The Lost Dog

by Michelle De Kretser

  held against her breast. A man said, ‘Yeah, g’day?’ Tom explained. ‘Yeah, sorry mate, I was gunna call, but the day got away?’ In the background, the woman said something. Trev said

  something. Tom cried, ‘You’re breaking up.’ ‘What?’ ‘I didn’t catch what you said.’ ‘Listen, mate, I dunno-’

  The woman said, ‘It’s me. Shirl? What he’s trying to say, love, it wasn’t your dog.’

  After a moment, Tom said, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I was the one spotted him, love. By the side of this track coupla hundred yards this side of Walhalla? Cute little tyke.’

  ‘Little.’

  ‘Yeah, little curly white fella, got a bit of that Malteser in him, I reckon? I didn’t get a real good look. Took off into the bush when I slowed down. Like he just vanished?’

  ‘So he definitely wasn’t…’

  ‘No, love. Nothing like, except they’re both white. Trev just remembered I said I’d seen a white dog.’

  ‘Right. OK.’

  ‘Sorry, love.’

  The women’s faces were turned to the bend in the track. Tom saw the light go out of them at the sight of his own.

  When he explained, Denise said, ‘That Trevor Opie. Might’ve known-guy’s a dickhead.’

  ‘At least we haven’t wasted much time. Back to Plan A.’

  Tom understood that Nelly’s briskness wasn’t directed at him alone; that one of the people she was trying to rally was herself. All the same, it set his teeth on edge.

  She was saying, ‘Nees says she’ll come with us. Help us search the farm.’

  Nees! Unreasonably, that grated too.

  ‘Thanks, Denise. But to be honest, the last thing I feel like doing right now is traipsing around a whole lot of paddocks.’ Tom said, ‘We could look over the farm tomorrow morning if you like. But let’s face it, the whole thing’s a waste of time, really.’

  He saw the two of them exchange glances; adults dealing with a fractious child.

  Nelly said, ‘It’s just-’ She gestured skywards. ‘This weather.’

  ‘Yeah, you’ve already made that point. Three weeks without food, three days without water. Wasn’t that how it went?’

  Nelly started to say something. He cut across her, keeping his tone very level. ‘Just think it through. If the rope got caught up in some undergrowth, he’s been trapped in one spot for nine days without food. If he’s still alive, he’s already gone twenty-four hours without water. So if we’re looking anywhere, it’s got to be in the bush. Where you know as well as I do, we’ll never fi nd him.’

  ‘But the thing is to act like we will. And to try everything we can think of. Like he might’ve got free at some point. Headed for the farm looking for food and collapsed there.’

  ‘Yeah, he might have. And he might have been picked up by someone who dumped him on the freeway, or used him as target practice, or took him home as an early Christmas present for the kiddies. Or he might have been bitten by a snake, or a fox might have waited till he was weak enough and finished him off. We can imagine whatever we like. But believing we’ll find him out there is just deluded.’

  ‘It’s not, it’s hoping. It’s not like giving up’s going to get us anywhere.’

  Sweaty and furious, the two of them glared at each other.

  Afterwards, they wouldn’t be able to agree on what Denise said. She was looking past them, at the path climbing to the ridge. When she spoke, Tom turned his head. A dog had appeared in the distance, small against the sky.

  ‘Nearest vet’s Traralgon.’ Denise glanced at her watch. ‘You’ll just make it before he closes. I’ll call and let them know you’re on your way.’

  Tom said, ‘The house-’

  ‘Leave everything. I’ll lock up and that. Just grab what you need and go.’ She was turning away, heading downhill towards the farm.

  Nelly was already running in the opposite direction. Tom gathered up the dog and followed.

  As the car approached the farm, Denise came racing out of the gate. She thrust a bag through Nelly’s window. ‘Thermos. Only instant but I figured it was better than nothing. Hope you take milk and sugar.’

  ‘Denise, you’re a goddess.’

  ‘There’s some honey there as well. Feed him honey,’ shouted Denise.

  Nelly leaned out, waving. The dog was a sack of dull fur on a doona spread over the back seat. In the mirror, Denise stood with her wrists on her hips, watching them go.

