The Lost Dog

by Michelle De Kretser

  ‘There you are.’ Posner spoke with a trace of impatience, as if Tom had been slow to answer a summons. ‘Bloody awful weather.’

  He thrust a crumpled black wing at Tom and glided past. There was an odour of damp cloth from the umbrella; nothing else. Posner had no smell.

  In the living room he said, ‘You’re in the phone book,’ as if it were a breach of taste. Then, without a glance at his surroundings, ‘Quaint little place.’

  Tom heard shoddy and cramped.

  The flat was heated by electric radiators but Posner crossed to the fireplace and stood with his back to the empty hearth. It conjured country weekends; the sense of well-being that comes from killing small animals. Yet Tom realised that his visitor wasn’t altogether at ease. It was the hint of disdain; assured, Posner had set himself to charm.

  The umbrella was a wounded thing dripping between them. Tom said, ‘Whisky?’ and left the room before Posner could reply. When he returned, Posner had shifted to the sofa. He had taken off his leather jacket and sat with one leg cocked, ankle resting on the opposite knee.

  In Posner’s hand the tumbler looked child-size, the tilting liquid calculated and mean. His moon gaze drifted about until he aimed it at the ceiling.

  Tom was thinking of rooms so casually perfect they might have been assembled for the camera; of paintings lining a hall, of polished wood in which a lamp might be reborn as a star. Other images intervened in these remembered frames. Iris’s kitchen cupboards, covered with yellow-fl owered contact paper, hovered above Posner’s mirrored mantelpiece. The vinyl concertina door that separated her living area from her bedroom now barred the access to his stairs.

  Absurd to blame Posner for the contrast. But the net of Tom’s feelings for his mother was not woven with reason. Even as his eye fell on the jacket slung beside Posner, what took shape in his thoughts was Iris’s double-handled vinyl bag. It was an object her son could not see without pain.

  He sat down, and the pale circle turned to him. A black-clad arm unfolded itself along the sofa, confident as a cat. ‘A word seemed in order,’ said Posner.

  He might have been addressing an underperforming minion across a desk.

  In the silence that followed, some echo of his tone must have communicated itself to the dealer. His manner altered. He uncocked his leg, and ran a hand over his silver scalp.‘You’re a literary man, of course.’

  A minute earlier, it would have had the ring of accusation. But Posner had hung out his imitation of a smile. ‘You must know the story of Virginia Woolf ’s marriage?’

  Tom swirled whisky around his glass.

  ‘Her family had no illusions about the severity of her illness. They had witnessed the clawing, the howling, every grubby detail of it. But when Leonard wanted to marry her, the Stephens made light of what he was taking on. The merest sketch. Well, he was a godsend, naturally. Most of all to Vanessa, who’d have been stuck with nursing a madwoman if her sister hadn’t married.’ Posner paused. ‘You know the story?’ he asked again.

  ‘The merest sketch.’

  ‘You can’t help thinking they’d never have had the nerve if they’d been dealing with one of their own. Instead of a Jew-boy from Putney.’

  There crept over Tom the sensation, marvel tinged with awe, that attends the sight of a great painting. It accompanied the realisation that Posner might still pass for a handsome man.

  ‘Of course only a Jew-boy from Putney would have stuck it all those years.’ Posner said, ‘One of my grandmothers was a Jewess. It makes me sensible to the deception.’

  His gaze was very intent. But it was apparent to them both that Tom couldn’t tell what was wanted of him.

  ‘These headaches of Nelly’s.’ There was a light, feline tread to Posner’s words.‘They leave her so very…drained. She doesn’t always recollect the intensity of an episode, you see.’

  Minutes passed.

  At last Tom said, ‘Does she know you go around suggesting she’s mad?’

  ‘Dear boy! Such vehemence! I would speak,’ said Posner,‘of heightened colours. I would speak of broadened effects.’ He patted the sofa beside him. When this failed to draw a response, he pulled his jacket across his lap and ran his fingers over the soft black skin.

  ‘There is such pressure on artists to be contemporary. A loathsome notion, frankly risible. But there it is. Painting, landscape, figuration… In certain not uninfl uential quarters these choices are condemned as inherently old hat.’ Posner sighed. ‘I wonder if you have any idea of the depths of Nelly’s self-doubt. Her fear that her work lacks legitimacy. The intolerable strain. Nelly is a dear, dear friend,’ insisted that thin voice. ‘So marvellous. So moving as well.’

