He filled a saucepan from the tank, heated it on the two-burner butane stove in the kitchen. The tin of ground coffee he had brought with him from the city was still a quarter full, but the milk had run out on Sunday. He tipped two spoons of sugar into his mug as compensation.
His jeans were damp, despite having hung in front of the fire all evening. His shirts were dirty. He needed wet-weather gear. He needed boots, and clean, warm clothes. His scalp felt greasy, the backs of his knees itched. He hadn’t had a shower since Thursday; getting dressed, he held his breath against his body’s fragrance. There was no bathroom in the house; super-ficially spruced up, it remained primitive in its lack of amenities. It occurred to Tom that eighty years earlier, when the house was built, his odour would have been literally unremarkable. It was the transition to a modern way of life that rendered his mustiness conspicuous.
There was no more muesli, but he discovered a plastic container of oats in a cupboard. Long afterwards, the taste was still in his mouth: distilled staleness.
He was stacking dishes in the washing-up bowl when he remembered the thunder of small steps he had heard the previous night. The image of a snarling, stunted child raging across the tin roof had jolted him from sleep. He had lain wakeful for minutes, listening to the possum, the dream still runny in his mind.
His mother was expecting him that evening. He would call her in a few hours and make some excuse. Without having to think about it, Tom knew he wouldn’t tell her that the dog was missing. Iris greeted news of a sore throat or mislaid keys with screams of, ‘My God. What are we to do?’ In lives where the margin of safety is narrow, mishaps readily assume the dimension of calamities. Iris was fond of the dog; her son wished, genuinely, to spare her distress. But his protective reflex was partly self-directed. At the age of twelve, he had realised he could endure most sorrows except the spectacle of hers. Slight, dark-skinned, bad at sport, he was able to withstand the humiliations that awaited him in an Australian schoolyard by keeping them from his mother. He reasoned that she could offer no practical aid, and that this proof of her inadequacy would be more than either of them could bear. At the same time, he grew sullen; half aware that something fundamental, the obligation of parents to shield their young from harm, was lost to him.
In this way, the strands of evasiveness and protection and resentment entwined in his love for her were determined.
The bleached bone of a dead eucalypt pointed skywards near the heart of the place where the dog had vanished. Another, stumpier, but still taller than the surrounding canopy, rose to Tom’s right. He decided to begin by searching the area between the two. He would proceed systematically, with calm, and due recognition of his limits; a methodology that had seen him through examinations, four months of post-doctoral unemployment, rejection by the first two, more prestigious universities to which he had applied for work, the failure of his marriage; the crises he had known.
He planned to break off twigs to mark his way. He noted the position of the sun. In his pockets were handfuls of sultanas for the dog, who would be ravenous, not having eaten since Monday evening. These precautions struck Tom as sensible, therefore as presages of success.
His watch showed ten minutes to eight.
One difficulty was that the ground wasn’t level. Trying to walk in a straight line, Tom found himself scrambling in and out of gullies. Tree ferns crowded in one. A steeper trench was knitted with fallen logs, the rotting wood treacherous underfoot. When he flung out a hand to save himself, his fingers encountered a growth as springy and slick as liver.
His sense of direction was good, but obliged to proceed in arcs, he began to fear doubling back on his steps. He had been snapping off twigs and thin branches in passing but the undergrowth had a way of pushing back to obscure these scars. Along with this elastic quality, it was tall—often as high as Tom—so that in every direction his eye met only the thrust of leaves.
The hillocky terrain was playing tricks with his marker trees. The shorter of the two had disappeared. The other was further to his left than he would have liked, and looked different, less skeletal than it had first appeared. A foreshortening brought about, Tom reasoned, by the angle of his view.
Despite these difficulties, he drew closer to the tall eucalpyt. He had, after all, made progress.
Cheered, he ate a few sultanas. The dog would understand.
By the time Tom reached the tree, the light dropping through the leaves had dulled. He sniffed the air: humus, and the aromatic scent he noticed the day before; and behind these, the faint, distinctive odour of rain.
The scrub was thinner here, his progress easy. But Tom had the impression that something was not right. It came to him that someone he wouldn’t want to see would be waiting beyond the trees. He stood still, ears straining.
