Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Tom gathered up what he needed for work, and went into the Monday morning street. Outside the blond-brick fl ats across the way, a straggle-locked wizard in velvet slippers and belted gown was keeping watch over a gathering of empty wheelie bins.

The previous evening, Sunday parking had obliged Tom to leave his car at the far end of the street. It stood beyond a row of thin white trees belled with silver nuts. Rain and the advent of summer had conspired to put on concertos sustained by the blue notes of hydrangeas. Behind low wooden fences, the native thrived beside the exotic, there was a scribble of rose in a fig tree, the tropics flourished about the Mediterranean. In these unassuming plots, a nation realised its grandest dream.

Tom thought,… to look at things in bloom, / Fifty springs are little room. But more than Osman would be granted.

When spring came, the city had loosened into blossom. On Tom and Nelly’s walks the wind might have been honed on a strop, but the scent of jasmine swelled from bluestone-paved lanes designed for the passage of nightsoil. The football clamour from the MCG was louder now, attendance and passion waxing as the Grand Final approached. Giant toddlers could be seen queuing outside the stadium: wrapped in shapeless, fleecy garments, attached to polystyrene feeding cups.

Tom told Nelly about the headline he had seen soon after arriving in Australia: ‘Pies Murder Lions’. For days it had caused him despair. He was a child at home in words. That too was to be taken from him in this place.

Enlightenment arrived with a conversation overheard while he hung about the locker room at recess, trying to appear solitary by choice. Magpies, Swans, Lions, Demons were not, after all, escapees from a fabulous bestiary but the names by which the city’s football teams were affectionately known. So began the incident’s passage into comedy, where it was now firmly lodged; the mocking of former terrors being one way in which we travesty our younger selves.

Nelly swooped at a gleam underfoot, then displayed the golden coin she had retrieved. It was astonishing how often she found money in the street, fifty cents, a five-dollar note, a twenty.

Once she picked up a small plastic fi sh. ‘Remember when these first appeared? Four, five years ago?’

Suddenly she had begun seeing them everywhere, Nelly said. The little fish were multitudinous. They lay in gutters, on footpaths, in car parks, on the beach, tiny fish with tapering faces. She had picked one up and unscrewed its red snout. Traces of dark liquid were visible in its scaled belly; its scent was briny. She wondered what purpose it might serve.

The riddle rolled in her mind, until at last she supposed that each fish had contained a single dose of newfangled fish-food. Nelly pictured an aquarium, and the bodies of fi sh darting to the thin, nutritive stream dispersing in their pond of glass.

It was a source of amazement to her, said Nelly, that so many of her fellow citizens had taken to keeping fi sh. She imagined people carrying home plastic bags of water and coloured fish, and pausing to feed the fish on the way; and inadvertently, because spellbound by iridescent life, letting the container of fi sh-food fall.

Then one day she bought takeaway sushi; opened the paper bag and found a plastic fish inside, filled with soy sauce. ‘I felt like a total idiot.’

But Tom was charmed by Nelly’s theory of sober men and women deflected from duty by the antics of fish. And there was the fact that she had noticed the discarded containers in the first place. She had a tremendous capacity for appreciating the world’s detail. Textures, colours, the casual disposition of forms were striking to Nelly, extra-ordinary. To spend time with her was to wander through a cabinet of curiosities. She remarked on a shoe jutting like a snout from a hollow high in a tree. Tom realised that the objects she hoarded were symptomatic of a more profound desire: to drag moments of perception from the grey ooze of oblivion.

When he was an old man, he would still remember a table-tennis ball he had seen in Nelly’s company, a sterile egg lying in the weedy rubbish under a nineteenth-century arch. He would remember a terrace opposite an elevated railway line where lighted carriages shot past bedroom windows like a ribbon of film. He would remember Nelly in her red jacket on a bridge, entranced by a city assembled in its river.

She owned a selection of glass slides intended for a magic lantern, five coloured views of European cities and one of Millet’s Gleaners . From time to time Nelly would bring out a slide and suspend it in front of a window, so that a diminutive Grand Canal or Brandenburg Gate was a luminous presence in the Preserve. When the sun was at the right slant a replica of the little cityscape would appear on the opposite wall, a light-painting that hovered there briefly, then vanished.

Tom asked why she didn’t keep one or another of the slides up permanently. ‘You could just rotate them.’

She told him about the Japanese practice of keeping a treasured object hidden away and only taking it out to look at now and then. ‘Because then it seems marvellous each time.’

The selection committee was waiting in Kevin Dodd’s office when Tom arrived at work on Monday. He muttered an apology; nodded to Vernon, to their colleague Anthea Rendle.

A stranger sprang to his feet and advanced with a purposeful cry of ‘Tosh!’ Tom’s hand was seized; squeezed. ‘Tosh Lindgren. Human Resources. ‘ Great to meet you.’

The centre parting in Tosh’s hair was a path in a cornfi eld. His cheeks had kept their boyhood roses above a corporate jaw.

‘Right: let’s progress this meeting.’ Professor Dodd coughed in the small, dry way he believed appropriate to his status. ‘A very satisfactory batch, I must say. There are applications here of the highest standard.’ He glanced around the room, hoping for dissent. ‘The highest standard,’ he repeated.

Kevin Dodd’s career, unburdened by intellectual distinction, had attracted sizeable research grants and the attention of vice-chancellors. No one could bring themselves to read anything he had written, which counted greatly in his favour. Members of the committee responsible for appointing him had assured each other that Dodd was not faddish. His rival for the Chair caused offence by being young, female and brilliant. The dean described Dodd as a numbers man; this was taken up and repeated as praise.

The professor was a study in beige: hair, skin, suit, socks. (‘His thoughts are leaking,’ explained Vernon.) Kevin Dodd believed sincerely, indeed passionately, in his own greatness. It followed that he had to be attracting exceptional talent to the department.

‘This fellow from Rotterdam, for instance. An original mind. Thinks outside the box.’

‘Oh, but originality…’ Vernon had taken off his spectacles and was twirling them. ‘Is that safe?’

‘Original in the best sense,’ said Dodd with a touch of asperity. ‘Nothing untoward.’

Tosh said, ‘Excuse me, Vernon. If I might make a suggestion?’

‘Go ahead, Tosh.’

‘It’s really easy to get sidetracked by subjective descriptors. Like original? That’s why at HR we advocate focus on the selection criteria. So that we’re thinking neutral instead of personal?’

‘I hear what you’re saying, Tosh. See, I’ve made a note: avoid personality, think HR.’

Anthea said, ‘Miriam Beyer’s the obvious choice. Gender studies, eighteenth-century and she gave a great paper on scandal fiction in Sydney last year. You remember, Vernon?’

‘I do. Teutonic. But ironic.’

‘Excuse me-’

Tom said hastily, ‘I’ve got Miriam down, too. And the Queensland guy-Sims.’