The Lost Dog

by Michelle De Kretser

  Tom had taken his camera with him when he visited Eileen. He came home one evening with packets of newly processed fi lm to find Karen drinking wine with a colleague. The two women sifted through his photos of Pondicherry, exclaiming over flame-coloured blossom arched above a pair of rickshaws, and a brass-belled cow grazing in front of a bicycle-repair shop painted sugar-almond pink. They loved India, they agreed.

  Eileen and Cedric sat side by side, posed on red rexine.

  Tom recalled what he had noticed when taking the picture: that being photographed was not a casual affair for his cousins. The flash found them smiling and attentive. Their image would circulate where they could not. It was not something to be yielded lightly.

  Karen’s friend said, ‘That’s funny.’ Her square-cut nail tapped a tiny picture on the blue wall above the dark heads: a minute Sacred Heart. ‘It doesn’t seem right, does it?’

  ‘What doesn’t?’

  ‘Well, the whole Christian thing-it’s not like it belongs in India.’

  The memory of this woman’s living room, in which a long-lobed Buddha reclined on a mantelpiece and frankincense smouldered beneath a portrait of the Dalai Lama, fl oated through Tom’s mind. He let it pass. Evidence of the subcontinent’s age-old traffic with the West rarely found favour with Westerners. To be eclectic was a Western privilege, as was the authentication of cultural artefacts. The real India was the flutter of a sari, a perfumed dish, a skull-chained goddess. Difference, readily identified, was easily corralled. Likeness was more subtly unnerving.

  Tom Loxley, drinking whisky on his bed, wished to lead a modern life. By which he meant a life that was free to be trivial, that had filtered out the dull sediment of tradition and inherited responsibilities; a life shiny as invention, that fl oated and gleamed.

  In that respect he was an exemplary Australian.

  His cousin’s blue walls contained a life Tom might have led.

  He saw himself waiting on a red settee to be rescued; with no real expectation that rescue would come.

  Recently, there were more and more South Asian faces in Australia. Each time he saw one, Tom felt a small surge of satisfaction. At the same time, he would think, But there are so many more waiting.

  Whenever he thought of the waiting going on around the globe, Tom was afraid. He feared that the ground of his life would give way; that he would fall into a room where, powerless as a figurine, he would have nothing to do but wait. Transformed into a human commodity, he would fi nd himself competing with thousands of identical products, all waiting to be chosen. It was an irrational, potent dread. It had visited Tom, assuming one shape, now another, for years. It whispered of the life led by millions, a phantom life characterised by stasis and the dull absence of hope; an unmodern life, where the best that could be expected of the future was that it be no worse than the past.

  Of late, its mutter had grown louder. Tom knew that this crescendo was bound up with his mother. As Iris’s body failed, he felt her claim on him grow forceful. He felt the proximity of history. The present makes use of what has gone before, feeding on and transforming it, and rejecting what remains. But Tom could remember the aromatic streets of his childhood, where faeces, animal and human, lingered on display. The past waited too: odorous, unhygienic, surplus; refusing to be disposed of with decent haste.

  Eileen and Cedric still lived on the black side of the canal, New Zealand having deemed superfluous such talents as they possessed.

  But recently their son had won a scholarship to a mid-western college. Tom pictured him in a laboratory, calibrating instruments; on a sidewalk, astonished by snow.

  Realism argued that the scholar would in time buy a Lexus and alter his idiom; would transfer money telegraphically, and put off lifting a phone to hear of a sister’s disappointments, a parent’s decline.

  Yet it was apparent to Tom that people, like nations, grew stunted on a diet of realism alone. To soar it was necessary to imagine the transcendent case.

  Arthur Loxley, pinkly moist in the tropics, spoke often of the cold. He described childhood winters: his eerie morning face in the basin’s ice mirror; a flaw that opened under his skates on a frozen pond and raced, a flame along a lit fuse, towards the shore.

