On another occasion, she halted before a rickety cottage. ‘That’s Dulcie’s place. She’s in a home now. She used to have these azaleas on her verandah that she watered every morning from a china hot water bottle.’
Nelly talked of the children who had once overflowed these hushed streets. ‘Even when I first moved to the Preserve you still saw kids all over the place, walking to school, playing cricket in the street. They’ve gone now. People with children can’t afford to live here any more.’
There was an evening when she stopped in front of a townhouse. ‘See that driveway? There used to be freesias there, the kind with the fabulous smell, before they pulled the old place down. I think of them every spring, trying to push through the concrete. Like a hundred little murders.’
Talk like this ran counter to Tom’s sense of his surroundings. The city as he experienced it was glassily new. That was its allure. In Mangalore, when he walked down a street his neighbours had beheld Sebastian who begat Iris who begat Thomas. He trailed genealogies. The air around him swarmed with incident and knowledge, faces that had turned to bone shimmered at his shoulder. In Australia, he was free-floating. Architecture expressed the difference in material form, the bricks and beaten earth of childhood exchanged for superstructures of glass and airy steel. At night they turned into giant motherboards, alive with circuitry: advance screenings of the electronic future.
Nelly’s version of the city was a palimpsest. A ruin. It was layered like memory.
Tom thought of history mummified and dismembered in the official memorials scattered through the streets; and how effortlessly Nelly conjured the living slither of time.
She pointed to the digital clock perched on the Nylex Plastics sign, and said that as a child on family outings, she had watched eagerly for it to appear on the skyline. ‘I wanted to be the first one in the car to read out the time.’
Tom had noticed that the clock, glittering on top of the Cremorne silos, turned up now and then in her work. He was affected by Nelly’s remark, recalling the potency of urban signs in his own childhood. He could remember the streaming, neon enchantment of an advertisement for Bata shoes that had flashed out at intervals on the side of a building in Mangalore: the utter blackness he feared might last forever, the thrill as each bright letter took shape again, the twinkling, magical whole.
Then there was Stick No Bills. Learning to read, he had deciphered it as Strike On Bells; had felt intense satisfaction whenever he saw the stencilled exhortation. It spoke to him of solemn undertakings and powerful, invisible allies, the kind of message in which fairy tales abound: direct yet riddling, a test of resourcefulness.
The Nylex clock drew him closer in spirit to that small girl peering through a car window. At the same time, Nelly’s remark underlined one of their essential differences. To possess a city fully it is necessary to have known it as a child, for children bring their private cartographies to the mapping of public spaces. The chart of Tom’s secret emblems was differently plotted. Oceans separated him from the sites featured on it. A block of flats unevenly distempered pink at a junction in India still materialised in his dreams. But the city in which he now lived remained opaque to him. Like a tourist who has memorised a street plan, he navigated by artifice. His gaze stopped at surfaces; slipped off façades that had never been penetrated by his childish imaginings.
Little by little, Tom’s thinking about Nelly’s work gathered itself around the skipping girl sign. Although, in this connection, thinking was at once too precise and too restrictive a term. What he divined in the skipping girl was a constellation of impressions, metaphors, quicksilver glints.
She led Tom to the
wild objects
: his shorthand for things Nelly depicted that had outlived their purpose or evolved a new one. They included an ancient pillarbox, graffitied and plastered with posters, lurking in the shade of the shining mailbox that had superseded it. There were the windchimes made from splayds that dangled in a window in a once-industrial street; the CDs strung from the arms of a scarecrow in a housing estate allotment, the leatherette rocker recliner positioned beside a Smokers Please bin at the rear of a discount electrical goods warehouse.
These images reminded Tom of a toy he had owned when very young, a waxy slate he would cover with childish scribbles. When he lifted the plastic sheet on top, the marks disappeared, magically expunged. Yet here and there on the clean overlay the faint imprint of his hand’s labour could still be discerned. The toy, which had enchanted him, afforded three pleasures: inscription, erasure and remembering. It was concerned, like Nelly’s work, with what was discarded and ephemeral yet caught in the tatters of memory.
