The Lost Dog

Wednesday

They sat on splintery steps in the sun, the last of the fresh milk in their coffee. An artful spray of white clouds had transformed the sky into a screensaver. The odour of cattle, a sweet country stench, arrived, then faded.

Tom’s face itched with stubble. It was a discomfort intrinsic to the wretchedness of looking for the dog, one of the small miseries that dissolved in the large one and thickened the brew. He sniffed himself discreetly. Everything that leaked from the body’s wrapping, emanations the city defeated in brisk, hygienic routs, was triumphant here.

He drew the back of his hand first one way, then the other, along his jaw. A truck coming down the ridge road changed gear on its way to the trees.

Nelly had been saying something about the apple tree in the cow paddock no longer bearing fruit. Now she scraped her spoon around the remains of her porridge, licked it, set the bowl aside.

The night’s revelations lay untouched between them. It was like opening a locked door and stumbling on a bound, swaddled form, thought Tom: the coverings could be peeled back to make sure but who would want to do it?

Something tugged faintly. Something Nelly had said the previous day. But what intervened was a bright, painted horse with a rolling eye. So that he blurted, ‘Don’t they frighten you?’

There was no context to the question. Nelly didn’t require one. She was fastening up her hair with a plastic comb, and only nodded, without pausing in her task.

In that way, negligently, she made him an enduring gift. It revealed itself by degrees, a slow enlightenment. Slowly Tom realised that Nelly neither shunned nor welcomed the past. She merely allowed it space. It was a question of accommodation. He saw that sometimes she was afraid of the shape it took. Sometimes fear is a necessary response to ghosts; but room must be found for them, nonetheless.

By mid-morning the sun, no longer a novelty, lay across their backs like a load. They were pushing forward through scrub, collecting fresh grazes. The green plant groweth, menacing / Almighty lovers in the spring. Only they were not that, thought Tom.

Birds worked and whistled. He cursed the cunning of blue gums: the rapid growth that produced density without shade. ‘We could pass within feet of him and not see.’

Nelly wiped her forehead on her arm. Her T-shirt was navy cotton with a red star on the chest; a red and blue striped football sock with the foot cut off had been sewn onto each sleeve.

One leg of her jeans was filthy. She had stepped knee-deep into the pulpy remains of a log. A thread of sweat made its way down her neck to pool above her collarbone; and Tom saw why the hollows there are known as salt cellars.

They were sitting at the foot of the tall eucalypt eating almonds and dried apricots. Withered branches lay around them like broken limbs. Gum forests so often suggested the aftermath of hostilities, the bark litter of dried bandages, the trees as bony and grey as the remnants of regiments.

Tom’s mind drifted, by related channels, to Nelly’s story of the wallaby; to the amazing teenager with the shotgun and scones.

He was tired. It took him a little while to get there. Then he said, ‘The woman Jimmy Morgan saw on the beach. Denise.’

‘Sure.’

‘No, listen. You said she was tall, even back then. Morgan said he saw a tall woman, remember?’ It was coming together with the thrilling symmetry of an equation. ‘Could Denise have got hold of that dress? The one she made for you?’

‘How come you know about that?’ And before Tom could reply, ‘No, she couldn’t have.’

‘Did the cops ask you about it?’

He thought Nelly was going to ignore the question. But eventually she said,‘That dress never fitted me. Felix got Denise to make it because I wouldn’t wear stuff he bought. And of course he got her a pattern that was way too big. I wore that dress like maybe once, to please her. Then I put it with a whole bunch of stuff to take to the Salvos.’

Tom waited.

‘Look, when the cops started asking, I couldn’t fi nd the dress, OK? So I told them I’d chucked it out in the rubbish weeks before, I didn’t know when exactly. I said they could check with Denise that it hadn’t fi tted me.’

‘So maybe Felix went through your op shop stuff and passed the dress on to Denise.’

‘Why would he do that?’

But the tone wasn’t quite right. Nelly sounded cautious rather than unconvinced.

