The Lost Dog

by Michelle De Kretser

  He followed his yellow tapes back to the path and found her waiting for him. She said, ‘The gully’s too deep here. We should try further up, where it peters out.’ There were scratches on her hands, and on one side of her face.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ he asked

  ‘What smell?’

  They sniffed. ‘There. I keep smelling it.’

  ‘Native mint bush.’

  She snapped off a leafy stalk and passed it to him. The clouds parted. ‘The sun,’ they said, together.

  Every time they set out again, Tom felt a little surge of hope. After about an hour his spirits sagged.

  He checked his watch and saw that all of twenty-eight minutes had passed.

  Sometimes he called the dog’s name backwards. To shake things up a little.

  ‘What sort of knot was it?’

  He told her. Added, ‘It won’t work free.’

  They were sitting by the side of the track on their jackets, eating apples. Tom said,‘There’s all this folklore to do with knots.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Knots are supposed to contain power that can be used for good or evil. It’s called maleficium. There’s a long history of people attributing magical powers to knots. The Romans believed that a wound would heal more quickly if the dressing was bound with a Hercules knot, which was their name for a reef knot.’

  Nelly ate apples core and all. She twirled the stem of this one in her fingers before letting it drop.

  ‘In Scandinavia the name Knut used to be given to boys whose parents already had as many children as they wanted. People believed that even the word for knot was powerful enough to prevent another pregnancy.’ Tom said,‘You wouldn’t think that’d survive too much reality, would you?’

  ‘I don’t know, they probably lucked out more often than not. A woman who had as many kids as she wanted would’ve most likely been older. Less fertile.’ Nelly had produced a pencil and was unfolding her map.

  Flies sizzled past Tom’s face. Somehow he began talking about Iris. Not the detail; he found himself unable to use the words mother and shit in relation to each other. But that he feared she wouldn’t be able to go on living on her own. ‘My aunt says it’s time she went into a home. And she’s probably right. But of course Ma hates the idea. She starts crying every time the subject comes up.’

  He added, ‘It’s not like all nursing homes are terrible. I’ve offered to drive her around, find a place she likes. But she won’t even think about it.’

  In this way he established Iris’s irrationality, and his willingness to do everything that might reasonably be expected of him.

  Nelly had stopped drawing. She asked, ‘So what does she want to do?’

  Tom was about to say, She wants to stay where she is, of course. But knowledge that had remained hidden within him, so that he had been able to ignore its tenancy, chose that moment to emerge into the light.

  ‘She’d never ask. But she’d like to live with me.’

  He waited for Nelly to assure him that it was reasonable for the old to be sent away from their families into the care of strangers.

  He waited for her to say what any reasonable person would say; what he himself had said to friends beleaguered by the needs of elderly parents. But that’s crazy. You have your own life to lead.

  Nelly said, ‘Is that possible?’

  Tom saw his books dispersed, his study transformed into a lair. He saw pillowslips stained with hair dye, and loose Strepsils turning sticky in a drawer. He saw his mother in a big pink chair in the sunroom, her flesh warming, the blurry nimbus of her perm.

  ‘Not really.’ He got to his feet. ‘I can’t imagine it.’

  Migration had entailed so many changes that years went by before Tom remarked a decisive one: in Australia he was no longer the child of the house. The obvious displacement in space had obscured a more subtle dislocation in time. The shift, facilitated by his father’s death, was sealed by the proximity of his young cousin, Shona. She was a large, dull child, lightly spotted with malice; their relations were wary but amicable.

  That first Christmas, eating roast turkey at Audrey’s table, Tom saw his uncle pluck the wishbone from the ruins of the bird. Automatically, he put out his hand. No one noticed, because attention was focused on nine-year-old Shona, who screwed her eyes shut, grasped the other end of the greasy bone and pulled. Tom’s gaze shot to his mother, but Iris was saying, ‘Tell, darling, did you make a nice wish?’ The boy pretended to be reaching for the gravy.

