‘I have students to bore me. You were due back yesterday, I believe.’

  ‘My dog ran off into the bush. I went looking for him.’

  Vernon considered this briefly, testing it like a loose tooth. ‘I am very fond of animals,’ he announced. ‘I intend to eat many, many more before I die.’ He hoisted one foot, encased in a tiny, shiny shoe, onto the opposite knee. ‘Now let us give ourselves over to scurrilous reflections on our fellow inmates. Who is your preferred candidate for the lectureship? I am in favour of the Lacanian from Rotterdam who would like to live in Australia because of our beautiful horses.’

  ‘Oh, Christ.’

  ‘Thomas, you deep cretin.’ Vernon removed his spectacles and dangled them by an earpiece, always a sign he was enjoying himself. ‘You had forgotten that we’re to produce a shortlist by Monday.’

  ‘Can I get out of it? Are there lots of applications?’

  ‘No, you cannot. And yes, indeed. Including a distinguished professor who’s published extensively on James.’

  ‘Run along and research something lovely, Vernon.’

  Tom finished marking the essay on James, dropped a faculty directive about Strategic Learning Outcomes into his recycling bin, wrote a scholarship reference for one of his postgraduates.

  Among the many messages in his Inbox from strangers offering to extend his penis was an email from a student protesting her exam results. ‘How am I supposed to get into Law if I get a 2B in Textual Studies?’

  He ran off a copy of the flyer he had mocked up at home. The photograph reproduced well, picking up the dog’s markings and the feathering along his legs. Tom ran off forty more; but even as he did, was conscious of plaintive notices passed with barely a glance as they peeled from lamp-posts. Have you seen Angel? That one, with its smudged image of a cat, had caught his eye just the previous week. He remembered also: Missing blue heeler (mainly red). At the time, he had smiled.

  At a shelter for lost dogs, a woman said, ‘So let me get this straight. Your dog… disappears into the bush… right?… with twenty feet of rope… you’ve tied to his collar.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t deserve an animal.’ She hung up.

  One of the maddening things about Nelly was that she didn’t have a phone. She could give the impression of existing in a fold of time. Walking to the Preserve to see her that winter, Tom was transported to India; to that era in his life when talk meant looking into a human face. His dealings with Nelly often uncovered these souvenirs of the past, little lumps impeding the smooth flow of time.

  It was not that she was anachronistic. Nelly was open to youth, novelty, the stir of their times. She was only two months younger than Tom, but in her company he was often conscious of having lived forty years in another century. She used words not yet codified in dictionaries. It was from her that he fi rst heard of MP3 files; of memory sticks. There was also her casual familiarity with new kinds of music, the CDs Rory and Yelena burned for her, their threeway conversations about the bands playing the Corner Hotel.

  Once he had seen Nelly absorbed in a game on someone’s laptop, moving about on her seat in excitement, little splashes of coloured screen light reflected now and then on her face. She was technological, thought Tom. And then, more potent than any sign, was his sense that, as an artist, she inhabited the modern age, the age of the image, while he was marooned in words.

  At some point in the previous decade consumption had turned gluttonous. There was more stuff around. More people were buying it. Democracy had become a giant factory outle
t. It was as if endless wealth had been converted by a malicious spell into endless want. Sometimes, late on a weekend afternoon, Tom would head to a café on Bridge Road. People crowded the pavements, shopping gathering up all classes and kinds in its dreamy pull. Isolated, spotlighted, displayed in glass niches, everyday objects took on fetishistic power, a vase or a pair of shoes acquiring the aura once enjoyed by religious icons. Such things could mean whatever people needed. They were repositories of dreams. Over espresso and the papers, Tom observed the spending that made the getting bearable: a last high-kicking performance on the public stage before the curtain of work came down.

  Early one Sunday he went fossicking with Nelly at the fl ea market in Camberwell. There was a purposeful air to her, signalled by the black bag worked with yellow daisies carried over her arm. She avoided the professional dealers; lingered among the offerings of stallholders who had turned out their cupboards so they could go shopping again.

