Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

That evening he returned to it, and the next day, and the next. On each occasion his methodology was the same: a sidelong approach, followed by flickers of vision. It was seeing and not-seeing at the same time. The child felt that to behold that picture in its entirety would be his undoing. But as long as it exceeded him, he was compelled to return to it.

Wholeness was in part what was horrifying about the image. A furry black face filled the cover of the book. Raised by the table, it loomed close to Tom’s own face. He was six or seven at the time.

Among the words on the cover was one that was larger than the rest. The child associated it with excretion; with what was at once necessary and repellent. It was spelled out plainly in thick dark letters: P-O-E.

Patterns of light on the verandah shifted with the sun’s journey across the sky. Brightness and shade worked their own dissection of the image. Tom took it in in glimpses. A slice of black fur, a sectioned snarl. Perception was jerky, a series of shudders. Straight after the flash, his eye lowered its shutter. If it happened often enough, he might assemble what he had seen; hold it steady in his mind.

On that night in Nelly’s kitchen, the trace of an old dread persisted in Tom’s desire to place his hand over his eyes: a child’s protective gesture.

The fireplace was silent and cold. Tom rocked gently back and forth, and wrapped his arms about himself. Opposite him was the window, with the blind down. After a little while, the notion came to him that something was pressing its face to the glass. The idea gathered strength, swelling to a conviction that kept him nailed to his chair.

At last he tore free. When he turned around, a fi gure was watching him from the door.

Nelly did practical things: lighting candles, getting the fi re

going, pouring whisky into glasses.

‘The photos fell out of your bag. I kicked it over and…’

‘It’s OK.’ She said, ‘Obviously, they’re not for general view. Nelly’s Nasties, like they say.’

Tom said quickly, ‘They’re great.’ But his gaze slipped to the image closest to him. There was something of Fuseli’s Nightmare behind it; something also of The Night of the Hunter . Yet the stance of the man in the photograph might have been protective, and the Akubra shading his face made it impossible to read. And who could say why the girl, on the edge of the scene, had flung up her head? But there was a carousel horse, gaily coloured, with a flaring eye. Situations revolved in the mind. Altogether, it was not an image Tom wished to look at for very long.

Nelly gathered up the photographs and replaced them in their folder. Then she sat at the table. Said, in a matter-of-fact way, ‘They frightened you.’

Tom refi lled his glass. ‘What went on with you and Felix?’ he asked.

‘I got married so young.’ She held her glass between fi nger and thumb, rocking it on the table, and repeated, ‘I was so young.’

Tom waited. She spoke patiently, as to a fool: ‘That was it .’ For a moment she was frightening again, jaw hard, eyes slitty. ‘That was what he liked,’ said Nelly.

It was Posner who introduced her to Atwood, said Nelly. The two men had been at school together. When she realised she was pregnant, ‘Felix was the one who wanted to get married. He was so happy. Well, we both were.’

She said, ‘It began when I started to show. I didn’t for ages, not until about six months. Then I disgusted him.’

Tom understood long before she had finished. The old Polaroid pinned up in the Preserve: he remembered thinking how much younger than her age she had looked.

Scraps of what she was saying lodged in his brain. Atwood had liked to buy her clothes. At first it excited Nelly. Her husband dressing her up the better to undress her. But she quickly grew bored with his taste; with pintucked frocks of English lawn. ‘I mean, all the artists I hung out with were in torn black.’ She began refusing to wear the garments Atwood bought; or wore them incongruously, a baby-doll nightie pulled over a long-sleeved flannel vest, a Peter Pan collar half-hidden under a polyester shift or a safety-pinned T-shirt.

He liked her in pigtails, so she had her hair cropped and gelled into spikes. She dropped a clutch of white cotton knickers into a vat of magenta dye.

Her resistance infuriated Atwood. What began as a mild squabble expanded into one of those sour conflicts that leaves both sides drained yet resolved not to yield. Nelly’s clothes- her appearance, her image-became the site each struggled to control. It was ludicrous and deadly. Sometimes, in the early stages, an argument collapsed because they would catch each other’s eye and begin to laugh. She didn’t speak of the lovemaking that followed, but Tom guessed its edgy mixture, the desire to punish leaving its tang in the syrup.

Nelly’s elastic young flesh sprang back within weeks of giving birth. But her milk-gorged breasts repelled Atwood.‘He wanted me to bottle feed. He’d leave the room as soon as I undid the fi rst button.’

It had phases. In one of them he bought concoctions of silk, or lace, or gossamer French chiffons, an armful of extravagant, feminine wisps one or two sizes larger than Nelly required. Slipping from her shoulder, a dress emphasised the slightness of her frame. There was also the dress-up aspect: lipsticked, hung with flashing paste jewels, she was a child essaying a sexual disguise.

Each mustered their weapons. Nelly’s income was minimal. Rory left her exhausted, with neither the time nor the stamina needed for painting; in any case, in those days only Posner collected her work. Atwood settled the household bills and did so unstintingly, but no longer paid a fortnightly sum into Nelly’s account.

He withheld treats: a line of cocaine, a trip to Venice. In bed he aroused her until she whimpered; at last, pinned beneath him, she would consent to his scheme. Arrayed in whatever elfin costume he required, she acted out his wishes.

She shaved off her hair. ‘It looked terrible. My skull’s that lumpy kind. I’d get around in these old Doc boots I bought at Camberwell, looking like the love child of Johnny Rotten and a Buddhist nun.’ She searched op shops for matronly castoffs and paraded them at formal dinners. ‘Those corporate occasions where all the men wear their wives.’ Atwood told his colleagues she was suffering from post-natal depression. ‘Anything I did from then on was down to being hormonal .’

She thought Posner guessed. ‘Sort of. He was friends with us both. But he’d known Felix for years. And been in love with him from the start. It was really important to him that things worked out between us.’ She said, ‘In a way, it was like I was his proxy.’

The manoeuvres husband and wife practised on each other were misleading. They lent the thing the aspect of a game. That was one reason Nelly stayed. Besides, there were stretches of calm. There was the delight the child brought into the world. They might be drinking cold wine on daisied grass while he crawled over a rug between them, and she would relish the ordinariness of these pleasures.

There was the eroticism that still reeled her in to Atwood. She said, ‘He had perfect ears.’

Nelly had no aptitude for narrative. But that night it poured from her. Tom was of no account in the spate. There was something unnerving in her indifference to his reception of her tale.

She spoke with scarcely a pause. She grew repetitive, elaborating on avowals, coiling back over explanations. She told a pointless story about a mothers’ group she had attended with Rory. She was prolix. A draught set the candles fl ickering and carried the smell of wax around the room. The tiny kitchen filled up with words.