The Lost Dog

by Michelle De Kretser

  He glanced covertly at Nelly sitting there beside him on the couch enmeshed in the detail of living: examining a chipped thumbnail, nibbling it, frowning at the result. It was an effort to reconcile the woman he knew, sunk in dailiness, with the Nelly who had existed so thoroughly in the larger-than-life events of Atwood’s disappearance.

  There was a girl who had been around at parties and clubs when Tom was twenty. She was no older, but seemed stereoscopic: she had starred in a film that had won a prize, her face, smilingly assured below a rakish hat, gazed out from billboards. Then she vanished, summoned by Berlin or LA; and Tom forgot her, until the day, years later, when he and his wife bought a pair of sheets in a department store. On the down escalator, Karen said, ‘You didn’t twig, did you? That was Jo Hutton who served us.’

  For days Tom was unable to evict her from his thoughts, the saleswoman he had barely noticed as she bleated of thread-counts; within minutes of turning away, he would have failed to recognise her if she had materialised before him. While the transaction was being processed, he had grumbled casually to his wife about the time their train had spent in the Jolimont shunting yards before delivering them to Flinders Street. The saleswoman looked up: ‘The exact same thing happened to me this morning. Doesn’t it drive you mad?’ Then she confi ded that this was her last day at the city store: she had been transferred to a branch in the suburbs. ‘I live a fi ve-minute drive away. I can’t wait to be shot of public transport.’ She handed Tom a pen and a credit card slip, and shook the two gold bangles on her wrist as he signed: a small, unconscious expression of glee at her victory over time and the railways.

  Tom tried to picture the girl in the tilted fedora pausing long enough to fret about train timetables, but found the challenge too strenuous.

  Now, sitting with Nelly in the draughty kitchen, he thought it was an error to equate authenticity with even tones. Existence was inseparable from tragedy and adventure, horror and romance; realism’s quiet hue derived from a blend of dramatic elements, as a child pressing together bright strands of plasticine creates a drab sphere.

  Thus Tom reasoned; but some vital component of the case continued to elude him. That other Nelly remained a stranger to this one, just as he had not succeeded in matching the two Jo Huttons with each other. The images were not quite congruent, and this was as disconcerting as if a tracing were to lift away from its original and show its own distinctive form.

  She said, ‘I’ll sleep here,’ patting the couch.

  ‘No need.’ To spell it out, Tom might have added. Instead: ‘I can bunk down in the small room.’

  ‘It’s warmer here. I prefer it.’

  Three feet of corded upholstery can assume the dimensions of a continent. Wind tugged at the house. A log shifted and collapsed on the fi re.

  Tuesday

  It was still raining on Tuesday morning. Nelly turned left onto the ridge road, away from the coast. She had offered to drive, saying she knew the roads better than Tom did.

  They meandered about the valley, Nelly steering smoothly around its curves. She had an affinity with engines. Tom recalled seeing her outside the Preserve, her round hands busy with a fan-belt under the hood of Yelena’s Beetle. The dog had been by his side that afternoon. It seemed a long time ago.

  A cemetery with iron gates came into view. Tom thought of the grinning dead in their filthy sheets. On waking he had found a sentence in his mind: Today it is a week. He felt the force of it again now, the days piling up, each a fresh clod tamped down over hope. A date over which so many Novembers had flowed without interruption had become an anniversary. Time was thickening around it. He thought of it waiting for him each year.

  There was the warm, companionable space of the car. Beyond it, sodden pastures and the sky. Tom scuttled between inside and outside, leaving rain-spotted flyers in letterboxes; every third or fourth farm used a milk can.

  It was sharp, slanted rain, a shower of arrows loosed by an archaic battalion.

  There were bursts of untuneful humming from Nelly. Then she remarked on the gleam that potatoes have when freshly dug from the earth.

  There would come a day, thought Tom, when he looked back on this one and was envious: because she was there, beside him. His fears for the dog, the news about Osman, everything that at present loomed large would dwindle to a speck on memory’s horizon. What remained would be the fl oodlit, ecstatic fact of her presence.

