He was a grown man, said Tom, before it occurred to him that the Prasads might have intended the name as a form of homage; a mark of respect, even affection. The old people had been gentle and ineffectual. Tom could recall a steady procession of beggars to their door.
He spoke to Nelly of marvels. Of arriving in Australia and finding clean water piped into every kitchen, every drinking fountain. He had drunk glass after glass of it: an everyday miracle on tap.
On a moonless night, Tom ventured a gothic little tale. It was a true story, said Tom, and he had heard it from his father. It was Arthur’s earliest memory, and this was how it went:
What Arthur remembered was a red thing. It jumped up and fell back. Sometimes it vanished but tiny red eyes still watched him. It had a name and that was fire.
Arthur had scarlet fever, which was red fever, and his head hurt. His arms and chest were on fire. In his mother’s ivory-handled mirror he saw that his cheeks had turned red. But his tongue was white: coated with sugar or snow.
Snow dropped past the window. Arthur’s throat burned. The next time he saw himself in the mirror his tongue was a strawberry. The red thing was growing inside him. It spread in his bed, and his sheets were on fire. The only cool thing in the world was his mother’s white hand. She smoothed his hair. She filled a red rubber bag with ice and placed it on his forehead. She read him a story about Snow White and Rose Red.
His older sister sent him a picture on folded white paper. She had drawn a wreath of sharp green leaves and berries like beads of blood. ‘It’s Christmas,’ said Arthur’s mother. She draped a snowy pillowcase over the foot of his bed and left him in the dark. The red thing leaped about.
In the night it turned into a man. It was a red man and Arthur knew him and he didn’t know him and he was coming closer.
Tell me a story
. It led Tom to reflect on the book he was writing. Near the end of his long life, Henry James had written a story with a happy ending; having until then, in exemplary modern fashion, avoided the redemptive case. ‘The Jolly Corner’ told of Spencer Brydon, who returned to New York after a long absence abroad. He was welcomed by Alice Staverton, an old friend who had loved him steadfastly over the years.
Not long after his return, Brydon began to suspect that a family property he had inherited was haunted. He took to prowling the house after dark and, after a harrowing pursuit one night, came face to face with the apparition. As Brydon had intuited, it was none other than his alter ego, the rich businessman he might have become if he hadn’t left New York. The terrible figure advanced on and overpowered the hero; who when he finally came to his senses found Alice cradling his head in her lap. She had come to the house because she sensed Brydon was in danger. She spoke gently to the bewildered man of the need to accept the path his life had taken; and they embraced as the story ended.
Tom had devoted several pages of his book to this text. He had concentrated on horror, on the awful qualities that pervaded the story. He had traced the presence of doubles in James’s fiction, had analysed the mythic, cultural and psychoanalytic import of the doppelgänger; and remained unsatisfied with his efforts. The tale continued to elude him, as the ghost eluded Brydon. It was a complex, masterly work, far removed from simple childhood tales. But Tom suddenly saw that the fairy-story, a humble, enduring form, might provide him with a fresh thread to follow in unravelling its significance. For Brydon, like the protagonist in a fairy-tale, had bravely stared down peril, securing selfhood and winning union with a beloved other.
It was an insight Tom pursued with happy results. In this way, Nelly entered a chapter of his book: an enabling, untragic muse.
S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON
passed in hopefulness and despair, and bouts of icy rain. Images of the dog continued to present themselves to Tom. He remembered him sitting up very straight at the top of the hill above Nelly’s house only a week earlier: calmly attentive to his wide surroundings, rich in world.
With wind stirring the trees into a formless boiling, Tom made his way back up the track towards the house. Felix Atwood’s attachment to authenticity notwithstanding, his architect had clad the old building in galvanised iron. Seen at a certain angle, its corrugations shadowed violet, the house could, in fact, pass for the shed it impersonated. It was iconic, in its way; at once more and less than it appeared, a persuasive fiction.
Nelly had told Tom that Atwood had acquired the house in her name. After negotiations with the tax office, her solicitors succeeded in saving it. Whereupon Nelly put the property on the market. But no one wanted it. Its lack of mod cons had no charm in rural eyes and it was too far from the city for a convenient weekender. And it was in any case dismaying.
‘The estate agent said people would go, But it looks like a shed. They’d drive off without having left the car.’
