Her husband kept returning to the topic of a second child: acquiescing in its deferral but urging it towards reality. A phrase tripped so often from his tongue that she heard it as scarcely more than an arrangement of phonemes. How nice for Rory, he would remark, to have a sister.
That small figure from the future kept them company for a season; was summoned and vanished, and glided again through their desires. It passed through the Nightingale paintings, occasioning unease but withholding clarity; a riddling presence, as apparitions so often are.
Afterwards, she would think, A little girl in that house!
Wednesday
They sat on splintery steps in the sun, the last of the fresh milk in their coffee. An artful spray of white clouds had transformed the sky into a screensaver. The odour of cattle, a sweet country stench, arrived, then faded.
Tom’s face itched with stubble. It was a discomfort intrinsic to the wretchedness of looking for the dog, one of the small miseries that dissolved in the large one and thickened the brew. He sniffed himself discreetly. Everything that leaked from the body’s wrapping, emanations the city defeated in brisk, hygienic routs, was triumphant here.
He drew the back of his hand first one way, then the other, along his jaw. A truck coming down the ridge road changed gear on its way to the trees.
Nelly had been saying something about the apple tree in the cow paddock no longer bearing fruit. Now she scraped her spoon around the remains of her porridge, licked it, set the bowl aside.
The night’s revelations lay untouched between them. It was like opening a locked door and stumbling on a bound, swaddled form, thought Tom: the coverings could be peeled back to make sure but who would want to do it?
Something tugged faintly. Something Nelly had said the previous day. But what intervened was a bright, painted horse with a rolling eye. So that he blurted, ‘Don’t they frighten you?’
There was no context to the question. Nelly didn’t require one. She was fastening up her hair with a plastic comb, and only nodded, without pausing in her task.
In that way, negligently, she made him an enduring gift. It revealed itself by degrees, a slow enlightenment. Slowly Tom realised that Nelly neither shunned nor welcomed the past. She merely allowed it space. It was a question of accommodation. He saw that sometimes she was afraid of the shape it took. Sometimes fear is a necessary response to ghosts; but room must be found for them, nonetheless.
By mid-morning the sun, no longer a novelty, lay across their backs like a load. They were pushing forward through scrub, collecting fresh grazes. The green plant groweth, menacing / Almighty lovers in the spring. Only they were not that, thought Tom.
Birds worked and whistled. He cursed the cunning of blue gums: the rapid growth that produced density without shade. ‘We could pass within feet of him and not see.’
Nelly wiped her forehead on her arm. Her T-shirt was navy cotton with a red star on the chest; a red and blue striped football sock with the foot cut off had been sewn onto each sleeve.
One leg of her jeans was filthy. She had stepped knee-deep into the pulpy remains of a log. A thread of sweat made its way down her neck to pool above her collarbone; and Tom saw why the hollows there are known as salt cellars.
They were sitting at the foot of the tall eucalypt eating almonds and dried apricots. Withered branches lay around them like broken limbs. Gum forests so often suggested the aftermath of hostilities, the bark litter of dried bandages, the trees as bony and grey as the remnants of regiments.
Tom’s mind drifted, by related channels, to Nelly’s story of the wallaby; to the amazing teenager with the shotgun and scones.
He was tired. It took him a little while to get there. Then he said, ‘The woman Jimmy Morgan saw on the beach. Denise.’
‘Sure.’
‘No, listen. You said she was tall, even back then. Morgan said he saw a tall woman, remember?’ It was coming together with the thrilling symmetry of an equation. ‘Could Denise have got hold of that dress? The one she made for you?’
‘How come you know about that?’ And before Tom could reply, ‘No, she couldn’t have.’
‘Did the cops ask you about it?’
He thought Nelly was going to ignore the question. But eventually she said,‘That dress never fitted me. Felix got Denise to make it because I wouldn’t wear stuff he bought. And of course he got her a pattern that was way too big. I wore that dress like maybe once, to please her. Then I put it with a whole bunch of stuff to take to the Salvos.’
Tom waited.
