In 1972 in Australia there was work even for a man of fifty-three. Even for Arthur Loxley.
When he left the pub that Thursday evening, Arthur’s breast pocket contained what was left of his second week’s wages from the bottling plant where he had been taken on for a month’s trial.
Any number of things might have been on his mind as he approached the tram tracks. The need to find a flat, as they could not stay with Audrey forever. The discovery that Australia, or at least this southern corner of it, was not a warm place.
The certainty that he would not keep his job, as the senior accountant didn’t like Poms and had told him so.
In fact, Arthur was gazing at the sky, and remembering a Sunday School picnic on a manored estate where there were blue pools under trees. Then he wondered why violets look purple close up but blue at a distance. There came into his mind something barely remembered, and perhaps, after all, only dreamed: the discovery of blue petals on his tongue.
He heard a shout, and the wild tinging of a bell, but did not immediately understand their significance. When he saw the tram swaying above him, he hopped smartly back. There was time to register surprise and pleasure at his nimbleness; then the car hit him. He heard his knee crack as he went down.
A
T FIRST
Tom was not afraid. The dog was given to running off. In parks, beside creeks, over waste ground: tracking a scent, he vanished; emerged as a white band glimpsed among trees or on a plunging hillside; disappeared again. In time—half an hour or so—he would turn up, grinning.
But this was the bush: a site constructed from narratives of disaster. Tom thought of dogs forcing their way into wombat holes, where they stuck fast and starved. He thought of snakes. He thought of sheep, and guns.
There came the sound of barking.
Twenty yards away, a track led up to the ridge. Tom took it at a run, air tearing in his chest. The pale trunks of saplings reeled past.
Away to his right it went on: a high consistent barking designed to attract the pack’s attention. So the dog barked when dancing around a tree where a cat or a possum clung among leaves. After a while, it would be borne in on him that he was alone in his venture; that the man would not assist in capturing the prey he had gone to the effort of flushing out. Like marriage, their relations had entailed the downward adjustment of expectations. A dog: Tom had pictured a faithful presence at his heel, an obedient head pressed to his knee. And the dog, thought Tom, arms hanging loose, breathing hard on a bush track, what had the dog hoped for from him? Something more than the recurrence of food in a dish, surely; surely some untrammelled dream of loping camaraderie.
Over the years, with patient repetition and bribes of raw flesh, he had taught the dog to fetch. But when he picked up the ball and threw it a second time, Tom would feel the dog’s gaze on him. He tried to imagine how his actions might appear from the dog’s point of view: the man had thrown the ball away, the dog had obligingly sought out this object the man desired and dropped it at his feet; and behold, the man hurled it away again. How long could this stupidity go on?
‘Anthropomorphism,’ Karen would have said, his wife being the kind of person who mistrusted emotions that had not been assigned a name. But what was apparent to Tom in all their dealings was the otherness of the dog: the expanse each had to cover to arrive at a corridor of common ground.
Where the bushes fanned less densely, he pushed his way through and found himself on an overgrown path. There was a smell: leafy, aromatic.
The barking now sounded higher up the hill; somewhere to his left, where a wall of grey-green undergrowth barred the way. He pressed on ahead, hoping to loop around behind the dog. His jacket grew damp from the branches that reached across his face. Water found the place between his collar and his skin.
He was so intent on moving forward that at first he didn’t notice the silence. When he did, he stopped. Silence meant the dog had given up hope that the pack would come to his assistance; and with it, the chase. Silence meant he was making his way back.
Tom Loxley returned, under a thickening sky, to the place where the wallaby had bounded across the track. Well after the rain came he was still standing there, a slight man in large wet sneakers, calling, calling.
By lunchtime the dog had been gone five hours and the rain over the trees had fined to drizzle. Tom remembered Nelly’s raincoat, hanging from a hook behind the bedroom door; it would be too short in the arms, but the hood was the thing. When he took it down, he discovered a promotional calendar from a stock agent stuck to the door. May 2001: no one had torn off a leaf in six months.
The forested crest of the hill was hemmed on the east by the track that ran down from Nelly’s house past paddocks and a farmhouse. To the north was the trail Tom had followed that morning; another led up the hill to the south. Both came out on the ridge road that curved around the top of the hill and turned down into the valley, where it met the muddy farm track. Tom set out along the perimeter of this bush trapezoid, calling and whistling and calling.
