Every time he tugged on it, the rope would’ve twisted tighter around his leg. See how it’s just starting to scab over? I reckon he got free sometime in the last twenty-four hours.’
When Tom put his arms around him, the dog squirmed and struggled. His claws scrabbled on the table. An unbearably light bundle, he hated being carried. He had lost eight kilos, a third of his weight. His hips were angle brackets coated with fur.
‘He’ll need plenty of sleep, plenty of good tucker. Small amounts: four, five meals a day. No meat to begin with and introduce it gradually. Wouldn’t do any harm to have your regular vet check him out in the next few days.’
‘You know, in a way he looks pretty good,’ said Nelly. ‘Look how bright his eyes are.’
‘That’s how fasting works. The toxins go, along with the fat. But I wouldn’t like to say how much more he could’ve taken. You found him pretty much just in time, I reckon.’
‘It was the other way round,’ said Tom. ‘He found us.’
The dog licked honey from Nelly’s fingers. In the waiting room, he strained at a cage of snow-bellied kittens.
On the far side of the clipped pittosporums that separated the clinic from the street, an invisible woman said, ‘She’s good-looking in that really obvious way. You know?’
Tom put his hand over his ear. ‘What?’
In the city, Iris cried, ‘You’re not coming tonight?’
‘Ma, I’m still at the vet’s, it’s hours away-’ Tom broke off. ‘Not tonight. We’ll have dinner tomorrow, OK?’
‘What?’
‘Dinner tomorrow!’
‘All right.’
He said, ‘Ma, do you understand? He’s very thin, but he’s basically OK.’
‘I know.’ Iris had greeted the news with the same calm. ‘It’s a miracle. Saint Anthony never fails.’
‘What I don’t get is, if the rope got twisted around something and he chewed through it, or if it wore through somehow, why wasn’t the end of it still tied to his collar?’
‘Because the knot worked loose,’ said Nelly.
‘I’ve had that knot on my mind ever since he ran off. There’s no way it would’ve come undone.’
They shot past a car on the shoulder of the freeway, its hazard lights flashing. A man paced beside it, talking into a phone. A little further on, a billboard floated a lucent female over a city, replacing her entrails with skyscrapers.
‘What was it called, that magic in knots? Didn’t you say it could work for good?’
‘Do you think someone might’ve found him caught up in the bush?’ Tom was hearing a motorbike fading into the night. ‘Just untied the knot and let him go?’
‘You hungry?’ she asked.
‘Starving.’
‘Next bypass, OK?’
Tom said,‘My mother says it’s a miracle. She’s been praying to Saint Anthony.’
‘Well, there you go then.’
Nelly nudged him. ‘Look.’
In the mirror tiles that covered the back wall of the pizza parlour, two wild-eyed grotesques had appeared. Their garments were squalid, their hair feral. They were escapees from an experiment conducted on another planet. Unearthly happiness glimmered in their soiled faces.
One evening, Nelly was waiting for Tom when he rang her bell. ‘Come on, come on, you have to see this while it’s still light.’
She led him to a street they hadn’t visited in weeks. ‘Look.’
It was a flat-faced, two-storey house in a street of Federation cottages. Just completed: a skip containing rubble and crumpled guttering still at the kerb, the yard a stretch of trampled earth.
The glass panels that covered the façade of the house contained the life-size image of a low, wooden dwelling with finials and decrepit fretwork.
‘It’s a photograph of the house that used to be here,’ said Nelly.‘A digital print on laminated glass. Isn’t it brilliant? Don’t you love it?’
When a building has been demolished, the memory of it seems to linger awhile, imprinted on the eye. Here, before them, was that phantom rendered material.
The house that was there and not might have been a metaphor for what passed between them. Tom thought of what his relations with Nelly lacked: sex, answers. Straightforward things. Instead, she offered ghosts, illusion, imagery, a handful of glass eyes. Nelly offered detail and excess. Things extra and other, oddments left on the pavement when the bins had been emptied, illuminated capitals for a manuscript not written. She offered diversions, discontinuities, impediments to progress. Tom thought of scenes that present themselves to a traveller, in which confusion and brilliance so entrance that scenery itself eludes attention.
The past is not what is over but what we wish to have done with. That year time turned translucent. Old things moved just beneath its surface, familiar and strange as a known face glimpsed under water.
It was a year of fearful symmetries. There was a fashion for shopping bags made from woven nylon that reminded Tom of the cheap totes found in the markets of India. They had handles formed from skipping rope and were patterned with serial, stylised skipping girls. Tom saw them all over the city, colourful presences signalling from women’s hands.
Once he saw a ghost. On a kidney-shaped coffee table in the window of the retro shop on Church Street stood an object Tom recognised with a small, sickening lurch. Knobbly purple glass, an elongated stopper: the amethyst double of the yellow bottle he had smashed all those years ago; as if smashing were all it took.
There was the sea-hiss of the freeway in the background. They sat at a picnic table beside the car park, devouring pizza.
The dog was licking around his takeaway container, nosing it over the gravel. When he was sure it held no more spaghetti he returned to the car and raised a shaky leg against a tyre. Then he waited by the door.
Nelly opened the door and lifted him onto the seat; placed her face against his fur. He sighed and fell asleep.
Tom crammed the empty food containers one by one into a slit-mouthed bin. Night’s brilliant little logos were starting to appear all over the sky.
He was on his way back to Nelly, advancing in a measured diagonal across the car park, when he fell. His foot tripped over nothing and he went down.
After a moment he registered pain, gravel-scorch on the palms flung out to protect his face. Also, one knee had hit the ground hard.
What was overwhelming, however, was the astonishment: the sheer scandal of falling. Tom was returned, in one swift instant, to childhood; for children, not having learned to stand on their dignity, are accustomed to being slapped by the earth.
His first instinct was to scramble to his feet as if nothing had happened. But the dumb machinery of his flesh refused to obey. The rebellion was brief and shocking; then his thoughts took a different course. He stayed where he was, the adult length of him at rest in gravelled dirt. Without realising it, he began to cry.
Later, he leaned his forehead on the steering wheel and cried. He wiped his face on his sodden sleeve and went on crying.
At some point he said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help it.’ He said, ‘I keep thinking how the rope would’ve cut into him whenever he tried to struggle free or lie down. That he’d have had to choose between pain and exhaustion.’
What Tom meant also was that while the dog had persisted in his painful effort to rejoin him, he had persuaded himself the dog was dead. What he meant was that he was unworthy of grace.
He thought of Iris doing what she could to help, adding her prayers to the world’s cargo of trust. He remembered the receptionist at the health centre who had told him about her grandfather’s dog, the ranger who had spoken kindly on the phone. He recalled the gifts of hope and reassurance he had been offered, and cried with his hands over his face.
Nelly kept saying,‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’ Tom lifted his head, and saw her hands opening and shutting. They made passes in the air as if essaying spells once familiar but long forgotten.