The Lost Dog

Tuesday

It was still raining on Tuesday morning. Nelly turned left onto the ridge road, away from the coast. She had offered to drive, saying she knew the roads better than Tom did.

They meandered about the valley, Nelly steering smoothly around its curves. She had an affinity with engines. Tom recalled seeing her outside the Preserve, her round hands busy with a fan-belt under the hood of Yelena’s Beetle. The dog had been by his side that afternoon. It seemed a long time ago.

A cemetery with iron gates came into view. Tom thought of the grinning dead in their filthy sheets. On waking he had found a sentence in his mind: Today it is a week. He felt the force of it again now, the days piling up, each a fresh clod tamped down over hope. A date over which so many Novembers had flowed without interruption had become an anniversary. Time was thickening around it. He thought of it waiting for him each year.

There was the warm, companionable space of the car. Beyond it, sodden pastures and the sky. Tom scuttled between inside and outside, leaving rain-spotted flyers in letterboxes; every third or fourth farm used a milk can.

It was sharp, slanted rain, a shower of arrows loosed by an archaic battalion.

There were bursts of untuneful humming from Nelly. Then she remarked on the gleam that potatoes have when freshly dug from the earth.

There would come a day, thought Tom, when he looked back on this one and was envious: because she was there, beside him. His fears for the dog, the news about Osman, everything that at present loomed large would dwindle to a speck on memory’s horizon. What remained would be the fl oodlit, ecstatic fact of her presence.

At least he had a photograph of her. Mogs, having turned up at the Preserve in Posner’s retinue one evening, in due course demonstrated a Japanese camera-‘Isn’t it brilliant!’- that shot out Polaroids no larger than a stamp. The results passed from hand to hand. It was easy to palm the image Tom wanted: Nelly turning towards the camera, snapped before her expression could settle. There was an edge of paisley sleeve in the foreground. Tom thought it belonged to Osman but wasn’t sure.

He would have liked to carry the miniature in his wallet but feared it being seen. Instead he kept it in a drawer, slotted between the pages of a square-ruled notebook. It was a form of insurance; a material vestige of Nelly to set against the fi ckleness of memory. He saw himself in years to come, extracting it from the dimness of his desk. Projecting himself through time, he discovered that he was already moved; affected in advance by that trace of her presence caught in waves of light.

None of it would come to pass. In one of those enigmatic conjuring tricks effected by objects, the Polaroid would vanish within a few months. Tom would turn out his desk; grasp the notebook by its spine and shake, thumb its pages a hundred times. But one day, when years had passed and his need had long withered, he would open a book and discover the photograph within it.

What was strange was that this volume, the collected poems of Christina Rossetti, belonged to his wife. Tom had his own copy somewhere, but this one, a handsome, jacketed edition, was hers. He checked the flyleaf to make sure: For Becky, Happy Christmas 1992, Love always, Granny.

On a forested back road, there was a flash of fur in the bush.

Nelly said, ‘Felix hit a wallaby once, have I said?’

Tom shook his head.

‘There was nothing he could’ve done, it came fl ying out when he was taking that curve near Jack’s gate. It wasn’t dead. We just stood there, looking at its eyes, with Rory bawling in the car. I went to get Jack but he was out in the paddocks. So I left Rory with Denise’s mum, and Denise came back with me, and put Jack’s gun against the wallaby’s head and shot it. This tall, skinny teenager, right, and so collected. We go back to the farm and next thing she’s handing round these pumpkin scones she’s just baked.’

Nelly said, ‘She was sort of amazing in those days, Denise.’

They bought coffee from a shop that served a deserted campsite. Nelly drove on to a spot where they could pull off the bitumen. Mountain ash rose before them, superb and desolate. The forest was chilling in the way of ancient landscapes, evoking human insignificance. It suggested aeons; vegetable time. This was how the planet had looked before the advent of their kind.

Riddled with time, it was a scene easily emptied of history. The Edenic new world: an image to set against European sophistication and decadence. Tom was unable to contemplate it with equanimity. He said something along these lines to Nelly.

‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’ She lowered her window; lit one of her spiced cigarettes. ‘The whole wilderness thing’s so loaded in this country. Landscape without figures: we don’t like thinking how that came about.’

It was not that Tom disagreed. But the forest disturbed him in a way that far exceeded the merely historical. It was wild and latent and old. It addressed an aspect of his nature that had endured, whatever victories cultivation knew elsewhere.

Clove-scented smoke rolled about. Nelly, shooing it away, said she had cut back to five cigarettes a day. ‘But I’ve got to give up, really. They’re hardly the best thing for migraine.’

‘Is that what they are, your headaches?’

She didn’t reply at once. Then she glanced at Tom sideways. ‘I’m painting again.’

‘Yeah? That’s great.’

‘I seem to get ill more when I’m working. That’s one reason I put off starting.’ Nelly said, ‘I know a headache’s on the way when I start seeing these shapes like doughnuts. With light where the hole should be.’ Her fi ngers fluttered beside her left eye. ‘Also I get these, like, flickers of gold. And the air goes sort of brittle. Like tiny glass wings.’

Something about the gesture, these remarks, the way her eyes slipped away. For a moment, it was as if a stranger had entered the car and was sitting beside Tom. A prickle ran over his scalp.

On their way back, as they were passing a cluster of naked sheep, Nelly said, ‘When Jack’s father was a child none of this land had been cleared. It was still one of the wonders of the world.’

Later: ‘They have such small arms. Wallabies.’

On a windy blue evening in October, when they were walking past a broad-fronted house near Tom’s flat, Nelly spoke of the elderly immigrant who had lived there. He had sold the house and returned to Greece so that his life might loop to a close as it had begun, on a rock in the Aegean.

