Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

He walked up to Victoria Street one evening while the light still held, past a glass-walled gym where scantily clad bodies had the stripped look of fish. It was the first time in years he had scrutinised the skipping girl sign. He saw that the building on which it perched had been converted into offices and apartments. A woman came jogging out of the lobby, murmuring ‘Beat it!’ as she adjusted her earphones.

Gazing up at the red figure with a piece of moon at its back, Tom felt his old foreboding flicker. He had just remembered that the skipping girl was double-sided. From the pinnacle of a metal frame, she stared along the street in two-faced vigil. Her eeriness was immanent. Nelly’s image-making merely drew on that quality and intensifi ed it.

A Prime Cut declared the real estate board adorned with the picture of a bull in front of a disused warehouse. You are everywhere said the vertical scrawl on a telephone pole beside it. Across the road, a multi-storey shopping centre was rising from a hole in the earth. With its empty window-sockets and fragmentary stairs, it might have been archaeological; a ruin from the future.

The tremor usually settled after breakfast, but that morning Iris’s hands went on shaking. She jabbed and jabbed at the remote. It took both hands to raise it to chest level and aim it at the set, which made finding the right button awkward.

Iris sat before grainy footage of heads bobbing in water, her mind taking its own direction. An incident from her department store years swam up to meet her. She had been on her way to Hosiery one lunch hour when she heard her name. A stranger stood in her path, a tremulous form in a checked cap and navy jacket. ‘Iris!’ he said again. ‘I say, it is Iris, isn’t it?’ He peered at her; she saw a brick-red pear packed with teeth. ‘Frank Saunders.’ Iris smiled in propitiation, certain he was one of Audrey’s perverts. He said,‘We met in India. I was in the Hussars with Larry Fitch.’

What struck Iris was the corrugated column rising from his collar. The image was overlaid by another, a muscled neck with a little scar at the base. Her hand went to the stranded gilt at her throat.

Saunders was saying, ‘I say, Iris, you do look tremendously well.’

He swayed closer. Stale sweat and fresh beer muddled the fragrant department store air. An officer who gave off an odour of caramel took Iris in his arms; behind his shoulder she glimpsed a presence, sandy hair, a Fair Isle pullover. It was as if a sideboard or a standard lamp should come to life and address her. ‘Do you remember…?’ began Saunders, and Iris said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘My name is Mrs Arthur Loxley. I don’t know you from Adam.’ In her wake, he called, ‘I say, I say…’

Iris shook in her chair, and loud farts rolled from her. She was blocked up, again. Once she could have turned to milk of magnesia. Lately, however, even a half-dose mitigated relief with disaster.

When you could no longer manage the lavatory: that was when they put you in a home.

She had reached the age where choice is synonymous with fear. Iris was afraid, in this matter, of an alliance between Tom and Audrey; an ancient animal mistrust of the strong and the young.

She feared soiling herself. She feared the consequences, impressed on her at an early age, of irregularity. Sebastian de Souza had locked himself in the lavatory every morning at twenty-five minutes past seven and remained there until he had extruded a well-formed stool. His wife and child followed him in turn. Thankfully there was a good strong fl ush, although the slit-windowed cabinet remained pregnant with odours. The implications of the ritual far exceeded hygiene. To fail the daily rendezvous was to fall short of a moral standard. Diarrhoea was heathenish; constipation warned of wilfulness. If the flesh was disobedient, the spirit was base. Bodies that lacked discipline required control.

Iris’s son said, ‘Stop worrying, Ma.’ He said it often, with varying degrees of irritation. But Iris’s thoughts leaped and raced, skittish with fear.

She worried about Tommy: her clever son without wife or child, his life an accumulation of unwritten pages. She feared he would meet a modern, untimely death: a plane dropping from the clouds, a madman at a service station swivelling a gun. She feared the loneliness that was accruing for his old age.

As a toddler, he had learned to use his china pot only to reject it. The household entered a phase during which a telltale reek would lead Iris to a little mound deposited behind an armchair or under a table. Once a glistening serpent lay coiled inside one of her shoes. The child was visibly excited by these incidents, gleeful even while scolded.

Iris’s father detected depravity and counselled thrashing. ‘Children are animals. The two things they understand are food and pain.’ It was clear that Tommy knew what was required of him; yet he refused to conform. Iris’s anxiety mounted. Arthur advised her to let the boy be, saying he would outgrow the problem. It was no more than his wife expected. That from the sensible English multitude she had managed to acquire a specimen devoid of sense had long been all too plain to her.

With time and observation, she saw that her son’s offence had the aspect of a game. If anyone other than Iris happened upon his faeces, the child’s pleasure was mixed with agitation. But when the discovery fell to her, he chuckled and whooped. Eventually she understood. She had schooled him herself in the use of his pot, praising him as he strained to please her. The habit acquired, she had left him alone; now, when he moved his bowels a servant bore away the aromatic receptacle and returned it scoured. And so the child’s ingenuity had contrived a means of continuing to make her the present of his stools.

The foundation of a pattern was laid. The mother fretted; the son provided for her. What neither grasped was that worry, too, might be a form of giving. As Iris aged, her anxieties multiplied to encompass the trivial and the sublime, rational eventuality and wild hypothesis, lost keys, toothache, ATMs, road accidents, seizures, what people would think, the years that had elapsed since her last confession, running out of sugar. To voice anxiety was to risk her son’s disapproval. At the same time, he might allay apprehension: find her key, go to the ATM in her place, assure her that the brakes wouldn’t fail. Her worrying empowered him. That was part of its value to her.

There was also this: worry, eating away at the present, made room for the future. ‘For God’s sake, Ma: it’ll never happen.’ Thus Tom, missing the point. Because worrying was a way of looking forward to something. That it might be a calamity was irrelevant. Fear was Iris’s mechanism for allotting herself time. It was a crafty manoeuvre. She was old and ill and poor. Fear was her best hope.

After Saunders, Iris shunned Hosiery, forgoing her staff discount to buy her tights in a rival establishment. She told no one what had happened. But one morning, years after the encounter, she found herself speaking of it to her son.

Tom pressed for details. At once Iris ended the conversation: ‘What’s the use?’ It was her standard response whenever he asked about the years before her marriage.

Fragments of knowledge-photographs, dates, conversations half heard when he was young-formed a patchwork in Tom’s mind. His mother, a beautiful girl, had married late. The strange word jilted had snared his attention in childhood. Now he assumed that Iris had run into the suitor who had once betrayed her. He had lately met the woman he would marry; was himself in love. It rendered him susceptible to romantic explanation.

He looked at the lipstick escaping in fine red threads from his mother’s mouth; the skin below her chin hung pleated. His own flesh was replete; satiny with consummation. He thought, Nobody touches her. He thought, No wonder she doesn’t want to dwell on the past.