Then, as he advanced, and the track faded into a clearing, he saw: the tree was wrong. It was the stumpy one, split at the top like a broken tooth; the jagged crown, smoothed by the direction of his approach, was plainly visible now. He looked over his shoulder and saw the tall tree far behind him, pointed in warning.
For two hours he had crashed about a modest wedge of scrub and trees, an area of perhaps three acres.
Rain began to fall.
Tom stepped over a log and felt his sneaker sink through the ooze of leaves covering a shallow depression. His ankle turned, a little.
He patted one pocket, then another. A picture came into his mind of the kitchen table: radio, laptop, spare batteries, his papers and books; the mobile phone he had taken from his wet jeans the previous evening. It would almost certainly be out of range here. Nevertheless, he had been negligent.
Overnight, these had become his familiars: fear; rage at his carelessness.
Back at the house, he added hot water to pumpkin soup made from a packet he found in a cupboard. Its savour was chemical; trust Nelly to buy a generic brand. His feet were icy, there was a dull ache in his ankle. He swallowed a second cup.
A
T FIRST
, Tom rationed his visits to the Preserve: several days had to elapse before he would let himself return. Very soon he saw that Yelena did not register his presence except in the abstract, as the homage her beauty extracted. Her friends would gather at the Preserve of an evening before going on to clubs or pubs. There were those among them whose faces hungered for her. Tom saw the girl’s consciousness of her power. She was amiable with him, including him in the casual sweep of her attention but making it clear he held no particular interest in her eyes. Although beautiful, Yelena was kind.
All the same, as autumn gave way to winter, Tom was a regular presence at the Preserve. The ease with which he had slipped into familiarity with Nelly surprised him. He was not given to swift intimacies of the mind, but it was almost as if he had known Nelly of old.
Her laugh was huge, disgraceful. It broke loose over small things. Yet when he was away from Nelly, Tom discovered that he was unable to picture her amused. Try as he might, he could call up only a frozen version of her face. One effect of this was that the mobility of her features delighted him afresh every time he saw her. Another was the brief, disconcerting sense of a familiar face overlaid with strangeness.
It was only when his loneliness lifted that Tom realised how acute it had been. The Preserve offered companionship and conversation. It offered Brendon, who designed websites by day and was usually to be found in the Preserve at night. His presence was signalled by music: fugues, cantatas, concertos turned up loud. He was secretive, allowing no one into his studio. At intervals he emerged to prepare tiny, lethal cups of coffee brewed in a blue enamelled pan. Brendon brought handfuls of flowers into the Preserve, and mandarins and walnuts, and coloured leaves. When his imagination stalled he would build these, along with the apples Nelly loved, into Arcimbaldo-like fantasies, a cork serving for an eye, a paper napkin pleated into a ruffle.
He was a spidery man. Tom would watch, entranced, the deft movements of his long arms. He noticed that Brendon was compelled to touch beautiful things: the curve of a jug, the buttery leather of Yelena’s new bag. Once, leaning over the girl, he lifted a strand of her hair: ‘Gold enough to eat.’
Nelly lived on awful food, squares of soft white bread, instant noodles, tinned soup. (Brendon: ‘I had this bag of peas in the pod once. Nelly goes, What are they? I say Peas, and she goes, Very funny, Brendon, I’ve eaten peas, they’re
round
.’)
It was one of the things that endeared her to Tom. Early in life, he had encountered too many people who did not have enough to eat. It remained with him as the only thing that mattered about food: who had it and who did not. In a city where friends fell out over the merits of rival olive oils or the correct way to prepare a confit of duck, Nelly’s lack of interest in what she ate was bracing.
Yet in odd pockets of diet she was faddish, returning laden with Gravensteins and Royal Galas from the Saturday street market. Once a week she dosed herself, rather ostentatiously, with an infusion of senna pods and ginger. ‘Get plenty of fresh air and keep your bowels open. Ancient Chinese wisdom.’
It grated on Tom. ‘You’re, like, what? Third, fourth generation? Why do you pretend you’re Chinese?’
‘You think I should pretend I’m Australion?’
‘What?’
‘Australion. You know: like the ones who think they own the place. The Australions won’t let me, for one thing. Want to know how many weeks I can go without getting asked where I’m from?’