On another occasion, she halted before a rickety cottage. ‘That’s Dulcie’s place. She’s in a home now. She used to have these azaleas on her verandah that she watered every morning from a china hot water bottle.’

Nelly talked of the children who had once overfl owed these hushed streets. ‘Even when I first moved to the Preserve you still saw kids all over the place, walking to school, playing cricket in the street. They’ve gone now. People with children can’t afford to live here any more.’

There was an evening when she stopped in front of a townhouse. ‘See that driveway? There used to be freesias there, the kind with the fabulous smell, before they pulled the old place down. I think of them every spring, trying to push through the concrete. Like a hundred little murders.’

Talk like this ran counter to Tom’s sense of his surroundings. The city as he experienced it was glassily new. That was its allure. In Mangalore, when he walked down a street his neighbours had beheld Sebastian who begat Iris who begat Thomas. He trailed genealogies. The air around him swarmed with incident and knowledge, faces that had turned to bone shimmered at his shoulder. In Australia, he was free-fl oating. Architecture expressed the difference in material form, the bricks and beaten earth of childhood exchanged for superstructures of glass and airy steel. At night they turned into giant motherboards, alive with circuitry: advance screenings of the electronic future.

Nelly’s version of the city was a palimpsest. A ruin. It was layered like memory.

Tom thought of history mummifi ed and dismembered in the official memorials scattered through the streets; and how effortlessly Nelly conjured the living slither of time.

She pointed to the digital clock perched on the Nylex Plastics sign, and said that as a child on family outings, she had watched eagerly for it to appear on the skyline. ‘I wanted to be the fi rst one in the car to read out the time.’

Tom had noticed that the clock, glittering on top of the Cremorne silos, turned up now and then in her work. He was affected by Nelly’s remark, recalling the potency of urban signs in his own childhood. He could remember the streaming, neon enchantment of an advertisement for Bata shoes that had fl ashed out at intervals on the side of a building in Mangalore: the utter blackness he feared might last forever, the thrill as each bright letter took shape again, the twinkling, magical whole.

Then there was Stick No Bills. Learning to read, he had deciphered it as Strike On Bells; had felt intense satisfaction whenever he saw the stencilled exhortation. It spoke to him of solemn undertakings and powerful, invisible allies, the kind of message in which fairy tales abound: direct yet riddling, a test of resourcefulness.

The Nylex clock drew him closer in spirit to that small girl peering through a car window. At the same time, Nelly’s remark underlined one of their essential differences. To possess a city fully it is necessary to have known it as a child, for children bring their private cartographies to the mapping of public spaces. The chart of Tom’s secret emblems was differently plotted. Oceans separated him from the sites featured on it. A block of flats unevenly distempered pink at a junction in India still materialised in his dreams. But the city in which he now lived remained opaque to him. Like a tourist who has memorised a street plan, he navigated by artifice. His gaze stopped at surfaces; slipped off façades that had never been penetrated by his childish imaginings.

Little by little, Tom’s thinking about Nelly’s work gathered itself around the skipping girl sign. Although, in this connection, thinking was at once too precise and too restrictive a term. What he divined in the skipping girl was a constellation of impressions, metaphors, quicksilver glints.

She led Tom to the wild objects: his shorthand for things Nelly depicted that had outlived their purpose or evolved a new one. They included an ancient pillarbox, graffi tied and plastered with posters, lurking in the shade of the shining mailbox that had superseded it. There were the windchimes made from splayds that dangled in a window in a once-industrial street; the CDs strung from the arms of a scarecrow in a housing estate allotment, the leatherette rocker recliner positioned beside a Smokers Please bin at the rear of a discount electrical goods warehouse.

These images reminded Tom of a toy he had owned when very young, a waxy slate he would cover with childish scribbles. When he lifted the plastic sheet on top, the marks disappeared, magically expunged. Yet here and there on the clean overlay the faint imprint of his hand’s labour could still be discerned. The toy, which had enchanted him, afforded three pleasures: inscription, erasure and remembering. It was concerned, like Nelly’s work, with what was discarded and ephemeral yet caught in the tatters of memory.

The wild objects suggested that time deals unkindly with things. They spoke to Tom of that period between nostalgia and novelty which contained objects once the height of fashion and now out of date. From time to time one or two would wander into the saga of the present (the CDs, the reclining chair…): untimely apparitions, humble fragments from the wreck of modernity. No longer new but not yet antique, they were merely old-fashioned; hence in poor taste.

These tiny punctures in the now-scape of the present allowed the past entry into Nelly’s images. No one looks twice at a disused pillarbox or old cutlery, thought Tom. But such things were infected with historical memory. Former emblems of progress and style, they functioned as memento mori of the endless rage for the new.

The skipping girl’s programmed rope had traced that frenzy in lights. In place of remembrance, it offered repetition. The skipping girl was as dazzling as novelty and, like it, going nowhere. Now, without her neon, she had the air of a sad revenant; a lifeless trace of history.

Over time, it was that sadness that caught at Tom. He found himself intensely moved by a photograph that showed the outlines of vanished rooms on a wall where the end house had been demolished in a terrace. There were days when he thrust Nelly’s photographs out of sight. Things illuminated, seen and surrendered to darkness: he was not always capable of looking at them with composure.

One day, when they were alone at the Preserve, he said as much to Brendon. Who listened, then led Tom to the room Nelly used for storage. There, he opened a cupboard. It contained a jumble of hardware and plastic flexes. Tom saw a sage-green dial telephone and a cream one. A slide projector. A boxy beige Mac Plus. A Betamax video recorder. A contraption with a built-in keyboard that Brendon identified as a Kaypro.

Brendon drew out a cumbersome black clock radio. ‘Remember these? With numbers that click over?’ He glanced around. ‘She’s got a black-and-white portable telly somewhere.’

