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

Friday

Tiny feet fled when Tom entered Nelly’s house. In the kitchen, there was a morse code of mouse shit on the sill, the sink, the table.

He unpacked the car, then sat on the back step with coffee from his thermos. It was shortly after eight; he had risen at four. His mind brimmed with metal and oncoming lights, with images slippery as speed. He concentrated on the stream of his breathing, trying to absorb the saturated calm of the place. Cattle raised their heavy heads to look at him, then lowered them once more to their table. Magpies drove their beaks into the damp earth.

The dish of oats he had left by the steps, partly covered with a piece of masonite, was soggy but undisturbed.

He noticed that his ritual magic had taken a variant turn. His latest revisioning of the scene with the wallaby began by Nelly’s water tank, where, instead of fastening a length of orange polypropylene baling twine to the dog’s collar, he merely clipped on his lead. The wallaby crossed in front of them. The dog bounded into the bush. He reappeared shortly afterwards, shamefaced but unrepentant; his lead, too short to tangle with the undergrowth, dragging through the mud.

The replay was relentless. Tom was learning that disaster is repetitive: animated, yet inert. Offering neither the release of change nor the serenity of detachment, it was merely always there; always terrible.

His purchases the previous day had included builders’ tape and a pocket knife. Short lengths of bright yellow plastic now flagged his passage through the bush.

There were fugitive smells: humus, rotting wood, the pungent green tang he had already remarked.

Tom would call the dog, then listen, straining to hear a whimper, a rustle. But if he was silent and still for too long, he had the impression that something was listening to him. Very quickly, the feeling grew oppressive. It was necessary to keep moving, keep shouting.

Then he saw it: close to the ground, a patch of white. Tom tore and pushed his way through recalcitrant vegetation; came to a standstill at a sack that had once contained superphosphate.

The rain held off all morning, then fell in sheets.

The road from the hills coiled tightly down through forest to the highway. For four or five clenched minutes Tom was tailgated by a truck, until the road widened sufficiently for him to pull over. The monster ground its way past, horn blasting. The air shook. Tom crouched in his car, rain and his heart drumming, and saw the cargo of dead trees rock as the truck took the bend. To his left, the abyss inches from his wheels held the towering calm of mountain ash.

The logging traffic had pocked the road into potholes. A second truck with its consignment of giant pencils passed Tom further down the hill. Water swooshed over his windscreen. Friday afternoon: drivers racing to meet their quotas at the sawmill.

The road broadened and improved when it reached the coastal plain. Paddocks came into view; a windbreak of dark pines. The noteless staves of fences, hymning possession. When a driveway appeared, Tom pulled over; dashed out and dropped a flyer into a letterbox. The sodden fields had the pulled-down look of a bitch who has whelped too often.

Here and there, stringy eucalypts had been allowed to live. They ran counter to Tom’s idea of a tree, which was wide as centuries and differently green. These had failed an audition. They loitered, dusty tree-ghosts; bungled sketches signed God or whatever.

He thought of his progress that morning, the hillocks and gullies he had traversed. There was something humbling about uneven, wooded ground. He realised, peering past his laborious wipers, that it came from the absence of vistas. Here, he was a surveyor of horizons: mastery was in his gaze. There, in the hills, vision came up against the palpable folds and pockets of the earth; was obliged to follow the lie of the land.

Forward motion: it was the engine of settler nations, where there was no past and a limitless future, and pioneers were depicted gazing out across distant expanses. The man in the car remembered, The pleasure of believing what we see / Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

He was a citizen of a country that had entered the modern age with a practical demonstration of the superiority of gunpowder over stone. To be impractical on these shores- tender, visionary-was to question the core of that enterprise. Yet the place itself was hardwired for marvels. What was a platypus if not the product of a cosmic abracadabra? So much that was native to Australia seemed to be the invention of a child or a genius. Minds receptive to its example had grown sumptuous with dreaming.

