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

Monday

Into Tom’s waking thoughts came fear, those he loved in the world withdrawing from him one by one. The future had the shape of a corridor, empty of everything but time.

He thought of his mother surrounded by shit. Was excrement part of the world or part of the body? It blurred the distinction between inside and outside. Among the things it offended against was the human need for order.

There was a man Tom remembered from India, one of casteless thousands assigned to work with shit. When the sewer in a local tenement clogged, this man lowered himself into the overﬂowing cesspit, feeling for and removing the obstruction with his toes. He was the humblest of beings and he was charged with transgressive magic. If the Indian dread of contamination was at work, so was a wider taboo. The opposite of what is seen is obscene. The cess man embodied the return of the private and unsightly to public view.

Thus Tom’s musings rolled about his mother. Was unrestrained shitting the symptom of a deeper unravelling? Language deﬁnes humans; and, Faeces are like words, thought Tom sleepily, they both come out of bodies. It carried the irrational, illuminating force of an utterance heard in a dream.

His mind, slipping about, fastened on a terror at once sharper and more manageable. He was afraid his book would never be published. Its premises struck him as ridiculous, its conclusions absurd. He brought his knees to his chest and moaned. He had wasted years on work drained of movement and intelligence. A single sentence in James contained more brilliant breadth.

He moved in and out of sleep. Posner’s sombre mass was in the room; at cuff and collar, waxen ﬂ esh gleamed. What had prompted his visit? Tom cupped his groin, a morning reﬂex. The blind moved and a rectangle of light shuddered on his wall. An ogre lurching and groaning down the street brought him wide awake, to the accompaniment of running footsteps and slammed bins. Someone shouted, ‘That was my good yellow T-shirt, dickhead.’

Now it seemed plain to Tom that Posner’s insinuations were a hook baited with slime. There are so many aspects to Nelly. The prick’ll say anything to get me away from her, show me he’s on my side, thought Tom. It was for him, he decided, with a small luxurious shiver, that Posner had come.

But over breakfast he found himself gnawing at another scene. Some weeks earlier, he had arrived at the Preserve just as Rory was leaving with a friend. Consequently Tom entered the building unannounced.

The door to Nelly’s studio stood open; a light shone within. Tom followed the corridor, past the ﬁctitious curtained door, to her threshold, and there he remained. What he saw in those few moments would leave its print forever, although it was in no sense shocking or even irregular. Nelly was sprawled on a curious seat she favoured, not long enough for a couch but wider than a chair: a chaise courte as it were, a distinctive, unyielding contrivance of lacy wood and hard velvet. Beside it loomed the monolith of Posner, his silver skull inclined towards Nelly. He might have been a doctor, listening in his dark jacket. He might have been a courtier attending the levée of a queen.

The tilt of Posner’s head hid his face. But a halogen lamp held Nelly in its beam, and the watcher in the doorway saw that she was scratching the side of her head; one hand casually frenzied in her hair, her expression calm with an underglaze of satisfaction. The next instant her aspect altered, as her eyes turned towards the door. And Posner turned also, and the tableau broke up and recomposed itself like a pattern viewed in a child’s optical toy.

Nevertheless, Tom was left with an impression. He had observed those two often enough, and in an assortment of contexts; had watched them argue, share a private quip, treat each other with unceremonious disdain. But the stillness of the scene in the studio lent it a force that animation obscured. It stripped sociability from Nelly and Posner’s bond, which showed old and iron. That was scarcely a revelation. Yet Tom retained a sense of having come upon something uncovered.

There was surprise in the faces they turned to him; also a hint of alarm. Replaying the episode, freezing each of its elements, Tom could see that his silent apparition might well have been disquieting. And, the ﬁrst moment past, the occupants of the room showed no sign of discomﬁ ture. Nelly greeted him with her usual ease. Posner gave vent to the piping salutations of a large white bat.

Yet Tom couldn’t excise the memory of their communion. It hadn’t escaped him-although he had missed the precise moment-that in his presence Nelly had ceased clawing at her scalp. Yet that simple, unhindered act had struck no discord in the scene with Posner. Turning the incident over, Tom kept reverting to Nelly’s expression. The ruminant, private pleasure it projected was suggestive equally of the easing of an irritation or the maturation of a design. Whenever he felt he was on the verge of decoding it, a shadow intruded on his vision: Posner bent in command or supplication over that self-sufﬁ cient face.

Tom gathered up what he needed for work, and went into the Monday morning street. Outside the blond-brick ﬂ ats across the way, a straggle-locked wizard in velvet slippers and belted gown was keeping watch over a gathering of empty wheelie bins.

The previous evening, Sunday parking had obliged Tom to leave his car at the far end of the street. It stood beyond a row of thin white trees belled with silver nuts. Rain and the advent of summer had conspired to put on concertos sustained by the blue notes of hydrangeas. Behind low wooden fences, the native thrived beside the exotic, there was a scribble of rose in a ﬁg tree, the tropics ﬂourished about the Mediterranean. In these unassuming plots, a nation realised its grandest dream.

Tom thought,… to look at things in bloom, / Fifty springs are little room. But more than Osman would be granted.

When spring came, the city had loosened into blossom. On Tom and Nelly’s walks the wind might have been honed on a strop, but the scent of jasmine swelled from bluestone-paved lanes designed for the passage of nightsoil. The football clamour from the MCG was louder now, attendance and passion waxing as the Grand Final approached. Giant toddlers could be seen queuing outside the stadium: wrapped in shapeless, ﬂeecy garments, attached to polystyrene feeding cups.