  Not long afterwards, and in quick succession, he was displaying symptoms of diseases evaded in disease-ridden India. Measles, chicken pox: the classic illnesses of childhood. It was a simple ruse and it failed. His mother had to go out to work. Tom was told to be a big boy; tucked up and left for the day, with TV, a thermos of Heinz soup and a stack of Shona’s old comics for cheer. Outside the window mynahs called into the huge Australian silence.

  After he recovered the second time, Tom remained healthy for years. There was no one to look after him; the message had been received. But it was couched in cipher. What remained vivid from that Christmas was the recollection of looking across the centrepiece of plastic fir cones and seeing his mother speaking with her mouth full. The sight of food that was neither inside nor outside the body, food that had broken down into an indistinct, glutinous mass, was disgusting: an Australian rule clever Tom Loxley had absorbed. He would believe it was the reason he flinched from the memory of that meal. The wishbone he had not been offered vanished under a slime of mashed fowl.

  Consider the great cunning of the operation. It enabled the boy to transfer his gaffe to his mother. It demonstrated that he knew better than she did; that in the antipodes their roles were reversed. It aroused his pity. Crucially, it shielded him from pain.

  But it was not foolproof. Hurt thrust deep festers slowly. Time passed, and Iris grew frail, and what Tom could not bear to grant her was childlike need. A request that he fasten her clothing or cut up her food might provoke a putrid eruption; at best, a spike of rage. It was a disgraceful reaction and he did his best to master it. He eased his mother’s arms into her cardigan and folded a tissue for her sleeve; he wiped her swirled excrement from the floor. With cautious steps, Iris was fi nding her way back to the kingdom of childhood. One of the emotions it aroused in her son was a terrible envy.

  A thin stream of self-pity was decanting itself into Tom. They were climbing the hill for a last foray into the bush, Nelly a few steps ahead.

  ‘It’s nothing like you and Rory,’ he said wordlessly to her back. ‘We don’t talk. It’s not one of those modern relationships.’

  His thoughts slid to Karen’s parents. The Cliffords were as groomed and athletic as the couples featured on billboards for superannuation funds. They played tennis three times a week and jogged around an artifi cial lake every morning. Tom had once watched them power walk down a path in twin designer tracksuits with the wind lifting their silver hair. In their dealings with their children, they deployed a brisk, practical brand of affection. One Christmas, Karen and her sisters had been given copies of their parents’ wills, and invited to choose furniture and other keepsakes from the family home. They were also informed that their parents had inspected a range of what they termed low and high care facilities, and entered into agreements with suitable establishments.‘We don’t want you girls bothered with our lifestyle options.’

  What about deathstyle options, Tom had enquired privately of Karen. ‘Have they given you the go-ahead to switch off the machines?’ He was electric with derision and envy. It was all so sensible; so sanitary. It was emotional hygiene and it was unavailable to him. He was a giant child engulfed by the unfairness of life’s arrangements.

  How was Tom to convey-to Nelly, to anyone-the muffl ed dependencies that weighted his relations with Iris? He was unable to shake off the image of that powder-puff head. His mother’s claim on him was mute, elemental; the animal invitation to feel with.

  When she
had worked as a cleaner, she would tiptoe past Tom before sunrise, her breath pinched so he could sleep undisturbed. At night she went to bed early. Tom sat at the fold-up table in the living room, his books and papers spread before him. His sleeve, moving across a page, produced a soft swishing. Later he lay in bed reading, or watched TV with the sound down. During the unwelcome intimacies imposed by school, by the annexe, he looked forward to these solitary hours.

  Iris had been cleaning offices for a few months when Tom, working through a page of calculus one evening, became aware of a noise that had being going on for some time. He listened. Then he knocked. Then he went in.

  ‘Ma? Ma, what’s wrong?’

  She didn’t answer but went on with her soft keening.

  Tom switched on the bedside lamp. Iris’s eyes were closed but she was plainly not asleep. Again he asked what was wrong; roughly, because he was afraid. Tears went on slipping down

  her face but still she didn’t reply.

  He asked, ‘Do you want Audrey?’

  After a little while, she said that her back hurt. Rather, she said it was paining.

