Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

How we imagine another person reveals the limits of our understanding. Tom was then not yet thirty. He could not have guessed that, surrounded by artifi cial limbs encased in nylon, Iris’s first thought on seeing Saunders had been, Who’s that old man? It was not the past she had recoiled from in their encounter but the future.

Fear had this advantage too: it could sidle up to the future side on, by wiles. There was no need to look what was waiting in the face.

The weeks in 1965 when Indian tanks rolled to within three miles of Lahore had left no impression on the child Tom’s mind. Six years passed in relative peace; then, with Indian troops already moving to support bloodied Dacca, Pakistan declared war on its sibling.

It so happened that Tom had recently read the diary of Anne Frank. With the formalisation of hostilities, he sensed a meeting of life and literature. He was a child built by books and his excitement was boundless.

He couldn’t quite settle on his part in the confl ict: would he shelter Hindus when Pakistan invaded? To this end, he searched the house for secret places, paying particular attention to cupboards. There was the equally thrilling possibility that he himself would be forced into hiding. He reviewed the Muslim boys he knew: he counted no special friends among them, but trusted that in time the rules of plot would reveal one. What was certain, in any case, was that his role would be heroic. He passed agreeable hours trailing a stick in the dirt, his lips moving soundlessly, imagining the raids he would conduct under cover of night. Sometimes he swung his arms and counted his strides, shouting out numbers as if they were blasphemies. A spindly twig or leaf might enrage him by appearing defenceless, and he would strike it to the ground. His dreams of pursuit and daring were broken into now and then by fear; but like the delicious shiver provoked by a tale of ghosts, it was merely his body’s involuntary tribute to art.

This happy state lasted a scant fortnight. Then the war was over, and in the midst of national jubilation, Tom tasted the melancholy of those who wake from visions. His refl ection in the mirror appeared to have shrunk. For a glorious interval, he had been larger than life. It was his first, dim perception of the power of narrative: war, like love, raising its accomplices to the status of figures in a known story.

Tom knew that a lucky country was one where history happened to other people. For thirty years after his marginal involvement in its adventure, he had found a place in which to take cover from its reach.

On the September night when he stood in a bar with Nelly watching towers sink to their knees, the fear he felt was an acute version of a child’s alarm as the seeker in a hiding game draws near. He had always known it was only a matter of time before it happened. Living in Australia was like being a student at a party that went on and on; he didn’t want it to end, but couldn’t suppress the knowledge that exams were approaching.

Tom Loxley wished what anyone might: that a pleasant life should go on being pleasant. He wished for continuity. He wished for the orderly progression of events. He wished, that is to say, for an end to history. It was incompatible with modern life. It raged over benighted continents and there it should have stayed, ripping up sites already littered with its debris. What was unnerving was the juxtaposition of that ancient face with Power-Point and water coolers. Its eruption in nylon-carpeted cubicles where people were sneaking a look at stuff on eBay.

It was as if the events of that year had set out to demonstrate that history could not be confined to historical places. In the same spring as the towers fell, boats making their way to Australia foundered on the treachery of currents and destiny.

People looking for sanctuary drowned. They might have been found; they might have been saved. But what prevailed was the protection of a line drawn in the water.

Night after night, images of the refugees appeared. Tom saw death flicker in the furtive glow of TV and knew the guilty rage of those who have crossed to safety. Time toppled like a wave. He was a falling thing, spiralling down to wait forever in a room as blue as an ocean. He felt the convergence of public and private dread.

Buried deep in Australian memories was the knowledge that strangers had once sailed to these shores and destroyed what they found. How could that nightmare be remembered? How could it be unselfishly forgotten? A trauma that had never been laid to rest, it went on disturbing a nation’s dreams. In the rejection of the latest newcomers, Tom glimpsed the past convulsing like a faulty film. It was a confession coded as a denial. It was as if a fi end had paused in its ravaging to cover its face and howl.

The images he saw on TV brought him out in goose bumps: fear writing its name on his flesh. And since the frightened are often frightening, the pictures on his screen made him grimace and distorted his face.

Bodies flashed up constantly in those weeks: broken, burned, fished lifeless from the sea. He thrust at them with his remote, willing them to disappear. But it was as if the images were imprinted on his retina. They affected everything he saw. In ordinary streets the air turned red with callistemons. Tiny corpses appeared on pavements, nestlings as naked and strange as Martians.

A roller-blader sped past Tom, fl eeing as if from catastrophe; the white stare of the baby strapped to his back followed like a curse. A lunatic in flawless linen strode up and down a supermarket aisle, gesticulating, shouting, ‘What do you mean by a small pumpkin?’ Then Tom noticed the wire running into her pocket from her ear.

A municipal hard-rubbish collection produced surreal assemblages on footpaths. Tom’s route to a protest about the war in Afghanistan took him through dystopic chambers furnished with soiled carpet squares and disembowelled futons. He passed an orange divan stripped of cushions; collapsed hoovers, torn fl yscreens, a backless TV. A bicycle wheel leaned against a birdcage. Rusty barbecues might have strayed from a torturer’s repertoire. There were contraptions for improving muscle tone, computer keyboards fanned in a magazine rack, plastic flowerpots packed with grey earth. It was like leafi ng through snapshots of a civilisation’s unconscious.

Spring came apart under a weight of rain, death-laden spring. Fear put out live shoots in Tom. Instantly identifi able as foreign matter, he feared being labelled waste. He feared expulsion from the body of the nation.

In the hills, the mild city day was cold and wild. The rain arrived soon after Tom and Nelly, herding them back to the house, putting an end to their search.

Nelly’s pink hat lay on a chair, misty beads tangling its fi ne fibres. She built up the fire while Tom set about preparing a meal. Rain slashed leaves, clawed at the walls. The paddocks darkened under their leaking roof.

Tom wound spaghetti around his fork, then rested it on his plate. The wind continued its assault on the trees, pulling their hair. To think of the dog without shelter in this weather was unbearable. Tom rose, crossed to the window and drew down the blind.

Nelly had pushed her plate aside, and was sketching on the back of one of his flyers. ‘Look.’ He saw cross-hatching on a pencilled map. ‘That’s where we were today. You can mark where you searched last week. But in any case we’ll cover it all, bit by bit.’

Approximate, not to scale, unscientific. He sat at the table and said, ‘I shouldn’t have dragged you up here. I’m sorry.’

She was adding to her map: an arrow pointing to the house, the tracks, a compass rose.

‘If he’s out there, how could he have survived? This rain, this cold.’