  At least he had a photograph of her. Mogs, having turned up at the Preserve in Posner’s retinue one evening, in due course demonstrated a Japanese camera-‘Isn’t it brilliant!’- that shot out Polaroids no larger than a stamp. The results passed from hand to hand. It was easy to palm the image Tom wanted: Nelly turning towards the camera, snapped before her expression could settle. There was an edge of paisley sleeve in the foreground. Tom thought it belonged to Osman but wasn’t sure.

  He would have liked to carry the miniature in his wallet but feared it being seen. Instead he kept it in a drawer, slotted between the pages of a square-ruled notebook. It was a form of insurance; a material vestige of Nelly to set against the fi ckleness of memory. He saw himself in years to come, extracting it from the dimness of his desk. Projecting himself through time, he discovered that he was already moved; affected in advance by that trace of her presence caught in waves of light.

  None of it would come to pass. In one of those enigmatic conjuring tricks effected by objects, the Polaroid would vanish within a few months. Tom would turn out his desk; grasp the notebook by its spine and shake, thumb its pages a hundred times. But one day, when years had passed and his need had long withered, he would open a book and discover the photograph within it.

  What was strange was that this volume, the collected poems of Christina Rossetti, belonged to his wife. Tom had his own copy somewhere, but this one, a handsome, jacketed edition, was hers. He checked the flyleaf to make sure: For Becky, Happy Christmas 1992, Love always, Granny.

  On a forested back road, there was a flash of fur in the bush.

  Nelly said, ‘Felix hit a wallaby once, have I said?’

  Tom shook his head.

  ‘There was nothing he could’ve done, it came fl ying out when he was taking that curve near Jack’s gate. It wasn’t dead. We just stood there, looking at its eyes, with Rory bawling in the car. I went to get Jack but he was out in the paddocks. So I left Rory with Denise’s mum, and Denise came back with me, and put Jack’s gun against the wallaby’s head and shot it. This tall, skinny teenager, right, and so collected. We go back to the farm and next thing she’s handing round these pumpkin scones she’s just baked.’

  Nelly said, ‘She was sort of amazing in those days, Denise.’

  They bought coffee from a shop that served a deserted campsite. Nelly drove on to a spot where they could pull off the bitumen. Mountain ash rose before them, superb and desolate. The forest was chilling in the way of ancient landscapes, evoking human insignificance. It suggested aeons; vegetable time. This was how the planet had looked before the advent of their kind.

  Riddled with time, it was a scene easily emptied of history. The Edenic new world: an image to set against European sophistication and decadence. Tom was unable to contemplate it with equanimity. He said something along these lines to Nelly.

  ‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’ She lowered her window; lit one of her spiced cigarettes. ‘The whole wilderness thing’s so loaded in this country. Landscape without figures: we don’t like thinking how that came about.’

  It was not that Tom disagreed. But the forest disturbed him in a way that far exceeded the merely historical. It was wild and latent and old. It addressed an aspect of his nature that had endured, whatever victories cultivation knew elsewhere.

  Clove-scented smoke rolled about. Nelly, shooing it away, said she had cut back to five cigarettes a day. ‘But I’ve got to give up, really. They’re hardly the best thing for migraine.’

  ‘Is that what they are, your headaches?’

  She didn’
t reply at once. Then she glanced at Tom sideways. ‘I’m painting again.’

  ‘Yeah? That’s great.’

  ‘I seem to get ill more when I’m working. That’s one reason I put off starting.’ Nelly said, ‘I know a headache’s on the way when I start seeing these shapes like doughnuts. With light where the hole should be.’ Her fi ngers fluttered beside her left eye. ‘Also I get these, like, flickers of gold. And the air goes sort of brittle. Like tiny glass wings.’

  Something about the gesture, these remarks, the way her eyes slipped away. For a moment, it was as if a stranger had entered the car and was sitting beside Tom. A prickle ran over his scalp.

  On their way back, as they were passing a cluster of naked sheep, Nelly said, ‘When Jack’s father was a child none of this land had been cleared. It was still one of the wonders of the world.’

