What was more, he was familiar with the symptom. The mimicry of those he wished to impress was a reflex with him. Certain distinctive gestures or turns of phrase, the pronunciation he gave to some words, a habit of leaving his cuffs unbuttoned, a dislike of salads that combined lettuce and tomato, an idiosyncratic way of looping his capital Ks: these, and other traits that identified him, were old borrowings. Imitation is the trace of a compulsion to consume another; it proceeds by assimilation and regurgitation. For a split second the windowpane held enemies, gurus, lovers, a neurotic procession winding back to Tom’s childhood. Nelly now had her place in that diaphanous parade.
Tom glimpsed, at unwelcome moments, something clenched within him: a hard pellet of suspicion. In this he knew himself his mother’s son. Like Iris, he calculated and judged; fingered the world to assess its worth. His father, by contrast, had been on good terms with life, greeting it with interest and pleasure. In the ease with which Nelly laughed, Tom caught an echo of Arthur Loxley’s readiness to be charmed by the great extempore adventure of existence.
Nelly was endlessly forbearing, tolerant of the dull, the deluded, the earnest, the video artist who steered all conversations to his gall bladder meridian. Vulnerability provokes one of two responses: the impulse to protect or the desire to crush. Tom could see—it was plain as sunlight—the sweetness that ran in her depths.
Yet he was driven also to remark the ambiguities eddying her surface. One of them concerned money. Tom learned— from Yelena, from Brendon, from others he met at the Preserve—that Nelly sold steadily. Museums across the country sought her out for projects and collected her work. The flood of talent and ambition that characterised the group was not without a resentful undertow. Now and then, in the detailing of Nelly’s good fortune, Tom detected a sidelong envy: she was someone her peers kept tabs on.
Running counter to this narrative of success was Nelly’s perennial consciousness of money. She was thrifty in ways uncommon in her cosseted generation, a single bag yielding two or even three cups of tea, meagre leftovers scraped together and refrigerated. Once, when Yelena was preparing a meal for them at her house, Nelly helped by chopping zucchini. Tom saw her slice off a stem, then trim the scanty flesh from around it that anyone else would have discarded.
Nelly taught painting at a visual arts college one day a week. It was reliable, coveted, ill-paid work. She frequented op shops, coaxed Yelena into cutting her hair, stored money away in envelopes marked
Gas
,
Rent
,
Electricity
, rode her bike to save on fares.
Tom watched her going about the Preserve hitting switches, grumbling that her tenants were wasteful with lights and heating. This regard for the conservation of resources might have been deemed admirable. But something in his gaze caught her attention. ‘Haven’t you heard? We Chinese invented cheap.’ It was as stagy as a pirouette. But Tom feared stumbling on an essential, submerged narrowness beneath the pose.
He glimpsed calculation in her friendship with Posner, who served Nelly in ways well beyond the commercial. She had a key to the dealer’s house, a five-minute walk up the hill; a room was set aside there for her use. Posner would lend her his car, take her out for meals and films, buy her books. The digital camera she now used for preparatory images was a present from him. When she needed root canal work on a molar, it was Posner who paid.
At times, Nelly seemed to want only to appease the dealer. Posner would be delivering himself of an opinion, and Nelly would murmur, ‘Exactly. That’s like, just so exactly right’; her dutiful, daughterly manner at these moments approaching caricature. On other occasions she was offhand with Posner, barely acknowledging his presence; and then it was he who was deferential, who cajoled while his eyes remained watchful. It was as if each possessed something the other wanted and feared would be withheld. Knowledge lapped between them, and need, and tenderness. They might have been conspirators or siblings. They had that air of mutual reliance tinged with resentment that tells of consanguinity or crime.
Yelena’s work was included in a group show in Fitzroy. Afterwards, in a bar, a curator said, ‘The thing is, Nelly’s slow. Too long between shows.’ His fleshy, egg-shaped skull was adorned here and there with feathery stubs. He had the soft, greedy air of a baby bird: beak wide, waiting.
Tom bought a round, and the curator edged closer. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know if what they say about the paintings is true?’
‘What do they say?’
