Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

I can drive you back this evening. Or drop you at a station. No point us both wasting our time.’

‘So let’s say he’s dead. Don’t you want to keep looking anyway? We can still take him home.’

‘Hey, look.’

They bent over the wing: bone and cartilage and dusty brown feathers. Tom’s toes drew back in his boots.

‘Do you think…?’

He sniffed: nothing. ‘Probably been there for days.’

In the clearing nothing seemed to have changed. The smooth tyre, an assortment of damp rubbish. Tom had half expected the remains of brutality: smashed bones, slit corpses strung from trees. His foot stirred a set of fi lthy cardboard corrugations stamped with a brewer’s logo and uncovered a condom.

‘Did you hear the motorbike? Last night, when you were out?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘I came looking for you. Couldn’t see you.’

Nelly yawned. Then said, indifferently, ‘I walked up to the top of the hill.’

Tom fastened a length of yellow tape to a branch. Nelly was somewhere on the hillside below. He stepped forward, trying to do so soundlessly. For a while now it had been gaining force, the impression that something was listening to him.

A stick cracked in the distance. Tom peered through the undergrowth and caught a glimpse of red between jittery leaves. He was about to call out to Nelly, when he remembered his dream of the previous week, the stumpy child raging over the roof, its face full of fury. Suddenly he was very frightened. Trees he couldn’t name pressed about him.

Fear revived the memory of an exchange that had taken place months earlier, not long after Tom had begun visiting the Preserve. A tiny fat woman he knew by sight, a friend of Yelena’s, had been complaining about another student. ‘It creeps me out, how she never says much. But just hangs about watching everything-you know?’

Yelena said amiably, ‘You are right, it is very powerful this way to be still and observe.’ Her gaze drifted about the little group drinking shiraz from a cardboard box. ‘It is frightening. Like Tom.’

People concentrated on the contents of their glasses. The fat girl’s eyes met Tom’s briefl y. A terrified giggle broke from her, and she spoke at once of something else. The conversation slid gratefully away.

Pinned in Nelly’s armchair, Tom was returned to a rainy morning when, in the course of a schoolboy discussion about breakfast, a classmate of his, a boy named Sanjeev Swarup, had said, ‘Boiled eggs make your breath stink. Like Loxley’s.’

There was the shock, never adequately anticipated, of finding himself, the sovereign subject, an object of conversation. There was the terrible content of the statement, of course. But what had pierced Tom was the casualness of Swarup’s remark; a fatal lightness echoed in Yelena’s words. Like Sanjeev Swarup, she had intended neither harm nor provocation, had referred merely to a known, accepted fact. Tom thought, So that is how they see me! It was as if he had glanced down and discovered a precipice at his feet.

It was an incident he had dismissed over time, reasoning that as Yelena and the others came to know him, their view of him had altered. If he had failed to smother the recollection altogether, nevertheless its power to disturb had grown feeble.

But now a curious notion came after Tom, took hold of him and swivelled him, as he blundered among unfamiliar trees. He had assumed that Posner’s hints about Nelly’s fragility had been designed to frighten him off. But what if the dealer had been trying to protect her? From me, thought Tom, horrified. The idea was like coming upon something unholy. He fl ed from it, refusing to look over his shoulder.

He came out of the bush on the southern trail and found Nelly waiting there. She gestured at the shawl of paddocks below them fastened with the bright brooch of a dam. ‘We should search the farm. Jack-even Mick-would’ve spotted anything obvious. But they won’t have been everywhere. There could be something they’ve missed that we’d see.’

Her eyes were pouchy, the whites stained. Tom looked at her scratched hands and grimy clothes and thought, She wants a break from this.

She was saying, ‘Like there’s this old paddock that’s going back to bush with a grassy bit still in the middle. There’s so much you can’t see from the road or take in at a glance, all these tucked-away places.’

‘Why don’t you go back to the house and have a rest? I can keep going here.’

‘I think we should check over the farm. And I’m OK. I don’t need a break.’

Tom could have sworn that the farm track was empty when they first turned on to it. Then he saw that a woman was standing by the bank, in the shade of an overhanging branch. As if released by a Play button, she began moving towards them.

‘I was just on my way up to your place.’ It was the fi rst thing Denise said, as if her presence there required justifi cation. And then, ‘Hi Nelly.’

‘Hi.’ After a moment, Nelly said, ‘How you doing?’

‘Yeah, good. You?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s good. You look good.’

This was so patently absurd that Nelly smiled. At once, something invisible altered, as if a breeze had found its way into a room.

Denise looked at Tom. ‘This bloke came into the clinic who’s done his hamstring. He said he saw your dog up near Walhalla.’

‘That’s miles away!’ But hope sprang open instantly within Tom. ‘When was this?’

‘This morning. Oh-when did he see the dog? Sunday, I think. I gave him one of your flyers so he could call you.’ Denise was digging in the back pocket of her jeans; embroidered white cotton tightened over her breasts.

‘Here you go.’ She handed Tom a Post-it. ‘I got his number, in case.’ He had his phone out. ‘Thanks. I’ll take this up to the top

of the hill.’ ‘You’re welcome to call from the farm if it’s easier.’ ‘No, it’s fine. Thanks. Thanks.’

No messages. He called his landline. Nothing. He sat on his heels in the grass beside the track. Two

magpies swooped low, a third began to sing. A long, greenish beetle lifted one antenna, toiling past Tom’s foot while somewhere a phone rang and rang.

‘Hello?’ He said, ‘Could I speak to Trevor, please? My name’s Loxley.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Tom Loxley. I think Trevor saw my dog. Is he there?’ He could hear her breathing while she thought it over.

Then she shouted, ‘Trev, you there? Trev?’ There were voices; indistinct. Tom pictured the receiver,

held against her breast. A man said, ‘Yeah, g’day?’ Tom explained. ‘Yeah, sorry mate, I was gunna call, but the day got away?’ In the background, the woman said something. Trev said

something. Tom cried, ‘You’re breaking up.’ ‘What?’ ‘I didn’t catch what you said.’ ‘Listen, mate, I dunno-’

The woman said, ‘It’s me. Shirl? What he’s trying to say, love, it wasn’t your dog.’

After a moment, Tom said, ‘Are you sure?’

‘I was the one spotted him, love. By the side of this track coupla hundred yards this side of Walhalla? Cute little tyke.’

‘Little.’

‘Yeah, little curly white fella, got a bit of that Malteser in him, I reckon? I didn’t get a real good look. Took off into the bush when I slowed down. Like he just vanished?’

‘So he definitely wasn’t…’

‘No, love. Nothing like, except they’re both white. Trev just remembered I said I’d seen a white dog.’

‘Right. OK.’

‘Sorry, love.’

The women’s faces were turned to the bend in the track. Tom saw the light go out of them at the sight of his own.

When he explained, Denise said, ‘That Trevor Opie. Might’ve known-guy’s a dickhead.’