The Lost Dog (34 page)
I
N
I
NDIA
, the Loxleys had lived half a mile from a large Hindu temple. It was neither ancient nor celebrated, but its tall gopurams, gaudily painted and ornately carved, delighted the child Tom’s eye. Pilgrims and sadhus and tricksters passed through its gates, generating noise and emotion. Now and then an elephant would sway forth from its fastness.
If Tom happened to pass the temple in the company of his grandfather, the old man would speak of primitivism and barbaric rites. Sebastian de Souza pointed out men with iron hooks in their flesh; described a reeking stone block where goats were sacrificed. If he caught his grandson looking towards the temple, he would slap him. He referred to filth, meaning the celestial and animal couplings depicted in the carvings as well as the rosettes of dung in the street, when it was in fact the busy little stalls selling coconuts and holy images and garlands of marigolds that had attracted the child’s interest. In this way Tom’s pleasure in the place was smudged, and the temple became associated in his mind with fear.
In his tenth year, the stories of Catholic missions he heard at school inspired in Tom an evangelising fervour. He longed to save a soul. He selected Madhu, a six-year-old whose family occupied a modest room in the de Souza mansion. In her gapped smile, he detected malleability. There was also the consideration, only half formulated but nevertheless present, that her low social status would protect him from serious repercussions should the enterprise go awry.
Screened by lush plantains, he spoke to Madhu of miracles. The child listened attentively, and repeated the prayers he taught her. But what zealotry fears is not resistance but duplicity. Tom sensed that his pupil was more interested in him than in the substance of his discourse. He felt, at the end of a week, that language alone was inadequate to his purpose. It came to him that if Madhu were to behold its images, the splendour and force of his faith could not fail to impress itself upon her heart.
Conveniently at hand, on the edge of a district that was now a slum but had once housed imperial adventurers, stood a grimy Portuguese church. Madhu trotted there after Tom willingly enough the next morning, although she faltered an instant on entering the high, dim premises. The boy took her by the wrist and led her intuitively towards light; to the great window glowing at the eastern end of the transept.
Madhu looked where he pointed and saw a sublime flowering of the glassmaker’s art, commissioned from a French master by a belatedly pious Iberian pirate and shipped east at ruinous expense. She, however, had no means of understanding these things, let alone the allegory of suffering and redemption portrayed before her. And so she screamed and, covering her head with her arms, dashed in terror from the place.
Days passed; days in which Madhu did not come out to play, and slipped behind a purple fold of her mother’s sari when Tom ambushed her by the gate. That he grasped, eventually, what his convert had perceived was a tribute to the boy’s intelligence and the range of his imagination. In his mind he stood once again before the window. He beheld the sacrifice that illustrated his god’s infinite compassion; and saw, also, a man whose broken white body and crimsoned wounds the light endowed with awful verisimilitude.
That a sign might proclaim a truth as well as its opposite was in itself a disturbing magic. Further reflection brought a more profound revelation: for if Madhu saw violence and cruelty at the heart of his religion, might there not be loving kindness in the barbarism attributed to hers?
It was an insight both liberating and shocking. Tom Loxley, dusty-toed, felt the foundations of his world tremble. It would always be possible to stroll around to the back of knowledge and look at it from the other side.
M
OGS’S LONG
stride carried her away, past the ringleted Goth buckled into black texting at the tram stop;
Death to Moonlight
read the legend on his T-shirt. A girl emerged from a juice bar and pranced across the street, a golden ring winking in her brown belly. A courier astride a motorcycle turned his glass face to watch her.
On a car radio, children sang,
Christmas in Australia’s
hot, / Cold and frosty is what it’s not.
Two boys with clipboards and biros closed in on a woman trying to slip into the supermarket. Tom put on his sunglasses against the gaudy day.
Listening to Mogs deny it, he had known he had been duped; now he was no longer certain. His mind was running with what Nelly might say, with assurances she might offer or withhold. On a suburban pavement he was privy to the interrogator’s exquisite dilemma: nothing less than the truth could satisfy, but when was satisfaction ever a guarantee of truth?
But even as he framed the problem, Tom rejected its terms. If he had got everything wrong, a mistake, levering open prospects, can reveal far more than mere precision. He saw that knowledge, which had sheltered him round for so long, had been allowed to shrink to a constraint. Over the clanking of a green tram, he was aware of unruly starlings making mock.
The lights changed. The traffic coursed forward. A skateboarder crossing the other way said, ‘I wouldn’t call it a Kodak moment, dude.’ Nelly’s laughter rolled through Tom again.
On the far pavement, iron railings clasped a municipal gum. A window held a crayonned image of a red-cloaked child and a grinning beast. Tom went slowly past uphill. Of where he was heading he had no clear sense. But what he wished, with all the force of imperial afternoon, was that he might yet be graced with courage and loving conduct in the face of everything that can never be known.
There came, at that moment, a soft vibration against his hip. He took out his phone and found he was reading a message he had sent himself. It was time to feed the dog.
I
RIS’S FINGERS
tightened on the handles of her walker as it approached the step. The front wheels tilted into space; and ‘I’m falling!’ screamed Iris. ‘I’m falling!’
Tom said, ‘I won’t let you fall.’
I
HAD THE GOOD
fortune to benefit from the editorial guidance of Jane Palfreyman, Alison Samuel and Pat Strachan. Sarah Lutyens did what she does brilliantly, and it was a pleasure to work with Caren Florance and Ali Lavau.
Ian Britain, Glenn D’Cruz, Gail Jones, Anna Schwartz and Chris Wallace-Crabbe advised me on the manuscript. Jan Nelson offered conversation about art and artists, while John Chambers enlightened me about bond trading in the 1980s. Kate Darian-Smith and Glenda Sluga facilitated my research by offering me a fellowship at the Australian Centre in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. I am grateful to them all.
Thank you also to Émilie Asselineau, Alexandre Asselineau and Ned Lutyens for their hand in this book.
Chris Andrews read every draft of the manuscript, and was always insightful and encouraging; which is a wholly inadequate acknowledgment of the extent of my debt to him.
The following books were particularly useful in the writing of this one:
Illuminations
(Fontana 1973) and
One-Way Street
and Other Writings
(NLB 1979) by Walter Benjamin;
The Lie of
the Land
(Faber 1996) by Paul Carter;
Farewell to an Idea:
Episodes in the History of Modernism
(Yale University Press 1999) by T. J. Clark;
The Practice of Everyday Life
(University of Minnesota Press 1988) by Michel de Certeau;
The Oxford Book
of Australian Ghost Stories
(Oxford University Press 1994) edited by Ken Gelder;
A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women
and His Art
(Chatto & Windus 1998) by Lyndall Gordon; and
The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety
(Cambridge University Press 1999) by Peter Pierce.
The Lost Dog
also draws directly and obliquely on works by Henry James.
The lines quoted on page 37 are from ‘The Lost Man’ by Judith Wright in
A Human Pattern: Selected Poems
(ETT Imprint, Sydney 1996). Reprinted by permission of ETT Imprint.
The line quoted on page 237 is from ‘The Choice’ by W. B. Yeats in
Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
(Macmillan, London 1967). Reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Gráinne Yeats.
The lyrics quoted on page 341 are from
Christmas Where
the Gum Trees Grow
by Lesley Davies. Reprinted by permission of Lesley Davies.
