Again and again, the child Tom trundled out the boy, the girl; singly, together. They were Boo and Baby. He conducted complicated conversations with them. Sometimes he punished one or the other, Boo’s door or Baby’s remaining shut all day. He would stroke the relevant tab, shift it a fraction; then withdraw his hand. The satisfaction he knew at such moments was intense.
But in years to come the page struck Tom as a terrible foreshadowing of his ordered existence. Each day was a sum with a red tick beside it. Intellectual curiosity, love’s huge anarchy: he had succeeded in taming even these. There he came, the bright-eyed boy, one arm raised in merry greeting; the plaything of a shuttling machinery.
Into these broodings arrived the dog.
The dog hid blood-threaded bones down the side of a couch. He tore open a pillow and clawed the paint from a door. He sprang into a neighbour’s ornamental pond and swallowed a goldfish. There was his ecstatic fondness for rolling in filth. He would dig in his ear with a hind foot; extract the paw and lick it. Now and then while snuffling along a footpath he would hastily eat a turd. His desires were beastly. At his most docile, he remained an emissary from a kingdom with enigmatic laws.
And slowly, slowly it dawned on Tom that the animal acquired to please his wife spoke to a need that was his alone. All giving is shot with ambiguity, directed at multiple and paradoxical ends. A gift might exceed thought and desire. It might be epiphanic.
The dog was handsome, sweet-natured. It was easy to love such a creature. Nevertheless, his core was wild. In accommodating that unruliness, Tom’s life flowed in a broader vein.
Late for work while the dog danced out of reach, followed his own imperatives through mud and weeds, Tom was conscious of anger ticking in him like time. It didn’t preclude elation. For fleet minutes, a rage for control had been outfoxed.
Matted fur drifted against skirting boards. Even as he worked a soft grey clump from the bristles of a dustbrush, Sucks to you, Boo, thought Tom.
It was not the end of disgust, which is an aversion to anything that reminds us we are animals. But the dog unleashed in Tom a kind of grace; a kind of beastliness.
S
UNDAYS WERE
ritualistic. Morning tea, lunch, a video, afternoon tea; then Tom would return his mother to Audrey.
He was transferring sugar from packet to bowl that afternoon when he became aware of an unambiguous organic stench.
He lived in what had once been a capacious family house, one that had offered pleasure to the eye in a way that was commonplace before architects discovered their talent for brutality. Later two dentists had run their practice on the ground floor. Later still, the building had served as a rooming house. Finally, it had been converted into flats. This last rearrangement had taken a lavatory situated outside the back door of the original house and placed it between Tom’s laundry and sunroom with doors to both. The old-fashioned seat there, marginally higher than the one in the renovated ensuite, was preferred by Iris.
Tom hovered in the sunroom. Rain had pooled, trembling, in the lower corners of the windowpanes. He raised his voice: ‘Ma, are you OK?’
‘Yes, yes.’
He heard her moving about. Water gushed. A ripeness filled his nostrils.
After some minutes, she called, ‘Tommy?’
‘Yes?’
‘Can you come?’
On the floor near the seat lay part of a large turd; the rest had been tracked over the linoleum. Faeces and wadded paper clung to the sides of the lavatory bowl. The seat, imperfectly wiped, showed pale brown whorls.
Tom’s first thought was of a child: of a monstrous infant soiling its pen.
His mother said, ‘There is a piece of shit.’
She said, ‘Don’t be angry, Tommy. I can’t pick it up.’
She was clinging to the edge of the basin; because the handles of her walker were soiled, realised Tom. He reached around her, ran the tap over a facecloth, used it to wipe the handles clean.
It was difficult to manoeuvre in the constricted space. With infinite care, he led his mother to the door, trying, with his hands over hers, to steer the walker clear of the filth; trying also to avoid stepping in it.
He was murmuring, ‘It’s OK, don’t worry, it’s OK.’
In the laundry he kneeled and, one at a time, lifted Iris’s heels and eased off her ballet slippers. For a small woman, she had broad feet; he had to tug to dislodge the shoes.
All the while, ‘Wait, wait,’ shrieked Iris. ‘I’m falling.’
‘You’re fine. It’s OK.’
She was wearing nylon knee-highs. ‘These stockings are slipping.’ Again she screamed, ‘I’m falling.’
‘I’ll walk you to your chair, Ma. Just hang on a sec.’
