The Lost Dog

by Michelle De Kretser

  The gallery lights came up, and were lowered once more. Again the images shone out. Fireworks burst over an illuminated palace, lanterns glowed beside water and were answered by a scatter of stars. Tom and Nelly stared and stared. They were twenty-first century people, accustomed to digital imaging and computer simulation and all manner of modern enchantments. They stood before the antique miracle of light, transfixed with wonder.

  Searching for a corkscrew at the Preserve, Tom opened a drawer and found it full of silky folds. He shook out scarf after scarf, musty souvenirs printed with banksias and trams, marsupials and modernist skylines. Nelly said she had picked them up in op shops, collected them over years.

  She had boxes of postcards and photographs, and a collapsing Edwardian scrapbook with seraphim and posies of forget-me-nots peeling from its pages. A large blue envelope, rescued from a dumpster, contained three X-rays of a scoliotic spine. There was also a plastic sleeve stuffed with stamps; a relic, Nelly said, from student days when she had made jewellery with a friend. She fished out one of their efforts: a Czechoslovakian deerhound, a tiny stamp-picture encased in clear resin and hung from a silken cord.

  Nelly owned tin trays painted with advertisements for beer, and a little grubby brick of swap cards. She had a bowl of souvenir ballpoints bought for her by travelling friends. Within a window set in each barrel, an image glided up and down: the Guard changing at Buckingham Palace, the chorus line cancanning at the Moulin Rouge.

  Many of these objects were damaged, the scarves stained, the tin surfaces scratched. Watching Tom draw his fi nger along the creases sectioning a photo, Nelly said, ‘It’s stuff people were throwing away. I got it for nothing, mostly.’

  That was no doubt true. At the same time, he sensed a deadpan teasing: her cut-price instinct dangled in his face. And beyond the self-guying, something deeper and more characteristic still: an impulse to salvage what had been marked for oblivion. An It-girl peddling Foster’s, the tottering, cotton-reel stack of a stranger’s vertebrae, an archangel with upcast eyes and a faint reek of glue: nothing was too trivial to snatch from the flow of time.

  A shelf in Nelly’s studio held a modest array of view-ware, ashtrays, coasters, small dishes that might hold trinkets or sweets. Made of clear glass, each had a handtinted photograph embedded in its base: the war memorial at Ballarat, Frankston beach in summer, Hanging Rock, and so on.

  These kitsch little objects fascinated Tom. He found an excuse to handle them. It was partly that their unnatural hues and thick glass glaze turned the commonplace images dreamily surreal. They were also faintly sinister. Their creepiness was intrinsic to the sway they exercised, these miniature honourings of national icons and fresh air and the healthy bodies of white nuclear families. And then, the view-ware drew on the magic of all collections. Redeemed from mere utility, its coasters and dishes were multiple yet individual. They were as serial as money and partook of its abstraction.

  They exceeded the world of things. They erased labour, seeming to have been magicked into existence. Tom found himself fighting down an impulse to steal one.

  In the township in the country, he left flyers at the supermarket; also at the newsagent’s-cum-post office, the town hall, the hardware store. The only bank he could find had been made over into a phone shop; but the owner of the Thai takeaway, having studied a flyer, took ten for the perspex menu holder on his counter.

  The receptionist at the health centre said, ‘Is that the dog Denise was talking about?’ She took a pile of flyers for the waiting room, and tacked one onto a noticeboard, beside a poster depicting an engorged blue-red heart with severed blood vessels.‘He’ll turn up when he’s ready, love. My granddad used to tell this story how he got lost in the bush one night when he was first married? So he tied his hanky round his dog’s neck and just followed it home.’

  The bakery had tables by the window. A woman with ropy brown hair caught at the nape of her neck was forking a cavity in a small emerald breast topped with a pink sugar nipple.

  Denise Corrigan said, ‘Steer clear of the coffee. But these are a whole lot better than they look.’

  Tom bought a cup of tea and a cinnamon scroll at the counter. When he returned to Denise, she had picked up a fl yer. ‘Lovely dog.’

  He nodded, looking past her at rain falling in an empty street. He did not wish to be undone by kindness.

