The Lost Dog

by Michelle De Kretser

  ‘Not at all,’ said Posner, although Tom had not apologised. He spread his hands. ‘It exerts such a pull. I feel it myself.’

  He came up close to Tom. Who was conscious, unexpectedly, of Posner’s appeal; of the calm that would follow submission to that pearl-glazed mass. He could offer up the gift of himself, and Posner would keep him safe in his pocket. He would take him out now and then and polish him on his sleeve.

  ‘I mean, just look at it.’ Posner’s hand rested on Tom’s shoulder, urging him gently around. ‘I think, I think, what makes it extraordinary is the way it risks sentimentality. How it doesn’t shy away from sheer gorgeousness. The way she’s laid on that paint. And this.’ His finger hovered above a rectangle of gold and burnt orange. ‘The whole thing’s such a huge risk. And she confronts it and makes use of it. Subordinates it to a larger design, like this scrap of Chinese paper. It’s an exorcism, in a way. It looks something dangerous in the face and accepts it. Controls it. And you think, How absolutely fucking marvellous.’

  His fingers tightened a little on Tom’s shoulder.‘Would you like to touch it?’ His mouth approached Tom’s ear. ‘Touch it, if you like,’ breathed Posner.

  After dinner, Tom assembled clothes, food, the equipment he had bought that afternoon. He checked his list again, aware that he was not entirely sober. He had begun drinking as soon as he had got home, and had kept it up more or less all evening.

  He added a tube of Beroccas to his overnight bag.

  It was his habit to try for private truthfulness. He paused in his preparations to acknowledge that what disturbed him most-more than his sense that Posner had anticipated the entire episode, more than his flustered, schoolboyish retreat- was the flicker of acquiescence Posner had drawn from him.

  A champagne-bright afternoon in winter; the blank interval that July during which Tom had sworn off Nelly.

  In a paddock by the river, where a post measured fl oods in imperial feet, he unclipped the dog’s lead. A giant metal man stood sentry over the place, one of a series of pylons striding beside the freeway. But there were also eucalypts and wattles deep in waving grasses, or leaning over the water. To leave the bike path for the leafy corridor that dipped into the paddock was like returning to a scene almost forgotten.

  The dog vanished over a bank; reappeared eventually with damp paws. He never went out of his depth, but stood in the sluggish current even in the coldest weather, attentive to ducks. Sometimes a dog on the far side of the river made him bark.

  Time passed. Shadows stretched over the beaten tin surface of the water. The sun was easing itself earthwards with the caution of an old, exhausted animal. In the yawning sky, which was still full of light, a dark path opened and lengthened. It was the city’s daily visitation from horror. The bats streamed up from the botanic gardens, following the river’s chill road to the orchards waiting in the east.

  Tom walked back into the baroque ruins of a sunset, rose and gold curds whipped up in a Roman dream. It was a city that put on wonderful skies. He thought of a cloudscape in one of Nelly’s pictures: oyster-grey puffs blown over a yellow bed.

  Up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour / Of silk-sack clouds! Then he remembered believing, as a very young child, that the sun and the clouds followed wherever he walked.

  A voice from a hedged garden hissed, ‘You’ve had every opportunity.’ But when Tom turned his head, there was no one there.

  Without having intended to, he found he had deviated from his course and was in the vicinity of the Preserve. He began to fantasise about turning a corner and coming face to face with Nelly. This flight of imagination was so persuasive that the smell of her entered his nostrils. He saw her hand, emerging from its padded red sleeve, in the dog’s fur, and noticed what had escaped his attention until then: a tiny corkcoloured blemish between her thumb and index fi nger.

  He came to a halt at the junction of two streets, beyond which the bulk of the Preserve detached itself against the darkening sky. The upper storeys could be plainly seen above the surrounding buildings. Nelly’s studio, which lay on the far side, was invisible, but the wall of panes in the central room was a sheet of gold, and Rory’s windows were lined with light.

  The dog clicked to and fro on the corner; he wished to return to his dinner. With the onset of evening, it was very cold. Tom slipped his free hand into his pocket.