Tom told Nelly about the headline he had seen soon after arriving in Australia: ‘Pies Murder Lions’. For days it had caused him despair. He was a child at home in words. That too was to be taken from him in this place.

Enlightenment arrived with a conversation overheard while he hung about the locker room at recess, trying to appear solitary by choice. Magpies, Swans, Lions, Demons were not, after all, escapees from a fabulous bestiary but the names by which the city’s football teams were affectionately known. So began the incident’s passage into comedy, where it was now ﬁrmly lodged; the mocking of former terrors being one way in which we travesty our younger selves.

Nelly swooped at a gleam underfoot, then displayed the golden coin she had retrieved. It was astonishing how often she found money in the street, ﬁfty cents, a ﬁve-dollar note, a twenty.

Once she picked up a small plastic ﬁ sh. ‘Remember when these ﬁrst appeared? Four, ﬁve years ago?’

Suddenly she had begun seeing them everywhere, Nelly said. The little ﬁsh were multitudinous. They lay in gutters, on footpaths, in car parks, on the beach, tiny ﬁsh with tapering faces. She had picked one up and unscrewed its red snout. Traces of dark liquid were visible in its scaled belly; its scent was briny. She wondered what purpose it might serve.

The riddle rolled in her mind, until at last she supposed that each ﬁsh had contained a single dose of newfangled ﬁsh-food. Nelly pictured an aquarium, and the bodies of ﬁ sh darting to the thin, nutritive stream dispersing in their pond of glass.

It was a source of amazement to her, said Nelly, that so many of her fellow citizens had taken to keeping ﬁ sh. She imagined people carrying home plastic bags of water and coloured ﬁsh, and pausing to feed the ﬁsh on the way; and inadvertently, because spellbound by iridescent life, letting the container of ﬁ sh-food fall.

Then one day she bought takeaway sushi; opened the paper bag and found a plastic ﬁsh inside, ﬁlled with soy sauce. ‘I felt like a total idiot.’

But Tom was charmed by Nelly’s theory of sober men and women deﬂected from duty by the antics of ﬁsh. And there was the fact that she had noticed the discarded containers in the ﬁrst place. She had a tremendous capacity for appreciating the world’s detail. Textures, colours, the casual disposition of forms were striking to Nelly, extra-ordinary. To spend time with her was to wander through a cabinet of curiosities. She remarked on a shoe jutting like a snout from a hollow high in a tree. Tom realised that the objects she hoarded were symptomatic of a more profound desire: to drag moments of perception from the grey ooze of oblivion.

When he was an old man, he would still remember a table-tennis ball he had seen in Nelly’s company, a sterile egg lying in the weedy rubbish under a nineteenth-century arch. He would remember a terrace opposite an elevated railway line where lighted carriages shot past bedroom windows like a ribbon of ﬁlm. He would remember Nelly in her red jacket on a bridge, entranced by a city assembled in its river.

She owned a selection of glass slides intended for a magic lantern, ﬁve coloured views of European cities and one of Millet’s Gleaners. From time to time Nelly would bring out a slide and suspend it in front of a window, so that a diminutive Grand Canal or Brandenburg Gate was a luminous presence in the Preserve. When the sun was at the right slant a replica of the little cityscape would appear on the opposite wall, a light-painting that hovered there brieﬂy, then vanished.

Tom asked why she didn’t keep one or another of the slides up permanently. ‘You could just rotate them.’

She told him about the Japanese practice of keeping a treasured object hidden away and only taking it out to look at now and then. ‘Because then it seems marvellous each time.’

The selection committee was waiting in Kevin Dodd’s ofﬁce when Tom arrived at work on Monday. He muttered an apology; nodded to Vernon, to their colleague Anthea Rendle.

A stranger sprang to his feet and advanced with a purposeful cry of ‘Tosh!’ Tom’s hand was seized; squeezed. ‘Tosh Lindgren. Human Resources. ‘Great to meet you.’

The centre parting in Tosh’s hair was a path in a cornﬁ eld. His cheeks had kept their boyhood roses above a corporate jaw.

‘Right: let’s progress this meeting.’ Professor Dodd coughed in the small, dry way he believed appropriate to his status. ‘A very satisfactory batch, I must say. There are applications here of the highest standard.’ He glanced around the room, hoping for dissent. ‘The highest standard,’ he repeated.

Kevin Dodd’s career, unburdened by intellectual distinction, had attracted sizeable research grants and the attention of vice-chancellors. No one could bring themselves to read anything he had written, which counted greatly in his favour. Members of the committee responsible for appointing him had assured each other that Dodd was not faddish. His rival for the Chair caused offence by being young, female and brilliant. The dean described Dodd as a numbers man; this was taken up and repeated as praise.

The professor was a study in beige: hair, skin, suit, socks. (‘His thoughts are leaking,’ explained Vernon.) Kevin Dodd believed sincerely, indeed passionately, in his own greatness. It followed that he had to be attracting exceptional talent to the department.

‘This fellow from Rotterdam, for instance. An original mind. Thinks outside the box.’

‘Oh, but originality…’ Vernon had taken off his spectacles and was twirling them. ‘Is that safe?’

‘Original in the best sense,’ said Dodd with a touch of asperity. ‘Nothing untoward.’

Tosh said, ‘Excuse me, Vernon. If I might make a suggestion?’

‘Go ahead, Tosh.’

‘It’s really easy to get sidetracked by subjective descriptors. Like original? That’s why at HR we advocate focus on the selection criteria. So that we’re thinking neutral instead of personal?’

