The Lost Dog (15 page)

It was their faces that had drawn him: uplifted and calm as churchgoers.

When they parted, Nelly said, ‘Everything changes when Americans fall from the sky.’

As a child, Tom was accustomed to thinking of himself as rich. The Loxleys, no strangers to invisible darning and the last crucial pass of the knife that scrapes the excess butter from a slice of bread, were nevertheless not poor; not as one is poor in India, roofless, filthy, starved, diseased. There was a Protestant hymn Arthur sang when he was drunk, compounding offences.
The rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate.
Beneath his ancestors’ vaulted ceilings, with cracked marble underfoot, it was plain to Tom where he stood.

In Australia everything was reversed. The Loxleys were poor. Tom learned this early, his cousin Shona losing no time in pointing out what he lacked: his own room, a tank top, Twister, a bean bag, a poster of The Partridge Family. Yet within a few short weeks the boy had amassed possessions undreamed of in austere India, dozens of cheap, amusing objects, iron-on smileys, plastic figurines, a rainbow of felt-tip pens. A three-minute walk took him to a cornucopia known as a milk bar that disgorged Life Savers, bubble gum, Coke, ice-creams, chocolate bars, potato chips in astonishing flavours. Among the novelties on offer in the land of plenty was food designed to give pleasure to children.

Nothing in Tom’s experience had prepared him for the beckoning display of so much that was both unnecessary and irresistible. Long before he encountered theories of capitalism and commodity production, he had grasped that
things
— desiring and acquiring and discarding them—were the lifeblood of his new world.

Against that cascade of pretty baubles stood India: the name itself shorthand for privation.

Tom Loxley counted himself lucky to have escaped into abundance. It was a plenitude he measured in possessions at first; but he soon sensed that it exceeded the material. At school he met children from countries whose names he barely recognised. He looked up Chile in the encyclopaedia; Hungary, Yugoslavia, Taiwan. An impression came to him of standing in a great public square, hemmed by severe buildings, where all kinds of people came for work or amusement. It was a place of wonder and dread. The boy was jostled; sometimes he lost his bearings. But he glimpsed the promise of enlargement in that huge, variegated flow.

The real city was a grey and brown place sectioned by a grid of chilling winds. From time to time, when he should have been at school, Tom wandered its ruled streets: King, William
;
Queen, Elizabeth. Within a familiar history he was finding his place in a new geography. Sometimes he thought, No one in the whole world knows where I am.

It was his father’s journey in reverse, a flight into modernity.

And still Tom would never be able to shake off the notion that the West was a childish place, where life was based on elaborate play. Reality was the old, serious world he had known when he was young, where there were not enough toys to deflect attention from the gravity of existence and extinction.

When Tom’s father died, his mother decided—took it into her head, in Audrey’s phrase—that the calamity had to be communicated at once to a decrepit uncle in Madras. Tom was placed in charge of the telephone call, a procedure which, in those days, assumed the dimensions of a diplomatic mission, with its attendant panoply of intermediaries, uncertain outcomes and fabulous expenditure.

The operator said, ‘Go ahead, Australia,’ and went off the line. Tom pressed the receiver against his ear, in readiness for the old man’s papery tones. But the ink-black instrument transmitted only a steady, inhuman whisper that flared now and then into a ragged crackle.

The fault was remedied; a death passed over oceans. But what lodged in the boy’s private mythology was what he had been permitted to hear: the underground mutter of large, disagreeable truths that could be ignored but not evaded.

Twenty-nine Septembers later, he would join a crowd enthralled by images in time to see the second plane drill into the tower. Nelly came up to stand beside him but Tom barely noticed her. He was remembering a flawed connection; the patient rage of history in his ear.

T
HE LOGGING
company furnished its lobby in nylon and vinyl. A pink girl with mauve eyelids bent her head over Tom’s flyer, biting her lip. The word Joy had been engraved in plastic and pinned to her breast.

On the wood-veneer counter a glass held water and the kind of flowers plucked over fences: daisies, fat fuchsias, coral and scarlet geraniums; blooms of passage. Tom noted this modest expression of the human and natural against synthetic odds.

‘If you leave me a stack, I’ll make sure they get to the drivers.’ Her face was a clear oval under her centre parting. It gave her a stately air, but Tom guessed she was not yet twenty. She had the expectant gaze of those who still believe there must be more to life than other people have settled for.

She consulted the sheet of paper again. ‘Jasper’s Hill. There’s some funny stuff goes on round there.’

Tom waited.

‘My brother’s a ranger? He’s got all these stories. Like people have these dope plantations hidden away up there? And there was this bloke from interstate, drove his car into the bush and shot himself. The loggers found what was left twenty years later.’ Her voice was matter-of-fact, and Tom saw that this child had taken the measure of her world and neither esteemed nor trivialised it.

When he was at the door she said, ‘I hope your dog turns up safe. I really do.’

He had bought two refill cartridges for Nelly’s butane stove. Stirring a takeaway green curry on it that evening, Tom was absurdly cheered; the dread he had felt earlier in the day dispersed by the sense that he had taken action in distributing the flyers.

He ate straight from the pan, relishing flavours and aromatic steam, musing on smell as the sensory sign of a transition. Odour marked the passage from the pure to the putrid, from the raw to the cooked; from inside to outside the body.

Tom’s own scent was patrilineal. Its varnished wood with a bass note of cumin was one of the traces Arthur Loxley had left in the world. Even now, so many years after Arthur had died, Tom sometimes buried his face in the clothes he took off at the end of a day. By his odour, he knew himself his father’s son.

When he woke, in the downy warmth of his sleeping bag, the room was hushed. He directed his torch at his watch: a few minutes past midnight.

He was certain something had woken him. The previous week, the dog had slept at the foot of the bed. Now, alone at night, Tom was conscious of the unpeopled woods and pastures about him. It was a country in which the old ideal of rural solitude had been bought with violence; and some hint of this lingered in the most tranquil setting, converting calm itself into an indictment.

He went outside and saw that the night was fine, the sky glittering with fierce southern constellations. When he came in he was careful to bolt the door.

Saturday

T
OM 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 flaying.

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.

O
N 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 first 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 elfin. 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.