Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

The past four days were already assuming the unreal glaze of an idyll: a time of rain broken up by windy sun, the soft, mad chatter of Tom’s keyboard, the dog curled like a medallion before the fi re.

In the evening he walked down to the adjoining farm.

Turning off the ridge road on Thursday evening, he had pulled over to let a mud-freckled Land Cruiser pass. It slowed; the driver leaned across the passenger seat. Tom saw a man with sparse grey hair and eyes half as old as the rest of his face: Nelly’s neighbour, Jack Feeney.

There was a trailer to one side of Jack’s drive, and a prevailing air of practical untidiness: old seedling trays loosely stacked, lengths of pipe covered with a plastic sheet, lax coils of wire netting. But the farmhouse clad in biscuit-brown bricks was a suburban box, neat with window awnings and potted plants; as incongruous in that setting as if aliens had placed it among the paddocks, and left a flying saucer disguised as a satellite dish on the roof.

The man who came out of the door raised his voice over the racket of dogs who lived a dog’s life on the end of a chain. ‘Help you?’

When the Australian desire to provide assistance meshed with the Australian dread of appearing unmanly, it produced the bluff menace that was Mick Corrigan’s default setting:

‘Yeah, I reckon this wallaby would’ve kicked your dog’s brains out for sure, mate.’

‘Tell you what, he’s dead meat if he goes after sheep.’

‘Saw a kangaroo hold this kelpie down and drown it in a dam one time.’

‘Can’t blame a bloke that shoots a stray first and asks questions later.’

Tom had seen those helpful blue eyes in schoolyards: ‘What about you fuck off back to the other black bastards?’

The Land Cruiser was in the carport, but Mick said his wife had driven Jack to the medical centre in town.‘He’ll be tucking into a counter tea by now while Nees finishes up work.’

‘Nothing serious, then?’

‘Nah, check-up. He’s got a crook heart. Tough as shit, but. Got to hand it to these old bastards,’ said Jack’s son-in-law magnanimously.

He insisted on accompanying Tom to the gate, contriving to suggest, under the guise of courtesy, that he was seeing off an intruder. He walked on the balls of his feet, the fi ngertips of one hand jammed in his pocket. There was something heroic- at once absurd and touching-about his gait.

When there were bars between them, he looked at Tom. Who saw looped gold in a lobeless ear, a bracelet of coppery blue tattoos; a handsome face that had started to melt under a cap of dull yellow curls.

‘Known Nelly long?’

Tom shrugged.

Mick leaned in.‘Tell you what, mate, you want to watch how you go. Look what happened to the poor bloody husband, eh.’

Tom walked back up the hill in the dirty light of a day that had gone on and on, despair dragging through him like a chain.

In April, a week or so after he first met Nelly Zhang, Tom was driving home from work when a storm broke. In Swan Street golden-eyed tramfish glided through tinsel rain. There were the oily dabs of streetlights; pedestrian doubles fl eeing through shop windows.

The traffic trickled past a travel agency plastered with images plucked from dreams. Sorry , said the bone-white script on the hoarding next door, graffiti being only the residue of a larger story.

A woman dashing between awnings crossed her bare arms over her chest. Tom put his hand on the horn.

Nelly said, ‘But you’re going the other way.’ Water was running off her hair and her arms. It glistened on her cheekbones, which were broad as a cat’s.

He turned up the hill, into the monumental sky.

She directed him through post-industrial streets, factories reinvented as offices, cafés, galleries, apartments. In a cul-desac behind the train station were four grimy brick storeys, the remains of a painted advertisement still visible on a wall whose lower reaches were covered in tags. Tom’s headlights revealed corrugated iron nailed over windows; bins and sodden cardboard in a concreted yard.

The building, a minor landmark in the area, was known as the Preserve, said Nelly, after the old ad for marmalade on the wall.‘The Fat Orange.Who needs the Big Apple?’ She had lived there for thirteen years, she told him; illegally, because her lease was non-residential.

‘There used to be a printing works on the ground fl oor. They held out until Christmas. Now there’s only us.’ Nelly indicated an estate agent’s board: Your own slice of history . She had small, creaturely hands. ‘Not for much longer.’

Posner, he thought. Us . He noticed that she had a way of pausing between sentences that rendered her talk mechanical. It was faintly disconcerting; he found himself tensing for the grind of levers.

Nelly was saying, ‘No one actually makes things any more. It’s all lawyers in lofts around here.’

The complaint of trains, and wind lifting like a voice. Cara-paced in steel, Tom Loxley was lashed about by sentiments as large as weather.

Among other things, he was disturbed-aroused, intrigued, repelled-by her spoor of spice and sweat.

She was fumbling for keys. He switched on the overhead light, and saw, in her gaping bag, a little cardboard folder that fastened across the corners with elastic.

‘Come up and have a drink,’ said Nelly.

A hundred years earlier the Preserve had been a textile mill. By the 1970s, it was housing several small industries. On the top floor, before Nelly’s time, children’s shoes had been manufactured. She showed him a box, retrieved from the rubbish on a landing, that contained wooden shoe moulds. ‘Brendon’s after them for an installation but I can’t bear to give them up.’ She set them along the edge of the tall, scarred bench that served as a kitchen counter.

Brendon, Rory, Yelena: the artists who rented studios from Nelly. The Preserve was huge.An echoing central space included a kitchen corner: sink, ancient stove, microwave, ramshackle cupboards. There were two cavernous studios and two merely large ones; a cubicle in which Nelly slept, another she used for storage. Five lavatories side by side. Each artist had claimed one, with a spare for visitors. On the facing wall someone had stencilled Cannery Row .

Tom sat in a vinyl armchair and drank whisky from a glass that had once held Vegemite. Rain rollicked against the grid of frosted panes that filled one wall. A game of Go was set out on a table. He noticed things on that stormy autumn evening that he would not notice again as familiarity blunted attention: an orange-glazed lamp base, grubby grey walls whose grazes showed blue. The heavy folds of a Pompeian red curtain which, partly drawn back, exposed a door set halfway along a passage. Tom looked twice before realising that both curtain and door were painted on the wall.

The other thing that struck him was the makeshift air of the place. It was cheaply and carelessly furnished with disparate items. People had come and gone from here, leaving marks of their passing: a lampshade that was too small for its base, mismatched cups on a mug-tree, assorted chairs.

Nelly was draping the plum-coloured towel she had used to dry her hair around the wire shoulders of a dressmaker’s dummy. It stood behind a long table on a dais by the window. A Concise Oxford with a peeling spine had fetched up under a couch. A plant pot displayed Barbie and Ken’s heads impaled on rulers marked off in inches.

One reason these things would stand out in Tom’s memory was that the Preserve was brightly-in fact glaringly-lit that first evening. That was unusual. He would grow accustomed to seeing the room velvety with shadows, in which a lamp or a string of tulip-shaped lights acquired dramatic force.