‘I hear what you’re saying, Tosh. See, I’ve made a note: avoid personality, think HR.’

Anthea said, ‘Miriam Beyer’s the obvious choice. Gender studies, eighteenth-century and she gave a great paper on scandal ﬁction in Sydney last year. You remember, Vernon?’

‘I do. Teutonic. But ironic.’

‘Excuse me-’

Tom said hastily, ‘I’ve got Miriam down, too. And the Queensland guy-Sims.’

‘Sims? No way.’

‘You can’t put Sims in front of students, Thomas. Not even our students.’

‘Excuse-’

‘Not at all right for this department. In the last analysis, it’s about the right kind of person.’

‘What’s wrong with him? It’s a pretty convincing application.’

‘Like for a start he’s got this totally anachronistic great works fetish. You know, courses on…’ Anthea appeared to be groping after a dim recollection. ‘Things like Shakespeare,’ she said ﬁ nally.

‘Think of a fog, Thomas. An industrious one.’

‘He chaired my paper on “The Limits of Poetry”. Claimed I’d run out of time when I’d barely started.’ Dodd said, ‘He was quite impertinent about it. Deﬁnitely the wrong kind of person.’

There followed minutes of satisfying gossip about the applicant. (Vernon: ‘… of course Sims swears he was only tucking in his shirt.’)

‘Excuse me, Professor.’ For Tosh was not without heroism. ‘If a candidate meets the selection criteria, HR would deﬁ nitely advocate interviewing him. Or her.’

Cheered by the prospect of snubbing an enemy, Dodd was no worse than avuncular. ‘At the end of the day, Tosh, it’s more than a matter of a level playing ﬁeld. Or, to put it less poetically, we can’t let mere regulations constrain our-’

‘Originality?’

‘Freedom. Academic freedom,’ said Dodd, with meaningful emphasis. He leaned back in his chair, knees wide. (Vernon: ‘It’s the kind of crotch that follows you about the room.’) On the superior side of the chasm separating academic from administrative mind, professorial teeth came together with a hard little snap.

‘There’s Helen, of course,’ said Anthea.

This entirely predictable turn provoked the usual spasm of disquiet. Vernon murmured, ‘Again?’ But it lacked conviction.

There were two grave impediments to Helen Neill’s career: she was a conscientious, gifted teacher, and she was bringing up two young children on her own. Years after enrolling in a PhD, she had yet to complete her thesis. Her scholarship had long run out. She lived on the contract teaching that came her way from tenured staff using research grants to buy themselves out of classroom hours and marking. Their careers prospered; hers did not.

Collective guilt about Helen ran high. It was assuaged by interviewing her for every entry-level lectureship that came up in the department. Afterwards, Anthea would take her out to lunch and explain that the panel had been compelled to appoint a candidate with publications and a doctoral degree.

‘She’s made excellent progress recently.’ Anthea spoke in the bright, determined tone she reserved for Helen. ‘I’m sure she’ll have a complete draft by the end of summer.’ It was a topic on which she was a practised liar.

There hung in her colleagues’ minds an image of Helen Neill: shaggy, overweight, fatally mild. She interviewed badly, lacking sleep and the necessary conﬁdence in her genius.

‘We’re not obliged to interview her,’ said Dodd. ‘Applicants must have completed a doctoral degree. There’s your bottom line. No reason to start shifting the goalposts.’

‘Excuse me-’

‘It would be grossly inconsiderate not to interview her. Tom, Vernon?’

Tosh said in a rush, ‘Within context-sensitive parameters, HR strongly advises against unsuccessing in-house candidates.’ His hair had shaken free in two shining wings. He was an angel who did not fear to tread.

Kevin Dodd would have done very well as a goldﬁsh; it was something about the set of his ears. ‘Well, if we’re pushing the envelope… The young English lass, what’s her name now- Felton?’

Tom looked up. Rebecca Finton was the DPhil on his list.

‘Becky Finton, that’s it. She was at the Modern Times conference in Zürich.’ Dodd cleared his throat. ‘Very, ah, striking.’

Vernon angled his pad towards Tom. ‘SHAGADELIC! PHWOAR!!’

The meeting went on being progressed.

Anthea held the lift for him.‘Can you believe Kevin?’ She thrust out her lower lip and blew a little puff of air upwards. The springy red curls on her forehead shook.

A poster beside them warned of a graduate forum on ‘Performing Masculinity’. Bruce Lee’s body, taught with fury…

Anthea said, ‘It’s OK for you to laugh. That’s one of my students.’ Then she laughed anyway. ‘Lunch?’

‘Love to, but I’ve got to dash.’

The door pinged open.‘We’re having a party. I’ll email you.’ Thirty seconds later she called, ‘Bring your girlfriend.’

When he turned, she was smiling. ‘So it’s true.’

He thought, then said, ‘Esther.’

‘Three degrees of separation in this town, Tommo.’

‘Really, that many?’

That Nelly and he were coupled in gossip pleased him. He walked to the car park through light strokes of rain. From the dome of an umbrella going the other way a voice said, ‘Yeah, but will I like philosophy?’

In talk at least he lay enlaced with Nelly. Tom’s ﬁ ngers curved in his pocket, assuming the round weight of her breast.

On the way to the Preserve, his mood darkened. The premonition of failure returned and spread its wings. Stuck in trafﬁ c he stared past his wipers, seeing his book unpublished, his career stagnating. The pursuit of knowledge: as a young man he had thought it honourable, a twentieth-century way to be good.

