Tom finished marking the essay on James, dropped a faculty directive about Strategic Learning Outcomes into his recycling bin, wrote a scholarship reference for one of his postgraduates.
Among the many messages in his Inbox from strangers offering to extend his penis was an email from a student protesting her exam results. ‘How am I supposed to get into Law if I get a 2B in Textual Studies?’
He ran off a copy of the flyer he had mocked up at home. The photograph reproduced well, picking up the dog’s markings and the feathering along his legs. Tom ran off forty more; but even as he did, was conscious of plaintive notices passed with barely a glance as they peeled from lamp-posts. Have you seen Angel? That one, with its smudged image of a cat, had caught his eye just the previous week. He remembered also: Missing blue heeler (mainly red). At the time, he had smiled.
At a shelter for lost dogs, a woman said, ‘So let me get this straight. Your dog… disappears into the bush… right?… with twenty feet of rope… you’ve tied to his collar.’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t deserve an animal.’ She hung up.
One of the maddening things about Nelly was that she didn’t have a phone. She could give the impression of existing in a fold of time. Walking to the Preserve to see her that winter, Tom was transported to India; to that era in his life when talk meant looking into a human face. His dealings with Nelly often uncovered these souvenirs of the past, little lumps impeding the smooth flow of time.
It was not that she was anachronistic. Nelly was open to youth, novelty, the stir of their times. She was only two months younger than Tom, but in her company he was often conscious of having lived forty years in another century. She used words not yet codified in dictionaries. It was from her that he fi rst heard of MP3 files; of memory sticks. There was also her casual familiarity with new kinds of music, the CDs Rory and Yelena burned for her, their threeway conversations about the bands playing the Corner Hotel.
Once he had seen Nelly absorbed in a game on someone’s laptop, moving about on her seat in excitement, little splashes of coloured screen light reflected now and then on her face. She was technological, thought Tom. And then, more potent than any sign, was his sense that, as an artist, she inhabited the modern age, the age of the image, while he was marooned in words.
At some point in the previous decade consumption had turned gluttonous. There was more stuff around. More people were buying it. Democracy had become a giant factory outlet. It was as if endless wealth had been converted by a malicious spell into endless want. Sometimes, late on a weekend afternoon, Tom would head to a café on Bridge Road. People crowded the pavements, shopping gathering up all classes and kinds in its dreamy pull. Isolated, spotlighted, displayed in glass niches, everyday objects took on fetishistic power, a vase or a pair of shoes acquiring the aura once enjoyed by religious icons. Such things could mean whatever people needed. They were repositories of dreams. Over espresso and the papers, Tom observed the spending that made the getting bearable: a last high-kicking performance on the public stage before the curtain of work came down.
Early one Sunday he went fossicking with Nelly at the fl ea market in Camberwell. There was a purposeful air to her, signalled by the black bag worked with yellow daisies carried over her arm. She avoided the professional dealers; lingered among the offerings of stallholders who had turned out their cupboards so they could go shopping again.
Strolling along packed aisles, Tom marvelled at the ease with which articles changed status, transmuted by the alchemy of desire. The flea market was a resting place for the debris piling up behind the whirlwind of the new. Wishes were its currency. Their force might resurrect objects no longer animated by collective yearning. A turquoise and black dress with shoulder pads, Jim Reeves’s Greatest Hits on vinyl, a brown-glazed biscuit jar sealed with a cork, a Smith-Corona typewriter in a pale-blue, rigid plastic case: Tom saw each of these leavings pounced on. Invested with fresh, private meaning, they passed once more into the treasure albums of someone’s mind.
At a bookstall there were volumes Tom could scarcely bring himself to touch: liberated from libraries, they displayed their violet stamps and yellow stains like prisoners exhibiting proofs of torture. A pile of comics looked more inviting. He fl icked through them, and saw Huckleberry Hound and Top Cat take flight, forgotten comrades spinning up from the pillows where he had lain with measles; as if memory were one of those little flip books that need only correct handling to bring their trapped images to life.
Nelly bought a pair of fingerless gloves, an openwork cardigan threaded with lurex, a handtinted panoramic postcard of the lake at Mount Gambier. Tom bought her a hot jam doughnut and a pot of pink hyacinths.
She negotiated with stallholders: ‘Would you take four for it?’ ‘Any chance you could make it two-fifty?’ He looked away from these scenes, ashamed for her. He always paid whatever was asked, not wishing to appear typically Asian.
From a tray that held a clutter of brooches, single earrings and broken chains, she drew a strand of greeny-blue plastic pearls. It lacked a clasp and cost fi fty cents.
They had arrived, at her insistence, by seven. When they were leaving she said, ‘If we’d come early, we’d have got the real bargains.’
Not long afterwards, Yelena arrived at the Preserve wearing Nelly’s necklace over pale cinnamon wool. Against that setting, it turned extraordinary: the pearls glowing, other-worldly.
Tom could hear his father: They are better than stars or water, / Better than voices of winds that sing, / Better than any man’s fair daughter, / Your green glass beads on a silver ring.
The girl noticed Tom noticing; slipped her fi ngers under the necklace and held it up. ‘Isn’t it gorgeous? My birthday present from Nelly.’
Why not? Nelly had restrung the necklace, fitted it with a new catch. The gift was enriched with her labour. Tom was reminded again of childhood: of bazaar handkerchiefs embellished with lace or stitched monograms in the weeks leading up to Christmas; of birthday greetings fashioned from images cut from hoarded foreign cards and glued to coloured cardboard with flour-and-water paste. Such things were more than links in a disaffected chain of production and consumption. They bore a human tang.
All the same, he thought, She spent fifty cents on Yelena.
It was Nelly’s habit to roam the streets of their suburb after dinner, padded against the weather in her scarlet parka. On a June evening when a southerly carried the memory of icebergs, she had coaxed Tom out with her. It became their usual way of being together.
In invisible gardens on the hill, pale camellias were the ghosts of girls locked out after balls. There was the wintry fragrance of daphne; and once-but they could never fi nd it again-a scented drift of violets escaping through pickets. Each dark street climbing west climaxed in a peepshow of a radiant city.
In Victoria Street they bought rice-paper rolls from a man with exquisite hands. A soft-bellied god smiled over joss sticks and golden mandarins. The public housing towers showed scattered patterns of light: the concrete punch cards of a superseded technology.
A girl going past said, ‘Forgiveness is really important. I forgive myself all the time now.’ Tom and Nelly shunned the narrow pavements, sauntering down the middle of the street, as people will.
Window displays drew them with the theatricality of lightdefined space. A stage in Swan Street was a favourite. For weeks it held nothing but a backdrop of translucent cloth, ivory striped with gold. It floated and shimmered, a stream, a veil. It was sacred and profane. It was almost not there. It was lively with the magic of money.