It was true that local characters and scenes slotted effortlessly into a global script. Muscled teenagers in big shorts crowded the nation’s shopping malls. On neat estates where every house replicated its neighbour, young women pushed strollers containing babies of such plush perfection it was difficult to believe they would grow up to eat McDonald’s and pay to have their flesh tanned orange. There was comfort to be derived from this sense that the nation was keeping up with the great elsewhere. What claim does a new world have on our imagination if it falls out of date?

But a stand of eucalypts in a park or the graffiti on an overpass might call up a vision of what malls and rotary mowers had displaced. Australia was LA, it was London; and then it was not. Here there was the sense that everything modern might be provisional: that teenagers, news crews, French fries might vanish overnight like a soap opera with poor ratings. The country shimmered with this unsettling magic, which raised and erased it in a single motion.

The past was not always past enough here. It was like living in a house acquired for its clean angles and gleaming appliances; and discovering a bricked-up door at which, faint but insistent, the sound of knocking could be heard.

Nelly having asked to borrow a copy of The Turn of the Screw, Tom lent her an edition that included a selection of critical commentaries. When she returned it, she said, ‘Do you think we create mysteries because we crave explanations?’

She could unsettle him in the way of certain students: seeming to miss an idea, yet leaving the after-impression of striking to its core.

When she asked about his book on James, Tom talked about the novelist’s desire to be modern. ‘He wanted to distance himself from the literary past, from old forms like gothic. But that stuff wafts around his work like a smell he’s too exquisite to mention.’

There was James’s fascination with the supernatural. ‘He tried to contain it by writing ghost stories. Sidelining it, trying to keep it out of the major work, out of the novels. But even in The Portrait of a Lady, which everyone agrees is a realist masterpiece, the heroine sees her cousin’s ghost at a crucial moment.’

Over time the monumental Portrait itself turned spectral, said Tom. Its presence showed and faded and shimmered again in The Wings of the Dove, a novel written when James had grown old; and haunted, like its predecessor, by his memories of his cousin Minny Temple. She had died young, leaving James with the uneasy thought that he had not loved her well enough.

This conversation was taking place in the Preserve. While he was speaking, Tom was conscious of many things, of the sound produced by Nelly’s teeth biting into an apple, for instance, and of the unexpected mildness of the evening. Someone had placed a double row of candles all down the long table on the dais, the only illumination in the cavernous room. Tom’s eyes kept returning to that bright, unstable path. But what he was seeing had no material form. Over the years, as he worked on his book, he had begun to picture James’s oeuvre as a massive, stooped figure, its progress along the passage of time impeded by a dragging shadow. Tom understood that the name of this darkness was history; that it represented unwelcome aspects of the past that blundered into James’s fi ction.

Nelly said, ‘But isn’t that the way it works? I mean, doesn’t setting out to reject the past guarantee you’ll never be free of it? It’s like being modern means walking with a built-in limp.’

Her almost magical divination of the halting colossus Tom had pictured so astonished him that he couldn’t reply. The lurching figure advanced in his mind again, a grotesque portrait stepping clear of its frame. The vision was central to his argument, and it frightened him. He feared being unable to convey its force in reasoned prose; and of this fear, he said nothing to Nelly.

I used to be Nelly Atwood. It had sent Tom to his university library early the next morning. There he learned that sixteen years earlier, in 1985, the disappearance of a man called Felix Atwood had made headlines across Australia. A graduate student in the States at the time, Tom had missed the story. Now he began piecing it together from archived newspapers, leaning over the shining glass of a microfi lm reader.

Atwood, aged thirty-three, a trader in bonds at an investment bank that had financed the Napoleonic wars, vanished while spending Easter with his wife and young son at their holiday house in the bush. His wife was reported to have been unconcerned when she woke on Saturday morning and found her husband missing and no car in the drive. Atwood, an early riser, liked to go bushwalking on his own. The property was surrounded by forest. It seemed likely that he had left the car at a trail head, and set off into the bush. Equally, he might have driven down to the coast. He was a keen swimmer, and half an hour away was a beach he favoured.

