Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

He added, ‘It’s not like all nursing homes are terrible. I’ve offered to drive her around, find a place she likes. But she won’t even think about it.’

In this way he established Iris’s irrationality, and his willingness to do everything that might reasonably be expected of him.

Nelly had stopped drawing. She asked, ‘So what does she want to do?’

Tom was about to say, She wants to stay where she is, of course. But knowledge that had remained hidden within him, so that he had been able to ignore its tenancy, chose that moment to emerge into the light.

‘She’d never ask. But she’d like to live with me.’

He waited for Nelly to assure him that it was reasonable for the old to be sent away from their families into the care of strangers.

He waited for her to say what any reasonable person would say; what he himself had said to friends beleaguered by the needs of elderly parents. But that’s crazy. You have your own life to lead.

Nelly said, ‘Is that possible?’

Tom saw his books dispersed, his study transformed into a lair. He saw pillowslips stained with hair dye, and loose Strepsils turning sticky in a drawer. He saw his mother in a big pink chair in the sunroom, her flesh warming, the blurry nimbus of her perm.

‘Not really.’ He got to his feet. ‘I can’t imagine it.’

Migration had entailed so many changes that years went by before Tom remarked a decisive one: in Australia he was no longer the child of the house. The obvious displacement in space had obscured a more subtle dislocation in time. The shift, facilitated by his father’s death, was sealed by the proximity of his young cousin, Shona. She was a large, dull child, lightly spotted with malice; their relations were wary but amicable.

That first Christmas, eating roast turkey at Audrey’s table, Tom saw his uncle pluck the wishbone from the ruins of the bird. Automatically, he put out his hand. No one noticed, because attention was focused on nine-year-old Shona, who screwed her eyes shut, grasped the other end of the greasy bone and pulled. Tom’s gaze shot to his mother, but Iris was saying, ‘Tell, darling, did you make a nice wish?’ The boy pretended to be reaching for the gravy.

Not long afterwards, and in quick succession, he was displaying symptoms of diseases evaded in disease-ridden India. Measles, chicken pox: the classic illnesses of childhood. It was a simple ruse and it failed. His mother had to go out to work. Tom was told to be a big boy; tucked up and left for the day, with TV, a thermos of Heinz soup and a stack of Shona’s old comics for cheer. Outside the window mynahs called into the huge Australian silence.

After he recovered the second time, Tom remained healthy for years. There was no one to look after him; the message had been received. But it was couched in cipher. What remained vivid from that Christmas was the recollection of looking across the centrepiece of plastic fir cones and seeing his mother speaking with her mouth full. The sight of food that was neither inside nor outside the body, food that had broken down into an indistinct, glutinous mass, was disgusting: an Australian rule clever Tom Loxley had absorbed. He would believe it was the reason he flinched from the memory of that meal. The wishbone he had not been offered vanished under a slime of mashed fowl.

Consider the great cunning of the operation. It enabled the boy to transfer his gaffe to his mother. It demonstrated that he knew better than she did; that in the antipodes their roles were reversed. It aroused his pity. Crucially, it shielded him from pain.

But it was not foolproof. Hurt thrust deep festers slowly. Time passed, and Iris grew frail, and what Tom could not bear to grant her was childlike need. A request that he fasten her clothing or cut up her food might provoke a putrid eruption; at best, a spike of rage. It was a disgraceful reaction and he did his best to master it. He eased his mother’s arms into her cardigan and folded a tissue for her sleeve; he wiped her swirled excrement from the floor. With cautious steps, Iris was fi nding her way back to the kingdom of childhood. One of the emotions it aroused in her son was a terrible envy.

A thin stream of self-pity was decanting itself into Tom. They were climbing the hill for a last foray into the bush, Nelly a few steps ahead.

‘It’s nothing like you and Rory,’ he said wordlessly to her back. ‘We don’t talk . It’s not one of those modern relationships.’

His thoughts slid to Karen’s parents. The Cliffords were as groomed and athletic as the couples featured on billboards for superannuation funds. They played tennis three times a week and jogged around an artifi cial lake every morning. Tom had once watched them power walk down a path in twin designer tracksuits with the wind lifting their silver hair. In their dealings with their children, they deployed a brisk, practical brand of affection. One Christmas, Karen and her sisters had been given copies of their parents’ wills, and invited to choose furniture and other keepsakes from the family home. They were also informed that their parents had inspected a range of what they termed low and high care facilities , and entered into agreements with suitable establishments.‘We don’t want you girls bothered with our lifestyle options.’

What about deathstyle options, Tom had enquired privately of Karen. ‘Have they given you the go-ahead to switch off the machines?’ He was electric with derision and envy. It was all so sensible; so sanitary. It was emotional hygiene and it was unavailable to him. He was a giant child engulfed by the unfairness of life’s arrangements.

How was Tom to convey-to Nelly, to anyone-the muffl ed dependencies that weighted his relations with Iris? He was unable to shake off the image of that powder-puff head. His mother’s claim on him was mute, elemental; the animal invitation to feel with .

When she had worked as a cleaner, she would tiptoe past Tom before sunrise, her breath pinched so he could sleep undisturbed. At night she went to bed early. Tom sat at the fold-up table in the living room, his books and papers spread before him. His sleeve, moving across a page, produced a soft swishing. Later he lay in bed reading, or watched TV with the sound down. During the unwelcome intimacies imposed by school, by the annexe, he looked forward to these solitary hours.

Iris had been cleaning offices for a few months when Tom, working through a page of calculus one evening, became aware of a noise that had being going on for some time. He listened. Then he knocked. Then he went in.

‘Ma? Ma, what’s wrong?’

She didn’t answer but went on with her soft keening.

Tom switched on the bedside lamp. Iris’s eyes were closed but she was plainly not asleep. Again he asked what was wrong; roughly, because he was afraid. Tears went on slipping down

her face but still she didn’t reply.

He asked, ‘Do you want Audrey?’

After a little while, she said that her back hurt. Rather, she said it was paining.

He corrected her mechanically. But in fact it was he who was mistaken. Her locution, which had struck him as sounding Indian , was not after all geographical but historical. Years later he would come across it in a book of good Edwardian prose.

He asked, ‘Shall I get an Aspro?’

When he returned, she was propped up against her pillows.

Tom said, ‘I can leave school. Get a job. You don’t have to do it.’

Her mouth was full of water and aspirin but her head shook vigorously.

Later she said, ‘What’s to be done.’ It was not a question.

Her gown of quilted pink nylon lay across the bed. Its spiritual twin was suspended on a hanger hooked over the wardrobe door: an unlined grey coat trimmed with fake fur, ready for the morning.