The Lost Dog

by Michelle De Kretser

  No one had set out to mislead him. The agent at the controls was concocted from inadvertence and poor timing. It was the selective vision of hindsight, he reasoned, that set a fi gure in the carpet. There could be no motive for deceiving him; and only a mind corroded by evil or disease deceives without purpose.

  But not everything he failed to grasp was insignifi cant. And by accumulation, even minor errors take on density and cast shadows. Reality is an effect produced by the accrual of detail, a trickery whose operations Tom had traced in the pages of countless fictions. He was unable to shake off the impression that a similar process governed his relations with Nelly, staging elaborate scenarios that mimicked the solidity of truth. These, if probed, readily revealed their flimsiness; yet who could be sure that the vista thus arrived at was not equally contrived? The bottom of the box might always be false; so Tom Loxley feared.

  There was the matter of Rory.

  Nelly, clashing cutlery in the sink one afternoon, addressed the boy over her shoulder. ‘You’ve known for ages Gretchen’s interested. She sets up a meeting to look at your folio. And you ring up the day before and cancel?’

  ‘Yeah, whatever. How come you’re suddenly so keen on Gretchen anyway? You’ve always said she had crap taste.’

  ‘You’ve got to put the effort in. With any dealer.’

  ‘Easy for you to say. Like when did you last have to-?’

  But he interrupted himself to answer his phone: a sullen, square-set boy with a patch of black fur under his lip. ‘Sweet!’ he said to his caller. And to Nelly, ‘Gotta go.’ Tom he ignored.

  They heard the crash of his boots on the stair; the jump that took him to the half-landing.

  It was a scene that returned to nag at Tom. It reminded him of something he was unable to name. He had recognised Rory, of course: the dark boy who had laughed with Posner that first evening at the gallery. It was obvious Rory didn’t remember him, but he rather thought Posner did. At the solstice party, the dealer’s eyes had considered Tom as if he were something on a plate; something Posner might eat, or send back to the kitchen.

  Yet Posner set himself to be attentive. The reedy voice, so at odds with the man’s bulk, held forth about Tom’s book. ‘James and the uncanny: it wouldn’t have occurred to me. His novels seem so thoroughly materialist. All those people hankering after all those things.’ He filled Tom’s glass from the bottle he was holding and inclined his head, fl atteringly deferential.

  Encouraging a man to display expertise is the shortest path to gaining his trust. It seemed a transparent tactic.

  ‘And money! It’s everywhere in James,’ went on Posner.

  Tom thought, And what’s more elusive, more ghostly, than money?

  On the other side of the room, Nelly was laughing.

  ‘Mind you, it’s a long time since I’ve read him.’ Somehow it was clear Posner was lying. Tom thought, He’s prepared for this conversation. Now he’ll trot out some lit crit crap he thinks is profound.

  ‘There’s a sentence in one of the notebooks about going to the Comédie Française a great deal in ’72.’ Posner said, ‘I came across that, quite by chance, years ago. It had the effect of marooning James forever in the past. Eighteen seventy-two: unimaginable from the perspective of the 1970s. But I’ve never forgotten it.’ He smiled: a wet, pink-lipped, humourless occasion. ‘As it happened, I was living in Paris at the time. And I did go, now and then, to the theatre. I imagine a young man reading that in my diary one day.’ Posner looked up from his glass. ‘Quite a jolt, realising that the life you remember so vividly exists for someone else as so much historical dust.’

  Tom thought, I’ve felt that too.Was, despite himself, moved.

  Yet the man made his fl esh crawl.

  Nelly had said, ‘We had a thing-oh, you know, ages ago. Before I was married.’

  ‘I thought he was gay.’

  Her hand made a rocking motion. ‘He’s not too fussy, Carson.’

  The idea of her young. There was a faded Polaroid pinned to her lavatory door: high-necked blouse and tight skirt, pouty mouth, jet hair drawn into a topknot with strands falling around her face. She was twenty and looked thirteen. She looked desirable, bruised, corrupt, infi nitely oriental. ‘Very World of Suzy Wong.’ Posner’s broad-knuckled fi ngers carried the knowledge of her fl esh.