  It was talk that horrified his wife. As a bride, Iris’s great-grandmother had visited Lisbon in January. The sky was blue enamel, mosaic pavements sparkled in the sun. On her ninety-sixth birthday Henrietta de Souza was still reliving the deception she had experienced on drawing off a glove and holding out her hand to a slanted ray. ‘The sun was cold!’ the old lady declared in cracked, imperious tones, and thumped her stick on a tile painted with a spouting whale. ‘The sun was cold!’

  That unnatural reversal worked powerfully on her Iris’s imagination. The European Winter: she pictured it as a beast.

  It lay open-mawed across the jewelled cavern of London, daring her to pass. In Lawrence Fitch’s embrace, envisaging her English future as wavelets travelled from her thighs to her throat, she saw herself the plaything of icy paws; and shuddered, so that the captain, finding her name circulating with the port and himself the object of regimental envy, felt justified in referring to her as a ravishing little trollop.

  When the earth cracked open in pre-monsoonal heat, Arthur evoked the geometric precision of snowfl akes. Fanning himself with a newspaper, he spoke of wind-whipped sleet, and the brown slush on Coventry pavements. He described the sensation of grasping iron chains in a frozen playground, and how to fashion a man from snow.

  He held his son entranced with tales of icy queens, and wolves howling through black, leafless woods. There was a story about a ship manned by wraiths that might be glimpsed in Arctic latitudes, hoar-frost diamonds in its rigging. A bookseller’s warren yielded a musty yellow volume written by a Dane; and a five-year-old who had never known cold shed warm tears at the plight of a small girl freezing with her tray of matches.

  Tom tilted a glass of whisky, the better to observe the melting of icebergs.

  In time he had encountered theories of cultural identity and discovered that his childhood had been deficient in reading that reflected the world around him. The argument had its force; and was, like all orthodoxies, blind in one eye. It viewed Arthur’s stories as nostalgic exercises in the colonial project of ignoring what was indigenous and vital in favour of alien constructions.

  Tom saw the thing as more intricate, and himself as happy to have experienced, when young, the empire of imagination. Stories with Indian backdrops offered the pleasure of recognition. Those that brought outlandish elements into play posed India as one reality among many.

  It was precisely the disjunction between Arthur’s anecdotes and the scenes unfolding before his eyes that had fascinated Tom as a boy. He was stirred by a tale of alpine snows as a northern child might quicken to palm-fringed lagoons: each thrilling to wonders that existed beyond the rim of perception.

  The most blatantly trumped-up tale captured Arthur’s sympathy, so that swindlers of every stripe sought him out with stories of widowed mothers or failsafe investments. A lean, ageless individual who went by the name of Perry once laid siege to him for a month with whisky and sagas of the Brazilian interior; at the end of which time Arthur agreed to relieve him of three uncut diamonds he claimed to have wrested at knifepoint from a dishonest garimpeiro. The contract had been sealed with a fresh bottle when Perry’s angry blue eyes filled with tears. ‘You have driven me to honesty,’ he announced, and blew his nose violently. He reached for the soft leather pouch containing the pebbles and flung it over his shoulder into a bed of shocking-pink anthuriums.

  The incident made its way back to Iris, who placed herself in her husband’s path with her hands on her hips. ‘I told you about that Perry,’ she began, her voice ominously even. ‘As soon as I set eyes on him, large as life and twice as ugly, didn’t I tell you, Here is a humbug?’

  It was true. Even Tom, then aged eight, had been struck by the unreliability of Perry: flagrant in every facet of th
e man, from his winking tiepin to his golden-cornered smile. Perry’s Pebbles: it became family shorthand for the preposterous; for a tale too good to be true.

  Arthur had been dead a decade when an exchange occurred that cast the episode forever in a different light. Seeking to amuse a girl he was involved with, Tom had set about skewering a bombastic acquaintance.

  Lizzie said abruptly, ‘For Christ’s sake.’ She broke off whatever task engaged her, and turned to face him. ‘There are alternatives to seeing through people.’

  ‘Why don’t you run them past me.’ (Startled, but not out of irony.)

  The girl opened and closed one hand. It was a gesture already familiar to Tom, signifying exasperation. She said, ‘Try seeing into them. That’d be a start.’

