The Lost Dog

Thursday

Tom checked the weather for the hills on the Internet: heavy rain with intermittent hail and a gale warning.

Straightening up, he was conscious of stiffness in the small of his back. As a student, he had worked part-time as a storeman; had set himself to heft cartons with the casual aplomb of the muscled boys beside him. Now he spent too many hours reading, or in front of a computer: the scholar’s hunched existence.

Palms on the desk, he stretched, relishing the voluptuous ache along his spine.

He wondered how his mother was faring that morning. Age, he thought. The undistinguished thing.

Less than a month earlier Osman had said, ‘I’m forty-seven. I won’t die young.’ He had been allowed to go home at the beginning of November, the cancer in remission; although, as he told Tom, the respite would almost certainly be brief. A hospital bed filled the living room, where chairs had been pushed against walls and a new flat-screen TV set up on the sideboard.

‘My welcome home present,’ said the effigy on the bed. ‘We watch DVDs. I can’t read any more. And who can bear the news? This election they will win for leaving people to drown.’ He looked at Tom. ‘Tell me a poem.’

‘Yet might your glassy prison seem / A place where joy is known, / Where golden flash and silver gleam / Have meanings of their own.’

When Osman closed his eyes, the curve of the ball was prominent under the lid. Cancer had made him thin-skinned. His face was in the process of being replaced by a skull, an ancestor stepping forward to claim him. Yet his ability to bring ease into a room remained.

Afterwards, he said, ‘So many poems. How come you know so many old poems?’

It was a question he had asked before, but the medication had made him forgetful. So Tom told him again about evenings with anthologies; seeing a vein-blue binding in Arthur’s hand. ‘My father taught me to read a poem aloud, and repeat it line by line. You learn without noticing that way.’

Tom could still hear entire poems in Arthur’s voice; a good voice, clear and unaffected. Arthur Loxley had been an indiscriminate reader. He had pages of Keats and Browning and Hardy by heart; also much his son would learn to call third rate. In resentful moods, Tom saw his mind as an attic crammed with an incongruent jumble. Groping for treasure, he was just as likely to come up with a gimcrack oddment.

Nevertheless, what had stuck was delight in words arranged well.

On a chair wedged between bed and bookcase, he said, ‘Even the Gatling jammed and the colonel dead is a lesson in rhetoric.’

‘You know, a thing that astonishes me. How quickly poetry has slipped from the culture. I mean what lives in memory. The remembering of poems: a collective inheritance, vanished.’ Osman shifted, trying to raise himself against his pillows. Tom sensed Brendon, squeezed in beside him, grow tense; watched love fight itself down to grant its beloved the dignity of struggle. ‘I have seen this happen in my lifetime,’ Osman went on. ‘In democracies, with no dictators to burn books. So many centuries of poems, and then-’

He looked at Tom. ‘There are people when I say this who think, how come this Turk lectures us about poetry?’ His eyes were black olives, now and then still shiny.

On his way out, Tom came to a halt in front of a picture. ‘It’s one of Nelly’s.’

‘Yeah, it’s from last year’s show.’ Brendon said, ‘I’ve only just got round to having it framed.’

The image had the depth and richness of painting. You had to look closer to see it was a photograph. Then you realised it was both: a photograph of a painting.

‘The way the paint’s laid on, you can see it even in a photo. Nelly can get these really amazing effects with brushwork.’ Brendon’s hand moved out to an abacus of railway tracks depicted at the blue hinge of evening. ‘It really gets to me, you know. I can’t bear to think of her destroying work like this.

Tom ate breakfast while loading clothes into the machine. Then he scattered the contents of drawers, searching for a photograph.

Meanwhile, his mind busied itself with this production: he was making his way down the farm track with the dog snuffling ahead on his rope when a wallaby flashed out from the bush. The dog sprang forward. But Tom kept his grip on the rope, using both hands to wind it in. The dog twisted, barking furiously. They walked on.

He had begun sketching in this scenario within hours of losing the dog. Each replay introduced a detail: his shoulder wrenching as the dog lunged forward, his skidding half-steps in the mud before he mastered the animal. An ancient corner of Tom’s brain insisted that if he could bring suffi cient intensity of imagination to this sequence, it would in fact be true.

At eight he began calling animal shelters. ‘Hang in there, mate,’ said a ranger. Tom put the phone down, and found tears prickling his lids.

There was an odd spaciousness to the morning: a dreamlike drawing out of time. At some point he realised it came from not having to walk the dog.

The campus jacarandas were staining concrete pathways blue. Exams were over; deserted courtyards and empty corridors lent the university a shifty, malingering air.

Tom settled down in his office to read a late essay from his seminar on the modern novel. ‘It was Henry James’s ambition to break with melodrama and romance and establish himself as the master of the new psychological novel. Discuss with reference to at least two works by James.’

This had elicited the following response:‘Henry James failed completely in his ambition to be a modern writer. For example he invented point of view but could not always rise above omniscience. His problems are demonstrated in his last work called The Sense of the Past. There are the implications of the title. Furthermore the novelist provides many juxtapositions of melodrama in the text, ie when Ralph, a modern character because he is American visits a family house in London (old world) that is haunted. A ghost is one of the most well known symbols of romantic discourse. Similarly the protagonist travels back in time and meets his ancestors who are dead. Time-travel is a modern device (for the time), however-’

But Vernon Pillai was rolling through the door. ‘Thomas, Thomas, how I have missed you. No one to scuttle with, claw in ragged claw.’

Vernon was a small circle balanced on a large one; an anomalous black snowman. He wheeled hither and thither, turning his round head sideways to decipher a spine, picking up letters and perusing them with frank interest. He tapped a photocopied article lying on Tom’s desk. ‘Have you read this?’

‘Not yet. Have you?’

‘Terrible. But short.’ Then Vernon pointed to a mug beside the computer. ‘That is a disgusting object.’

It was the survivor of a set of four once presented by Iris to Karen. Tom had felt the shame of it when the wrapping paper came away: his gleaming, expensive girl with a lapful of supermarket china. His agitation was accompanied by a fi erce protective surge. If his wife were to betray, by word or sign, what she must think of the gift, he would have no choice but to leave her.