Tom checked the wheels on her walker; ran the facecloth over them.
‘Have you washed your hands?’ he asked; and caught, again, the echo of childhood.
‘Yes, yes.’
Iris let herself be steered along the passage to the living room. Her chair waited in front of the TV. She lowered herself onto it by degrees, with creaks and sighs. When she looked up she saw a face that had slipped from its bones in the grey depths of the screen. It was a moment before she recognised her reflection.
She said, ‘Give me my bag.’
While she was foraging in it, Tom went into his bathroom. He washed his hands, thinking that it was the first time he had heard the word
shit
from his mother. It was out of place in the realm of the ladylike, which admitted only big job,
kakka
, number two.
When he returned to her, Iris was checking her lipstick in a hand mirror: pressing her lips together, pushing them out. About to snap her bag shut, she said, ‘Better see that I’ve got my key.’
‘You have. You checked before lunch, remember?’
Iris went on pulling pills, spectacle case, tissues, rosary from her bag. ‘My God, what’ll happen if it’s lost?’
‘It’s not lost, Ma. How could it be?’
‘But how will I get in?’ Her voice had risen. She was close to tears.
‘Your key can’t possibly be lost. Think about it. If it is, I’ve got a spare. And so has Audrey.’
‘What if she’s not there?’
Tom felt he might scream with her. He said, ‘Ma, I’ll be driving you home. I’ve got a key. And in any—’ ‘Ah. Found it.’ Her agitation subsided on the instant. ‘Thank God for that.’ Then she said, ‘These tissues are all wrong now.’ She began refolding them, all her attention concentrated on the flimsy pink squares.
Tom was reminded of his own intense involvement, as a child, with his immediate surroundings. A segment of a forgotten day came back to him: he was sucking up a fizzy orange drink through a straw, sometimes letting the liquid in the anodised metal tumbler subside before it reached his mouth. While this was going on, the sun moved in and out of clouds, and there was the pleasure of light alternating with shade on the side of his face.
He handed his mother a small, silver-capped bottle.
‘What’s this?’
‘Cologne.’
‘What for?’
‘You might like to put some on.’
‘What?’
‘Put some on!’
Deafness, conducive to imperatives, discouraged nuance. Tom said, ‘How about a cup of tea?’
Iris, absorbed in perfuming herself, ignored him.
‘Tea!’ he bellowed.
A tray held a milk jug and sugar bowl, a white cup, a pastry cloud on a blue-glazed plate. The mother inspected these objects. The son braced himself for criticism.
Praise was rare on Iris’s tongue. When Tom, as a child, presented her with his school report, she would scan it for deficiencies. ‘What is this 87% in Geography? Why are you second this term?’
She had her father’s sixth sense for inadequacy. No servant had lasted long in the de Souza household: Sebastian reached automatically for the smudged tumbler on the credenza, Iris’s finger trailed over the undusted ledge. The dhobi’s fortnightly bundle of spotless laundry unfailingly lacked a sock or a pillowcase.
But her son overrode Iris’s instinct for shortfalls. In the last month of her confinement, gripped by premonition, she had prayed daily that the child would be spared Arthur’s nose. Then he arrived, furiously protesting the breach of their union. Iris saw a slimy, dark, curiously elongated organism that was whisked from her at once. She began to cry, because she had beheld perfection.
Her son was healthy; he grew up handsome and clever. Of course she feared for him. There was the evil eye. If a neighbour remarked that the child was looking well, Iris assured her at once that he was sickly. When Arthur heaped praise on the boy, she cut him short and crossed her fingers behind her back. Calamities, like moths, are drawn to the light. To speak glowingly of Tommy was to risk the wrong sort of attention.
Jesus
bids us shine with a pure clear light
, piped the massed infants of St Stephen’s; and Iris, radiating pride in the front pew, thought how men, even the best intentioned, so often missed the point.
It became her habit to call attention to her son’s limitations. Disparagement might mean the opposite of what it says; it might be a form of love. Only, it is difficult for the disparaged to construe it as such. How was Tom to distinguish between the flaws his mother discovered in his best efforts and her fault-finding with the world? ‘She doesn’t mean it,’ Arthur would say; but like so much Arthur said, it was easily discounted.
