He awarded himself a break; drank coffee issued in sour gouts from a dispenser while thinking of the way bodies changed with technology. Handwriting, assuming the speed of a body, was marked by its dynamic. Technology reversed the process, leaving its impress on corporeal arrangements. The history of machines was written in the alignment of muscles.
A scene from the previous year came back to him. One evening, as he was putting out his rubbish, he had noticed a woman wave at a car pulling away from the kerb. Then she rotated her forefinger rapidly: she was asking the driver to call her. And Tom had realised that this gesture, once commonplace, had almost disappeared. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen it. The rotary-dial telephone, until recently an everyday object, was glimpsed now only as a ghost inhabiting a gesture; itself an ephemeral sign, transient as progress.
Public interest in Felix Atwood had started to wane, when a man walked into a police station in a country town and told a story. Jimmy Morgan was known locally as
a character
; a photograph showed a narrow brow above a drinker’s unfastened face. He lived alone in a shack deep in the bush some miles from the spot where Atwood’s car had been found. It was the kind of refuge Australia was still good at offering.
Very early on the day Atwood vanished, Jimmy Morgan was walking along the beach. To what purpose was not evident, purposelessness being the end to which Morgan aspired; an aim harder to achieve than it appears. But he assured the men who interviewed him that the date was fixed in his mind, for it marked the completion of his fifty-fourth year on earth.
It was still some minutes to sunrise, but the night had begun to dissolve. In the lengthening clefts of light Morgan saw a woman climbing the track that bent through scattered ti-tree to the road. She didn’t look over her shoulder. In any case, Morgan had the knack of not drawing attention to himself.
Eventually he followed her over the dunes. The empty road curved away out of sight to left and right along the coast. Morgan might have heard a car. It was hard to tell. The wind was up and there was the sound of the sea.
It was a narrative of missed opportunities, thought Tom. If Morgan had approached the winding track from a different direction, he would have seen Atwood’s BMW and whoever was or wasn’t in it. If he hadn’t hesitated before following the woman, he would have seen where she went. Crucially, if he had told his story sooner, the police would have stood a chance of finding her. But almost three weeks went by before Morgan heard a conversation in a pub and realised the significance of what he had seen; weeks in which drink went on washing relentlessly over his mind, and the near past and the far faded equally into the dim unhappiness of so many things that might have been.
Yet Morgan would tell his story many times in the weeks to come, and over all those retellings, his description of the woman never wavered. After the first sighting, the ti-tree had screened her; but then Morgan had seen her again, just before she disappeared, near the top of the track. One pale hand tugged at the dress stretched above her knees so that she might climb more freely. Morgan thought she was carrying a bag in her other hand; a small suitcase, perhaps.
There was another thing, a strange thing. It was the reason Jimmy Morgan had hung back on the track that night; the reason that had sent him, against instinct and experience, to lay his tale before pebble-eyed detectives. But it wasn’t easy for Morgan to pin down what had occasioned his unease. Even sober, all he could say was that there was something peculiar about the figure on the track. It was an impression: distinct and elusive. Images slid about in Morgan’s brain.
He told the same story to the journalist who was waiting for him when the cops were through. Some hours later, with two inches of Southern Comfort left in the bottle, Morgan confessed he had been
shit scared
. ‘I thought she was going to turn round.’ He passed his hand over his jaw and said, ‘I didn’t want to see her face.’
O
NE OF
the pleasures knowing Nelly had brought Tom was the rediscovery of images. Looking at paintings with her, he gave way to an old delight. The anxiety he brought to analysis was less urgent in her presence, subsumed in sensuous attentiveness to stagings of mass and colour and line.
Nelly brought a practitioner’s gaze to looking. She might talk of the problem of representing form in two dimensions, the use of perspective and shading versus the modulation of lines. She might say, ‘Warm colours advance, cool ones recede. That’s what they teach you at art school. But what makes this bit work is she’s used blue here, where the highlight is, where you’d expect yellow. It’s a thing Cézanne used to do.’
Or, ‘This guy’s so good. He’s such a great colourist, and their work can look, you know, sort of vague. Just big, loose outbursts. But there’s really solid structure here, it’s so disciplined.’
As Tom listened, what he had known as abstractions of period and style acquired immediacy. There was the mess and endeavour of the studio in Nelly’s conversation.
He had a gobbling eye. Nelly was teaching him to look slowly.
She took him to an exhibition of pre-cinematic illusions. They looked at dioramas and Javanese shadow puppets, and the
ombres chinoises
theatres that captivated eighteenth-century France. In the illusory depths of peepshows they saw a Venetian carnival, and baboons at play in a jungle glade. A snowscape dissolved from day to night before their eyes. They witnessed phantasms.
Then they found themselves in front of a display of parchment lithographs coloured with translucent dyes and strategically perforated. As they watched, the overhead lighting dimmed while at the same time light shone behind the pictures. At once the little scenes came to life. A string of fairy lights appeared in a pleasure garden. The moon glimmered above a forest. Candelabra and footlights lit up the gilded interior of a playhouse. Best of all was a huddle of houses at dusk by a wintry lake, for a lamp glowed in the window of one of the cottages, and the sight of that tiny golden rectangle in the night was incomparably moving and magical.
The gallery lights came up, and were lowered once more. Again the images shone out. Fireworks burst over an illuminated palace, lanterns glowed beside water and were answered by a scatter of stars. Tom and Nelly stared and stared. They were twenty-first century people, accustomed to digital imaging and computer simulation and all manner of modern enchantments. They stood before the antique miracle of light, transfixed with wonder.
Searching for a corkscrew at the Preserve, Tom opened a drawer and found it full of silky folds. He shook out scarf after scarf, musty souvenirs printed with banksias and trams, marsupials and modernist skylines. Nelly said she had picked them up in op shops, collected them over years.
She had boxes of postcards and photographs, and a collapsing Edwardian scrapbook with seraphim and posies of forget-me-nots peeling from its pages. A large blue envelope, rescued from a dumpster, contained three X-rays of a scoliotic spine. There was also a plastic sleeve stuffed with stamps; a relic, Nelly said, from student days when she had made jewellery with a friend. She fished out one of their efforts: a Czechoslovakian deerhound, a tiny stamp-picture encased in clear resin and hung from a silken cord.
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 finger 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 still: 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 honour-ings 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.
I
N 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 flyer. ‘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 office 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.