  At that moment something pale moved in the shadows above the Preserve. In Tom’s chest a muscle jolted. With that first shock, he took an instinctive step backwards. Then, straining to decode the vision before him, he stood stone-still and peered. Posner was walking on the roof of the Preserve.

  It was where Nelly and the others went to smoke. What business Posner, a non-smoker, had there on an icy evening was not apparent. Then it occurred to Tom that he might not be alone. Nelly might be strolling there, hidden by the parapet, drawing poisonous spice into her lungs, while the dealer regaled her with a witty dissection of the motives of the fi gure shrinking on the pavement below.

  Posner came to a halt, the whey circle of his face directed at Tom. Who told himself that in his dark fleece, at that distance, he was invisible to the watcher on the roof. He mastered an impulse to look away; made himself return that blind gaze. For a frozen passage Posner and he remained motionless, stricken with each other.

  But there was the dog, a patch of light shifting at Tom’s feet. He placed his hand on the furry spine and pressed. The dog sat.

  This obedience so surprised Tom that he glanced down. When he looked up again, Posner had vanished.

  The chill of the street, seeping up through his boots, had entered Tom’s marrow. He shivered, and heard soft growling. The dog’s hackles had risen. There must be a cat somewhere close at hand, crouched in the darkness that had spread like leaves.

  Tom went in and out of rooms in his flat. In the laundry, a blanket-lined basket still held the dog’s smell.

  He found himself flicking through his address book. The dog had belonged to his wife. Tom had picked him out with her from the animals with their noses pressed to the mesh at the shelter; but he was Karen’s birthday present, technically hers.

  The presumption of it struck Tom now: that one should speak of ownership in relation to nerved fl esh.

  He sat on his bed and punched in a series of numbers.

  On the other side of the globe, his wife said,‘Karen Clifford.’ She had retained the crisply professional manner she had honed as a solicitor, crisp professionalism being a quality by which she set great store.

  In those same clear tones, designed to purge conversation of the pungent and ambiguous-to make speech over as communication-she had informed Tom that she was leaving him for a human rights lawyer who had just been appointed to the Hague. ‘Hugh’s doing absolutely vital work for asylum seekers,’ she had announced, with her little characteristic gesture of tucking her hair behind her ears.

  Hugh’s manifest superiority thus established, it was plain she expected her husband to raise no objection.

  With time, as he picked over the rubble of his marriage, Tom Loxley realised that its end repeated its beginning, each having its origin in the erotic coupling of virtue and transgression. Karen was the product of the usual liberal, middle-class upbringing that tolerated Asian immigration while not expecting to encounter it at the altar. The prospect of union with Tom had satisfied both her need to rebel and her social conscience; the same erotic fusion she sought, years later, in adultery sanctified by the pro bono advocacy of Hugh Hopkirk.

  Yet Tom knew he was not blameless in what had failed between them. With hindsight it was obvious enough: a fact as large and plain as a wardrobe.

  A few months after he met Karen, she got pregnant. They had been unlucky: a condom had burst. Neither wavered over their course of action, their dialogue regretful but charged with practicalities. Afterwards, they were sad together; also relieved. They had been sensible. There was the sense of having averted something that had the capacity to engu
lf them. They held hands on the beach at Queenscliff, and what Tom noticed was the unimpeded horizon.

  They spoke of the business of children now and then in the years that followed, prompted by the arrival of other people’s babies; or, as their generation aged, by protracted, harrowing encounters between depleted flesh and biotechnology. Meanwhile, Karen would roll her eyes, telling him of this or that colleague who had chosen ‘the Mummy track’.

  She worked fifty, sixty hours a week, often spending a day and a night and another day at the office. When she was made a partner, they celebrated with five days at a resort in Tahiti. In the airport bar, waiting for their flight home to be called, she looked up from her second vodka tonic. ‘Look: this whole children thing. I just don’t want to go there, OK?’

  Her pale eyes, always very clear, were luminous in her tanned face. Tom was visited by a brief, brutal need to take her to a private place and ram himself into her. A blurred

  voice overhead announced destinations, delays.

