The Lost Dog (26 page)

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 fire.

‘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 confided that this was her last day at the city store: she had been transferred to a branch in the suburbs. ‘I live a five-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 fire.

Tuesday

I
T WAS STILL RAINING
on Tuesday morning. Nelly turned left onto the ridge road, away from the coast. She had offered to drive, saying she knew the roads better than Tom did.

They meandered about the valley, Nelly steering smoothly around its curves. She had an affinity with engines. Tom recalled seeing her outside the Preserve, her round hands busy with a fan-belt under the hood of Yelena’s Beetle. The dog had been by his side that afternoon. It seemed a long time ago.

A cemetery with iron gates came into view. Tom thought of the grinning dead in their filthy sheets. On waking he had found a sentence in his mind:
Today it is a week.
He felt the force of it again now, the days piling up, each a fresh clod tamped down over hope. A date over which so many Novembers had flowed without interruption had become an anniversary. Time was thickening around it. He thought of it waiting for him each year.

There was the warm, companionable space of the car. Beyond it, sodden pastures and the sky. Tom scuttled between inside and outside, leaving rain-spotted flyers in letterboxes; every third or fourth farm used a milk can.

It was sharp, slanted rain, a shower of arrows loosed by an archaic battalion.

There were bursts of untuneful humming from Nelly. Then she remarked on the gleam that potatoes have when freshly dug from the earth.

There would come a day, thought Tom, when he looked back on this one and was envious: because she was there, beside him. His fears for the dog, the news about Osman, everything that at present loomed large would dwindle to a speck on memory’s horizon. What remained would be the floodlit, ecstatic fact of her presence.

At least he had a photograph of her. Mogs, having turned up at the Preserve in Posner’s retinue one evening, in due course demonstrated a Japanese camera—‘
Isn’t
it brilliant!’— that shot out Polaroids no larger than a stamp. The results passed from hand to hand. It was easy to palm the image Tom wanted: Nelly turning towards the camera, snapped before her expression could settle. There was an edge of paisley sleeve in the foreground. Tom thought it belonged to Osman but wasn’t sure.

He would have liked to carry the miniature in his wallet but feared it being seen. Instead he kept it in a drawer, slotted between the pages of a square-ruled notebook. It was a form of insurance; a material vestige of Nelly to set against the fickle-ness of memory. He saw himself in years to come, extracting it from the dimness of his desk. Projecting himself through time, he discovered that he was already moved; affected in advance by that trace of her presence caught in waves of light.

None of it would come to pass. In one of those enigmatic conjuring tricks effected by objects, the Polaroid would vanish within a few months. Tom would turn out his desk; grasp the notebook by its spine and shake, thumb its pages a hundred times. But one day, when years had passed and his need had long withered, he would open a book and discover the photograph within it.

What was strange was that this volume, the collected poems of Christina Rossetti, belonged to his wife. Tom had his own copy somewhere, but this one, a handsome, jacketed edition, was hers. He checked the flyleaf to make sure:
For Becky, Happy
Christmas 1992, Love always, Granny.

On a forested back road, there was a flash of fur in the bush. Nelly said, ‘Felix hit a wallaby once, have I said?’

Tom shook his head.

‘There was nothing he could’ve done, it came flying out when he was taking that curve near Jack’s gate. It wasn’t dead. We just stood there, looking at its eyes, with Rory bawling in the car. I went to get Jack but he was out in the paddocks. So I left Rory with Denise’s mum, and Denise came back with me, and put Jack’s gun against the wallaby’s head and shot it. This tall, skinny teenager, right, and so
collected
. We go back to the farm and next thing she’s handing round these pumpkin scones she’s just baked.’

Nelly said, ‘She was sort of amazing in those days, Denise.’

They bought coffee from a shop that served a deserted campsite. Nelly drove on to a spot where they could pull off the bitumen. Mountain ash rose before them, superb and desolate. The forest was chilling in the way of ancient landscapes, evoking human insignificance. It suggested aeons; vegetable time. This was how the planet had looked before the advent of their kind.

Riddled with time, it was a scene easily emptied of history. The Edenic new world: an image to set against European sophistication and decadence. Tom was unable to contemplate it with equanimity. He said something along these lines to Nelly.

‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’ She lowered her window; lit one of her spiced cigarettes. ‘The whole wilderness thing’s so loaded in this country. Landscape without figures: we don’t like thinking how that came about.’

It was not that Tom disagreed. But the forest disturbed him in a way that far exceeded the merely historical. It was wild and latent and old. It addressed an aspect of his nature that had endured, whatever victories cultivation knew elsewhere.

Clove-scented smoke rolled about. Nelly, shooing it away, said she had cut back to five cigarettes a day. ‘But I’ve got to give up, really. They’re hardly the best thing for migraine.’

‘Is that what they are, your headaches?’

She didn’t reply at once. Then she glanced at Tom sideways. ‘I’m painting again.’

‘Yeah? That’s great.’

‘I seem to get ill more when I’m working. That’s one reason I put off starting.’ Nelly said, ‘I know a headache’s on the way when I start seeing these shapes like doughnuts. With light where the hole should be.’ Her fingers fluttered beside her left eye. ‘Also I get these, like, flickers of gold. And the air goes sort of brittle. Like tiny glass wings.’

Something about the gesture, these remarks, the way her eyes slipped away. For a moment, it was as if a stranger had entered the car and was sitting beside Tom. A prickle ran over his scalp.

On their way back, as they were passing a cluster of naked sheep, Nelly said, ‘When Jack’s father was a child none of this land had been cleared. It was still one of the wonders of the world.’

Later: ‘They have such small arms. Wallabies.’

O
N A
windy blue evening in October, when they were walking past a broad-fronted house near Tom’s flat, Nelly spoke of the elderly immigrant who had lived there. He had sold the house and returned to Greece so that his life might loop to a close as it had begun, on a rock in the Aegean.