"The Lost Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kretser Michelle de)

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.’

Nelly lived on awful food, squares of soft white bread, instant noodles, tinned soup. (Brendon: ‘I had this bag of peas in the pod once. Nelly goes, What are they? I say Peas, and she goes, Very funny, Brendon, I’ve eaten peas, they’re round.’)

It was one of the things that endeared her to Tom. Early in life, he had encountered too many people who did not have enough to eat. It remained with him as the only thing that mattered about food: who had it and who did not. In a city where friends fell out over the merits of rival olive oils or the correct way to prepare a confit of duck, Nelly’s lack of interest in what she ate was bracing.

Yet in odd pockets of diet she was faddish, returning laden with Gravensteins and Royal Galas from the Saturday street market. Once a week she dosed herself, rather ostentatiously, with an infusion of senna pods and ginger. ‘Get plenty of fresh air and keep your bowels open. Ancient Chinese wisdom.’

It grated on Tom. ‘You’re, like, what? Third, fourth generation? Why do you pretend you’re Chinese?’

‘You think I should pretend I’m Australion?’

‘What?’

‘Australion. You know: like the ones who think they own the place. The Australions won’t let me, for one thing. Want to know how many weeks I can go without getting asked where I’m from?’

Nelly’s mother was a Scot. Among her ancestors she counted a Pole and an Englishman. The cast of her adulterated features was only vaguely Asiatic. She exploited it to the hilt, exaggerating the slant of her eyes with kohl, powdering her face into an expressionless mask. Stilettos and a slit skirt, and she might have stepped from a Shanghai den. A sashed tunic over wide trousers impersonated a woman warrior. She wore her hair cut blunt across her forehead, and drew attention to what she called her ‘thick Chinese calves’.

She was not for the taxonomy-minded. Sometimes a rosary strung with mother-of-pearl served her as a necklace, while a red glass bindi glittered on her brow. Her palms might be intricately patterned with henna, or her chin painted with geometric tattoos. She was smoke and mirrors; a category error. Yelena, noting the attentiveness with which Tom was examining an old photograph of Nelly with dreadlocks, remarked, ‘She is not some kind of sign for you to study, you know.’

There was wit in Nelly’s self-fashioning. Sometimes she fastened her hair with chopsticks. Her fondness for a particularly unflattering set of garments had Tom baffled for weeks. Then suddenly he understood. Baggy trousers that ended above socked ankles, a red quilted parka, a man’s felt hat jammed on her head: it was the anti-chinoiserie favoured by the ageless Chinese females who can be observed presiding over bok choy and cabbages in vegetable markets.

Tom could see Nelly’s choices as parody, as a defensive flaunting of caricature. There was playfulness in her imagery; and something sad. It was also kitsch. By that time he was half in love with Nelly Zhang. Anything that seemed to diminish her was painful to him.

An empty easel was a miniature gallows at one end of her studio. Tom’s gaze took in a large-screen Mac on a workstation, portfolios leaning against a wall, a pear made from solid green glass. Nelly’s painting overalls hung from a hook by the window. There were tall rolls of canvas under a table, and offcuts on top of a cupboard. Music he didn’t recognise was playing on a paint-splattered boombox. Nelly hummed along for a few discordant bars. She was incapable of holding a tune.

Long benches displayed tubes of paint, bottles of medium and thinner, jars of brushes. Tom wandered around the room, noticing things, touching them. Nelly showed him the spectacles of different magnification that she wore for detailed work. There were shelves stacked with folders and fi le boxes. Oddments in a milk crate: rags, a hammer, a pair of pliers, empty jars. A sheet of glass that served Nelly as a palette: ‘It’s easy to scrape clean.’

A notebook lay open by the computer. The collision between photography and painting, read Tom. Their circular conversation. And below this: There are now more photographs in the world than bricks.

These jottings were the remains of ideas, said Nelly. She was only just starting to feel her way towards her next show.

‘I need fallow time. Dreaming time.’ Then she said,‘Scary time. When you doubt you’ll ever be able to do it again.’

Tom told her that Renoir, reproached for doing everything but settle down to paint, had answered that a roaring fi re requires the gathering of a great deal of wood. He saw that this pleased Nelly, although she didn’t remark on it.