Karen’s impeccable manners brought her safely through the peril, as manners are designed to do. But the mugs remained in a cupboard. Iris, visiting some months later, enquired after them, choosing a moment when she was alone with her son. Her little finger, with its salmon-painted nail, flew like a fl ag from the handle of a cobalt-rimmed cup. They had lunched off the same service, a wedding present from Karen’s godparents.

Tom said, ‘The mugs are great. But I needed some at work and Karen said I could have them. So now at last I can offer people a coffee in my offi ce.’

He saw Iris’s satisfaction in picturing his clever friends sipping from her mugs. Whatever she gave his wife was in any case an indirect offering to her son.

And so her gift ended up in Tom’s office. The mugs were patterned with white hearts on a red ground, or the reverse. Three quickly broke or vanished. The last persisted, with the stubbornness of the unwanted. Time scoured the hearts closest to its rim, leaving a row of pinkish smears. Recently the mug had acquired a chip. Stained with coffee, it was indeed sordid. Tom was helpless before it.

Vernon inserted his plump buttocks into the most comfortable chair and scrutinised Tom. ‘Where have you been darkly loitering?’

‘I took a couple of days off to work on-’

‘That will do.’ Vernon held up a startlingly pink palm. ‘I have students to bore me. You were due back yesterday, I believe.’

‘My dog ran off into the bush. I went looking for him.’

Vernon considered this briefly, testing it like a loose tooth. ‘I am very fond of animals,’ he announced. ‘I intend to eat many, many more before I die.’ He hoisted one foot, encased in a tiny, shiny shoe, onto the opposite knee. ‘Now let us give ourselves over to scurrilous reflections on our fellow inmates. Who is your preferred candidate for the lectureship? I am in favour of the Lacanian from Rotterdam who would like to live in Australia because of our beautiful horses.’

‘Oh, Christ.’

‘Thomas, you deep cretin.’ Vernon removed his spectacles and dangled them by an earpiece, always a sign he was enjoying himself. ‘You had forgotten that we’re to produce a shortlist by Monday.’

‘Can I get out of it? Are there lots of applications?’

‘No, you cannot. And yes, indeed. Including a distinguished professor who’s published extensively on James.’

‘Run along and research something lovely, Vernon.’

Tom finished marking the essay on James, dropped a faculty directive about Strategic Learning Outcomes into his recycling bin, wrote a scholarship reference for one of his postgraduates.

Among the many messages in his Inbox from strangers offering to extend his penis was an email from a student protesting her exam results. ‘How am I supposed to get into Law if I get a 2B in Textual Studies?’

He ran off a copy of the flyer he had mocked up at home. The photograph reproduced well, picking up the dog’s markings and the feathering along his legs. Tom ran off forty more; but even as he did, was conscious of plaintive notices passed with barely a glance as they peeled from lamp-posts. Have you seen Angel? That one, with its smudged image of a cat, had caught his eye just the previous week. He remembered also: Missing blue heeler (mainly red). At the time, he had smiled.

At a shelter for lost dogs, a woman said, ‘So let me get this straight. Your dog… disappears into the bush… right?… with twenty feet of rope… you’ve tied to his collar.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t deserve an animal.’ She hung up.

One of the maddening things about Nelly was that she didn’t have a phone. She could give the impression of existing in a fold of time. Walking to the Preserve to see her that winter, Tom was transported to India; to that era in his life when talk meant looking into a human face. His dealings with Nelly often uncovered these souvenirs of the past, little lumps impeding the smooth flow of time.

It was not that she was anachronistic. Nelly was open to youth, novelty, the stir of their times. She was only two months younger than Tom, but in her company he was often conscious of having lived forty years in another century. She used words not yet codified in dictionaries. It was from her that he fi rst heard of MP3 files; of memory sticks. There was also her casual familiarity with new kinds of music, the CDs Rory and Yelena burned for her, their threeway conversations about the bands playing the Corner Hotel.

Once he had seen Nelly absorbed in a game on someone’s laptop, moving about on her seat in excitement, little splashes of coloured screen light reflected now and then on her face. She was technological, thought Tom. And then, more potent than any sign, was his sense that, as an artist, she inhabited the modern age, the age of the image, while he was marooned in words.

At some point in the previous decade consumption had turned gluttonous. There was more stuff around. More people were buying it. Democracy had become a giant factory outlet. It was as if endless wealth had been converted by a malicious spell into endless want. Sometimes, late on a weekend afternoon, Tom would head to a café on Bridge Road. People crowded the pavements, shopping gathering up all classes and kinds in its dreamy pull. Isolated, spotlighted, displayed in glass niches, everyday objects took on fetishistic power, a vase or a pair of shoes acquiring the aura once enjoyed by religious icons. Such things could mean whatever people needed. They were repositories of dreams. Over espresso and the papers, Tom observed the spending that made the getting bearable: a last high-kicking performance on the public stage before the curtain of work came down.

Early one Sunday he went fossicking with Nelly at the fl ea market in Camberwell. There was a purposeful air to her, signalled by the black bag worked with yellow daisies carried over her arm. She avoided the professional dealers; lingered among the offerings of stallholders who had turned out their cupboards so they could go shopping again.

Strolling along packed aisles, Tom marvelled at the ease with which articles changed status, transmuted by the alchemy of desire. The flea market was a resting place for the debris piling up behind the whirlwind of the new. Wishes were its currency. Their force might resurrect objects no longer animated by collective yearning. A turquoise and black dress with shoulder pads, Jim Reeves’s Greatest Hits on vinyl, a brown-glazed biscuit jar sealed with a cork, a Smith-Corona typewriter in a pale-blue, rigid plastic case: Tom saw each of these leavings pounced on. Invested with fresh, private meaning, they passed once more into the treasure albums of someone’s mind.

At a bookstall there were volumes Tom could scarcely bring himself to touch: liberated from libraries, they displayed their violet stamps and yellow stains like prisoners exhibiting proofs of torture. A pile of comics looked more inviting. He fl icked through them, and saw Huckleberry Hound and Top Cat take flight, forgotten comrades spinning up from the pillows where he had lain with measles; as if memory were one of those little flip books that need only correct handling to bring their trapped images to life.