  Tom knew that Rory had dropped out of university; that he lived in Posner’s house. He imagined them together: the silver head grazing a dark line on the boy’s fl at stomach.

  At the solstice party, he watched Posner’s terrible eyes seek Rory out; and the boy not noticing, stroking the hair under his lip, then crossing to the throng around Yelena.

  Later, when things were breaking up, a group left to go clubbing, Rory swept up in the clamour.

  Watch out, thought Tom, he’s slipping your leash. He felt a small, mean joy: Posner, wakeful and alone.

  It was to Yelena, early in their acquaintance, that Tom spoke of Nelly’s painting. ‘I can’t get it out of my mind.’

  The girl was spooning baked beans straight from the tin onto white bread. She had a predilection for vaguely repellent snacks: fruit-flavoured yoghurt eaten between bites of gherkin, crackers topped with peanut butter and chocolate sprinkles.

  Her great dark eyes rested on Tom. ‘You say it like a criticism.’

  ‘It’s just…’ He began again. ‘I keep coming back to how beautiful it is.’

  Yelena spoke through a mouthful of beans. ‘So?’

  Acutely aware of that angled face, he answered with deliberate scorn. ‘It’s an amateurish response. It doesn’t exactly advance understanding, does it?’

  When she had finished her sandwich, Yelena set down her plate. She reached under the couch and retrieved the Concise Oxford.‘Amateur: one who is fond.’ There was something semiliterate about the way she read aloud: sounding each word distinctly, as if testing it out.‘It says here, from amare, love.’ She looked at Tom.‘Love is amateurish.You wouldn’t say it advances understanding?’

  She abandoned him soon afterwards. Then Nelly turned up, and noticed the plate Yelena had left on the kitchen counter. She picked it up, and came and perched beside Tom, on the broad arm of his chair. ‘Look.’

  The plate, smudged here and there with sauce, was rimmed in faded gilt. It showed a man and a woman conversing in a garden where a fountain played against a backdrop of pagodas and snowy peaks. Opposite this scene, a tree blossomed pinkly beside water, while overhead a plane flew through rags of blue.

  Tom could see nothing remarkable about this object.

  If anything he was faintly disgusted by the combination of smeared surface and pretty patterning.

  Nelly was saying, ‘Plates like this, they’re usually oldeworlde. They have these pictures of frilly ladies and hollyhocks and stuff. But this one’s got a plane.’

  He looked again.

  ‘It would’ve been the latest thing when it was designed,’ she went on. ‘A tribute to air travel or something.’

  But there was something about the plane, the oriental scenery: recognition flashed in Tom. ‘It’s Shangri-La.’ He took the plate from her and turned it over, scattering crumbs. Together they read the inscription: Lost Horizon.

  ‘Oh wow. I remember that movie from when I was a kid.’

  ‘The book the film’s based on was the first literary paperback. Late ’30s, something like that.’

  ‘How cool is that!’ Delight stretched in Nelly’s face. ‘So this plate would’ve been doubly modern.’

  She had come in from the street. Was stitched about with thready peak-hour fumes that fluttered in Tom’s nostrils.

  He rubbed his nose and said, ‘That’s not quite how I’d describe it.’ He was not sentimental about second-hand crockery, having expended energy in putting some distance between himself and that kind of thing.

  ‘But that’s what gets me.’ Nelly said, ‘Modern can never keep up with itself. Nothing dates quicker than now.’

  A few days
passed, and Tom found his thoughts returning to the sauce-smeared plate. He couldn’t understand the pull. Then, without warning, the plate slipped sideways in his mind, revealing an object he had once yearned for with the absolute, concentrated longing of small children and later quite forgotten.

  Auntie Eulalia Doutre, who was not his aunt, had a long, low cupboard with angled legs and sliding doors in her hall. When Tom and his mother called on her,Auntie Eulalia opened one of the doors and handed the child a wooden object for his amusement. It was a pencil box with a range of snowy mountains and a pink flowering tree painted on its lid. Tom ran his fingers over it and the lid slid to one end. He found this wonderful, the box that opened sideways, doubling the cupboard door’s smooth glide. He moved the lid back and forth, glancing now and then at the cupboard. In bed he would think about the wooden box lying in the wooden cupboard. He pushed his sheet away and drew it back over himself, and felt pleasure thrill in his marrow. The big door slid open and so did the little one. The child wished to keep that marvel safe forever.