‘Look, when the cops started asking, I couldn’t fi nd the dress, OK? So I told them I’d chucked it out in the rubbish weeks before, I didn’t know when exactly. I said they could check with Denise that it hadn’t fi tted me.’
‘So maybe Felix went through your op shop stuff and passed the dress on to Denise.’
‘Why would he do that?’
But the tone wasn’t quite right. Nelly sounded cautious rather than unconvinced.
Tom said, ‘So that people might take her for you? I don’t know. But Morgan said the woman he saw had hitched up her skirt so she could climb the dunes. A dress made for you would be a mini on Denise. And it would be tight. Awkward to get around in. Which would be why Morgan thought there was something weird about her.’
Nelly closed her eyes, then opened them wide. She said, ‘Except none of this fits with Felix and Denise. The way they related to each other.’
‘Denise had a crush on you. And just then she hated you. And being asked to help Felix would’ve flattered her. He’d have put some joky spin on it, and by the time she’d realised what it was all about and that he was going to stay missing, it was too late and she was too scared to say anything.’
‘How would she have got home from the beach?’
‘Maybe he’d rented a car. She could’ve driven his car to the beach and set up the scene with his clothes, and then he dropped her back in the rental before taking off in it.’
‘There was no record of Felix renting a car. The cops checked out all that stuff.’
‘Maybe Denise rented it.’
‘I don’t think she was old enough to have a licence.’
‘Who do you think she was then? The woman on the beach.’
‘I nearly went crazy trying to figure it all out, you know. And in the end-’
‘What?’
‘There’s all these bits and pieces. Little unconnected facts. Smart guesses. What they add up to…’ Nelly said, ‘It’s a puzzle.’
‘Puzzles have solutions.’
‘And which is more intriguing? If we knew what happened to Felix, do you think we’d be talking about him?’ She said, ‘Like I think that’s what he wanted. To create a mystery, something people would remember.’
‘Meaning you think it was all a set-up?’
‘Meaning that if he killed himself, it wasn’t there, not on that beach.’ Nelly got to her feet. ‘Somewhere else, somewhere in bush like this would be my guess, somewhere he knew he’d never be found.’
Then she said a thing that made Tom’s skin crawl. ‘It’s been at the back of my mind all the time we’ve been searching. What we might come across at the bottom of a gully.’
Every Christmas, Iris received a publicity calendar produced by the travel agency where Shona worked. Photographs of unblemished views and merry peasants presided over the feasts that governed her year: birthdays, pension days, medical appointments. Not that Iris, whose memory was excellent, needed to consult this almanac. Its function was purely magical. The shaky inscriptions it displayed were anchored to a submerged set of needs and wishes. One of these was the hope that the future would be like the past. A ringed date warded off ambulances, perverts, glaucoma, the fridge breaking down. It signified life going on as usual.
On Friday, Audrey would be driving Iris to the local health centre. There, on a moulded plastic chair, across from the disgusting poster of a man with his red interior on view, Iris would tell her story, wh
ile Doctor fingered the coffee mug stamped with the same name as her anti-infl ammatories.
Iris had decided that she would refer to ‘motions’. She would take her time: delaying the moment of diagnosis, postponing dread. She would speak of blockages, wind, the treacherous packages that slid from her, she would describe what her body withheld and what it yielded.
What survived of the tea-set was a single cup, bold red dragons on a shell-pink ground. Iris kept it wrapped in a nylon head-scarf in the suitcase under her bed. There had been a time, not so many years ago, when she could kneel beside her bed, bend forward and drag the suitcase out. But that was before verticality began its onslaught on her attention. Now it was vital to keep her feet on the ground, and the rest of herself off it.
As she drowsed after lunch in front of the TV, the improbability of having entered her eighties struck Iris anew. She thought of the long, long string of her life, so many afternoons and Easters and Julys, so many Wednesdays. How many times had she woken up to Wednesday?