‘But what’s it all doing here?’

‘You don’t know?’

Tom said, ‘Outdated stuff.’

‘Not just stuff. Outdated technology: the most dated stuff in the world. Not so long out of date, either. Stuff people aren’t yet nostalgic about. Stuff you can’t give away.’

The little room was icy. Tom, turning a rubber-banded sheaf of 5¹⁄4-inch floppy disks in his hands, saw the fl esh pimple along his arms. Brendon noticed too: ‘It’s modernity. Walking over your grave.’

They stood by the place where the dog had disappeared. It was Nelly who had spotted it: a three-toed print set in the bank. ‘That’ll be the wallaby.’

The rain had stopped, but Nelly, reaching for a handhold among the bushes, set off a small deluge. She hauled herself up, feet scrabbling. Crouched at the top of the bank, she peered into the bush. ‘I can get a little way, I think.’

Soon they were pushing along through undergrowth that kept bouncing back in their faces. Nelly said, ‘If you could lift me up. To try to get a better view.’

She rose past Tom’s face, disconcertingly solid. He had Nelly Zhang in his arms and couldn’t wait to be rid of her.

He heard her cooee off to his right. It was an unsettling call, syllables that straddled word and sound; an eerie trace of the real and imaginary vanishings in which Australian folk legend abounded, a mythology whose richness betrayed the fragility of European confidence in this place.

Tom never heard it without thinking of a picture that had hung in his first classroom in Australia: a small girl in a landscape of yellow grass and tall, splotched gums, the pretty wild-flowers that had led her astray still clutched in her pinafore. Light folded her in its cloth of gold, and drew a veil across the distant foliage that blocked her escape. She wept in her shining prison: lost in Australia, a predicament the Indian boy had understood at once.

The plan was to cross the hill from south to north. They had started out on parallel tracks about twenty feet apart but Nelly now sounded further away.

Tom came to a log-ridden gully. Halfway down, he knew he couldn’t get any further. He called to the dog. To Nelly.

He followed his yellow tapes back to the path and found her waiting for him. She said, ‘The gully’s too deep here. We should try further up, where it peters out.’ There were scratches on her hands, and on one side of her face.

‘What’s that smell?’ he asked

‘What smell?’

They sniffed. ‘There. I keep smelling it.’

‘Native mint bush.’

She snapped off a leafy stalk and passed it to him. The clouds parted. ‘The sun,’ they said, together.

Every time they set out again, Tom felt a little surge of hope. After about an hour his spirits sagged.

He checked his watch and saw that all of twenty-eight minutes had passed.

Sometimes he called the dog’s name backwards. To shake things up a little.

‘What sort of knot was it?’

He told her. Added, ‘It won’t work free.’

They were sitting by the side of the track on their jackets, eating apples. Tom said,‘There’s all this folklore to do with knots.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Knots are supposed to contain power that can be used for good or evil. It’s called maleficium. There’s a long history of people attributing magical powers to knots. The Romans believed that a wound would heal more quickly if the dressing was bound with a Hercules knot, which was their name for a reef knot.’

Nelly ate apples core and all. She twirled the stem of this one in her fingers before letting it drop.

‘In Scandinavia the name Knut used to be given to boys whose parents already had as many children as they wanted. People believed that even the word for knot was powerful enough to prevent another pregnancy.’ Tom said,‘You wouldn’t think that’d survive too much reality, would you?’

‘I don’t know, they probably lucked out more often than not. A woman who had as many kids as she wanted would’ve most likely been older. Less fertile.’ Nelly had produced a pencil and was unfolding her map.

Flies sizzled past Tom’s face. Somehow he began talking about Iris. Not the detail; he found himself unable to use the words mother and shit in relation to each other. But that he feared she wouldn’t be able to go on living on her own. ‘My aunt says it’s time she went into a home. And she’s probably right. But of course Ma hates the idea. She starts crying every time the subject comes up.’

He added, ‘It’s not like all nursing homes are terrible. I’ve offered to drive her around, find a place she likes. But she won’t even think about it.’

In this way he established Iris’s irrationality, and his willingness to do everything that might reasonably be expected of him.

Nelly had stopped drawing. She asked, ‘So what does she want to do?’

Tom was about to say, She wants to stay where she is, of course. But knowledge that had remained hidden within him, so that he had been able to ignore its tenancy, chose that moment to emerge into the light.

‘She’d never ask. But she’d like to live with me.’

He waited for Nelly to assure him that it was reasonable for the old to be sent away from their families into the care of strangers.

He waited for her to say what any reasonable person would say; what he himself had said to friends beleaguered by the needs of elderly parents. But that’s crazy. You have your own life to lead.

Nelly said, ‘Is that possible?’

Tom saw his books dispersed, his study transformed into a lair. He saw pillowslips stained with hair dye, and loose Strepsils turning sticky in a drawer. He saw his mother in a big pink chair in the sunroom, her flesh warming, the blurry nimbus of her perm.

‘Not really.’ He got to his feet. ‘I can’t imagine it.’

Migration had entailed so many changes that years went by before Tom remarked a decisive one: in Australia he was no longer the child of the house. The obvious displacement in space had obscured a more subtle dislocation in time. The shift, facilitated by his father’s death, was sealed by the proximity of his young cousin, Shona. She was a large, dull child, lightly spotted with malice; their relations were wary but amicable.

That first Christmas, eating roast turkey at Audrey’s table, Tom saw his uncle pluck the wishbone from the ruins of the bird. Automatically, he put out his hand. No one noticed, because attention was focused on nine-year-old Shona, who screwed her eyes shut, grasped the other end of the greasy bone and pulled. Tom’s gaze shot to his mother, but Iris was saying, ‘Tell, darling, did you make a nice wish?’ The boy pretended to be reaching for the gravy.