His faith had wilted when exposed to departmental realpolitik; had shrivelled before the academy’s whole-hearted adoption of corporate values and the pursuit of proﬁ t over larger aims. Yet a trace of his original reverence had endured, as a phial of scent perfumes a drawer long after the last subtle drops have evaporated. The constant element in a life is usually the product of illusion, dreams directing history with surer cunning than any charter. Perfection of the life, or of the work. Tom had never hesitated; never imagined he might botch both.

There came to him, with graphic intensity, a memory from his ﬁrst year of teaching. Lecturing on Dubliners, he had looked up from his notes and seen a student slip from the theatre: silhouetted against a bright oblong before the door swung shut behind her. Tom found himself controlling an impulse to shout encouragement, urging her to ﬂee while there was time. Only weeks earlier his appointment had ﬁlled him with elation. Now he gripped the lectern and saw the track on which his days would run.

He pressed the button that lowered the car window. Despite the gloom, the air no longer pinched. The mild, rainy afternoon, scented with exhaust, might have been Indian. Another self ﬂickered at the edge of Tom’s vision: short-sleeved, subtitled in Hindi. He climbed a grimy stairway, through waftings of urine and mustard seed. On a bus bulging with bodies, he reached past layers of hands that matched his own.

For a period in Tom’s adolescence this parallel life had been very real to him. He could still call up a repertoire of scenes rehearsed to perfection. They were not nostalgic, not a revisiting of childish haunts, but sustained visions of an Indian existence. Their function was propitiatory. If he set himself to imagine an Indian life, he would not be returned to one. This bargain with fate involved dropping down the social scale, so that every element of his ﬁctional existence-the clothes he wore, the food he ate, the language he spoke-was borrowed from lives remote from his own. Thus, at the sight of a Friday night treat of ﬁsh and chips, Tom pictured himself squatting over a tin plate of spiced pulses. He strolled between the laden shelves of a supermarket while serving glasses of germ-ridden water in a squalid teashop.

Then, quite abruptly, he had abandoned these dreamy designs. If an inattentive moment found him in their thrall, he would break free through an effort of will. He told himself the practice was frivolous, incommensurate with the gravity of his ﬁfteen years. What he feared, in truth, was more insidious. His life in Australia was rendered superﬁcial by the everyday density of his inventions. Beside his hardy Indian familiar, he appeared cursory and surplus. Even now, after the passage of so many seasons, Tom had no wish to prolong their encounter.

The rain had thinned. There were bundles of light above the river. Tom thought of the life he had led, and the life he had missed, and how he would never see his vague teenage face recycled in a child. A message loomed against the sky: The More You Spend, The More You Earn; and Tom, picturing his life, saw the impress left by feet on a beach; as if what mattered had walked away.

At the Preserve, Nelly was putting clothes into a bag for the country. When she got into the car, Tom noticed a wide black band of insulating tape stuck across the toe of her left boot.

They talked about Osman. Nelly turned a pink knitted hat in her hands.

On the freeway, she told Tom she had another piece of bad news. The Preserve had sold at auction in May, but the developers had overstretched their resources. Work on the building had been postponed and Nelly allowed to stay; for twelve months, she had been assured. But a letter had arrived that morning giving her until the end of January to move out. ‘I’ve seen the plans. They’re going to squish three apartments onto each ﬂoor and put a penthouse on the roof.’ She folded her hat down the middle and said, ‘I’m trying to think of it as a kind of collage. The uses and reuses of a building.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Brendon’s mentioned some place in Footscray we could share. But I don’t think he’s planning too far ahead right now.’

Then she said, ‘There’s a six-month artist’s residency in Kyoto coming up. Starting next September.’

Kilometres streamed past. Tom said, ‘That sounds pretty exciting.’

‘There’ll be stacks of people after it. But some guy Carson knows on the board says my chances are good.’

In the mid-1990s, Nelly had begun showing photographs of wooden printer’s trays of the kind once used to store metal type in compartments of different sizes. She would paint the sides of her trays to resemble elaborate carving. Within these frames, some compartments were left empty; others held an object or image. Tom studied a tray whose sumptuous recesses had been lined with the royal blue velvet of jeweller’s cases. Nestled within were banal found objects, one to a niche in reverent display: a pineapple-topped swizzle stick, a hairslide, a condom wrapper, two dead matches, a doll’s dismembered arm. These items deposited by the human tide passing through its streets bore witness to the city’s energy and erosion. Tom was reminded also of the fascination detritus holds for the very young; of the way a small child will pass over a costly toy in favour of absorbed play with bottle tops or a rag or the foil from a toffee, investing the valueless things of the world with joy.

Nelly was given to recycling images: inserting them into new contexts, reproducing them on different scales. Tom noticed that she kept returning to the skipping girl ﬁgure. He came across a series in which a painting of the neon sign had been photographed, then smeared while the paint was still wet, photographed again, smeared again, and so on. The image disintegrated over ﬁve paintings, the last showing only billows of gorgeous, violet-tinged reds worthy of Venice. Tom pictured Nelly working with swift concentration, her photographer beside her, stepping back from her canvas with wet red hands. In a museum’s online collection he found a photo of a

painted child skipping on the wall of a factory, encircled by the caption Skipping Girl Pure Malt Vinegar. Nelly had montaged this old black-and-white image over a contemporary streetscape, so that while the painted child remained stranded in two dimensions, her metal twin rose airily above her in the sky.