Tom said, ‘So that people might take her for you? I don’t know. But Morgan said the woman he saw had hitched up her skirt so she could climb the dunes. A dress made for you would be a mini on Denise. And it would be tight. Awkward to get around in. Which would be why Morgan thought there was something weird about her.’

Nelly closed her eyes, then opened them wide. She said, ‘Except none of this fits with Felix and Denise. The way they related to each other.’

‘Denise had a crush on you. And just then she hated you. And being asked to help Felix would’ve flattered her. He’d have put some joky spin on it, and by the time she’d realised what it was all about and that he was going to stay missing, it was too late and she was too scared to say anything.’

‘How would she have got home from the beach?’

‘Maybe he’d rented a car. She could’ve driven his car to the beach and set up the scene with his clothes, and then he dropped her back in the rental before taking off in it.’

‘There was no record of Felix renting a car. The cops checked out all that stuff.’

‘Maybe Denise rented it.’

‘I don’t think she was old enough to have a licence.’

‘Who do you think she was then? The woman on the beach.’

‘I nearly went crazy trying to figure it all out, you know. And in the end-’

‘What?’

‘There’s all these bits and pieces. Little unconnected facts. Smart guesses. What they add up to…’ Nelly said, ‘It’s a puzzle.’

‘Puzzles have solutions.’

‘And which is more intriguing? If we knew what happened to Felix, do you think we’d be talking about him?’ She said, ‘Like I think that’s what he wanted. To create a mystery, something people would remember.’

‘Meaning you think it was all a set-up?’

‘Meaning that if he killed himself, it wasn’t there, not on that beach.’ Nelly got to her feet. ‘Somewhere else, somewhere in bush like this would be my guess, somewhere he knew he’d never be found.’

Then she said a thing that made Tom’s skin crawl. ‘It’s been at the back of my mind all the time we’ve been searching. What we might come across at the bottom of a gully.’

Every Christmas, Iris received a publicity calendar produced by the travel agency where Shona worked. Photographs of unblemished views and merry peasants presided over the feasts that governed her year: birthdays, pension days, medical appointments. Not that Iris, whose memory was excellent, needed to consult this almanac. Its function was purely magical. The shaky inscriptions it displayed were anchored to a submerged set of needs and wishes. One of these was the hope that the future would be like the past. A ringed date warded off ambulances, perverts, glaucoma, the fridge breaking down. It signified life going on as usual.

On Friday, Audrey would be driving Iris to the local health centre. There, on a moulded plastic chair, across from the disgusting poster of a man with his red interior on view, Iris would tell her story, while Doctor fingered the coffee mug stamped with the same name as her anti-infl ammatories.

Iris had decided that she would refer to ‘motions’. She would take her time: delaying the moment of diagnosis, postponing dread. She would speak of blockages, wind, the treacherous packages that slid from her, she would describe what her body withheld and what it yielded.

What survived of the tea-set was a single cup, bold red dragons on a shell-pink ground. Iris kept it wrapped in a nylon head-scarf in the suitcase under her bed. There had been a time, not so many years ago, when she could kneel beside her bed, bend forward and drag the suitcase out. But that was before verticality began its onslaught on her attention. Now it was vital to keep her feet on the ground, and the rest of herself off it.

As she drowsed after lunch in front of the TV, the improbability of having entered her eighties struck Iris anew. She thought of the long, long string of her life, so many afternoons and Easters and Julys, so many Wednesdays. How many times had she woken up to Wednesday?

There were days when being eighty-two was a terrible thing; bad days, when Iris was subject to small jagged outbursts, the remains of her temper, which had worn down like everything else. On bad days, Iris was afraid: not of what was waiting but of what was past, the arrangements that had seemed as fixed as stars and now shuddered with plastic invitation. On bad days she allowed herself to dream. She dreamed of a childhood unclouded by fear, where a raised voice signalled delight, not anger. She dreamed of a girl who dropped to her knees before a Chinaman kneeling in betel-stained dirt.