Not long afterwards, and in quick succession, he was displaying symptoms of diseases evaded in disease-ridden India. Measles, chicken pox: the classic illnesses of childhood. It was a simple ruse and it failed. His mother had to go out to work. Tom was told to be a big boy; tucked up and left for the day, with TV, a thermos of Heinz soup and a stack of Shona’s old comics for cheer. Outside the window mynahs called into the huge Australian silence.

After he recovered the second time, Tom remained healthy for years. There was no one to look after him; the message had been received. But it was couched in cipher. What remained vivid from that Christmas was the recollection of looking across the centrepiece of plastic fir cones and seeing his mother speaking with her mouth full. The sight of food that was neither inside nor outside the body, food that had broken down into an indistinct, glutinous mass, was disgusting: an Australian rule clever Tom Loxley had absorbed. He would believe it was the reason he flinched from the memory of that meal. The wishbone he had not been offered vanished under a slime of mashed fowl.

Consider the great cunning of the operation. It enabled the boy to transfer his gaffe to his mother. It demonstrated that he knew better than she did; that in the antipodes their roles were reversed. It aroused his pity. Crucially, it shielded him from pain.

But it was not foolproof. Hurt thrust deep festers slowly. Time passed, and Iris grew frail, and what Tom could not bear to grant her was childlike need. A request that he fasten her clothing or cut up her food might provoke a putrid eruption; at best, a spike of rage. It was a disgraceful reaction and he did his best to master it. He eased his mother’s arms into her cardigan and folded a tissue for her sleeve; he wiped her swirled excrement from the floor. With cautious steps, Iris was fi nding her way back to the kingdom of childhood. One of the emotions it aroused in her son was a terrible envy.

A thin stream of self-pity was decanting itself into Tom. They were climbing the hill for a last foray into the bush, Nelly a few steps ahead.

‘It’s nothing like you and Rory,’ he said wordlessly to her back. ‘We don’t talk. It’s not one of those modern relationships.’

His thoughts slid to Karen’s parents. The Cliffords were as groomed and athletic as the couples featured on billboards for superannuation funds. They played tennis three times a week and jogged around an artifi cial lake every morning. Tom had once watched them power walk down a path in twin designer tracksuits with the wind lifting their silver hair. In their dealings with their children, they deployed a brisk, practical brand of affection. One Christmas, Karen and her sisters had been given copies of their parents’ wills, and invited to choose furniture and other keepsakes from the family home. They were also informed that their parents had inspected a range of what they termed low and high care facilities, and entered into agreements with suitable establishments.‘We don’t want you girls bothered with our lifestyle options.’

What about deathstyle options, Tom had enquired privately of Karen. ‘Have they given you the go-ahead to switch off the machines?’ He was electric with derision and envy. It was all so sensible; so sanitary. It was emotional hygiene and it was unavailable to him. He was a giant child engulfed by the unfairness of life’s arrangements.

How was Tom to convey-to Nelly, to anyone-the muffl ed dependencies that weighted his relations with Iris? He was unable to shake off the image of that powder-puff head. His mother’s claim on him was mute, elemental; the animal invitation to feel with.

When she had worked as a cleaner, she would tiptoe past Tom before sunrise, her breath pinched so he could sleep undisturbed. At night she went to bed early. Tom sat at the fold-up table in the living room, his books and papers spread before him. His sleeve, moving across a page, produced a soft swishing. Later he lay in bed reading, or watched TV with the sound down. During the unwelcome intimacies imposed by school, by the annexe, he looked forward to these solitary hours.

Iris had been cleaning offices for a few months when Tom, working through a page of calculus one evening, became aware of a noise that had being going on for some time. He listened. Then he knocked. Then he went in.

‘Ma? Ma, what’s wrong?’

She didn’t answer but went on with her soft keening.

Tom switched on the bedside lamp. Iris’s eyes were closed but she was plainly not asleep. Again he asked what was wrong; roughly, because he was afraid. Tears went on slipping down

her face but still she didn’t reply.

He asked, ‘Do you want Audrey?’

After a little while, she said that her back hurt. Rather, she said it was paining.

He corrected her mechanically. But in fact it was he who was mistaken. Her locution, which had struck him as sounding Indian, was not after all geographical but historical. Years later he would come across it in a book of good Edwardian prose.

He asked, ‘Shall I get an Aspro?’

When he returned, she was propped up against her pillows.

Tom said, ‘I can leave school. Get a job. You don’t have to do it.’

Her mouth was full of water and aspirin but her head shook vigorously.

Later she said, ‘What’s to be done.’ It was not a question.

Her gown of quilted pink nylon lay across the bed. Its spiritual twin was suspended on a hanger hooked over the wardrobe door: an unlined grey coat trimmed with fake fur, ready for the morning.

Other men came up with strategies that rendered their mothers harmless. Neglect was one solution; so was marrying a woman with a capacity for ruthlessness. There was also comedy. There was Vernon, who had reconfigured his mother as a monstrous buffoon. Her prying, her avarice, her vanity, her pile creams, the satisfaction the old despot derived from making children cry: farce drew the poison from it all. Now and then, even as he was laughing, Tom detected a familiar flutter of frustration or despair in Vernon ’s anecdotes; but it twitched uselessly in a web of comic invention.

Tom had always thought of himself as siding with the defenceless; as most people do, when the risk of personal inconvenience is small. But Iris grated on his sensibilities. He thought of abrasions his soul would endure if they were to live together. There would be questions: where are you going, what time are you coming back, who is that friend of yours? There would be ritual conversations, stupefying banalities. Laugh-tracks crashed through his concentration. His mother inspected the crustless salmon sandwiches he had prepared for her and said, ‘That’s wrong. You’ve cut them wrong.’