Mrs Atwood, who suffered from headaches, had woken to familiar symptoms that morning. With an effort she dressed; stumbled with her child to a neighbour’s farm, where she left him. It was not an unusual arrangement; the four-year-old had a pet lamb there and was spoiled by the farmer’s teenage daughters.

Atwood’s wife said she returned to bed. Around noon she woke to find herself still alone in the house, and started to wonder if something had gone wrong. The Atwoods were expecting a visitor from the city later that day, and surely only a mishap could have kept her husband from being there to greet him.

Still the woman did nothing. She was quoted as saying she was not thinking clearly. The Atwoods’ friend arrived; and, learning what had happened, went immediately to the farm, where he made the call to the police.

The machinery of process clicked on. In the days that followed, the police interviewed the missing man’s relatives and friends, and began sorting through the reports still coming in from people who claimed to have seen him. Atwood’s BMW was found almost at once, parked in ti-tree scrub by the beach where he liked to swim. His clothes lay folded on the passenger seat. Forensic testing yielded numerous traces, none of them of use in determining what had happened to him.

Then a statement issued by Atwood’s employer revealed that he was under investigation for irregular dealing. While his managers had supposed him to be exploiting low-risk arbitrage opportunities, Felix Atwood had in fact been gambling spectacular sums in directional bets. These unauthorised activities produced substantial profits at fi rst, consolidating Atwood’s reputation as a trading star. What greed, complacency and lax internal controls failed to discover was the secret account he had opened. Here he hid the monumental losses that his high-risk strategies produced, while posting fabricated profits in the account where his performance was evaluated.

Atwood was clever and lucky; just not enough. The bank’s auditors presented their findings within a week of his disappearance, causing a fresh wave of speculation. For as the auditors closed in, Atwood could scarcely have failed to notice the stench blowing his way. It was an old story: a man faced with public ruin walking away from his life. Perhaps literally; for suicide was quickly mooted as a solution, Atwood wading into the sea as his wife and child slept, preferring death to disgrace.

It was discovered that the Atwoods’ house in the city was double-mortgaged. There were personal loans and credit card debts, and irregularities in income tax; the tax office was about to launch an enquiry of its own. Ready-made phrases appeared on the sheet of light under Tom’s eyes: luxury lifestyle, cocaine habit, assets seized.

Tom studied the photographs. Felix Atwood: curly hair, an angular, inviting muzzle. He was pictured on a beach with long breakers at his back and a surfboard under his arm; bowtied, with curls slicked down, outside a concert hall. He looked straight into the camera and smiled. He had good, or at least expensive, teeth. Somehow it was clear he did not make the mistake of underestimating his effect.

The Atwoods’ friend from the city was identifi ed, predictably, as Posner: dark hair emphasising his pallor, but for the rest astonishingly unchanged, as if that large, smooth face had repelled even time. Posner was in fact everywhere: escorting Mrs Atwood to a car, at a fundraising dinner with her husband, grave-eyed outside police headquarters in Russell Street.

But it was Nelly who held Tom’s attention. In the early photographs she was anonymous in sunglasses. But as events gathered speed and density, a different set of images prevailed. She appeared in an ugly ruffled dress with jewels at her throat: a photograph taken at the same opening night at which her husband had been snapped, with this crucial difference, that she gazed stonily at the lens. To Tom’s eye she looked-oddly- older than she did now, her cropped hair and frumpish frilled bodice making her seem dated; compounding the rigidity of her stare.

Elsewhere she was pictured in such a way as to bring out the prominence of her jaw. Then a new photograph showed her with her arm raised and mouth wide, screaming at the camera. She might have been trying to hide her face, but the gesture, coupled with that glimpse of her tongue and teeth, suggested a harridan’s attack.

In this way, from multiple images, a single portrait was being composed: of a hard-faced, alien female, operating from unfathomable motives, capable of losing control.