He told himself the dog was making the most of freedom, running where his nose led, through the crags and troughs of unimaginable scentscapes.
He reminded himself of the time when two children selling chocolate to raise money for their school left a gate open and the dog escaped into the street. Karen and Tom ran along pavements, checked parks, trespassed, knocked on doors, called animal shelters. Then the phone rang. A woman who lived half a mile away had returned from work to find the dog asleep on her step and her cat’s bowl licked clean.
The dog was still hard-muscled, swift and strong. But he was twelve now; old for a dog his size. He spent less time darting after swallows and more snoozing in his basket, dream-paws scrabbling. He would not willingly be out in this rain.
The ridge road was deserted. But it was the route taken by the logging trucks. The drivers, quota-ruled, were always in a hurry. The dog had no traffic sense. With the wind in his face, Tom tried not to think of these things.
He followed a path that led into the bush from the southern track. It took him to a clearing where a treadless tractor tyre held the charred traces of a fire. There were crushed cans; cigarette butts and balled-up tissues disintegrating in the scrub.
The past four days were already assuming the unreal glaze of an idyll: a time of rain broken up by windy sun, the soft, mad chatter of Tom’s keyboard, the dog curled like a medallion before the fire.
In the evening he walked down to the adjoining farm.
Turning off the ridge road on Thursday evening, he had pulled over to let a mud-freckled Land Cruiser pass. It slowed; the driver leaned across the passenger seat. Tom saw a man with sparse grey hair and eyes half as old as the rest of his face: Nelly’s neighbour, Jack Feeney.
There was a trailer to one side of Jack’s drive, and a prevailing air of practical untidiness: old seedling trays loosely stacked, lengths of pipe covered with a plastic sheet, lax coils of wire netting. But the farmhouse clad in biscuit-brown bricks was a suburban box, neat with window awnings and potted plants; as incongruous in that setting as if aliens had placed it among the paddocks, and left a flying saucer disguised as a satellite dish on the roof.
The man who came out of the door raised his voice over the racket of dogs who lived a dog’s life on the end of a chain. ‘Help you?’
When the Australian desire to provide assistance meshed with the Australian dread of appearing unmanly, it produced the bluff menace that was Mick Corrigan’s default setting:
‘Yeah, I reckon this wallaby would’ve kicked your dog’s brains out for sure, mate.’
‘Tell you what, he’s dead meat if he goes after sheep.’
‘Saw a kangaroo hold this kelpie down and drown it in a dam one time.’
‘Can’t blame a bloke that shoots a stray first and asks questions later.’
Tom had seen those helpful blue eyes in schoolyards: ‘What about you fuck off back to the other black bastards?’
The Land Cruiser was in the carport, but Mick said his wife had driven Jack to the medical centre in town. ‘He’ll be tucking into a counter tea by now while Nees finishes up work.’
‘Nothing serious, then?’
‘Nah, check-up. He’s got a crook heart. Tough as shit, but. Got to hand it to these old bastards,’ said Jack’s son-in-law magnanimously.
He insisted on accompanying Tom to the gate, contriving to suggest, under the guise of courtesy, that he was seeing off an intruder. He walked on the balls of his feet, the fingertips of one hand jammed in his pocket. There was something heroic— at once absurd and touching—about his gait.
When there were bars between them, he looked at Tom. Who saw looped gold in a lobeless ear, a bracelet of coppery blue tattoos; a handsome face that had started to melt under a cap of dull yellow curls.
‘Known Nelly long?’
Tom shrugged.
Mick leaned in. ‘Tell you what, mate, you want to watch how you go. Look what happened to the poor bloody husband, eh.’
Tom walked back up the hill in the dirty light of a day that had gone on and on, despair dragging through him like a chain.
I
N
A
PRIL
, a week or so after he first met Nelly Zhang, Tom was driving home from work when a storm broke. In Swan Street golden-eyed tramfish glided through tinsel rain. There were the oily dabs of streetlights; pedestrian doubles fleeing through shop windows.
The traffic trickled past a travel agency plastered with images plucked from dreams.