There were days when being eighty-two was a terrible thing; bad days, when Iris was subject to small jagged outbursts, the remains of her temper, which had worn down like everything else. On bad days, Iris was afraid: not of what was waiting but of what was past, the arrangements that had seemed as fixed as stars and now shuddered with plastic invitation. On bad days she allowed herself to dream. She dreamed of a childhood unclouded by fear, where a raised voice signalled delight, not anger. She dreamed of a girl who dropped to her knees before a Chinaman kneeling in betel-stained dirt.
It was dangerous reverie. Iris could feel its pull. She rationed it, as she rationed the little liqueur-filled chocolate bottles Tommy brought her, measuring out doses of Cointreau and daring. She sculpted the past according to whim, as a child plays with the future; each having an abundance of material.
Iris had arrived in the world when Sebastian de Souza was twenty-seven years old. Twenty-three years earlier, he had asked for a dolls’ tea-set for his birthday. It was yet another improbability: no matter how hard she tried, Iris was unable to construct a story that coupled dainty pink china and the man whose rage had filled her childhood; the bony orb of even his smallest knuckle refused the curve of the teacup’s handle. Nevertheless, these things were true: her father had once been four years old and wanted a miniature tea-set more than anything in the world.
How could you know when something was the last time, wondered Iris. The last time a stranger turned to look at you in the street, the last time you could stand up while putting on your knickers, the last time there was no pain when you tried to turn over in bed, the last time you imagined your life would change for the better. On TV a woman sang about fabric softener, and Iris longed to hold her father’s cup; to gaze, one last time, on fearless red dragons. Her heart stuttered with the marvellous absurdity of it: that blossom-thin porcelain should survive when so much had been smashed or lost or discarded.
Beside that miracle, it was scarcely remarkable that Iris Loxley, née de Souza, who had sausage curls and climbed a banyan in the monsoon, Iris, who had an eighteen-inch waist and rode a pony by a mountain stream, that gardenia-scented Iris, bare-shouldered and straight-spined in the gilt-lace frame beside the telephone, should have mutated into this mound of ruined flesh, which had flouted gravity for eighty-two years and was afraid of falling.
Nelly had her head back, drinking water. When she passed him the bottle Tom said, ‘Have you noticed? We’ve both stopped calling.’
‘It’s the sun, on top of not enough sleep. Making us dopey.’ ‘Or because we know he can’t still be alive.’ Tom said,‘Look,
I can drive you back this evening. Or drop you at a station. No point us both wasting our time.’
‘So let’s say he’s dead. Don’t you want to keep looking anyway? We can still take him home.’
‘Hey, look.’
They bent over the wing: bone and cartilage and dusty brown feathers. Tom’s toes drew back in his boots.
‘Do you think…?’
He sniffed: nothing. ‘Probably been there for days.’
In the clearing nothing seemed to have changed. The smooth tyre, an assortment of damp rubbish. Tom had half expected the remains of brutality: smashed bones, slit corpses strung from trees. His foot stirred a set of fi lthy cardboard corrugations stamped with a brewer’s logo and uncovered a condom.
‘Did you hear the motorbike? Last night, when you were out?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘I came looking for you. Couldn’t see you.’
Nelly yawned. Then said, indifferently, ‘I walked up to the top of the hill.’
Tom fastened a length of yellow tape to a branch. Nelly was somewhere on the hillside below. He stepped forward, trying to do so soundlessly. For a while now it had been gaining force, the impression that something was listening to him.
A stick cracked in the distance. Tom peered through the undergrowth and caught a glimpse of red between jittery leaves. He was about to call out to Nelly, when he remembered his dream of the previous week, the stumpy child raging over the roof, its face full of fury. Suddenly he was very frightened. Trees he couldn’t name pressed about him.
Fear revived the memory of an exchange that had taken place months earlier, not long after Tom had begun visiting the Preserve. A tiny fat woman he knew by sight, a friend of Yelena’s, had been complaining about another student. ‘It creeps me out, how she never says much. But just hangs about watching everything-you know?’
Yelena said amiably, ‘You are right, it is very powerful this way to be still and observe.’ Her gaze drifted about the little group drinking shiraz from a cardboard box. ‘It is frightening. Like Tom.’
