The Lost Dog

Saturday

Tom would select a point on a track, mark it with tape and walk into the bush. It was like trying to pass through a living wall. Ferns and vines swayed up from the murk of gullies. Fine scratches covered the backs of his hands.

There were rustlings and tickings, the inhuman sounds of the bush. The great blue forests of Australia were walked by strangers and ghosts. People like the Feeneys did not much go in for entering them on foot. It was an unvoiced taboo: the ancient human respect for wooded places, strengthened by memories of a time when the only people who trod these paths were blacks or fugitive convicts.

Flies settled on Tom’s lids. The bush was full of light. In a north ern forest, vegetable density would have brought gloom. Here light dropped straight down past vertical leaves. There was the discon certing impression of being both trapped and exposed.

Mountain ash, clear-felled and rejected, rotted in the hollows where they had been herded by machines. Five or six years earlier the hill had been replanted with blue gums, chosen for the rapidity of their growth. Their puny forms were still struggling for supremacy over the undergrowth; an outbreak of mean skirmishes arising from a great defeat.

Felix Atwood had bought the house on the hill from Jack three years before he disappeared. It stood on land that had been selected late, the topography and weather deterring all but dirt-poor optimists; which is to say the Irish. Built in 1920 by a man called McDermot, the old farmhouse was testimony to the hardscrabble of his life.

Half a century later, his grandson gave up. Machinery and stock were sold; the house and its vertical acres to Jack Feeney. The McDermots moved to a town where a power station was hiring.

Framed photographs in Nelly’s kitchen taken at the time her husband bought the house showed rotting boards, a sagging chimney. Even in a picture from the 1950s, when the McDermots were still living there, the house had a desolate look. A flat garment pegged to a rope in the background was suggestive of fl aying.

Looking at these images, Tom understood the attraction of a brown suburban box with its own generator.

Jack agisted beef cattle in Nelly’s paddock, clearing it of blackberries and ragwort in return, and keeping an eye on the property. Nelly would go up to the house for a week or so at a stretch; and in the milder seasons, friends were persuaded to rent it for brief periods. But in that comfortless place, the hard winters were harder. And bad summers threatened fire: a red beast rampaging over the forested hills.

The Feeneys had stored sheepskins in the house. When the rooms were first repainted, the sharp animal smell disappeared, said Nelly. Then it returned to stay.

On his third or fourth visit to the library’s archives, Tom learned that the police had re-interviewed Mrs Atwood in the light of Jimmy Morgan’s evidence. The photograph that showed her shouting at the camera coincided with this development. It was at this stage of the story, too, that conscientious citizens began writing to the papers urging Nelly’s arrest: You’ve only got to look at her to know it was all her idea. Nelly Atwood failed the first universal test of womanliness, which is to appear meek. She failed the fi rst Australian test of virtue, which is to appear ordinary. Intangibles such as these, operating with a subterranean force unavailable to mere evidence, bound her to the figure Morgan had seen among the ti-tree.

Sources inevitably described as close to the couple claimed that the Atwoods’ marriage had been unhappy. There had been arguments about money. She was always on at him, wanting more. Tom read reports of extravagance on a Roman scale. Mrs Atwood was a brand junkie. She wore tights woven in Lille from cashmere and silk. A weekly florist’s bill ran to hundreds of dollars. Confirmation came in the form of a photograph: the florist himself, righteous above an armful of triangular blooms.

And so, with the practised ease of a sleight-of-hand, disapproval passed from the man to his wife. Atwood photographed well. He went surfing. His victims were bankers. He was halfway to being a hero in Australian eyes.

Nelly Atwood was also Nelly Zhang. She was A and Z, twin poles, the extremities of a line that might loop into a snare. She was double: a rich man’s wife and an artist; native yet foreign. Duplicity was inscribed in her face.

But Morgan insisted he had seen a tall woman. ‘Same as me, about’; and he was five foot nine. Nelly Atwood came in at barely five one. High heels might account for missing inches but seemed unlikely on a sandy track; in any case, the story kept running into Morgan. He was shown TV footage of Atwood’s wife. The woman on the path had been, ‘Different,’ he insisted.

His objections were easily disregarded, of course. Morgan reeked of imbalance. One chop short of the barbecue. And then-distance, darkness, the passage of time: these might deceive a far steadier witness.

But-and this was crucial-if Morgan was to be discredited over small things, he could scarcely be relied on for large ones. The woman on the dunes might have been elfi n. Equally, she might never have existed. Elusive female forms were known to appear to men who lived alone in the bush. Folk tales were told about them. The woman on the beach might have been nothing more than a splutter of memory, the brightest element in a story related by lamplight in the unimaginable kingdom where Jimmy Morgan had been young.

The police commissioner himself appealed to her to come forward. But the woman from the sand dunes never materialised. She had appeared in flashes among the scrub, then vanished. Like the hitch-hikers who were her kin, she remained legendary; the latest variant of an old tradition.

There was a limit to what journalism could concoct from repetition and guesswork. There was a limit to what could be done with Morgan. The bush lent him a tattered heroism. Shabbiness, alcoholism, eccentricity: these might pass as the decadent residues of a mythic past. But there was a fatal laxity to the man. He should have been shrewd and sparing of words. In fact he ran on endlessly, a garrulous drunk.

There was a hunger to equate the woman he had seen with Nelly. All those years later, Tom felt it quiver under the surface of tabloid prose. It would have been so neat. Perfect solutions make perfect stories. This one foundered on a paradox: the solution required Morgan, but Morgan undid the solution.

