Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Nelly Zhang under flat strip lighting with damp hair falling about her face was older than she had appeared at the gallery. Tom saw the loosening skin on her neck; the hips thickened by ill-fi tting trousers.

A great draught of rain-smelling air entered with a girl in a slick yellow jacket. ‘Oh, oh,’ shrieked Yelena. She swooped on the row of little wooden feet. ‘Oh, Nelly, they look so sad. Like something left by a war.’

She had waves of golden and bright brown hair, a wide red mouth. On her feet, below long, bare legs, she wore lacy orange ankle socks and peep-toed golden stilettos. From a bag she drew plastic containers that snapped open to fill the room with the scent of coriander and lemongrass and rice cooked with coconut.

Tom saw the legs, the face made for the camera. It was inevitable perhaps that such perfection would throw up a kind of smoke-screen in his mind. Consequently, in those fi rst few weeks, images of luminous flesh and a geranium-red mouth accompanied Tom Loxley’s self-administered pleasure. He would believe, during this interval, that it was for Yelena he returned.

That initial misdirection led to others. So that months later, when he said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Nelly answered, ‘But I thought you knew.’

‘How could I have known?’

‘Didn’t Yelena tell you? You were always hanging around her.’ Nelly’s tone was severe, and bubbles of joy effervesced in Tom.

Reproached in turn, Yelena stared. ‘You’re Nelly’s friend.’

‘Yes, but at the start… I’d only just met her.’

Yelena shrugged. She was the kind of female who shrugs superbly. Men circled her like moons. The beam of her attention might alight now and then on their affairs, but only a fool expected sustained illumination.

What Tom misconstrued was mostly trivial. Like Brendon and Nelly’s talk.‘Did you know Dan Kopensky?’ one might ask, and the other reply, ‘The completely undetectable hairpiece?’ Then they would be off, their conversation splicing student houses in Darlinghurst, rip-off art dealers, Cyn Riley’s fi lm, dancing to The Sports, assorted bastards, that Canadian girl with the amazing tits, a waiter in a café in Glebe Point Road, someone called Freddie.

Tom concluded, not unreasonably, that these two were old friends. Until a chance remark revealed that they had met at a millennium party.

‘Brendon’s from Sydney,’ explained Osman. He kept his voice low, reaching under the rackety music. ‘Nelly and he knew the same crowd when she spent a year there so long ago. But’-his broad hands fell open-‘they never connected.’

He smiled at Tom. That slow smile was what people remembered of Brendon’s lover, who had the kind of face that hasn’t set itself a plan. ‘Look at Brendon dancing, so terrible,’ said Osman, who did not know, on that June evening in the Preserve, where they were holding a party to mark the winter solstice, that he would die on New Year’s Day. His mind had reverted to an afternoon in Istanbul in 1993: heavy bees fumbling the lavender outside his window while he translated an Australian poem. ‘To go by the way he went you must fi nd beneath you / that last and faceless pool, and fall. And falling / fi nd-’. He looked at Tom. ‘Find, find… what? Do you remember what comes next?’ His right hip had begun to ache.

Tom would tell himself there was no design at work in the misunderstandings. They arose because Nelly and her friends had forgotten how recently he had arrived among them. It was a compliment, this taking for granted that spared him explanations. He acknowledged, too, his own part in the confusion, his preference for observation over asking questions. He wondered, not for the first time, whether the trait was symptomatic of arrogance or caution, the clever boy’s reluctance to expose ignorance or the outsider’s fear of what might follow if he does.

No one had set out to mislead him. The agent at the controls was concocted from inadvertence and poor timing. It was the selective vision of hindsight, he reasoned, that set a fi gure in the carpet. There could be no motive for deceiving him; and only a mind corroded by evil or disease deceives without purpose.

But not everything he failed to grasp was insignifi cant. And by accumulation, even minor errors take on density and cast shadows. Reality is an effect produced by the accrual of detail, a trickery whose operations Tom had traced in the pages of countless fictions. He was unable to shake off the impression that a similar process governed his relations with Nelly, staging elaborate scenarios that mimicked the solidity of truth. These, if probed, readily revealed their flimsiness; yet who could be sure that the vista thus arrived at was not equally contrived? The bottom of the box might always be false; so Tom Loxley feared.

There was the matter of Rory.

Nelly, clashing cutlery in the sink one afternoon, addressed the boy over her shoulder. ‘You’ve known for ages Gretchen’s interested. She sets up a meeting to look at your folio. And you ring up the day before and cancel?’

‘Yeah, whatever. How come you’re suddenly so keen on Gretchen anyway? You’ve always said she had crap taste.’

‘You’ve got to put the effort in. With any dealer.’

‘Easy for you to say. Like when did you last have to-?’

But he interrupted himself to answer his phone: a sullen, square-set boy with a patch of black fur under his lip. ‘Sweet!’ he said to his caller. And to Nelly, ‘Gotta go.’ Tom he ignored.

They heard the crash of his boots on the stair; the jump that took him to the half-landing.

It was a scene that returned to nag at Tom. It reminded him of something he was unable to name. He had recognised Rory, of course: the dark boy who had laughed with Posner that first evening at the gallery. It was obvious Rory didn’t remember him, but he rather thought Posner did. At the solstice party, the dealer’s eyes had considered Tom as if he were something on a plate; something Posner might eat, or send back to the kitchen.

Yet Posner set himself to be attentive. The reedy voice, so at odds with the man’s bulk, held forth about Tom’s book. ‘James and the uncanny: it wouldn’t have occurred to me. His novels seem so thoroughly materialist. All those people hankering after all those things.’ He filled Tom’s glass from the bottle he was holding and inclined his head, fl atteringly deferential.

Encouraging a man to display expertise is the shortest path to gaining his trust. It seemed a transparent tactic.

‘And money! It’s everywhere in James,’ went on Posner.

Tom thought, And what’s more elusive, more ghostly, than money?

On the other side of the room, Nelly was laughing.

‘Mind you, it’s a long time since I’ve read him.’ Somehow it was clear Posner was lying. Tom thought, He’s prepared for this conversation. Now he’ll trot out some lit crit crap he thinks is profound.

‘There’s a sentence in one of the notebooks about going to the Comédie Française a great deal in ’72.’ Posner said, ‘I came across that, quite by chance, years ago. It had the effect of marooning James forever in the past. Eighteen seventy-two: unimaginable from the perspective of the 1970s. But I’ve never forgotten it.’ He smiled: a wet, pink-lipped, humourless occasion. ‘As it happened, I was living in Paris at the time. And I did go, now and then, to the theatre. I imagine a young man reading that in my diary one day.’ Posner looked up from his glass. ‘Quite a jolt, realising that the life you remember so vividly exists for someone else as so much historical dust.’

Tom thought, I’ve felt that too.Was, despite himself, moved.

Yet the man made his fl esh crawl.