It was dangerous reverie. Iris could feel its pull. She rationed it, as she rationed the little liqueur-filled chocolate bottles Tommy brought her, measuring out doses of Cointreau and daring. She sculpted the past according to whim, as a child plays with the future; each having an abundance of material.

Iris had arrived in the world when Sebastian de Souza was twenty-seven years old. Twenty-three years earlier, he had asked for a dolls’ tea-set for his birthday. It was yet another improbability: no matter how hard she tried, Iris was unable to construct a story that coupled dainty pink china and the man whose rage had filled her childhood; the bony orb of even his smallest knuckle refused the curve of the teacup’s handle. Nevertheless, these things were true: her father had once been four years old and wanted a miniature tea-set more than anything in the world.

How could you know when something was the last time, wondered Iris. The last time a stranger turned to look at you in the street, the last time you could stand up while putting on your knickers, the last time there was no pain when you tried to turn over in bed, the last time you imagined your life would change for the better. On TV a woman sang about fabric softener, and Iris longed to hold her father’s cup; to gaze, one last time, on fearless red dragons. Her heart stuttered with the marvellous absurdity of it: that blossom-thin porcelain should survive when so much had been smashed or lost or discarded.

Beside that miracle, it was scarcely remarkable that Iris Loxley, née de Souza, who had sausage curls and climbed a banyan in the monsoon, Iris, who had an eighteen-inch waist and rode a pony by a mountain stream, that gardenia-scented Iris, bare-shouldered and straight-spined in the gilt-lace frame beside the telephone, should have mutated into this mound of ruined flesh, which had flouted gravity for eighty-two years and was afraid of falling.

Nelly had her head back, drinking water. When she passed him the bottle Tom said, ‘Have you noticed? We’ve both stopped calling.’

‘It’s the sun, on top of not enough sleep. Making us dopey.’ ‘Or because we know he can’t still be alive.’ Tom said,‘Look,

I can drive you back this evening. Or drop you at a station. No point us both wasting our time.’

‘So let’s say he’s dead. Don’t you want to keep looking anyway? We can still take him home.’

‘Hey, look.’

They bent over the wing: bone and cartilage and dusty brown feathers. Tom’s toes drew back in his boots.

‘Do you think…?’

He sniffed: nothing. ‘Probably been there for days.’

In the clearing nothing seemed to have changed. The smooth tyre, an assortment of damp rubbish. Tom had half expected the remains of brutality: smashed bones, slit corpses strung from trees. His foot stirred a set of fi lthy cardboard corrugations stamped with a brewer’s logo and uncovered a condom.

‘Did you hear the motorbike? Last night, when you were out?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘I came looking for you. Couldn’t see you.’

Nelly yawned. Then said, indifferently, ‘I walked up to the top of the hill.’

Tom fastened a length of yellow tape to a branch. Nelly was somewhere on the hillside below. He stepped forward, trying to do so soundlessly. For a while now it had been gaining force, the impression that something was listening to him.

A stick cracked in the distance. Tom peered through the undergrowth and caught a glimpse of red between jittery leaves. He was about to call out to Nelly, when he remembered his dream of the previous week, the stumpy child raging over the roof, its face full of fury. Suddenly he was very frightened. Trees he couldn’t name pressed about him.

Fear revived the memory of an exchange that had taken place months earlier, not long after Tom had begun visiting the Preserve. A tiny fat woman he knew by sight, a friend of Yelena’s, had been complaining about another student. ‘It creeps me out, how she never says much. But just hangs about watching everything-you know?’

Yelena said amiably, ‘You are right, it is very powerful this way to be still and observe.’ Her gaze drifted about the little group drinking shiraz from a cardboard box. ‘It is frightening. Like Tom.’

People concentrated on the contents of their glasses. The fat girl’s eyes met Tom’s briefl y. A terrified giggle broke from her, and she spoke at once of something else. The conversation slid gratefully away.

Pinned in Nelly’s armchair, Tom was returned to a rainy morning when, in the course of a schoolboy discussion about breakfast, a classmate of his, a boy named Sanjeev Swarup, had said, ‘Boiled eggs make your breath stink. Like Loxley’s.’