A house imitating a shed was an unprecedented object. Nelly said, ‘It takes time to see something new.’
One of the old outbuildings on the property had been left to rot in peace: roof rusting, boards weathered to soft black and silver. Beside the shiny iron house it had the cringing look of an animal that fears attention.
The gatepost, grey with age, was patched with yellow lichen. Tom was lifting the wire fastening over it, when he heard his name. He turned to see Denise Corrigan in her blue rain jacket. ‘I thought you might need a hand.’
He explained that he had to drive back to the city. ‘I see my mother on Sunday. You know how it is.’
‘Well, you get along. I’ll head up to the ridge anyway.’
She was wearing pale, faintly shiny lipstick; an unflattering choice. She saw him noticing it and looked away.
Her awkwardness, and the adolescent colour of her mouth: they prompted Tom to say, ‘You used to look after Rory, didn’t you? You and your sister.’
‘Not Jen. She preferred tractors to kids back then. Probably still does.’
‘So you were the one who used to babysit Rory?’
‘He was a gorgeous kid. I felt sorry for him, really. His dad liked to take off, go walking, head down the beach, whatever. And Nelly could get caught up with her painting and that.’
‘It was good of you to help out.’
‘Rory wasn’t any trouble. And they were cool people to have around. They’d have friends up from the city, sometimes a whole crowd. It was all pretty exciting for a teenager stuck out here.’
Her lips were slightly parted; he glimpsed her tongue. In a delirious moment, considered to what uses it might be put.
She was saying, ‘I cooked for them, sometimes. Felix used to say my steaks were the best he’d ever eaten.’
Something about the way she said it. He could hear Nelly:
I didn’t go up there so much. It was Felix’s retreat.
Denise and Atwood. Tom saw the man’s hand in the ropes of her hair; a plate of bloody flesh on a table between them.
On an impulse he asked, ‘What do you think happened? With Atwood, I mean.’
‘I know one thing for sure. That set-up on the beach, the car and that? It was so tacky. There’s no way Felix would’ve gone like that.’
Darkness and a deserted beach, clothes folded in a car: Tom could see that they might add up to a clichéd quotation from tragedy. But he disagreed with Denise’s deduction. Why should banality be incompatible with seriousness of intent? It was like art that flaunted its lack of artistry; it was Warhol’s Brillo box all over again. Atwood might have laid out the signs of his death in wry acknowledgment of their triteness; the sea winking hugely at his back. Kitsch might be no more than it appears, or a different thing altogether. The enigma was one of signification.
Tom moved involuntarily, a kind of half shrug.
It annoyed Denise. She said, ‘That was Nelly Jimmy Morgan saw on the beach that day.’
‘Sure.’
‘Oh, you can think what you like. But I recognised that dress straight away from how Jimmy described it. I’d made it for Nelly. A surprise for her birthday. Felix got me the fabric, this lovely silky French stuff. Cost a packet.’ Denise said, ‘It wasn’t the greatest fit. He got the wrong size pattern or something. But Nelly still looked gorgeous in it.’
There was the distant sound of machinery in the paddocks. Nearer at hand, the pepper tree was flinging itself sideways with throaty noises.
Tom said, ‘Did you share this with anyone? Like the cops?’
A cool, dappled stare: ‘Why do you think Nelly and I aren’t friends any more?’
‘What that amounts to is, the cops followed it up and got nowhere.’
‘Nelly’d have had some story ready.’
‘Morgan swore he saw a tall woman, remember?’
‘Half the time Jimmy hadn’t a clue what he was seeing. I know what he was like: he used to give us a hand with shearing before he went totally off the rails. But he was spot on about that dress. Like that Nelly’d hitched it up so she could climb the dunes better. It was that Chinese style with a slit skirt.’
Denise Corrigan had a recurring dream of bleeding from the mouth in public, and the memory, passing through her mind at that moment, drew her tongue across her gums. It left tiny bubbles of spit between her upper teeth, which were translucent and sloped inwards a little.
‘OK, so maybe Nelly helped Atwood get away.’ Tom said, ‘You can’t really blame her, can you? When it was a choice between prison or cocktails poolside someplace they don’t do extradition.’
Trying to lighten the conversation, he realised Denise was close to crying.
‘I was the one who was home that morning. When she brought Rory down saying she wasn’t feeling too good. She didn’t look ill to me, she looked scared.’