With the evidence of making all about him, he remembered something he had heard her say to Yelena about an artist’s muscles retaining the memory of the gestures required to lay paint on canvas.‘It can become automatic. Like you don’t notice your wrist turning a certain way, producing this effortless brushwork. That’s when you start repeating yourself. Competency: it’s the enemy of art.’

A page torn raggedly from a magazine was blu-tacked to the far wall. Tom moved closer: Goya’s ambiguous dog, poised between extinction and deliverance, gazing over the rim of the world.

‘That’s a painting I can hardly bear to look at,’ he said.

Nelly was standing near him, close enough for him to smell her scalp. She was not entirely appetising: her hands were often grubby; her red parka was grimed about the pockets. All Tom’s Indian fastidiousness rose against her musk, even as he was stirred.

When he sought to represent her to himself, there came into his mind the image of a great city: anomalous, layered, not exempt from reproach; magnifi cent.

The realisation of what she meant to him came about like this. One morning, he was conducting a seminar in a room where a row of interior windows opened onto a corridor. The lights were on against the darkness of the day, and Tom caught sight of himself in a window as he listened to a student read her paper. The glass was deceptive, a distortion in the pane or a trick of the light endowing his reflection with a vague double. In both incarnations the middle fingers of his left hand rested lightly on his upper lip. It was one of Nelly’s poses. He recognised her in him at once.

What was more, he was familiar with the symptom. The mimicry of those he wished to impress was a reflex with him. Certain distinctive gestures or turns of phrase, the pronunciation he gave to some words, a habit of leaving his cuffs unbuttoned, a dislike of salads that combined lettuce and tomato, an idiosyncratic way of looping his capital Ks: these, and other traits that identified him, were old borrowings. Imitation is the trace of a compulsion to consume another; it proceeds by assimilation and regurgitation. For a split second the windowpane held enemies, gurus, lovers, a neurotic procession winding back to Tom’s childhood. Nelly now had her place in that diaphanous parade.

Tom glimpsed, at unwelcome moments, something clenched within him: a hard pellet of suspicion. In this he knew himself his mother’s son. Like Iris, he calculated and judged; fi ngered the world to assess its worth. His father, by contrast, had been on good terms with life, greeting it with interest and pleasure. In the ease with which Nelly laughed, Tom caught an echo of Arthur Loxley’s readiness to be charmed by the great extempore adventure of existence.

Nelly was endlessly forbearing, tolerant of the dull, the deluded, the earnest, the video artist who steered all conversations to his gall bladder meridian. Vulnerability provokes one of two responses: the impulse to protect or the desire to crush. Tom could see-it was plain as sunlight-the sweetness that ran in her depths.

Yet he was driven also to remark the ambiguities eddying her surface. One of them concerned money. Tom learned- from Yelena, from Brendon, from others he met at the Preserve-that Nelly sold steadily. Museums across the country sought her out for projects and collected her work. The fl ood of talent and ambition that characterised the group was not without a resentful undertow. Now and then, in the detailing of Nelly’s good fortune, Tom detected a sidelong envy: she was someone her peers kept tabs on.

Running counter to this narrative of success was Nelly’s perennial consciousness of money. She was thrifty in ways uncommon in her cosseted generation, a single bag yielding two or even three cups of tea, meagre leftovers scraped together and refrigerated. Once, when Yelena was preparing a meal for them at her house, Nelly helped by chopping zucchini. Tom saw her slice off a stem, then trim the scanty flesh from around it that anyone else would have discarded.

Nelly taught painting at a visual arts college one day a week. It was reliable, coveted, ill-paid work. She frequented op shops, coaxed Yelena into cutting her hair, stored money away in envelopes marked Gas, Rent, Electricity, rode her bike to save on fares.

Tom watched her going about the Preserve hitting switches, grumbling that her tenants were wasteful with lights and heating. This regard for the conservation of resources might have been deemed admirable. But something in his gaze caught her attention. ‘Haven’t you heard? We Chinese invented cheap.’ It was as stagy as a pirouette. But Tom feared stumbling on an essential, submerged narrowness beneath the pose.