  ‘Dad and I had a look around, evening before last. Walked the tracks and that. Dad went back again yesterday.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I wish we’d found him.’ She set down her fork. ‘How’s your mum?’

  ‘Fine. Thanks.’ He gestured. ‘I don’t know how much longer for.’

  ‘Does she live on her own?’

  He explained, briefly. ‘My aunt’s been very good. But she’s getting on herself now. It’s all a bit much for her.’

  ‘Do you have brothers or sisters?’ When he shook his head, ‘It’s hard being the only one.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I’ve got a sister. In New Zealand. It’s funny: I always wanted to get away. Jen was the one who loved the farm, life on the land and that. But she ended up marrying a Kiwi and now she’s bringing up three kids on a quarter-acre block in Napier.’

  She told Tom she had worked in Papua New Guinea and Darwin after finishing her training. ‘But then Mum died-’ She paused. ‘Dad was doing OK. But I don’t know, there was something so not OK about the way he was OK. He rang me one time and asked how you make what he called “proper mash”. This was, like, two, three years after Mum died, and all that time he’d been boiling potatoes and just smashing them with a spoon.’ She looked at Tom. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of him alone at that table where there used to be the four of us, eating his smashed potatoes and trying to figure out what was wrong. So I came back. And then I got married, and Dad’s really glad of Mick’s help, though he’d never admit it.’

  She picked up her cup, peered into it, set it down again. ‘How does your mum feel about going into a nursing home?’

  ‘How do you think?’

  She flushed a little. ‘They’re not all bad. I’ve seen people who were struggling at home really improve when they went into care. Just getting balanced meals is a huge boost. You don’t know how many old people live on, like, tea and bread and jam.’ Then she stopped. Said, after a few moments, in a different tone, ‘Yeah, you’re right. They’re places for when you’ve given up hope.’

  Tom thought that few people would have abandoned a line of defence with her ready grace. And that in different circumstances, he might have welcomed her into his bed.

  He realised that this last notion had come to him because Nelly had been in his mind all day. The radio alarm had shaken him from a dream permeated with images of her, which had dissolved on the instant but left the filmy residue of her presence.

  Some flicker of his thoughts communicated itself to Denise. Who said, ‘So what’s the latest on Nelly? Still living with that guy Carson?’

  There was something avid in her speckled eyes. Tom had not yet learned to anticipate the hunger Nelly provoked; her contaminated glamour.

  From a panel van parked up the street a voice cried, ‘Got this huge fucken tray of fucken T-bones for seven bucks.’

  Tom watched two children jump down a flight of steps, each carrying a cotton bag angular with the shapes of books. Denise had provided directions to the logging company’s offi ce on a road that looped around the back of the town. But he remained at the kerb, behind the wheel of his car, reluctant to leave such comfort as was on offer, the domesticity of iced cakes and library books.

  He was thinking of his mother; of the dog; of Osman, in whom death was advancing cell by cell. He felt malevolence gathering force and drawing closer. The children crossed the street, hooded figures from a tale. Life would set them impossible tasks; straw and spinning wheels waited. Tom crossed his fingers and wished them luck: lives reckoned on the blank pages of history. And thought of a night in Sept
ember when Nelly and he had sat contented in a pub, until people began to gather in front of the TV mounted on the wall at the other end of the bar.

  It was their faces that had drawn him: uplifted and calm as churchgoers.

  When they parted, Nelly said, ‘Everything changes when Americans fall from the sky.’

  As a child, Tom was accustomed to thinking of himself as rich. The Loxleys, no strangers to invisible darning and the last crucial pass of the knife that scrapes the excess butter from a slice of bread, were nevertheless not poor; not as one is poor in India, roofl ess, filthy, starved, diseased. There was a Protestant hymn Arthur sang when he was drunk, compounding offences. The rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate. Beneath his ancestors’ vaulted ceilings, with cracked marble underfoot, it was plain to Tom where he stood.