  ‘Getting a bit old for this kind of caper, aren’t you fella?’ The vet’s long nose was blunt at the tip, as if someone had placed a finger there and pushed. He tickled the dog’s chest; examined the gash on his foreleg, the shallower slits above. ‘Rope cuts.

  Every time he tugged on it, the rope would’ve twisted tighter around his leg. See how it’s just starting to scab over? I reckon he got free sometime in the last twenty-four hours.’

  When Tom put his arms around him, the dog squirmed and struggled. His claws scrabbled on the table. An unbearably light bundle, he hated being carried. He had lost eight kilos, a third of his weight. His hips were angle brackets coated with fur.

  ‘He’ll need plenty of sleep, plenty of good tucker. Small amounts: four, five meals a day. No meat to begin with and introduce it gradually. Wouldn’t do any harm to have your regular vet check him out in the next few days.’

  ‘You know, in a way he looks pretty good,’ said Nelly. ‘Look how bright his eyes are.’

  ‘That’s how fasting works. The toxins go, along with the fat. But I wouldn’t like to say how much more he could’ve taken. You found him pretty much just in time, I reckon.’

  ‘It was the other way round,’ said Tom. ‘He found us.’

  The dog licked honey from Nelly’s fingers. In the waiting room, he strained at a cage of snow-bellied kittens.

  On the far side of the clipped pittosporums that separated the clinic from the street, an invisible woman said, ‘She’s good-looking in that really obvious way. You know?’

  Tom put his hand over his ear. ‘What?’

  In the city, Iris cried, ‘You’re not coming tonight?’

  ‘Ma, I’m still at the vet’s, it’s hours away-’ Tom broke off. ‘Not tonight. We’ll have dinner tomorrow, OK?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dinner tomorrow!’

  ‘All right.’

  He said, ‘Ma, do you understand? He’s very thin, but he’s basically OK.’

  ‘I know.’ Iris had greeted the news with the same calm. ‘It’s a miracle. Saint Anthony never fails.’

  ‘What I don’t get is, if the rope got twisted around something and he chewed through it, or if it wore through somehow, why wasn’t the end of it still tied to his collar?’

  ‘Because the knot worked loose,’ said Nelly.

  ‘I’ve had that knot on my mind ever since he ran off. There’s no way it would’ve come undone.’

  They shot past a car on the shoulder of the freeway, its hazard lights flashing. A man paced beside it, talking into a phone. A little further on, a billboard floated a lucent female over a city, replacing her entrails with skyscrapers.

  ‘What was it called, that magic in knots? Didn’t you say it could work for good?’

  ‘Do you think someone might’ve found him caught up in the bush?’ Tom was hearing a motorbike fading into the night. ‘Just untied the knot and let him go?’

  ‘You hungry?’ she asked.

  ‘Starving.’

  ‘Next bypass, OK?’

  Tom said,‘My mother says it’s a miracle. She’s been praying to Saint Anthony.’

  ‘Well, there you go then.’

  Nelly nudged him. ‘Look.’

  In the mirror tiles that covered the back wall of the pizza parlour, two wild-eyed grotesques had appeared. Their garments were squalid, their hair feral. They were escapees from an experiment conducted on another planet. Unearthly happiness glimmered in their soiled faces.

  One evening, Nelly was waiting for Tom when h
e rang her bell. ‘Come on, come on, you have to see this while it’s still light.’

  She led him to a street they hadn’t visited in weeks. ‘Look.’

  It was a flat-faced, two-storey house in a street of Federation cottages. Just completed: a skip containing rubble and crumpled guttering still at the kerb, the yard a stretch of trampled earth.

  The glass panels that covered the façade of the house contained the life-size image of a low, wooden dwelling with finials and decrepit fretwork.

  ‘It’s a photograph of the house that used to be here,’ said Nelly.‘A digital print on laminated glass. Isn’t it brilliant? Don’t you love it?’

  When a building has been demolished, the memory of it seems to linger awhile, imprinted on the eye. Here, before them, was that phantom rendered material.

