Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

‘The rain’ll keep him going. A dog can live three weeks without food. Three days without water.’

Her mulish cheer irritated Tom. He sneezed. Once, twice.

Nelly told him that when the house was first built, the interior walls had been covered in hessian pasted over with layers of newspaper. In the tiny second bedroom Tom had previously glanced into but not entered, Atwood’s architect had preserved a section of the original décor. Nelly pointed out pages from Christmas colour supplements that had been included in the final paper coating. When the house was new, these illustrations must have brought the opulence of icons to the room. Eighty years later, vague figures showed here and there on the wall, faded divas and emperors emerging from a brownish nicotine haze. ‘They used to spook Rory. He wouldn’t sleep in here when he was a kid.’

Tom was thinking of the delight coloured pictures had once brought, before the proliferation of images. He remembered a parcel of foodstuffs that had arrived from England when he was five or six. A spoonful of glowing red jam from a tin wrapped in bright scenery: a gift from another world.

They were drinking wine, their socked feet outstretched towards the fire. The planked floor hadn’t been polished in years. But it was a living thing by firelight, dark spots swirling on a lemony pelt.

Tom said, fishing, ‘Denise asked after you the other day.’

‘Been chatting to her, have you?’ Nelly lit a cigarette.

‘What?’

She exhaled.

‘What?’

‘There was all this stuff in the papers when Felix disappeared, about us arguing, things like that.’ Nelly said, ‘They got a lot of it from Denise. It’s sort of hard to forget.’

‘Why’d she do that?’

Nelly stared into the fi re.

‘Was she jealous? I mean, I guessed there was something between her and Felix, the way she’s talked about him.’ Tom could feel his mind labouring, thickened with tiredness.

Nelly giggled. It went on too long. ‘Sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s not funny, really. But the idea of Felix and Denise.’

When she had dropped what was left of her cigarette into the fire, she said, ‘Look, I was the one she had a crush on.’

‘You know how you feel things so much then? When you’re

seventeen, eighteen?’

Tom said, ‘I remember.’

‘We had this party here, loads of people came up, I think it was Australia Day. The year Felix went missing.’ Nelly shrugged. ‘Denise had too much champagne, I guess. Like everyone else.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing.’ She said, ‘It’s hard to get over. When you come out with what you feel, and get nowhere.’ After a little while: ‘There was all this other stuff going on in my life at the time. I couldn’t really be bothered with Denise. She was just sort of irrelevant.’

‘Ouch.’

‘Exactly.’

Tom permitted himself a brief fantasy of abstracting some small, odorous item of Nelly’s clothing-a sock, the rosy hat. He thought of Herrick delicately sniffing his mistress, declaring that her ‘ hands, and thighs, and legs are all / Richly aromatical.’

He glanced covertly at Nelly sitting there beside him on the couch enmeshed in the detail of living: examining a chipped thumbnail, nibbling it, frowning at the result. It was an effort to reconcile the woman he knew, sunk in dailiness, with the Nelly who had existed so thoroughly in the larger-than-life events of Atwood’s disappearance.

There was a girl who had been around at parties and clubs when Tom was twenty. She was no older, but seemed stereoscopic: she had starred in a film that had won a prize, her face, smilingly assured below a rakish hat, gazed out from billboards. Then she vanished, summoned by Berlin or LA; and Tom forgot her, until the day, years later, when he and his wife bought a pair of sheets in a department store. On the down escalator, Karen said, ‘You didn’t twig, did you? That was Jo Hutton who served us.’

For days Tom was unable to evict her from his thoughts, the saleswoman he had barely noticed as she bleated of thread-counts; within minutes of turning away, he would have failed to recognise her if she had materialised before him. While the transaction was being processed, he had grumbled casually to his wife about the time their train had spent in the Jolimont shunting yards before delivering them to Flinders Street. The saleswoman looked up: ‘The exact same thing happened to me this morning. Doesn’t it drive you mad?’ Then she confi ded that this was her last day at the city store: she had been transferred to a branch in the suburbs. ‘I live a fi ve-minute drive away. I can’t wait to be shot of public transport.’ She handed Tom a pen and a credit card slip, and shook the two gold bangles on her wrist as he signed: a small, unconscious expression of glee at her victory over time and the railways.

Tom tried to picture the girl in the tilted fedora pausing long enough to fret about train timetables, but found the challenge too strenuous.

Now, sitting with Nelly in the draughty kitchen, he thought it was an error to equate authenticity with even tones. Existence was inseparable from tragedy and adventure, horror and romance; realism’s quiet hue derived from a blend of dramatic elements, as a child pressing together bright strands of plasticine creates a drab sphere.

Thus Tom reasoned; but some vital component of the case continued to elude him. That other Nelly remained a stranger to this one, just as he had not succeeded in matching the two Jo Huttons with each other. The images were not quite congruent, and this was as disconcerting as if a tracing were to lift away from its original and show its own distinctive form.

She said, ‘I’ll sleep here,’ patting the couch.

‘No need.’ To spell it out, Tom might have added. Instead: ‘I can bunk down in the small room.’

‘It’s warmer here. I prefer it.’

Three feet of corded upholstery can assume the dimensions of a continent. Wind tugged at the house. A log shifted and collapsed on the fi re.

It was still raining on Tuesday morning. Nelly turned left onto the ridge road, away from the coast. She had offered to drive, saying she knew the roads better than Tom did.

They meandered about the valley, Nelly steering smoothly around its curves. She had an affinity with engines. Tom recalled seeing her outside the Preserve, her round hands busy with a fan-belt under the hood of Yelena’s Beetle. The dog had been by his side that afternoon. It seemed a long time ago.

A cemetery with iron gates came into view. Tom thought of the grinning dead in their filthy sheets. On waking he had found a sentence in his mind: Today it is a week. He felt the force of it again now, the days piling up, each a fresh clod tamped down over hope. A date over which so many Novembers had flowed without interruption had become an anniversary. Time was thickening around it. He thought of it waiting for him each year.

There was the warm, companionable space of the car. Beyond it, sodden pastures and the sky. Tom scuttled between inside and outside, leaving rain-spotted flyers in letterboxes; every third or fourth farm used a milk can.

It was sharp, slanted rain, a shower of arrows loosed by an archaic battalion.

There were bursts of untuneful humming from Nelly. Then she remarked on the gleam that potatoes have when freshly dug from the earth.

There would come a day, thought Tom, when he looked back on this one and was envious: because she was there, beside him. His fears for the dog, the news about Osman, everything that at present loomed large would dwindle to a speck on memory’s horizon. What remained would be the fl oodlit, ecstatic fact of her presence.