Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Then, quite abruptly, he had abandoned these dreamy designs. If an inattentive moment found him in their thrall, he would break free through an effort of will. He told himself the practice was frivolous, incommensurate with the gravity of his fifteen years. What he feared, in truth, was more insidious. His life in Australia was rendered superficial by the everyday density of his inventions. Beside his hardy Indian familiar, he appeared cursory and surplus. Even now, after the passage of so many seasons, Tom had no wish to prolong their encounter.

The rain had thinned. There were bundles of light above the river. Tom thought of the life he had led, and the life he had missed, and how he would never see his vague teenage face recycled in a child. A message loomed against the sky: The More You Spend, The More You Earn ; and Tom, picturing his life, saw the impress left by feet on a beach; as if what mattered had walked away.

At the Preserve, Nelly was putting clothes into a bag for the country. When she got into the car, Tom noticed a wide black band of insulating tape stuck across the toe of her left boot.

They talked about Osman. Nelly turned a pink knitted hat in her hands.

On the freeway, she told Tom she had another piece of bad news. The Preserve had sold at auction in May, but the developers had overstretched their resources. Work on the building had been postponed and Nelly allowed to stay; for twelve months, she had been assured. But a letter had arrived that morning giving her until the end of January to move out. ‘I’ve seen the plans. They’re going to squish three apartments onto each floor and put a penthouse on the roof.’ She folded her hat down the middle and said, ‘I’m trying to think of it as a kind of collage. The uses and reuses of a building.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Brendon’s mentioned some place in Footscray we could share. But I don’t think he’s planning too far ahead right now.’

Then she said, ‘There’s a six-month artist’s residency in Kyoto coming up. Starting next September.’

Kilometres streamed past. Tom said, ‘That sounds pretty exciting.’

‘There’ll be stacks of people after it. But some guy Carson knows on the board says my chances are good.’

In the mid-1990s, Nelly had begun showing photographs of wooden printer’s trays of the kind once used to store metal type in compartments of different sizes. She would paint the sides of her trays to resemble elaborate carving. Within these frames, some compartments were left empty; others held an object or image. Tom studied a tray whose sumptuous recesses had been lined with the royal blue velvet of jeweller’s cases. Nestled within were banal found objects, one to a niche in reverent display: a pineapple-topped swizzle stick, a hairslide, a condom wrapper, two dead matches, a doll’s dismembered arm. These items deposited by the human tide passing through its streets bore witness to the city’s energy and erosion. Tom was reminded also of the fascination detritus holds for the very young; of the way a small child will pass over a costly toy in favour of absorbed play with bottle tops or a rag or the foil from a toffee, investing the valueless things of the world with joy.

Nelly was given to recycling images: inserting them into new contexts, reproducing them on different scales. Tom noticed that she kept returning to the skipping girl figure. He came across a series in which a painting of the neon sign had been photographed, then smeared while the paint was still wet, photographed again, smeared again, and so on. The image disintegrated over five paintings, the last showing only billows of gorgeous, violet-tinged reds worthy of Venice. Tom pictured Nelly working with swift concentration, her photographer beside her, stepping back from her canvas with wet red hands. In a museum’s online collection he found a photo of a

painted child skipping on the wall of a factory, encircled by the caption Skipping Girl Pure Malt Vinegar. Nelly had montaged this old black-and-white image over a contemporary streetscape, so that while the painted child remained stranded in two dimensions, her metal twin rose airily above her in the sky.

Tom knew the advertising sign of old. His uncle had pointed it out, on a sightseeing evening drive, when the Loxleys first came to Australia; the sign was one of Tom’s earliest memories of the city. The skipping girl wore a scarlet bolero over a snowy blouse, with white socks and strapped black shoes. A neon rope lit up in alternation above her head and at her feet to simulate movement. Her red skirt fl ared like a night-blooming poppy.

Modern magic was at hand: Tom Googled the sign. He learned that it dated from 1936: the city’s first animated neon sign, calculated to imbue dull vinegar with the romance of novelty. Over time it had deteriorated, been dismantled and replaced; the sky-sign he knew as a child was that copy.

When the vinegar factory relocated to a different suburb, the skipping girl was left behind. By then neon was no longer glamorous, no longer a sign of the times. Besides, the skipping girl had become a landmark. There was a local outcry at the suggestion that she might be moved. Eventually, as buildings were demolished and the streetscape altered, she was shifted along the road to a different rooftop. There she froze in a deathly sleep. It had been years now since her turning rope had lit up the night sky. She had entered the memory of a generation as a spellbound red fi gure.

Tom could remember the contrary emotions his fi rst encounter with the sign had brought. His instinctive surge of pleasure in the magical sight quickly turned queasy. The big red child’s mimicry of the human seemed tainted with malevolence. The boy twisting around in the back seat of the car for a last glimpse of her was reminded of the long, dim mirrors of India that rippled with secret being; objects that shared her strangeness, denizens of a zone somewhere between artifi ce and life. She called up a personage who had terrified Tom when he was very young, the tall red scissorman who comes / To little boys who suck their thumbs.

There was this too: the sign continued the kingdom of things into the sky. Fresh from a country where giant cutouts and logos and billboards were still rare, Tom was subject to a sentiment he was too young to articulate: that the skipping girl’s presence violated something that should have been inviolable. It was a perception that would dim over time, as he grew accustomed, like everyone else in the city, to the invasion of the sky by commerce. Now tiny silver planes routinely inscribed brand names on the atmosphere, as if the blue air itself were a must-have accessory. People stepping out of their houses in the morning lifted up their eyes to hot-air balloons emblazoned with trademarks, hanging from heaven like Christmas-tree baubles.

Nelly had a printer’s tray called Own Your Own that displayed an identical vinegar label, each featuring a skipping girl, in every niche. Tom studied a colour reproduction of the construction in Art & Australia . There was a depressing hint of the cage and the production line about the imprisoned, endlessly reiterated figure. It was reinforced by the fi ne white-painted wire mesh fastened down a vertical line of compartments. But closer examination revealed that in all but two recesses, a tiny box camera had been painted in at the girl’s feet. Its viewfi nder faced out, suggesting it was for her use.

Tom supposed it was Nelly’s way of pointing out that the skipping girl had floated free. In acquiring mythic status she had become more and less than the product she embodied: a servant of the market who exceeded the commodity that bore her name. Once an emblem of modernity, she had fallen out of fashion and into a life of her own.