  The house that was there and not might have been a metaphor for what passed between them. Tom thought of what his relations with Nelly lacked: sex, answers. Straightforward things. Instead, she offered ghosts, illusion, imagery, a handful of glass eyes. Nelly offered detail and excess. Things extra and other, oddments left on the pavement when the bins had been emptied, illuminated capitals for a manuscript not written. She offered diversions, discontinuities, impediments to progress. Tom thought of scenes that present themselves to a traveller, in which confusion and brilliance so entrance that scenery itself eludes attention.

  The past is not what is over but what we wish to have done with. That year time turned translucent. Old things moved just beneath its surface, familiar and strange as a known face glimpsed under water.

  It was a year of fearful symmetries. There was a fashion for shopping bags made from woven nylon that reminded Tom of the cheap totes found in the markets of India. They had handles formed from skipping rope and were patterned with serial, stylised skipping girls. Tom saw them all over the city, colourful presences signalling from women’s hands.

  Once he saw a ghost. On a kidney-shaped coffee table in the window of the retro shop on Church Street stood an object Tom recognised with a small, sickening lurch. Knobbly purple glass, an elongated stopper: the amethyst double of the yellow bottle he had smashed all those years ago; as if smashing were all it took.

  There was the sea-hiss of the freeway in the background. They sat at a picnic table beside the car park, devouring pizza.

  The dog was licking around his takeaway container, nosing it over the gravel. When he was sure it held no more spaghetti he returned to the car and raised a shaky leg against a tyre. Then he waited by the door.

  Nelly opened the door and lifted him onto the seat; placed her face against his fur. He sighed and fell asleep.

  Tom crammed the empty food containers one by one into a slit-mouthed bin. Night’s brilliant little logos were starting to appear all over the sky.

  He was on his way back to Nelly, advancing in a measured diagonal across the car park, when he fell. His foot tripped over nothing and he went down.

  After a moment he registered pain, gravel-scorch on the palms flung out to protect his face. Also, one knee had hit the ground hard.

  What was overwhelming, however, was the astonishment: the sheer scandal of falling. Tom was returned, in one swift instant, to childhood; for children, not having learned to stand on their dignity, are accustomed to being slapped by the earth.

  His first instinct was to scramble to his feet as if nothing had happened. But the dumb machinery of his flesh refused to obey. The rebellion was brief and shocking; then his thoughts took a different course. He stayed where he was, the adult length of him at rest in gravelled dirt. Without realising it, he began to cry.

  Later, he leaned his forehead on the steering wheel and cried. He wiped his face on his sodden sleeve and went on crying.

  At some point he said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help it.’ He said, ‘I keep thinking how the rope would’ve cut into him whenever he tried to struggle free or lie down. That he’d have had to choose between pain and exhaustion.’

  What Tom meant also was that while the dog had persisted in his painful effort to rejoin him, he had persuaded himself the dog was dead. What he meant was that he was unworthy of grace.

  He thought of Iris doing what she could to help, adding her prayers to the world’s cargo of trust. He remembered the receptionist at the health centre who had told him about her grandfather’s dog, the ranger who had spoken kindly on the phone. He recalled the gifts of hope and reassurance he had been offered, and cried with his hands over his face.

  Nelly kept saying,‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’ Tom lifted his head, and saw her hands opening and shutting. They made passes in the air as if essaying spells once familiar but long forgotten.

  Grace, rocking along Tom’s fibres, murmured of wonders that exceed reason. It whispered of the miracle of patient, flawed endeavour. It butted and nuzzled him, blindly purposeful as a beast.

  On the freeway, Nelly slid a CD into the player. ‘This’ll keep us awake.’

  The Beastie Boys were blasting through their fi rst track when he glanced across and saw that she was asleep.

  Tom took the exit ramp. In the rear-view mirror, the dog raised his head.

  At the Swan Street lights Nelly woke up. The dog staggered to his feet and put his nose out of the window.

  ‘How come you’re turning right?’

  ‘Something I’ve remembered.’

  The dog swayed on the back seat as they approached the bend in the empty road. Tom pulled in opposite the disused tram depot. In the sudden silence the engine ticked like a heart.

