‘My welcome home present,’ said the effigy on the bed. ‘We watch DVDs. I can’t read any more. And who can bear the news? This election they will win for leaving people to drown.’ He looked at Tom. ‘Tell me a poem.’
‘
Yet might your glassy prison seem / A place where joy is
known, / Where golden flash and silver gleam / Have meanings
of their own
.’
When Osman closed his eyes, the curve of the ball was prominent under the lid. Cancer had made him thin-skinned. His face was in the process of being replaced by a skull, an ancestor stepping forward to claim him. Yet his ability to bring ease into a room remained.
Afterwards, he said, ‘So many poems. How come you know so many old poems?’
It was a question he had asked before, but the medication had made him forgetful. So Tom told him again about evenings with anthologies; seeing a vein-blue binding in Arthur’s hand. ‘My father taught me to read a poem aloud, and repeat it line by line. You learn without noticing that way.’
Tom could still hear entire poems in Arthur’s voice; a good voice, clear and unaffected. Arthur Loxley had been an indiscriminate reader. He had pages of Keats and Browning and Hardy by heart; also much his son would learn to call third rate. In resentful moods, Tom saw his mind as an attic crammed with an incongruent jumble. Groping for treasure, he was just as likely to come up with a gimcrack oddment.
Nevertheless, what had stuck was delight in words arranged well.
On a chair wedged between bed and bookcase, he said, ‘Even the Gatling jammed and the colonel dead is a lesson in rhetoric.’
‘You know, a thing that astonishes me. How quickly poetry has slipped from the culture. I mean what lives in memory. The remembering of poems: a collective inheritance, vanished.’ Osman shifted, trying to raise himself against his pillows. Tom sensed Brendon, squeezed in beside him, grow tense; watched love fight itself down to grant its beloved the dignity of struggle. ‘I have seen this happen in my lifetime,’ Osman went on. ‘In democracies, with no dictators to burn books. So many centuries of poems, and then—’
He looked at Tom. ‘There are people when I say this who think, how come this Turk lectures us about poetry?’ His eyes were black olives, now and then still shiny.
On his way out, Tom came to a halt in front of a picture. ‘It’s one of Nelly’s.’
‘Yeah, it’s from last year’s show.’ Brendon said, ‘I’ve only just got round to having it framed.’
The image had the depth and richness of painting. You had to look closer to see it was a photograph. Then you realised it was both: a photograph of a painting.
‘The way the paint’s laid on, you can see it even in a photo. Nelly can get these really amazing effects with brushwork.’ Brendon’s hand moved out to an abacus of railway tracks depicted at the blue hinge of evening. ‘It really gets to me, you know. I can’t bear to think of her destroying work like this.
T
OM ATE
breakfast while loading clothes into the machine. Then he scattered the contents of drawers, searching for a photograph.
Meanwhile, his mind busied itself with this production: he was making his way down the farm track with the dog snuf-fling ahead on his rope when a wallaby flashed out from the bush. The dog sprang forward. But Tom kept his grip on the rope, using both hands to wind it in. The dog twisted, barking furiously. They walked on.
He had begun sketching in this scenario within hours of losing the dog. Each replay introduced a detail: his shoulder wrenching as the dog lunged forward, his skidding half-steps in the mud before he mastered the animal. An ancient corner of Tom’s brain insisted that if he could bring sufficient intensity of imagination to this sequence, it would in fact be true.
At eight he began calling animal shelters. ‘Hang in there, mate,’ said a ranger. Tom put the phone down, and found tears prickling his lids.
There was an odd spaciousness to the morning: a dreamlike drawing out of time. At some point he realised it came from not having to walk the dog.
The campus jacarandas were staining concrete pathways blue. Exams were over; deserted courtyards and empty corridors lent the university a shifty, malingering air.
Tom settled down in his office to read a late essay from his seminar on the modern novel. ‘It was Henry James’s ambition to break with melodrama and romance and establish himself as the master of the new psychological novel. Discuss with reference to at least two works by James.’
This had elicited the following response: ‘Henry James failed completely in his ambition to be a modern writer. For example he invented point of view but could not always rise above omniscience. His problems are demonstrated in his last work called
The Sense of the Past.