Nelly was never photographed with Rory. He was always pictured alone, and looked, as children do in such circumstances, fearful and exposed.

There would have been other pictures, gleaming and persuasive. But what television had made of Nelly was left to Tom’s imagination.

His university archived most of its newspaper holdings on positive film. However, a two-week period was stored on negatives. Their velvety darkness coincided with the least fl attering images of Nelly. Bat-black with silver-foil lips, she hung inverted in the machine’s overhead mirror.

Tom avoided microfilm whenever possible; was thankful for the digital imaging that had replaced it. There was the fi ddle of loading the film onto the spools and threading it correctly.

Librarians breathed at his shoulder with ostentatious forbearance as his hands thickened into paws. The film jammed or slipped from its reel.

Blurred columns of newsprint rolled towards him, the past advancing with speedy, futuristic menace as he tried to locate what he needed. The jumpy, black-on-white batik of fast-forwarding hurt his eyes and brought on intimations of nausea. As time passed his arm began to ache from rewinding each spool. His body had accommodated itself to the demands of his laptop and was protesting the readjustment. He rotated his head and heard a vertebral click.

He awarded himself a break; drank coffee issued in sour gouts from a dispenser while thinking of the way bodies changed with technology. Handwriting, assuming the speed of a body, was marked by its dynamic. Technology reversed the process, leaving its impress on corporeal arrangements. The history of machines was written in the alignment of muscles.

A scene from the previous year came back to him. One evening, as he was putting out his rubbish, he had noticed a woman wave at a car pulling away from the kerb. Then she rotated her forefinger rapidly: she was asking the driver to call her.And Tom had realised that this gesture, once commonplace, had almost disappeared. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen it. The rotary-dial telephone, until recently an everyday object, was glimpsed now only as a ghost inhabiting a gesture; itself an ephemeral sign, transient as progress.

Public interest in Felix Atwood had started to wane, when a man walked into a police station in a country town and told a story. Jimmy Morgan was known locally as a character; a photograph showed a narrow brow above a drinker’s unfastened face. He lived alone in a shack deep in the bush some miles from the spot where Atwood’s car had been found. It was the kind of refuge Australia was still good at offering.

Very early on the day Atwood vanished, Jimmy Morgan was walking along the beach. To what purpose was not evident, purposelessness being the end to which Morgan aspired; an aim harder to achieve than it appears. But he assured the men who interviewed him that the date was fixed in his mind, for it marked the completion of his fifty-fourth year on earth.

It was still some minutes to sunrise, but the night had begun to dissolve. In the lengthening clefts of light Morgan saw a woman climbing the track that bent through scattered ti-tree to the road. She didn’t look over her shoulder. In any case, Morgan had the knack of not drawing attention to himself.

Eventually he followed her over the dunes. The empty road curved away out of sight to left and right along the coast. Morgan might have heard a car. It was hard to tell. The wind was up and there was the sound of the sea.

It was a narrative of missed opportunities, thought Tom. If Morgan had approached the winding track from a different direction, he would have seen Atwood’s BMW and whoever was or wasn’t in it. If he hadn’t hesitated before following the woman, he would have seen where she went. Crucially, if he had told his story sooner, the police would have stood a chance of finding her. But almost three weeks went by before Morgan heard a conversation in a pub and realised the signifi cance of what he had seen; weeks in which drink went on washing relentlessly over his mind, and the near past and the far faded equally into the dim unhappiness of so many things that might have been.

Yet Morgan would tell his story many times in the weeks to come, and over all those retellings, his description of the woman never wavered. After the first sighting, the ti-tree had screened her; but then Morgan had seen her again, just before she disappeared, near the top of the track. One pale hand tugged at the dress stretched above her knees so that she might climb more freely. Morgan thought she was carrying a bag in her other hand; a small suitcase, perhaps.