There was the shock, never adequately anticipated, of finding himself, the sovereign subject, an object of conversation. There was the terrible content of the statement, of course. But what had pierced Tom was the casualness of Swarup’s remark; a fatal lightness echoed in Yelena’s words. Like Sanjeev Swarup, she had intended neither harm nor provocation, had referred merely to a known, accepted fact. Tom thought, So that is how they see me! It was as if he had glanced down and discovered a precipice at his feet.

It was an incident he had dismissed over time, reasoning that as Yelena and the others came to know him, their view of him had altered. If he had failed to smother the recollection altogether, nevertheless its power to disturb had grown feeble.

But now a curious notion came after Tom, took hold of him and swivelled him, as he blundered among unfamiliar trees. He had assumed that Posner’s hints about Nelly’s fragility had been designed to frighten him off. But what if the dealer had been trying to protect her? From me, thought Tom, horrified. The idea was like coming upon something unholy. He fl ed from it, refusing to look over his shoulder.

He came out of the bush on the southern trail and found Nelly waiting there. She gestured at the shawl of paddocks below them fastened with the bright brooch of a dam. ‘We should search the farm. Jack-even Mick-would’ve spotted anything obvious. But they won’t have been everywhere. There could be something they’ve missed that we’d see.’

Her eyes were pouchy, the whites stained. Tom looked at her scratched hands and grimy clothes and thought, She wants a break from this.

She was saying, ‘Like there’s this old paddock that’s going back to bush with a grassy bit still in the middle. There’s so much you can’t see from the road or take in at a glance, all these tucked-away places.’

‘Why don’t you go back to the house and have a rest? I can keep going here.’

‘I think we should check over the farm. And I’m OK. I don’t need a break.’

Tom could have sworn that the farm track was empty when they first turned on to it. Then he saw that a woman was standing by the bank, in the shade of an overhanging branch. As if released by a Play button, she began moving towards them.

‘I was just on my way up to your place.’ It was the fi rst thing Denise said, as if her presence there required justifi cation. And then, ‘Hi Nelly.’

‘Hi.’ After a moment, Nelly said, ‘How you doing?’

‘Yeah, good. You?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s good. You look good.’

This was so patently absurd that Nelly smiled. At once, something invisible altered, as if a breeze had found its way into a room.

Denise looked at Tom. ‘This bloke came into the clinic who’s done his hamstring. He said he saw your dog up near Walhalla.’

‘That’s miles away!’ But hope sprang open instantly within Tom. ‘When was this?’

‘This morning. Oh-when did he see the dog? Sunday, I think. I gave him one of your flyers so he could call you.’ Denise was digging in the back pocket of her jeans; embroidered white cotton tightened over her breasts.

‘Here you go.’ She handed Tom a Post-it. ‘I got his number, in case.’ He had his phone out. ‘Thanks. I’ll take this up to the top

of the hill.’ ‘You’re welcome to call from the farm if it’s easier.’ ‘No, it’s fine. Thanks. Thanks.’

No messages. He called his landline. Nothing. He sat on his heels in the grass beside the track. Two

magpies swooped low, a third began to sing. A long, greenish beetle lifted one antenna, toiling past Tom’s foot while somewhere a phone rang and rang.

‘Hello?’ He said, ‘Could I speak to Trevor, please? My name’s Loxley.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Tom Loxley. I think Trevor saw my dog. Is he there?’ He could hear her breathing while she thought it over.

Then she shouted, ‘Trev, you there? Trev?’ There were voices; indistinct. Tom pictured the receiver,

held against her breast. A man said, ‘Yeah, g’day?’ Tom explained. ‘Yeah, sorry mate, I was gunna call, but the day got away?’ In the background, the woman said something. Trev said

something. Tom cried, ‘You’re breaking up.’ ‘What?’ ‘I didn’t catch what you said.’ ‘Listen, mate, I dunno-’

The woman said, ‘It’s me. Shirl? What he’s trying to say, love, it wasn’t your dog.’