An interview with Carson Posner appeared in a Saturday supplement. The photographer had posed him against an early Howard Arkley abstract, and there was much obsequious fi ller about the dealer’s reputation as a talent-spotter, his unwavering, unfashionable devotion to painting, and so on. But the real subject of the feature was never in doubt.

Posner said he had been devastated to learn what Felix Atwood had done. The evidence against the broker was overwhelming. Nevertheless, Posner felt sure his friend was not devoid of conscience. Atwood would not have required the certainty of punishment to suffer for what he had done. When they were both boys, he had spoken of drowning; that it was the way he would like to go. And so he, Posner, believed that his old friend had chosen to end his days in the southern waters he loved.

His interviewer raised the subject of a note. Wasn’t the absence of one a serious flaw in the suicide theory? Posner’s disdain was superb. ‘Art exists because there are realities that exceed words.’

If it was plain that Posner’s portrait of Atwood had been airbrushed into smoothness, there was admiration, in the days that followed, for the loyalty that had produced it. Mateship: the Australian male’s birthright. Even stockbrokers were worthy of it.

Above all, Posner’s opining added weight to the idea that Atwood had taken his own life. Perhaps not having really made a decision, merely going on swimming; the continent receding, and with it, the braided pull of life itself.

The most satisfying conclusions are bodily: a corpse or a coupling, death or its miniature. Tide patterns had already been verified, currents monitored. Felix Atwood’s body was never recovered. Still, the story might have ended as the larger one is said to have begun: in the huge, slow roll of the sea. But there was the feeling that had built up against Atwood’s wife. In time it would find the outlet it required.

In August, Esther Kade asked if Tom would like to meet for lunch: a small, proprietary pat to check that he was still in place.

She arrived with amber and Mexican silver bound about her wrists and said at once,‘So, Tom: what’s all this about Nelly Zhang?’ It being Esther’s habit when faced with a closed door to turn the handle and walk in.

Tom, chary of the scorn of Esther Kade at amateur trespassing on her art historical terrain, repeated the hazy half-truth he had devised in his email to her: that he was considering writing about literary and artistic controversies. ‘Nothing academic, of course. You know how the vicechancellor’s always saying we mustn’t shut ourselves off from the marketplace. So I’m thinking along the lines of feature articles. Eventually, maybe a book. The kind you see in real bookshops.’

Esther rolled her bright brown eyes, dismissing their vicechancellor’s idiocies along with Tom’s rigmarole. She had the face of a friendly monkey and was much feared on committees.

In the course of their affair, she had said, ‘I’m like one of those cities that people go, Oh it’s great for a day or two.’

Now she produced a manila envelope from her bag. ‘Not exactly my field. But I asked around the department.’

Tom took out a thin sheaf of photocopies: reviews, catalogues, the bibliography of a book called Contemporary Australian Art in which entries had been marked in fl uorescent pen.

Esther said, ‘A starting point.’

When he thanked her, she replied, ‘I saw the famous show, actually. The one that caused all the fuss.’

‘I’ve read what the papers said. But I was PhD-ing in the States at the time.’ A tiny irrelevant shard of history was rising to the surface in Tom’s mind, the memory of walking with a visiting Australian friend down an avenue of lime-green leaves in Baltimore. The tourist had fashioned silver tips for his shirt collar from foil in parody of current fashion.

A waiter dropped cutlery on the table. He made cabbalistic passes with a pepper grinder and commanded them to

‘Enjoy!’

Tom said, ‘Tell me about those paintings.’

‘How well do you know your Ernst?’

‘Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale. It was one of Nelly’s sources, obviously.’

Esther said drily, ‘How very clever you are.’ Then, as she scrutinised him over mushroom soup, her tone changed. ‘You know, I couldn’t stop thinking about them for ages. You could see where that Nelly’s Nasties tag came from. There were these day-glo colours and a sense of pure evil. The bright day is done, / And we are for the dark. Isn’t that how it goes? Only the darkness was already there, inseparable from the bright day. But only implied. In one sense, it was all in your mind,’ said Esther. ‘That was the worst thing, in a way. It made you part of it.’

When they said goodbye, she kissed Tom; on both cheeks, with a little pause in between to convert affection into irony. ‘Good luck with Nelly Zhang.’ Another beat. ‘I’m so pleased you’re pursuing a non-academic line there.’

Nelly, the least intimidating of creatures, could summon great aloofness at will. Her marriage, the events surrounding Atwood’s disappearance: these remained virgin stretches in the map of their friendship. Once, when speaking of Karen, lightly sketching the ways he had failed with her, Tom mentioned Atwood. Nelly went on with whatever she was doing. The subject dropped between them like a stone.

Sometimes Tom suspected that she understood the fascination of taboo. That her silence was a way of ensuring his ongoing interest. Or they might be talking about anything at all-politics, TV, the perennial weather-and slowly there would grow in him the certainty that the real subject of the conversation was Felix Atwood. The very fullness of their dialogue was shaped by his absence. A string of banal observations seemed to contain him, in every sense. Tom’s consciousness of the man would swell until it seemed that Atwood’s name must burst from his tongue. Once or twice, at these moments, he thought Nelly was looking at him with something like dismay. He would make an effort, would force himself to say something entirely trivial. The danger was skirted. Once more, there would be nothing but ease between them.