  The plum-blossom plate had this consequence too: it focused Tom’s attention on Nelly.

  Wednesday

  Tom slept in socks, tracksuit pants, a T-shirt, a fl annel shirt, a windcheater. There was a blanket on the bed, and a quilt patterned with shambolic roses. He woke at fi rst light, needles of cold in his limbs.

  Falling asleep, he had told himself he would wake in the night to the scrape of the dog’s paw against the door. The moment he opened his eyes, he knew this to have been absurd.

  It was scarcely colder outside. Preferring not to face the earthy reek of the dunny, he urinated off the step into a clump of coarse-leafed vegetation. In the paddock beyond the gums, cattle showed as solid, blocky forms.

  He filled a saucepan from the tank, heated it on the two-burner butane stove in the kitchen. The tin of ground coffee he had brought with him from the city was still a quarter full, but the milk had run out on Sunday. He tipped two spoons of sugar into his mug as compensation.

  His jeans were damp, despite having hung in front of the fire all evening. His shirts were dirty. He needed wet-weather gear. He needed boots, and clean, warm clothes. His scalp felt greasy, the backs of his knees itched. He hadn’t had a shower since Thursday; getting dressed, he held his breath against his body’s fragrance. There was no bathroom in the house; superficially spruced up, it remained primitive in its lack of amenities. It occurred to Tom that eighty years earlier, when the house was built, his odour would have been literally unremarkable. It was the transition to a modern way of life that rendered his mustiness conspicuous.

  There was no more muesli, but he discovered a plastic container of oats in a cupboard. Long afterwards, the taste was still in his mouth: distilled staleness.

  He was stacking dishes in the washing-up bowl when he remembered the thunder of small steps he had heard the previous night. The image of a snarling, stunted child raging across the tin roof had jolted him from sleep. He had lain wakeful for minutes, listening to the possum, the dream still runny in his mind.

  His mother was expecting him that evening. He would call her in a few hours and make some excuse. Without having to think about it, Tom knew he wouldn’t tell her that the dog was missing. Iris greeted news of a sore throat or mislaid keys with screams of, ‘My God. What are we to do?’ In lives where the margin of safety is narrow, mishaps readily assume the dimension of calamities. Iris was fond of the dog; her son wished, genuinely, to spare her distress. But his protective refl ex was partly self-directed. At the age of twelve, he had realised he could endure most sorrows except the spectacle of hers. Slight, dark-skinned, bad at sport, he was able to withstand the humiliations that awaited him in an Australian schoolyard by keeping them from his mother. He reasoned that she could offer no practical aid, and that this proof of her inadequacy would be more than either of them could bear. At the same time, he grew sullen; half aware that something fundamental, the obligation of parents to shield their young from harm, was lost to him.

  In this way, the strands of evasiveness and protection and resentment entwined in his love for her were determined.

  The bleached bone of a dead eucalypt pointed skywards near the heart of the place where the dog had vanished. Another, stumpier, but still taller than the surrounding canopy, rose to Tom’s right. He decided to begin by searching the area between the two. He would proceed systematically, with calm, and due recognition of his limits; a methodology that had seen him through examinations, four months of post-doctoral unemployment, rejection by the first two, more prestigious universities to which he had applied for work, the failure of his marriage; the crises he had known.

  He planned to break off twigs to mark his way. He noted the position of the sun. In his pockets were handfuls of sultanas for the dog, who would be ravenous, not having eaten since Monday evening. These precautions struck Tom as sensible, therefore as presages of success.

  His watch showed ten minutes to eight.

  One difficulty was that the ground wasn’t level. Trying to walk in a straight line, Tom found himself scrambling in and out of gullies. Tree ferns crowded in one. A steeper trench was knitted with fallen logs, the rotting wood treacherous underfoot.

  When he flung out a hand to save himself, his fi ngers encountered a growth as springy and slick as liver.