Tom knew the advertising sign of old. His uncle had pointed it out, on a sightseeing evening drive, when the Loxleys ﬁrst came to Australia; the sign was one of Tom’s earliest memories of the city. The skipping girl wore a scarlet bolero over a snowy blouse, with white socks and strapped black shoes. A neon rope lit up in alternation above her head and at her feet to simulate movement. Her red skirt ﬂ ared like a night-blooming poppy.

Modern magic was at hand: Tom Googled the sign. He learned that it dated from 1936: the city’s ﬁrst animated neon sign, calculated to imbue dull vinegar with the romance of novelty. Over time it had deteriorated, been dismantled and replaced; the sky-sign he knew as a child was that copy.

When the vinegar factory relocated to a different suburb, the skipping girl was left behind. By then neon was no longer glamorous, no longer a sign of the times. Besides, the skipping girl had become a landmark. There was a local outcry at the suggestion that she might be moved. Eventually, as buildings were demolished and the streetscape altered, she was shifted along the road to a different rooftop. There she froze in a deathly sleep. It had been years now since her turning rope had lit up the night sky. She had entered the memory of a generation as a spellbound red ﬁ gure.

Tom could remember the contrary emotions his ﬁ rst encounter with the sign had brought. His instinctive surge of pleasure in the magical sight quickly turned queasy. The big red child’s mimicry of the human seemed tainted with malevolence. The boy twisting around in the back seat of the car for a last glimpse of her was reminded of the long, dim mirrors of India that rippled with secret being; objects that shared her strangeness, denizens of a zone somewhere between artiﬁ ce and life. She called up a personage who had terriﬁed Tom when he was very young, the tall red scissorman who comes / To little boys who suck their thumbs.

There was this too: the sign continued the kingdom of things into the sky. Fresh from a country where giant cutouts and logos and billboards were still rare, Tom was subject to a sentiment he was too young to articulate: that the skipping girl’s presence violated something that should have been inviolable. It was a perception that would dim over time, as he grew accustomed, like everyone else in the city, to the invasion of the sky by commerce. Now tiny silver planes routinely inscribed brand names on the atmosphere, as if the blue air itself were a must-have accessory. People stepping out of their houses in the morning lifted up their eyes to hot-air balloons emblazoned with trademarks, hanging from heaven like Christmas-tree baubles.

Nelly had a printer’s tray called Own Your Own that displayed an identical vinegar label, each featuring a skipping girl, in every niche. Tom studied a colour reproduction of the construction in Art amp; Australia. There was a depressing hint of the cage and the production line about the imprisoned, endlessly reiterated ﬁgure. It was reinforced by the ﬁ ne white-painted wire mesh fastened down a vertical line of compartments. But closer examination revealed that in all but two recesses, a tiny box camera had been painted in at the girl’s feet. Its viewﬁ nder faced out, suggesting it was for her use.

Tom supposed it was Nelly’s way of pointing out that the skipping girl had ﬂoated free. In acquiring mythic status she had become more and less than the product she embodied: a servant of the market who exceeded the commodity that bore her name. Once an emblem of modernity, she had fallen out of fashion and into a life of her own.

He walked up to Victoria Street one evening while the light still held, past a glass-walled gym where scantily clad bodies had the stripped look of ﬁsh. It was the ﬁrst time in years he had scrutinised the skipping girl sign. He saw that the building on which it perched had been converted into ofﬁces and apartments. A woman came jogging out of the lobby, murmuring ‘Beat it!’ as she adjusted her earphones.

Gazing up at the red ﬁgure with a piece of moon at its back, Tom felt his old foreboding ﬂicker. He had just remembered that the skipping girl was double-sided. From the pinnacle of a metal frame, she stared along the street in two-faced vigil. Her eeriness was immanent. Nelly’s image-making merely drew on that quality and intensiﬁ ed it.

A Prime Cut declared the real estate board adorned with the picture of a bull in front of a disused warehouse. You are everywhere said the vertical scrawl on a telephone pole beside it. Across the road, a multi-storey shopping centre was rising from a hole in the earth. With its empty window-sockets and fragmentary stairs, it might have been archaeological; a ruin from the future.

The tremor usually settled after breakfast, but that morning Iris’s hands went on shaking. She jabbed and jabbed at the remote. It took both hands to raise it to chest level and aim it at the set, which made ﬁnding the right button awkward.

Iris sat before grainy footage of heads bobbing in water, her mind taking its own direction. An incident from her department store years swam up to meet her. She had been on her way to Hosiery one lunch hour when she heard her name. A stranger stood in her path, a tremulous form in a checked cap and navy jacket. ‘Iris!’ he said again. ‘I say, it is Iris, isn’t it?’ He peered at her; she saw a brick-red pear packed with teeth. ‘Frank Saunders.’ Iris smiled in propitiation, certain he was one of Audrey’s perverts. He said,‘We met in India. I was in the Hussars with Larry Fitch.’

What struck Iris was the corrugated column rising from his collar. The image was overlaid by another, a muscled neck with a little scar at the base. Her hand went to the stranded gilt at her throat.

Saunders was saying, ‘I say, Iris, you do look tremendously well.’

He swayed closer. Stale sweat and fresh beer muddled the fragrant department store air. An ofﬁcer who gave off an odour of caramel took Iris in his arms; behind his shoulder she glimpsed a presence, sandy hair, a Fair Isle pullover. It was as if a sideboard or a standard lamp should come to life and address her. ‘Do you remember…?’ began Saunders, and Iris said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘My name is Mrs Arthur Loxley. I don’t know you from Adam.’ In her wake, he called, ‘I say, I say…’

Iris shook in her chair, and loud farts rolled from her. She was blocked up, again. Once she could have turned to milk of magnesia. Lately, however, even a half-dose mitigated relief with disaster.