Now and then a fragment of information came Tom’s way, maddening in its incompleteness and particularity. When proposing that he rent her house, Nelly warned him of its inconveniences: hurricane lamps, tank water, a stone fi replace for warmth. Then she said, ‘Felix didn’t want somewhere cosified. It was before everyone went postmodern. People were still big on authenticity.’

‘It can’t have been easy, weekends in a place like that when Rory was a baby.’ Tom was thinking, The selfish prick, no running water for his wife and kid so he could feel authentic.

Across the road from the bar in which they sat, a window displayed bra and knicker sets in shell pink, vanilla, peppermint. Tiny satin bows signalled the gift-wrapping of female flesh. A few doors away, a chandelier-hung lighting shop that specialised in Never To Be Repeated Bargains went on closing down.

Nelly remained silent for so long, staring into her glass, that Tom’s mind drifted to a DVD he had rented. Then she said, ‘I didn’t go up there so much. It was really Felix’s place. His retreat where the city couldn’t get in.’

Tom waited.

She lit a cigarette. ‘But it’s beautiful. You’ll see, if you go. I think about living there one day.’

His heart dipped. That she might speak so lightly of a future in which he had no part.

He always pictured her framed by the city, he said. Seeing, in his mind, her red parka blocky and vivid against a blur of traffic, or suspended in a plate-glass door.

She exhaled clove-scented smoke in his face. ‘The Chinese is a creature of alleys.’

But afterwards, in the street, she spoke of watching shooting stars over the paddocks. Of the daffodils a woman long dead had planted around the house, golden and cream and orange-centred, hundreds of flowers quaking in cold August. She said she nurtured a dream of planting trees all over the property. ‘All the different trees that belong there, blackwoods, gums, wattles. I’d like to see it start to turn back into bush.’

People were coming out of restaurants; a woman lifted her hair over the collar of her jacket. There was the scrape of metal on concrete as waiters began packing up the pavement seating.

A voice said, ‘Remind me again who you are?’ Nelly and Tom made their way through a stream of stills, a beef-pink face mounted on a pearl choker, two girls in studded denim turning away from each other on a corner, a taxi flashing its lights at a man with his arm raised.

‘A perfect city is one you can walk out of,’ said Nelly.

Tom pictured the pair of them on a road striped by tree shadows: towers at their back, a mountain in the space between their bodies.

Nelly often sought his advice on what to read. She would quiz Tom about literary history, borrow his course readers. She studied his bookshelves like museum cases, hands behind her back. She squatted to peer at shelves where neglected volumes gathered, and fished out treasures: Kafka’s diaries, an anthology of Victorian poems, The Man Who Loved Children.

‘I only read about five books when I was growing up.’ But one day a chance remark revealed that having come across Crime and Punishment at the age of seventeen, Nelly had read her way through the nineteenth-century Russians. What she found there had stayed with her as a series of images. She might speak of a man striking a woman at a window with his riding crop as if describing a page in an illuminated missal. In Nelly’s distillation of a famous story there was a woman dressed in grey and an inkstand grey with dust; one day the woman’s lover looked in the mirror and saw, from the colour of his hair, that he had grown old.

Tom would have spoken of the formal qualities of Chekhov’s tale, its understated, almost offhand treatment of love, and evasive resolution. All this Nelly omitted or missed in favour of detail and implication. But years later, when Tom himself was old, he would discover that what remained, when the sifting was done, was a dress, an inkstand, a man whose hair was the colour of ashes.

What he missed in images, said Tom, was the passage of time. ‘Stories are about time. But looking’s a present-tense activity. We live in an age where everything’s got to be now, because consumerism’s based on change. Images seem complicit with that somehow.’

Then he said, ‘Sometimes I think I’ll never really get what’s going on in a painting.’

He had never admitted this before. It required an effort.

‘Is it so different from what you do?’ Nelly said, ‘Reading a book, looking at a painting-they’re both things that might change you.’

Tom noticed that where he spoke of knowledge, Nelly talked of transformation. It confirmed his sense that pictures exceed analysis. Art was ghostly in a way, he thought, something magical that he recognised rather than understood.

He said as much to Nelly. Who argued, ‘But you can see a painting, touch it. Fiction’s the spooky thing. The thing that’s not there.’

She stirred in her ugly vinyl armchair as she spoke. The movement caused her shirt to ride up; there was the glimmer of a bare hip. It was an intensely erotic apparition. Tom looked away. He thought there was nothing more present, more material, than her flesh; and nothing he found more disturbing.

When he told Nelly that he was thinking of writing about her work, she looked doubtful. ‘Yeah, right, that’s good, I guess.’

Next thing there was Posner, lying in wait for Tom at the Preserve. ‘Dear boy, this is tremendously exciting. The serious attention Nelly’s attracted so far has been rather outweighed by sensationalist dross. The hour is ripe, ripe, for a scholar.’ He brought out his version of a smile; cautiously, like a man exercising an alligator. ‘Oh, I know you’re not an art historian. But as I’ve been saying to Nelly, one must think over and through mere categories. The specialist is a contemptible modern creation. I consider the fact that you come to us from literature a veritable atout. Art and text: an illustrious association.’ A shirtfront loomed vast as a snowfield. ‘If I could help,’ said Posner, ‘I would be honoured. Resources, contacts, suggestions… We could start with dinner.’

Tom murmured that the project was in its infancy.

Nelly said, ‘You’re scaring him off, Carson.’