There are the implications of the title. Furthermore the novelist provides many juxtapositions of melodrama in the text, ie when Ralph, a modern character because he is American visits a family house in London (old world) that is haunted. A ghost is one of the most well known symbols of romantic discourse. Similarly the protagonist travels back in time and meets his ancestors who are dead. Time-travel is a modern device (for the time), however—’
But Vernon Pillai was rolling through the door. ‘Thomas, Thomas, how I have missed you. No one to scuttle with, claw in ragged claw.’
Vernon was a small circle balanced on a large one; an anomalous black snowman. He wheeled hither and thither, turning his round head sideways to decipher a spine, picking up letters and perusing them with frank interest. He tapped a photocopied article lying on Tom’s desk. ‘Have you read this?’
‘Not yet. Have you?’
‘Terrible. But short.’ Then Vernon pointed to a mug beside the computer. ‘That is a disgusting object.’
It was the survivor of a set of four once presented by Iris to Karen. Tom had felt the shame of it when the wrapping paper came away: his gleaming, expensive girl with a lapful of supermarket china. His agitation was accompanied by a fierce protective surge. If his wife were to betray, by word or sign, what she must think of the gift, he would have no choice but to leave her.
Karen’s impeccable manners brought her safely through the peril, as manners are designed to do. But the mugs remained in a cupboard. Iris, visiting some months later, enquired after them, choosing a moment when she was alone with her son. Her little finger, with its salmon-painted nail, flew like a flag from the handle of a cobalt-rimmed cup. They had lunched off the same service, a wedding present from Karen’s godparents.
Tom said, ‘The mugs are great. But I needed some at work and Karen said I could have them. So now at last I can offer people a coffee in my office.’
He saw Iris’s satisfaction in picturing his clever friends sipping from her mugs. Whatever she gave his wife was in any case an indirect offering to her son.
And so her gift ended up in Tom’s office. The mugs were patterned with white hearts on a red ground, or the reverse. Three quickly broke or vanished. The last persisted, with the stubbornness of the unwanted. Time scoured the hearts closest to its rim, leaving a row of pinkish smears. Recently the mug had acquired a chip. Stained with coffee, it was indeed sordid. Tom was helpless before it.
Vernon inserted his plump buttocks into the most comfortable chair and scrutinised Tom. ‘Where have you been darkly loitering?’
‘I took a couple of days off to work on—’
‘That will do.’ Vernon held up a startlingly pink palm. ‘I have students to bore me. You were due back yesterday, I believe.’
‘My dog ran off into the bush. I went looking for him.’
Vernon considered this briefly, testing it like a loose tooth. ‘I am very fond of animals,’ he announced. ‘I intend to eat many, many more before I die.’ He hoisted one foot, encased in a tiny, shiny shoe, onto the opposite knee. ‘Now let us give ourselves over to scurrilous reflections on our fellow inmates. Who is your preferred candidate for the lectureship? I am in favour of the Lacanian from Rotterdam who would like to live in Australia because of our beautiful horses.’
‘Oh, Christ.’
‘Thomas, you deep cretin.’ Vernon removed his spectacles and dangled them by an earpiece, always a sign he was enjoying himself. ‘You had forgotten that we’re to produce a shortlist by Monday.’
‘Can I get out of it? Are there lots of applications?’
‘No, you cannot. And yes, indeed. Including a distinguished professor who’s published extensively on James.’
‘Run along and research something lovely, Vernon.’
Tom finished marking the essay on James, dropped a faculty directive about Strategic Learning Outcomes into his recycling bin, wrote a scholarship reference for one of his postgraduates.
Among the many messages in his Inbox from strangers offering to extend his penis was an email from a student protesting her exam results. ‘How am I supposed to get into Law if I get a 2B in Textual Studies?’
He ran off a copy of the flyer he had mocked up at home. The photograph reproduced well, picking up the dog’s markings and the feathering along his legs. Tom ran off forty more; but even as he did, was conscious of plaintive notices passed with barely a glance as they peeled from lamp-posts.
Have you
seen Angel?
That one, with its smudged image of a cat, had caught his eye just the previous week. He remembered also:
Missing blue heeler (mainly red).
At the time, he had smiled.