Forebodings rushed to fill the future he might share with her. His best intentions would sour. The example of Audrey was before him. Having risen to the occasion, he would swiftly descend. He heard himself enumerating, for Iris’s edifi cation, the sacrifices her presence entailed, and the virtues he imagined himself to be displaying.

When he was fourteen, he had turned the corner of a street and seen a figure hesitate at a pedestrian crossing. From the protection of a curved tin awning, he beheld a brassy perm and hectic rouge perched on the body of a slack-bellied sprite. It placed its thumb between its teeth, and peered into the traffi c from the prudent kerb. The gesture brought recognition without dispelling estrangement: the queerest sensation. It was his fi rst glimpse of his mother as left over from another time. He studied her as though she were a page in an anthropological text, taking in the knowledge that she was no longer essential to him.

At the same time, he was aware of an impulse to dash out diagonally through streaming cars and gather her up in his arms. He would carry her to a place of safety. But where, where?

The sky was solid Australian blue, lightly laminated with cloud near the horizon. Nelly was waiting for him at the top of the track. Lines from a poem about hope came into Tom’s mind: With that I gave a viall full of tears: / But he a few green eares. He didn’t speak them, for poetry can be alarming. His fi ngers sought and found the leaves crushed in his pocket.

When the man first appeared, Iris had been afraid. It was true that he was a long way away-beyond grey palings, beyond trees and tiled roofs-and that he did not seem to be coming closer. Still: a man floating in the sky. In all but the most jaded civilisation it was a vision to arouse trepidation and wonder.

He was large and shiny, with rounded limbs. When the sun was out, as it was that afternoon, his body ran with light. Then he was dazzling; Iris had to look away. Dull skies enabled her to see him whole, golden against his backdrop of lead.

She was waiting for her electric jug to boil. The teabag and two spoons of sugar were in the mug, the carton of milk was on the counter. This modest state of affairs took time to engineer.

That was, in its way, a blessing. Time is the great wealth of the elderly, and the spending of it, as with any fortune, poses a quandary.

The jug was too heavy for Iris to fill directly. She had to position a plastic beaker under the tap, lift it out of the sink when it held a cupful of water, ease it along the counter, then lift it again to tip its contents into the jug. All manner of daily acts called for guile. Iris lived by contrivance. There were gadgets, provided by her son, designed to twist the lids off jars or manipulate taps. Elsewhere she had arrived at her own arrangements, a cord looped over a handle enabling a drawer to slide open, bras renounced in favour of mercifully hookless vests. Certain objects defeated her: buttons, nail clippers. At the hairdresser’s, a hot helmet clamped to her skull, she looked into a mirror and saw a girl draw a rosy brush over a client’s splayed fingers. Iris would have liked a manicure herself, but Audrey could not be kept waiting. There was also the expense.

When her son was small, he had loved to sit beside her whenever she painted her nails at her dressing table. The instant her little finger was done, Tommy would lean forward, lips pursed. Iris made a fan of her hand. The child blew on her nails, moving his head this way and that. His eyes were turned sideways, to the fi fteen fi ngers fluttering in Iris’s triple mirror. He called it doing butterfl ies: their private game.

Iris found herself thinking about a nail file she had owned. It was made of silver metal and shaped like a stockinged leg. The rough grain of the stocking’s weave provided a fi ling surface, while the smooth, pointed foot served to clean under nails. This object, once unobtrusively part of her days, had slipped from her mind for years. She couldn’t remember which part of her life it had belonged to, nor imagine what had become of it; why or how their trajectories had diverged.

In the lavatory, lacking the suppleness required to reach around behind herself, she had devised a method for wiping while holding onto her walking frame and keeping her trousers from collapsing about her ankles. It involved preparing wads of paper in advance. These, when soiled, were placed on her walker until she had adjusted her clothing, twisting her knickers around, and her hands were free to grip the frame and turn herself with it to face the bowl. It was a disgusting practice. But what was Iris to do? It was a question of balance: the need to remain upright measured against animal necessity. Every day on a stage fitted with baby-blue porcelain, she re-enacted civilisation’s elemental struggle.

Iris had raised the subject of the floating man with Audrey, referring to him with calculated nonchalance as ‘that thing’. Later she sought a second opinion from her son. He confi rmed Audrey’s diagnosis: the man was connected to the car dealership that had opened on the highway. The name of the dealership was written across his chest, Tommy said, while Iris peered through her window. Her sight was much improved since she had had her cataracts done, but the man often had his back to her and she hadn’t noticed the lettering. He was ‘Like a balloon,’ said Tommy, and offered to drive her past the dealership one day. But he always forgot, making his usual left turn at the Dreamworld showroom instead.

Iris didn’t mind. Facts may reassure, even convince, and yet fall short of adequacy. Every time she saw the man her sense of his power was renewed. Now and then he disappeared for a day or two, which strengthened her impression that their association was not casual. Distance was integral to it. It was akin to her relations with talkback hosts: an intimacy predicated on detachment. Late afternoon sun, pouring into her kitchen, showed her a man touched with fire; caused her to fold her head, for she was mortal and might not look upon such splendour.

Brought up never to importune the Almighty on her own behalf, Iris sometimes asked him to heed the petitions of those striving to find a cure for arthritis. The safe return of a dog was a more straightforward matter. A dozen times between waking and sleeping she began, ‘O holy Saint Anthony, gentlest of saints, your love for God and charity for his creatures made you worthy when on earth to possess miraculous powers.’