He glimpsed calculation in her friendship with Posner, who served Nelly in ways well beyond the commercial. She had a key to the dealer’s house, a five-minute walk up the hill; a room was set aside there for her use. Posner would lend her his car, take her out for meals and films, buy her books. The digital camera she now used for preparatory images was a present from him. When she needed root canal work on a molar, it was Posner who paid.

At times, Nelly seemed to want only to appease the dealer. Posner would be delivering himself of an opinion, and Nelly would murmur, ‘Exactly. That’s like, just so exactly right’; her dutiful, daughterly manner at these moments approaching caricature. On other occasions she was offhand with Posner, barely acknowledging his presence; and then it was he who was deferential, who cajoled while his eyes remained watchful. It was as if each possessed something the other wanted and feared would be withheld. Knowledge lapped between them, and need, and tenderness. They might have been conspirators or siblings. They had that air of mutual reliance tinged with resentment that tells of consanguinity or crime.

Yelena’s work was included in a group show in Fitzroy. Afterwards, in a bar, a curator said, ‘The thing is, Nelly’s slow. Too long between shows.’ His fleshy, egg-shaped skull was adorned here and there with feathery stubs. He had the soft, greedy air of a baby bird: beak wide, waiting.

Tom bought a round, and the curator edged closer. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know if what they say about the paintings is true?’

‘What do they say?’

‘Ah well.’ A claw flipped, dismissing private hope. There remained the pleasure of imparting gossip. ‘There’s a whisper that Nelly doesn’t actually get rid of her paintings after they’re photographed. That they’re stashed away, accruing value.’ The voice was malicious and admiring. ‘She’ll make a killing one day.’

Once, after Tom had gone with her to a gallery in a suburb of tall houses and broad-leafed European trees, Nelly said she had some shopping to do and showed him the list inked on her palm: milk, cheese, bread. He drove to the nearest supermarket, where he picked up a few things he needed himself.

At the checkout, Nelly arrived with a carton of milk and a sliced loaf.

‘Is that it?’ he asked.

She had her purse out and he saw that it held only a fi vedollar note and a few coins. Not enough for cheese at the prices charged by the small, expensive store.

Tom walked up to the top of the farm track, where he knew his phone would have coverage. The air over the paddocks was a substance between liquid and paper. It held, on the horizon, the trace of a mountain: a watercolour blotted while wet into almost blankness.

There was a message from his aunt, left that morning, asking him to ring her urgently.

No message from his mother.

He imagined her dead, of course. He had failed to call her the previous day, and now she had died. Plains and cities and snow-headed peaks filed before his eyes: vast India passing with her. The ground of history gave way. Tom Loxley swung in sickening freedom.

He pressed the numbers that would bring about a changed world.

In the farmhouse at the bottom of the track, Jack added an artificial sweetener to his mug. The shading of hair on the sides of his hands gave them the look of a drawing of themselves.

Tom said, ‘I left the gate ajar. And some food in a bowl.’

‘Foxes’ll have that.’

‘I’ll be back tomorrow night. Friday morning at the latest.’

On the wall behind Jack was a frayed piece of tribal cloth in a wooden frame, a beautiful scrap in buff and dull ochres. Baskets woven from grass hung beside it. Yellow and red kangaroo paws crowded a greenish metal beaker on a table. The sleek couch, grey with a thin stripe of lemon, was a replica of the one Tom owned.

He sipped the tea Denise Corrigan had insisted on making, and felt her gaze on him. She was an unremarkable woman, with her father’s remarkable eyes. Tom saw that she was enjoying the effect of the room, its calculated undoing of assumptions created by brown brick veneer. He looked away, to the window framing fields with a filmy backdrop of mountain.

Jack said, ‘Rain’ll ease up later. I’ll go up and have a gander. Take one of the dogs.’

When Tom rose to leave, he was confronted by another anomaly. A set of hanging shelves by the door paraded kittens, boots, thatched cottages, mermaids: each miniature and doubled, a display of china salt and pepper shakers.

‘Mum used to collect them.’

Denise’s voice, utterly even, defied him to betray disdain. He was familiar with that tone.