When you could no longer manage the lavatory: that was when they put you in a home.

She had reached the age where choice is synonymous with fear. Iris was afraid, in this matter, of an alliance between Tom and Audrey; an ancient animal mistrust of the strong and the young.

She feared soiling herself. She feared the consequences, impressed on her at an early age, of irregularity. Sebastian de Souza had locked himself in the lavatory every morning at twenty-ﬁve minutes past seven and remained there until he had extruded a well-formed stool. His wife and child followed him in turn. Thankfully there was a good strong ﬂ ush, although the slit-windowed cabinet remained pregnant with odours. The implications of the ritual far exceeded hygiene. To fail the daily rendezvous was to fall short of a moral standard. Diarrhoea was heathenish; constipation warned of wilfulness. If the ﬂesh was disobedient, the spirit was base. Bodies that lacked discipline required control.

Iris’s son said, ‘Stop worrying, Ma.’ He said it often, with varying degrees of irritation. But Iris’s thoughts leaped and raced, skittish with fear.

She worried about Tommy: her clever son without wife or child, his life an accumulation of unwritten pages. She feared he would meet a modern, untimely death: a plane dropping from the clouds, a madman at a service station swivelling a gun. She feared the loneliness that was accruing for his old age.

As a toddler, he had learned to use his china pot only to reject it. The household entered a phase during which a telltale reek would lead Iris to a little mound deposited behind an armchair or under a table. Once a glistening serpent lay coiled inside one of her shoes. The child was visibly excited by these incidents, gleeful even while scolded.

Iris’s father detected depravity and counselled thrashing. ‘Children are animals. The two things they understand are food and pain.’ It was clear that Tommy knew what was required of him; yet he refused to conform. Iris’s anxiety mounted. Arthur advised her to let the boy be, saying he would outgrow the problem. It was no more than his wife expected. That from the sensible English multitude she had managed to acquire a specimen devoid of sense had long been all too plain to her.

With time and observation, she saw that her son’s offence had the aspect of a game. If anyone other than Iris happened upon his faeces, the child’s pleasure was mixed with agitation. But when the discovery fell to her, he chuckled and whooped. Eventually she understood. She had schooled him herself in the use of his pot, praising him as he strained to please her. The habit acquired, she had left him alone; now, when he moved his bowels a servant bore away the aromatic receptacle and returned it scoured. And so the child’s ingenuity had contrived a means of continuing to make her the present of his stools.

The foundation of a pattern was laid. The mother fretted; the son provided for her. What neither grasped was that worry, too, might be a form of giving. As Iris aged, her anxieties multiplied to encompass the trivial and the sublime, rational eventuality and wild hypothesis, lost keys, toothache, ATMs, road accidents, seizures, what people would think, the years that had elapsed since her last confession, running out of sugar. To voice anxiety was to risk her son’s disapproval. At the same time, he might allay apprehension: ﬁnd her key, go to the ATM in her place, assure her that the brakes wouldn’t fail. Her worrying empowered him. That was part of its value to her.

There was also this: worry, eating away at the present, made room for the future. ‘For God’s sake, Ma: it’ll never happen.’ Thus Tom, missing the point. Because worrying was a way of looking forward to something. That it might be a calamity was irrelevant. Fear was Iris’s mechanism for allotting herself time. It was a crafty manoeuvre. She was old and ill and poor. Fear was her best hope.

After Saunders, Iris shunned Hosiery, forgoing her staff discount to buy her tights in a rival establishment. She told no one what had happened. But one morning, years after the encounter, she found herself speaking of it to her son.

Tom pressed for details. At once Iris ended the conversation: ‘What’s the use?’ It was her standard response whenever he asked about the years before her marriage.

Fragments of knowledge-photographs, dates, conversations half heard when he was young-formed a patchwork in Tom’s mind. His mother, a beautiful girl, had married late. The strange word jilted had snared his attention in childhood. Now he assumed that Iris had run into the suitor who had once betrayed her. He had lately met the woman he would marry; was himself in love. It rendered him susceptible to romantic explanation.

He looked at the lipstick escaping in ﬁne red threads from his mother’s mouth; the skin below her chin hung pleated. His own ﬂesh was replete; satiny with consummation. He thought, Nobody touches her. He thought, No wonder she doesn’t want to dwell on the past.

How we imagine another person reveals the limits of our understanding. Tom was then not yet thirty. He could not have guessed that, surrounded by artiﬁ cial limbs encased in nylon, Iris’s ﬁrst thought on seeing Saunders had been, Who’s that old man? It was not the past she had recoiled from in their encounter but the future.

Fear had this advantage too: it could sidle up to the future side on, by wiles. There was no need to look what was waiting in the face.

The weeks in 1965 when Indian tanks rolled to within three miles of Lahore had left no impression on the child Tom’s mind. Six years passed in relative peace; then, with Indian troops already moving to support bloodied Dacca, Pakistan declared war on its sibling.

It so happened that Tom had recently read the diary of Anne Frank. With the formalisation of hostilities, he sensed a meeting of life and literature. He was a child built by books and his excitement was boundless.

