Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

At some point, quite early on, she must have grasped the significance of Atwood’s preferences. What she failed to imagine was that they might encompass other beings. Nelly was accustomed to the cluster of fantasies that she drew from men. With the egotism that is a symptom of innocence, she believed it was her singularity that triggered Atwood’s response.

In this way, her knowledge of what her husband desired was tempered. It was seeing and not-seeing: the perfect mechanism for controlling dread. Nevertheless, what made its way into her paintings was fear.

Atwood began spending longer at work. He was often away. There were meetings in Sydney, in Hong Kong, in Singapore. When he had a free weekend, he would drive to the house in the bush. Usually he went alone. Their skirmishes might have turned wholly vicious but grew routine instead.

At the time, the dwindling of his attention brought Nelly relief. It was only long afterwards that she began to imagine what it might have meant. At once the void left by his lack of interest in her filled with childish forms she had never seen. She pictured flesh so immaculate it measured each caress in damages.

In the last months she spent with Atwood, Nelly’s headaches were more frequent and more brutal. Between bouts of illness, she shut herself into her studio and worked. Rory had started kindergarten, in addition to which she hired babysitters for him while she painted; borrowing their wages, as she borrowed money for materials, from Posner. In five months she completed her Nightingale series, a lunatic fl ow.

‘The selection in the show, Carson said those seven were no worse than gruesome. I was totally pissed off with him for refusing to show them all, but then…’ She shrugged. ‘I was walking around the gallery after the installation and I stood in front of those paintings and it hit me for the fi rst time . Felix had been gone months and it was only then that I realised what’d been really going on.’

Tom asked, ‘Why carry the photos around?’

But the answer took shape even as he formulated the question. When understanding fails, the consequence is always a haunting.

In the last year of their marriage, Atwood began pressing her to have a second child. The idea, once speculative, took on definition: a print emerging into clarity through the chemistry of talk. Nelly temporised; not while she was working towards a show. In that rationalisation of reluctance, she was entirely sincere.

Atwood accepted it without argument. There was an increasingly disengaged quality to his scenarios. ‘I guess things were hotting up at work.’ It was a period when more than ever before Nelly was struck by the abstract nature of money, its almost hallucinatory disembodiment. She was hard put to lay her hands on twenty cents for the bag of mixed lollies her son begged for at the milk bar, but luxuries multiplied around her as in a dream. She swigged vintage Krug in her bath and lay every night in a clean linen envelope.

She said, ‘I can see why Felix lied about that money. It just wasn’t real. Even the way he and his mates talked about it. Like they never said a half a million-it was always half a bar.’

Once, early on in the marriage, Nelly had visited him at the bank in Collins Street. She spoke of the modern, luminous beauty of the green figures on the dealing screens; of the telephones ringing non-stop in the trading room, and the clashing screams of ‘Buy!’ and ‘Sell!’ There was a reverent undertone to Nelly’s words. Her eyes were bright as screens in the shadowy kitchen. ‘Loads of zeros. Unreal money.’

Her husband kept returning to the topic of a second child: acquiescing in its deferral but urging it towards reality. A phrase tripped so often from his tongue that she heard it as scarcely more than an arrangement of phonemes. How nice for Rory, he would remark, to have a sister.

That small figure from the future kept them company for a season; was summoned and vanished, and glided again through their desires. It passed through the Nightingale paintings, occasioning unease but withholding clarity; a riddling presence, as apparitions so often are.

Afterwards, she would think, A little girl in that house!

They sat on splintery steps in the sun, the last of the fresh milk in their coffee. An artful spray of white clouds had transformed the sky into a screensaver. The odour of cattle, a sweet country stench, arrived, then faded.

Tom’s face itched with stubble. It was a discomfort intrinsic to the wretchedness of looking for the dog, one of the small miseries that dissolved in the large one and thickened the brew. He sniffed himself discreetly. Everything that leaked from the body’s wrapping, emanations the city defeated in brisk, hygienic routs, was triumphant here.

He drew the back of his hand first one way, then the other, along his jaw. A truck coming down the ridge road changed gear on its way to the trees.

Nelly had been saying something about the apple tree in the cow paddock no longer bearing fruit. Now she scraped her spoon around the remains of her porridge, licked it, set the bowl aside.

The night’s revelations lay untouched between them. It was like opening a locked door and stumbling on a bound, swaddled form, thought Tom: the coverings could be peeled back to make sure but who would want to do it?

Something tugged faintly. Something Nelly had said the previous day. But what intervened was a bright, painted horse with a rolling eye. So that he blurted, ‘Don’t they frighten you?’

There was no context to the question. Nelly didn’t require one. She was fastening up her hair with a plastic comb, and only nodded, without pausing in her task.

In that way, negligently, she made him an enduring gift. It revealed itself by degrees, a slow enlightenment. Slowly Tom realised that Nelly neither shunned nor welcomed the past. She merely allowed it space. It was a question of accommodation. He saw that sometimes she was afraid of the shape it took. Sometimes fear is a necessary response to ghosts; but room must be found for them, nonetheless.

By mid-morning the sun, no longer a novelty, lay across their backs like a load. They were pushing forward through scrub, collecting fresh grazes. The green plant groweth, menacing / Almighty lovers in the spring . Only they were not that, thought Tom.

Birds worked and whistled. He cursed the cunning of blue gums: the rapid growth that produced density without shade. ‘We could pass within feet of him and not see.’

Nelly wiped her forehead on her arm. Her T-shirt was navy cotton with a red star on the chest; a red and blue striped football sock with the foot cut off had been sewn onto each sleeve.

One leg of her jeans was filthy. She had stepped knee-deep into the pulpy remains of a log. A thread of sweat made its way down her neck to pool above her collarbone; and Tom saw why the hollows there are known as salt cellars.

They were sitting at the foot of the tall eucalypt eating almonds and dried apricots. Withered branches lay around them like broken limbs. Gum forests so often suggested the aftermath of hostilities, the bark litter of dried bandages, the trees as bony and grey as the remnants of regiments.

Tom’s mind drifted, by related channels, to Nelly’s story of the wallaby; to the amazing teenager with the shotgun and scones.

He was tired. It took him a little while to get there. Then he said, ‘The woman Jimmy Morgan saw on the beach. Denise.’

‘Sure.’

‘No, listen. You said she was tall, even back then. Morgan said he saw a tall woman, remember?’ It was coming together with the thrilling symmetry of an equation. ‘Could Denise have got hold of that dress? The one she made for you?’