Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

‘Piss off, Carson.’

Posner shifted in his seat. His hand brushed the jacket, sliding it from his knees. It might have been accidental. But Tom thought he could see a swelling in the dealer’s crotch.

He couldn’t have sworn to it. Posner was wearing black, and his body was in shadow. But Tom shifted his gaze at once. And said, ‘Tell me: have you shared your opinion of his mother with Rory? Not that I imagine he gives a fuck about you anyway.’

He was intent on cruelty. But was unprepared for the stillness that came over Posner’s face, rendering the eyes twin caverns in that pallid waste.

He thought, My God, he really loves him.

By the time Posner left it had stopped raining. In his study, Tom reached for a book.

It was a massive work, Les Grandes Baigneuses, its scale and the frontality of its handling closer to mural than easel painting. Tom had once written an essay about it. Had traced its precursors, described the way it vitalised the worn grammar of naked women in a rural setting.

The man leaning over the book had forgotten most of what he had argued.

What he remembered were the bodies. They fi lled the picture plane: preposterous, lumpish. Nor would they stay still, as Posner had remarked. A woman kneeling at the far right of the canvas was also a striding figure, the torso of one forming the buttocks and legs of the other. Observing this, the mind shimmered between two meanings, as in a dream.

Tom recognised the hurtling sensation: his sense of the duplicity of images. A trace of nausea-stiffened with excitement-worked in him still. The grotesque treatment of the bodies had the effect of rendering flesh itself inorganic. It was a painting in which something mechanistic grated at the heart.

But it was the figure facing out who now held Tom’s attention. Or rather, it was the blue line spurting at its groin. He took in heavy breasts, the specific marks of femaleness, and what he was seeing for the first time: a countering, ambiguous penis.

It was what had passed between him and Posner, Tom knew, that had opened his eyes to that doubleness. He thought, It’s a painting about him, not Nelly.

The phone shrilled him out of sleep.

‘Tom, it’s Yelena. Sorry, I-’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s Osman.’ She began to cry. ‘He’s back in hospital.’

‘Saint V’s? Give me ten minutes.’

‘No, no.’ He heard her gulp; then a loud, snorting sniff. ‘They’re filling him full of morphine. He will be out of it completely. I’m on my way home. Brendon is with him, and Nelly. He wanted you to know.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘They are doing tests and so forth in the morning.’ Her voice was quavery again. ‘But it looks like it’s no longer in remission.’

‘Oh, God.’

‘Nelly said to say you should still come and get her at the Preserve tomorrow. And, Tom, this is terrible also about-’

But Yelena couldn’t go on.

Into Tom’s waking thoughts came fear, those he loved in the world withdrawing from him one by one. The future had the shape of a corridor, empty of everything but time.

He thought of his mother surrounded by shit. Was excrement part of the world or part of the body? It blurred the distinction between inside and outside. Among the things it offended against was the human need for order.

There was a man Tom remembered from India, one of casteless thousands assigned to work with shit. When the sewer in a local tenement clogged, this man lowered himself into the overflowing cesspit, feeling for and removing the obstruction with his toes. He was the humblest of beings and he was charged with transgressive magic. If the Indian dread of contamination was at work, so was a wider taboo. The opposite of what is seen is obscene. The cess man embodied the return of the private and unsightly to public view.

Thus Tom’s musings rolled about his mother. Was unrestrained shitting the symptom of a deeper unravelling? Language defines humans; and, Faeces are like words, thought Tom sleepily, they both come out of bodies. It carried the irrational, illuminating force of an utterance heard in a dream.

His mind, slipping about, fastened on a terror at once sharper and more manageable. He was afraid his book would never be published. Its premises struck him as ridiculous, its conclusions absurd. He brought his knees to his chest and moaned. He had wasted years on work drained of movement and intelligence. A single sentence in James contained more brilliant breadth.

He moved in and out of sleep. Posner’s sombre mass was in the room; at cuff and collar, waxen fl esh gleamed. What had prompted his visit? Tom cupped his groin, a morning reflex. The blind moved and a rectangle of light shuddered on his wall. An ogre lurching and groaning down the street brought him wide awake, to the accompaniment of running footsteps and slammed bins. Someone shouted, ‘That was my good yellow T-shirt, dickhead.’

Now it seemed plain to Tom that Posner’s insinuations were a hook baited with slime. There are so many aspects to Nelly. The prick’ll say anything to get me away from her, show me he’s on my side, thought Tom. It was for him, he decided, with a small luxurious shiver, that Posner had come.

But over breakfast he found himself gnawing at another scene. Some weeks earlier, he had arrived at the Preserve just as Rory was leaving with a friend. Consequently Tom entered the building unannounced.

The door to Nelly’s studio stood open; a light shone within. Tom followed the corridor, past the fictitious curtained door, to her threshold, and there he remained. What he saw in those few moments would leave its print forever, although it was in no sense shocking or even irregular. Nelly was sprawled on a curious seat she favoured, not long enough for a couch but wider than a chair: a chaise courte as it were, a distinctive, unyielding contrivance of lacy wood and hard velvet. Beside it loomed the monolith of Posner, his silver skull inclined towards Nelly. He might have been a doctor, listening in his dark jacket. He might have been a courtier attending the levée of a queen.

The tilt of Posner’s head hid his face. But a halogen lamp held Nelly in its beam, and the watcher in the doorway saw that she was scratching the side of her head; one hand casually frenzied in her hair, her expression calm with an underglaze of satisfaction. The next instant her aspect altered, as her eyes turned towards the door. And Posner turned also, and the tableau broke up and recomposed itself like a pattern viewed in a child’s optical toy.

Nevertheless, Tom was left with an impression. He had observed those two often enough, and in an assortment of contexts; had watched them argue, share a private quip, treat each other with unceremonious disdain. But the stillness of the scene in the studio lent it a force that animation obscured. It stripped sociability from Nelly and Posner’s bond, which showed old and iron. That was scarcely a revelation. Yet Tom retained a sense of having come upon something uncovered.

There was surprise in the faces they turned to him; also a hint of alarm. Replaying the episode, freezing each of its elements, Tom could see that his silent apparition might well have been disquieting. And, the first moment past, the occupants of the room showed no sign of discomfi ture. Nelly greeted him with her usual ease. Posner gave vent to the piping salutations of a large white bat.

Yet Tom couldn’t excise the memory of their communion. It hadn’t escaped him-although he had missed the precise moment-that in his presence Nelly had ceased clawing at her scalp. Yet that simple, unhindered act had struck no discord in the scene with Posner. Turning the incident over, Tom kept reverting to Nelly’s expression. The ruminant, private pleasure it projected was suggestive equally of the easing of an irritation or the maturation of a design. Whenever he felt he was on the verge of decoding it, a shadow intruded on his vision: Posner bent in command or supplication over that self-suffi cient face.