Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Audrey concentrated on economics: the wastefulness of eating out amplified by the extravagance of neighbourhood shopping. Did Iris realise the delicatessen was run by Jews? She possessed the despot’s talent for representing oppression as benevolence, and was herself entirely swayed by the performance. The pain she suffered at the prospect of Iris squandering her resources was genuine; but its source, the bid for independence she sensed in her sister-in-law’s plan, exceeded her diagnostic skills.

It was a pattern repeated in Audrey’s dealings with all she encountered. In the theatre of her mind, as in the classical drama, brutality occurred offstage. What was on view, above all to herself, was only the aftermath of invisible carnage. So Tom observed, with the cold-eyed scrutiny of adolescence. It left him resolved to be clear about motive. Which, admirable when directed inwards, strengthened his cynicism about motive in others.

That was the impress his aunt left on the minds around her. Audrey had the inquisitorial approach to innocence: subjected to enough stress, it was bound to crack.

Sixteen-year-old Tom, dazzled by Julie Vogel who had just started at the newsagent’s, discovered in himself the desire for new plumage. He bought a T-shirt: rich blue, trimmed with scarlet at the neck and sleeves. It was a garment pleasing in form and hue. It would in any case have drawn his aunt’s eye, for everything the Loxleys acquired was by defi nition not Audrey’s and therefore resented.

‘That’s a nice T-shirt, Tommy. Looks expensive.’

‘Four bucks.’ Tom’s thoughts were busy with the golden Vogel but he knew what was required, Audrey pricing every

item that entered the Loxley household.

‘That’s good value for money. Where’d you get it?’

He told her.

‘I might get one for Shona. Did they have other colours?’

‘I think. Yeah.’

‘Do they come in girls’ sizes?’ Then, with a bright little peal, ‘Although you could hardly be called manly.’

The annexe was reached by a path that led past dwarf conifers and a yellow-flecked shrub before turning down the side of Audrey’s house. The next day, approaching an open window in soundless sneakers, Tom heard his name.

‘… conveniently vague. I could tell at once he was lying. So I took the bus up there this morning, and sure enough they were five dollars. Five, not four. He’s been out of the house, avoiding me, all day.’

The boy turned and went out again into the street. There was the summer evening smell of barbecued fl esh. Minutes before, he had been joyful: for Julie had smiled at him when he bought a green biro from her; and again when the newsagent’s closed and she emerged to see him absorbed in a window where teddy bears and bootees were displayed. He had made up his mind to speak to her the next day. Now he was trembling. The gulf between his feelings for shining-haired Julie, the image to him of all that was pure and fi ne, and his aunt’s caricature of his soul was hideous. In that chasm he glimpsed the edge of his species’ capacity for needless harm.

Anger quivered up through his body, liquid rising to the boil. He raged at his mother in an undertone. ‘We’ve got to get

out. I can’t stand it any longer. She’s such a bitch.’

‘Don’t use that language, child.’

‘It’s Audrey’s language you should worry about. Calling me a liar. Sneaking around, checking up on me. I don’t know why those T-shirts were five dollars today. I paid four. I’ve had it with her. I’m going to bloody tell her so.’

‘Don’t upset her, Tommy. What will happen if she gets angry with us?’

‘We’ll be rid of her and this dump for good.’

It ended the usual way, with Iris in tears.

Now and then Tom would stand before his aunt, his voice rising in denunciation. There would follow a period of intricate punishment for Iris. Before giving herself over to those slower pleasures,Audrey would observe, with mingled triumph and righteousness, that if, after everything she had done, matters were not to the Loxleys’ satisfaction, they were always free to leave. It was, she assured them, no skin off her nose.

But who voluntarily relinquishes a victim? In the wake of an argument, Audrey related stories of perverts who preyed on widows; circled reports of inflationary rents and extortionate landlords in the newspaper she passed on to the Loxleys.

After Iris was made redundant at the department store, Bill found her a job cleaning offices. She rose in black dawns and dressed before a single-bar radiator in a series of muffl ed clicks and taps, so as not to wake Tommy, a presence sensed rather than seen in musty darkness traversed on her way to the door. At the corner of the street it might occur to her to doubt whether she had switched off the radiator; there followed agonising indecision over returning to check or missing her tram.

There was fear, and its twin, safety; their relationship was mirrored, fluid. Iris looked out of the window of the tram and saw the compartment in which she sat hovering golden and unfinished in the dark street, inhabited briefly by towers or trees. She shifted on her seat, giving a little expert kick at a nylon or trousered shin in the process. The ensuing interlude of apology and forgiveness confirmed her anchorage in the world.

Her knees held up until the day after Tom was awarded a university scholarship. At least now he was off her hands, as Audrey said, reducing Tom to a stubborn stain.

Iris had been taught to darn by French nuns, but that was scarcely a marketable asset in an economy where the notion of mending rather than replacing was already as quaint as madrigals.

In India, finding herself in need, she would have had recourse to a web of human relationships. Here goodwill, or at least obligation, was impersonal and administrative, though no less grudged. She was grateful for sickness benefits; later, for the pension. A savings account hoarded every spare cent. She did not wish to be a burden. It was one of Audrey’s mantras: I wouldn’t want to be a burden. Love was represented as a load; one saw tiny figures broken-backed under monstrous cargos.

Iris took comfort in having a roof over her head. It was a phrase she liked; it brought to mind the plump-thighed cherubim on her father’s vaulted ceilings. Beyond it lay Australia: boundless, open to the sky. ‘As long as we stay with Audrey, we have a roof over our heads.’ ‘What can go wrong if you have a roof over your head?’

‘It can fall in and crush you,’ said Tom.

Towards the end of her son’s last year at school, Iris spoke now and then of renting a flat with him after his exams. The idea was vague and constituted nothing like a plan; it was also what Tom had urged on her in the past, seeing in his mind a bare space that was his alone. A compact, neat teenager, he had blundered, again and again, into the clutter of the annexe, his shins encountering varnished wood, his knuckles grazing a long-necked, stoppered bottle of warty yellow glass, an object both ugly and useless. At night, when he lay swaddled before the TV’s grey eye with the metal underpinnings of his sofa bed ridging his spine, a room-lofty, pale-walled, fl oored with grooved boards-formed in his mind.

In those years all his unadulterated energy was spent on the captive’s instinctive lunge towards light and air. Books furnished him with a daily, spacious refuge. Later, looking back, he would see swift water widening; his mother a diminished figure on the shore.

By the time Tom’s university offer came through, Iris had become part of what he was intent on leaving. Of this small, cataclysmic shift in his thinking he was unaware. All the same, a lie slid polished from his tongue. He told Iris that his scholarship was conditional on his moving into student housing; ‘a university regulation’. When he had lifted the last carton of books into a friend’s car and kissed his mother-‘So long, Ma!’-he was light-headed with the sense of having got away with something.