After a moment, Tom said, ‘Are you sure?’

‘I was the one spotted him, love. By the side of this track coupla hundred yards this side of Walhalla? Cute little tyke.’

‘Little.’

‘Yeah, little curly white fella, got a bit of that Malteser in him, I reckon? I didn’t get a real good look. Took off into the bush when I slowed down. Like he just vanished?’

‘So he definitely wasn’t…’

‘No, love. Nothing like, except they’re both white. Trev just remembered I said I’d seen a white dog.’

‘Right. OK.’

‘Sorry, love.’

The women’s faces were turned to the bend in the track. Tom saw the light go out of them at the sight of his own.

When he explained, Denise said, ‘That Trevor Opie. Might’ve known-guy’s a dickhead.’

‘At least we haven’t wasted much time. Back to Plan A.’

Tom understood that Nelly’s briskness wasn’t directed at him alone; that one of the people she was trying to rally was herself. All the same, it set his teeth on edge.

She was saying, ‘Nees says she’ll come with us. Help us search the farm.’

Nees! Unreasonably, that grated too.

‘Thanks, Denise. But to be honest, the last thing I feel like doing right now is traipsing around a whole lot of paddocks.’ Tom said, ‘We could look over the farm tomorrow morning if you like. But let’s face it, the whole thing’s a waste of time, really.’

He saw the two of them exchange glances; adults dealing with a fractious child.

Nelly said, ‘It’s just-’ She gestured skywards. ‘This weather.’

‘Yeah, you’ve already made that point. Three weeks without food, three days without water. Wasn’t that how it went?’

Nelly started to say something. He cut across her, keeping his tone very level. ‘Just think it through. If the rope got caught up in some undergrowth, he’s been trapped in one spot for nine days without food. If he’s still alive, he’s already gone twenty-four hours without water. So if we’re looking anywhere, it’s got to be in the bush. Where you know as well as I do, we’ll never fi nd him.’

‘But the thing is to act like we will. And to try everything we can think of. Like he might’ve got free at some point. Headed for the farm looking for food and collapsed there.’

‘Yeah, he might have. And he might have been picked up by someone who dumped him on the freeway, or used him as target practice, or took him home as an early Christmas present for the kiddies. Or he might have been bitten by a snake, or a fox might have waited till he was weak enough and finished him off. We can imagine whatever we like. But believing we’ll find him out there is just deluded.’

‘It’s not, it’s hoping. It’s not like giving up’s going to get us anywhere.’

Sweaty and furious, the two of them glared at each other.

Afterwards, they wouldn’t be able to agree on what Denise said. She was looking past them, at the path climbing to the ridge. When she spoke, Tom turned his head. A dog had appeared in the distance, small against the sky.

‘Nearest vet’s Traralgon.’ Denise glanced at her watch. ‘You’ll just make it before he closes. I’ll call and let them know you’re on your way.’

Tom said, ‘The house-’

‘Leave everything. I’ll lock up and that. Just grab what you need and go.’ She was turning away, heading downhill towards the farm.

Nelly was already running in the opposite direction. Tom gathered up the dog and followed.

As the car approached the farm, Denise came racing out of the gate. She thrust a bag through Nelly’s window. ‘Thermos. Only instant but I figured it was better than nothing. Hope you take milk and sugar.’

‘Denise, you’re a goddess.’

‘There’s some honey there as well. Feed him honey,’ shouted Denise.

Nelly leaned out, waving. The dog was a sack of dull fur on a doona spread over the back seat. In the mirror, Denise stood with her wrists on her hips, watching them go.

‘Getting a bit old for this kind of caper, aren’t you fella?’ The vet’s long nose was blunt at the tip, as if someone had placed a finger there and pushed. He tickled the dog’s chest; examined the gash on his foreleg, the shallower slits above. ‘Rope cuts.

Every time he tugged on it, the rope would’ve twisted tighter around his leg. See how it’s just starting to scab over? I reckon he got free sometime in the last twenty-four hours.’

