Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

The most satisfying conclusions are bodily: a corpse or a coupling, death or its miniature. Tide patterns had already been verified, currents monitored. Felix Atwood’s body was never recovered. Still, the story might have ended as the larger one is said to have begun: in the huge, slow roll of the sea. But there was the feeling that had built up against Atwood’s wife. In time it would find the outlet it required.

In August, Esther Kade asked if Tom would like to meet for lunch: a small, proprietary pat to check that he was still in place.

She arrived with amber and Mexican silver bound about her wrists and said at once,‘So, Tom: what’s all this about Nelly Zhang?’ It being Esther’s habit when faced with a closed door to turn the handle and walk in.

Tom, chary of the scorn of Esther Kade at amateur trespassing on her art historical terrain, repeated the hazy half-truth he had devised in his email to her: that he was considering writing about literary and artistic controversies. ‘Nothing academic, of course. You know how the vicechancellor’s always saying we mustn’t shut ourselves off from the marketplace. So I’m thinking along the lines of feature articles. Eventually, maybe a book. The kind you see in real bookshops.’

Esther rolled her bright brown eyes, dismissing their vicechancellor’s idiocies along with Tom’s rigmarole. She had the face of a friendly monkey and was much feared on committees.

In the course of their affair, she had said, ‘I’m like one of those cities that people go, Oh it’s great for a day or two.’

Now she produced a manila envelope from her bag. ‘Not exactly my field. But I asked around the department.’

Tom took out a thin sheaf of photocopies: reviews, catalogues, the bibliography of a book called Contemporary Australian Art in which entries had been marked in fl uorescent pen.

Esther said, ‘A starting point.’

When he thanked her, she replied, ‘I saw the famous show, actually. The one that caused all the fuss.’

‘I’ve read what the papers said. But I was PhD-ing in the States at the time.’ A tiny irrelevant shard of history was rising to the surface in Tom’s mind, the memory of walking with a visiting Australian friend down an avenue of lime-green leaves in Baltimore. The tourist had fashioned silver tips for his shirt collar from foil in parody of current fashion.

A waiter dropped cutlery on the table. He made cabbalistic passes with a pepper grinder and commanded them to

‘Enjoy!’

Tom said, ‘Tell me about those paintings.’

‘How well do you know your Ernst?’

‘ Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale . It was one of Nelly’s sources, obviously.’

Esther said drily, ‘How very clever you are.’ Then, as she scrutinised him over mushroom soup, her tone changed. ‘You know, I couldn’t stop thinking about them for ages. You could see where that Nelly’s Nasties tag came from. There were these day-glo colours and a sense of pure evil. The bright day is done, / And we are for the dark . Isn’t that how it goes? Only the darkness was already there, inseparable from the bright day. But only implied. In one sense, it was all in your mind,’ said Esther. ‘That was the worst thing, in a way. It made you part of it.’

When they said goodbye, she kissed Tom; on both cheeks, with a little pause in between to convert affection into irony. ‘Good luck with Nelly Zhang.’ Another beat. ‘I’m so pleased you’re pursuing a non-academic line there.’

Nelly, the least intimidating of creatures, could summon great aloofness at will. Her marriage, the events surrounding Atwood’s disappearance: these remained virgin stretches in the map of their friendship. Once, when speaking of Karen, lightly sketching the ways he had failed with her, Tom mentioned Atwood. Nelly went on with whatever she was doing. The subject dropped between them like a stone.

Sometimes Tom suspected that she understood the fascination of taboo. That her silence was a way of ensuring his ongoing interest. Or they might be talking about anything at all-politics, TV, the perennial weather-and slowly there would grow in him the certainty that the real subject of the conversation was Felix Atwood. The very fullness of their dialogue was shaped by his absence. A string of banal observations seemed to contain him, in every sense. Tom’s consciousness of the man would swell until it seemed that Atwood’s name must burst from his tongue. Once or twice, at these moments, he thought Nelly was looking at him with something like dismay. He would make an effort, would force himself to say something entirely trivial. The danger was skirted. Once more, there would be nothing but ease between them.

Now and then a fragment of information came Tom’s way, maddening in its incompleteness and particularity. When proposing that he rent her house, Nelly warned him of its inconveniences: hurricane lamps, tank water, a stone fi replace for warmth. Then she said, ‘Felix didn’t want somewhere cosified. It was before everyone went postmodern. People were still big on authenticity.’

‘It can’t have been easy, weekends in a place like that when Rory was a baby.’ Tom was thinking, The selfish prick, no running water for his wife and kid so he could feel authentic.

Across the road from the bar in which they sat, a window displayed bra and knicker sets in shell pink, vanilla, peppermint. Tiny satin bows signalled the gift-wrapping of female flesh. A few doors away, a chandelier-hung lighting shop that specialised in Never To Be Repeated Bargains went on closing down.

Nelly remained silent for so long, staring into her glass, that Tom’s mind drifted to a DVD he had rented. Then she said, ‘I didn’t go up there so much. It was really Felix’s place. His retreat where the city couldn’t get in.’

Tom waited.

She lit a cigarette. ‘But it’s beautiful. You’ll see, if you go. I think about living there one day.’

His heart dipped. That she might speak so lightly of a future in which he had no part.

He always pictured her framed by the city, he said. Seeing, in his mind, her red parka blocky and vivid against a blur of traffic, or suspended in a plate-glass door.

She exhaled clove-scented smoke in his face. ‘The Chinese is a creature of alleys.’

But afterwards, in the street, she spoke of watching shooting stars over the paddocks. Of the daffodils a woman long dead had planted around the house, golden and cream and orange-centred, hundreds of flowers quaking in cold August. She said she nurtured a dream of planting trees all over the property. ‘All the different trees that belong there, blackwoods, gums, wattles. I’d like to see it start to turn back into bush.’

People were coming out of restaurants; a woman lifted her hair over the collar of her jacket. There was the scrape of metal on concrete as waiters began packing up the pavement seating.

A voice said, ‘Remind me again who you are?’ Nelly and Tom made their way through a stream of stills, a beef-pink face mounted on a pearl choker, two girls in studded denim turning away from each other on a corner, a taxi flashing its lights at a man with his arm raised.

‘A perfect city is one you can walk out of,’ said Nelly.

Tom pictured the pair of them on a road striped by tree shadows: towers at their back, a mountain in the space between their bodies.

Nelly often sought his advice on what to read. She would quiz Tom about literary history, borrow his course readers. She studied his bookshelves like museum cases, hands behind her back. She squatted to peer at shelves where neglected volumes gathered, and fished out treasures: Kafka’s diaries, an anthology of Victorian poems, The Man Who Loved Children .