Sorry
, said the bone-white script on the hoarding next door, graffiti being only the residue of a larger story.
A woman dashing between awnings crossed her bare arms over her chest. Tom put his hand on the horn.
Nelly said, ‘But you’re going the other way.’ Water was running off her hair and her arms. It glistened on her cheekbones, which were broad as a cat’s.
He turned up the hill, into the monumental sky.
She directed him through post-industrial streets, factories reinvented as offices, cafés, galleries, apartments. In a cul-de-sac behind the train station were four grimy brick storeys, the remains of a painted advertisement still visible on a wall whose lower reaches were covered in tags. Tom’s headlights revealed corrugated iron nailed over windows; bins and sodden cardboard in a concreted yard.
The building, a minor landmark in the area, was known as the Preserve, said Nelly, after the old ad for marmalade on the wall. ‘The Fat Orange. Who needs the Big Apple?’ She had lived there for thirteen years, she told him; illegally, because her lease was non-residential.
‘There used to be a printing works on the ground floor. They held out until Christmas. Now there’s only us.’ Nelly indicated an estate agent’s board:
Your own slice of history
. She had small, creaturely hands. ‘Not for much longer.’
Posner, he thought.
Us
. He noticed that she had a way of pausing between sentences that rendered her talk mechanical. It was faintly disconcerting; he found himself tensing for the grind of levers.
Nelly was saying, ‘No one actually makes things any more. It’s all lawyers in lofts around here.’
The complaint of trains, and wind lifting like a voice. Cara-paced in steel, Tom Loxley was lashed about by sentiments as large as weather.
Among other things, he was disturbed—aroused, intrigued, repelled—by her spoor of spice and sweat.
She was fumbling for keys. He switched on the overhead light, and saw, in her gaping bag, a little cardboard folder that fastened across the corners with elastic.
‘Come up and have a drink,’ said Nelly.
A hundred years earlier the Preserve had been a textile mill. By the 1970s, it was housing several small industries. On the top floor, before Nelly’s time, children’s shoes had been manufactured. She showed him a box, retrieved from the rubbish on a landing, that contained wooden shoe moulds. ‘Brendon’s after them for an installation but I can’t bear to give them up.’ She set them along the edge of the tall, scarred bench that served as a kitchen counter.
Brendon, Rory, Yelena: the artists who rented studios from Nelly. The Preserve was huge. An echoing central space included a kitchen corner: sink, ancient stove, microwave, ramshackle cupboards. There were two cavernous studios and two merely large ones; a cubicle in which Nelly slept, another she used for storage. Five lavatories side by side. Each artist had claimed one, with a spare for visitors. On the facing wall someone had stencilled
Cannery Row
.
Tom sat in a vinyl armchair and drank whisky from a glass that had once held Vegemite. Rain rollicked against the grid of frosted panes that filled one wall. A game of Go was set out on a table. He noticed things on that stormy autumn evening that he would not notice again as familiarity blunted attention: an orange-glazed lamp base, grubby grey walls whose grazes showed blue. The heavy folds of a Pompeian red curtain which, partly drawn back, exposed a door set halfway along a passage. Tom looked twice before realising that both curtain and door were painted on the wall.
The other thing that struck him was the makeshift air of the place. It was cheaply and carelessly furnished with disparate items. People had come and gone from here, leaving marks of their passing: a lampshade that was too small for its base, mismatched cups on a mug-tree, assorted chairs.
Nelly was draping the plum-coloured towel she had used to dry her hair around the wire shoulders of a dressmaker’s dummy. It stood behind a long table on a dais by the window. A
Concise Oxford
with a peeling spine had fetched up under a couch. A plant pot displayed Barbie and Ken’s heads impaled on rulers marked off in inches.
One reason these things would stand out in Tom’s memory was that the Preserve was brightly—in fact glaringly—lit that first evening. That was unusual. He would grow accus-34 tomed to seeing the room velvety with shadows, in which a lamp or a string of tulip-shaped lights acquired dramatic force.
Nelly Zhang under flat strip lighting with damp hair falling about her face was older than she had appeared at the gallery. Tom saw the loosening skin on her neck; the hips thickened by ill-fitting trousers.