Nelly bought a pair of fingerless gloves, an openwork cardigan threaded with lurex, a handtinted panoramic postcard of the lake at Mount Gambier. Tom bought her a hot jam doughnut and a pot of pink hyacinths.

She negotiated with stallholders: ‘Would you take four for it?’ ‘Any chance you could make it two-fifty?’ He looked away from these scenes, ashamed for her. He always paid whatever was asked, not wishing to appear typically Asian.

From a tray that held a clutter of brooches, single earrings and broken chains, she drew a strand of greeny-blue plastic pearls. It lacked a clasp and cost fi fty cents.

They had arrived, at her insistence, by seven. When they were leaving she said, ‘If we’d come early, we’d have got the real bargains.’

Not long afterwards, Yelena arrived at the Preserve wearing Nelly’s necklace over pale cinnamon wool. Against that setting, it turned extraordinary: the pearls glowing, other-worldly.

Tom could hear his father: They are better than stars or water, / Better than voices of winds that sing, / Better than any man’s fair daughter, / Your green glass beads on a silver ring.

The girl noticed Tom noticing; slipped her fi ngers under the necklace and held it up. ‘Isn’t it gorgeous? My birthday present from Nelly.’

Why not? Nelly had restrung the necklace, fitted it with a new catch. The gift was enriched with her labour. Tom was reminded again of childhood: of bazaar handkerchiefs embellished with lace or stitched monograms in the weeks leading up to Christmas; of birthday greetings fashioned from images cut from hoarded foreign cards and glued to coloured cardboard with flour-and-water paste. Such things were more than links in a disaffected chain of production and consumption. They bore a human tang.

All the same, he thought, She spent fifty cents on Yelena.

It was Nelly’s habit to roam the streets of their suburb after dinner, padded against the weather in her scarlet parka. On a June evening when a southerly carried the memory of icebergs, she had coaxed Tom out with her. It became their usual way of being together.

In invisible gardens on the hill, pale camellias were the ghosts of girls locked out after balls. There was the wintry fragrance of daphne; and once-but they could never fi nd it again-a scented drift of violets escaping through pickets. Each dark street climbing west climaxed in a peepshow of a radiant city.

In Victoria Street they bought rice-paper rolls from a man with exquisite hands. A soft-bellied god smiled over joss sticks and golden mandarins. The public housing towers showed scattered patterns of light: the concrete punch cards of a superseded technology.

A girl going past said, ‘Forgiveness is really important. I forgive myself all the time now.’ Tom and Nelly shunned the narrow pavements, sauntering down the middle of the street, as people will.

Window displays drew them with the theatricality of lightdefined space. A stage in Swan Street was a favourite. For weeks it held nothing but a backdrop of translucent cloth, ivory striped with gold. It floated and shimmered, a stream, a veil. It was sacred and profane. It was almost not there. It was lively with the magic of money.

From this temple they would cross to a discount department store. Here sly comedies were enacted. Bald mannequins clad in cheap, belted raincoats thrust suggestive hips at passersby. A boy in pyjamas straddled a man’s thigh, offering him a power tool for Father’s Day. Two women who appeared to be laden from a shopping spree at the store were discovered, on closer inspection, to be bag ladies in gaping sneakers and clothes held together with pins. Everything on display looked trumpery. That was the crack through which parody made its entrance, mocking the shoddiness of all such enchantments.

Between the river and the railway lines lay a semi-industrial zone where lights were few. Streets that began with auto repair shops and small foundries ended in yards packed tight with vegetables and vines. There were herbs planted in old paint tins, ashtrays on verandah tables, rusty bed frames, palings crooked as bad dentistry.

They passed an electricity substation and an overgrown quarry. Late cars zipped by on the freeway. Mists crept up from the river. Sometimes there were fireworks staggering about the sky.

When his wife left him, Tom moved to this inner suburb because it was one of the few he could afford on his own.

In that hellish interval when the humiliation of Karen’s choice was a blade endlessly drawn across his soul, he had a singular stroke of luck, buying his flat just weeks before the property boom doubled its value.

It was a neighbourhood on the way up. The butcher had taken to stocking free-range eggs. The doctors no longer bulk-billed. Wooden plantation blinds were replacing cutwork nylon in windows. Tibetan prayer-fl ags fluttered across verandahs; neighbours fell out over parking for their four-wheel drives. Pubs that had featured topless waitresses now offered trivia nights and wood-fired pizza. It was easier to buy a latte than a litre of milk. The roomy weatherboard places on the big corner blocks were coming down; townhouses were going up. There were fewer lemon trees and more roof gardens. Construction sites gave off the odour of cement dust and prodigious money to be made. Vistas ended in angled cranes, colossal needles knitting up the future.

The marvellous city built by gold and wool had once voided its filth in these parts. The sweet-watered river of the early days of settlement had been swiftly converted into a reeking flow. A sludge of cheap housing appeared, row after row of wooden cottages: so many fl imsy coffins in which to bury the ambition of another century’s poor. It was the kind of suburb where people had lived in tiny buildings and worked in huge ones. Tanneries set up beside the river; later, factories. They were symbols of a great metropolis, signs that the colonial city was no longer raw material but an up-to-the-minute artefact.

Now the echoing shells of these industrial molluscs promised Prestigious River Frontage; or what one copywriter called An Envious Lifestyle. The riverside path had taken on rural airs, with poplars and gums and unruly willows. Men and women sweated doggedly along its length, or lunched on terraces overlooking the water. Wealth was inserting itself into this newly fashionable terrain, as decoration accrues on a renovated façade.

In the course of their walks, Nelly and Tom noticed that some shop fronts displayed a commemorative plaque. ‘William Merton, bootmaker, conducted business on this site in 1899.’ ‘Alice Corbett ran a bakery here in 1920.’ The memorials were puzzling in their arbitrariness, offering no indication why these places, dates and citizens had been singled out. Tom discerned the willed creation of a sense of the past: a municipal mythmaking. It produced the inscriptions in parks that signalled a site pregnant with meaning for the people who had lived here first: a tree where corroborees had been held, or one whose bark had served to fashion boats. Cloaked in virtuous intention, these signs functioned insidiously. They displaced history with heritage, plastering over trauma with a picturesque frieze. A spectator might have their detail by heart and no inkling of the chasm that separated bark canoes and William Merton, bootmaker.