‘But it’s quite the other way around. I’m entirely awed.’ Then he was pressing something into Tom’s hand, the bloodless fingers surprisingly warm. ‘My card. Whenever you’re ready,’ crooned Posner.

‘Tell me a story,’ Nelly would say.

It was oddly disquieting. The childishness of it: Tell me a story. It rang through their encounters like a refrain. Tom was unable to resist it, of course. Soon he was going to meet Nelly stocked with stories like charms.

He told her about April Fonceca, who sang in the last row of the choir and was a living example. When April was a little girl, she had lit a candle and placed her dolls around it. Afterwards, she said she was only playing birthday parties. Afterwards, who could tell exactly how it happened? But there was a golden flame and there was a celluloid doll, and then the doll was the flame. And there was April, reaching to save her pretty doll, and the flame reaching for April. April wore high necks and long sleeves, but there was nothing to be done about her face, and that was what came of playing with matches. Whenever Tom looked at her, he saw the girl and her doll flowering into light, a big candle and a small one. He didn’t want to look at April, said Tom, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

He told Nelly about a widowed Englishwoman his parents had known. She kept a little dog called Chess: tight white body, black ears. ‘The Civil Service terrier,’ said Arthur. One day Chess was bitten by a snake and died. Soon afterwards, the elderly Indian couple who lived next door to the widow acquired a dun-coated mongrel and promptly named him Chess. This greatly amused Sebastian de Souza: ‘The fools! A brown mutt called Chess!’ Passing their compound, he would call out,‘Here, Magpie! Here, Domino!’ Or,‘I say, Prasad, how’s Zebra today?’

He was a grown man, said Tom, before it occurred to him that the Prasads might have intended the name as a form of homage; a mark of respect, even affection. The old people had been gentle and ineffectual. Tom could recall a steady procession of beggars to their door.

He spoke to Nelly of marvels. Of arriving in Australia and finding clean water piped into every kitchen, every drinking fountain. He had drunk glass after glass of it: an everyday miracle on tap.

On a moonless night, Tom ventured a gothic little tale. It was a true story, said Tom, and he had heard it from his father. It was Arthur’s earliest memory, and this was how it went:

What Arthur remembered was a red thing. It jumped up and fell back. Sometimes it vanished but tiny red eyes still watched him. It had a name and that was fi re.

Arthur had scarlet fever, which was red fever, and his head hurt. His arms and chest were on fire. In his mother’s ivory-handled mirror he saw that his cheeks had turned red. But his tongue was white: coated with sugar or snow.

Snow dropped past the window. Arthur’s throat burned. The next time he saw himself in the mirror his tongue was a strawberry. The red thing was growing inside him. It spread in his bed, and his sheets were on fire. The only cool thing in the world was his mother’s white hand. She smoothed his hair. She fi lled a red rubber bag with ice and placed it on his forehead. She read him a story about Snow White and Rose Red.

His older sister sent him a picture on folded white paper. She had drawn a wreath of sharp green leaves and berries like beads of blood. ‘It’s Christmas,’ said Arthur’s mother. She draped a snowy pillowcase over the foot of his bed and left him in the dark. The red thing leaped about.

In the night it turned into a man. It was a red man and Arthur knew him and he didn’t know him and he was coming closer.

Tell me a story. It led Tom to reflect on the book he was writing. Near the end of his long life, Henry James had written a story with a happy ending; having until then, in exemplary modern fashion, avoided the redemptive case.‘The Jolly Corner’ told of Spencer Brydon, who returned to New York after a long absence abroad. He was welcomed by Alice Staverton, an old friend who had loved him steadfastly over the years.

Not long after his return, Brydon began to suspect that a family property he had inherited was haunted. He took to prowling the house after dark and, after a harrowing pursuit one night, came face to face with the apparition. As Brydon had intuited, it was none other than his alter ego, the rich businessman he might have become if he hadn’t left New York. The terrible figure advanced on and overpowered the hero; who when he finally came to his senses found Alice cradling his head in her lap. She had come to the house because she sensed Brydon was in danger. She spoke gently to the bewildered man of the need to accept the path his life had taken; and they embraced as the story ended.

Tom had devoted several pages of his book to this text. He had concentrated on horror, on the awful qualities that pervaded the story. He had traced the presence of doubles in James’s fiction, had analysed the mythic, cultural and psychoanalytic import of the doppelgänger; and remained unsatisfi ed with his efforts. The tale continued to elude him, as the ghost eluded Brydon. It was a complex, masterly work, far removed from simple childhood tales. But Tom suddenly saw that the fairy-story, a humble, enduring form, might provide him with a fresh thread to follow in unravelling its significance. For Brydon, like the protagonist in a fairy-tale, had bravely stared down peril, securing selfhood and winning union with a beloved other.

It was an insight Tom pursued with happy results. In this way, Nelly entered a chapter of his book: an enabling, untragic muse.

Saturday afternoon passed in hopefulness and despair, and bouts of icy rain. Images of the dog continued to present themselves to Tom. He remembered him sitting up very straight at the top of the hill above Nelly’s house only a week earlier: calmly attentive to his wide surroundings, rich in world.

With wind stirring the trees into a formless boiling, Tom made his way back up the track towards the house. Felix Atwood’s attachment to authenticity notwithstanding, his architect had clad the old building in galvanised iron. Seen at a certain angle, its corrugations shadowed violet, the house could, in fact, pass for the shed it impersonated. It was iconic, in its way; at once more and less than it appeared, a persuasive fi ction.