  Strolling along packed aisles, Tom marvelled at the ease with which articles changed status, transmuted by the alchemy of desire. The flea market was a resting place for the debris piling up behind the whirlwind of the new. Wishes were its currency. Their force might resurrect objects no longer animated by collective yearning. A turquoise and black dress with shoulder pads, Jim Reeves’s Greatest Hits on vinyl, a brown-glazed biscuit jar sealed with a cork, a Smith-Corona typewriter in a pale-blue, rigid plastic case: Tom saw each of these leavings pounced on. Invested with fresh, private meaning, they passed once more into the treasure albums of someone’s mind.

  At a bookstall there were volumes Tom could scarcely bring himself to touch: liberated from libraries, they displayed their violet stamps and yellow stains like prisoners exhibiting proofs of torture. A pile of comics looked more inviting. He fl icked through them, and saw Huckleberry Hound and Top Cat take flight, forgotten comrades spinning up from the pillows where he had lain with measles; as if memory were one of those little flip books that need only correct handling to bring their trapped images to life.

  Nelly bought a pair of fingerless gloves, an openwork cardigan threaded with lurex, a handtinted panoramic postcard of the lake at Mount Gambier. Tom bought her a hot jam doughnut and a pot of pink hyacinths.

  She negotiated with stallholders: ‘Would you take four for it?’ ‘Any chance you could make it two-fifty?’ He looked away from these scenes, ashamed for her. He always paid whatever was asked, not wishing to appear typically Asian.

  From a tray that held a clutter of brooches, single earrings and broken chains, she drew a strand of greeny-blue plastic pearls. It lacked a clasp and cost fi fty cents.

  They had arrived, at her insistence, by seven. When they were leaving she said, ‘If we’d come early, we’d have got the real bargains.’

  Not long afterwards, Yelena arrived at the Preserve wearing Nelly’s necklace over pale cinnamon wool. Against that setting, it turned extraordinary: the pearls glowing, other-worldly.

  Tom could hear his father: They are better than stars or water, / Better than voices of winds that sing, / Better than any man’s fair daughter, / Your green glass beads on a silver ring.

  The girl noticed Tom noticing; slipped her fi ngers under the necklace and held it up. ‘Isn’t it gorgeous? My birthday present from Nelly.’

  Why not? Nelly had restrung the necklace, fitted it with a new catch. The gift was enriched with her labour. Tom was reminded again of childhood: of bazaar handkerchiefs embellished with lace or stitched monograms in the weeks leading up to Christmas; of birthday greetings fashioned from images cut from hoarded foreign cards and glued to coloured cardboard with flour-and-water paste. Such things were more than links in a disaffected chain of production and consumption. They bore a human tang.

  All the same, he thought, She spent fifty cents on Yelena.

  It was Nelly’s habit to roam the streets of their suburb after dinner, padded against the weather in her scarlet parka. On a June evening when a southerly carried the memory of icebergs, she had coaxed Tom out with her. It became their usual way of being together.

  In invisible gardens on the hill, pale camellias were the ghosts of girls locked out after balls. There was the wintry fragrance of daphne; and once-but they could never fi nd it again-a scented drift of violets escaping through pickets. Each dark street climbing west climaxed in a peepshow of a radiant city.

  In Victoria Street they bought rice-paper rolls from a man with exquisite hands. A soft-bellied god smiled over joss sticks and golden mandarins. The public housing towers showed scattered patterns of light: the concrete punch cards of a superseded technology.

  A girl going past said, ‘Forgiveness is really important. I forgive myself all the time now.’ Tom and Nelly shunned the narrow pavements, sauntering down the middle of the street, as people will.

  Window displays drew them with the theatricality of lightdefined space. A stage in Swan Street was a favourite. For weeks it held nothing but a backdrop of translucent cloth, ivory striped with gold. It floated and shimmered, a stream, a veil. It was sacred and profane. It was almost not there. It was lively with the magic of money.