This was the third day, and she knew the prayer by heart. It was a powerful incantation, to be used in extremis. Iris had never doubted its efficacy. Yet it was only now, in her kitchen with her eyes closed, that she saw. She had been granted a sign. Matthew Ho’s image had been hung in the sky to show that her prayers were heard in heaven.

Tom said, ‘I’m going to go see Jack. I haven’t thanked him for everything he’s done.’

‘Cool. I’ll come with you.’ Then, in response to his silence, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘What about Denise?’

‘What about her?’

As they walked down the track, Nelly was talking about the terrain around her house being unsuited to mechanised farming. ‘Cows do fine. Machines tip over. That’s what fi nished off the McDermots. Like imagine trying to get a baler around those paddocks.’

The Feeneys, farming at the bottom of the hill, had fared better. ‘Also Jack got himself a licence to dig tree ferns from the bush and sell them to nurseries. He did pretty well out of that.’

Tom asked, ‘Do you think Denise married Mick just so there’d be someone to help Jack with the farm?’

‘Sounds complicated.’ Nelly said, ‘He’s sort of sexy, Mick.’

At the sight of Tom’s face she burst out laughing.

The scrape of the gate sent invisible dogs crazy. Nelly raised her voice: ‘No hatchback, see? Tuesday evenings she’s got clinic.’

‘We’ve had no funny buggers with sheep.’ Mick Corrigan said, ‘If your dog was alive, he’d be after a feed for sure, eh? Nah, tell you what: he copped it from that wallaby.’

‘He’s a city dog. He wouldn’t make the connection between a sheep and food.’

‘Dog’s a dog, mate.’

The scent of sausages hung in the room. Nelly and Jack were by the window, which left Tom with sexy Mick. There was soundless boxing on TV; Mick’s gaze never left the screen. Now and then he tensed as if anticipating a blow.

Tom caught snatches of farm talk from Jack: ‘… fatten them up in about four months’; ‘… picking out the dry ewes.’

Mick sat with his arms crossed over his chest. ‘Best just get a new one, eh?’

But Tom had seen this: as Jack passed his son-in-law’s chair on his way across the room, he had picked up the remote and pressed the Mute button. He addressed no word to Mick, who made no protest. It was a thirty-second silent fi lm summarising what Mick Corrigan was up against.

On the porch, Jack said, ‘The bush was an open place when I was a lad. We’d go running through the trees on the way to school.’ He turned to Tom. ‘There were four farms along this road before the war. I’m the only one left now.’

The old man spoke with a survivor’s pride. But what he was remembering was the sensation of flight. He had emerged from the bush and gone racing down a hillside, unable to stop. He remembered the wind in his face, prickly grass underfoot. He shouted at cows and shocked trees. At the hurtling future.

It was always the worst hour, night coming on, and the dog missing from the circle of firelight. Nothing was said between them, but Nelly lit the lamp and placed candles about the kitchen while a lurid sunset was still smearing itself across the horizon.

With her hand on the blind, she paused.‘Cows. I always want to go over and talk to them. It’s something about their faces.’

‘You could tell them how terrific they’ll look on a plate.’

He had not yet quite forgiven Nelly her assessment of Mick Corrigan.

When they were eating, she said, ‘It used to be solid dairy country round here. Then one day Jack sold off his herd and got sheep in. He’ll tell you that all of a sudden he couldn’t bear to watch cows he’d known all their lives go off to the yards.’

She said, ‘He didn’t sell them all either. One of them, Belle, was still around when I got to know the Feeneys. She ended up with the rest under Jack’s old potato paddock.’

‘So what’s that mob doing out there?’

‘They’re Mick’s. He got them in when wool prices were down. Jack doesn’t really want anything to do with cattle, which is why they’re up here.’

‘Because sending sheep to the abattoir is a different thing altogether.’

‘Yeah, I know it doesn’t add up. And everyone pointed that out, Jack’s wife, the neighbours, everyone. He was a joke throughout the shire. Like it still comes up when people talk about him.’ Nelly said, ‘I’m sure he hated being called sentimental. And irrational. But in the end he wasn’t ashamed to be those things.’

In bed Tom lay thinking about the power of shame.

On learning that he intended to keep searching for the dog, Audrey had said, ‘There’s a limit to how much you can do.’ She was attuned to limits, especially other people’s. Patting the back of her hair, she added, ‘It’s not like losing a kiddy, is it? Count your blessings he’s only a dog.’

Love without limits was reserved for his own species. To display great affection for an animal invariably provoked censure. Tom felt ashamed to admit to it. It was judged excessive: overflowing a limit that was couched as a philosophical distinction, as the line that divided the rational, human creature from all others. Animals, deemed incapable of reason, did not deserve the same degree of love.

Now Tom wondered if the function of the scorn such love attracted was to preserve a vital source of food: because to love even one animal boundlessly might make it unthinkable to eat any. Bodies craving protein justified their desire as a matter of reason. But perhaps the limit at risk was in fact the material distinction between what was and was not considered fi t for consumption.

It was a topic that aroused unease. When eating out with friends, Tom had noticed a fashion for naming the animal that had supplied a dish. I’ll have the cow. Have you tried the minced pig? An ironic flaunting was at work: I know very well that this food on my plate was once a sentient creature, and that doesn’t bother me. Euphemisms are symptomatic of shame; to avoid them was to deny shame, deflecting it with cool.

Another familiar urban scenario: on seeing a beggar, Tom’s first impulse was to reach for money. Then he would imagine being observed in the act of placing a coin in a hand; a sentimental act, an act of feeling. The shame this occasioned was so strong that it triumphed over charity. He would walk on, ignoring the beggar.

Now he realised that what he risked in showing empathy was to appear unironic. Irony was the trope of mastery: of seeing through, of knowing better. And it was a refl ex with Tom. He had invented himself through the study of modern literature, and it had provided him with a mode; the twentieth-century mode. To be modern was to be ironic. Among the things he was ashamed of was seeming out of date.

