Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

At least he had a photograph of her. Mogs, having turned up at the Preserve in Posner’s retinue one evening, in due course demonstrated a Japanese camera-‘ Isn’t it brilliant!’- that shot out Polaroids no larger than a stamp. The results passed from hand to hand. It was easy to palm the image Tom wanted: Nelly turning towards the camera, snapped before her expression could settle. There was an edge of paisley sleeve in the foreground. Tom thought it belonged to Osman but wasn’t sure.

He would have liked to carry the miniature in his wallet but feared it being seen. Instead he kept it in a drawer, slotted between the pages of a square-ruled notebook. It was a form of insurance; a material vestige of Nelly to set against the fi ckleness of memory. He saw himself in years to come, extracting it from the dimness of his desk. Projecting himself through time, he discovered that he was already moved; affected in advance by that trace of her presence caught in waves of light.

None of it would come to pass. In one of those enigmatic conjuring tricks effected by objects, the Polaroid would vanish within a few months. Tom would turn out his desk; grasp the notebook by its spine and shake, thumb its pages a hundred times. But one day, when years had passed and his need had long withered, he would open a book and discover the photograph within it.

What was strange was that this volume, the collected poems of Christina Rossetti, belonged to his wife. Tom had his own copy somewhere, but this one, a handsome, jacketed edition, was hers. He checked the flyleaf to make sure: For Becky, Happy Christmas 1992, Love always, Granny.

On a forested back road, there was a flash of fur in the bush.

Nelly said, ‘Felix hit a wallaby once, have I said?’

Tom shook his head.

‘There was nothing he could’ve done, it came fl ying out when he was taking that curve near Jack’s gate. It wasn’t dead. We just stood there, looking at its eyes, with Rory bawling in the car. I went to get Jack but he was out in the paddocks. So I left Rory with Denise’s mum, and Denise came back with me, and put Jack’s gun against the wallaby’s head and shot it. This tall, skinny teenager, right, and so collected . We go back to the farm and next thing she’s handing round these pumpkin scones she’s just baked.’

Nelly said, ‘She was sort of amazing in those days, Denise.’

They bought coffee from a shop that served a deserted campsite. Nelly drove on to a spot where they could pull off the bitumen. Mountain ash rose before them, superb and desolate. The forest was chilling in the way of ancient landscapes, evoking human insignificance. It suggested aeons; vegetable time. This was how the planet had looked before the advent of their kind.

Riddled with time, it was a scene easily emptied of history. The Edenic new world: an image to set against European sophistication and decadence. Tom was unable to contemplate it with equanimity. He said something along these lines to Nelly.

‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’ She lowered her window; lit one of her spiced cigarettes. ‘The whole wilderness thing’s so loaded in this country. Landscape without figures: we don’t like thinking how that came about.’

It was not that Tom disagreed. But the forest disturbed him in a way that far exceeded the merely historical. It was wild and latent and old. It addressed an aspect of his nature that had endured, whatever victories cultivation knew elsewhere.

Clove-scented smoke rolled about. Nelly, shooing it away, said she had cut back to five cigarettes a day. ‘But I’ve got to give up, really. They’re hardly the best thing for migraine.’

‘Is that what they are, your headaches?’

She didn’t reply at once. Then she glanced at Tom sideways. ‘I’m painting again.’

‘Yeah? That’s great.’

‘I seem to get ill more when I’m working. That’s one reason I put off starting.’ Nelly said, ‘I know a headache’s on the way when I start seeing these shapes like doughnuts. With light where the hole should be.’ Her fi ngers fluttered beside her left eye. ‘Also I get these, like, flickers of gold. And the air goes sort of brittle. Like tiny glass wings.’

Something about the gesture, these remarks, the way her eyes slipped away. For a moment, it was as if a stranger had entered the car and was sitting beside Tom. A prickle ran over his scalp.

On their way back, as they were passing a cluster of naked sheep, Nelly said, ‘When Jack’s father was a child none of this land had been cleared. It was still one of the wonders of the world.’

Later: ‘They have such small arms. Wallabies.’

On a windy blue evening in October, when they were walking past a broad-fronted house near Tom’s flat, Nelly spoke of the elderly immigrant who had lived there. He had sold the house and returned to Greece so that his life might loop to a close as it had begun, on a rock in the Aegean.

On another occasion, she halted before a rickety cottage. ‘That’s Dulcie’s place. She’s in a home now. She used to have these azaleas on her verandah that she watered every morning from a china hot water bottle.’

Nelly talked of the children who had once overfl owed these hushed streets. ‘Even when I first moved to the Preserve you still saw kids all over the place, walking to school, playing cricket in the street. They’ve gone now. People with children can’t afford to live here any more.’

There was an evening when she stopped in front of a townhouse. ‘See that driveway? There used to be freesias there, the kind with the fabulous smell, before they pulled the old place down. I think of them every spring, trying to push through the concrete. Like a hundred little murders.’

Talk like this ran counter to Tom’s sense of his surroundings. The city as he experienced it was glassily new. That was its allure. In Mangalore, when he walked down a street his neighbours had beheld Sebastian who begat Iris who begat Thomas. He trailed genealogies. The air around him swarmed with incident and knowledge, faces that had turned to bone shimmered at his shoulder. In Australia, he was free-fl oating. Architecture expressed the difference in material form, the bricks and beaten earth of childhood exchanged for superstructures of glass and airy steel. At night they turned into giant motherboards, alive with circuitry: advance screenings of the electronic future.

Nelly’s version of the city was a palimpsest. A ruin. It was layered like memory.

Tom thought of history mummifi ed and dismembered in the official memorials scattered through the streets; and how effortlessly Nelly conjured the living slither of time.

She pointed to the digital clock perched on the Nylex Plastics sign, and said that as a child on family outings, she had watched eagerly for it to appear on the skyline. ‘I wanted to be the fi rst one in the car to read out the time.’

Tom had noticed that the clock, glittering on top of the Cremorne silos, turned up now and then in her work. He was affected by Nelly’s remark, recalling the potency of urban signs in his own childhood. He could remember the streaming, neon enchantment of an advertisement for Bata shoes that had fl ashed out at intervals on the side of a building in Mangalore: the utter blackness he feared might last forever, the thrill as each bright letter took shape again, the twinkling, magical whole.

Then there was Stick No Bills. Learning to read, he had deciphered it as Strike On Bells; had felt intense satisfaction whenever he saw the stencilled exhortation. It spoke to him of solemn undertakings and powerful, invisible allies, the kind of message in which fairy tales abound: direct yet riddling, a test of resourcefulness.

The Nylex clock drew him closer in spirit to that small girl peering through a car window. At the same time, Nelly’s remark underlined one of their essential differences. To possess a city fully it is necessary to have known it as a child, for children bring their private cartographies to the mapping of public spaces. The chart of Tom’s secret emblems was differently plotted. Oceans separated him from the sites featured on it. A block of flats unevenly distempered pink at a junction in India still materialised in his dreams. But the city in which he now lived remained opaque to him. Like a tourist who has memorised a street plan, he navigated by artifice. His gaze stopped at surfaces; slipped off façades that had never been penetrated by his childish imaginings.