The wind was amusing itself with Denise’s hair, heaving it about. She pushed pieces of it away fiercely and said, ‘She wouldn’t have helped Felix. Don’t you know about those terrible paintings she did? Anyone could see she hated him.’
F
IVE MONTHS
after Felix Atwood disappeared, an exhibition by Nelly Zhang had opened at Posner’s gallery. It included a suite of paintings called
The Day of the Nightingale.
Among the crowd at the opening was a journalist who had covered the Atwood story. The next day, his newspaper ran a front-page article under the headline
Nelly’s Nasties
. The phrase gained its own tripping momentum and circulated throughout the city. Nelly was arraigned in single-sentence paragraphs. The charges included cashing in on her husband’s notoriety, trendy feminism, washing her dirty linen in public, ruthless ambition, sick navel-gazing.
The newspaper reproduced the photograph of Felix Atwood with his surfboard, beside the image of his wife’s distorted face.
A rock star who collected art was quoted as saying he was struggling with aesthetic and ethical objections to Nelly’s work. And a grand old painter described her as a she-artist whose frames displayed great promise.
The gallery’s windows attracted eggs and a brick. The show sold briskly but closed three days later, the contentious sequence withdrawn from sale; destroyed by the artist, belatedly appalled by her own images, so it was reported.
In the art world there was widespread dismay at these events. Artists and critics defended Nelly’s right to display the controversial work. A virtuous rapping of philistine knuckles was heard.
Yet it was plain to Tom, reading through the material Esther had given him, that even among professionals the
Nightingale
paintings had caused unease. The same sort of thing kept turning up in reviews:
barely suppressed violence, eerie stagings.
Elusiveness was also mentioned; this last an affront, since reviewers who would have sacrificed their lives, or at least their columns, defending art’s right to scandalise were stirred to outrage by its refusal to simplify. An eminent critic summed up the problem:
Zhang (re)presents the systemic violence of
authoritarian modes in images as ambiguous as they are oppressive.
Nowhere in these paintings is the phallocentric will-to-power
explicitly critiqued. The refusal to engage in direct visual discourse
is ultimately elitist and unsatisfying.
P
ACKING UP
at Nelly’s house, Tom discovered a box of food he had set on a kitchen chair and forgotten: soup, chilli sauce, olive oil, tins of tomatoes and mangoes. Grains of rice trickled from a packet, and he realised that the plastic had been nibbled away in one corner.
He remembered the stale oats; he would throw them away and use the container for rice. He eased up the lid and found a dead mouse inside.
He stood with his back against the sink, his jaw tight. He saw his hand, scooping oats into a stainless steel dish. He saw himself carrying the dog’s bowl outside and placing it on the grass by the steps.
In those minutes, the mouse had emerged, run up the table leg and climbed into the oats. Tom had replaced the lid; and in time, the mouse had died.
The time it had taken was what Tom didn’t wish to think about.
He drank some water, first holding the enamel mug against each of his temples in turn.
When he had finished his chores, he went outside and dug a hole at the foot of a gum tree. He tipped mouse and oats into the depression and covered them with earth.
Light was starting to drain from the sky. But as Tom was turning away, something glimmered white in the grass. He stooped; and found he was looking at a little heap of old dog turds.
That was when tears began slipping down his cheeks. He sat on his heels and wrapped his arms about his legs, and rocked. He rubbed his face on his knees, leaving a glitter of mucus on his jeans, and went on crying.
On Saturday nights there was only TV on TV. Tired from the long drive home, Tom lay on his bed. A picture had come to him, as he inserted the key in his front door, of the dog bounding up the hall to greet him. This mental image had such power, the pale animal rearing from the gloom of the passage in such speckled detail, that it was like encountering a revenant. Tom had entered his flat convinced that the dog was dead.
Now he lay with whisky at hand and his thoughts drifting, as they did in this mood, to a room with a polished concrete floor. Some years earlier, on a stopover in India, he had been persuaded by his mother to call on a relative, a third cousin who lived in Pondicherry. Eileen had married a man ten years older, a Tamil with cracked purple lips. He accepted Tom’s bottle of duty-free single malt with both hands, and placed it on a glass-fronted cabinet between a vase of nylon hibiscus and a plastic Madonna containing holy water from Lourdes.