‘Ah well.’ A claw flipped, dismissing private hope. There remained the pleasure of imparting gossip. ‘There’s a whisper that Nelly doesn’t actually get rid of her paintings after they’re photographed. That they’re stashed away, accruing value.’ The voice was malicious and admiring. ‘She’ll make a killing one day.’
Once, after Tom had gone with her to a gallery in a suburb of tall houses and broad-leafed European trees, Nelly said she had some shopping to do and showed him the list inked on her palm: milk, cheese, bread. He drove to the nearest supermarket, where he picked up a few things he needed himself.
At the checkout, Nelly arrived with a carton of milk and a sliced loaf.
‘Is that it?’ he asked.
She had her purse out and he saw that it held only a five-dollar note and a few coins. Not enough for cheese at the prices charged by the small, expensive store.
T
OM WALKED
up to the top of the farm track, where he knew his phone would have coverage. The air over the paddocks was a substance between liquid and paper. It held, on the horizon, the trace of a mountain: a watercolour blotted while wet into almost blankness.
There was a message from his aunt, left that morning, asking him to ring her urgently.
No message from his mother.
He imagined her dead, of course. He had failed to call her the previous day, and now she had died. Plains and cities and snow-headed peaks filed before his eyes: vast India passing with her. The ground of history gave way. Tom Loxley swung in sickening freedom.
He pressed the numbers that would bring about a changed world.
In the farmhouse at the bottom of the track, Jack added an artificial sweetener to his mug. The shading of hair on the sides of his hands gave them the look of a drawing of themselves.
Tom said, ‘I left the gate ajar. And some food in a bowl.’
‘Foxes’ll have that.’
‘I’ll be back tomorrow night. Friday morning at the latest.’
On the wall behind Jack was a frayed piece of tribal cloth in a wooden frame, a beautiful scrap in buff and dull ochres. Baskets woven from grass hung beside it. Yellow and red kangaroo paws crowded a greenish metal beaker on a table. The sleek couch, grey with a thin stripe of lemon, was a replica of the one Tom owned.
He sipped the tea Denise Corrigan had insisted on making, and felt her gaze on him. She was an unremarkable woman, with her father’s remarkable eyes. Tom saw that she was enjoying the effect of the room, its calculated undoing of assumptions created by brown brick veneer. He looked away, to the window framing fields with a filmy backdrop of mountain.
Jack said, ‘Rain’ll ease up later. I’ll go up and have a gander. Take one of the dogs.’
When Tom rose to leave, he was confronted by another anomaly. A set of hanging shelves by the door paraded kittens, boots, thatched cottages, mermaids: each miniature and doubled, a display of china salt and pepper shakers.
‘Mum used to collect them.’
Denise’s voice, utterly even, defied him to betray disdain. He was familiar with that tone.
On the step, he asked, ‘Is your father OK? I mean, to go looking . . . ?’
‘Yeah, he’s good. The pacemaker’s made a difference.’ Denise added, ‘I’ll go with him.’
‘I didn’t mean to trouble . . .’
‘No trouble. Wednesday’s my afternoon off.’ She nodded at him; smiled. In flat shoes, she was taller than Tom by inches.
She said, ‘You must be worried about your mum.’
‘It’s nothing serious. But I have to get back.’ He clicked open Denise’s umbrella. ‘She’s eighty-two. Arthritis in both knees. When she gets up from a chair, there’s this tearing noise . . .’
Denise nodded again. She told him she was a physiotherapist at the local health centre. She pulled up the hood of her raincoat. ‘It’s cruel, arthritis.’
He lowered the window and thanked her again.
‘No worries. Drive safely.’
Tom had started up the engine when she leaned forward. ‘They turn up, you know. Dogs. I’ll ask people at work to keep an eye out.’
Children draw rain as a finite thing, a band of broken strokes descending through fine weather. The rain curtain: Tom, driving at a crawl along the breakneck road curling down from the hills, could remember searching for its watery beads all through a monsoon; but the rain never showed itself until it had him surrounded.
Hours later, the rain had eased and the city was a thrust of tombstones at the horizon. Soon the freeway would catch up with fast food, shopping malls, showrooms, car yards flying shrouds of plastic bunting. But for the moment there were pale, flat paddocks that went on and on. This was landscape that could only just remember colour, as time fades bright experience. There remained the faintest recollection of something called green.
