Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

The past is not what is over but what we wish to have done with. That year time turned translucent. Old things moved just beneath its surface, familiar and strange as a known face glimpsed under water.

It was a year of fearful symmetries. There was a fashion for shopping bags made from woven nylon that reminded Tom of the cheap totes found in the markets of India. They had handles formed from skipping rope and were patterned with serial, stylised skipping girls. Tom saw them all over the city, colourful presences signalling from women’s hands.

Once he saw a ghost. On a kidney-shaped coffee table in the window of the retro shop on Church Street stood an object Tom recognised with a small, sickening lurch. Knobbly purple glass, an elongated stopper: the amethyst double of the yellow bottle he had smashed all those years ago; as if smashing were all it took.

There was the sea-hiss of the freeway in the background. They sat at a picnic table beside the car park, devouring pizza.

The dog was licking around his takeaway container, nosing it over the gravel. When he was sure it held no more spaghetti he returned to the car and raised a shaky leg against a tyre. Then he waited by the door.

Nelly opened the door and lifted him onto the seat; placed her face against his fur. He sighed and fell asleep.

Tom crammed the empty food containers one by one into a slit-mouthed bin. Night’s brilliant little logos were starting to appear all over the sky.

He was on his way back to Nelly, advancing in a measured diagonal across the car park, when he fell. His foot tripped over nothing and he went down.

After a moment he registered pain, gravel-scorch on the palms flung out to protect his face. Also, one knee had hit the ground hard.

What was overwhelming, however, was the astonishment: the sheer scandal of falling. Tom was returned, in one swift instant, to childhood; for children, not having learned to stand on their dignity, are accustomed to being slapped by the earth.

His first instinct was to scramble to his feet as if nothing had happened. But the dumb machinery of his flesh refused to obey. The rebellion was brief and shocking; then his thoughts took a different course. He stayed where he was, the adult length of him at rest in gravelled dirt. Without realising it, he began to cry.

Later, he leaned his forehead on the steering wheel and cried. He wiped his face on his sodden sleeve and went on crying.

At some point he said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help it.’ He said, ‘I keep thinking how the rope would’ve cut into him whenever he tried to struggle free or lie down. That he’d have had to choose between pain and exhaustion.’

What Tom meant also was that while the dog had persisted in his painful effort to rejoin him, he had persuaded himself the dog was dead. What he meant was that he was unworthy of grace.

He thought of Iris doing what she could to help, adding her prayers to the world’s cargo of trust. He remembered the receptionist at the health centre who had told him about her grandfather’s dog, the ranger who had spoken kindly on the phone. He recalled the gifts of hope and reassurance he had been offered, and cried with his hands over his face.

Nelly kept saying,‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’ Tom lifted his head, and saw her hands opening and shutting. They made passes in the air as if essaying spells once familiar but long forgotten.

Grace, rocking along Tom’s fibres, murmured of wonders that exceed reason. It whispered of the miracle of patient, flawed endeavour. It butted and nuzzled him, blindly purposeful as a beast.

On the freeway, Nelly slid a CD into the player. ‘This’ll keep us awake.’

The Beastie Boys were blasting through their fi rst track when he glanced across and saw that she was asleep.

Tom took the exit ramp. In the rear-view mirror, the dog raised his head.

At the Swan Street lights Nelly woke up. The dog staggered to his feet and put his nose out of the window.

‘How come you’re turning right?’

‘Something I’ve remembered.’

The dog swayed on the back seat as they approached the bend in the empty road. Tom pulled in opposite the disused tram depot. In the sudden silence the engine ticked like a heart.

Nelly peered out at the orange-brick relic of a stubborn, unmodern need. The huge, ugly façade of the church was wrapped in forgiving darkness. But it was possible to pick out the pale figure of the saint with the child in his arms.

Tom said, ‘Perry’s Pebbles.’

She looked around. ‘What?’

‘Another time.’

And still the endless day had not used up its store of wonders. With sublime unhaste, the tip of Nelly’s fi nger began to trace a circle on Tom’s knee.

The tears that had filled his eyes started rolling down his face.

He was still crying soundlessly, unable to stop, when the dog tottered through the flat, tail waving gently, and into the laundry. There, he stepped into his basket, turned around three times while sniffing his bedding; folded his limbs, drew tail and nose together as neatly as a knot.

Tom washed his hands, his face. He breathed in the merciful scent of a clean cotton towel.

Nelly wasn’t in the kitchen. He poured warm water onto oats for the dog and placed a cloth serially stamped with the Mona Lisa over the dish.

Across the passage a light gleamed, but there was no one in the living room.

Then he noticed a piece of paper lying on the TV. He went closer and saw a hand-drawn map. It was stained and much creased. But it had been updated with the addition of a tiny, stylised dog, tail jauntily aloft.

Tom switched off the lamp and went to Nelly.

They had gone to bed late and not slept until later still. But Nelly roused him early, while it was still dark. The bedside candle she had lit lay in a shallow cup of red glass. It was the ruby and gold illumination of Tom’s solitary performances. What he desired, on the instant, was her direction. His hand passed across his hip, glided over hers, and drew her fingers towards him.

‘Hang on.’ She said, ‘Something I want to tell you.’

She had twisted up her hair, secured it with the comb he had taken from it some hours earlier. Now she retrieved his bedspread from the floor and arranged it about her shoulders. Its loose blue folds, in which tiny mirrors glittered, lay open at her breasts. The soft indigo cotton flowed like a kimono. This brazen orientalism achieved, she was ready to begin.

‘What you said yesterday about Felix taking my dress.’

Propped on one elbow, Tom waited.

Nelly said it was what she herself had suspected when she heard Jimmy Morgan’s story.

‘So I was right about Denise. Why didn’t you say?’

‘I don’t think he took it for Denise.’

Nelly was silent for so long that Tom slid his free hand into blue shadows. At which she said, ‘I think Felix took it for himself.’

I didn’t want to see her face. Jimmy Morgan’s unease slid into Tom’s mind as female flesh parted unambiguously at his touch.

Nelly murmured, ‘Like you said about Denise. If someone saw my dress, they might think they’d seen me. And also-’

‘What?’

‘Felix knew I would know.’ A little later: ‘It was his message to me. The note he didn’t leave.’

Scented molecules were being released into the air; a flower was opening, thick-petalled, sweetly reeking. The man’s fl esh fluttered and thrilled in response. Silently fl y the birds / all through us , he thought.

But Nelly went on talking. ‘It’s like he turned himself into a letter only I could read.’

Tom tried to concentrate. ‘Wouldn’t he have looked weird? People would have noticed for sure.’