There was another thing, a strange thing. It was the reason Jimmy Morgan had hung back on the track that night; the reason that had sent him, against instinct and experience, to lay his tale before pebble-eyed detectives. But it wasn’t easy for Morgan to pin down what had occasioned his unease. Even sober, all he could say was that there was something peculiar about the figure on the track. It was an impression: distinct and elusive. Images slid about in Morgan’s brain.

He told the same story to the journalist who was waiting for him when the cops were through. Some hours later, with two inches of Southern Comfort left in the bottle, Morgan confessed he had been shit scared. ‘I thought she was going to turn round.’ He passed his hand over his jaw and said, ‘I didn’t want to see her face.’

One of the pleasures knowing Nelly had brought Tom was the rediscovery of images. Looking at paintings with her, he gave way to an old delight. The anxiety he brought to analysis was less urgent in her presence, subsumed in sensuous attentiveness to stagings of mass and colour and line.

Nelly brought a practitioner’s gaze to looking. She might talk of the problem of representing form in two dimensions, the use of perspective and shading versus the modulation of lines. She might say, ‘Warm colours advance, cool ones recede. That’s what they teach you at art school. But what makes this bit work is she’s used blue here, where the highlight is, where you’d expect yellow. It’s a thing Cézanne used to do.’

Or, ‘This guy’s so good. He’s such a great colourist, and their work can look, you know, sort of vague. Just big, loose outbursts. But there’s really solid structure here, it’s so disciplined.’

As Tom listened, what he had known as abstractions of period and style acquired immediacy. There was the mess and endeavour of the studio in Nelly’s conversation.

He had a gobbling eye. Nelly was teaching him to look slowly.

She took him to an exhibition of pre-cinematic illusions. They looked at dioramas and Javanese shadow puppets, and the ombres chinoises theatres that captivated eighteenth-century France. In the illusory depths of peepshows they saw a Venetian carnival, and baboons at play in a jungle glade. A snowscape dissolved from day to night before their eyes. They witnessed phantasms.

Then they found themselves in front of a display of parchment lithographs coloured with translucent dyes and strategically perforated. As they watched, the overhead lighting dimmed while at the same time light shone behind the pictures. At once the little scenes came to life. A string of fairy lights appeared in a pleasure garden. The moon glimmered above a forest. Candelabra and footlights lit up the gilded interior of a playhouse. Best of all was a huddle of houses at dusk by a wintry lake, for a lamp glowed in the window of one of the cottages, and the sight of that tiny golden rectangle in the night was incomparably moving and magical.

The gallery lights came up, and were lowered once more. Again the images shone out. Fireworks burst over an illuminated palace, lanterns glowed beside water and were answered by a scatter of stars. Tom and Nelly stared and stared. They were twenty-first century people, accustomed to digital imaging and computer simulation and all manner of modern enchantments. They stood before the antique miracle of light, transfixed with wonder.

Searching for a corkscrew at the Preserve, Tom opened a drawer and found it full of silky folds. He shook out scarf after scarf, musty souvenirs printed with banksias and trams, marsupials and modernist skylines. Nelly said she had picked them up in op shops, collected them over years.

She had boxes of postcards and photographs, and a collapsing Edwardian scrapbook with seraphim and posies of forget-me-nots peeling from its pages. A large blue envelope, rescued from a dumpster, contained three X-rays of a scoliotic spine. There was also a plastic sleeve stuffed with stamps; a relic, Nelly said, from student days when she had made jewellery with a friend. She fished out one of their efforts: a Czechoslovakian deerhound, a tiny stamp-picture encased in clear resin and hung from a silken cord.

Nelly owned tin trays painted with advertisements for beer, and a little grubby brick of swap cards. She had a bowl of souvenir ballpoints bought for her by travelling friends. Within a window set in each barrel, an image glided up and down: the Guard changing at Buckingham Palace, the chorus line cancanning at the Moulin Rouge.

Many of these objects were damaged, the scarves stained, the tin surfaces scratched. Watching Tom draw his fi nger along the creases sectioning a photo, Nelly said, ‘It’s stuff people were throwing away. I got it for nothing, mostly.’