  ‘Don’t forget mad.’

  And still Tom could not be sure that he had understood what Posner had come there to say. He had the impression, fleeting but forceful, of something waiting close at hand, something that might yet twitch loose and tear up the room.

  ‘Tom, such wilful misconstruction…’ But Posner broke off, shaking his large head. He studied the ceiling and said, ‘I knew this would be a painful conversation. I put if off for as long as I could. But I’ve known Nelly a long time. Now and then there comes… someone entirely charming.’ He was folding back the tip of the jacket collar, and folding it back again. ‘Someone who overcomes Nelly’s resolution to avoid excitement. And then-’ Posner let the leather spring free under his fi ngers.

  ‘There are so many aspects to Nelly.’ A white hand lifted, fluttered. ‘There’s a painting by Cézanne: Les Grandes Baigneuses. In the old days I’d go to Philadelphia just to look at it. It’s always reminded me of Nelly. Something about the way the figures melt into and out of each other, so that your perception of them keeps shifting. But out of that flurry of muffl ing and displacement, what emerges is singularity. Oh, it’s brilliant, utterly brilliant,’ said Posner severely, as if the point were in dispute. ‘Also unsettling. And sad.’

  ‘Piss off, Carson.’

  Posner shifted in his seat. His hand brushed the jacket, sliding it from his knees. It might have been accidental. But Tom thought he could see a swelling in the dealer’s crotch.

  He couldn’t have sworn to it. Posner was wearing black, and his body was in shadow. But Tom shifted his gaze at once. And said, ‘Tell me: have you shared your opinion of his mother with Rory? Not that I imagine he gives a fuck about you anyway.’

  He was intent on cruelty. But was unprepared for the stillness that came over Posner’s face, rendering the eyes twin caverns in that pallid waste.

  He thought, My God, he really loves him.

  By the time Posner left it had stopped raining. In his study, Tom reached for a book.

  It was a massive work, Les Grandes Baigneuses, its scale and the frontality of its handling closer to mural than easel painting. Tom had once written an essay about it. Had traced its precursors, described the way it vitalised the worn grammar of naked women in a rural setting.

  The man leaning over the book had forgotten most of what he had argued.

  What he remembered were the bodies. They fi lled the picture plane: preposterous, lumpish. Nor would they stay still, as Posner had remarked. A woman kneeling at the far right of the canvas was also a striding figure, the torso of one forming the buttocks and legs of the other. Observing this, the mind shimmered between two meanings, as in a dream.

  Tom recognised the hurtling sensation: his sense of the duplicity of images. A trace of nausea-stiffened with excitement-worked in him still. The grotesque treatment of the bodies had the effect of rendering flesh itself inorganic. It was a painting in which something mechanistic grated at the heart.

  But it was the figure facing out who now held Tom’s attention. Or rather, it was the blue line spurting at its groin. He took in heavy breasts, the specific marks of femaleness, and what he was seeing for the first time: a countering, ambiguous penis.

  It was what had passed between him and Posner, Tom knew, that had opened his eyes to that d
oubleness. He thought, It’s a painting about him, not Nelly.

  The phone shrilled him out of sleep.

  ‘Tom, it’s Yelena. Sorry, I-’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s Osman.’ She began to cry. ‘He’s back in hospital.’

  ‘Saint V’s? Give me ten minutes.’

  ‘No, no.’ He heard her gulp; then a loud, snorting sniff. ‘They’re filling him full of morphine. He will be out of it completely. I’m on my way home. Brendon is with him, and Nelly. He wanted you to know.’

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘They are doing tests and so forth in the morning.’ Her voice was quavery again. ‘But it looks like it’s no longer in remission.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Nelly said to say you should still come and get her at the Preserve tomorrow. And, Tom, this is terrible also about-’

  But Yelena couldn’t go on.

  Monday

  Into Tom’s waking thoughts came fear, those he loved in the world withdrawing from him one by one. The future had the shape of a corridor, empty of everything but time.