Nelly had told Tom that Atwood had acquired the house in her name. After negotiations with the tax office, her solicitors succeeded in saving it. Whereupon Nelly put the property on the market. But no one wanted it. Its lack of mod cons had no charm in rural eyes and it was too far from the city for a convenient weekender. And it was in any case dismaying.

‘The estate agent said people would go, But it looks like a shed. They’d drive off without having left the car.’

A house imitating a shed was an unprecedented object. Nelly said, ‘It takes time to see something new.’

One of the old outbuildings on the property had been left to rot in peace: roof rusting, boards weathered to soft black and silver. Beside the shiny iron house it had the cringing look of an animal that fears attention.

The gatepost, grey with age, was patched with yellow lichen. Tom was lifting the wire fastening over it, when he heard his name. He turned to see Denise Corrigan in her blue rain jacket.

‘I thought you might need a hand.’

He explained that he had to drive back to the city. ‘I see my mother on Sunday. You know how it is.’

‘Well, you get along. I’ll head up to the ridge anyway.’

She was wearing pale, faintly shiny lipstick; an unfl attering choice. She saw him noticing it and looked away.

Her awkwardness, and the adolescent colour of her mouth: they prompted Tom to say, ‘You used to look after Rory, didn’t you? You and your sister.’

‘Not Jen. She preferred tractors to kids back then. Probably still does.’

‘So you were the one who used to babysit Rory?’

‘He was a gorgeous kid. I felt sorry for him, really. His dad liked to take off, go walking, head down the beach, whatever. And Nelly could get caught up with her painting and that.’

‘It was good of you to help out.’

‘Rory wasn’t any trouble. And they were cool people to have around. They’d have friends up from the city, sometimes a whole crowd. It was all pretty exciting for a teenager stuck out here.’

Her lips were slightly parted; he glimpsed her tongue. In a delirious moment, considered to what uses it might be put.

She was saying, ‘I cooked for them, sometimes. Felix used to say my steaks were the best he’d ever eaten.’

Something about the way she said it. He could hear Nelly: I didn’t go up there so much. It was Felix’s retreat.

Denise and Atwood. Tom saw the man’s hand in the ropes of her hair; a plate of bloody flesh on a table between them.

On an impulse he asked, ‘What do you think happened? With Atwood, I mean.’

‘I know one thing for sure. That set-up on the beach, the car and that? It was so tacky. There’s no way Felix would’ve gone like that.’

Darkness and a deserted beach, clothes folded in a car: Tom could see that they might add up to a clichéd quotation from tragedy. But he disagreed with Denise’s deduction. Why should banality be incompatible with seriousness of intent? It was like art that flaunted its lack of artistry; it was Warhol’s Brillo box all over again. Atwood might have laid out the signs of his death in wry acknowledgment of their triteness; the sea winking hugely at his back. Kitsch might be no more than it appears, or a different thing altogether. The enigma was one of signifi cation.

Tom moved involuntarily, a kind of half shrug.

It annoyed Denise. She said,‘That was Nelly Jimmy Morgan saw on the beach that day.’

‘Sure.’

‘Oh, you can think what you like. But I recognised that dress straight away from how Jimmy described it. I’d made it for Nelly. A surprise for her birthday. Felix got me the fabric, this lovely silky French stuff. Cost a packet.’ Denise said, ‘It wasn’t the greatest fit. He got the wrong size pattern or something. But Nelly still looked gorgeous in it.’

There was the distant sound of machinery in the paddocks. Nearer at hand, the pepper tree was flinging itself sideways with throaty noises.

Tom said, ‘Did you share this with anyone? Like the cops?’

A cool, dappled stare: ‘Why do you think Nelly and I aren’t friends any more?’

‘What that amounts to is, the cops followed it up and got nowhere.’

‘Nelly’d have had some story ready.’

‘Morgan swore he saw a tall woman, remember?’

‘Half the time Jimmy hadn’t a clue what he was seeing. I know what he was like: he used to give us a hand with shearing before he went totally off the rails. But he was spot on about that dress. Like that Nelly’d hitched it up so she could climb the dunes better. It was that Chinese style with a slit skirt.’

Denise Corrigan had a recurring dream of bleeding from the mouth in public, and the memory, passing through her mind at that moment, drew her tongue across her gums. It left tiny bubbles of spit between her upper teeth, which were translucent and sloped inwards a little.

‘OK, so maybe Nelly helped Atwood get away.’ Tom said, ‘You can’t really blame her, can you? When it was a choice between prison or cocktails poolside someplace they don’t do extradition.’

Trying to lighten the conversation, he realised Denise was close to crying.

‘I was the one who was home that morning. When she brought Rory down saying she wasn’t feeling too good. She didn’t look ill to me, she looked scared.’

The wind was amusing itself with Denise’s hair, heaving it about. She pushed pieces of it away fiercely and said, ‘She wouldn’t have helped Felix. Don’t you know about those terrible paintings she did? Anyone could see she hated him.’

Five months after Felix Atwood disappeared, an exhibition by Nelly Zhang had opened at Posner’s gallery. It included a suite of paintings called The Day of the Nightingale.

Among the crowd at the opening was a journalist who had covered the Atwood story. The next day, his newspaper ran a front-page article under the headline Nelly’s Nasties. The phrase gained its own tripping momentum and circulated throughout the city. Nelly was arraigned in single-sentence paragraphs. The charges included cashing in on her husband’s notoriety, trendy feminism, washing her dirty linen in public, ruthless ambition, sick navel-gazing.

