Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Passed for Australia.

At the thought of a New World, Arthur felt great weariness. He was not sure he could be dusted off for it. But there was his son’s face, etched with excitement. He had realised, in the first week of his marriage, that his wife was vain, capable of pettiness and not in love with him. In all that concerned the boy, however, her faculty for selfl essness outstripped his own. She would willingly plough herself into the dust for the sake of the future quivering in their son. Arthur thought of rain falling in a far country; one day, turning to grain.

Old Mr Lal sent his ancient, gleaming Bentley to take them to the station. Friends and neighbours gathered on the steps. At the last moment, with faces already arranged for farewells and all the luggage squeezed in, Tom said he had to use the lavatory.

In the yawning rooms of childhood he raced hither and thither, touching a doorframe, a tile; thinking, The last time, the last time. Glancing through a window to fix a view forever- the last time, the last time-he saw a dog on the shadowed edge of the lawn: a tiny, heraldic beast, one forepaw raised; milky as marble. Then it was gone. Fear opened its wings under Tom’s heart. Already a neighbour had acquired a dog he didn’t recognise. It was a glimpse of the terrible future: a world he knew as well as his own face altering by degrees, never entirely alien but riddled with strangeness. One day he would pass through these scenes like a ghost, everywhere encountering proof of his irrelevance.

In 1972 in Australia there was work even for a man of fi ftythree. Even for Arthur Loxley.

When he left the pub that Thursday evening, Arthur’s breast pocket contained what was left of his second week’s wages from the bottling plant where he had been taken on for a month’s trial.

Any number of things might have been on his mind as he approached the tram tracks. The need to find a flat, as they could not stay with Audrey forever. The discovery that Australia, or at least this southern corner of it, was not a warm place.

The certainty that he would not keep his job, as the senior accountant didn’t like Poms and had told him so.

In fact, Arthur was gazing at the sky, and remembering a Sunday School picnic on a manored estate where there were blue pools under trees. Then he wondered why violets look purple close up but blue at a distance. There came into his mind something barely remembered, and perhaps, after all, only dreamed: the discovery of blue petals on his tongue.

He heard a shout, and the wild tinging of a bell, but did not immediately understand their significance. When he saw the tram swaying above him, he hopped smartly back. There was time to register surprise and pleasure at his nimbleness; then the car hit him. He heard his knee crack as he went down.

At first Tom was not afraid. The dog was given to running off. In parks, beside creeks, over waste ground: tracking a scent, he vanished; emerged as a white band glimpsed among trees or on a plunging hillside; disappeared again. In time-half an hour or so-he would turn up, grinning.

But this was the bush: a site constructed from narratives of disaster. Tom thought of dogs forcing their way into wombat holes, where they stuck fast and starved. He thought of snakes. He thought of sheep, and guns.

There came the sound of barking.

Twenty yards away, a track led up to the ridge. Tom took it at a run, air tearing in his chest. The pale trunks of saplings reeled past.

Away to his right it went on: a high consistent barking designed to attract the pack’s attention. So the dog barked when dancing around a tree where a cat or a possum clung among leaves. After a while, it would be borne in on him that he was alone in his venture; that the man would not assist in capturing the prey he had gone to the effort of flushing out. Like marriage, their relations had entailed the downward adjustment of expectations. A dog: Tom had pictured a faithful presence at his heel, an obedient head pressed to his knee. And the dog, thought Tom, arms hanging loose, breathing hard on a bush track, what had the dog hoped for from him? Something more than the recurrence of food in a dish, surely; surely some untrammelled dream of loping camaraderie.

Over the years, with patient repetition and bribes of raw flesh, he had taught the dog to fetch. But when he picked up the ball and threw it a second time, Tom would feel the dog’s gaze on him. He tried to imagine how his actions might appear from the dog’s point of view: the man had thrown the ball away, the dog had obligingly sought out this object the man desired and dropped it at his feet; and behold, the man hurled it away again. How long could this stupidity go on?

‘Anthropomorphism,’ Karen would have said, his wife being the kind of person who mistrusted emotions that had not been assigned a name. But what was apparent to Tom in all their dealings was the otherness of the dog: the expanse each had to cover to arrive at a corridor of common ground.

Where the bushes fanned less densely, he pushed his way through and found himself on an overgrown path. There was a smell: leafy, aromatic.

The barking now sounded higher up the hill; somewhere to his left, where a wall of grey-green undergrowth barred the way. He pressed on ahead, hoping to loop around behind the dog. His jacket grew damp from the branches that reached across his face. Water found the place between his collar and his skin.

He was so intent on moving forward that at first he didn’t notice the silence. When he did, he stopped. Silence meant the dog had given up hope that the pack would come to his assistance; and with it, the chase. Silence meant he was making his way back.

Tom Loxley returned, under a thickening sky, to the place where the wallaby had bounded across the track. Well after the rain came he was still standing there, a slight man in large wet sneakers, calling, calling.

By lunchtime the dog had been gone five hours and the rain over the trees had fined to drizzle. Tom remembered Nelly’s raincoat, hanging from a hook behind the bedroom door; it would be too short in the arms, but the hood was the thing. When he took it down, he discovered a promotional calendar from a stock agent stuck to the door. May 2001: no one had torn off a leaf in six months.

The forested crest of the hill was hemmed on the east by the track that ran down from Nelly’s house past paddocks and a farmhouse. To the north was the trail Tom had followed that morning; another led up the hill to the south. Both came out on the ridge road that curved around the top of the hill and turned down into the valley, where it met the muddy farm track. Tom set out along the perimeter of this bush trapezoid, calling and whistling and calling.

He told himself the dog was making the most of freedom, running where his nose led, through the crags and troughs of unimaginable scentscapes.

He reminded himself of the time when two children selling chocolate to raise money for their school left a gate open and the dog escaped into the street. Karen and Tom ran along pavements, checked parks, trespassed, knocked on doors, called animal shelters. Then the phone rang. A woman who lived half a mile away had returned from work to find the dog asleep on her step and her cat’s bowl licked clean.

The dog was still hard-muscled, swift and strong. But he was twelve now; old for a dog his size. He spent less time darting after swallows and more snoozing in his basket, dream-paws scrabbling. He would not willingly be out in this rain.

The ridge road was deserted. But it was the route taken by the logging trucks. The drivers, quota-ruled, were always in a hurry. The dog had no traffic sense. With the wind in his face, Tom tried not to think of these things.

He followed a path that led into the bush from the southern track. It took him to a clearing where a treadless tractor tyre held the charred traces of a fire. There were crushed cans; cigarette butts and balled-up tissues disintegrating in the scrub.