Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

‘I only read about five books when I was growing up.’ But one day a chance remark revealed that having come across Crime and Punishment at the age of seventeen, Nelly had read her way through the nineteenth-century Russians. What she found there had stayed with her as a series of images. She might speak of a man striking a woman at a window with his riding crop as if describing a page in an illuminated missal. In Nelly’s distillation of a famous story there was a woman dressed in grey and an inkstand grey with dust; one day the woman’s lover looked in the mirror and saw, from the colour of his hair, that he had grown old.

Tom would have spoken of the formal qualities of Chekhov’s tale, its understated, almost offhand treatment of love, and evasive resolution. All this Nelly omitted or missed in favour of detail and implication. But years later, when Tom himself was old, he would discover that what remained, when the sifting was done, was a dress, an inkstand, a man whose hair was the colour of ashes.

What he missed in images, said Tom, was the passage of time. ‘Stories are about time. But looking’s a present-tense activity. We live in an age where everything’s got to be now , because consumerism’s based on change. Images seem complicit with that somehow.’

Then he said, ‘Sometimes I think I’ll never really get what’s going on in a painting.’

He had never admitted this before. It required an effort.

‘Is it so different from what you do?’ Nelly said, ‘Reading a book, looking at a painting-they’re both things that might change you.’

Tom noticed that where he spoke of knowledge, Nelly talked of transformation. It confirmed his sense that pictures exceed analysis. Art was ghostly in a way, he thought, something magical that he recognised rather than understood.

He said as much to Nelly. Who argued, ‘But you can see a painting, touch it. Fiction’s the spooky thing. The thing that’s not there.’

She stirred in her ugly vinyl armchair as she spoke. The movement caused her shirt to ride up; there was the glimmer of a bare hip. It was an intensely erotic apparition. Tom looked away. He thought there was nothing more present, more material, than her flesh; and nothing he found more disturbing.

When he told Nelly that he was thinking of writing about her work, she looked doubtful. ‘Yeah, right, that’s good, I guess.’

Next thing there was Posner, lying in wait for Tom at the Preserve. ‘Dear boy, this is tremendously exciting. The serious attention Nelly’s attracted so far has been rather outweighed by sensationalist dross. The hour is ripe, ripe , for a scholar.’ He brought out his version of a smile; cautiously, like a man exercising an alligator. ‘Oh, I know you’re not an art historian. But as I’ve been saying to Nelly, one must think over and through mere categories. The specialist is a contemptible modern creation. I consider the fact that you come to us from literature a veritable atout . Art and text: an illustrious association.’ A shirtfront loomed vast as a snowfield. ‘If I could help,’ said Posner, ‘I would be honoured. Resources, contacts, suggestions… We could start with dinner.’

Tom murmured that the project was in its infancy.

Nelly said, ‘You’re scaring him off, Carson.’

‘But it’s quite the other way around. I’m entirely awed.’ Then he was pressing something into Tom’s hand, the bloodless fingers surprisingly warm. ‘My card. Whenever you’re ready,’ crooned Posner.

‘Tell me a story,’ Nelly would say.

It was oddly disquieting. The childishness of it: Tell me a story . It rang through their encounters like a refrain. Tom was unable to resist it, of course. Soon he was going to meet Nelly stocked with stories like charms.

He told her about April Fonceca, who sang in the last row of the choir and was a living example. When April was a little girl, she had lit a candle and placed her dolls around it. Afterwards, she said she was only playing birthday parties. Afterwards, who could tell exactly how it happened? But there was a golden flame and there was a celluloid doll, and then the doll was the flame. And there was April, reaching to save her pretty doll, and the flame reaching for April. April wore high necks and long sleeves, but there was nothing to be done about her face, and that was what came of playing with matches. Whenever Tom looked at her, he saw the girl and her doll flowering into light, a big candle and a small one. He didn’t want to look at April, said Tom, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

He told Nelly about a widowed Englishwoman his parents had known. She kept a little dog called Chess: tight white body, black ears. ‘The Civil Service terrier,’ said Arthur. One day Chess was bitten by a snake and died. Soon afterwards, the elderly Indian couple who lived next door to the widow acquired a dun-coated mongrel and promptly named him Chess. This greatly amused Sebastian de Souza: ‘The fools! A brown mutt called Chess!’ Passing their compound, he would call out,‘Here, Magpie! Here, Domino!’ Or,‘I say, Prasad, how’s Zebra today?’

He was a grown man, said Tom, before it occurred to him that the Prasads might have intended the name as a form of homage; a mark of respect, even affection. The old people had been gentle and ineffectual. Tom could recall a steady procession of beggars to their door.

He spoke to Nelly of marvels. Of arriving in Australia and finding clean water piped into every kitchen, every drinking fountain. He had drunk glass after glass of it: an everyday miracle on tap.

On a moonless night, Tom ventured a gothic little tale. It was a true story, said Tom, and he had heard it from his father. It was Arthur’s earliest memory, and this was how it went:

What Arthur remembered was a red thing. It jumped up and fell back. Sometimes it vanished but tiny red eyes still watched him. It had a name and that was fi re.

Arthur had scarlet fever, which was red fever, and his head hurt. His arms and chest were on fire. In his mother’s ivory-handled mirror he saw that his cheeks had turned red. But his tongue was white: coated with sugar or snow.

Snow dropped past the window. Arthur’s throat burned. The next time he saw himself in the mirror his tongue was a strawberry. The red thing was growing inside him. It spread in his bed, and his sheets were on fire. The only cool thing in the world was his mother’s white hand. She smoothed his hair. She fi lled a red rubber bag with ice and placed it on his forehead. She read him a story about Snow White and Rose Red.

His older sister sent him a picture on folded white paper. She had drawn a wreath of sharp green leaves and berries like beads of blood. ‘It’s Christmas,’ said Arthur’s mother. She draped a snowy pillowcase over the foot of his bed and left him in the dark. The red thing leaped about.

In the night it turned into a man. It was a red man and Arthur knew him and he didn’t know him and he was coming closer.

Tell me a story . It led Tom to reflect on the book he was writing. Near the end of his long life, Henry James had written a story with a happy ending; having until then, in exemplary modern fashion, avoided the redemptive case.‘The Jolly Corner’ told of Spencer Brydon, who returned to New York after a long absence abroad. He was welcomed by Alice Staverton, an old friend who had loved him steadfastly over the years.

Not long after his return, Brydon began to suspect that a family property he had inherited was haunted. He took to prowling the house after dark and, after a harrowing pursuit one night, came face to face with the apparition. As Brydon had intuited, it was none other than his alter ego, the rich businessman he might have become if he hadn’t left New York. The terrible figure advanced on and overpowered the hero; who when he finally came to his senses found Alice cradling his head in her lap. She had come to the house because she sensed Brydon was in danger. She spoke gently to the bewildered man of the need to accept the path his life had taken; and they embraced as the story ended.