The newspaper reproduced the photograph of Felix Atwood with his surfboard, beside the image of his wife’s distorted face.

A rock star who collected art was quoted as saying he was struggling with aesthetic and ethical objections to Nelly’s work. And a grand old painter described her as a she-artist whose frames displayed great promise.

The gallery’s windows attracted eggs and a brick. The show sold briskly but closed three days later, the contentious sequence withdrawn from sale; destroyed by the artist, belatedly appalled by her own images, so it was reported.

In the art world there was widespread dismay at these events. Artists and critics defended Nelly’s right to display the controversial work. A virtuous rapping of philistine knuckles was heard.

Yet it was plain to Tom, reading through the material Esther had given him, that even among professionals the Nightingale paintings had caused unease. The same sort of thing kept turning up in reviews: barely suppressed violence, eerie stagings. Elusiveness was also mentioned; this last an affront, since reviewers who would have sacrificed their lives, or at least their columns, defending art’s right to scandalise were stirred to outrage by its refusal to simplify. An eminent critic summed up the problem: Zhang (re)presents the systemic violence of authoritarian modes in images as ambiguous as they are oppressive. Nowhere in these paintings is the phallocentric will-to-power explicitly critiqued. The refusal to engage in direct visual discourse is ultimately elitist and unsatisfying.

Packing up at Nelly’s house, Tom discovered a box of food he had set on a kitchen chair and forgotten: soup, chilli sauce, olive oil, tins of tomatoes and mangoes. Grains of rice trickled from a packet, and he realised that the plastic had been nibbled away in one corner.

He remembered the stale oats; he would throw them away and use the container for rice. He eased up the lid and found a dead mouse inside.

He stood with his back against the sink, his jaw tight. He saw his hand, scooping oats into a stainless steel dish. He saw himself carrying the dog’s bowl outside and placing it on the grass by the steps.

In those minutes, the mouse had emerged, run up the table leg and climbed into the oats. Tom had replaced the lid; and in time, the mouse had died.

The time it had taken was what Tom didn’t wish to think about.

He drank some water, first holding the enamel mug against each of his temples in turn.

When he had finished his chores, he went outside and dug a hole at the foot of a gum tree. He tipped mouse and oats into the depression and covered them with earth.

Light was starting to drain from the sky. But as Tom was turning away, something glimmered white in the grass. He stooped; and found he was looking at a little heap of old dog turds.

That was when tears began slipping down his cheeks. He sat on his heels and wrapped his arms about his legs, and rocked. He rubbed his face on his knees, leaving a glitter of mucus on his jeans, and went on crying.

On Saturday nights there was only TV on TV. Tired from the long drive home, Tom lay on his bed. A picture had come to him, as he inserted the key in his front door, of the dog bounding up the hall to greet him. This mental image had such power, the pale animal rearing from the gloom of the passage in such speckled detail, that it was like encountering a revenant. Tom had entered his flat convinced that the dog was dead.

Now he lay with whisky at hand and his thoughts drifting, as they did in this mood, to a room with a polished concrete floor. Some years earlier, on a stopover in India, he had been persuaded by his mother to call on a relative, a third cousin who lived in Pondicherry. Eileen had married a man ten years older, a Tamil with cracked purple lips. He accepted Tom’s bottle of duty-free single malt with both hands, and placed it on a glass-fronted cabinet between a vase of nylon hibiscus and a plastic Madonna containing holy water from Lourdes.

Children’s faces bloomed at different heights in a doorway hung with a flowered curtain. Tom smiled at a stumpy tot with plaited hair, who burst into tears. ‘Take no notice,’ said Eileen. ‘That one is needing two tight slaps.’

A girl entered the room bearing a tray of tumblers in which a bilious green drink was fizzing. It dawned on Tom that his cousins were teetotallers.

Cedric held an obscure clerical post in a Catholic charity. Before her marriage, Eileen had worked as a stenographer. They had applied to immigrate to the States, Canada and Australia, and been rejected on every occasion. There remained New Zealand, and what could be salvaged of hope.

Eileen summoned her eldest son: ‘Show Tommy Uncle your school report.’ On a settee covered in hard red rexine, Tom read of proficiency at chemistry and mathematics. A boy with fanned lashes stood beside him, breathing through his mouth. ‘He is pestering us all the time for a computer.’

The scent of India, excrement and spices, billowed through the house. On a radio somewhere close at hand, a crooner was singing ‘Whispering Hope’. A ziggurat of green oranges glided past, inches from the barred window. The walls of the room were washed blue, of the shade the Virgin wore in heaven.

Eileen brought out a heavy album with brass studs along the spine. From its matt black pages de Souzas gazed out unsmiling, each new generation less plausibly European.

On his return to Australia, Tom struggled to find a rhetoric suited to the episode. When Karen had travelled with him through India on their honeymoon, she had made up her mind to be charmed by everything she saw. It was an admirable resolution and she kept it, heat, swindles, belligerent monkeys, spectacular diarrhoea and headlines reporting communal murder notwithstanding; her tenacity boosted by air-conditioned hotels and sandals of German manufacture.

Karen informed Tom that India was spiritual. From the great shrines at Madurai and Kanyakumari, she returned marigold-hung and exalted. At dinner parties in Australia she would speak of the extraordinary atmosphere of India ’s sacred precincts. Tom desisted from comparisons with Lourdes, where the identical spectacle of ardent belief and fl agrant commercialism had worked on his wife’s Protestant sensibilities as fingernails on a blackboard. The glaze of exoticism transformed superstitious nonsense into luminous grace.