On the step, he asked, ‘Is your father OK? I mean, to go looking…?’

‘Yeah, he’s good. The pacemaker’s made a difference.’ Denise added, ‘I’ll go with him.’

‘I didn’t mean to trouble…’

‘No trouble. Wednesday’s my afternoon off.’ She nodded at him; smiled. In flat shoes, she was taller than Tom by inches.

She said, ‘You must be worried about your mum.’

‘It’s nothing serious. But I have to get back.’ He clicked open Denise’s umbrella. ‘She’s eighty-two. Arthritis in both knees. When she gets up from a chair, there’s this tearing noise…’

Denise nodded again. She told him she was a physiotherapist at the local health centre. She pulled up the hood of her raincoat. ‘It’s cruel, arthritis.’

He lowered the window and thanked her again.

‘No worries. Drive safely.’

Tom had started up the engine when she leaned forward. ‘They turn up, you know. Dogs. I’ll ask people at work to keep an eye out.’

Children draw rain as a finite thing, a band of broken strokes descending through fine weather. The rain curtain: Tom, driving at a crawl along the breakneck road curling down from the hills, could remember searching for its watery beads all through a monsoon; but the rain never showed itself until it had him surrounded.

Hours later, the rain had eased and the city was a thrust of tombstones at the horizon. Soon the freeway would catch up with fast food, shopping malls, showrooms, car yards flying shrouds of plastic bunting. But for the moment there were pale, fl at paddocks that went on and on. This was landscape that could only just remember colour, as time fades bright experience. There remained the faintest recollection of something called green.

Coming up behind a truck, Tom saw sheep pressed against slats: eyes, dirty fillets of shoulder and breast.

Jack Feeney kept a few beef cattle, large polled grey beasts, in Nelly’s paddock. For the rest he ran sheep.

Light stretching in the sky pulled silver through charcoal, transforming clouds into a softly expensive pelt.

Tom pulled out and overtook the truck as soon as he could.

At home, the first thing he did was step into the shower. With water streaming over his turning body, his mind occupied itself with shit.

‘I knew something was wrong. It was almost nine-thirty and I hadn’t seen her and you know we have a cup of tea at nine. When I knocked, she was still in her nightie. And there was a smell…’ Here his aunt’s voice had faltered. ‘She’d done you-know-what on the floor. And trodden it into the carpet.’

‘But why? How…?’

‘She says she didn’t realise she’d done it. “It must have slipped out.” That’s all I can get out of her. I’ll never be rid of the stains.’

The last thing Tom had done in the country, in accordance with the instructions taped to a wall in Nelly’s kitchen, had been to lift out the pail in the lavatory and bury its contents.

As a boy, sharing a lavatory with his mother, it had been impossible to avoid the stench of her faeces. It was not until he left home and shared living spaces with other people that he realised their shit smelled different-from each other’s, from his-even though they all ate the same food. But his mother rose unaltered from that elemental reek when he buried his waste in a hole by Nelly’s fence.

Did that mean the odour of shit was genetically determined, in part at least? Towelling himself dry, he thought there must be a book about it, one of those fashionable volumes offering packets of whimsical facts, histories of fi sh, biographies of numerals. An Archaeology of Excrement. It’s got to have occurred to the French, thought Tom.

A low, black iron gate swung open into his aunt’s garden, where a red man had been strung up in a tree; outlined in fairy bulbs, he held a sign that blinked Season’s Greetings. November still had a few days to run, but Audrey was always early with her decorations. She prepared for Christmas as for a catastrophe, warning, ‘It’ll be here before you know it,’ weeks ahead of the feast, observing its advance with the grim satisfaction of an Old Testament prophet notified that the first wave of locusts had been sighted.

Tom went down the path that led to Iris’s door, which had once been the side entrance to his aunt’s house. The slippers aligned on her doormat were deep pink with golden chevrons across the toe. He crouched; the fabric was still damp.

He thought about the moment when his mother must have realised what had happened. Iris, whose knees made it impossible to stoop; to pick up a coin or a pill, to scrape her own fi lth from the carpet.

‘She’d been sitting there for an hour.’ Audrey, on the telephone. ‘You’d think she could have told me sooner, instead of just sitting there with it all around her.’