The unofficial past flared more vividly, illuminated in matchlit glimpses. Tom and Nelly paused before roadside shrines dedicated to lives that had ended violently: makeshift memorials composed from soft toys and plastic fl owers. There were dates, photographs, greeting cards on which the ink had blurred. Each shrine was a little gash in the illusion of continuity. Propped against walls or fastened to poles, what they proclaimed was the terrible fact of rupture.

Nelly talked of people in cities needing to find places that seemed to speak to them privately; places that detached themselves, like spots of time, from unmemorable surrounds.

They discovered they were both drawn to a convent school that stood beside a traffic-choked intersection a few miles to the north. Stiff pine trees lined its high perimeter wall. Painted white, an arcaded verandah on the upper floor glimmered in the apertures between dark branches.

It was the trees, they agreed, that gave the place its aura: setting it off from the polluted streets, suggesting an enchanted domain. At the same time, the pines were ambiguous presences, their green-black wings suggesting menace as well as protection.

Tom said the scene reminded him of a woodcut in an old book of children’s tales. It was like something remembered from a dream, said Nelly. ‘Something marvellous and strange you can almost see under the skin of reality.’

Tom described a tiny pair of opera glasses, imagined by Raymond Roussel, to be worn as a pendant. The writer had envisioned each lens, two millimetres in diameter, to contain a photograph on glass: Cairo bazaars on one and a bank of the Nile at Luxor on the other.

Nelly yearned for this virtual object; as Tom had known she would.

One day she produced a calico bag from her pocket, unfastened the drawstring at its neck and tipped its contents into her hand. When she opened her fingers, her palm was full of eyes. They had belonged to her grandmother, who had inherited them from her great-grandfather, who as a small boy in London had been apprenticed to a manufacturer of dolls. It was the child’s task to separate the black and brown eyes from the grey and blue ones, and then to sort each group again, in precise gradations of hue.

Nelly moved her fingers. Blue eyes shuddered in her palm. Kingfi sher, cornflower, steel. Smoke crushed with violets. Tom looked at them, and they looked back. It was impossible not to avert his gaze.

They spoke of the past, discovering each other. Tom learned that Nelly was an only child. Her mother had died when she was fifteen, her father was into serial marriage. There had been a goldfish called Fluffy.

It was not much to go on. He knew that Nelly had once been married, but little beyond that bare fact. A stray remark of Posner’s confirmed that the union had been short-lived. Tom longed to know more, of course. But he wouldn’t question Posner; and Nelly had a trick, to which he did not immediately tumble, of deflecting questions about herself with enquiries of her own. She drew from him stories of childhood, women, sorrows, travel, his preferences in matters trivial and weighty. What’s the fi rst thing you remember? Would you rather live in the mountains or by the sea? What’s something you regret not doing? Describe a perfect city. Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else.

It was the kind of talk that takes place in bed. Except that Nelly, despite the intensity of her attention, withheld all bodily intimacy. She never touched Tom. Her hand didn’t accidentally brush his; an occurrence that, in any case, is never accidental, and requires collusion. It occurred to Tom that even her enthusiasm for their walks might be a device for avoiding closeness. There was the Wordsworth precedent: William and Dorothy out striding the dales for fear of what might take place between them in the confines of Dove Cottage.

One day he came to a decision as he was leaving the Preserve

with her. On an unlit landing, he grasped her arm: ‘Nelly.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

The dark, confined space seemed to concentrate her odour. A succession of scenes, purely pornographic, was unreeling in Tom’s mind.

She disengaged herself, and continued down the stairs.

He swore that was the end of it. He lay on his bed compiling an inventory of the ways she repelled him; his cunning fl esh working all the while at its own satisfaction.

Over the days that followed, what remained was his need for her. And beyond Nelly, for the world she had created. He missed the drift of people in and out of the Preserve, improvised meals and conversations, the jokiness. The sense of being caught up in a wide spate of imaginative work.

Small scenes haunted him. Nelly and Osman bent over the sink with dripping raspberry icypoles. Someone’s kid in stripy leggings riding a Razor scooter up and down the passage. He left a café without ordering, because a shelf behind the counter held a pink plastic sugar canister with a grey lid, identical to one in the Preserve. Lifting a glass from a sink of soapy water, he noticed the rainbow membrane of detergent stretched across it. His first thought was, Nelly would like that. Then he remembered. Her footsteps retreated through him down a cold stair.

To the raw ache of solitude he applied his usual balm of work: marking essays, reading, typing words onto a screen late into the night. The dog would leave his basket to settle on a rug in the study; first turning around thrice, an apprentice sorcerer. Later he would go out into the yard.When he returned, his fur carried the mineral scent of earth into the room.

Tom went to the cinema; out to dinner with colleagues. Then, at the end of a blunt winter’s day, in the act of transferring a packet of buckwheat noodles from a shelf to a supermarket cart, he froze. Pride, which had seemed insurmountable, lay in ruins: toppled, like that, and the view a sparkling clarity. What counted was that Nelly was not indifferent to him. He might learn from the discipline she imposed. An obstacle might be a gift, deferral conceived of as a slow striptease.

There was also the novelty of the situation. Tom was a product of his times: what he knew of preludes was swift and unambiguous. Among other things, his curiosity was pricked.

There was no point going back to the country on Thursday night, Tom decided. He would sleep more soundly in his own bed; would rise early and drive up to the hills.

So he went looking for Nelly at the Preserve. But found only Rory, who told him that Nelly had not been well, and was staying at Posner’s. ‘One of her headaches.’

It had happened before. Tom told himself again that what mattered was Nelly having somewhere to go, someone to look after her. Once again the formula failed to counter his jealousy.

He became aware that Rory was studying him; covertly, the narrow eyes rapid and darting. Tom could not remember having been alone with him before. Silence lay between them, awkward as a beginning, heightened by the weather slapping at the panes.