  He said, conscious of awkwardness, ‘Of course it’s OK.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Positive. It’s exactly the same for me.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Time passed. Tom witnessed the lives of men and women he had known for years bent into new configurations by the impact of children. He understood, with the brain not the heart, as one understands a syllogism, that paternity might represent an enlargement of experience; to him it seemed dilution. Babies arrived and individual histories thinned, became difficult to distinguish from the great biological tasks. The small parcel of clotted tissue he had helped bring into being rarely crossed his mind; and never as a lost possibility in his marriage.

  It didn’t occur to him to doubt that these things held true for his wife as well.

  Yet a year after she left him she had a child; and then another. A boy and a girl, the right number in the right order. It was all very Karen: perfectionism in everything she undertook. Malicious friends reported on impeccable toddlers, sleep-schooled and potty-trained within months of arriving on earth. There was a rumour that the three-year-old had begun violin lessons.

  It was gossip Tom relished and propagated. At the same time, recognising that Hugh Hopkirk had addressed what he himself had neglected to notice in Karen: an aptitude for love infinitely larger than any caricature concocted from her fl aws.

  It was to that sense of something private and true in the woman who had been his wife that Tom spoke now, across the silence of oceans, telling her what had happened.

  She said, ‘Oh, God. Oh, it’s too horrible.’

  When leaving Tom, she had wept for the dog. Who could not be conveniently transported to the Hague.

  Tom talked of the cold in the hills, the unseasonable spring. Then he spoke of the dog’s strength, his freedom from the diseases of old age. Ending weakly with, ‘I still stick to that diet you came up with for him. Always.’

  It became clear, to him at least, that he was trying to prove he had not fallen short of her standards.

  ‘I’m going back first thing tomorrow. I’ll keep looking. I haven’t given up hope.’

  He massaged his neck, his temples.

  Into the silence Karen said, ‘He must have hanged himself.’ Her voice, which had wavered earlier, was now fi rm. ‘The rope would have got caught up around a tree or something and he’d have gone over the edge of a gully and broken his neck.’

  When Tom didn’t reply, she said,‘It would have been quick. He wouldn’t have suffered.’

  She sounded quite calm; even contented, having found consolation in picturing an animal she had loved dying at the end of a rope.

  The microfish darted through Iris’s mind, flashes of emerald and garnet and iridescent opal. She never thought of the little fish without feeling comforted; even though they had taken away her job as a filing clerk in the department store, where she had been happy, in her pale blue uniform, for four years, splashing out once a week on a hot lunch in the cafeteria, choosing chocolates from the revolving assortment in Confectionery to take home on a Friday. Even now, so many years later, as she sat on the lavatory slow with sleep, the warm, sharp scent of banknotes rising from her pay-packet remained distinct to her.

  Then Mr Parker called everyone together and said the microfish were taking over. Some of the girls began to cry. Mr Parker was a knife-faced man with an infinite capacity for kindness. His pinpoint eyes moistened readily; when the girls clubbed together for a layered sponge on his birthday, for instance. His moustache quivered as he spoke of redundancies throughout Clerical. ‘Length of service doesn’t come into it. My own future’s on the line.’

  Tommy had said that the microfish weren’t fish at all. ‘Christ, Ma, I can’t believe you thought they’d trained fi sh to take over the filing. That’s really dumb.’ He was sixteen, a scornful age. Iris had long forgotten, having in the fi rst place not understood, his impatient explanations. But she could remember the long filing room, with its green-shaded lights and the row of potted plants Mr Parker tended under the high window. It looked to her not unlike an aquarium. And whatever her clever son had to say about microfi sh, Iris had heard from Mr Parker’s own lips that his future was on the line.

  Henceforth she would always picture him perched on a fi ling cabinet, long legs dangling as he hauled in one tiny fi sh after another, filling the green-tinged room with their brilliance.

  Iris grasped her walker and began the process of hauling herself off the lavatory. Pain was a drawn-out shriek in her knees as they straightened.