  Lizzie proved transient. But the rebuke lodged in Tom. He thought of Perry, with his glinting, ready smile. Arthur had seen honesty in the man; and his son realised, with a little stab of surprise, that it was Arthur, after all, who had been right.

  If, on numerous other occasions, his father had been duped, he was surely not the party cheapened in the process. There are illusions that are glorious. If the shabby surface extended to the depths, it was still infinitely grander to project the other case.

  Sunday

  In the weeks that followed his lunch with Esther Kade, Tom read everything he could find about Nelly’s work. What began as curiosity ended as need. His book on James lacked only its conclusion, yet he neglected it, led on from catalogue to periodical to website. Obsessive as a gun dog, he tracked the glimmer of her, not caring if it led him astray.

  It was easy enough to find reproductions of Nelly’s more recent work; easy to reconstitute the stages of her career. But Tom soon realised that no visual record of the Nightingale suite existed. He had a copy of the exhibition catalogue, but it reproduced none of the controversial works; as if wily Posner had anticipated the furore.

  More than one critic lamented the loss of the paintings, reporting that Nelly had destroyed them as soon as the show closed. But surely, Tom thought, surely they couldn’t be gone altogether? He thought enviously of Esther, whose memory held their trace.

  Five years after the Nightingale debacle, an exhibition of new work by Nelly Zhang opened at Posner’s gallery. It marked a turning point in her career.

  The new show consisted of photographs of original paintings. The catalogue essay was signed by a critic called Frederick Vickery, whose crumpled jowls and rectangular, black-rimmed glasses had since enjoyed mild notoriety on a late-night television arts programme. Zhang confronts us with work that follows Barthes in presenting realism as secondary mimesis, wrote Vickery. That is, not as a copy from nature but as the copy of a copy.

  The essay went on to explain that once photographed by a professional photographer, the paintings were destroyed. It struck Tom as a re-enactment of the fate of the Nightingale suite, part protest, part catharsis; the deliberate repetition that controls trauma but refuses appeasement. Or so he reasoned, while flinching at Nelly’s destruction of her paintings, at the calculated violence of the act.

  He had heard Nelly and the other artists talk about Vickery. While there was a coolness between him and Posner now, the critic had once been integral to the dealer’s set. His essay had Posner’s spin all over it, decided Tom, noting its concluding sentence: Here is an artistic practice that denies the market’s lust for the original, offering an endless multiplicity of likenesses instead.

  Tom examined images of freeways, multi-storey car parks, supermarkets, fast-food outlets. Nelly painted the strange, assertive beauty of constructions essential to the functioning of large cities. She painted hospitals, those non-places where modern lives begin and end. She had a fondness for changing light and liminal hours, for the theatricality of sunset and the frightening blue of certain dusks.

  What was curious was the change she worked on her subjects. Inanimate things glistened and appeared to move in her pictures. The ugly musculature of an overpass or a high-rise estate turned dreamily vaporous under her hand. Hung about with the huge blackness of night, concrete and steel grew ectoplasmic. Tom clicked on a link in an online art journal and was confronted with a shining tendon that might once have been a road.

  These were images that had the quality of apparitions. Others struck Tom as forensic. A deserted railway platform suggested CCTV footage; a desolate mall might have been filched from the photo-board in an incident room. He found himself looking at a city envisioned as the scene of a crime.

  He made notes on technique, composition, the use of colour and space. It was a methodology that had served him well as a student, the close scrutiny and faithful recording of what was before him producing gleams of insight, bright fissures opening in his mind. Noting the featureless architecture and nondescript vistas Nelly favoured, he believed he saw why she was drawn to these anonymous elements. She lived in a city deficient in visual icons, a place without a bridge or harbour or distinctive skyline. It lacked an image. From that lack, Nelly had fashioned a style.

  Tom analysed and speculated. He had been trained to perform these operations. He sat in his study before shining windows, and filled them with words. It required connective tissue, conclusions; since one thing leads to another in narrative. He was aware of a degree of wrenching entailed. But a story need not be true to be useful. He was happier in those weeks than he had been in years.

  A photograph called Secured by Modern showed tramlines, a half-demolished office block, the Victoria Street neon sign that advertised Skipping Girl Vinegar.