Coming up behind a truck, Tom saw sheep pressed against slats: eyes, dirty fillets of shoulder and breast.
Jack Feeney kept a few beef cattle, large polled grey beasts, in Nelly’s paddock. For the rest he ran sheep.
Light stretching in the sky pulled silver through charcoal, transforming clouds into a softly expensive pelt.
Tom pulled out and overtook the truck as soon as he could.
At home, the first thing he did was step into the shower. With water streaming over his turning body, his mind occupied itself with shit.
‘I knew something was wrong. It was almost nine-thirty and I hadn’t seen her and you know we have a cup of tea at nine. When I knocked, she was still in her nightie. And there was a smell . . .’ Here his aunt’s voice had faltered. ‘She’d done you-know-what on the floor. And trodden it into the carpet.’
‘But why? How . . .?’
‘She says she didn’t realise she’d done it. “It must have slipped out.” That’s all I can get out of her. I’ll never be rid of the stains.’
The last thing Tom had done in the country, in accordance with the instructions taped to a wall in Nelly’s kitchen, had been to lift out the pail in the lavatory and bury its contents.
As a boy, sharing a lavatory with his mother, it had been impossible to avoid the stench of her faeces. It was not until he left home and shared living spaces with other people that he realised their shit smelled different—from each other’s, from his—even though they all ate the same food. But his mother rose unaltered from that elemental reek when he buried his waste in a hole by Nelly’s fence.
Did that mean the odour of shit was genetically determined, in part at least? Towelling himself dry, he thought there must be a book about it, one of those fashionable volumes offering packets of whimsical facts, histories of fish, biographies of numerals.
An Archaeology of Excrement
. It’s got to have occurred to the French, thought Tom.
A low, black iron gate swung open into his aunt’s garden, where a red man had been strung up in a tree; outlined in fairy bulbs, he held a sign that blinked
Season’s Greetings
. November still had a few days to run, but Audrey was always early with her decorations. She prepared for Christmas as for a catastrophe, warning, ‘It’ll be here before you know it,’ weeks ahead of the feast, observing its advance with the grim satisfaction of an Old Testament prophet notified that the first wave of locusts had been sighted.
Tom went down the path that led to Iris’s door, which had once been the side entrance to his aunt’s house. The slippers aligned on her doormat were deep pink with golden chevrons across the toe. He crouched; the fabric was still damp.
He thought about the moment when his mother must have realised what had happened. Iris, whose knees made it impossible to stoop; to pick up a coin or a pill, to scrape her own filth from the carpet.
‘She’d been sitting there for an hour.’ Audrey, on the telephone. ‘You’d think she could have told me sooner, instead of just sitting there with it all around her.’
Tom thought of his mother trying to come to terms with the disaster; preparing the words in which she would have to confess what she had done; the moment when the shameful evidence of age and incapacity would be made public, when it would be clear that she had lost control of her body and couldn’t hide the consequences.
He made tea-bag tea for Iris, instant coffee for himself, carried the mugs into the living room. His nostrils identified chemical lavender.
‘The biscuits,’ said Iris. ‘Where are the Tim-Tams?’
In adolescence, Tom had devoured packet after packet of chocolate biscuits, unable to desist. He no longer liked the taste. But his mother went on buying them, and he could not deny her the pleasure she derived from being able to offer him this small indulgence.
He sat on the wooden-armed sofa-bed, on which he had slept for six years, and ate a biscuit.
On the wall was the starburst clock Iris had bought on lay-by with her first wages. Every time Tom saw it he remembered the passions it had ignited. He had sat at the card table in the corner, a book about the First fleet open before him, while Audrey remarked that in her opinion, it was nothing short of robbery to squander money on ornaments while living on charity. For did Iris imagine that the pittance she paid would rent her two rooms and the use of a Whirlpool anywhere else in this day and age?
‘The amount was agreed,’ Iris cried. ‘The rent was set by you. When my husband was alive and you were ashamed to try this highway rookery.’
A week later, Bill presented Audrey with a starburst clock for their wedding anniversary. He was a heavy, peaceable man who sold surfaces; on the subject of laminates, he approached eloquence. The clock was larger, more elaborate than Iris’s, about which nothing further was heard.