  Nelly peered out at the orange-brick relic of a stubborn, unmodern need. The huge, ugly façade of the church was wrapped in forgiving darkness. But it was possible to pick out the pale figure of the saint with the child in his arms.

  Tom said, ‘Perry’s Pebbles.’

  She looked around. ‘What?’

  ‘Another time.’

  And still the endless day had not used up its store of wonders. With sublime unhaste, the tip of Nelly’s fi nger began to trace a circle on Tom’s knee.

  The tears that had filled his eyes started rolling down his face.

  He was still crying soundlessly, unable to stop, when the dog tottered through the flat, tail waving gently, and into the laundry. There, he stepped into his basket, turned around three times while sniffing his bedding; folded his limbs, drew tail and nose together as neatly as a knot.

  Tom washed his hands, his face. He breathed in the merciful scent of a clean cotton towel.

  Nelly wasn’t in the kitchen. He poured warm water onto oats for the dog and placed a cloth serially stamped with the Mona Lisa over the dish.

  Across the passage a light gleamed, but there was no one in the living room.

  Then he noticed a piece of paper lying on the TV. He went closer and saw a hand-drawn map. It was stained and much creased. But it had been updated with the addition of a tiny, stylised dog, tail jauntily aloft.

  Tom switched off the lamp and went to Nelly.

  Thursday

  They had gone to bed late and not slept until later still. But Nelly roused him early, while it was still dark. The bedside candle she had lit lay in a shallow cup of red glass. It was the ruby and gold illumination of Tom’s solitary performances. What he desired, on the instant, was her direction. His hand passed across his hip, glided over hers, and drew her fingers towards him.

  ‘Hang on.’ She said, ‘Something I want to tell you.’

  She had twisted up her hair, secured it with the comb he had taken from it some hours earlier. Now she retrieved his bedspread from the floor and arranged it about her shoulders. Its loose blue folds, in which tiny mirrors glittered, lay open at her breasts. The soft indigo cotton flowed like a kimono. This brazen orientalism achieved, she was ready to begin.

  ‘What you said yesterday about Felix taking my dress.’

  Propped on one elbow, Tom waited.

  Nelly said it was what she herself had suspected when she heard Jimmy Morgan’s story.
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  ‘So I was right about Denise. Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I don’t think he took it for Denise.’

  Nelly was silent for so long that Tom slid his free hand into blue shadows. At which she said, ‘I think Felix took it for himself.’

  I didn’t want to see her face. Jimmy Morgan’s unease slid into Tom’s mind as female flesh parted unambiguously at his touch.

  Nelly murmured, ‘Like you said about Denise. If someone saw my dress, they might think they’d seen me. And also-’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Felix knew I would know.’ A little later: ‘It was his message to me. The note he didn’t leave.’

  Scented molecules were being released into the air; a flower was opening, thick-petalled, sweetly reeking. The man’s fl esh fluttered and thrilled in response. Silently fly the birds / all through us, he thought.

  But Nelly went on talking. ‘It’s like he turned himself into a letter only I could read.’

  Tom tried to concentrate. ‘Wouldn’t he have looked weird? People would have noticed for sure.’

  ‘It was mostly dark. And just to get to the beach and away.’

  She spoke hurriedly; Tom realised she was impatient for him to continue. He rearranged blue pleats, the better to observe her.

  ‘Jimmy Morgan thought the woman he saw was carrying a bag.’ Nelly said, ‘Felix could’ve had other stuff in there, clothes that fi tted him.’

  ‘It sounds-I don’t know, incredible. Not to mention risky.’

  ‘He didn’t have a lot of time to plan it. And he was good at risks.’

  While she was speaking the flame in the red glass dipped and died, and a great wing of shadow reared against the wall.

  In the blind dark Nelly said, ‘It would explain why he’s never been found.’

  She said, ‘He might have gone on doing it. Cross-dressing, I mean.’

  Tom was conscious of her body’s heat, of her quick blood under his fingers. At the same time, she seemed mechanical in a way he hadn’t noticed the previous night; a pulse jumping at a stroked wrist suggested not so much life as animation. He had created this staccato but it was not susceptible to rule.