  Every Sunday she had lunch at Tommy’s, where the toilet seat was lower than her own.Audrey dismissed this as nonsense. ‘There’s a standard measure for everything.’ Iris’s knees knew better.

  Upright at last, she looked down at her hands: two plucked birds welded to her walker. Her rings were buried in fl esh. But the cabochon ruby Arthur had bought for a knockdown price from a fellow who once managed a mine in Burma glowed on her fi nger.

  Her father had taken one look: ‘Glass.’

  Lowering herself onto her bed, Iris sighed. She wriggled her buttocks into position. Swivelled from the waist-slowly, like a tank on manoeuvres-and brought her right leg up, then the left. She reached for the jar beside her bed and began rubbing a herbal cream into the swollen hinges on which verticality depended.

  Her bathroom cabinet contained a mess of half-used tubes and jars. Each had marked a station on a path that shimmered before Iris, promising to lead her from pain.

  Sometimes Iris would listen to late-night talkback when she returned to her bed; sometimes she reached under her pillow for her rosary. Tonight she lay with her eyes closed and listened to the wind, which was breathing among leaves with the sound of the sea. She thought of miracles, of waking to find her knees strong and supple; of hunger satisfi ed with loaves and little fi shes.

  The rain started up its brisk conversation. Standing under a banyan tree, a child looked into an amber mask in the fork of the trunk. A monsoon was crashing in the compound and, ‘Come on,’ shouted Matthew Ho, over the din. ‘Climb up the rain.’

  Iris sucked the end of a ringlet; balanced on her right foot, her left. Then she tucked her drenched skirt into her knickers, hoisted herself skywards and began swarming up the ladder of rain.

  Friday

  Tiny feet fled when Tom entered Nelly’s house. In the kitchen, there was a morse code of mouse shit on the sill, the sink, the table.

  He unpacked the car, then sat on the back step with coffee from his thermos. It was shortly after eight; he had risen at four. His mind brimmed with metal and oncoming lights, with images slippery as speed. He concentrated on the stream of his breathing, trying to absorb the saturated calm of the place. Cattle raised their heavy heads to look at him, then lowered them once more to their table. Magpies drove their beaks into the damp earth.

  The dish of oats he had left by the steps, partly covered with a piece of masonite, was soggy but undisturbed.

  He no
ticed that his ritual magic had taken a variant turn. His latest revisioning of the scene with the wallaby began by Nelly’s water tank, where, instead of fastening a length of orange polypropylene baling twine to the dog’s collar, he merely clipped on his lead. The wallaby crossed in front of them. The dog bounded into the bush. He reappeared shortly afterwards, shamefaced but unrepentant; his lead, too short to tangle with the undergrowth, dragging through the mud.

  The replay was relentless. Tom was learning that disaster is repetitive: animated, yet inert. Offering neither the release of change nor the serenity of detachment, it was merely always there; always terrible.

  His purchases the previous day had included builders’ tape and a pocket knife. Short lengths of bright yellow plastic now flagged his passage through the bush.

  There were fugitive smells: humus, rotting wood, the pungent green tang he had already remarked.

  Tom would call the dog, then listen, straining to hear a whimper, a rustle. But if he was silent and still for too long, he had the impression that something was listening to him. Very quickly, the feeling grew oppressive. It was necessary to keep moving, keep shouting.

  Then he saw it: close to the ground, a patch of white. Tom tore and pushed his way through recalcitrant vegetation; came to a standstill at a sack that had once contained superphosphate.

  The rain held off all morning, then fell in sheets.

  The road from the hills coiled tightly down through forest to the highway. For four or five clenched minutes Tom was tailgated by a truck, until the road widened sufficiently for him to pull over. The monster ground its way past, horn blasting. The air shook. Tom crouched in his car, rain and his heart drumming, and saw the cargo of dead trees rock as the truck took the bend. To his left, the abyss inches from his wheels held the towering calm of mountain ash.

  The logging traffic had pocked the road into potholes. A second truck with its consignment of giant pencils passed Tom further down the hill. Water swooshed over his windscreen. Friday afternoon: drivers racing to meet their quotas at the sawmill.