Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Little by little, Tom’s thinking about Nelly’s work gathered itself around the skipping girl sign. Although, in this connection, thinking was at once too precise and too restrictive a term. What he divined in the skipping girl was a constellation of impressions, metaphors, quicksilver glints.

She led Tom to the wild objects : his shorthand for things Nelly depicted that had outlived their purpose or evolved a new one. They included an ancient pillarbox, graffi tied and plastered with posters, lurking in the shade of the shining mailbox that had superseded it. There were the windchimes made from splayds that dangled in a window in a once-industrial street; the CDs strung from the arms of a scarecrow in a housing estate allotment, the leatherette rocker recliner positioned beside a Smokers Please bin at the rear of a discount electrical goods warehouse.

These images reminded Tom of a toy he had owned when very young, a waxy slate he would cover with childish scribbles. When he lifted the plastic sheet on top, the marks disappeared, magically expunged. Yet here and there on the clean overlay the faint imprint of his hand’s labour could still be discerned. The toy, which had enchanted him, afforded three pleasures: inscription, erasure and remembering. It was concerned, like Nelly’s work, with what was discarded and ephemeral yet caught in the tatters of memory.

The wild objects suggested that time deals unkindly with things. They spoke to Tom of that period between nostalgia and novelty which contained objects once the height of fashion and now out of date. From time to time one or two would wander into the saga of the present (the CDs, the reclining chair…): untimely apparitions, humble fragments from the wreck of modernity. No longer new but not yet antique, they were merely old-fashioned; hence in poor taste.

These tiny punctures in the now-scape of the present allowed the past entry into Nelly’s images. No one looks twice at a disused pillarbox or old cutlery, thought Tom. But such things were infected with historical memory. Former emblems of progress and style, they functioned as memento mori of the endless rage for the new.

The skipping girl’s programmed rope had traced that frenzy in lights. In place of remembrance, it offered repetition. The skipping girl was as dazzling as novelty and, like it, going nowhere. Now, without her neon, she had the air of a sad revenant; a lifeless trace of history.

Over time, it was that sadness that caught at Tom. He found himself intensely moved by a photograph that showed the outlines of vanished rooms on a wall where the end house had been demolished in a terrace. There were days when he thrust Nelly’s photographs out of sight. Things illuminated, seen and surrendered to darkness: he was not always capable of looking at them with composure.

One day, when they were alone at the Preserve, he said as much to Brendon. Who listened, then led Tom to the room Nelly used for storage. There, he opened a cupboard. It contained a jumble of hardware and plastic flexes. Tom saw a sage-green dial telephone and a cream one. A slide projector. A boxy beige Mac Plus. A Betamax video recorder. A contraption with a built-in keyboard that Brendon identified as a Kaypro.

Brendon drew out a cumbersome black clock radio. ‘Remember these? With numbers that click over?’ He glanced around. ‘She’s got a black-and-white portable telly somewhere.’

‘But what’s it all doing here?’

‘You don’t know?’

Tom said, ‘Outdated stuff.’

‘Not just stuff. Outdated technology: the most dated stuff in the world. Not so long out of date, either. Stuff people aren’t yet nostalgic about. Stuff you can’t give away.’

The little room was icy. Tom, turning a rubber-banded sheaf of 5 1⁄4-inch floppy disks in his hands, saw the fl esh pimple along his arms. Brendon noticed too: ‘It’s modernity. Walking over your grave.’

They stood by the place where the dog had disappeared. It was Nelly who had spotted it: a three-toed print set in the bank. ‘That’ll be the wallaby.’

The rain had stopped, but Nelly, reaching for a handhold among the bushes, set off a small deluge. She hauled herself up, feet scrabbling. Crouched at the top of the bank, she peered into the bush. ‘I can get a little way, I think.’

Soon they were pushing along through undergrowth that kept bouncing back in their faces. Nelly said, ‘If you could lift me up. To try to get a better view.’

She rose past Tom’s face, disconcertingly solid. He had Nelly Zhang in his arms and couldn’t wait to be rid of her.

He heard her cooee off to his right. It was an unsettling call, syllables that straddled word and sound; an eerie trace of the real and imaginary vanishings in which Australian folk legend abounded, a mythology whose richness betrayed the fragility of European confidence in this place.

Tom never heard it without thinking of a picture that had hung in his first classroom in Australia: a small girl in a landscape of yellow grass and tall, splotched gums, the pretty wild-flowers that had led her astray still clutched in her pinafore. Light folded her in its cloth of gold, and drew a veil across the distant foliage that blocked her escape. She wept in her shining prison: lost in Australia, a predicament the Indian boy had understood at once.

The plan was to cross the hill from south to north. They had started out on parallel tracks about twenty feet apart but Nelly now sounded further away.

Tom came to a log-ridden gully. Halfway down, he knew he couldn’t get any further. He called to the dog. To Nelly.

He followed his yellow tapes back to the path and found her waiting for him. She said, ‘The gully’s too deep here. We should try further up, where it peters out.’ There were scratches on her hands, and on one side of her face.

‘What’s that smell?’ he asked

‘What smell?’

They sniffed. ‘There. I keep smelling it.’

‘Native mint bush.’

She snapped off a leafy stalk and passed it to him. The clouds parted. ‘The sun ,’ they said, together.

Every time they set out again, Tom felt a little surge of hope. After about an hour his spirits sagged.

He checked his watch and saw that all of twenty-eight minutes had passed.

Sometimes he called the dog’s name backwards. To shake things up a little.

‘What sort of knot was it?’

He told her. Added, ‘It won’t work free.’

They were sitting by the side of the track on their jackets, eating apples. Tom said,‘There’s all this folklore to do with knots.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Knots are supposed to contain power that can be used for good or evil. It’s called maleficium. There’s a long history of people attributing magical powers to knots. The Romans believed that a wound would heal more quickly if the dressing was bound with a Hercules knot, which was their name for a reef knot.’

Nelly ate apples core and all. She twirled the stem of this one in her fingers before letting it drop.

‘In Scandinavia the name Knut used to be given to boys whose parents already had as many children as they wanted. People believed that even the word for knot was powerful enough to prevent another pregnancy.’ Tom said,‘You wouldn’t think that’d survive too much reality, would you?’

‘I don’t know, they probably lucked out more often than not. A woman who had as many kids as she wanted would’ve most likely been older. Less fertile.’ Nelly had produced a pencil and was unfolding her map.

Flies sizzled past Tom’s face. Somehow he began talking about Iris. Not the detail; he found himself unable to use the words mother and shit in relation to each other. But that he feared she wouldn’t be able to go on living on her own. ‘My aunt says it’s time she went into a home. And she’s probably right. But of course Ma hates the idea. She starts crying every time the subject comes up.’