Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Tom had devoted several pages of his book to this text. He had concentrated on horror, on the awful qualities that pervaded the story. He had traced the presence of doubles in James’s fiction, had analysed the mythic, cultural and psychoanalytic import of the doppelgänger; and remained unsatisfi ed with his efforts. The tale continued to elude him, as the ghost eluded Brydon. It was a complex, masterly work, far removed from simple childhood tales. But Tom suddenly saw that the fairy-story, a humble, enduring form, might provide him with a fresh thread to follow in unravelling its significance. For Brydon, like the protagonist in a fairy-tale, had bravely stared down peril, securing selfhood and winning union with a beloved other.

It was an insight Tom pursued with happy results. In this way, Nelly entered a chapter of his book: an enabling, untragic muse.

Saturday afternoon passed in hopefulness and despair, and bouts of icy rain. Images of the dog continued to present themselves to Tom. He remembered him sitting up very straight at the top of the hill above Nelly’s house only a week earlier: calmly attentive to his wide surroundings, rich in world.

With wind stirring the trees into a formless boiling, Tom made his way back up the track towards the house. Felix Atwood’s attachment to authenticity notwithstanding, his architect had clad the old building in galvanised iron. Seen at a certain angle, its corrugations shadowed violet, the house could, in fact, pass for the shed it impersonated. It was iconic, in its way; at once more and less than it appeared, a persuasive fi ction.

Nelly had told Tom that Atwood had acquired the house in her name. After negotiations with the tax office, her solicitors succeeded in saving it. Whereupon Nelly put the property on the market. But no one wanted it. Its lack of mod cons had no charm in rural eyes and it was too far from the city for a convenient weekender. And it was in any case dismaying.

‘The estate agent said people would go, But it looks like a shed. They’d drive off without having left the car.’

A house imitating a shed was an unprecedented object. Nelly said, ‘It takes time to see something new.’

One of the old outbuildings on the property had been left to rot in peace: roof rusting, boards weathered to soft black and silver. Beside the shiny iron house it had the cringing look of an animal that fears attention.

The gatepost, grey with age, was patched with yellow lichen. Tom was lifting the wire fastening over it, when he heard his name. He turned to see Denise Corrigan in her blue rain jacket.

‘I thought you might need a hand.’

He explained that he had to drive back to the city. ‘I see my mother on Sunday. You know how it is.’

‘Well, you get along. I’ll head up to the ridge anyway.’

She was wearing pale, faintly shiny lipstick; an unfl attering choice. She saw him noticing it and looked away.

Her awkwardness, and the adolescent colour of her mouth: they prompted Tom to say, ‘You used to look after Rory, didn’t you? You and your sister.’

‘Not Jen. She preferred tractors to kids back then. Probably still does.’

‘So you were the one who used to babysit Rory?’

‘He was a gorgeous kid. I felt sorry for him, really. His dad liked to take off, go walking, head down the beach, whatever. And Nelly could get caught up with her painting and that.’

‘It was good of you to help out.’

‘Rory wasn’t any trouble. And they were cool people to have around. They’d have friends up from the city, sometimes a whole crowd. It was all pretty exciting for a teenager stuck out here.’

Her lips were slightly parted; he glimpsed her tongue. In a delirious moment, considered to what uses it might be put.

She was saying, ‘I cooked for them, sometimes. Felix used to say my steaks were the best he’d ever eaten.’

Something about the way she said it. He could hear Nelly: I didn’t go up there so much. It was Felix’s retreat.

Denise and Atwood. Tom saw the man’s hand in the ropes of her hair; a plate of bloody flesh on a table between them.

On an impulse he asked, ‘What do you think happened? With Atwood, I mean.’

‘I know one thing for sure. That set-up on the beach, the car and that? It was so tacky. There’s no way Felix would’ve gone like that.’

Darkness and a deserted beach, clothes folded in a car: Tom could see that they might add up to a clichéd quotation from tragedy. But he disagreed with Denise’s deduction. Why should banality be incompatible with seriousness of intent? It was like art that flaunted its lack of artistry; it was Warhol’s Brillo box all over again. Atwood might have laid out the signs of his death in wry acknowledgment of their triteness; the sea winking hugely at his back. Kitsch might be no more than it appears, or a different thing altogether. The enigma was one of signifi cation.

Tom moved involuntarily, a kind of half shrug.

It annoyed Denise. She said,‘That was Nelly Jimmy Morgan saw on the beach that day.’

‘Sure.’

‘Oh, you can think what you like. But I recognised that dress straight away from how Jimmy described it. I’d made it for Nelly. A surprise for her birthday. Felix got me the fabric, this lovely silky French stuff. Cost a packet.’ Denise said, ‘It wasn’t the greatest fit. He got the wrong size pattern or something. But Nelly still looked gorgeous in it.’

There was the distant sound of machinery in the paddocks. Nearer at hand, the pepper tree was flinging itself sideways with throaty noises.

Tom said, ‘Did you share this with anyone? Like the cops?’

A cool, dappled stare: ‘Why do you think Nelly and I aren’t friends any more?’

‘What that amounts to is, the cops followed it up and got nowhere.’

‘Nelly’d have had some story ready.’

‘Morgan swore he saw a tall woman, remember?’

‘Half the time Jimmy hadn’t a clue what he was seeing. I know what he was like: he used to give us a hand with shearing before he went totally off the rails. But he was spot on about that dress. Like that Nelly’d hitched it up so she could climb the dunes better. It was that Chinese style with a slit skirt.’

Denise Corrigan had a recurring dream of bleeding from the mouth in public, and the memory, passing through her mind at that moment, drew her tongue across her gums. It left tiny bubbles of spit between her upper teeth, which were translucent and sloped inwards a little.

‘OK, so maybe Nelly helped Atwood get away.’ Tom said, ‘You can’t really blame her, can you? When it was a choice between prison or cocktails poolside someplace they don’t do extradition.’

Trying to lighten the conversation, he realised Denise was close to crying.

‘I was the one who was home that morning. When she brought Rory down saying she wasn’t feeling too good. She didn’t look ill to me, she looked scared.’

The wind was amusing itself with Denise’s hair, heaving it about. She pushed pieces of it away fiercely and said, ‘She wouldn’t have helped Felix. Don’t you know about those terrible paintings she did? Anyone could see she hated him.’

Five months after Felix Atwood disappeared, an exhibition by Nelly Zhang had opened at Posner’s gallery. It included a suite of paintings called The Day of the Nightingale.

Among the crowd at the opening was a journalist who had covered the Atwood story. The next day, his newspaper ran a front-page article under the headline Nelly’s Nasties . The phrase gained its own tripping momentum and circulated throughout the city. Nelly was arraigned in single-sentence paragraphs. The charges included cashing in on her husband’s notoriety, trendy feminism, washing her dirty linen in public, ruthless ambition, sick navel-gazing.