Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iris was eating a biscuit with the audible, laborious mastica

tion of those who no longer have molars.

‘Ma, is everything all right?’

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

‘Audrey told me what happened in the morning.’

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

‘But Ma, if you can’t manage…’

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

‘Ma, be reasonable.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Hold me, darling, hold me.’

‘Ma, you’re fi ne.’

‘Easy for you to say, child.’

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

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

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

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

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

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