  The metal sky-sign modelled to resemble a skipping child was one of several forms in Nelly’s work that recalled the human. There were effigies in a shop window, a plastic-sheathed jacket on a dry-cleaner’s rack, shadows thrown by invisible bodies, two silhouettes entwined on a dance studio’s sign. But there were no people in Nelly’s scenes. They suggested dramas from which the actors had fl ed.

  As his intimacy with her work grew, Tom noticed the evidence of decay Nelly included in her streetscapes. Rubbish overflowing a bin, weeds pushing through concrete, broken or missing tiles. The cracked, outdated faces of seventies and eighties buildings. These signs told of a city that was neither ancient nor exactly new, but mutable. Inscribed within them was the memory of the maggoty cheeses and rotten fruit once painted into still lifes as warnings against excess and reminders of the transience of earthly splendour.

  The conflation of work and author is an error into which novices fall; so Tom Loxley believed, and sought to impress on recidivist students. It had the inadequacy of all law. How could his obsession with Nelly’s work be distinguished from his desire for her? He was governed by a hunger for possession, images serving to paper over a bodily absence.

  It was a substitution he literalised. In one of the regular sessions he devoted to Nelly, he lay in a darkened room, gazing by the unsteady light of a tea candle at a photocopied page. When he had finished, the edifice of her imaginings was tagged with his luminous urgency.

  Iris’s eyebrows, long vanished, reappeared every day as two greasy, coquettish arcs. The bronze puffs over her skull showed white at the roots. The events of Wednesday had caused her to miss her appointment at the hairdresser and she would not pay the extortionate prices of Thursday and Friday.

  At the sight of Tom, her mouth unscrolled like a scarlet ribbon.

  She was delivered to his door on Sunday morning by Audrey. A horn sounded and Tom went into the street with an umbrella to extract his mother from the car. As soon as he reached for her, ‘I’m falling,’ cried Iris. ‘I’m falling.’

  Braced between the car door and her son’s arm, she staggered upright at last. Many of her parts still worked, but she had been obliged to renounce high heels. With her feet crammed into pink ballet shoes suitable for a six-year-old, she knew herself to have grown old.

  Expertly assessing the room for recent acquisitions, Audrey declined a cup of tea. She was running late; Iris had misplaced her eyebrow pencil that mo
rning.

  Audrey patted the back of her head: ‘I can’t imagine why you use one in the first place. People should age naturally, if you ask me.’

  She stood before them, the product of skilled professionals-hairdresser, manicurist, orthodontist, podiatrist-and delivered herself of this view.

  Iris Loxley, née de Souza, had triumphed over pain, rain-slick pavements and the treachery of bucket seats to accomplish the repositioning of her flesh from her living room to her son’s. The successful completion of any journey represented a victory. A girl who moved like water was present in her thoughts from time to time, but in the detached way of an actress familiar from a long-running serial.

  Her double-handled handbag of imitation leather on her lap, Iris sat motionless as an idol. A picture was sliding about in her memory of a grey stone half sunk in tough-bladed grass. Matthew Ho from next door squatted on his heels in front of it, reading aloud. His stubby finger, moving over the writing cut into the stone, was green-rimmed from scraping moss. Iris could see the ivory silk ribbon threaded about the hem and pockets of her blue batiste dress. She could hear Matthew saying, Snowflake. Then he said, A Merry Companion. She could remember a date, 1819. One hundred years before she had been born.

  By the time Iris was seven, that part of the de Souza compound had disappeared under concrete. Matthew said the stone had marked the place where a small dog was buried. He said that the labourers working on the new extension had dug up its remains. He had seen them, he said. ‘Three bones. And an eyeball.’ He put his face close to Iris’s: ‘Now its ghost will haunt you forever,’ he hissed.

  Audrey, disliking waste, never disposed of a grievance that had not been squeezed dry. She wished to impress upon Tom that his mother had inconvenienced her that morning; and so, following him into the kitchen to complain of delay, delayed further.

  He said mildly, ‘We’d be lost without you, Audrey.’ And added, ‘Shona coming over for lunch?’