  His sense of direction was good, but obliged to proceed in arcs, he began to fear doubling back on his steps. He had been snapping off twigs and thin branches in passing but the undergrowth had a way of pushing back to obscure these scars. Along with this elastic quality, it was tall-often as high as Tom-so that in every direction his eye met only the thrust of leaves.

  The hillocky terrain was playing tricks with his marker trees. The shorter of the two had disappeared. The other was further to his left than he would have liked, and looked different, less skeletal than it had first appeared. A foreshortening brought about, Tom reasoned, by the angle of his view.

  Despite these difficulties, he drew closer to the tall eucalpyt. He had, after all, made progress.

  Cheered, he ate a few sultanas. The dog would understand.

  By the time Tom reached the tree, the light dropping through the leaves had dulled. He sniffed the air: humus, and the aromatic scent he noticed the day before; and behind these, the faint, distinctive odour of rain.

  The scrub was thinner here, his progress easy. But Tom had the impression that something was not right. It came to him that someone he wouldn’t want to see would be waiting beyond the trees. He stood still, ears straining.

  Then, as he advanced, and the track faded into a clearing, he saw: the tree was wrong. It was the stumpy one, split at the top like a broken tooth; the jagged crown, smoothed by the direction of his approach, was plainly visible now. He looked over his shoulder and saw the tall tree far behind him, pointed in warning.

  For two hours he had crashed about a modest wedge of scrub and trees, an area of perhaps three acres.

  Rain began to fall.

  Tom stepped over a log and felt his sneaker sink through the ooze of leaves covering a shallow depression. His ankle turned, a little.

  He patted one pocket, then another. A picture came into his mind of the kitchen table: radio, laptop, spare batteries, his papers and books; the mobile phone he had taken from his wet jeans the previous evening. It would almost certainly be out of range here. Nevertheless, he had been negligent.

  Overnight, these had become his familiars: fear; rage at his carelessness.

  Back at the house, he added hot water to pumpkin soup made from a packet he found in a cupboard. Its savour was chemical; trust Nelly to buy a generic brand. His feet were icy, there was a dull ache in his ankle. He swallowed a second cup.

  At first, Tom rationed his visits to the Preserve: several days had to elapse before he would let himself return. Very soon he saw that Yelena did not register his presence except in the abstract, as the homage her beauty extracted. Her friends would gather at the Preserve
of an evening before going on to clubs or pubs. There were those among them whose faces hungered for her. Tom saw the girl’s consciousness of her power. She was amiable with him, including him in the casual sweep of her attention but making it clear he held no particular interest in her eyes. Although beautiful, Yelena was kind.

  All the same, as autumn gave way to winter, Tom was a regular presence at the Preserve. The ease with which he had slipped into familiarity with Nelly surprised him. He was not given to swift intimacies of the mind, but it was almost as if he had known Nelly of old.

  Her laugh was huge, disgraceful. It broke loose over small things. Yet when he was away from Nelly, Tom discovered that he was unable to picture her amused. Try as he might, he could call up only a frozen version of her face. One effect of this was that the mobility of her features delighted him afresh every time he saw her. Another was the brief, disconcerting sense of a familiar face overlaid with strangeness.

  It was only when his loneliness lifted that Tom realised how acute it had been. The Preserve offered companionship and conversation. It offered Brendon, who designed websites by day and was usually to be found in the Preserve at night. His presence was signalled by music: fugues, cantatas, concertos turned up loud. He was secretive, allowing no one into his studio. At intervals he emerged to prepare tiny, lethal cups of coffee brewed in a blue enamelled pan. Brendon brought handfuls of flowers into the Preserve, and mandarins and walnuts, and coloured leaves. When his imagination stalled he would build these, along with the apples Nelly loved, into Arcimbaldo-like fantasies, a cork serving for an eye, a paper napkin pleated into a ruffl e.

  He was a spidery man. Tom would watch, entranced, the deft movements of his long arms. He noticed that Brendon was compelled to touch beautiful things: the curve of a jug, the buttery leather of Yelena’s new bag. Once, leaning over the girl, he lifted a strand of her hair: ‘Gold enough to eat.’