That was no doubt true. At the same time, he sensed a deadpan teasing: her cut-price instinct dangled in his face. And beyond the self-guying, something deeper and more characteristic still: an impulse to salvage what had been marked for oblivion. An It-girl peddling Foster’s, the tottering, cotton-reel stack of a stranger’s vertebrae, an archangel with upcast eyes and a faint reek of glue: nothing was too trivial to snatch from the flow of time.

A shelf in Nelly’s studio held a modest array of view-ware, ashtrays, coasters, small dishes that might hold trinkets or sweets. Made of clear glass, each had a handtinted photograph embedded in its base: the war memorial at Ballarat, Frankston beach in summer, Hanging Rock, and so on.

These kitsch little objects fascinated Tom. He found an excuse to handle them. It was partly that their unnatural hues and thick glass glaze turned the commonplace images dreamily surreal. They were also faintly sinister. Their creepiness was intrinsic to the sway they exercised, these miniature honourings of national icons and fresh air and the healthy bodies of white nuclear families. And then, the view-ware drew on the magic of all collections. Redeemed from mere utility, its coasters and dishes were multiple yet individual. They were as serial as money and partook of its abstraction.

They exceeded the world of things. They erased labour, seeming to have been magicked into existence. Tom found himself fighting down an impulse to steal one.

In the township in the country, he left flyers at the supermarket; also at the newsagent’s-cum-post office, the town hall, the hardware store. The only bank he could find had been made over into a phone shop; but the owner of the Thai takeaway, having studied a flyer, took ten for the perspex menu holder on his counter.

The receptionist at the health centre said, ‘Is that the dog Denise was talking about?’ She took a pile of flyers for the waiting room, and tacked one onto a noticeboard, beside a poster depicting an engorged blue-red heart with severed blood vessels.‘He’ll turn up when he’s ready, love. My granddad used to tell this story how he got lost in the bush one night when he was first married? So he tied his hanky round his dog’s neck and just followed it home.’

The bakery had tables by the window. A woman with ropy brown hair caught at the nape of her neck was forking a cavity in a small emerald breast topped with a pink sugar nipple.

Denise Corrigan said, ‘Steer clear of the coffee. But these are a whole lot better than they look.’

Tom bought a cup of tea and a cinnamon scroll at the counter. When he returned to Denise, she had picked up a fl yer. ‘Lovely dog.’

He nodded, looking past her at rain falling in an empty street. He did not wish to be undone by kindness.

‘Dad and I had a look around, evening before last. Walked the tracks and that. Dad went back again yesterday.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I wish we’d found him.’ She set down her fork. ‘How’s your mum?’

‘Fine. Thanks.’ He gestured. ‘I don’t know how much longer for.’

‘Does she live on her own?’

He explained, briefly. ‘My aunt’s been very good. But she’s getting on herself now. It’s all a bit much for her.’

‘Do you have brothers or sisters?’ When he shook his head, ‘It’s hard being the only one.’

‘Are you?’

‘I’ve got a sister. In New Zealand. It’s funny: I always wanted to get away. Jen was the one who loved the farm, life on the land and that. But she ended up marrying a Kiwi and now she’s bringing up three kids on a quarter-acre block in Napier.’

She told Tom she had worked in Papua New Guinea and Darwin after finishing her training. ‘But then Mum died-’ She paused. ‘Dad was doing OK. But I don’t know, there was something so not OK about the way he was OK. He rang me one time and asked how you make what he called “proper mash”. This was, like, two, three years after Mum died, and all that time he’d been boiling potatoes and just smashing them with a spoon.’ She looked at Tom. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of him alone at that table where there used to be the four of us, eating his smashed potatoes and trying to figure out what was wrong. So I came back. And then I got married, and Dad’s really glad of Mick’s help, though he’d never admit it.’

She picked up her cup, peered into it, set it down again. ‘How does your mum feel about going into a nursing home?’