He came awake all at once, and knew he was alone.

In the kitchen, the fi re was out. He went into the passage, where his torch showed the yard door ajar.

It was not as cold as the previous night; still, Tom was glad of his jacket. He stood by the water tank, and eventually urinated. Then he walked up the drive.

There was a sound; he realised it had been going on for a while, growing fainter all the time, the motorbike heading down into the valley. The stars glittered, fixed as a malediction. After standing at the gate for some minutes, he went back into the house.

In the kitchen, he stumbled over something propped against a chair. Nelly’s bag appeared in the wavering circle of his torch; and peering from it like temptation, one corner of a small cardboard folder.

Afterwards, Tom made himself look at the photographs again, shining his torch on each in turn. There were thirteen of them. They lay on the table like an evil tarot. Nelly’s Nasties: they were before him at last. Most of all he was aware of wanting to protect his gaze with his hand; to filter the force of what he was seeing through his fi ngers.

He resisted the instinct. But it trailed an ancient horror.

On a long-ago morning, Tom had caught sight of a paperback beside his father’s chair as he crossed the verandah on his way to school. So his first view of the book’s cover was glancing; and then, when he looked again, at once he looked away.

That evening he returned to it, and the next day, and the next. On each occasion his methodology was the same: a sidelong approach, followed by flickers of vision. It was seeing and not-seeing at the same time. The child felt that to behold that picture in its entirety would be his undoing. But as long as it exceeded him, he was compelled to return to it.

Wholeness was in part what was horrifying about the image. A furry black face filled the cover of the book. Raised by the table, it loomed close to Tom’s own face. He was six or seven at the time.

Among the words on the cover was one that was larger than the rest. The child associated it with excretion; with what was at once necessary and repellent. It was spelled out plainly in thick dark letters: P-O-E.

Patterns of light on the verandah shifted with the sun’s journey across the sky. Brightness and shade worked their own dissection of the image. Tom took it in in glimpses. A slice of black fur, a sectioned snarl. Perception was jerky, a series of shudders. Straight after the flash, his eye lowered its shutter. If it happened often enough, he might assemble what he had seen; hold it steady in his mind.

On that night in Nelly’s kitchen, the trace of an old dread persisted in Tom’s desire to place his hand over his eyes: a child’s protective gesture.

The fireplace was silent and cold. Tom rocked gently back and forth, and wrapped his arms about himself. Opposite him was the window, with the blind down. After a little while, the notion came to him that something was pressing its face to the glass. The idea gathered strength, swelling to a conviction that kept him nailed to his chair.

At last he tore free. When he turned around, a fi gure was watching him from the door.

Nelly did practical things: lighting candles, getting the fi re

going, pouring whisky into glasses.

‘The photos fell out of your bag. I kicked it over and…’

‘It’s OK.’ She said, ‘Obviously, they’re not for general view. Nelly’s Nasties, like they say.’

Tom said quickly, ‘They’re great.’ But his gaze slipped to the image closest to him. There was something of Fuseli’s Nightmare behind it; something also of The Night of the Hunter. Yet the stance of the man in the photograph might have been protective, and the Akubra shading his face made it impossible to read. And who could say why the girl, on the edge of the scene, had flung up her head? But there was a carousel horse, gaily coloured, with a flaring eye. Situations revolved in the mind. Altogether, it was not an image Tom wished to look at for very long.

Nelly gathered up the photographs and replaced them in their folder. Then she sat at the table. Said, in a matter-of-fact way, ‘They frightened you.’

Tom refi lled his glass. ‘What went on with you and Felix?’ he asked.

‘I got married so young.’ She held her glass between fi nger and thumb, rocking it on the table, and repeated, ‘I was so young.’

Tom waited. She spoke patiently, as to a fool: ‘That was it.’ For a moment she was frightening again, jaw hard, eyes slitty. ‘That was what he liked,’ said Nelly.

It was Posner who introduced her to Atwood, said Nelly. The two men had been at school together. When she realised she was pregnant, ‘Felix was the one who wanted to get married. He was so happy. Well, we both were.’

She said, ‘It began when I started to show. I didn’t for ages, not until about six months. Then I disgusted him.’

Tom understood long before she had finished. The old Polaroid pinned up in the Preserve: he remembered thinking how much younger than her age she had looked.

Scraps of what she was saying lodged in his brain. Atwood had liked to buy her clothes. At first it excited Nelly. Her husband dressing her up the better to undress her. But she quickly grew bored with his taste; with pintucked frocks of English lawn. ‘I mean, all the artists I hung out with were in torn black.’ She began refusing to wear the garments Atwood bought; or wore them incongruously, a baby-doll nightie pulled over a long-sleeved flannel vest, a Peter Pan collar half-hidden under a polyester shift or a safety-pinned T-shirt.

He liked her in pigtails, so she had her hair cropped and gelled into spikes. She dropped a clutch of white cotton knickers into a vat of magenta dye.

Her resistance infuriated Atwood. What began as a mild squabble expanded into one of those sour conflicts that leaves both sides drained yet resolved not to yield. Nelly’s clothes- her appearance, her image-became the site each struggled to control. It was ludicrous and deadly. Sometimes, in the early stages, an argument collapsed because they would catch each other’s eye and begin to laugh. She didn’t speak of the lovemaking that followed, but Tom guessed its edgy mixture, the desire to punish leaving its tang in the syrup.

Nelly’s elastic young flesh sprang back within weeks of giving birth. But her milk-gorged breasts repelled Atwood.‘He wanted me to bottle feed. He’d leave the room as soon as I undid the fi rst button.’

