Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Nelly had said, ‘We had a thing-oh, you know, ages ago. Before I was married.’

‘I thought he was gay.’

Her hand made a rocking motion. ‘He’s not too fussy, Carson.’

The idea of her young. There was a faded Polaroid pinned to her lavatory door: high-necked blouse and tight skirt, pouty mouth, jet hair drawn into a topknot with strands falling around her face. She was twenty and looked thirteen. She looked desirable, bruised, corrupt, infi nitely oriental. ‘Very World of Suzy Wong .’ Posner’s broad-knuckled fi ngers carried the knowledge of her fl esh.

Tom knew that Rory had dropped out of university; that he lived in Posner’s house. He imagined them together: the silver head grazing a dark line on the boy’s fl at stomach.

At the solstice party, he watched Posner’s terrible eyes seek Rory out; and the boy not noticing, stroking the hair under his lip, then crossing to the throng around Yelena.

Later, when things were breaking up, a group left to go clubbing, Rory swept up in the clamour.

Watch out, thought Tom, he’s slipping your leash. He felt a small, mean joy: Posner, wakeful and alone.

It was to Yelena, early in their acquaintance, that Tom spoke of Nelly’s painting. ‘I can’t get it out of my mind.’

The girl was spooning baked beans straight from the tin onto white bread. She had a predilection for vaguely repellent snacks: fruit-flavoured yoghurt eaten between bites of gherkin, crackers topped with peanut butter and chocolate sprinkles.

Her great dark eyes rested on Tom. ‘You say it like a criticism.’

‘It’s just…’ He began again. ‘I keep coming back to how beautiful it is.’

Yelena spoke through a mouthful of beans. ‘So?’

Acutely aware of that angled face, he answered with deliberate scorn. ‘It’s an amateurish response. It doesn’t exactly advance understanding, does it?’

When she had finished her sandwich, Yelena set down her plate. She reached under the couch and retrieved the Concise Oxford .‘Amateur: one who is fond.’ There was something semiliterate about the way she read aloud: sounding each word distinctly, as if testing it out.‘It says here, from amare , love.’ She looked at Tom.‘Love is amateurish.You wouldn’t say it advances understanding?’

She abandoned him soon afterwards. Then Nelly turned up, and noticed the plate Yelena had left on the kitchen counter. She picked it up, and came and perched beside Tom, on the broad arm of his chair. ‘Look.’

The plate, smudged here and there with sauce, was rimmed in faded gilt. It showed a man and a woman conversing in a garden where a fountain played against a backdrop of pagodas and snowy peaks. Opposite this scene, a tree blossomed pinkly beside water, while overhead a plane flew through rags of blue.

Tom could see nothing remarkable about this object.

If anything he was faintly disgusted by the combination of smeared surface and pretty patterning.

Nelly was saying, ‘Plates like this, they’re usually oldeworlde. They have these pictures of frilly ladies and hollyhocks and stuff. But this one’s got a plane.’

He looked again.

‘It would’ve been the latest thing when it was designed,’ she went on. ‘A tribute to air travel or something.’

But there was something about the plane, the oriental scenery: recognition flashed in Tom. ‘It’s Shangri-La.’ He took the plate from her and turned it over, scattering crumbs. Together they read the inscription: Lost Horizon .

‘Oh wow. I remember that movie from when I was a kid.’

‘The book the film’s based on was the first literary paperback. Late ’30s, something like that.’

‘How cool is that!’ Delight stretched in Nelly’s face. ‘So this plate would’ve been doubly modern.’

She had come in from the street. Was stitched about with thready peak-hour fumes that fluttered in Tom’s nostrils.

He rubbed his nose and said, ‘That’s not quite how I’d describe it.’ He was not sentimental about second-hand crockery, having expended energy in putting some distance between himself and that kind of thing.

‘But that’s what gets me.’ Nelly said, ‘Modern can never keep up with itself. Nothing dates quicker than now.’

A few days passed, and Tom found his thoughts returning to the sauce-smeared plate. He couldn’t understand the pull. Then, without warning, the plate slipped sideways in his mind, revealing an object he had once yearned for with the absolute, concentrated longing of small children and later quite forgotten.

Auntie Eulalia Doutre, who was not his aunt, had a long, low cupboard with angled legs and sliding doors in her hall. When Tom and his mother called on her,Auntie Eulalia opened one of the doors and handed the child a wooden object for his amusement. It was a pencil box with a range of snowy mountains and a pink flowering tree painted on its lid. Tom ran his fingers over it and the lid slid to one end. He found this wonderful, the box that opened sideways, doubling the cupboard door’s smooth glide. He moved the lid back and forth, glancing now and then at the cupboard. In bed he would think about the wooden box lying in the wooden cupboard. He pushed his sheet away and drew it back over himself, and felt pleasure thrill in his marrow. The big door slid open and so did the little one. The child wished to keep that marvel safe forever.

The plum-blossom plate had this consequence too: it focused Tom’s attention on Nelly.

Tom slept in socks, tracksuit pants, a T-shirt, a fl annel shirt, a windcheater. There was a blanket on the bed, and a quilt patterned with shambolic roses. He woke at fi rst light, needles of cold in his limbs.

Falling asleep, he had told himself he would wake in the night to the scrape of the dog’s paw against the door. The moment he opened his eyes, he knew this to have been absurd.

It was scarcely colder outside. Preferring not to face the earthy reek of the dunny, he urinated off the step into a clump of coarse-leafed vegetation. In the paddock beyond the gums, cattle showed as solid, blocky forms.

He filled a saucepan from the tank, heated it on the two-burner butane stove in the kitchen. The tin of ground coffee he had brought with him from the city was still a quarter full, but the milk had run out on Sunday. He tipped two spoons of sugar into his mug as compensation.

His jeans were damp, despite having hung in front of the fire all evening. His shirts were dirty. He needed wet-weather gear. He needed boots, and clean, warm clothes. His scalp felt greasy, the backs of his knees itched. He hadn’t had a shower since Thursday; getting dressed, he held his breath against his body’s fragrance. There was no bathroom in the house; superficially spruced up, it remained primitive in its lack of amenities. It occurred to Tom that eighty years earlier, when the house was built, his odour would have been literally unremarkable. It was the transition to a modern way of life that rendered his mustiness conspicuous.

There was no more muesli, but he discovered a plastic container of oats in a cupboard. Long afterwards, the taste was still in his mouth: distilled staleness.

He was stacking dishes in the washing-up bowl when he remembered the thunder of small steps he had heard the previous night. The image of a snarling, stunted child raging across the tin roof had jolted him from sleep. He had lain wakeful for minutes, listening to the possum, the dream still runny in his mind.

His mother was expecting him that evening. He would call her in a few hours and make some excuse. Without having to think about it, Tom knew he wouldn’t tell her that the dog was missing. Iris greeted news of a sore throat or mislaid keys with screams of, ‘My God. What are we to do?’ In lives where the margin of safety is narrow, mishaps readily assume the dimension of calamities. Iris was fond of the dog; her son wished, genuinely, to spare her distress. But his protective refl ex was partly self-directed. At the age of twelve, he had realised he could endure most sorrows except the spectacle of hers. Slight, dark-skinned, bad at sport, he was able to withstand the humiliations that awaited him in an Australian schoolyard by keeping them from his mother. He reasoned that she could offer no practical aid, and that this proof of her inadequacy would be more than either of them could bear. At the same time, he grew sullen; half aware that something fundamental, the obligation of parents to shield their young from harm, was lost to him.