Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

As his intimacy with her work grew, Tom noticed the evidence of decay Nelly included in her streetscapes. Rubbish overflowing a bin, weeds pushing through concrete, broken or missing tiles. The cracked, outdated faces of seventies and eighties buildings. These signs told of a city that was neither ancient nor exactly new, but mutable. Inscribed within them was the memory of the maggoty cheeses and rotten fruit once painted into still lifes as warnings against excess and reminders of the transience of earthly splendour.

The conflation of work and author is an error into which novices fall; so Tom Loxley believed, and sought to impress on recidivist students. It had the inadequacy of all law. How could his obsession with Nelly’s work be distinguished from his desire for her? He was governed by a hunger for possession, images serving to paper over a bodily absence.

It was a substitution he literalised. In one of the regular sessions he devoted to Nelly, he lay in a darkened room, gazing by the unsteady light of a tea candle at a photocopied page. When he had finished, the edifice of her imaginings was tagged with his luminous urgency.

Iris’s eyebrows, long vanished, reappeared every day as two greasy, coquettish arcs. The bronze puffs over her skull showed white at the roots. The events of Wednesday had caused her to miss her appointment at the hairdresser and she would not pay the extortionate prices of Thursday and Friday.

At the sight of Tom, her mouth unscrolled like a scarlet ribbon.

She was delivered to his door on Sunday morning by Audrey. A horn sounded and Tom went into the street with an umbrella to extract his mother from the car. As soon as he reached for her, ‘I’m falling,’ cried Iris. ‘I’m falling.’

Braced between the car door and her son’s arm, she staggered upright at last. Many of her parts still worked, but she had been obliged to renounce high heels. With her feet crammed into pink ballet shoes suitable for a six-year-old, she knew herself to have grown old.

Expertly assessing the room for recent acquisitions, Audrey declined a cup of tea. She was running late; Iris had misplaced her eyebrow pencil that morning.

Audrey patted the back of her head: ‘I can’t imagine why you use one in the first place. People should age naturally, if you ask me.’

She stood before them, the product of skilled professionals-hairdresser, manicurist, orthodontist, podiatrist-and delivered herself of this view.

Iris Loxley, née de Souza, had triumphed over pain, rain-slick pavements and the treachery of bucket seats to accomplish the repositioning of her flesh from her living room to her son’s. The successful completion of any journey represented a victory. A girl who moved like water was present in her thoughts from time to time, but in the detached way of an actress familiar from a long-running serial.

Her double-handled handbag of imitation leather on her lap, Iris sat motionless as an idol. A picture was sliding about in her memory of a grey stone half sunk in tough-bladed grass. Matthew Ho from next door squatted on his heels in front of it, reading aloud. His stubby finger, moving over the writing cut into the stone, was green-rimmed from scraping moss. Iris could see the ivory silk ribbon threaded about the hem and pockets of her blue batiste dress. She could hear Matthew saying, Snowflake. Then he said, A Merry Companion. She could remember a date, 1819. One hundred years before she had been born.

By the time Iris was seven, that part of the de Souza compound had disappeared under concrete. Matthew said the stone had marked the place where a small dog was buried. He said that the labourers working on the new extension had dug up its remains. He had seen them, he said. ‘Three bones. And an eyeball.’ He put his face close to Iris’s: ‘Now its ghost will haunt you forever,’ he hissed.

Audrey, disliking waste, never disposed of a grievance that had not been squeezed dry. She wished to impress upon Tom that his mother had inconvenienced her that morning; and so, following him into the kitchen to complain of delay, delayed further.

He said mildly, ‘We’d be lost without you, Audrey.’ And added, ‘Shona coming over for lunch?’

Audrey was eyeing a circle of French cakes on a plate. ‘Cost an arm and a leg.’

‘Help yourself. Please.’ Tom was wondering where he had put the empty food containers. In Audrey’s codebook, takeaway was an offence that compounded profligacy with neglect. Love merited the effort of indifferent home cooking.

‘No time, thanks, Tommy. I’ve got to get my lamb in the oven.’ She picked up an oval dish, turned it over to check the brand name, replaced it on the table. ‘You know what Shona’s like about her Sunday roast.’

Tom spooned leaves into a wicker-handled pot.

Audrey observed that there was nothing wrong with bags in her opinion. She lifted the lid of a saucepan.‘I knew I smelled curry. That’s the thing about curry, isn’t it: the smell. Gets into the soft furnishings. I suppose you don’t notice if you’re born to it.’

Still she would not leave. Tom slid pastries fi lled with vanilla cream into a paper bag and offered them to her, setting off an operetta of surprise, remonstrance, denial and a fi nal yielding.

Yet at the door she came to a halt. She had remarked the absence of the dog.

Misfortune brought out the best in Audrey, providing scope for pity tempered with common sense. She was twelve years younger than Arthur, and the great regret of her girlhood was having missed the war. Clean gauze bandages, wounded offi cers wanting to hold her hand: she could have managed all that, she felt. She had trained as a nurse for six months before her marriage, and for the rest of her life would check a pulse against a watch, lips professionally tightened.

Audrey was always quick to extend what she called a helping hand; and, finding it grasped, to detect exploitation. Muggins here; a soft touch: so she described herself. Debit and credit were computed with decimal precision, each benign gesture incurring a debt of gratitude that could never be paid in full.

Her brother’s death she judged a piece of characteristic foolishness; yet it opened pleasant avenues for dispensing favours. There she might stroll, vigilant and loved as a guardian angel. She was of a generation that had attended Sunday School and the word raiment came into her mind. She pictured it as a kind of rayon that cost the earth.

It was decided that Arthur’s widow was to stay on in Audrey and Bill’s annexe; Bill wouldn’t hear of Iris moving, said Audrey. In time it would transpire that he would not hear of Iris cooking curry more than once a fortnight, and then only if all the windows were open; would not hear of Tom turning up the volume on the radio, nor of replacing the orange and green paper on the feature wall in the living room with white paint. It was a catalogue dense with prohibitions communicated piecemeal by Audrey. Bill, the silent source of so much nay-saying, took Tom to the Test every Boxing Day, and slipped him five dollars now and then, with a fi nger laid along his nose and a music-hall wink.

Charity, as those who have endured it know, is not easily distinguished from control. Audrey gave Iris and Tom a lift to a multi-storey shopping centre on Friday evenings. Here, everything from cornflakes to flannelette sheets could be acquired with Audrey’s approval. Brands were crucial, a novel concept; the Loxleys’ vocabulary expanded to take in Arnott’s and Onkaparinga. They were grateful for guidance. Iris, fi ngering pale wool, was informed that cream was not a winter colour. Silver escalators carried them to new heights of consumption.

A few of the girls in Filing invited Iris to join them for tea in a coffee lounge in the city after work the following Friday. Audrey asked how Iris was going to get her shopping done; or did she imagine that Bill and Audrey would rearrange their whole timetable to suit her? Iris ventured the notion that she might walk to the shops on Saturday; a street two blocks distant containing a butcher, a baker and so on.