It had phases. In one of them he bought concoctions of silk, or lace, or gossamer French chiffons, an armful of extravagant, feminine wisps one or two sizes larger than Nelly required. Slipping from her shoulder, a dress emphasised the slightness of her frame. There was also the dress-up aspect: lipsticked, hung with flashing paste jewels, she was a child essaying a sexual disguise.

Each mustered their weapons. Nelly’s income was minimal. Rory left her exhausted, with neither the time nor the stamina needed for painting; in any case, in those days only Posner collected her work. Atwood settled the household bills and did so unstintingly, but no longer paid a fortnightly sum into Nelly’s account.

He withheld treats: a line of cocaine, a trip to Venice. In bed he aroused her until she whimpered; at last, pinned beneath him, she would consent to his scheme. Arrayed in whatever elfin costume he required, she acted out his wishes.

She shaved off her hair. ‘It looked terrible. My skull’s that lumpy kind. I’d get around in these old Doc boots I bought at Camberwell, looking like the love child of Johnny Rotten and a Buddhist nun.’ She searched op shops for matronly castoffs and paraded them at formal dinners. ‘Those corporate occasions where all the men wear their wives.’ Atwood told his colleagues she was suffering from post-natal depression. ‘Anything I did from then on was down to being hormonal.’

She thought Posner guessed. ‘Sort of. He was friends with us both. But he’d known Felix for years. And been in love with him from the start. It was really important to him that things worked out between us.’ She said, ‘In a way, it was like I was his proxy.’

The manoeuvres husband and wife practised on each other were misleading. They lent the thing the aspect of a game. That was one reason Nelly stayed. Besides, there were stretches of calm. There was the delight the child brought into the world. They might be drinking cold wine on daisied grass while he crawled over a rug between them, and she would relish the ordinariness of these pleasures.

There was the eroticism that still reeled her in to Atwood. She said, ‘He had perfect ears.’

Nelly had no aptitude for narrative. But that night it poured from her. Tom was of no account in the spate. There was something unnerving in her indifference to his reception of her tale.

She spoke with scarcely a pause. She grew repetitive, elaborating on avowals, coiling back over explanations. She told a pointless story about a mothers’ group she had attended with Rory. She was prolix. A draught set the candles fl ickering and carried the smell of wax around the room. The tiny kitchen filled up with words.

At some point, quite early on, she must have grasped the significance of Atwood’s preferences. What she failed to imagine was that they might encompass other beings. Nelly was accustomed to the cluster of fantasies that she drew from men. With the egotism that is a symptom of innocence, she believed it was her singularity that triggered Atwood’s response.

In this way, her knowledge of what her husband desired was tempered. It was seeing and not-seeing: the perfect mechanism for controlling dread. Nevertheless, what made its way into her paintings was fear.

Atwood began spending longer at work. He was often away. There were meetings in Sydney, in Hong Kong, in Singapore. When he had a free weekend, he would drive to the house in the bush. Usually he went alone. Their skirmishes might have turned wholly vicious but grew routine instead.

At the time, the dwindling of his attention brought Nelly relief. It was only long afterwards that she began to imagine what it might have meant. At once the void left by his lack of interest in her filled with childish forms she had never seen. She pictured flesh so immaculate it measured each caress in damages.

In the last months she spent with Atwood, Nelly’s headaches were more frequent and more brutal. Between bouts of illness, she shut herself into her studio and worked. Rory had started kindergarten, in addition to which she hired babysitters for him while she painted; borrowing their wages, as she borrowed money for materials, from Posner. In five months she completed her Nightingale series, a lunatic fl ow.

‘The selection in the show, Carson said those seven were no worse than gruesome. I was totally pissed off with him for refusing to show them all, but then…’ She shrugged. ‘I was walking around the gallery after the installation and I stood in front of those paintings and it hit me for the fi rst time. Felix had been gone months and it was only then that I realised what’d been really going on.’

Tom asked, ‘Why carry the photos around?’

But the answer took shape even as he formulated the question. When understanding fails, the consequence is always a haunting.

In the last year of their marriage, Atwood began pressing her to have a second child. The idea, once speculative, took on definition: a print emerging into clarity through the chemistry of talk. Nelly temporised; not while she was working towards a show. In that rationalisation of reluctance, she was entirely sincere.

Atwood accepted it without argument. There was an increasingly disengaged quality to his scenarios. ‘I guess things were hotting up at work.’ It was a period when more than ever before Nelly was struck by the abstract nature of money, its almost hallucinatory disembodiment. She was hard put to lay her hands on twenty cents for the bag of mixed lollies her son begged for at the milk bar, but luxuries multiplied around her as in a dream. She swigged vintage Krug in her bath and lay every night in a clean linen envelope.

She said, ‘I can see why Felix lied about that money. It just wasn’t real. Even the way he and his mates talked about it. Like they never said a half a million-it was always half a bar.’

Once, early on in the marriage, Nelly had visited him at the bank in Collins Street. She spoke of the modern, luminous beauty of the green figures on the dealing screens; of the telephones ringing non-stop in the trading room, and the clashing screams of ‘Buy!’ and ‘Sell!’ There was a reverent undertone to Nelly’s words. Her eyes were bright as screens in the shadowy kitchen. ‘Loads of zeros. Unreal money.’

Her husband kept returning to the topic of a second child: acquiescing in its deferral but urging it towards reality. A phrase tripped so often from his tongue that she heard it as scarcely more than an arrangement of phonemes. How nice for Rory, he would remark, to have a sister.

That small figure from the future kept them company for a season; was summoned and vanished, and glided again through their desires. It passed through the Nightingale paintings, occasioning unease but withholding clarity; a riddling presence, as apparitions so often are.

Afterwards, she would think, A little girl in that house!