Tom thought of his mother trying to come to terms with the disaster; preparing the words in which she would have to confess what she had done; the moment when the shameful evidence of age and incapacity would be made public, when it would be clear that she had lost control of her body and couldn’t hide the consequences.

He made tea-bag tea for Iris, instant coffee for himself, carried the mugs into the living room. His nostrils identifi ed chemical lavender.

‘The biscuits,’ said Iris. ‘Where are the Tim-Tams?’

In adolescence, Tom had devoured packet after packet of chocolate biscuits, unable to desist. He no longer liked the taste. But his mother went on buying them, and he could not deny her the pleasure she derived from being able to offer him this small indulgence.

He sat on the wooden-armed sofa-bed, on which he had slept for six years, and ate a biscuit.

On the wall was the starburst clock Iris had bought on lay-by with her fi rst wages. Every time Tom saw it he remembered the passions it had ignited. He had sat at the card table in the corner, a book about the First Fleet open before him, while Audrey remarked that in her opinion, it was nothing short of robbery to squander money on ornaments while living on charity. For did Iris imagine that the pittance she paid would rent her two rooms and the use of a Whirlpool anywhere else in this day and age?

‘The amount was agreed,’ Iris cried. ‘The rent was set by you. When my husband was alive and you were ashamed to try this highway rookery.’

A week later, Bill presented Audrey with a starburst clock for their wedding anniversary. He was a heavy, peaceable man who sold surfaces; on the subject of laminates, he approached eloquence. The clock was larger, more elaborate than Iris’s, about which nothing further was heard.

Australian history for Tom would henceforth be inseparable from economics, high dudgeon and the sense of entrenched moral positions.

His mother sat in the straight-backed chair she preferred, her walker within reach. Tom’s earliest memory of Iris placed her in an armchair beside a wireless, with her legs in a bag made of flowered cretonne. It fastened below her knees with a drawstring, protecting her calves from mosquitos.

The bag disappeared when Tom was very young, and for the rest of his childhood a table fan and Shelltox kept the living room mosquito-free. But he could still see the large red blooms on the creamy cretonne; the ivied trellis against which they climbed.

Iris was eating a biscuit with the audible, laborious mastica

tion of those who no longer have molars.

‘Ma, is everything all right?’

His mother sucked melted chocolate from her front teeth. ‘Knees are bad today. This weather.’

‘Audrey told me what happened in the morning.’

‘I knew she would ring you and carry on. There was no need at all.’

‘But Ma, if you can’t manage…’

‘I can manage,’ cried Iris. ‘You-all want to get rid of me. You-all want to put me in a home.’

‘Ma, be reasonable.’

‘It’s hard to bear when you’re rejected by your own child.’

Tom jumped up. He walked to the kitchen door and back; a short distance. His gaze fell on an arrangement of dried thistles he had always detested. The room, unchanged in thirty years, returned him to the helpless rage of adolescence, the sensation of being trapped in poverty and irrational argument and ugliness.

‘How can you say that? I see you regularly, I do everything I can. How can you say you’ve been rejected?’

‘No need to get worked up,’ said Iris.

Tom had decided to say nothing about what had happened the previous day, telling himself that the dog would be found and that there was no need to cause his mother unnecessary grief. Yet now he resented her not enquiring after the animal.

With her talent for irritating her son, Iris asked, ‘So how was your holiday?’

‘It wasn’t a holiday.’ He was shouting again. ‘I was working-’

Long-past Sunday afternoons: ‘I’m not reading, I’m studying. Why can’t they wash their own car?’ And so Tom Loxley still leaped to defend the life he had chosen against the imputation of idleness; the reflex as immutable as arithmetic.

He made himself breathe in slowly, feeling his ribs move sideways. He breathed out again. He said, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

A three-inch step led down from the living room into the passage. Iris approached the brink; then stopped. ‘I’m falling,’ she cried, and clutched the handles of her walker still tighter. ‘Tommy, I’m falling.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Hold me, darling, hold me.’

‘Ma, you’re fi ne.’

‘Easy for you to say, child.’