Tom said, ‘Could you tell Nelly I need to hang on to her keys? I’ve got to go back to the bush for a few days.’

The boy nodded.

‘I’ll be off then.’

Rory said, ‘You OK? You look a bit shabby.’ Having blurted it out, he glanced away.

Tom thought, I forget how young he is. What he had diagnosed as sullenness, he now saw as the caution of someone who was trying to find a way of being in the world.

He told Rory about the dog.

‘That’s awful.’ The boy tugged at the hair under his lip, fingered the zip on his jumper. He was in the habit of touching himself, as if to make sure he was still there. ‘You should go up to Carson ’s,’ he said.

‘But Nelly-’

‘She’s OK. Out of bed. I saw her at lunch.’ Rory pulled the zip down a little way, then did it up again. Tom understood that the boy was looking for something to offer him.

Rory said, ‘You should tell her what’s happened.’ His sympathies were engaged by Tom’s predicament, but what had just entered his mind was the table mat his mother used to place under his bowl when he was very young: a sunny circle stamped with bright blue butterfl ies.

‘Go up to Carson ’s,’ he repeated.

‘Yeah, thanks. I will.’

On an evening in late July, Tom had arrived at the Preserve to find Brendon angled over the stove. He resembled a hinged ruler, his long body forever obliged to fold itself into defi cient spaces.

Nelly, on the couch with her feet tucked under her, was talking about Rory. ‘So now there’s this band. I mean it’s good he’s going back to music, he used to be a really good violinist, and these guys are great, he’ll get a lot out of playing with them. But that’s the end of painting, although he says it isn’t.’

‘No reason he can’t do both,’ said Brendon.

Nelly’s hair was fastened on top of her head, her eyes and mouth were painted. Her face, always pale, had been powdered rice-paper white. Her concubine look. Tom had known her long enough to understand it signalled defensiveness.

She said, ‘But he won’t. Not seriously. He won’t paint in a focused way because all his energy’ll be directed at this band. He always gives a hundred and ten per cent to whatever he’s just taken up.’

‘Well, that’s not a bad thing,’ said Brendon easily. He looked at Tom. ‘Coffee?’

‘Yeah, it’s not a bad thing if it lasts.’ Nelly twirled a vagrant strand of hair around her finger. ‘But there’s this burst of enthusiasm and then-’ She exhaled theatrically.‘I don’t know, sometimes I wish he wasn’t coming into all that dough. It’s like he doesn’t have to make an effort, you know?’

Tom sipped Brendon’s heart-stopping brew and was stabbed with impatience. Nelly grimacing, her jaw tense, was almost plain. ‘Why do you let Rory get to you?’ he asked. He remembered the earlier exchange he had witnessed between the two; and in that instant knew what it mimicked. ‘You act like you’re his mother or something.’

Afterwards, he would remember their faces: aimed at him, oddly still.

Until, ‘I am his mother,’ said Nelly.

Nelly poured herself a glass of wine. Pushed up the sleeves of her jumper.

Brendon said, ‘I’ll leave you guys to it,’ and carried his cup into his studio. Moments later, a cello began to fl ow.

Tom felt the familiar jolt: he had misunderstood. The thought dropped open, and what lay underneath was the suspicion that he had been misled.

But he knew Nelly had been married. And then, with hindsight sharpening his vision, he could see the resemblance be tween mother and son: attenuated, but discernible all the same in the shallow-set eyes, the rather heavy moulding of the chin.

It was the kind of oversight to which Tom was prone. He lived in a country where he had no continuity with the dead; and being childless, no connection to the future. Most lives describe a line that runs behind and before. His drew the airless, perfect circle of autobiography. What he missed, in the world, was affi liation.

He felt immensely foolish.

Nelly was talking. He retained facts. Her husband taking off-a phrase Tom would remember-when Rory was four. The turmoil; life going awry. ‘It was like the plates shook and fell off the wall.’ Her in-laws trying to get custody of the child.

She continued to speak of these things as if Tom should have had prior knowledge of them.

‘I used to spend more time at Carson ’s place when Rory was still a kid.’ Nelly looked into her empty glass. ‘He’s been really good to us, Carson.’

It sounded stilted. Tom looked at her averted face and thought, You know I don’t like him.

He said, ‘I should have joined the dots.’

Nelly gestured-Oh well. ‘Rory’s not round here much when you are. I guess you never heard his surname.’

Tom said slowly, ‘Atwood. Rory Atwood. I’ve heard him on the phone.’

He saw that Nelly was, among other things, fearful.

She made a noise: half laugh, half groan. ‘Oh crikey. You really don’t know, do you?’

It was Tom who felt afraid, then, of what he was about to learn.

‘I used to be Nelly Atwood.’ The voice was gentle. ‘Nelly’s Nasties. Remember?’

Posner’s house, on a corner block, was high and broad, built of grim bluestone hand-chiselled by men in chains. A wrought-iron fence around the garden brought impaling to mind. Formal beds restrained by low box hedges contained the kind of roses whose icy perfection was impervious to common rain.

Tom had steeled himself for Posner, but a stocky brown man answered the door. He wore blue overalls with a logo on the pocket. Tom asked for Nelly; gave his name. There was the sound of vacuuming from a room off the hall.

‘Ah, Nelly.’ The cleaner smiled, stepped aside; pointed to the stairs.

An overalled woman looked up as Tom passed an open door but went on with her work.

The arched window on the half landing looked out on to a deep back garden. Bowery, treed; a stone birdbath on shaggy grass. Just then, as so often at the end of a rainy afternoon, the sun shone. The garden showed shadows and spotted light. Flowers were everywhere, fat spillages of cream and pink, belled blue spikes, frothy lemon. Leaves and grasses moved, the scene shaking in light.

‘Hi.’ Nelly had her arms on the banister. Light was dangling in her black hair.

They stood awkwardly, not having, in all these months, evolved a satisfactory way of greeting each other.

Tom indicated the window at his back. ‘So glorious.’