He couldn’t quite settle on his part in the conﬂ ict: would he shelter Hindus when Pakistan invaded? To this end, he searched the house for secret places, paying particular attention to cupboards. There was the equally thrilling possibility that he himself would be forced into hiding. He reviewed the Muslim boys he knew: he counted no special friends among them, but trusted that in time the rules of plot would reveal one. What was certain, in any case, was that his role would be heroic. He passed agreeable hours trailing a stick in the dirt, his lips moving soundlessly, imagining the raids he would conduct under cover of night. Sometimes he swung his arms and counted his strides, shouting out numbers as if they were blasphemies. A spindly twig or leaf might enrage him by appearing defenceless, and he would strike it to the ground. His dreams of pursuit and daring were broken into now and then by fear; but like the delicious shiver provoked by a tale of ghosts, it was merely his body’s involuntary tribute to art.

This happy state lasted a scant fortnight. Then the war was over, and in the midst of national jubilation, Tom tasted the melancholy of those who wake from visions. His reﬂ ection in the mirror appeared to have shrunk. For a glorious interval, he had been larger than life. It was his ﬁrst, dim perception of the power of narrative: war, like love, raising its accomplices to the status of ﬁgures in a known story.

Tom knew that a lucky country was one where history happened to other people. For thirty years after his marginal involvement in its adventure, he had found a place in which to take cover from its reach.

On the September night when he stood in a bar with Nelly watching towers sink to their knees, the fear he felt was an acute version of a child’s alarm as the seeker in a hiding game draws near. He had always known it was only a matter of time before it happened. Living in Australia was like being a student at a party that went on and on; he didn’t want it to end, but couldn’t suppress the knowledge that exams were approaching.

Tom Loxley wished what anyone might: that a pleasant life should go on being pleasant. He wished for continuity. He wished for the orderly progression of events. He wished, that is to say, for an end to history. It was incompatible with modern life. It raged over benighted continents and there it should have stayed, ripping up sites already littered with its debris. What was unnerving was the juxtaposition of that ancient face with Power-Point and water coolers. Its eruption in nylon-carpeted cubicles where people were sneaking a look at stuff on eBay.

It was as if the events of that year had set out to demonstrate that history could not be conﬁned to historical places. In the same spring as the towers fell, boats making their way to Australia foundered on the treachery of currents and destiny.

People looking for sanctuary drowned. They might have been found; they might have been saved. But what prevailed was the protection of a line drawn in the water.

Night after night, images of the refugees appeared. Tom saw death ﬂicker in the furtive glow of TV and knew the guilty rage of those who have crossed to safety. Time toppled like a wave. He was a falling thing, spiralling down to wait forever in a room as blue as an ocean. He felt the convergence of public and private dread.

Buried deep in Australian memories was the knowledge that strangers had once sailed to these shores and destroyed what they found. How could that nightmare be remembered? How could it be unselﬁshly forgotten? A trauma that had never been laid to rest, it went on disturbing a nation’s dreams. In the rejection of the latest newcomers, Tom glimpsed the past convulsing like a faulty ﬁlm. It was a confession coded as a denial. It was as if a ﬁ end had paused in its ravaging to cover its face and howl.

The images he saw on TV brought him out in goose bumps: fear writing its name on his ﬂesh. And since the frightened are often frightening, the pictures on his screen made him grimace and distorted his face.

Bodies ﬂashed up constantly in those weeks: broken, burned, ﬁshed lifeless from the sea. He thrust at them with his remote, willing them to disappear. But it was as if the images were imprinted on his retina. They affected everything he saw. In ordinary streets the air turned red with callistemons. Tiny corpses appeared on pavements, nestlings as naked and strange as Martians.

A roller-blader sped past Tom, ﬂ eeing as if from catastrophe; the white stare of the baby strapped to his back followed like a curse. A lunatic in ﬂawless linen strode up and down a supermarket aisle, gesticulating, shouting, ‘What do you mean by a small pumpkin?’ Then Tom noticed the wire running into her pocket from her ear.

A municipal hard-rubbish collection produced surreal assemblages on footpaths. Tom’s route to a protest about the war in Afghanistan took him through dystopic chambers furnished with soiled carpet squares and disembowelled futons. He passed an orange divan stripped of cushions; collapsed hoovers, torn ﬂ yscreens, a backless TV. A bicycle wheel leaned against a birdcage. Rusty barbecues might have strayed from a torturer’s repertoire. There were contraptions for improving muscle tone, computer keyboards fanned in a magazine rack, plastic ﬂowerpots packed with grey earth. It was like leaﬁ ng through snapshots of a civilisation’s unconscious.

Spring came apart under a weight of rain, death-laden spring. Fear put out live shoots in Tom. Instantly identiﬁ able as foreign matter, he feared being labelled waste. He feared expulsion from the body of the nation.

In the hills, the mild city day was cold and wild. The rain arrived soon after Tom and Nelly, herding them back to the house, putting an end to their search.

Nelly’s pink hat lay on a chair, misty beads tangling its ﬁ ne ﬁbres. She built up the ﬁre while Tom set about preparing a meal. Rain slashed leaves, clawed at the walls. The paddocks darkened under their leaking roof.

Tom wound spaghetti around his fork, then rested it on his plate. The wind continued its assault on the trees, pulling their hair. To think of the dog without shelter in this weather was unbearable. Tom rose, crossed to the window and drew down the blind.

Nelly had pushed her plate aside, and was sketching on the back of one of his ﬂyers. ‘Look.’ He saw cross-hatching on a pencilled map. ‘That’s where we were today. You can mark where you searched last week. But in any case we’ll cover it all, bit by bit.’

Approximate, not to scale, unscientiﬁc. He sat at the table and said, ‘I shouldn’t have dragged you up here. I’m sorry.’