‘Be sensible, Ma. I’m right here. You’re not going to fall.’

The front wheels clunked into the abyss. ‘I’m falling, I’m falling.’

They shuffled up and down the passage, between the entrance to the annexe and the door that led to Audrey’s part of the house. Rain kept up its steady gunning on the tin roof. On the other side of the wall, there was the shapeless noise of TV.

Tom was thinking of an almirah made of Indian calamander that his mother had once owned. Now and then Iris had unlocked its single drawer, lifted it out and placed it before her son. The child was allowed to look but not to touch. Naturally, he disobeyed. He turned his grandfather’s ivory teething ring in his hands. He examined a thermometer, and a tiny pink teacup painted with fiery dragons. An empty, redolent bottle with an engraved label and the enigmatic legend Je Reviens. Three glass buttons shaped like tiny clusters of purple grapes. A satin-bowed chocolate box with a basket of fl uffy kittens on the lid. A jet and diamanté earring. A cardboard coaster stamped with a golden flower. A leather case in which a satin-lined trench held a silver biro; when the case was opened, a puff of cool, metallic air was released into the world.

At random moments, the child Tom would shut his eyes and call up these items one by one. It was his version of Kim’s Game. The almirah was doubly implicated in remembering: there was the memory game, and there were the stories attached to each object, the past glimmering into life as Tom pondered the provenance of a foreign coin or a small brass key.

In Australia Iris had a wardrobe, utilitarian as equipment. History sank beneath the imperatives of the present, its kingdom conquered by objects with no aura, by bulky blankets and woollen garments that spoke only of household management and the weather. Who transports coasters and old chocolate boxes over oceans? Practical considerations had ensured that Iris was no longer the custodian of memory. But there was worse: within her new setting, she appeared archaic. It was as if a malevolent substitution was at work, so that she had begun to assume the aspect of a relic herself.

Iris moaned, ‘I’m tired. I want to sit down.’

‘Five minutes more.’

‘My knees are paining.’

‘Just up and down twice more. Exercise is good for you.’

‘Oh, I’m tired. I want to sit down.’

Side by side, they carried on.

When he kissed her goodbye, he said, ‘Ma, if it happens again, call me.’

She peered up at him. Fear moved in her eyes, a rat scuttling through shadows. ‘I was good up to eighty.’ Her hand tightened on his arm.

‘Tell Dr Coutras about it when you see him, OK?’

‘He’ll say it’s cancer and want to open me up.’

‘No, he won’t.’

Iris’s perm, the thin hair in airy loops, stood out from her skull like petals; like a child’s crayoned sun. ‘All right, I’ll tell him,’ she said.

The docility, the large, nodding head: Tom thought of beasts, waiting to be killed or fed.

While he was still on her doorstep, Audrey said, ‘I draw the line at nursing.’ There were many such lines, existence taking on for his aunt the aspect of a dense cross-hatching.

‘It must have been awful. So humiliating.’

‘Yes, well.’ Audrey patted the back of her hair, hitched up her cardigan at the shoulders. ‘I’ve got the professional training, of course. And when I think what I went through with poor Bill.’

‘I meant humiliating for Ma.’ Tom knew he was being foolish, as well as unfeeling. His aunt, too, had had a bad day; and he could not do without her. Yet it seemed important, at the outset of the discussion he knew would follow, to establish Iris as a distinct being; before talk took away her particularity, positioning her as the object of sentences.

He said, ‘What a terrible shock for you. You’ve been tremendous.’

‘Yes, well.’ But her heroism acknowledged, Audrey favoured the version of herself that was selfless and uncomplaining. ‘It’s second nature to me, rendering assistance. Remember when Shona did my personality on the Internet?’ She drew her nephew into the house, ignoring his murmured protest; she had been waiting for this conversation all day.

A glass-fronted cabinet held a harlequin, a corsair, a ballerina, a drummer boy, a Bo Peep with a crook wreathed in fl owers and a lilac dress bunched up over a sprigged underskirt. Once a week Audrey murmured to small porcelain people of love while holding them face down in soapy water.

