Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

The newspaper reproduced the photograph of Felix Atwood with his surfboard, beside the image of his wife’s distorted face.

A rock star who collected art was quoted as saying he was struggling with aesthetic and ethical objections to Nelly’s work. And a grand old painter described her as a she-artist whose frames displayed great promise.

The gallery’s windows attracted eggs and a brick. The show sold briskly but closed three days later, the contentious sequence withdrawn from sale; destroyed by the artist, belatedly appalled by her own images, so it was reported.

In the art world there was widespread dismay at these events. Artists and critics defended Nelly’s right to display the controversial work. A virtuous rapping of philistine knuckles was heard.

Yet it was plain to Tom, reading through the material Esther had given him, that even among professionals the Nightingale paintings had caused unease. The same sort of thing kept turning up in reviews: barely suppressed violence, eerie stagings. Elusiveness was also mentioned; this last an affront, since reviewers who would have sacrificed their lives, or at least their columns, defending art’s right to scandalise were stirred to outrage by its refusal to simplify. An eminent critic summed up the problem: Zhang (re)presents the systemic violence of authoritarian modes in images as ambiguous as they are oppressive. Nowhere in these paintings is the phallocentric will-to-power explicitly critiqued. The refusal to engage in direct visual discourse is ultimately elitist and unsatisfying.

Packing up at Nelly’s house, Tom discovered a box of food he had set on a kitchen chair and forgotten: soup, chilli sauce, olive oil, tins of tomatoes and mangoes. Grains of rice trickled from a packet, and he realised that the plastic had been nibbled away in one corner.

He remembered the stale oats; he would throw them away and use the container for rice. He eased up the lid and found a dead mouse inside.

He stood with his back against the sink, his jaw tight. He saw his hand, scooping oats into a stainless steel dish. He saw himself carrying the dog’s bowl outside and placing it on the grass by the steps.

In those minutes, the mouse had emerged, run up the table leg and climbed into the oats. Tom had replaced the lid; and in time, the mouse had died.

The time it had taken was what Tom didn’t wish to think about.

He drank some water, first holding the enamel mug against each of his temples in turn.

When he had finished his chores, he went outside and dug a hole at the foot of a gum tree. He tipped mouse and oats into the depression and covered them with earth.

Light was starting to drain from the sky. But as Tom was turning away, something glimmered white in the grass. He stooped; and found he was looking at a little heap of old dog turds.

That was when tears began slipping down his cheeks. He sat on his heels and wrapped his arms about his legs, and rocked. He rubbed his face on his knees, leaving a glitter of mucus on his jeans, and went on crying.

On Saturday nights there was only TV on TV. Tired from the long drive home, Tom lay on his bed. A picture had come to him, as he inserted the key in his front door, of the dog bounding up the hall to greet him. This mental image had such power, the pale animal rearing from the gloom of the passage in such speckled detail, that it was like encountering a revenant. Tom had entered his flat convinced that the dog was dead.

Now he lay with whisky at hand and his thoughts drifting, as they did in this mood, to a room with a polished concrete floor. Some years earlier, on a stopover in India, he had been persuaded by his mother to call on a relative, a third cousin who lived in Pondicherry. Eileen had married a man ten years older, a Tamil with cracked purple lips. He accepted Tom’s bottle of duty-free single malt with both hands, and placed it on a glass-fronted cabinet between a vase of nylon hibiscus and a plastic Madonna containing holy water from Lourdes.

Children’s faces bloomed at different heights in a doorway hung with a flowered curtain. Tom smiled at a stumpy tot with plaited hair, who burst into tears. ‘Take no notice,’ said Eileen. ‘That one is needing two tight slaps.’

A girl entered the room bearing a tray of tumblers in which a bilious green drink was fizzing. It dawned on Tom that his cousins were teetotallers.

Cedric held an obscure clerical post in a Catholic charity. Before her marriage, Eileen had worked as a stenographer. They had applied to immigrate to the States, Canada and Australia, and been rejected on every occasion. There remained New Zealand, and what could be salvaged of hope.

Eileen summoned her eldest son: ‘Show Tommy Uncle your school report.’ On a settee covered in hard red rexine, Tom read of proficiency at chemistry and mathematics. A boy with fanned lashes stood beside him, breathing through his mouth. ‘He is pestering us all the time for a computer.’

The scent of India, excrement and spices, billowed through the house. On a radio somewhere close at hand, a crooner was singing ‘Whispering Hope’. A ziggurat of green oranges glided past, inches from the barred window. The walls of the room were washed blue, of the shade the Virgin wore in heaven.

Eileen brought out a heavy album with brass studs along the spine. From its matt black pages de Souzas gazed out unsmiling, each new generation less plausibly European.

On his return to Australia, Tom struggled to find a rhetoric suited to the episode. When Karen had travelled with him through India on their honeymoon, she had made up her mind to be charmed by everything she saw. It was an admirable resolution and she kept it, heat, swindles, belligerent monkeys, spectacular diarrhoea and headlines reporting communal murder notwithstanding; her tenacity boosted by air-conditioned hotels and sandals of German manufacture.

Karen informed Tom that India was spiritual . From the great shrines at Madurai and Kanyakumari, she returned marigold-hung and exalted. At dinner parties in Australia she would speak of the extraordinary atmosphere of India ’s sacred precincts. Tom desisted from comparisons with Lourdes, where the identical spectacle of ardent belief and fl agrant commercialism had worked on his wife’s Protestant sensibilities as fingernails on a blackboard. The glaze of exoticism transformed superstitious nonsense into luminous grace .

Karen’s good faith was manifest. Yet her insistence on the spirituality of India struck Tom as self-serving. It wafted her effortlessly over the misery of degraded lives, for the poorest Indian possessed such spiritual riches, after all. And then, there was the global nation: the India of the IT boom, the pavement-vendor of okra with his cell phone clamped to his ear, the foreign-returned graduates climbing the executive ladder at McKinsey or Merrill Lynch, the street children enthralled by Bart Simpson in a store window, the call centre workers parroting the idioms of Sydney or Swindon. The energetic, perilous glamour of technology and capital: spiritual India, existing outside history, was disallowed that, too.

Faced with Karen’s curiosity about his cousins, Tom thought of Cedric’s eyes travelling in opposite directions behind heavy-rimmed spectacles; of the way Eileen’s hand fl ew to cover the deficiencies in her smile. In India bodies were historic, tissue and bone still testifying to chance and time.

In the former French quarter of Pondicherry, Tamil gendarmes in scarlet peaked caps strolled the calm boulevards; bougainvillea stained colonial stucco turmeric, saffron, chilli. At sunrise, managerial Indians jogged the length of the seafront, where the waves were restrained by a decaying wall. The wines of Burgundy were served in the dining room at Tom’s hotel. The maître d’, who bore an unnerving resemblance to Baroness Thatcher, had once been a waiter at the Tour d’Argent. At mealtimes he was to be found surveying his domain with a cramped countenance. The table napkins, although freshly starched and mitred, were always limp from the heat. It is not the absence of an ideal that produces despair, thought Tom, but its approximation.