  He corrected her mechanically. But in fact it was he who was mistaken. Her locution, which had struck him as sounding Indian, was not after all geographical but historical. Years later he would come across it in a book of good Edwardian prose.

  He asked, ‘Shall I get an Aspro?’

  When he returned, she was propped up against her pillows.

  Tom said, ‘I can leave school. Get a job. You don’t have to do it.’

  Her mouth was full of water and aspirin but her head shook vigorously.

  Later she said, ‘What’s to be done.’ It was not a question.

  Her gown of quilted pink nylon lay across the bed. Its spiritual twin was suspended on a hanger hooked over the wardrobe door: an unlined grey coat trimmed with fake fur, ready for the morning.

  Other men came up with strategies that rendered their mothers harmless. Neglect was one solution; so was marrying a woman with a capacity for ruthlessness. There was also comedy. There was Vernon, who had reconfigured his mother as a monstrous buffoon. Her prying, her avarice, her vanity, her pile creams, the satisfaction the old despot derived from making children cry: farce drew the poison from it all. Now and then, even as he was laughing, Tom detected a familiar flutter of frustration or despair in Vernon ’s anecdotes; but it twitched uselessly in a web of comic invention.

  Tom had always thought of himself as siding with the defenceless; as most people do, when the risk of personal inconvenience is small. But Iris grated on his sensibilities. He thought of abrasions his soul would endure if they were to live together. There would be questions: where are you going, what time are you coming back, who is that friend of yours? There would be ritual conversations, stupefying banalities. Laugh-tracks crashed through his concentration. His mother inspected the crustless salmon sandwiches he had prepared for her and said, ‘That’s wrong. You’ve cut them wrong.’

  Forebodings rushed to fill the future he might share with her. His best intentions would sour. The example of Audrey was before him. Having risen to the occasion, he would swiftly descend. He heard himself enumerating, for Iris’s edifi cation, the sacrifices her presence entailed, and the virtues he imagined himself to be displaying.

  When he was fourteen, he had turned the corner of a street and seen a figure hesitate at a pedestrian crossing. From the protection of a curved tin awning, he beheld a brassy perm and hectic rouge perched on the body of a slack-bellied sprite. It placed its thumb between its teeth, and peered into the traffi c from the prudent kerb. The gesture brought recognition without dispelling estrangement: the queerest sensation. It was his fi rst glimpse of his mother as left over from another time. He studied her as though she were a page in an anthropological text, taking in the knowledge that she was no longer essential to him.

  At the same time, he was aware of an impulse to dash out diagonally through streaming cars and gather her up in his arms. He would carry her to a place of safety. But where, where?

  The sky was solid Australian blue, lightly laminated with cloud near the horizon. Nelly was waiting for him at the top of the track. Lines from a poem about hope came into Tom’s mind: With that I gave a viall full of tears: / But he a few green eares. He didn’t speak them, for poetry can be alarming. His fi ngers sought and found the leaves crushed in his pocket.

  When the man first appeared, Iris had been afraid. It was true that he was a long way away-beyond grey palings, beyond trees and tiled roofs-and that he did not seem to be coming closer. Still: a man floating in the sky. In all but the most jaded civilisation it was a vision to arouse trepidation and wonder.

  He was large and shiny, with rounded limbs. When the sun was out, as it was that afternoon, his body ran with light. Then he was dazzling; Iris had to look away. Dull skies enabled her to see him whole, golden against his backdrop of lead.

  She was waiting for her electric jug to boil. The teabag and two spoons of sugar were in the mug, the carton of milk was on the counter. This modest state of affairs took time to engineer.

  That was, in its way, a blessing. Time is the great wealth of the elderly, and the spending of it, as with any fortune, poses a quandary.

