Free The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser

with fiery dragons. An empty, redolent bottle with an engraved label and the enigmatic legend Je Reviens . Three glass buttons shaped like tiny clusters of purple grapes. A satin-bowed chocolate box with a basket of fluffy kittens on the lid. A jet and diamanté earring. A cardboard coaster stamped with a golden flower. A leather case in which a satin-lined trench held a silver biro; when the case was opened, a puff of cool, metallic air was released into the world.
    At random moments, the child Tom would shut his eyes and call up these items one by one. It was his version of Kim’s Game. The almirah was doubly implicated in remembering: there was the memory game, and there were the stories attached to each object, the past glimmering into life as Tom pondered the provenance of a foreign coin or a small brass key.
    In Australia Iris had a wardrobe, utilitarian as equipment. History sank beneath the imperatives of the present, its kingdom conquered by objects with no aura, by bulky blankets and woollen garments that spoke only of household management and the weather. Who transports coasters and old chocolate boxes over oceans? Practical considerations had ensured that Iris was no longer the custodian of memory. But there was worse: within her new setting, she appeared archaic. It was as if a malevolent substitution was at work, so that she had begun to assume the aspect of a relic herself.
    Iris moaned, ‘I’m tired. I want to sit down.’
    ‘Five minutes more.’
    ‘My knees are paining.’
    ‘Just up and down twice more. Exercise is good for you.’
    ‘Oh, I’m tired. I want to sit down.’
    Side by side, they carried on.
    When he kissed her goodbye, he said, ‘Ma, if it happens again, call me.’
    She peered up at him. Fear moved in her eyes, a rat scuttling through shadows. ‘I was good up to eighty.’ Her hand tightened on his arm.
    ‘Tell Dr Coutras about it when you see him, OK?’
    ‘He’ll say it’s cancer and want to open me up.’
    ‘No, he won’t.’
    Iris’s perm, the thin hair in airy loops, stood out from her skull like petals; like a child’s crayoned sun. ‘All right, I’ll tell him,’ she said.
    The docility, the large, nodding head: Tom thought of beasts, waiting to be killed or fed.
    While he was still on her doorstep, Audrey said, ‘I draw the line at nursing.’ There were many such lines, existence taking on for his aunt the aspect of a dense cross-hatching.
    ‘It must have been awful. So humiliating.’
    ‘Yes, well.’ Audrey patted the back of her hair, hitched up her cardigan at the shoulders. ‘I’ve got the professional training, of course. And when I think what I went through with poor Bill.’
    ‘I meant humiliating for Ma.’ Tom knew he was being foolish, as well as unfeeling. His aunt, too, had had a bad day; and he could not do without her. Yet it seemed important, at the outset of the discussion he knew would follow, to establish Iris as a distinct being; before talk took away her particularity, positioning her as the object of sentences.
    He said, ‘What a terrible shock for you. You’ve been tremendous.’
    ‘Yes, well .’ But her heroism acknowledged, Audrey favoured the version of herself that was selfless and uncomplaining. ‘It’s second nature to me, rendering assistance. Remember when Shona did my personality on the Internet?’ She drew her nephew into the house, ignoring his murmured protest; she had been waiting for this conversation all day.
    A glass-fronted cabinet held a harlequin, a corsair, a ballerina, a drummer boy, a Bo Peep with a crook wreathed in flowers and a lilac dress bunched up over a sprigged underskirt. Once a week Audrey murmured to small porcelain people of love while holding them face down in soapy water.
    Tom turned the flowered mug in his hands. He couldn’t bring himself to drink another cup of bad coffee. A plump tabby left her cushion by the heater and crossed the room to rub her ears against the visitor’s legs. She