Nelly was wrapped in a shawl he hadn’t seen before, swarthy red stamped with tiny cream and golden flowers. She said, ‘Going from the front to the back of this place is like one of those movies where the librarian takes off her glasses and starts to unbutton her blouse.’

‘That’s exactly right. That garden’s wanton.’

‘We could sit out there.’ Nelly peered at the landing window. ‘No, everything’ll be wet. Let’s just look at it from my room.’

He said, ‘How are you? Rory told me you were here, that you’ve been ill.’

‘The usual. A headache. Such a drag. I’m heaps better, thanks,’ said Nelly.‘I should’ve gone to college today. But there’s all this.’ A gesture. ‘I’m getting soft.’

All this was a long room, light-filled. The bed was high and wide; a disarray of square and oblong pillows, dull silk contrasting with smooth cotton. Tom took in a lacquered cabinet with intricate locks, a glowing rug, books with opulent jackets on shelves and tables. Things Posner could give her.

He conceived of it as a transaction between Nelly and the dealer: unvoiced and understood, with the gleaming presence of Rory at its core. His early sense of Posner’s relations with the boy had since wavered from certainty. Rory’s manner towards the former seemed unencumbered; wholly free of the lover’s charged style. Nevertheless, time and again, Tom had seen Posner’s gaze find and follow the boy. Need settled on Rory, and sucked.

A book, partly obscured by another, lay on Nelly’s bed: Vanished Splendours, and the fragment of a name, Balthasar Klos-. It was a name Tom recognised and didn’t recognise, a name on the edge of memory.

Nelly had crossed the room and was pushing up the sash. Beads of water edged sill and window.

‘And your book?’ she asked. ‘Did you get it fi nished? Was the house OK?’

Tom sat in a low, embroidered chair by the window and began to talk.

‘I’m coming with you,’ said Nelly.

She had placed the decanter and a glass beside him and prepared tea for herself, saying she was off the grog. Now she sat with fingers laced about a translucent grey bowl. ‘I’ll help you look for him. We’ll cover more ground than if you’re by yourself.’

But Tom had observed the indigo stains below her eyes; the tight, whitish lips.

‘Do you think you’re up to it?’

‘Sure.’ But her eyes travelled to the table by the bed, and he saw the pills there on a wicker tray.

‘Why don’t you see how you go over the next couple of days? It’s pretty bleak up there with all this rain.’

He expected her to protest, and when she didn’t, understood that he had been right not to take up her offer.

‘I’ll be back by Sunday,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to see my mother.

And there’s a meeting I can’t get out of Monday morning. If he doesn’t turn up tomorrow, we could go back together next week.’

She was refilling her bowl, her head bent over the task. There was something unfamiliar about her presence; then Tom realised it was the clean smell of her hair. It had been washed in something herbal, faintly medicinal; rosemary, he thought.

Later he carried his glass and Nelly’s tea things into a recess off the landing that had been fitted up with a sink and cupboards. When he came back into the room, an object caught his eye. It was the small folder with elastic fastenings he had first glimpsed in Nelly’s bag all those months ago. Its blue and red marbled cardboard was furred, as if much handled.

She was still sitting by the window. The wind had risen and the room was cold. Tom lowered the sash. Two lorikeets, feathered purple and crimson and green, flew up from the muscled mauve arms of a eucalypt: a Fauve canvas come to life.

Nelly said, ‘You mustn’t be hard on yourself.’ She leaned forward. ‘You were doing the right thing, keeping him on a long lead.’

Tom allowed himself to place the back of his hand, very lightly, against her cheek.

He could find his own way out, he insisted, and left her settled in her chair. But he was still on the stairs, when he heard her call and turned to see her come out onto the upper landing. ‘Your book. Did you get it done?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hey!’ Nelly crowed with pleasure. ‘That’s great.’

Gazing down on him, hung with heavy ruby folds, she had the air of a tiny idol; one who might save him or do him great harm.

Downstairs, lamps had been switched on against the gathering evening. The glare of parquet was everywhere. A spotlighted alcove sheltered a pre-Colombian figure carved from stone. For a split second Tom saw the miniature double of the squat brown man who had let him into the house.

Paintings filled the walls. But Tom would not allow himself to linger before Posner’s trophies.

Nevertheless, as he came to the open door of the room where the woman had been vacuuming, he halted. Gleaming wood and muted jewel tones repeated the message of wealth tempered by taste that the house had been designed to communicate. But what held Tom’s attention was the landscape on the far wall.

He had forgotten how small it was. With light steps he crossed the room until he stood in front of it; and felt again the force of something that could not be contained in rational dimensions.

A reedy voice at his back murmured,‘How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a fl ower?’

The pale pillar of Posner was rising from the black scoop of a chair. For a large man, he moved as if oiled.

A dribble of dismay made its way down Tom’s spine. That he should be in this place, twitching in Posner’s snare. That he should have been discovered coveting what Posner possessed. That Posner, a gross, material creature, should have Shakespeare at his disposal.

‘Not at all,’ said Posner, although Tom had not apologised. He spread his hands. ‘It exerts such a pull. I feel it myself.’

He came up close to Tom. Who was conscious, unexpectedly, of Posner’s appeal; of the calm that would follow submission to that pearl-glazed mass. He could offer up the gift of himself, and Posner would keep him safe in his pocket. He would take him out now and then and polish him on his sleeve.

‘I mean, just look at it.’ Posner’s hand rested on Tom’s shoulder, urging him gently around. ‘I think, I think, what makes it extraordinary is the way it risks sentimentality. How it doesn’t shy away from sheer gorgeousness. The way she’s laid on that paint. And this.’ His finger hovered above a rectangle of gold and burnt orange. ‘The whole thing’s such a huge risk. And she confronts it and makes use of it. Subordinates it to a larger design, like this scrap of Chinese paper. It’s an exorcism, in a way. It looks something dangerous in the face and accepts it. Controls it. And you think, How absolutely fucking marvellous.’

His fingers tightened a little on Tom’s shoulder.‘Would you like to touch it?’ His mouth approached Tom’s ear. ‘Touch it, if you like,’ breathed Posner.