  Later: ‘They have such small arms. Wallabies.’

  On a windy blue evening in October, when they were walking past a broad-fronted house near Tom’s flat, Nelly spoke of the elderly immigrant who had lived there. He had sold the house and returned to Greece so that his life might loop to a close as it had begun, on a rock in the Aegean.

  On another occasion, she halted before a rickety cottage. ‘That’s Dulcie’s place. She’s in a home now. She used to have these azaleas on her verandah that she watered every morning from a china hot water bottle.’

  Nelly talked of the children who had once overfl owed these hushed streets. ‘Even when I first moved to the Preserve you still saw kids all over the place, walking to school, playing cricket in the street. They’ve gone now. People with children can’t afford to live here any more.’

  There was an evening when she stopped in front of a townhouse. ‘See that driveway? There used to be freesias there, the kind with the fabulous smell, before they pulled the old place down. I think of them every spring, trying to push through the concrete. Like a hundred little murders.’

  Talk like this ran counter to Tom’s sense of his surroundings. The city as he experienced it was glassily new. That was its allure. In Mangalore, when he walked down a street his neighbours had beheld Sebastian who begat Iris who begat Thomas. He trailed genealogies. The air around him swarmed with incident and knowledge, faces that had turned to bone shimmered at his shoulder. In Australia, he was free-fl oating. Architecture expressed the difference in material form, the bricks and beaten earth of childhood exchanged for superstructures of glass and airy steel. At night they turned into giant motherboards, alive with circuitry: advance screenings of the electronic future.

  Nelly’s version of the city was a palimpsest. A ruin. It was layered like memory.

  Tom thought of history mummifi ed and dismembered in the official memorials scattered through the streets; and how effortlessly Nelly conjured the living slither of time.

  She pointed to the digital clock perched on the Nylex Plastics sign, and said that as a child on family outings, she had watched eagerly for it to appear on the skyline. ‘I wanted to be the fi rst one in the car to read out the time.’

  Tom had noticed that the clock, glittering on top of the Cremorne silos, turned up now and then in her work. He was affected by Nelly’s remark, recalling the potency of urban signs in his own childhood. He could remember the streaming, neon enchantment of an advertisement for Bata shoes that had fl ashed out at intervals on the side of a building in Mangalore: the utter blackness he feared might last forever, the thrill as each bright letter took shape again, the twinkling, magical whole.

  Then there was Stick No Bills. Learning to read, he had deciphered it as Strike On Bells; had felt intense satisfaction whenever he saw the stencilled exhortation. It spoke to him of solemn undertakings and powerful, invisible allies, the kind of message in which fairy tales abound: direct yet riddling, a test of resourcefulness.

  The Nylex clock drew him closer in spirit to that small girl peering through a car window. At the same time, Nelly’s remark underlined one of their essential differences. To possess a city fully it is necessary to have known it as a child, for children bring their private cartographies to the mapping of public spaces. The chart of Tom’s secret emblems was differently plotted. Oceans separated him from the sites featured on it. A block of flats unevenly distempered pink at a junction in India still materialised in his dreams. But the city in which he now lived remained opaque to him. Like a tourist who has memorised a street plan, he navigated by artifice. His gaze stopped at surfaces; slipped off façades that had never been penetrated by his childish imaginings.

  Little by little, Tom’s thinking about Nelly’s work gathered itself around the skipping girl sign. Although, in this connection, thinking was at once too precise and too restrictive a term. What he divined in the skipping girl was a constellation of impressions, metaphors, quicksilver glints.

  She led Tom to the wild objects: his shorthand for things Nelly depicted that had outlived their purpose or evolved a new one. They included an ancient pillarbox, graffi tied and plastered with posters, lurking in the shade of the shining mailbox that had superseded it. There were the windchimes made from splayds that dangled in a window in a once-industrial street; the CDs strung from the arms of a scarecrow in a housing estate allotment, the leatherette rocker recliner positioned beside a Smokers Please bin at the rear of a discount electrical goods warehouse.

