Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

The bill arrived on a hexagonal plastic saucer, khaki with narrow orange triangles around the rim.

‘ Carson comes here,’ went on Mogs.‘Rory likes it.’ She fi tted her hat over her glossy crimson head. ‘It’s so sweet, him and Rory, don’t you think?’

‘I guess.’ Tom was thinking, Sweet !

‘Oh, awfully sad, too, of course . You’re absolutely right.’ Mogs said, ‘I mean, I simply can’t imagine it, can you? Not being able to acknowledge your child?’

Tom had his wallet out. He went through the business of selecting a note and placing it on the saucer, actions he accomplished with the slow deliberation of a dream. Then he said, ‘Mogs, what are you talking about?’

Moments passed. Then, ‘Oh, lord . Oh, how frightful. I mean I just assumed …’ Mogs tugged on a pigtail. Her long cheeks were very pink. Tom realised that he had before him one of those rare specimens not enlivened by the dissemination of scandal.

He said, ‘Just tell me.’

‘It’s only talk. Nothing at all certain,’ wailed Mogs.

Tom waited.

‘I’ve heard-well, one or two people seem to have this notion that Carson is Rory’s father. Not that Rory has the least idea.’

The waitress picked up the saucer. Mogs said, ‘You know, I’d love a glass of water.’

‘Still or sparkling?’

‘ Tap would be super.’

When she had drunk it, Tom said, ‘Why would they be keeping it under wraps? Who’d care now?’

‘Rory’s coming into money. Quite a lot , apparently.’ Mogs’s tone was apologetic, as if the sheer size of the sum made for questionable taste.‘One of those inheritance trust things. From his father’s peop- no, gosh, isn’t it a muddle? What I mean is, from the Atwoods.’

In the street she said again, ‘It’s really only speculation. I mean, I always just sort of put it together with the way Carson is about Rory. But that could so easily be Carson. Such a sweet man. And if you know nothing about it-well, that tips it quite the other way.’

She stooped; pressed her cheek to Tom’s. ‘ Lots of love to darling Nelly. And hug that brave dog for me.’ Her skin smelled of childhood: ironing and wooden rulers.‘The love we have for them,’ said Mogs. ‘Sometimes it’s almost frightening .’

In India, the Loxleys had lived half a mile from a large Hindu temple. It was neither ancient nor celebrated, but its tall gopurams, gaudily painted and ornately carved, delighted the child Tom’s eye. Pilgrims and sadhus and tricksters passed through its gates, generating noise and emotion. Now and then an elephant would sway forth from its fastness.

If Tom happened to pass the temple in the company of his grandfather, the old man would speak of primitivism and barbaric rites. Sebastian de Souza pointed out men with iron hooks in their flesh; described a reeking stone block where goats were sacrificed. If he caught his grandson looking towards the temple, he would slap him. He referred to fi lth, meaning the celestial and animal couplings depicted in the carvings as well as the rosettes of dung in the street, when it was in fact the busy little stalls selling coconuts and holy images and garlands of marigolds that had attracted the child’s interest. In this way Tom’s pleasure in the place was smudged, and the temple became associated in his mind with fear.

In his tenth year, the stories of Catholic missions he heard at school inspired in Tom an evangelising fervour. He longed to save a soul. He selected Madhu, a six-year-old whose family occupied a modest room in the de Souza mansion. In her gapped smile, he detected malleability. There was also the consideration, only half formulated but nevertheless present, that her low social status would protect him from serious repercussions should the enterprise go awry.

Screened by lush plantains, he spoke to Madhu of miracles. The child listened attentively, and repeated the prayers he taught her. But what zealotry fears is not resistance but duplicity. Tom sensed that his pupil was more interested in him than in the substance of his discourse. He felt, at the end of a week, that language alone was inadequate to his purpose. It came to him that if Madhu were to behold its images, the splendour and force of his faith could not fail to impress itself upon her heart.

Conveniently at hand, on the edge of a district that was now a slum but had once housed imperial adventurers, stood a grimy Portuguese church. Madhu trotted there after Tom willingly enough the next morning, although she faltered an instant on entering the high, dim premises. The boy took her by the wrist and led her intuitively towards light; to the great window glowing at the eastern end of the transept.

Madhu looked where he pointed and saw a sublime fl owering of the glassmaker’s art, commissioned from a French master by a belatedly pious Iberian pirate and shipped east at ruinous expense. She, however, had no means of understanding these things, let alone the allegory of suffering and redemption portrayed before her. And so she screamed and, covering her head with her arms, dashed in terror from the place.

Days passed; days in which Madhu did not come out to play, and slipped behind a purple fold of her mother’s sari when Tom ambushed her by the gate. That he grasped, eventually, what his convert had perceived was a tribute to the boy’s intelligence and the range of his imagination. In his mind he stood once again before the window. He beheld the sacrifi ce that illustrated his god’s infinite compassion; and saw, also, a man whose broken white body and crimsoned wounds the light endowed with awful verisimilitude.

That a sign might proclaim a truth as well as its opposite was in itself a disturbing magic. Further refl ection brought a more profound revelation: for if Madhu saw violence and cruelty at the heart of his religion, might there not be loving kindness in the barbarism attributed to hers?

It was an insight both liberating and shocking. Tom Loxley, dusty-toed, felt the foundations of his world tremble. It would always be possible to stroll around to the back of knowledge and look at it from the other side.

Mogs’s long stride carried her away, past the ringleted Goth buckled into black texting at the tram stop; Death to Moonlight read the legend on his T-shirt. A girl emerged from a juice bar and pranced across the street, a golden ring winking in her brown belly. A courier astride a motorcycle turned his glass face to watch her.

On a car radio, children sang, Christmas in Australia ’s hot, / Cold and frosty is what it’s not. Two boys with clipboards and biros closed in on a woman trying to slip into the supermarket. Tom put on his sunglasses against the gaudy day.

Listening to Mogs deny it, he had known he had been duped; now he was no longer certain. His mind was running with what Nelly might say, with assurances she might offer or withhold. On a suburban pavement he was privy to the interrogator’s exquisite dilemma: nothing less than the truth could satisfy, but when was satisfaction ever a guarantee of truth?

But even as he framed the problem, Tom rejected its terms. If he had got everything wrong, a mistake, levering open prospects, can reveal far more than mere precision. He saw that knowledge, which had sheltered him round for so long, had been allowed to shrink to a constraint. Over the clanking of a green tram, he was aware of unruly starlings making mock.

The lights changed. The traffic coursed forward. A skateboarder crossing the other way said, ‘I wouldn’t call it a Kodak moment, dude.’ Nelly’s laughter rolled through Tom again.

On the far pavement, iron railings clasped a municipal gum. A window held a crayonned image of a red-cloaked child and a grinning beast. Tom went slowly past uphill. Of where he was heading he had no clear sense. But what he wished, with all the force of imperial afternoon, was that he might yet be graced with courage and loving conduct in the face of everything that can never be known.