Karen’s good faith was manifest. Yet her insistence on the spirituality of India struck Tom as self-serving. It wafted her effortlessly over the misery of degraded lives, for the poorest Indian possessed such spiritual riches, after all. And then, there was the global nation: the India of the IT boom, the pavement-vendor of okra with his cell phone clamped to his ear, the foreign-returned graduates climbing the executive ladder at McKinsey or Merrill Lynch, the street children enthralled by Bart Simpson in a store window, the call centre workers parroting the idioms of Sydney or Swindon. The energetic, perilous glamour of technology and capital: spiritual India, existing outside history, was disallowed that, too.

Faced with Karen’s curiosity about his cousins, Tom thought of Cedric’s eyes travelling in opposite directions behind heavy-rimmed spectacles; of the way Eileen’s hand fl ew to cover the deficiencies in her smile. In India bodies were historic, tissue and bone still testifying to chance and time.

In the former French quarter of Pondicherry, Tamil gendarmes in scarlet peaked caps strolled the calm boulevards; bougainvillea stained colonial stucco turmeric, saffron, chilli. At sunrise, managerial Indians jogged the length of the seafront, where the waves were restrained by a decaying wall. The wines of Burgundy were served in the dining room at Tom’s hotel. The maître d’, who bore an unnerving resemblance to Baroness Thatcher, had once been a waiter at the Tour d’Argent. At mealtimes he was to be found surveying his domain with a cramped countenance. The table napkins, although freshly starched and mitred, were always limp from the heat. It is not the absence of an ideal that produces despair, thought Tom, but its approximation.

Eileen lived in a street of stalls and small, open-fronted shops on the wrong side of Pondi’s canal; the Indian side, the ville noire, encrusted with time and filth. A crow picked at something in the gutter by her door. Tom feared it was a kitten.

In Australia, separated from his wife by a length of Tasmanian oak, the racket and reek of the bazaar returned keenly to him. Eileen’s azure room was oppressive with calculation and yearning. Children were its familiars. It held fl eeting, unique lives. Tom could not find a way to convert these things into narrative. The dailiness of India was too much with him.

Yet his wife required an anecdote. He spoke of the bureaucratic pettifogging that dogged his cousins, of immigration officials who didn’t have a clue; thus engaging Karen’s sympathy and deflecting her attention. She was given to causes, her imagination too broadly netted for the merely individual.

Tom had taken his camera with him when he visited Eileen. He came home one evening with packets of newly processed fi lm to find Karen drinking wine with a colleague. The two women sifted through his photos of Pondicherry, exclaiming over flame-coloured blossom arched above a pair of rickshaws, and a brass-belled cow grazing in front of a bicycle-repair shop painted sugar-almond pink. They loved India, they agreed.

Eileen and Cedric sat side by side, posed on red rexine.

Tom recalled what he had noticed when taking the picture: that being photographed was not a casual affair for his cousins. The flash found them smiling and attentive. Their image would circulate where they could not. It was not something to be yielded lightly.

Karen’s friend said, ‘That’s funny.’ Her square-cut nail tapped a tiny picture on the blue wall above the dark heads: a minute Sacred Heart. ‘It doesn’t seem right, does it?’

‘What doesn’t?’

‘Well, the whole Christian thing-it’s not like it belongs in India.’

The memory of this woman’s living room, in which a long-lobed Buddha reclined on a mantelpiece and frankincense smouldered beneath a portrait of the Dalai Lama, fl oated through Tom’s mind. He let it pass. Evidence of the subcontinent’s age-old traffic with the West rarely found favour with Westerners. To be eclectic was a Western privilege, as was the authentication of cultural artefacts. The real India was the flutter of a sari, a perfumed dish, a skull-chained goddess. Difference, readily identified, was easily corralled. Likeness was more subtly unnerving.

Tom Loxley, drinking whisky on his bed, wished to lead a modern life. By which he meant a life that was free to be trivial, that had filtered out the dull sediment of tradition and inherited responsibilities; a life shiny as invention, that fl oated and gleamed.

In that respect he was an exemplary Australian.

His cousin’s blue walls contained a life Tom might have led.

He saw himself waiting on a red settee to be rescued; with no real expectation that rescue would come.

Recently, there were more and more South Asian faces in Australia. Each time he saw one, Tom felt a small surge of satisfaction. At the same time, he would think, But there are so many more waiting.

Whenever he thought of the waiting going on around the globe, Tom was afraid. He feared that the ground of his life would give way; that he would fall into a room where, powerless as a figurine, he would have nothing to do but wait. Transformed into a human commodity, he would fi nd himself competing with thousands of identical products, all waiting to be chosen. It was an irrational, potent dread. It had visited Tom, assuming one shape, now another, for years. It whispered of the life led by millions, a phantom life characterised by stasis and the dull absence of hope; an unmodern life, where the best that could be expected of the future was that it be no worse than the past.

Of late, its mutter had grown louder. Tom knew that this crescendo was bound up with his mother. As Iris’s body failed, he felt her claim on him grow forceful. He felt the proximity of history. The present makes use of what has gone before, feeding on and transforming it, and rejecting what remains. But Tom could remember the aromatic streets of his childhood, where faeces, animal and human, lingered on display. The past waited too: odorous, unhygienic, surplus; refusing to be disposed of with decent haste.