After dinner, Tom assembled clothes, food, the equipment he had bought that afternoon. He checked his list again, aware that he was not entirely sober. He had begun drinking as soon as he had got home, and had kept it up more or less all evening.

He added a tube of Beroccas to his overnight bag.

It was his habit to try for private truthfulness. He paused in his preparations to acknowledge that what disturbed him most-more than his sense that Posner had anticipated the entire episode, more than his flustered, schoolboyish retreat- was the flicker of acquiescence Posner had drawn from him.

A champagne-bright afternoon in winter; the blank interval that July during which Tom had sworn off Nelly.

In a paddock by the river, where a post measured fl oods in imperial feet, he unclipped the dog’s lead. A giant metal man stood sentry over the place, one of a series of pylons striding beside the freeway. But there were also eucalypts and wattles deep in waving grasses, or leaning over the water. To leave the bike path for the leafy corridor that dipped into the paddock was like returning to a scene almost forgotten.

The dog vanished over a bank; reappeared eventually with damp paws. He never went out of his depth, but stood in the sluggish current even in the coldest weather, attentive to ducks. Sometimes a dog on the far side of the river made him bark.

Time passed. Shadows stretched over the beaten tin surface of the water. The sun was easing itself earthwards with the caution of an old, exhausted animal. In the yawning sky, which was still full of light, a dark path opened and lengthened. It was the city’s daily visitation from horror. The bats streamed up from the botanic gardens, following the river’s chill road to the orchards waiting in the east.

Tom walked back into the baroque ruins of a sunset, rose and gold curds whipped up in a Roman dream. It was a city that put on wonderful skies. He thought of a cloudscape in one of Nelly’s pictures: oyster-grey puffs blown over a yellow bed.

Up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour / Of silk-sack clouds! Then he remembered believing, as a very young child, that the sun and the clouds followed wherever he walked.

A voice from a hedged garden hissed, ‘You’ve had every opportunity.’ But when Tom turned his head, there was no one there.

Without having intended to, he found he had deviated from his course and was in the vicinity of the Preserve. He began to fantasise about turning a corner and coming face to face with Nelly. This flight of imagination was so persuasive that the smell of her entered his nostrils. He saw her hand, emerging from its padded red sleeve, in the dog’s fur, and noticed what had escaped his attention until then: a tiny corkcoloured blemish between her thumb and index fi nger.

He came to a halt at the junction of two streets, beyond which the bulk of the Preserve detached itself against the darkening sky. The upper storeys could be plainly seen above the surrounding buildings. Nelly’s studio, which lay on the far side, was invisible, but the wall of panes in the central room was a sheet of gold, and Rory’s windows were lined with light.

The dog clicked to and fro on the corner; he wished to return to his dinner. With the onset of evening, it was very cold. Tom slipped his free hand into his pocket.

At that moment something pale moved in the shadows above the Preserve. In Tom’s chest a muscle jolted. With that first shock, he took an instinctive step backwards. Then, straining to decode the vision before him, he stood stone-still and peered. Posner was walking on the roof of the Preserve.

It was where Nelly and the others went to smoke. What business Posner, a non-smoker, had there on an icy evening was not apparent. Then it occurred to Tom that he might not be alone. Nelly might be strolling there, hidden by the parapet, drawing poisonous spice into her lungs, while the dealer regaled her with a witty dissection of the motives of the fi gure shrinking on the pavement below.

Posner came to a halt, the whey circle of his face directed at Tom. Who told himself that in his dark fleece, at that distance, he was invisible to the watcher on the roof. He mastered an impulse to look away; made himself return that blind gaze. For a frozen passage Posner and he remained motionless, stricken with each other.

But there was the dog, a patch of light shifting at Tom’s feet. He placed his hand on the furry spine and pressed. The dog sat.

This obedience so surprised Tom that he glanced down. When he looked up again, Posner had vanished.

The chill of the street, seeping up through his boots, had entered Tom’s marrow. He shivered, and heard soft growling. The dog’s hackles had risen. There must be a cat somewhere close at hand, crouched in the darkness that had spread like leaves.

Tom went in and out of rooms in his flat. In the laundry, a blanket-lined basket still held the dog’s smell.

He found himself flicking through his address book. The dog had belonged to his wife. Tom had picked him out with her from the animals with their noses pressed to the mesh at the shelter; but he was Karen’s birthday present, technically hers.

The presumption of it struck Tom now: that one should speak of ownership in relation to nerved fl esh.

He sat on his bed and punched in a series of numbers.

On the other side of the globe, his wife said,‘Karen Clifford.’ She had retained the crisply professional manner she had honed as a solicitor, crisp professionalism being a quality by which she set great store.

In those same clear tones, designed to purge conversation of the pungent and ambiguous-to make speech over as communication-she had informed Tom that she was leaving him for a human rights lawyer who had just been appointed to the Hague. ‘Hugh’s doing absolutely vital work for asylum seekers,’ she had announced, with her little characteristic gesture of tucking her hair behind her ears.

Hugh’s manifest superiority thus established, it was plain she expected her husband to raise no objection.

With time, as he picked over the rubble of his marriage, Tom Loxley realised that its end repeated its beginning, each having its origin in the erotic coupling of virtue and transgression. Karen was the product of the usual liberal, middle-class upbringing that tolerated Asian immigration while not expecting to encounter it at the altar. The prospect of union with Tom had satisfied both her need to rebel and her social conscience; the same erotic fusion she sought, years later, in adultery sanctified by the pro bono advocacy of Hugh Hopkirk.

Yet Tom knew he was not blameless in what had failed between them. With hindsight it was obvious enough: a fact as large and plain as a wardrobe.

A few months after he met Karen, she got pregnant. They had been unlucky: a condom had burst. Neither wavered over their course of action, their dialogue regretful but charged with practicalities. Afterwards, they were sad together; also relieved. They had been sensible. There was the sense of having averted something that had the capacity to engulf them. They held hands on the beach at Queenscliff, and what Tom noticed was the unimpeded horizon.

They spoke of the business of children now and then in the years that followed, prompted by the arrival of other people’s babies; or, as their generation aged, by protracted, harrowing encounters between depleted flesh and biotechnology. Meanwhile, Karen would roll her eyes, telling him of this or that colleague who had chosen ‘the Mummy track’.

