Night after night, images of the refugees appeared. Tom saw death flicker in the furtive glow of TV and knew the guilty rage of those who have crossed to safety. Time toppled like a wave. He was a falling thing, spiralling down to wait forever in a room as blue as an ocean. He felt the convergence of public and private dread.
Buried deep in Australian memories was the knowledge that strangers had once sailed to these shores and destroyed what they found. How could that nightmare be remembered? How could it be unselfishly forgotten? A trauma that had never been laid to rest, it went on disturbing a nation’s dreams. In the rejection of the latest newcomers, Tom glimpsed the past convulsing like a faulty film. It was a confession coded as a denial. It was as if a fi end had paused in its ravaging to cover its face and howl.
The images he saw on TV brought him out in goose bumps: fear writing its name on his flesh. And since the frightened are often frightening, the pictures on his screen made him grimace and distorted his face.
Bodies flashed up constantly in those weeks: broken, burned, fished lifeless from the sea. He thrust at them with his remote, willing them to disappear. But it was as if the images were imprinted on his retina. They affected everything he saw. In ordinary streets the air turned red with callistemons. Tiny corpses appeared on pavements, nestlings as naked and strange as Martians.
A roller-blader sped past Tom, fl eeing as if from catastrophe; the white stare of the baby strapped to his back followed like a curse. A lunatic in flawless linen strode up and down a supermarket aisle, gesticulating, shouting, ‘What do you mean by a small pumpkin?’ Then Tom noticed the wire running into her pocket from her ear.
A municipal hard-rubbish collection produced surreal assemblages on footpaths. Tom’s route to a protest about the war in Afghanistan took him through dystopic chambers furnished with soiled carpet squares and disembowelled futons. He passed an orange divan stripped of cushions; collapsed hoovers, torn fl yscreens, a backless TV. A bicycle wheel leaned against a birdcage. Rusty barbecues might have strayed from a torturer’s repertoire. There were contraptions for improving muscle tone, computer keyboards fanned in a magazine rack, plastic flowerpots packed with grey earth. It was like leafi ng through snapshots of a civilisation’s unconscious.
Spring came apart under a weight of rain, death-laden spring. Fear put out live shoots in Tom. Instantly identifi able as foreign matter, he feared being labelled waste. He feared expulsion from the body of the nation.
In the hills, the mild city day was cold and wild. The rain arrived soon after Tom and Nelly, herding them back to the house, putting an end to their search.
Nelly’s pink hat lay on a chair, misty beads tangling its fi ne fibres. She built up the fire while Tom set about preparing a meal. Rain slashed leaves, clawed at the walls. The paddocks darkened under their leaking roof.
Tom wound spaghetti around his fork, then rested it on his plate. The wind continued its assault on the trees, pulling their hair. To think of the dog without shelter in this weather was unbearable. Tom rose, crossed to the window and drew down the blind.
Nelly had pushed her plate aside, and was sketching on the back of one of his flyers. ‘Look.’ He saw cross-hatching on a pencilled map. ‘That’s where we were today. You can mark where you searched last week. But in any case we’ll cover it all, bit by bit.’
Approximate, not to scale, unscientific. He sat at the table and said, ‘I shouldn’t have dragged you up here. I’m sorry.’
She was adding to her map: an arrow pointing to the house, the tracks, a compass rose.
‘If he’s out there, how could he have survived? This rain, this cold.’
‘The rain’ll keep him going. A dog can live three weeks without food. Three days without water.’
Her mulish cheer irritated Tom. He sneezed. Once, twice.
Nelly told him that when the house was first built, the interior walls had been covered in hessian pasted over with layers of newspaper. In the tiny second bedroom Tom had previously glanced into but not entered, Atwood’s architect had preserved a section of the original décor. Nelly pointed out pages from Christmas colour supplements that had been included in the final paper coating. When the house was new, these illustrations must have brought the opulence of icons to the room. Eighty years later, vague figures showed here and there on the wall, faded divas and emperors emerging from a brownish nicotine haze. ‘They used to spook Rory. He wouldn’t sleep in here when he was a kid.’
Tom was thinking of the delight coloured pictures had once brought, before the proliferation of images. He remembered a parcel of foodstuffs that had arrived from England when he was five or six. A spoonful of glowing red jam from a tin wrapped in bright scenery: a gift from another world.
They were drinking wine, their socked feet outstretched towards the fire. The planked floor hadn’t been polished in years. But it was a living thing by firelight, dark spots swirling on a lemony pelt.
Tom said, fishing, ‘Denise asked after you the other day.’
‘Been chatting to her, have you?’ Nelly lit a cigarette.
‘What?’
She exhaled.
‘What?’
‘There was all this stuff in the papers when Felix disappeared, about us arguing, things like that.’ Nelly said, ‘They got a lot of it from Denise. It’s sort of hard to forget.’
‘Why’d she do that?’
Nelly stared into the fi re.
‘Was she jealous? I mean, I guessed there was something between her and Felix, the way she’s talked about him.’ Tom could feel his mind labouring, thickened with tiredness.
Nelly giggled. It went on too long. ‘Sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s not funny, really. But the idea of Felix and Denise.’
When she had dropped what was left of her cigarette into the fire, she said, ‘Look, I was the one she had a crush on.’
‘You know how you feel things so much then? When you’re
seventeen, eighteen?’
Tom said, ‘I remember.’
‘We had this party here, loads of people came up, I think it was Australia Day. The year Felix went missing.’ Nelly shrugged. ‘Denise had too much champagne, I guess. Like everyone else.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing.’ She said, ‘It’s hard to get over. When you come out with what you feel, and get nowhere.’ After a little while: ‘There was all this other stuff going on in my life at the time. I couldn’t really be bothered with Denise. She was just sort of irrelevant.’
‘Ouch.’
‘Exactly.’
Tom permitted himself a brief fantasy of abstracting some small, odorous item of Nelly’s clothing-a sock, the rosy hat. He thought of Herrick delicately sniffing his mistress, declaring that her ‘hands, and thighs, and legs are all / Richly aromatical.’
He glanced covertly at Nelly sitting there beside him on the couch enmeshed in the detail of living: examining a chipped thumbnail, nibbling it, frowning at the result. It was an effort to reconcile the woman he knew, sunk in dailiness, with the Nelly who had existed so thoroughly in the larger-than-life events of Atwood’s disappearance.
There was a girl who had been around at parties and clubs when Tom was twenty. She was no older, but seemed stereoscopic: she had starred in a film that had won a prize, her face, smilingly assured below a rakish hat, gazed out from billboards. Then she vanished, summoned by Berlin or LA; and Tom forgot her, until the day, years later, when he and his wife bought a pair of sheets in a department store. On the down escalator, Karen said, ‘You didn’t twig, did you? That was Jo Hutton who served us.’
For days Tom was unable to evict her from his thoughts, the saleswoman he had barely noticed as she bleated of thread-counts; within minutes of turning away, he would have failed to recognise her if she had materialised before him. While the transaction was being processed, he had grumbled casually to his wife about the time their train had spent in the Jolimont shunting yards before delivering them to Flinders Street. The saleswoman looked up: ‘The exact same thing happened to me this morning. Doesn’t it drive you mad?’ Then she confi ded that this was her last day at the city store: she had been transferred to a branch in the suburbs. ‘I live a fi ve-minute drive away. I can’t wait to be shot of public transport.’ She handed Tom a pen and a credit card slip, and shook the two gold bangles on her wrist as he signed: a small, unconscious expression of glee at her victory over time and the railways.