Eileen and Cedric still lived on the black side of the canal, New Zealand having deemed superfluous such talents as they possessed.

But recently their son had won a scholarship to a mid-western college. Tom pictured him in a laboratory, calibrating instruments; on a sidewalk, astonished by snow.

Realism argued that the scholar would in time buy a Lexus and alter his idiom; would transfer money telegraphically, and put off lifting a phone to hear of a sister’s disappointments, a parent’s decline.

Yet it was apparent to Tom that people, like nations, grew stunted on a diet of realism alone. To soar it was necessary to imagine the transcendent case.

Arthur Loxley, pinkly moist in the tropics, spoke often of the cold. He described childhood winters: his eerie morning face in the basin’s ice mirror; a flaw that opened under his skates on a frozen pond and raced, a flame along a lit fuse, towards the shore.

It was talk that horrified his wife. As a bride, Iris’s great-grandmother had visited Lisbon in January. The sky was blue enamel, mosaic pavements sparkled in the sun. On her ninety-sixth birthday Henrietta de Souza was still reliving the deception she had experienced on drawing off a glove and holding out her hand to a slanted ray. ‘The sun was cold!’ the old lady declared in cracked, imperious tones, and thumped her stick on a tile painted with a spouting whale. ‘The sun was cold!’

That unnatural reversal worked powerfully on her Iris’s imagination. The European Winter: she pictured it as a beast.

It lay open-mawed across the jewelled cavern of London, daring her to pass. In Lawrence Fitch’s embrace, envisaging her English future as wavelets travelled from her thighs to her throat, she saw herself the plaything of icy paws; and shuddered, so that the captain, finding her name circulating with the port and himself the object of regimental envy, felt justified in referring to her as a ravishing little trollop.

When the earth cracked open in pre-monsoonal heat, Arthur evoked the geometric precision of snowfl akes. Fanning himself with a newspaper, he spoke of wind-whipped sleet, and the brown slush on Coventry pavements. He described the sensation of grasping iron chains in a frozen playground, and how to fashion a man from snow.

He held his son entranced with tales of icy queens, and wolves howling through black, leafless woods. There was a story about a ship manned by wraiths that might be glimpsed in Arctic latitudes, hoar-frost diamonds in its rigging. A bookseller’s warren yielded a musty yellow volume written by a Dane; and a five-year-old who had never known cold shed warm tears at the plight of a small girl freezing with her tray of matches.

Tom tilted a glass of whisky, the better to observe the melting of icebergs.

In time he had encountered theories of cultural identity and discovered that his childhood had been deficient in reading that reflected the world around him. The argument had its force; and was, like all orthodoxies, blind in one eye. It viewed Arthur’s stories as nostalgic exercises in the colonial project of ignoring what was indigenous and vital in favour of alien constructions.

Tom saw the thing as more intricate, and himself as happy to have experienced, when young, the empire of imagination. Stories with Indian backdrops offered the pleasure of recognition. Those that brought outlandish elements into play posed India as one reality among many.

It was precisely the disjunction between Arthur’s anecdotes and the scenes unfolding before his eyes that had fascinated Tom as a boy. He was stirred by a tale of alpine snows as a northern child might quicken to palm-fringed lagoons: each thrilling to wonders that existed beyond the rim of perception.

The most blatantly trumped-up tale captured Arthur’s sympathy, so that swindlers of every stripe sought him out with stories of widowed mothers or failsafe investments. A lean, ageless individual who went by the name of Perry once laid siege to him for a month with whisky and sagas of the Brazilian interior; at the end of which time Arthur agreed to relieve him of three uncut diamonds he claimed to have wrested at knifepoint from a dishonest garimpeiro. The contract had been sealed with a fresh bottle when Perry’s angry blue eyes filled with tears. ‘You have driven me to honesty,’ he announced, and blew his nose violently. He reached for the soft leather pouch containing the pebbles and flung it over his shoulder into a bed of shocking-pink anthuriums.

The incident made its way back to Iris, who placed herself in her husband’s path with her hands on her hips. ‘I told you about that Perry,’ she began, her voice ominously even. ‘As soon as I set eyes on him, large as life and twice as ugly, didn’t I tell you, Here is a humbug?’

It was true. Even Tom, then aged eight, had been struck by the unreliability of Perry: flagrant in every facet of the man, from his winking tiepin to his golden-cornered smile. Perry’s Pebbles: it became family shorthand for the preposterous; for a tale too good to be true.

Arthur had been dead a decade when an exchange occurred that cast the episode forever in a different light. Seeking to amuse a girl he was involved with, Tom had set about skewering a bombastic acquaintance.

Lizzie said abruptly, ‘For Christ’s sake.’ She broke off whatever task engaged her, and turned to face him. ‘There are alternatives to seeing through people.’

‘Why don’t you run them past me.’ (Startled, but not out of irony.)

The girl opened and closed one hand. It was a gesture already familiar to Tom, signifying exasperation. She said, ‘Try seeing into them. That’d be a start.’

Lizzie proved transient. But the rebuke lodged in Tom. He thought of Perry, with his glinting, ready smile. Arthur had seen honesty in the man; and his son realised, with a little stab of surprise, that it was Arthur, after all, who had been right.

If, on numerous other occasions, his father had been duped, he was surely not the party cheapened in the process. There are illusions that are glorious. If the shabby surface extended to the depths, it was still infinitely grander to project the other case.