The
wild objects
suggested that time deals unkindly with things. They spoke to Tom of that period between nostalgia and novelty which contained objects once the height of fashion and now out of date. From time to time one or two would wander into the saga of the present (the CDs, the reclining chair. . .): untimely apparitions, humble fragments from the wreck of modernity. No longer new but not yet antique, they were merely old-fashioned; hence in poor taste.
These tiny punctures in the now-scape of the present allowed the past entry into Nelly’s images. No one looks twice at a disused pillarbox or old cutlery, thought Tom. But such things were infected with historical memory. Former emblems of progress and style, they functioned as memento mori of the endless rage for the new.
The skipping girl’s programmed rope had traced that frenzy in lights. In place of remembrance, it offered repetition. The skipping girl was as dazzling as novelty and, like it, going nowhere. Now, without her neon, she had the air of a sad revenant; a lifeless trace of history.
Over time, it was that sadness that caught at Tom. He found himself intensely moved by a photograph that showed the outlines of vanished rooms on a wall where the end house had been demolished in a terrace. There were days when he thrust Nelly’s photographs out of sight. Things illuminated, seen and surrendered to darkness: he was not always capable of looking at them with composure.
One day, when they were alone at the Preserve, he said as much to Brendon. Who listened, then led Tom to the room Nelly used for storage. There, he opened a cupboard. It contained a jumble of hardware and plastic flexes. Tom saw a sage-green dial telephone and a cream one. A slide projector. A boxy beige Mac Plus. A Betamax video recorder. A contraption with a built-in keyboard that Brendon identified as a Kaypro.
Brendon drew out a cumbersome black clock radio. ‘Remember these? With numbers that click over?’ He glanced around. ‘She’s got a black-and-white portable telly somewhere.’
‘But what’s it all doing here?’
‘You don’t know?’
Tom said, ‘Outdated stuff.’
‘Not just stuff. Outdated technology: the most dated stuff in the world. Not so long out of date, either. Stuff people aren’t yet nostalgic about. Stuff you can’t give away.’
The little room was icy. Tom, turning a rubber-banded sheaf of 5¼-inch floppy disks in his hands, saw the flesh pimple along his arms. Brendon noticed too: ‘It’s modernity. Walking over your grave.’
T
HEY STOOD
by the place where the dog had disappeared. It was Nelly who had spotted it: a three-toed print set in the bank. ‘That’ll be the wallaby.’
The rain had stopped, but Nelly, reaching for a handhold among the bushes, set off a small deluge. She hauled herself up, feet scrabbling. Crouched at the top of the bank, she peered into the bush. ‘I can get a little way, I think.’
Soon they were pushing along through undergrowth that kept bouncing back in their faces. Nelly said, ‘If you could lift me up. To try to get a better view.’
She rose past Tom’s face, disconcertingly solid. He had Nelly Zhang in his arms and couldn’t wait to be rid of her.
He heard her cooee off to his right. It was an unsettling call, syllables that straddled word and sound; an eerie trace of the real and imaginary vanishings in which Australian folk legend abounded, a mythology whose richness betrayed the fragility of European confidence in this place.
Tom never heard it without thinking of a picture that had hung in his first classroom in Australia: a small girl in a landscape of yellow grass and tall, splotched gums, the pretty wild-flowers that had led her astray still clutched in her pinafore. Light folded her in its cloth of gold, and drew a veil across the distant foliage that blocked her escape. She wept in her shining prison: lost in Australia, a predicament the Indian boy had understood at once.
The plan was to cross the hill from south to north. They had started out on parallel tracks about twenty feet apart but Nelly now sounded further away.
Tom came to a log-ridden gully. Halfway down, he knew he couldn’t get any further. He called to the dog. To Nelly.
He followed his yellow tapes back to the path and found her waiting for him. She said, ‘The gully’s too deep here. We should try further up, where it peters out.’ There were scratches on her hands, and on one side of her face.
‘What’s that smell?’ he asked ‘What smell?’
They sniffed. ‘There. I keep smelling it.’
‘Native mint bush.’
She snapped off a leafy stalk and passed it to him. The clouds parted. ‘The
sun
,’ they said, together.
Every time they set out again, Tom felt a little surge of hope. After about an hour his spirits sagged.
He checked his watch and saw that all of twenty-eight minutes had passed.