When Tom was older, he might have been capable of unravelling Iris’s ruse; but if so, he would have scorned it. ‘It’s superstition, Ma! How can you be so irrational?’ Thus he greeted the pinch of salt his mother flung over her shoulder, the pin over which she bent stiffly in the street. It never occurred to Tom that superstition might be an expression of humility: an admission that knowledge is limited and possibility infinite. Rooted in the desire to free his mother from unreasoning fear, his loving impulse flowered as criticism. ‘Ma, that’s totally dumb!’ Of course Iris, recognising her own strategy at work in her son, paid no attention to his belittling. Besides, the devil lurked in spilled salt. Besides,
See a pin and let it lie, / All the day
you’ll have to cry.
And so: the tray, the milk and sugar, golden tea in a cup, a miniature éclair on a blue plate.
Tom’s breath caught in anticipation.
‘That looks absolutely nice,’ said Iris.
Tom assembled gloves, lavatory brush, disinfectant, cream cleanser, water, mop, wipes, what was left of the roll of paper.
Afterwards, while the floor was drying, he took his nailbrush and Iris’s shoes into the yard. There he turned on the hose and scrubbed dark, gummy excrement from their soles, using a twig to gouge it free where necessary.
He washed his hands again and soaped his arms all the way to the elbow. There was the tang of lemon verbena. And behind it, the fragrance of faeces.
It went on and went on, like a terrible dream. Floor, bowl, seat, lavatory brush, paper-holder, washbasin were spotless.
The soiled towel had been replaced with a fresh one. His nails gleamed, but to be safe he dug them into the wedge of soap. With his hand on the tap, he saw a few brown grains stuck to the chrome.
A
T THE
back of the deepest drawer in Tom’s desk was an object unlike any other he owned. In the Loxleys’ last week in India, he had spied a small, lilac-bound book among the rubbish in a wicker wastebasket. It was his mother’s old autograph album. He retrieved it straight away and secreted it under three starched white shirts in his suitcase.
It was an unfathomable action. For weeks Tom had watched the unwitting objects that had furnished his life—dessert spoons, mattresses, a treadle sewing machine, a carom board— sold or given away. This dismantling of the past, which had seemed so solid and was now shown to be as flimsy as a painted backdrop, had caused him no grief. He had known he was witnessing something at once terminal and cathartic. He met it with the grave exhilaration that was its due.
Yet there was his baffling rescue of the autograph album. As a small child he had turned its pastel pages carefully, drawn by their delicate, water-ice hues. Later, when he had learned to decipher handwriting, he read the verses the album contained; but only as he read everything that came his way. Years had passed since he had troubled to look inside it. Autograph albums were a girlish amusement. Twelve-year-old Tom Loxley held them in scorn.
From the wreckage of the past he might have salvaged a favourite toy, a book. But these he relinquished with never a pang, pressing them on friends or neighbourhood urchins, munificent as a maharajah. He watched old exercise books curl and blacken in the mali’s bonfire with glee. The little album with its dinted spine remained his only souvenir of India. No one knew it was in his possession; or so Tom believed. In fact Karen, for one, had pondered the anomaly it represented with some curiosity.
From time to time Tom flicked through the album. Signatures made him pause. Childhood mythologies uncoiled from certain names; others sank back into the faceless, unimaginable swarm of those who had known his mother when she was young.
Be good, sweet maid, and let who will / Be clever
. So Sebastian de Souza’s exquisite copperplate enjoined his daughter.
With time and rereading, Tom had the autograph album’s contents by heart. He didn’t wish to retain vows of undying friendship, mildly salacious witticisms, exhortations to virtue and remembrance; but the album had taken possession of him. He could never be rid of it now.
D
ETAILS OF
Nelly’s pictures would blend with Tom’s dreams, spawning brilliant figments lost to ham-fisted day. When he woke his eyes looked wider in the mirror, sated with images.
There was a nebulous quality to him in these months. Women were susceptible to it. In strange bedrooms he profited from their interest. He was ghostly; his rapture precise, embodied.
He speculated about the transformation of Nelly’s work after Atwood disappeared. The change to showing photographs of her paintings, too radical for evolution, suggested extremity. Tom was inclined to read it as a fable of loss: Atwood as categorically absent and mourned as the paintings Nelly destroyed. Photography was a form of willed remembrance. Tom was wary of it: this spectral medium, tirelessly calling up the past. Sometimes he shrank from a spread of Nelly’s photos as from a collection of gravestones, each a loving memorial to her marriage.