‘How do you think?’

She flushed a little. ‘They’re not all bad. I’ve seen people who were struggling at home really improve when they went into care. Just getting balanced meals is a huge boost. You don’t know how many old people live on, like, tea and bread and jam.’ Then she stopped. Said, after a few moments, in a different tone, ‘Yeah, you’re right. They’re places for when you’ve given up hope.’

Tom thought that few people would have abandoned a line of defence with her ready grace. And that in different circumstances, he might have welcomed her into his bed.

He realised that this last notion had come to him because Nelly had been in his mind all day. The radio alarm had shaken him from a dream permeated with images of her, which had dissolved on the instant but left the filmy residue of her presence.

Some flicker of his thoughts communicated itself to Denise. Who said, ‘So what’s the latest on Nelly? Still living with that guy Carson?’

There was something avid in her speckled eyes. Tom had not yet learned to anticipate the hunger Nelly provoked; her contaminated glamour.

From a panel van parked up the street a voice cried, ‘Got this huge fucken tray of fucken T-bones for seven bucks.’

Tom watched two children jump down a flight of steps, each carrying a cotton bag angular with the shapes of books. Denise had provided directions to the logging company’s offi ce on a road that looped around the back of the town. But he remained at the kerb, behind the wheel of his car, reluctant to leave such comfort as was on offer, the domesticity of iced cakes and library books.

He was thinking of his mother; of the dog; of Osman, in whom death was advancing cell by cell. He felt malevolence gathering force and drawing closer. The children crossed the street, hooded figures from a tale. Life would set them impossible tasks; straw and spinning wheels waited. Tom crossed his fingers and wished them luck: lives reckoned on the blank pages of history. And thought of a night in September when Nelly and he had sat contented in a pub, until people began to gather in front of the TV mounted on the wall at the other end of the bar.

It was their faces that had drawn him: uplifted and calm as churchgoers.

When they parted, Nelly said, ‘Everything changes when Americans fall from the sky.’

As a child, Tom was accustomed to thinking of himself as rich. The Loxleys, no strangers to invisible darning and the last crucial pass of the knife that scrapes the excess butter from a slice of bread, were nevertheless not poor; not as one is poor in India, roofl ess, filthy, starved, diseased. There was a Protestant hymn Arthur sang when he was drunk, compounding offences. The rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate. Beneath his ancestors’ vaulted ceilings, with cracked marble underfoot, it was plain to Tom where he stood.

In Australia everything was reversed. The Loxleys were poor. Tom learned this early, his cousin Shona losing no time in pointing out what he lacked: his own room, a tank top, Twister, a bean bag, a poster of The Partridge Family. Yet within a few short weeks the boy had amassed possessions undreamed of in austere India, dozens of cheap, amusing objects, iron-on smileys, plastic figurines, a rainbow of felt-tip pens. A three-minute walk took him to a cornucopia known as a milk bar that disgorged Life Savers, bubble gum, Coke, ice-creams, chocolate bars, potato chips in astonishing fl avours. Among the novelties on offer in the land of plenty was food designed to give pleasure to children.

Nothing in Tom’s experience had prepared him for the beckoning display of so much that was both unnecessary and irresistible. Long before he encountered theories of capitalism and commodity production, he had grasped that things- desiring and acquiring and discarding them-were the life- blood of his new world.

Against that cascade of pretty baubles stood India: the name itself shorthand for privation.

Tom Loxley counted himself lucky to have escaped into abundance. It was a plenitude he measured in possessions at first; but he soon sensed that it exceeded the material. At school he met children from countries whose names he barely recognised. He looked up Chile in the encyclopaedia; Hungary, Yugoslavia, Taiwan. An impression came to him of standing in a great public square, hemmed by severe buildings, where all kinds of people came for work or amusement. It was a place of wonder and dread. The boy was jostled; sometimes he lost his bearings. But he glimpsed the promise of enlargement in that huge, variegated fl ow.