  In Australia everything was reversed. The Loxleys were poor. Tom learned this early, his cousin Shona losing no time in pointing out what he lacked: his own room, a tank top, Twister, a bean bag, a poster of The Partridge Family. Yet within a few short weeks the boy had amassed possessions undreamed of in austere India, dozens of cheap, amusing objects, iron-on smileys, plastic figurines, a rainbow of felt-tip pens. A three-minute walk took him to a cornucopia known as a milk bar that disgorged Life Savers, bubble gum, Coke, ice-creams, chocolate bars, potato chips in astonishing fl avours. Among the novelties on offer in the land of plenty was food designed to give pleasure to children.

  Nothing in Tom’s experience had prepared him for the beckoning display of so much that was both unnecessary and irresistible. Long before he encountered theories of capitalism and commodity production, he had grasped that things- desiring and acquiring and discarding them-were the life- blood of his new world.

  Against that cascade of pretty baubles stood India: the name itself shorthand for privation.

  Tom Loxley counted himself lucky to have escaped into abundance. It was a plenitude he measured in possessions at first; but he soon sensed that it exceeded the material. At school he met children from countries whose names he barely recognised. He looked up Chile in the encyclopaedia; Hungary, Yugoslavia, Taiwan. An impression came to him of standing in a great public square, hemmed by severe buildings, where all kinds of people came for work or amusement. It was a place of wonder and dread. The boy was jostled; sometimes he lost his bearings. But he glimpsed the promise of enlargement in that huge, variegated fl ow.

  The real city was a grey and brown place sectioned by a grid of chilling winds. From time to time, when he should have been at school, Tom wandered its ruled streets: King, William; Queen, Elizabeth. Within a familiar history he was fi nding his place in a new geography. Sometimes he thought, No one in the whole world knows where I am.

  It was his father’s journey in reverse, a flight into modernity.

  And still Tom would never be able to shake off the notion that the West was a childish place, where life was based on elaborate play. Reality was the old, serious world he had known when he was young, where there were not enough toys to deflect attention from the gravity of existence and extinction.

  When Tom’s father died, his mother decided-took it into her head, in Audrey’s phrase-that the calamity had to be communicated at once to a decrepit uncle in Madras. Tom was placed in charge of the telephone call, a procedure which, in those days, assumed the dimensions of a diplomatic mission, with its attendant panoply of intermediaries, uncertain outcomes and fabulous expenditure.

  The operator said, ‘Go ahead, Australia,’ and went off the line. Tom pressed the receiver against his ear, in readiness for the old man’s papery tones. But the ink-black instrument transmitted only a steady, inhuman whisper that fl ared now and then into a ragged crackle.

  The fault was remedied; a death passed over oceans. But what lodged in the boy’s private mythology was what he had been permitted to hear: the underground mutter of large, disagreeable truths that could be ignored but not evaded.

  Twenty-nine Septembers later, he would join a crowd enthralled by images in time to see the second plane drill into the tower. Nelly came up to stand beside him but Tom barely noticed her. He was remembering a flawed connection; the patient rage of history in his ear.

  The logging company furnished its lobby in nylon and vinyl. A pink girl with mauve eyelids bent her head over Tom’s fl yer, biting her lip. The word Joy had been engraved in plastic and pinned to her breast.

  On the wood-veneer counter a glass held water and the kind of flowers plucked over fences: daisies, fat fuchsias, coral and scarlet geraniums; blooms of passage. Tom noted this modest expression of the human and natural against synthetic odds.

  ‘If you leave me a stack, I’ll make sure they get to the drivers.’ Her face was a clear oval under her centre parting. It gave her a stately air, but Tom guessed she was not yet twenty. She had the expectant gaze of those who still believe there must be more to life than other people have settled for.

  She consulted the sheet of paper again.‘Jasper’s Hill. There’s some funny stuff goes on round there.’

  Tom waited.

  ‘My brother’s a ranger? He’s got all these stories. Like people have these dope plantations hidden away up there? And there was this bloke from interstate, drove his car into the bush and shot himself. The loggers found what was left twenty years later.’ Her voice was matter-of-fact, and Tom saw that this child had taken the measure of her world and neither esteemed nor trivialised it.

  When he was at the door she said, ‘I hope your dog turns up safe. I really do.’

