Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

‘At least we haven’t wasted much time. Back to Plan A.’

Tom understood that Nelly’s briskness wasn’t directed at him alone; that one of the people she was trying to rally was herself. All the same, it set his teeth on edge.

She was saying, ‘Nees says she’ll come with us. Help us search the farm.’

Nees! Unreasonably, that grated too.

‘Thanks, Denise. But to be honest, the last thing I feel like doing right now is traipsing around a whole lot of paddocks.’ Tom said, ‘We could look over the farm tomorrow morning if you like. But let’s face it, the whole thing’s a waste of time, really.’

He saw the two of them exchange glances; adults dealing with a fractious child.

Nelly said, ‘It’s just-’ She gestured skywards. ‘This weather.’

‘Yeah, you’ve already made that point. Three weeks without food, three days without water. Wasn’t that how it went?’

Nelly started to say something. He cut across her, keeping his tone very level. ‘Just think it through. If the rope got caught up in some undergrowth, he’s been trapped in one spot for nine days without food. If he’s still alive, he’s already gone twenty-four hours without water. So if we’re looking anywhere, it’s got to be in the bush. Where you know as well as I do, we’ll never fi nd him.’

‘But the thing is to act like we will. And to try everything we can think of. Like he might’ve got free at some point. Headed for the farm looking for food and collapsed there.’

‘Yeah, he might have. And he might have been picked up by someone who dumped him on the freeway, or used him as target practice, or took him home as an early Christmas present for the kiddies. Or he might have been bitten by a snake, or a fox might have waited till he was weak enough and finished him off. We can imagine whatever we like. But believing we’ll find him out there is just deluded.’

‘It’s not, it’s hoping. It’s not like giving up’s going to get us anywhere.’

Sweaty and furious, the two of them glared at each other.

Afterwards, they wouldn’t be able to agree on what Denise said. She was looking past them, at the path climbing to the ridge. When she spoke, Tom turned his head. A dog had appeared in the distance, small against the sky.

‘Nearest vet’s Traralgon.’ Denise glanced at her watch. ‘You’ll just make it before he closes. I’ll call and let them know you’re on your way.’

Tom said, ‘The house-’

‘Leave everything. I’ll lock up and that. Just grab what you need and go.’ She was turning away, heading downhill towards the farm.

Nelly was already running in the opposite direction. Tom gathered up the dog and followed.

As the car approached the farm, Denise came racing out of the gate. She thrust a bag through Nelly’s window. ‘Thermos. Only instant but I figured it was better than nothing. Hope you take milk and sugar.’

‘Denise, you’re a goddess.’

‘There’s some honey there as well. Feed him honey,’ shouted Denise.

Nelly leaned out, waving. The dog was a sack of dull fur on a doona spread over the back seat. In the mirror, Denise stood with her wrists on her hips, watching them go.

‘Getting a bit old for this kind of caper, aren’t you fella?’ The vet’s long nose was blunt at the tip, as if someone had placed a finger there and pushed. He tickled the dog’s chest; examined the gash on his foreleg, the shallower slits above. ‘Rope cuts.

Every time he tugged on it, the rope would’ve twisted tighter around his leg. See how it’s just starting to scab over? I reckon he got free sometime in the last twenty-four hours.’

When Tom put his arms around him, the dog squirmed and struggled. His claws scrabbled on the table. An unbearably light bundle, he hated being carried. He had lost eight kilos, a third of his weight. His hips were angle brackets coated with fur.

‘He’ll need plenty of sleep, plenty of good tucker. Small amounts: four, five meals a day. No meat to begin with and introduce it gradually. Wouldn’t do any harm to have your regular vet check him out in the next few days.’

‘You know, in a way he looks pretty good,’ said Nelly. ‘Look how bright his eyes are.’

‘That’s how fasting works. The toxins go, along with the fat. But I wouldn’t like to say how much more he could’ve taken. You found him pretty much just in time, I reckon.’

‘It was the other way round,’ said Tom. ‘He found us.’

The dog licked honey from Nelly’s fingers. In the waiting room, he strained at a cage of snow-bellied kittens.

On the far side of the clipped pittosporums that separated the clinic from the street, an invisible woman said, ‘She’s good-looking in that really obvious way. You know?’

Tom put his hand over his ear. ‘What?’

In the city, Iris cried, ‘You’re not coming tonight?’

‘Ma, I’m still at the vet’s, it’s hours away-’ Tom broke off. ‘Not tonight. We’ll have dinner tomorrow, OK?’

‘What?’

‘Dinner tomorrow !’

‘All right.’

He said, ‘Ma, do you understand? He’s very thin, but he’s basically OK.’

‘I know.’ Iris had greeted the news with the same calm. ‘It’s a miracle. Saint Anthony never fails.’

‘What I don’t get is, if the rope got twisted around something and he chewed through it, or if it wore through somehow, why wasn’t the end of it still tied to his collar?’

‘Because the knot worked loose,’ said Nelly.

‘I’ve had that knot on my mind ever since he ran off. There’s no way it would’ve come undone.’

They shot past a car on the shoulder of the freeway, its hazard lights flashing. A man paced beside it, talking into a phone. A little further on, a billboard floated a lucent female over a city, replacing her entrails with skyscrapers.

‘What was it called, that magic in knots? Didn’t you say it could work for good?’

‘Do you think someone might’ve found him caught up in the bush?’ Tom was hearing a motorbike fading into the night. ‘Just untied the knot and let him go?’

‘You hungry?’ she asked.

‘Starving.’

‘Next bypass, OK?’

Tom said,‘My mother says it’s a miracle. She’s been praying to Saint Anthony.’

‘Well, there you go then.’

Nelly nudged him. ‘Look.’

In the mirror tiles that covered the back wall of the pizza parlour, two wild-eyed grotesques had appeared. Their garments were squalid, their hair feral. They were escapees from an experiment conducted on another planet. Unearthly happiness glimmered in their soiled faces.

One evening, Nelly was waiting for Tom when he rang her bell. ‘Come on, come on, you have to see this while it’s still light.’

She led him to a street they hadn’t visited in weeks. ‘Look.’

It was a flat-faced, two-storey house in a street of Federation cottages. Just completed: a skip containing rubble and crumpled guttering still at the kerb, the yard a stretch of trampled earth.

The glass panels that covered the façade of the house contained the life-size image of a low, wooden dwelling with finials and decrepit fretwork.

‘It’s a photograph of the house that used to be here,’ said Nelly.‘A digital print on laminated glass. Isn’t it brilliant? Don’t you love it?’

When a building has been demolished, the memory of it seems to linger awhile, imprinted on the eye. Here, before them, was that phantom rendered material.

The house that was there and not might have been a metaphor for what passed between them. Tom thought of what his relations with Nelly lacked: sex, answers. Straightforward things. Instead, she offered ghosts, illusion, imagery, a handful of glass eyes. Nelly offered detail and excess. Things extra and other, oddments left on the pavement when the bins had been emptied, illuminated capitals for a manuscript not written. She offered diversions, discontinuities, impediments to progress. Tom thought of scenes that present themselves to a traveller, in which confusion and brilliance so entrance that scenery itself eludes attention.