The real city was a grey and brown place sectioned by a grid of chilling winds. From time to time, when he should have been at school, Tom wandered its ruled streets: King, William; Queen, Elizabeth. Within a familiar history he was fi nding his place in a new geography. Sometimes he thought, No one in the whole world knows where I am.

It was his father’s journey in reverse, a flight into modernity.

And still Tom would never be able to shake off the notion that the West was a childish place, where life was based on elaborate play. Reality was the old, serious world he had known when he was young, where there were not enough toys to deflect attention from the gravity of existence and extinction.

When Tom’s father died, his mother decided-took it into her head, in Audrey’s phrase-that the calamity had to be communicated at once to a decrepit uncle in Madras. Tom was placed in charge of the telephone call, a procedure which, in those days, assumed the dimensions of a diplomatic mission, with its attendant panoply of intermediaries, uncertain outcomes and fabulous expenditure.

The operator said, ‘Go ahead, Australia,’ and went off the line. Tom pressed the receiver against his ear, in readiness for the old man’s papery tones. But the ink-black instrument transmitted only a steady, inhuman whisper that fl ared now and then into a ragged crackle.

The fault was remedied; a death passed over oceans. But what lodged in the boy’s private mythology was what he had been permitted to hear: the underground mutter of large, disagreeable truths that could be ignored but not evaded.

Twenty-nine Septembers later, he would join a crowd enthralled by images in time to see the second plane drill into the tower. Nelly came up to stand beside him but Tom barely noticed her. He was remembering a flawed connection; the patient rage of history in his ear.

The logging company furnished its lobby in nylon and vinyl. A pink girl with mauve eyelids bent her head over Tom’s fl yer, biting her lip. The word Joy had been engraved in plastic and pinned to her breast.

On the wood-veneer counter a glass held water and the kind of flowers plucked over fences: daisies, fat fuchsias, coral and scarlet geraniums; blooms of passage. Tom noted this modest expression of the human and natural against synthetic odds.

‘If you leave me a stack, I’ll make sure they get to the drivers.’ Her face was a clear oval under her centre parting. It gave her a stately air, but Tom guessed she was not yet twenty. She had the expectant gaze of those who still believe there must be more to life than other people have settled for.

She consulted the sheet of paper again.‘Jasper’s Hill. There’s some funny stuff goes on round there.’

Tom waited.

‘My brother’s a ranger? He’s got all these stories. Like people have these dope plantations hidden away up there? And there was this bloke from interstate, drove his car into the bush and shot himself. The loggers found what was left twenty years later.’ Her voice was matter-of-fact, and Tom saw that this child had taken the measure of her world and neither esteemed nor trivialised it.

When he was at the door she said, ‘I hope your dog turns up safe. I really do.’

He had bought two refill cartridges for Nelly’s butane stove. Stirring a takeaway green curry on it that evening, Tom was absurdly cheered; the dread he had felt earlier in the day dispersed by the sense that he had taken action in distributing the fl yers.

He ate straight from the pan, relishing fl avours and aromatic steam, musing on smell as the sensory sign of a transition. Odour marked the passage from the pure to the putrid, from the raw to the cooked; from inside to outside the body.

Tom’s own scent was patrilineal. Its varnished wood with a bass note of cumin was one of the traces Arthur Loxley had left in the world. Even now, so many years after Arthur had died, Tom sometimes buried his face in the clothes he took off at the end of a day. By his odour, he knew himself his father’s son.

When he woke, in the downy warmth of his sleeping bag, the room was hushed. He directed his torch at his watch: a few minutes past midnight.

He was certain something had woken him. The previous week, the dog had slept at the foot of the bed. Now, alone at night, Tom was conscious of the unpeopled woods and pastures about him. It was a country in which the old ideal of rural solitude had been bought with violence; and some hint of this lingered in the most tranquil setting, converting calm itself into an indictment.

He went outside and saw that the night was fine, the sky glittering with fierce southern constellations. When he came in he was careful to bolt the door.