  He had bought two refill cartridges for Nelly’s butane stove. Stirring a takeaway green curry on it that evening, Tom was absurdly cheered; the dread he had felt earlier in the day dispersed by the sense that he had taken action in distributing the fl yers.

  He ate straight from the pan, relishing fl avours and aromatic steam, musing on smell as the sensory sign of a transition. Odour marked the passage from the pure to the putrid, from the raw to the cooked; from inside to outside the body.

  Tom’s own scent was patrilineal. Its varnished wood with a bass note of cumin was one of the traces Arthur Loxley had left in the world. Even now, so many years after Arthur had died, Tom sometimes buried his face in the clothes he took off at the end of a day. By his odour, he knew himself his father’s son.

  When he woke, in the downy warmth of his sleeping bag, the room was hushed. He directed his torch at his watch: a few minutes past midnight.

  He was certain something had woken him. The previous week, the dog had slept at the foot of the bed. Now, alone at night, Tom was conscious of the unpeopled woods and pastures about him. It was a country in which the old ideal of rural solitude had been bought with violence; and some hint of this lingered in the most tranquil setting, converting calm itself into an indictment.

  He went outside and saw that the night was fine, the sky glittering with fierce southern constellations. When he came in he was careful to bolt the door.

  Saturday

  Tom would select a point on a track, mark it with tape and walk into the bush. It was like trying to pass through a living wall. Ferns and vines swayed up from the murk of gullies. Fine scratches covered the backs of his hands.

  There were rustlings and tickings, the inhuman sounds of the bush. The great blue forests of Australia were walked by strangers and ghosts. People like the Feeneys did not much go in for entering them on foot. It was an unvoiced taboo: the ancient human respect for wooded places, strengthened by memories of a time when the only people who trod these paths were blacks or fugitive convicts.

  Flies settled on Tom’s lids. The bush was full of light. In a north ern forest, vegetable density would have brought gloom. Here light dropped straight down past vertical leaves. There was the discon certing impression of being both trapped and exposed.

  Mountain ash, clear-felled and rejected, rotted in the hollows where they had been herded by machines. Five or six years earlier the hill had been replanted with blue gums, chosen for the rapi
dity of their growth. Their puny forms were still struggling for supremacy over the undergrowth; an outbreak of mean skirmishes arising from a great defeat.

  Felix Atwood had bought the house on the hill from Jack three years before he disappeared. It stood on land that had been selected late, the topography and weather deterring all but dirt-poor optimists; which is to say the Irish. Built in 1920 by a man called McDermot, the old farmhouse was testimony to the hardscrabble of his life.

  Half a century later, his grandson gave up. Machinery and stock were sold; the house and its vertical acres to Jack Feeney. The McDermots moved to a town where a power station was hiring.

  Framed photographs in Nelly’s kitchen taken at the time her husband bought the house showed rotting boards, a sagging chimney. Even in a picture from the 1950s, when the McDermots were still living there, the house had a desolate look. A flat garment pegged to a rope in the background was suggestive of fl aying.

  Looking at these images, Tom understood the attraction of a brown suburban box with its own generator.

  Jack agisted beef cattle in Nelly’s paddock, clearing it of blackberries and ragwort in return, and keeping an eye on the property. Nelly would go up to the house for a week or so at a stretch; and in the milder seasons, friends were persuaded to rent it for brief periods. But in that comfortless place, the hard winters were harder. And bad summers threatened fire: a red beast rampaging over the forested hills.

  The Feeneys had stored sheepskins in the house. When the rooms were first repainted, the sharp animal smell disappeared, said Nelly. Then it returned to stay.

  On his third or fourth visit to the library’s archives, Tom learned that the police had re-interviewed Mrs Atwood in the light of Jimmy Morgan’s evidence. The photograph that showed her shouting at the camera coincided with this development. It was at this stage of the story, too, that conscientious citizens began writing to the papers urging Nelly’s arrest: You’ve only got to look at her to know it was all her idea. Nelly Atwood failed the first universal test of womanliness, which is to appear meek. She failed the fi rst Australian test of virtue, which is to appear ordinary. Intangibles such as these, operating with a subterranean force unavailable to mere evidence, bound her to the figure Morgan had seen among the ti-tree.