At a shelter for lost dogs, a woman said, ‘So let me get this straight. Your dog . . . disappears into the bush . . . right? . . . with twenty feet of rope . . . you’ve tied to his collar.’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t
deserve
an animal.’ She hung up.
O
NE OF
the maddening things about Nelly was that she didn’t have a phone. She could give the impression of existing in a fold of time. Walking to the Preserve to see her that winter, Tom was transported to India; to that era in his life when talk meant looking into a human face. His dealings with Nelly often uncovered these souvenirs of the past, little lumps impeding the smooth flow of time.
It was not that she was anachronistic. Nelly was open to youth, novelty, the stir of their times. She was only two months younger than Tom, but in her company he was often conscious of having lived forty years in another century. She used words not yet codified in dictionaries. It was from her that he first heard of MP3 files; of memory sticks. There was also her casual familiarity with new kinds of music, the CDs Rory and Yelena burned for her, their threeway conversations about the bands playing the Corner Hotel.
Once he had seen Nelly absorbed in a game on someone’s laptop, moving about on her seat in excitement, little splashes of coloured screen light reflected now and then on her face. She was technological, thought Tom. And then, more potent than any sign, was his sense that, as an artist, she inhabited the modern age, the age of the image, while he was marooned in words.
At some point in the previous decade consumption had turned gluttonous. There was more stuff around. More people were buying it. Democracy had become a giant factory outlet. It was as if endless wealth had been converted by a malicious spell into endless want. Sometimes, late on a weekend afternoon, Tom would head to a café on Bridge Road. People crowded the pavements, shopping gathering up all classes and kinds in its dreamy pull. Isolated, spotlighted, displayed in glass niches, everyday objects took on fetishistic power, a vase or a pair of shoes acquiring the aura once enjoyed by religious icons. Such things could mean whatever people needed. They were repositories of dreams. Over espresso and the papers, Tom observed the spending that made the getting bearable: a last high-kicking performance on the public stage before the curtain of work came down.
Early one Sunday he went fossicking with Nelly at the flea market in Camberwell. There was a purposeful air to her, signalled by the black bag worked with yellow daisies carried over her arm. She avoided the professional dealers; lingered among the offerings of stallholders who had turned out their cupboards so they could go shopping again.
Strolling along packed aisles, Tom marvelled at the ease with which articles changed status, transmuted by the alchemy of desire. The flea market was a resting place for the debris piling up behind the whirlwind of the new. Wishes were its currency. Their force might resurrect objects no longer animated by collective yearning. A turquoise and black dress with shoulder pads, Jim Reeves’s
Greatest Hits
on vinyl, a brown-glazed biscuit jar sealed with a cork, a Smith-Corona typewriter in a pale-blue, rigid plastic case: Tom saw each of these leavings pounced on. Invested with fresh, private meaning, they passed once more into the treasure albums of someone’s mind.
At a bookstall there were volumes Tom could scarcely bring himself to touch: liberated from libraries, they displayed their violet stamps and yellow stains like prisoners exhibiting proofs of torture. A pile of comics looked more inviting. He flicked through them, and saw Huckleberry Hound and Top Cat take flight, forgotten comrades spinning up from the pillows where he had lain with measles; as if memory were one of those little flip books that need only correct handling to bring their trapped images to life.
Nelly bought a pair of fingerless gloves, an openwork cardigan threaded with lurex, a handtinted panoramic postcard of the lake at Mount Gambier. Tom bought her a hot jam doughnut and a pot of pink hyacinths.
She negotiated with stallholders: ‘Would you take four for it?’ ‘Any chance you could make it two-fifty?’ He looked away from these scenes, ashamed for her. He always paid whatever was asked, not wishing to appear
typically Asian
.
From a tray that held a clutter of brooches, single earrings and broken chains, she drew a strand of greeny-blue plastic pearls. It lacked a clasp and cost fifty cents.
They had arrived, at her insistence, by seven. When they were leaving she said, ‘If we’d come early, we’d have got the real bargains.’
Not long afterwards, Yelena arrived at the Preserve wearing Nelly’s necklace over pale cinnamon wool. Against that setting, it turned extraordinary: the pearls glowing, other-worldly.