Nelly owned tin trays painted with advertisements for beer, and a little grubby brick of swap cards. She had a bowl of souvenir ballpoints bought for her by travelling friends. Within a window set in each barrel, an image glided up and down: the Guard changing at Buckingham Palace, the chorus line cancanning at the Moulin Rouge.
Many of these objects were damaged, the scarves stained, the tin surfaces scratched. Watching Tom draw his fi nger along the creases sectioning a photo, Nelly said, ‘It’s stuff people were throwing away. I got it for nothing, mostly.’
That was no doubt true. At the same time, he sensed a deadpan teasing: her cut-price instinct dangled in his face. And beyond the self-guying, something deeper and more characteristic stilclass="underline" an impulse to salvage what had been marked for oblivion. An It-girl peddling Foster’s, the tottering, cotton-reel stack of a stranger’s vertebrae, an archangel with upcast eyes and a faint reek of glue: nothing was too trivial to snatch from the flow of time.
A shelf in Nelly’s studio held a modest array of view-ware, ashtrays, coasters, small dishes that might hold trinkets or sweets. Made of clear glass, each had a handtinted photograph embedded in its base: the war memorial at Ballarat, Frankston beach in summer, Hanging Rock, and so on.
These kitsch little objects fascinated Tom. He found an excuse to handle them. It was partly that their unnatural hues and thick glass glaze turned the commonplace images dreamily surreal. They were also faintly sinister. Their creepiness was intrinsic to the sway they exercised, these miniature honourings of national icons and fresh air and the healthy bodies of white nuclear families. And then, the view-ware drew on the magic of all collections. Redeemed from mere utility, its coasters and dishes were multiple yet individual. They were as serial as money and partook of its abstraction.
They exceeded the world of things. They erased labour, seeming to have been magicked into existence. Tom found himself fighting down an impulse to steal one.
In the township in the country, he left flyers at the supermarket; also at the newsagent’s-cum-post office, the town hall, the hardware store. The only bank he could find had been made over into a phone shop; but the owner of the Thai takeaway, having studied a flyer, took ten for the perspex menu holder on his counter.
The receptionist at the health centre said, ‘Is that the dog Denise was talking about?’ She took a pile of flyers for the waiting room, and tacked one onto a noticeboard, beside a poster depicting an engorged blue-red heart with severed blood vessels.‘He’ll turn up when he’s ready, love. My granddad used to tell this story how he got lost in the bush one night when he was first married? So he tied his hanky round his dog’s neck and just followed it home.’
The bakery had tables by the window. A woman with ropy brown hair caught at the nape of her neck was forking a cavity in a small emerald breast topped with a pink sugar nipple.
Denise Corrigan said, ‘Steer clear of the coffee. But these are a whole lot better than they look.’
Tom bought a cup of tea and a cinnamon scroll at the counter. When he returned to Denise, she had picked up a fl yer. ‘Lovely dog.’
He nodded, looking past her at rain falling in an empty street. He did not wish to be undone by kindness.
‘Dad and I had a look around, evening before last. Walked the tracks and that. Dad went back again yesterday.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I wish we’d found him.’ She set down her fork. ‘How’s your mum?’
‘Fine. Thanks.’ He gestured. ‘I don’t know how much longer for.’
‘Does she live on her own?’
He explained, briefly. ‘My aunt’s been very good. But she’s getting on herself now. It’s all a bit much for her.’
‘Do you have brothers or sisters?’ When he shook his head, ‘It’s hard being the only one.’
‘Are you?’
‘I’ve got a sister. In New Zealand. It’s funny: I always wanted to get away. Jen was the one who loved the farm, life on the land and that. But she ended up marrying a Kiwi and now she’s bringing up three kids on a quarter-acre block in Napier.’
She told Tom she had worked in Papua New Guinea and Darwin after finishing her training. ‘But then Mum died-’ She paused. ‘Dad was doing OK. But I don’t know, there was something so not OK about the way he was OK. He rang me one time and asked how you make what he called “proper mash”. This was, like, two, three years after Mum died, and all that time he’d been boiling potatoes and just smashing them with a spoon.’ She looked at Tom. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of him alone at that table where there used to be the four of us, eating his smashed potatoes and trying to figure out what was wrong. So I came back. And then I got married, and Dad’s really glad of Mick’s help, though he’d never admit it.’
She picked up her cup, peered into it, set it down again. ‘How does your mum feel about going into a nursing home?’
‘How do you think?’
She flushed a little. ‘They’re not all bad. I’ve seen people who were struggling at home really improve when they went into care. Just getting balanced meals is a huge boost. You don’t know how many old people live on, like, tea and bread and jam.’ Then she stopped. Said, after a few moments, in a different tone, ‘Yeah, you’re right. They’re places for when you’ve given up hope.’
Tom thought that few people would have abandoned a line of defence with her ready grace. And that in different circumstances, he might have welcomed her into his bed.
He realised that this last notion had come to him because Nelly had been in his mind all day. The radio alarm had shaken him from a dream permeated with images of her, which had dissolved on the instant but left the filmy residue of her presence.
Some flicker of his thoughts communicated itself to Denise. Who said, ‘So what’s the latest on Nelly? Still living with that guy Carson?’
There was something avid in her speckled eyes. Tom had not yet learned to anticipate the hunger Nelly provoked; her contaminated glamour.
From a panel van parked up the street a voice cried, ‘Got this huge fucken tray of fucken T-bones for seven bucks.’
Tom watched two children jump down a flight of steps, each carrying a cotton bag angular with the shapes of books. Denise had provided directions to the logging company’s offi ce on a road that looped around the back of the town. But he remained at the kerb, behind the wheel of his car, reluctant to leave such comfort as was on offer, the domesticity of iced cakes and library books.
He was thinking of his mother; of the dog; of Osman, in whom death was advancing cell by cell. He felt malevolence gathering force and drawing closer. The children crossed the street, hooded figures from a tale. Life would set them impossible tasks; straw and spinning wheels waited. Tom crossed his fingers and wished them luck: lives reckoned on the blank pages of history. And thought of a night in September when Nelly and he had sat contented in a pub, until people began to gather in front of the TV mounted on the wall at the other end of the bar.
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, roofl ess, 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 fl avours. Among the novelties on offer in the land of plenty was food designed to give pleasure to children.