  The jug was too heavy for Iris to fill directly. She had to position a plastic beaker under the tap, lift it out of the sink when it held a cupful of water, ease it along the counter, then lift it again to tip its contents into the jug. All manner of daily acts called for guile. Iris lived by contrivance. There were gadgets, provided by her son, designed to twist the lids off jars or manipulate taps. Elsewhere she had arrived at her own arrangements, a cord looped over a handle enabling a drawer to slide open, bras renounced in favour of mercifully hookless vests. Certain objects defeated her: buttons, nail clippers. At the hairdresser’s, a hot helmet clamped to her skull, she looked into a mirror and saw a girl draw a rosy brush over a client’s splayed fingers. Iris would have liked a manicure herself, but Audrey could not be kept waiting. There was also the expense.

  When her son was small, he had loved to sit beside her whenever she painted her nails at her dressing table. The instant her little finger was done, Tommy would lean forward, lips pursed. Iris made a fan of her hand. The child blew on her nails, moving his head this way and that. His eyes were turned sideways, to the fi fteen fi ngers fluttering in Iris’s triple mirror. He called it doing butterfl ies: their private game.

  Iris found herself thinking about a nail file she had owned. It was made of silver metal and shaped like a stockinged leg. The rough grain of the stocking’s weave provided a fi ling surface, while the smooth, pointed foot served to clean under nails. This object, once unobtrusively part of her days, had slipped from her mind for years. She couldn’t remember which part of her life it had belonged to, nor imagine what had become of it; why or how their trajectories had diverged.

  In the lavatory, lacking the suppleness required to reach around behind herself, she had devised a method for wiping while holding onto her walking frame and keeping her trousers from collapsing about her ankles. It involved preparing wads of paper in advance. These, when soiled, were placed on her walker until she had adjusted her clothing, twisting her knickers around, and her hands were free to grip the frame and turn herself with it to face the bowl. It was a disgusting practice. But what was Iris to do? It was a question of balance: the need to remain upright measured against animal necessity. Every day on a stage fitted with baby-blue porcelain, she re-enacted civilisation’s elemental struggle.

  Iris had raised the subject of the floating man with Audrey, referring to him with calculated nonchalance as ‘that thing’. Later she sought a second opinion from her son. He confi rmed Audrey’s diagnosis: the man was connected to the car dealership that had opened on the highway. The name of the dealership was written across his chest, Tommy said, while Iris peered through her window. Her sight was much improved since she had had her cataracts done, but the man often had his back to her
and she hadn’t noticed the lettering. He was ‘Like a balloon,’ said Tommy, and offered to drive her past the dealership one day. But he always forgot, making his usual left turn at the Dreamworld showroom instead.

  Iris didn’t mind. Facts may reassure, even convince, and yet fall short of adequacy. Every time she saw the man her sense of his power was renewed. Now and then he disappeared for a day or two, which strengthened her impression that their association was not casual. Distance was integral to it. It was akin to her relations with talkback hosts: an intimacy predicated on detachment. Late afternoon sun, pouring into her kitchen, showed her a man touched with fire; caused her to fold her head, for she was mortal and might not look upon such splendour.

  Brought up never to importune the Almighty on her own behalf, Iris sometimes asked him to heed the petitions of those striving to find a cure for arthritis. The safe return of a dog was a more straightforward matter. A dozen times between waking and sleeping she began, ‘O holy Saint Anthony, gentlest of saints, your love for God and charity for his creatures made you worthy when on earth to possess miraculous powers.’

  This was the third day, and she knew the prayer by heart. It was a powerful incantation, to be used in extremis. Iris had never doubted its efficacy. Yet it was only now, in her kitchen with her eyes closed, that she saw. She had been granted a sign. Matthew Ho’s image had been hung in the sky to show that her prayers were heard in heaven.

  Tom said, ‘I’m going to go see Jack. I haven’t thanked him for everything he’s done.’

  ‘Cool. I’ll come with you.’ Then, in response to his silence, ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘What about Denise?’

  ‘What about her?’

  As they walked down the track, Nelly was talking about the terrain around her house being unsuited to mechanised farming. ‘Cows do fine. Machines tip over. That’s what fi nished off the McDermots. Like imagine trying to get a baler around those paddocks.’

  The Feeneys, farming at the bottom of the hill, had fared better. ‘Also Jack got himself a licence to dig tree ferns from the bush and sell them to nurseries. He did pretty well out of that.’