  He thought of his mother surrounded by shit. Was excrement part of the world or part of the body? It blurred the distinction between inside and outside. Among the things it offended against was the human need for order.

  There was a man Tom remembered from India, one of casteless thousands assigned to work with shit. When the sewer in a local tenement clogged, this man lowered himself into the overflowing cesspit, feeling for and removing the obstruction with his toes. He was the humblest of beings and he was charged with transgressive magic. If the Indian dread of contamination was at work, so was a wider taboo. The opposite of what is seen is obscene. The cess man embodied the return of the private and unsightly to public view.

  Thus Tom’s musings rolled about his mother. Was unrestrained shitting the symptom of a deeper unravelling? Language defines humans; and, Faeces are like words, thought Tom sleepily, they both come out of bodies. It carried the irrational, illuminating force of an utterance heard in a dream.

  His mind, slipping about, fastened on a terror at once sharper and more manageable. He was afraid his book would never be published. Its premises struck him as ridiculous, its conclusions absurd. He brought his knees to his chest and moaned. He had wasted years on work drained of movement and intelligence. A single sentence in James contained more brilliant breadth.

  He moved in and out of sleep. Posner’s sombre mass was in the room; at cuff and collar, waxen fl esh gleamed. What had prompted his visit? Tom cupped his groin, a morning reflex. The blind moved and a rectangle of light shuddered on his wall. An ogre lurching and groaning down the street brought him wide awake, to the accompaniment of running footsteps and slammed bins. Someone shouted, ‘That was my good yellow T-shirt, dickhead.’

  Now it seemed plain to Tom that Posner’s insinuations were a hook baited with slime. There are so many aspects to Nelly. The prick’ll say anything to get me away from her, show me he’s on my side, thought Tom. It was for him, he decided, with a small luxurious shiver, that Posner had come.

  But over breakfast he found himself gnawing at another scene. Some weeks earlier, he had arrived at the Preserve just as Rory was leaving with a friend. Consequently Tom entered the building unannounced.

  The door to Nelly’s studio stood open; a light shone within. Tom followed the corridor, past the fictitious curtained door, to her threshold, and there he remained. What he saw in those few moments would leave its print forever, although it was in no sense shocking or even irregular. Nelly was sprawled on a curious seat she favoured, not long enough for a couch but wider than a chair: a chaise courte as it were, a distinctive, unyielding contrivance of lacy wood and hard velvet. Beside it loomed the monolith of Posner, his silver skull inclined towards Nelly. He might have been a doctor, listening in his dark jacket. He might have been a courtier attending the levée of a queen.

  The tilt of Posner’s head hid his face. But a halogen lamp held Nelly in its beam, and the watcher in the doorway saw that she was scratching the side of her head; one hand casually frenzied in her hair, her expression calm with an underglaze of satisfaction. The next instant her aspect altered, as her eyes turned towards the door. And Posner turned also, and the tableau broke up and recomposed itself like a pattern viewed in a child’s optical toy.

  Nevertheless, Tom was left with an impression. He had observed those two often enough, and in an assortment of contexts; had watched them argue, share a private quip, treat each other with unceremonious disdain. But the stillness of the scene in the studio lent it a force that animation obscured. It stripped sociability from Nelly and Posner’s bond, which showed old and iron. That was scarcely a revelation. Yet Tom retained a sense of having come upon something uncovered.

  There was surprise in the faces they turned to him; also a hint of alarm. Replaying the episode, freezing each of its elements, Tom could see that his silent apparition might well have been disquieting. And, the first moment past, the occupants of the room showed no sign of discomfi ture. Nelly greeted him with her usual ease. Posner gave vent to the piping salutations of a large white bat.

  Yet Tom couldn’t excise the memory of their communion. It hadn’t escaped him-although he had missed the precise moment-that in his presence Nelly had ceased clawing at her scalp. Yet that simple, unhindered act had struck no discord in the scene with Posner. Turning the incident over, Tom kept reverting to Nelly’s expression. The ruminant, private pleasure it projected was suggestive equally of the easing of an irritation or the maturation of a design. Whenever he felt he was on the verge of decoding it, a shadow intruded on his vision: Posner bent in command or supplication over that self-suffi cient face.