She was adding to her map: an arrow pointing to the house, the tracks, a compass rose.

‘If he’s out there, how could he have survived? This rain, this cold.’

‘The rain’ll keep him going. A dog can live three weeks without food. Three days without water.’

Her mulish cheer irritated Tom. He sneezed. Once, twice.

Nelly told him that when the house was ﬁrst built, the interior walls had been covered in hessian pasted over with layers of newspaper. In the tiny second bedroom Tom had previously glanced into but not entered, Atwood’s architect had preserved a section of the original décor. Nelly pointed out pages from Christmas colour supplements that had been included in the ﬁnal paper coating. When the house was new, these illustrations must have brought the opulence of icons to the room. Eighty years later, vague ﬁgures showed here and there on the wall, faded divas and emperors emerging from a brownish nicotine haze. ‘They used to spook Rory. He wouldn’t sleep in here when he was a kid.’

Tom was thinking of the delight coloured pictures had once brought, before the proliferation of images. He remembered a parcel of foodstuffs that had arrived from England when he was ﬁve or six. A spoonful of glowing red jam from a tin wrapped in bright scenery: a gift from another world.

They were drinking wine, their socked feet outstretched towards the ﬁre. The planked ﬂoor hadn’t been polished in years. But it was a living thing by ﬁrelight, dark spots swirling on a lemony pelt.

Tom said, ﬁshing, ‘Denise asked after you the other day.’

‘Been chatting to her, have you?’ Nelly lit a cigarette.

‘What?’

She exhaled.

‘What?’

‘There was all this stuff in the papers when Felix disappeared, about us arguing, things like that.’ Nelly said, ‘They got a lot of it from Denise. It’s sort of hard to forget.’

‘Why’d she do that?’

Nelly stared into the ﬁ re.

‘Was she jealous? I mean, I guessed there was something between her and Felix, the way she’s talked about him.’ Tom could feel his mind labouring, thickened with tiredness.

Nelly giggled. It went on too long. ‘Sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s not funny, really. But the idea of Felix and Denise.’

When she had dropped what was left of her cigarette into the ﬁre, she said, ‘Look, I was the one she had a crush on.’

‘You know how you feel things so much then? When you’re

seventeen, eighteen?’

Tom said, ‘I remember.’

‘We had this party here, loads of people came up, I think it was Australia Day. The year Felix went missing.’ Nelly shrugged. ‘Denise had too much champagne, I guess. Like everyone else.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing.’ She said, ‘It’s hard to get over. When you come out with what you feel, and get nowhere.’ After a little while: ‘There was all this other stuff going on in my life at the time. I couldn’t really be bothered with Denise. She was just sort of irrelevant.’

‘Ouch.’

‘Exactly.’

Tom permitted himself a brief fantasy of abstracting some small, odorous item of Nelly’s clothing-a sock, the rosy hat. He thought of Herrick delicately snifﬁng his mistress, declaring that her ‘hands, and thighs, and legs are all / Richly aromatical.’

He glanced covertly at Nelly sitting there beside him on the couch enmeshed in the detail of living: examining a chipped thumbnail, nibbling it, frowning at the result. It was an effort to reconcile the woman he knew, sunk in dailiness, with the Nelly who had existed so thoroughly in the larger-than-life events of Atwood’s disappearance.

There was a girl who had been around at parties and clubs when Tom was twenty. She was no older, but seemed stereoscopic: she had starred in a ﬁlm that had won a prize, her face, smilingly assured below a rakish hat, gazed out from billboards. Then she vanished, summoned by Berlin or LA; and Tom forgot her, until the day, years later, when he and his wife bought a pair of sheets in a department store. On the down escalator, Karen said, ‘You didn’t twig, did you? That was Jo Hutton who served us.’

For days Tom was unable to evict her from his thoughts, the saleswoman he had barely noticed as she bleated of thread-counts; within minutes of turning away, he would have failed to recognise her if she had materialised before him. While the transaction was being processed, he had grumbled casually to his wife about the time their train had spent in the Jolimont shunting yards before delivering them to Flinders Street. The saleswoman looked up: ‘The exact same thing happened to me this morning. Doesn’t it drive you mad?’ Then she conﬁ ded that this was her last day at the city store: she had been transferred to a branch in the suburbs. ‘I live a ﬁ ve-minute drive away. I can’t wait to be shot of public transport.’ She handed Tom a pen and a credit card slip, and shook the two gold bangles on her wrist as he signed: a small, unconscious expression of glee at her victory over time and the railways.

Tom tried to picture the girl in the tilted fedora pausing long enough to fret about train timetables, but found the challenge too strenuous.

Now, sitting with Nelly in the draughty kitchen, he thought it was an error to equate authenticity with even tones. Existence was inseparable from tragedy and adventure, horror and romance; realism’s quiet hue derived from a blend of dramatic elements, as a child pressing together bright strands of plasticine creates a drab sphere.

Thus Tom reasoned; but some vital component of the case continued to elude him. That other Nelly remained a stranger to this one, just as he had not succeeded in matching the two Jo Huttons with each other. The images were not quite congruent, and this was as disconcerting as if a tracing were to lift away from its original and show its own distinctive form.

She said, ‘I’ll sleep here,’ patting the couch.

‘No need.’ To spell it out, Tom might have added. Instead: ‘I can bunk down in the small room.’

‘It’s warmer here. I prefer it.’

Three feet of corded upholstery can assume the dimensions of a continent. Wind tugged at the house. A log shifted and collapsed on the ﬁ re.