On the September night when he stood in a bar with Nelly watching towers sink to their knees, the fear he felt was an acute version of a child’s alarm as the seeker in a hiding game draws near. He had always known it was only a matter of time before it happened. Living in Australia was like being a student at a party that went on and on; he didn’t want it to end, but couldn’t suppress the knowledge that exams were approaching.
Tom Loxley wished what anyone might: that a pleasant life should go on being pleasant. He wished for continuity. He wished for the orderly progression of events. He wished, that is to say, for an end to history. It was incompatible with modern life. It raged over benighted continents and there it should have stayed, ripping up sites already littered with its debris. What was unnerving was the juxtaposition of that ancient face with Power-Point and water coolers. Its eruption in nylon-carpeted cubicles where people were sneaking a look at stuff on eBay.
It was as if the events of that year had set out to demonstrate that history could not be confined to historical places. In the same spring as the towers fell, boats making their way to Australia foundered on the treachery of currents and destiny.
People looking for sanctuary drowned. They might have been found; they might have been saved. But what prevailed was the protection of a line drawn in the water.
Night after night, images of the refugees appeared. Tom saw death flicker in the furtive glow of TV and knew the guilty rage of those who have crossed to safety. Time toppled like a wave. He was a falling thing, spiralling down to wait forever in a room as blue as an ocean. He felt the convergence of public and private dread.
Buried deep in Australian memories was the knowledge that strangers had once sailed to these shores and destroyed what they found. How could that nightmare be remembered? How could it be unselfishly forgotten? A trauma that had never been laid to rest, it went on disturbing a nation’s dreams. In the rejection of the latest newcomers, Tom glimpsed the past convulsing like a faulty film. It was a confession coded as a denial. It was as if a fi end had paused in its ravaging to cover its face and howl.
The images he saw on TV brought him out in goose bumps: fear writing its name on his flesh. And since the frightened are often frightening, the pictures on his screen made him grimace and distorted his face.
Bodies flashed up constantly in those weeks: broken, burned, fished lifeless from the sea. He thrust at them with his remote, willing them to disappear. But it was as if the images were imprinted on his retina. They affected everything he saw. In ordinary streets the air turned red with callistemons. Tiny corpses appeared on pavements, nestlings as naked and strange as Martians.
A roller-blader sped past Tom, fl eeing as if from catastrophe; the white stare of the baby strapped to his back followed like a curse. A lunatic in flawless linen strode up and down a supermarket aisle, gesticulating, shouting, ‘What do you mean by a small pumpkin?’ Then Tom noticed the wire running into her pocket from her ear.
A municipal hard-rubbish collection produced surreal assemblages on footpaths. Tom’s route to a protest about the war in Afghanistan took him through dystopic chambers furnished with soiled carpet squares and disembowelled futons. He passed an orange divan stripped of cushions; collapsed hoovers, torn fl yscreens, a backless TV. A bicycle wheel leaned against a birdcage. Rusty barbecues might have strayed from a torturer’s repertoire. There were contraptions for improving muscle tone, computer keyboards fanned in a magazine rack, plastic flowerpots packed with grey earth. It was like leafi ng through snapshots of a civilisation’s unconscious.
Spring came apart under a weight of rain, death-laden spring. Fear put out live shoots in Tom. Instantly identifi able as foreign matter, he feared being labelled waste. He feared expulsion from the body of the nation.
In the hills, the mild city day was cold and wild. The rain arrived soon after Tom and Nelly, herding them back to the house, putting an end to their search.
Nelly’s pink hat lay on a chair, misty beads tangling its fi ne fibres. She built up the fire while Tom set about preparing a meal. Rain slashed leaves, clawed at the walls. The paddocks darkened under their leaking roof.
Tom wound spaghetti around his fork, then rested it on his plate. The wind continued its assault on the trees, pulling their hair. To think of the dog without shelter in this weather was unbearable. Tom rose, crossed to the window and drew down the blind.
Nelly had pushed her plate aside, and was sketching on the back of one of his flyers. ‘Look.’ He saw cross-hatching on a pencilled map. ‘That’s where we were today. You can mark where you searched last week. But in any case we’ll cover it all, bit by bit.’
Approximate, not to scale, unscientific. He sat at the table and said, ‘I shouldn’t have dragged you up here. I’m sorry.’
She was adding to her map: an arrow pointing to the house, the tracks, a compass rose.
‘If he’s out there, how could he have survived? This rain, this cold.’
‘The rain’ll keep him going. A dog can live three weeks without food. Three days without water.’
Her mulish cheer irritated Tom. He sneezed. Once, twice.
Nelly told him that when the house was first built, the interior walls had been covered in hessian pasted over with layers of newspaper. In the tiny second bedroom Tom had previously glanced into but not entered, Atwood’s architect had preserved a section of the original décor. Nelly pointed out pages from Christmas colour supplements that had been included in the final paper coating. When the house was new, these illustrations must have brought the opulence of icons to the room. Eighty years later, vague figures showed here and there on the wall, faded divas and emperors emerging from a brownish nicotine haze. ‘They used to spook Rory. He wouldn’t sleep in here when he was a kid.’
Tom was thinking of the delight coloured pictures had once brought, before the proliferation of images. He remembered a parcel of foodstuffs that had arrived from England when he was five or six. A spoonful of glowing red jam from a tin wrapped in bright scenery: a gift from another world.
They were drinking wine, their socked feet outstretched towards the fire. The planked floor hadn’t been polished in years. But it was a living thing by firelight, dark spots swirling on a lemony pelt.
Tom said, fishing, ‘Denise asked after you the other day.’
‘Been chatting to her, have you?’ Nelly lit a cigarette.
‘What?’
She exhaled.
‘What?’
‘There was all this stuff in the papers when Felix disappeared, about us arguing, things like that.’ Nelly said, ‘They got a lot of it from Denise. It’s sort of hard to forget.’
‘Why’d she do that?’
Nelly stared into the fi re.
‘Was she jealous? I mean, I guessed there was something between her and Felix, the way she’s talked about him.’ Tom could feel his mind labouring, thickened with tiredness.
Nelly giggled. It went on too long. ‘Sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s not funny, really. But the idea of Felix and Denise.’
When she had dropped what was left of her cigarette into the fire, she said, ‘Look, I was the one she had a crush on.’
‘You know how you feel things so much then? When you’re
seventeen, eighteen?’
Tom said, ‘I remember.’
‘We had this party here, loads of people came up, I think it was Australia Day. The year Felix went missing.’ Nelly shrugged. ‘Denise had too much champagne, I guess. Like everyone else.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing.’ She said, ‘It’s hard to get over. When you come out with what you feel, and get nowhere.’ After a little while: ‘There was all this other stuff going on in my life at the time. I couldn’t really be bothered with Denise. She was just sort of irrelevant.’