People concentrated on the contents of their glasses. The fat girl’s eyes met Tom’s briefl y. A terrified giggle broke from her, and she spoke at once of something else. The conversation slid gratefully away.
Pinned in Nelly’s armchair, Tom was returned to a rainy morning when, in the course of a schoolboy discussion about breakfast, a classmate of his, a boy named Sanjeev Swarup, had said, ‘Boiled eggs make your breath stink. Like Loxley’s.’
There was the shock, never adequately anticipated, of finding himself, the sovereign subject, an object of conversation. There was the terrible content of the statement, of course. But what had pierced Tom was the casualness of Swarup’s remark; a fatal lightness echoed in Yelena’s words. Like Sanjeev Swarup, she had intended neither harm nor provocation, had referred merely to a known, accepted fact. Tom thought, So that is how they see me! It was as if he had glanced down and discovered a precipice at his feet.
It was an incident he had dismissed over time, reasoning that as Yelena and the others came to know him, their view of him had altered. If he had failed to smother the recollection altogether, nevertheless its power to disturb had grown feeble.
But now a curious notion came after Tom, took hold of him and swivelled him, as he blundered among unfamiliar trees. He had assumed that Posner’s hints about Nelly’s fragility had been designed to frighten him off. But what if the dealer had been trying to protect her? From me, thought Tom, horrified. The idea was like coming upon something unholy. He fl ed from it, refusing to look over his shoulder.
He came out of the bush on the southern trail and found Nelly waiting there. She gestured at the shawl of paddocks below them fastened with the bright brooch of a dam. ‘We should search the farm. Jack-even Mick-would’ve spotted anything obvious. But they won’t have been everywhere. There could be something they’ve missed that we’d see.’
Her eyes were pouchy, the whites stained. Tom looked at her scratched hands and grimy clothes and thought, She wants a break from this.
She was saying, ‘Like there’s this old paddock that’s going back to bush with a grassy bit still in the middle. There’s so much you can’t see from the road or take in at a glance, all these tucked-away places.’
‘Why don’t you go back to the house and have a rest? I can keep
going here.’
‘I think we should check over the farm. And I’m OK. I don’t need a break.’
Tom could have sworn that the farm track was empty when they first turned on to it. Then he saw that a woman was standing by the bank, in the shade of an overhanging branch. As if released by a Play button, she began moving towards them.
‘I was just on my way up to your place.’ It was the fi rst thing Denise said, as if her presence there required justifi cation. And then, ‘Hi Nelly.’
‘Hi.’ After a moment, Nelly said, ‘How you doing?’
‘Yeah, good. You?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s good. You look good.’
This was so patently absurd that Nelly smiled. At once, something invisible altered, as if a breeze had found its way into a room.
Denise looked at Tom. ‘This bloke came into the clinic who’s done his hamstring. He said he saw your dog up near Walhalla.’
‘That’s miles away!’ But hope sprang open instantly within Tom. ‘When was this?’
‘This morning. Oh-when did he see the dog? Sunday, I think. I gave him one of your flyers so he could call you.’ Denise was digging in the back pocket of her jeans; embroidered white cotton tightened over her breasts.
‘Here you go.’ She handed Tom a Post-it. ‘I got his number, in case.’ He had his phone out. ‘Thanks. I’ll take this up to the top
of the hill.’ ‘You’re welcome to call from the farm if it’s easier.’ ‘No, it’s fine. Thanks. Thanks.’
No messages. He called his landline. Nothing. He sat on his heels in the grass beside the track. Two
magpies swooped low, a third began to sing. A long, greenish beetle lifted one antenna, toiling past Tom’s foot while somewhere a phone rang and rang.
‘Hello?’ He said, ‘Could I speak to Trevor, please? My name’s Loxley.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Tom Loxley. I think Trevor saw my dog. Is he there?’ He could hear her breathing while she thought it over.
Then she shouted, ‘Trev, you there? Trev?’ There were voices; indistinct. Tom pictured the receiver,
The Lost Dog Page 23