Sometimes he called the dog’s name backwards. To shake things up a little.
‘What sort of knot was it?’
He told her. Added, ‘It won’t work free.’
They were sitting by the side of the track on their jackets, eating apples. Tom said, ‘There’s all this folklore to do with knots.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Knots are supposed to contain power that can be used for good or evil. It’s called maleficium. There’s a long history of people attributing magical powers to knots. The Romans believed that a wound would heal more quickly if the dressing was bound with a Hercules knot, which was their name for a reef knot.’
Nelly ate apples core and all. She twirled the stem of this one in her fingers before letting it drop.
‘In Scandinavia the name Knut used to be given to boys whose parents already had as many children as they wanted. People believed that even the word for knot was powerful enough to prevent another pregnancy.’ Tom said, ‘You wouldn’t think that’d survive too much reality, would you?’
‘I don’t know, they probably lucked out more often than not. A woman who had as many kids as she wanted would’ve most likely been older. Less fertile.’ Nelly had produced a pencil and was unfolding her map.
Flies sizzled past Tom’s face. Somehow he began talking about Iris. Not the detail; he found himself unable to use the words
mother
and
shit
in relation to each other. But that he feared she wouldn’t be able to go on living on her own. ‘My aunt says it’s time she went into a home. And she’s probably right. But of course Ma hates the idea. She starts crying every time the subject comes up.’
He added, ‘It’s not like all nursing homes are terrible. I’ve offered to drive her around, find a place she likes. But she won’t even think about it.’
In this way he established Iris’s irrationality, and his willingness to do everything that might reasonably be expected of him.
Nelly had stopped drawing. She asked, ‘So what does she want to do?’
Tom was about to say, She wants to stay where she is, of course. But knowledge that had remained hidden within him, so that he had been able to ignore its tenancy, chose that moment to emerge into the light.
‘She’d never ask. But she’d like to live with me.’
He waited for Nelly to assure him that it was reasonable for the old to be sent away from their families into the care of strangers.
He waited for her to say what any reasonable person would say; what he himself had said to friends beleaguered by the needs of elderly parents.
But that’s crazy. You have your own life
to lead.
Nelly said, ‘Is that possible?’
Tom saw his books dispersed, his study transformed into a lair. He saw pillowslips stained with hair dye, and loose Strep-sils turning sticky in a drawer. He saw his mother in a big pink chair in the sunroom, her flesh warming, the blurry nimbus of her perm.
‘Not really.’ He got to his feet. ‘I can’t imagine it.’
M
IGRATION HAD
entailed so many changes that years went by before Tom remarked a decisive one: in Australia he was no longer the child of the house. The obvious displacement in space had obscured a more subtle dislocation in time. The shift, facilitated by his father’s death, was sealed by the proximity of his young cousin, Shona. She was a large, dull child, lightly spotted with malice; their relations were wary but amicable.
That first Christmas, eating roast turkey at Audrey’s table, Tom saw his uncle pluck the wishbone from the ruins of the bird. Automatically, he put out his hand. No one noticed, because attention was focused on nine-year-old Shona, who screwed her eyes shut, grasped the other end of the greasy bone and pulled. Tom’s gaze shot to his mother, but Iris was saying, ‘Tell, darling, did you make a nice wish?’ The boy pretended to be reaching for the gravy.
Not long afterwards, and in quick succession, he was displaying symptoms of diseases evaded in disease-ridden India. Measles, chicken pox: the classic illnesses of childhood. It was a simple ruse and it failed. His mother had to go out to work. Tom was told to be a big boy; tucked up and left for the day, with TV, a thermos of Heinz soup and a stack of Shona’s old comics for cheer. Outside the window mynahs called into the huge Australian silence.
After he recovered the second time, Tom remained healthy for years. There was no one to look after him; the message had been received. But it was couched in cipher. What remained vivid from that Christmas was the recollection of looking across the centrepiece of plastic fir cones and seeing his mother speaking with her mouth full. The sight of food that was neither inside nor outside the body, food that had broken down into an indistinct, glutinous mass, was disgusting: an Australian rule clever Tom Loxley had absorbed. He would believe it was the reason he flinched from the memory of that meal. The wishbone he had not been offered vanished under a slime of mashed fowl.