Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

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.

Tom would select a point on a track, mark it with tape and walk into the bush. It was like trying to pass through a living wall. Ferns and vines swayed up from the murk of gullies. Fine scratches covered the backs of his hands.