  These images reminded Tom of a toy he had owned when very young, a waxy slate he would cover with childish scribbles. When he lifted the plastic sheet on top, the marks disappeared, magically expunged. Yet here and there on the clean overlay the faint imprint of his hand’s labour could still be discerned. The toy, which had enchanted him, afforded three pleasures: inscription, erasure and remembering. It was concerned, like Nelly’s work, with what was discarded and ephemeral yet caught in the tatters of memory.

  The wild objects suggested that time deals unkindly with things. They spoke to Tom of that period between nostalgia and novelty which contained objects once the height of fashion and now out of date. From time to time one or two would wander into the saga of the present (the CDs, the reclining chair…): untimely apparitions, humble fragments from the wreck of modernity. No longer new but not yet antique, they were merely old-fashioned; hence in poor taste.

  These tiny punctures in the now-scape of the present allowed the past entry into Nelly’s images. No one looks twice at a disused pillarbox or old cutlery, thought Tom. But such things were infected with historical memory. Former emblems of progress and style, they functioned as memento mori of the endless rage for the new.

  The skipping girl’s programmed rope had traced that frenzy in lights. In place of remembrance, it offered repetition. The skipping girl was as dazzling as novelty and, like it, going nowhere. Now, without her neon, she had the air of a sad revenant; a lifeless trace of history.

  Over time, it was that sadness that caught at Tom. He found himself intensely moved by a photograph that showed the outlines of vanished rooms on a wall where the end house had been demolished in a terrace. There were days when he thrust Nelly’s photographs out of sight. Things illuminated, seen and surrendered to darkness: he was not always capable of looking at them with composure.

  One day, when they were alone at the Preserve, he said as much to Brendon. Who listened, then led Tom to the room Nelly used for storage. There, he opened a cupboard. It contained a jumble of hardware and plastic flexes. Tom saw a sage-green dial telephone and a cream one. A slide projector. A boxy beige Mac Plus. A Betamax video recorder. A contraption with a built-in keyboard that Brendon identified as a Kaypro.

  Brendon drew out a cumbersome black clock radio. ‘Remember these? With numbers that click over?’ He glanced around. ‘She’s got a black-and-white portable telly somewhere.’

  ‘But what’s it all doing here?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  Tom said, ‘Outdated stuff.’

  ‘Not just stuff. Outdated technology: the most dated stuff in the world. Not so long out of date, either
. Stuff people aren’t yet nostalgic about. Stuff you can’t give away.’

  The little room was icy. Tom, turning a rubber-banded sheaf of 51⁄4-inch floppy disks in his hands, saw the fl esh pimple along his arms. Brendon noticed too: ‘It’s modernity. Walking over your grave.’

  They stood by the place where the dog had disappeared. It was Nelly who had spotted it: a three-toed print set in the bank. ‘That’ll be the wallaby.’

  The rain had stopped, but Nelly, reaching for a handhold among the bushes, set off a small deluge. She hauled herself up, feet scrabbling. Crouched at the top of the bank, she peered into the bush. ‘I can get a little way, I think.’

  Soon they were pushing along through undergrowth that kept bouncing back in their faces. Nelly said, ‘If you could lift me up. To try to get a better view.’

  She rose past Tom’s face, disconcertingly solid. He had Nelly Zhang in his arms and couldn’t wait to be rid of her.

  He heard her cooee off to his right. It was an unsettling call, syllables that straddled word and sound; an eerie trace of the real and imaginary vanishings in which Australian folk legend abounded, a mythology whose richness betrayed the fragility of European confidence in this place.

  Tom never heard it without thinking of a picture that had hung in his first classroom in Australia: a small girl in a landscape of yellow grass and tall, splotched gums, the pretty wild-flowers that had led her astray still clutched in her pinafore. Light folded her in its cloth of gold, and drew a veil across the distant foliage that blocked her escape. She wept in her shining prison: lost in Australia, a predicament the Indian boy had understood at once.

  The plan was to cross the hill from south to north. They had started out on parallel tracks about twenty feet apart but Nelly now sounded further away.

  Tom came to a log-ridden gully. Halfway down, he knew he couldn’t get any further. He called to the dog. To Nelly.