She worked fifty, sixty hours a week, often spending a day and a night and another day at the office. When she was made a partner, they celebrated with five days at a resort in Tahiti. In the airport bar, waiting for their flight home to be called, she looked up from her second vodka tonic. ‘Look: this whole children thing. I just don’t want to go there, OK?’

Her pale eyes, always very clear, were luminous in her tanned face. Tom was visited by a brief, brutal need to take her to a private place and ram himself into her. A blurred

voice overhead announced destinations, delays.

He said, conscious of awkwardness, ‘Of course it’s OK.’

‘Sure?’

‘Positive. It’s exactly the same for me.’

‘That’s good.’

Time passed. Tom witnessed the lives of men and women he had known for years bent into new configurations by the impact of children. He understood, with the brain not the heart, as one understands a syllogism, that paternity might represent an enlargement of experience; to him it seemed dilution. Babies arrived and individual histories thinned, became difficult to distinguish from the great biological tasks. The small parcel of clotted tissue he had helped bring into being rarely crossed his mind; and never as a lost possibility in his marriage.

It didn’t occur to him to doubt that these things held true for his wife as well.

Yet a year after she left him she had a child; and then another. A boy and a girl, the right number in the right order. It was all very Karen: perfectionism in everything she undertook. Malicious friends reported on impeccable toddlers, sleep-schooled and potty-trained within months of arriving on earth. There was a rumour that the three-year-old had begun violin lessons.

It was gossip Tom relished and propagated. At the same time, recognising that Hugh Hopkirk had addressed what he himself had neglected to notice in Karen: an aptitude for love infinitely larger than any caricature concocted from her fl aws.

It was to that sense of something private and true in the woman who had been his wife that Tom spoke now, across the silence of oceans, telling her what had happened.

She said, ‘Oh, God. Oh, it’s too horrible.’

When leaving Tom, she had wept for the dog. Who could not be conveniently transported to the Hague.

Tom talked of the cold in the hills, the unseasonable spring. Then he spoke of the dog’s strength, his freedom from the diseases of old age. Ending weakly with, ‘I still stick to that diet you came up with for him. Always.’

It became clear, to him at least, that he was trying to prove he had not fallen short of her standards.

‘I’m going back first thing tomorrow. I’ll keep looking. I haven’t given up hope.’

He massaged his neck, his temples.

Into the silence Karen said, ‘He must have hanged himself.’ Her voice, which had wavered earlier, was now fi rm. ‘The rope would have got caught up around a tree or something and he’d have gone over the edge of a gully and broken his neck.’

When Tom didn’t reply, she said,‘It would have been quick. He wouldn’t have suffered.’

She sounded quite calm; even contented, having found consolation in picturing an animal she had loved dying at the end of a rope.

The microfish darted through Iris’s mind, flashes of emerald and garnet and iridescent opal. She never thought of the little fish without feeling comforted; even though they had taken away her job as a filing clerk in the department store, where she had been happy, in her pale blue uniform, for four years, splashing out once a week on a hot lunch in the cafeteria, choosing chocolates from the revolving assortment in Confectionery to take home on a Friday. Even now, so many years later, as she sat on the lavatory slow with sleep, the warm, sharp scent of banknotes rising from her pay-packet remained distinct to her.

Then Mr Parker called everyone together and said the microfish were taking over. Some of the girls began to cry. Mr Parker was a knife-faced man with an infinite capacity for kindness. His pinpoint eyes moistened readily; when the girls clubbed together for a layered sponge on his birthday, for instance. His moustache quivered as he spoke of redundancies throughout Clerical. ‘Length of service doesn’t come into it. My own future’s on the line.’

Tommy had said that the microfish weren’t fish at all. ‘Christ, Ma, I can’t believe you thought they’d trained fi sh to take over the filing. That’s really dumb.’ He was sixteen, a scornful age. Iris had long forgotten, having in the fi rst place not understood, his impatient explanations. But she could remember the long filing room, with its green-shaded lights and the row of potted plants Mr Parker tended under the high window. It looked to her not unlike an aquarium. And whatever her clever son had to say about microfi sh, Iris had heard from Mr Parker’s own lips that his future was on the line.

Henceforth she would always picture him perched on a fi ling cabinet, long legs dangling as he hauled in one tiny fi sh after another, filling the green-tinged room with their brilliance.

Iris grasped her walker and began the process of hauling herself off the lavatory. Pain was a drawn-out shriek in her knees as they straightened.

Every Sunday she had lunch at Tommy’s, where the toilet seat was lower than her own.Audrey dismissed this as nonsense. ‘There’s a standard measure for everything.’ Iris’s knees knew better.

Upright at last, she looked down at her hands: two plucked birds welded to her walker. Her rings were buried in fl esh. But the cabochon ruby Arthur had bought for a knockdown price from a fellow who once managed a mine in Burma glowed on her fi nger.

Her father had taken one look: ‘Glass.’

Lowering herself onto her bed, Iris sighed. She wriggled her buttocks into position. Swivelled from the waist-slowly, like a tank on manoeuvres-and brought her right leg up, then the left. She reached for the jar beside her bed and began rubbing a herbal cream into the swollen hinges on which verticality depended.

Her bathroom cabinet contained a mess of half-used tubes and jars. Each had marked a station on a path that shimmered before Iris, promising to lead her from pain.

Sometimes Iris would listen to late-night talkback when she returned to her bed; sometimes she reached under her pillow for her rosary. Tonight she lay with her eyes closed and listened to the wind, which was breathing among leaves with the sound of the sea. She thought of miracles, of waking to find her knees strong and supple; of hunger satisfi ed with loaves and little fi shes.

The rain started up its brisk conversation. Standing under a banyan tree, a child looked into an amber mask in the fork of the trunk. A monsoon was crashing in the compound and, ‘Come on,’ shouted Matthew Ho, over the din. ‘Climb up the rain.’

Iris sucked the end of a ringlet; balanced on her right foot, her left. Then she tucked her drenched skirt into her knickers, hoisted herself skywards and began swarming up the ladder of rain.