Nelly talked of the children who had once overfl owed 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-fl oating. 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 mummifi ed 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 fi rst 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 fl ashed 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, graffi tied 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 51⁄4-inch floppy disks in his hands, saw the fl esh pimple along his arms. Brendon noticed too: ‘It’s modernity. Walking over your grave.’
They 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.