Nelly’s mother was a Scot. Among her ancestors she counted a Pole and an Englishman. The cast of her adulterated features was only vaguely Asiatic. She exploited it to the hilt, exaggerating the slant of her eyes with kohl, powdering her face into an expressionless mask. Stilettos and a slit skirt, and she might have stepped from a Shanghai den. A sashed tunic over wide trousers impersonated a woman warrior. She wore her hair cut blunt across her forehead, and drew attention to what she called her ‘thick Chinese calves’.
She was not for the taxonomy-minded. Sometimes a rosary strung with mother-of-pearl served her as a necklace, while a red glass bindi glittered on her brow. Her palms might be intricately patterned with henna, or her chin painted with geometric tattoos. She was smoke and mirrors; a category error. Yelena, noting the attentiveness with which Tom was examining an old photograph of Nelly with dreadlocks, remarked, ‘She is not some kind of sign for you to study, you know.’
There was wit in Nelly’s self-fashioning. Sometimes she fastened her hair with chopsticks. Her fondness for a particularly unflattering set of garments had Tom baffled for weeks. Then suddenly he understood. Baggy trousers that ended above socked ankles, a red quilted parka, a man’s felt hat jammed on her head: it was the anti-chinoiserie favoured by the ageless Chinese females who can be observed presiding over bok choy and cabbages in vegetable markets.
Tom could see Nelly’s choices as parody, as a defensive flaunting of caricature. There was playfulness in her imagery; and something sad. It was also kitsch. By that time he was half in love with Nelly Zhang. Anything that seemed to diminish her was painful to him.
An empty easel was a miniature gallows at one end of her studio. Tom’s gaze took in a large-screen Mac on a workstation, portfolios leaning against a wall, a pear made from solid green glass. Nelly’s painting overalls hung from a hook by the window. There were tall rolls of canvas under a table, and offcuts on top of a cupboard. Music he didn’t recognise was playing on a paint-splattered boombox. Nelly hummed along for a few discordant bars. She was incapable of holding a tune.
Long benches displayed tubes of paint, bottles of medium and thinner, jars of brushes. Tom wandered around the room, noticing things, touching them. Nelly showed him the spectacles of different magnification that she wore for detailed work. There were shelves stacked with folders and file boxes. Oddments in a milk crate: rags, a hammer, a pair of pliers, empty jars. A sheet of glass that served Nelly as a palette: ‘It’s easy to scrape clean.’
A notebook lay open by the computer.
The collision between
photography and painting
, read Tom.
Their circular conversation
. And below this:
There are now more photographs in the world
than bricks.
These jottings were the remains of ideas, said Nelly. She was only just starting to feel her way towards her next show.
‘I need fallow time. Dreaming time.’ Then she said, ‘Scary time. When you doubt you’ll ever be able to do it again.’
Tom told her that Renoir, reproached for doing everything but settle down to paint, had answered that a roaring fire requires the gathering of a great deal of wood. He saw that this pleased Nelly, although she didn’t remark on it.
With the evidence of making all about him, he remembered something he had heard her say to Yelena about an artist’s muscles retaining the memory of the gestures required to lay paint on canvas. ‘It can become automatic. Like you don’t notice your wrist turning a certain way, producing this effortless brushwork. That’s when you start repeating yourself. Competency: it’s the enemy of art.’
A page torn raggedly from a magazine was blu-tacked to the far wall. Tom moved closer: Goya’s ambiguous dog, poised between extinction and deliverance, gazing over the rim of the world.
‘That’s a painting I can hardly bear to look at,’ he said.
Nelly was standing near him, close enough for him to smell her scalp. She was not entirely appetising: her hands were often grubby; her red parka was grimed about the pockets. All Tom’s Indian fastidiousness rose against her musk, even as he was stirred.
When he sought to represent her to himself, there came into his mind the image of a great city: anomalous, layered, not exempt from reproach; magnificent.
The realisation of what she meant to him came about like this. One morning, he was conducting a seminar in a room where a row of interior windows opened onto a corridor. The lights were on against the darkness of the day, and Tom caught sight of himself in a window as he listened to a student read her paper. The glass was deceptive, a distortion in the pane or a trick of the light endowing his reflection with a vague double. In both incarnations the middle fingers of his left hand rested lightly on his upper lip. It was one of Nelly’s poses. He recognised her in him at once.