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 signifi cance 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.’
One 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 fi nger 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.