When Tom put his arms around him, the dog squirmed and struggled. His claws scrabbled on the table. An unbearably light bundle, he hated being carried. He had lost eight kilos, a third of his weight. His hips were angle brackets coated with fur.

‘He’ll need plenty of sleep, plenty of good tucker. Small amounts: four, five meals a day. No meat to begin with and introduce it gradually. Wouldn’t do any harm to have your regular vet check him out in the next few days.’

‘You know, in a way he looks pretty good,’ said Nelly. ‘Look how bright his eyes are.’

‘That’s how fasting works. The toxins go, along with the fat. But I wouldn’t like to say how much more he could’ve taken. You found him pretty much just in time, I reckon.’

‘It was the other way round,’ said Tom. ‘He found us.’

The dog licked honey from Nelly’s fingers. In the waiting room, he strained at a cage of snow-bellied kittens.

On the far side of the clipped pittosporums that separated the clinic from the street, an invisible woman said, ‘She’s good-looking in that really obvious way. You know?’

Tom put his hand over his ear. ‘What?’

In the city, Iris cried, ‘You’re not coming tonight?’

‘Ma, I’m still at the vet’s, it’s hours away-’ Tom broke off. ‘Not tonight. We’ll have dinner tomorrow, OK?’

‘What?’

‘Dinner tomorrow!’

‘All right.’

He said, ‘Ma, do you understand? He’s very thin, but he’s basically OK.’

‘I know.’ Iris had greeted the news with the same calm. ‘It’s a miracle. Saint Anthony never fails.’

‘What I don’t get is, if the rope got twisted around something and he chewed through it, or if it wore through somehow, why wasn’t the end of it still tied to his collar?’

‘Because the knot worked loose,’ said Nelly.

‘I’ve had that knot on my mind ever since he ran off. There’s no way it would’ve come undone.’

They shot past a car on the shoulder of the freeway, its hazard lights flashing. A man paced beside it, talking into a phone. A little further on, a billboard floated a lucent female over a city, replacing her entrails with skyscrapers.

‘What was it called, that magic in knots? Didn’t you say it could work for good?’

‘Do you think someone might’ve found him caught up in the bush?’ Tom was hearing a motorbike fading into the night. ‘Just untied the knot and let him go?’

‘You hungry?’ she asked.

‘Starving.’

‘Next bypass, OK?’

Tom said,‘My mother says it’s a miracle. She’s been praying to Saint Anthony.’

‘Well, there you go then.’

Nelly nudged him. ‘Look.’

In the mirror tiles that covered the back wall of the pizza parlour, two wild-eyed grotesques had appeared. Their garments were squalid, their hair feral. They were escapees from an experiment conducted on another planet. Unearthly happiness glimmered in their soiled faces.

One evening, Nelly was waiting for Tom when he rang her bell. ‘Come on, come on, you have to see this while it’s still light.’

She led him to a street they hadn’t visited in weeks. ‘Look.’

It was a flat-faced, two-storey house in a street of Federation cottages. Just completed: a skip containing rubble and crumpled guttering still at the kerb, the yard a stretch of trampled earth.

The glass panels that covered the façade of the house contained the life-size image of a low, wooden dwelling with finials and decrepit fretwork.

‘It’s a photograph of the house that used to be here,’ said Nelly.‘A digital print on laminated glass. Isn’t it brilliant? Don’t you love it?’

When a building has been demolished, the memory of it seems to linger awhile, imprinted on the eye. Here, before them, was that phantom rendered material.

The house that was there and not might have been a metaphor for what passed between them. Tom thought of what his relations with Nelly lacked: sex, answers. Straightforward things. Instead, she offered ghosts, illusion, imagery, a handful of glass eyes. Nelly offered detail and excess. Things extra and other, oddments left on the pavement when the bins had been emptied, illuminated capitals for a manuscript not written. She offered diversions, discontinuities, impediments to progress. Tom thought of scenes that present themselves to a traveller, in which confusion and brilliance so entrance that scenery itself eludes attention.

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.