Tom turned the flowered mug in his hands. He couldn’t bring himself to drink another cup of bad coffee. A plump tabby left her cushion by the heater and crossed the room to rub her ears against the visitor’s legs. She sprang up, a warm purring weight.

Tom thought of how wolfish creatures are tolerant of cold but dislike damp. He tried willing himself to believe that the dog had made his way to the ridge road, and was lying safe, dry, sated, in a trucker’s kitchen. At this minute a woman might be reaching for the phone, while a child read off the number on a tag.

The picture was overlaid by another: night and bedraggled fur, a thin wind blowing.

Audrey was given to summary: the review of offences that confirms authority and justifies punishment. Cushioned in crisp chintz, she outlined what she called ‘the situation’. Iris would not venture into the passage alone. ‘What if the heater bursts into flame when I’m out? She’ll be burned to a crisp.’ Audrey had lately begun providing her sister-in-law with dinner as well as lunch, Iris now being capable of no more than tea and toast. ‘And even then, I don’t like to think of her with electricals.’ Audrey knew for a fact that Iris no longer risked the shower, making do with washbasin and facecloth. ‘You have to ask yourself about hygiene.’ It went without saying that Audrey was happy to do what she could; nevertheless, she said it. ‘But I can’t be bound hand and foot.’

She had a genius, this woman upholstered in rosy fl esh, for conjuring bodily abuse. ‘She’s got her nose out of joint.’ ‘I was running my head into a brick wall.’ Images that recurred, scenes from a censored film, on the bland screen of her talk.

‘I told her, I made it clear: If this goes on, you’ll have to go into a home.’ She looked at Tom with small blue eyes, the sapphire chips he had first seen in his father’s face. ‘No one can say I haven’t made it clear.’

‘No.’

‘Did you see my Berber? Ruined.’

‘If you could arrange steam-cleaning, I’ll fix you up, of course.’

But that was too simple an outcome.

‘Well, if you think I didn’t do a good enough job on that carpet.’

‘Of course not. I could hardly see the stains. Steam-cleaning would get rid of them completely, that’s all.’

‘I work my fingers to the bone for your mother.’

Driving home, his mind glazed with fatigue, Tom thought he should have offered his aunt more money. But for Audrey, money was a subject veiled in elaborate rituals; best approached, like a god, by cautious increment, face down in the dust.

There was her resentment that Tom should be in a position to offer money. On the other hand, if money was not offered, there was resentment at being taken for granted. And then, there was the question of how much; settled by indirection and insinuation and inspired guesswork, a process strung between accepting the figure named by Audrey and exceeding it by too wide a margin, either error occasioning tightened lips, silences charged with grievance, oblique accusations and small, roundabout acts of revenge.

The rain had stopped. At a traffic light, Tom lowered his window; a cold breath arrived on his cheek.

Audrey and he both knew he would rather write cheques than confront the devastation time had worked on his mother; as a man will make donations to charity the better to turn his face from the misery of the world.

This shared awareness diminished him in all his dealings with his aunt. It was Audrey, after all, who prepared meals and washed clothes, who drove Iris to the doctor and the hairdresser, who arranged for non-slip soles to be attached to shoes, who shopped for chocolate biscuits.

On Punt Road hill, Tom saw the city laid out before him like a parable. The sky was clear but blank, its lights obscured by electric galaxies. The hubris of it always thrilled him, that jewelled fist raised nightwards in defiance. Age brings increased delight in the natural world; or so tradition holds. But Tom was all for artifice, for the resplendent, doomed contrivances of his ingenious kind.

Towards morning he snapped awake, his mind on the loose. He drained the glass of water beside his bed; burrowed back down into warmth.

The dog’s muzzle was scattered with liverish spots, darker than the rest of his fox-red markings.

Animals do not suffer as we do. They do not live in time, they are not nostalgic for the past, they do not imagine a better future; and so they lack awareness of mortality. They might fear

death when it is imminent, but they do not dread it as we do.

So Tom Loxley reasoned, and tried to believe.

He thought of the stray dogs of India: question-mark tails raised over the lives they witness and endure.

He thought of the clearing he had seen on the hill, the tyre holding charred wood, the soggy remains of activity, and was visited by brief, lucid images of things that can be done to animals.