Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Palms on the desk, he stretched, relishing the voluptuous ache along his spine.

He wondered how his mother was faring that morning. Age, he thought. The undistinguished thing.

Less than a month earlier Osman had said, ‘I’m forty-seven. I won’t die young.’ He had been allowed to go home at the beginning of November, the cancer in remission; although, as he told Tom, the respite would almost certainly be brief. A hospital bed filled the living room, where chairs had been pushed against walls and a new flat-screen TV set up on the sideboard.

‘My welcome home present,’ said the effigy on the bed. ‘We watch DVDs. I can’t read any more. And who can bear the news? This election they will win for leaving people to drown.’ He looked at Tom. ‘Tell me a poem.’

‘ Yet might your glassy prison seem / A place where joy is known, / Where golden fl ash and silver gleam / Have meanings of their own .’

When Osman closed his eyes, the curve of the ball was prominent under the lid. Cancer had made him thin-skinned. His face was in the process of being replaced by a skull, an ancestor stepping forward to claim him. Yet his ability to bring ease into a room remained.

Afterwards, he said, ‘So many poems. How come you know so many old poems?’

It was a question he had asked before, but the medication had made him forgetful. So Tom told him again about evenings with anthologies; seeing a vein-blue binding in Arthur’s hand. ‘My father taught me to read a poem aloud, and repeat it line by line. You learn without noticing that way.’

Tom could still hear entire poems in Arthur’s voice; a good voice, clear and unaffected. Arthur Loxley had been an indiscriminate reader. He had pages of Keats and Browning and Hardy by heart; also much his son would learn to call third rate. In resentful moods, Tom saw his mind as an attic crammed with an incongruent jumble. Groping for treasure, he was just as likely to come up with a gimcrack oddment.

Nevertheless, what had stuck was delight in words arranged well.

On a chair wedged between bed and bookcase, he said, ‘Even the Gatling jammed and the colonel dead is a lesson in rhetoric.’

‘You know, a thing that astonishes me. How quickly poetry has slipped from the culture. I mean what lives in memory. The remembering of poems: a collective inheritance, vanished.’ Osman shifted, trying to raise himself against his pillows. Tom sensed Brendon, squeezed in beside him, grow tense; watched love fight itself down to grant its beloved the dignity of struggle. ‘I have seen this happen in my lifetime,’ Osman went on. ‘In democracies, with no dictators to burn books. So many centuries of poems, and then-’

He looked at Tom. ‘There are people when I say this who think, how come this Turk lectures us about poetry?’ His eyes were black olives, now and then still shiny.

On his way out, Tom came to a halt in front of a picture. ‘It’s one of Nelly’s.’

‘Yeah, it’s from last year’s show.’ Brendon said, ‘I’ve only just got round to having it framed.’

The image had the depth and richness of painting. You had to look closer to see it was a photograph. Then you realised it was both: a photograph of a painting.

‘The way the paint’s laid on, you can see it even in a photo. Nelly can get these really amazing effects with brushwork.’ Brendon’s hand moved out to an abacus of railway tracks depicted at the blue hinge of evening. ‘It really gets to me, you know. I can’t bear to think of her destroying work like this.

Tom ate breakfast while loading clothes into the machine. Then he scattered the contents of drawers, searching for a photograph.

Meanwhile, his mind busied itself with this production: he was making his way down the farm track with the dog snuffling ahead on his rope when a wallaby flashed out from the bush. The dog sprang forward. But Tom kept his grip on the rope, using both hands to wind it in. The dog twisted, barking furiously. They walked on.

He had begun sketching in this scenario within hours of losing the dog. Each replay introduced a detail: his shoulder wrenching as the dog lunged forward, his skidding half-steps in the mud before he mastered the animal. An ancient corner of Tom’s brain insisted that if he could bring suffi cient intensity of imagination to this sequence, it would in fact be true.

At eight he began calling animal shelters. ‘Hang in there, mate,’ said a ranger. Tom put the phone down, and found tears prickling his lids.

There was an odd spaciousness to the morning: a dreamlike drawing out of time. At some point he realised it came from not having to walk the dog.

The campus jacarandas were staining concrete pathways blue. Exams were over; deserted courtyards and empty corridors lent the university a shifty, malingering air.

Tom settled down in his office to read a late essay from his seminar on the modern novel. ‘It was Henry James’s ambition to break with melodrama and romance and establish himself as the master of the new psychological novel. Discuss with reference to at least two works by James.’

This had elicited the following response:‘Henry James failed completely in his ambition to be a modern writer. For example he invented point of view but could not always rise above omniscience. His problems are demonstrated in his last work called The Sense of the Past. There are the implications of the title. Furthermore the novelist provides many juxtapositions of melodrama in the text, ie when Ralph, a modern character because he is American visits a family house in London (old world) that is haunted. A ghost is one of the most well known symbols of romantic discourse. Similarly the protagonist travels back in time and meets his ancestors who are dead. Time-travel is a modern device (for the time), however-’

But Vernon Pillai was rolling through the door. ‘Thomas, Thomas, how I have missed you. No one to scuttle with, claw in ragged claw.’

Vernon was a small circle balanced on a large one; an anomalous black snowman. He wheeled hither and thither, turning his round head sideways to decipher a spine, picking up letters and perusing them with frank interest. He tapped a photocopied article lying on Tom’s desk. ‘Have you read this?’

‘Not yet. Have you?’

‘Terrible. But short.’ Then Vernon pointed to a mug beside the computer. ‘That is a disgusting object.’

It was the survivor of a set of four once presented by Iris to Karen. Tom had felt the shame of it when the wrapping paper came away: his gleaming, expensive girl with a lapful of supermarket china. His agitation was accompanied by a fi erce protective surge. If his wife were to betray, by word or sign, what she must think of the gift, he would have no choice but to leave her.

Karen’s impeccable manners brought her safely through the peril, as manners are designed to do. But the mugs remained in a cupboard. Iris, visiting some months later, enquired after them, choosing a moment when she was alone with her son. Her little finger, with its salmon-painted nail, flew like a fl ag from the handle of a cobalt-rimmed cup. They had lunched off the same service, a wedding present from Karen’s godparents.

Tom said, ‘The mugs are great. But I needed some at work and Karen said I could have them. So now at last I can offer people a coffee in my offi ce.’

He saw Iris’s satisfaction in picturing his clever friends sipping from her mugs. Whatever she gave his wife was in any case an indirect offering to her son.

And so her gift ended up in Tom’s office. The mugs were patterned with white hearts on a red ground, or the reverse. Three quickly broke or vanished. The last persisted, with the stubbornness of the unwanted. Time scoured the hearts closest to its rim, leaving a row of pinkish smears. Recently the mug had acquired a chip. Stained with coffee, it was indeed sordid. Tom was helpless before it.