  Tom gathered up what he needed for work, and went into the Monday morning street. Outside the blond-brick fl ats across the way, a straggle-locked wizard in velvet slippers and belted gown was keeping watch over a gathering of empty wheelie bins.

  The previous evening, Sunday parking had obliged Tom to leave his car at the far end of the street. It stood beyond a row of thin white trees belled with silver nuts. Rain and the advent of summer had conspired to put on concertos sustained by the blue notes of hydrangeas. Behind low wooden fences, the native thrived beside the exotic, there was a scribble of rose in a fig tree, the tropics flourished about the Mediterranean. In these unassuming plots, a nation realised its grandest dream.

  Tom thought,… to look at things in bloom, / Fifty springs are little room. But more than Osman would be granted.

  When spring came, the city had loosened into blossom. On Tom and Nelly’s walks the wind might have been honed on a strop, but the scent of jasmine swelled from bluestone-paved lanes designed for the passage of nightsoil. The football clamour from the MCG was louder now, attendance and passion waxing as the Grand Final approached. Giant toddlers could be seen queuing outside the stadium: wrapped in shapeless, fleecy garments, attached to polystyrene feeding cups.

  Tom told Nelly about the headline he had seen soon after arriving in Australia: ‘Pies Murder Lions’. For days it had caused him despair. He was a child at home in words. That too was to be taken from him in this place.

  Enlightenment arrived with a conversation overheard while he hung about the locker room at recess, trying to appear solitary by choice. Magpies, Swans, Lions, Demons were not, after all, escapees from a fabulous bestiary but the names by which the city’s football teams were affectionately known. So began the incident’s passage into comedy, where it was now firmly lodged; the mocking of former terrors being one way in which we travesty our younger selves.

  Nelly swooped at a gleam underfoot, then displayed the golden coin she had retrieved. It was astonishing how often she found money in the street, fifty cents, a five-dollar note, a twenty.

  Once she picked up a small plastic fi sh. ‘Remember when these first appeared? Four, five years ago?’

  Suddenly she had begun seeing them everywhere, Nelly said. The little f
ish were multitudinous. They lay in gutters, on footpaths, in car parks, on the beach, tiny fish with tapering faces. She had picked one up and unscrewed its red snout. Traces of dark liquid were visible in its scaled belly; its scent was briny. She wondered what purpose it might serve.

  The riddle rolled in her mind, until at last she supposed that each fish had contained a single dose of newfangled fish-food. Nelly pictured an aquarium, and the bodies of fi sh darting to the thin, nutritive stream dispersing in their pond of glass.

  It was a source of amazement to her, said Nelly, that so many of her fellow citizens had taken to keeping fi sh. She imagined people carrying home plastic bags of water and coloured fish, and pausing to feed the fish on the way; and inadvertently, because spellbound by iridescent life, letting the container of fi sh-food fall.

  Then one day she bought takeaway sushi; opened the paper bag and found a plastic fish inside, filled with soy sauce. ‘I felt like a total idiot.’

  But Tom was charmed by Nelly’s theory of sober men and women deflected from duty by the antics of fish. And there was the fact that she had noticed the discarded containers in the first place. She had a tremendous capacity for appreciating the world’s detail. Textures, colours, the casual disposition of forms were striking to Nelly, extra-ordinary. To spend time with her was to wander through a cabinet of curiosities. She remarked on a shoe jutting like a snout from a hollow high in a tree. Tom realised that the objects she hoarded were symptomatic of a more profound desire: to drag moments of perception from the grey ooze of oblivion.

  When he was an old man, he would still remember a table-tennis ball he had seen in Nelly’s company, a sterile egg lying in the weedy rubbish under a nineteenth-century arch. He would remember a terrace opposite an elevated railway line where lighted carriages shot past bedroom windows like a ribbon of film. He would remember Nelly in her red jacket on a bridge, entranced by a city assembled in its river.

  She owned a selection of glass slides intended for a magic lantern, five coloured views of European cities and one of Millet’s Gleaners. From time to time Nelly would bring out a slide and suspend it in front of a window, so that a diminutive Grand Canal or Brandenburg Gate was a luminous presence in the Preserve. When the sun was at the right slant a replica of the little cityscape would appear on the opposite wall, a light-painting that hovered there briefly, then vanished.