  From this temple they would cross to a discount department store. Here sly comedies were enacted. Bald mannequins clad in cheap, belted raincoats thrust suggestive hips at passersby. A boy in pyjamas straddled a man’s thigh, offering him a power tool for Father’s Day. Two women who appeared to be laden from a shopping spree at the store were discovered, on closer inspection, to be bag ladies in gaping sneakers and clothes held together with pins. Everything on display looked trumpery. That was the crack through which parody made its entrance, mocking the shoddiness of all such enchantments.

  Between the river and the railway lines lay a semi-industrial zone where lights were few. Streets that began with auto repair shops and small foundries ended in yards packed tight with vegetables and vines. There were herbs planted in old paint tins, ashtrays on verandah tables, rusty bed frames, palings crooked as bad dentistry.

  They passed an electricity substation and an overgrown quarry. Late cars zipped by on the freeway. Mists crept up from the river. Sometimes there were fireworks staggering about the sky.

  When his wife left him, Tom moved to this inner suburb because it was one of the few he could afford on his own.

  In that hellish interval when the humiliation of Karen’s choice was a blade endlessly drawn across his soul, he had a singular stroke of luck, buying his flat just weeks before the property boom doubled its value.

  It was a neighbourhood on the way up. The butcher had taken to stocking free-range eggs. The doctors no longer bulk-billed. Wooden plantation blinds were replacing cutwork nylon in windows. Tibetan prayer-fl ags fluttered across verandahs; neighbours fell out over parking for their four-wheel drives. Pubs that had featured topless waitresses now offered trivia nights and wood-fired pizza. It was easier to buy a latte than a litre of milk. The roomy weatherboard places on the big corner blocks were coming down; townhouses were going up. There were fewer lemon trees and more roof gardens. Construction sites gave off the odour of cement dust and prodigious money to be made. Vistas ended in angled cranes, colossal needles knitting up the future.

  The marvellous city built by gold and wool had once voided its filth in these parts. The sweet-watered river of the early days of settlement had been swiftly converted into a reeking flow. A sludge of cheap housing appeared, row after row of wooden cottages: so many fl imsy coffins in which to bury the ambition of another century’s poor. It was the kind of suburb where people had lived in tiny buildings and worked in huge ones. Tanneries set up beside the river; later, factories. They were symbols of a great metropolis, signs that the colonial city was no longer raw material but an up-to-the-minute artefact.

  Now the echoing shells of these industrial molluscs promised Prestigious River Frontage; or what one copywriter called An Envious Lifestyle. The riverside path had taken on rural airs, with poplars and gums and unruly willows. Men and women sweated doggedly al
ong its length, or lunched on terraces overlooking the water. Wealth was inserting itself into this newly fashionable terrain, as decoration accrues on a renovated façade.

  In the course of their walks, Nelly and Tom noticed that some shop fronts displayed a commemorative plaque. ‘William Merton, bootmaker, conducted business on this site in 1899.’ ‘Alice Corbett ran a bakery here in 1920.’ The memorials were puzzling in their arbitrariness, offering no indication why these places, dates and citizens had been singled out. Tom discerned the willed creation of a sense of the past: a municipal mythmaking. It produced the inscriptions in parks that signalled a site pregnant with meaning for the people who had lived here first: a tree where corroborees had been held, or one whose bark had served to fashion boats. Cloaked in virtuous intention, these signs functioned insidiously. They displaced history with heritage, plastering over trauma with a picturesque frieze. A spectator might have their detail by heart and no inkling of the chasm that separated bark canoes and William Merton, bootmaker.

  The unofficial past flared more vividly, illuminated in matchlit glimpses. Tom and Nelly paused before roadside shrines dedicated to lives that had ended violently: makeshift memorials composed from soft toys and plastic fl owers. There were dates, photographs, greeting cards on which the ink had blurred. Each shrine was a little gash in the illusion of continuity. Propped against walls or fastened to poles, what they proclaimed was the terrible fact of rupture.

  Nelly talked of people in cities needing to find places that seemed to speak to them privately; places that detached themselves, like spots of time, from unmemorable surrounds.

  They discovered they were both drawn to a convent school that stood beside a traffic-choked intersection a few miles to the north. Stiff pine trees lined its high perimeter wall. Painted white, an arcaded verandah on the upper floor glimmered in the apertures between dark branches.