Free The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser Page B

burrowed back down into warmth.
    The dog’s muzzle was scattered with liverish spots, darker than the rest of his fox-red markings.
    Animals do not suffer as we do. They do not live in time, they are not nostalgic for the past, they do not imagine a better future; and so they lack awareness of mortality. They might fear death when it is imminent, but they do not dread it as we do.
    So Tom Loxley reasoned, and tried to believe.
    He thought of the stray dogs of India: question-mark tails raised over the lives they witness and endure.
    He thought of the clearing he had seen on the hill, the tyre holding charred wood, the soggy remains of activity, and was visited by brief, lucid images of things that can be done to animals.

Thursday

    T OM CHECKED THE WEATHER for the hills on the Internet: heavy rain with intermittent hail and a gale warning.
    Straightening up, he was conscious of stiffness in the small of his back. As a student, he had worked part-time as a storeman; had set himself to heft cartons with the casual aplomb of the muscled boys beside him. Now he spent too many hours reading, or in front of a computer: the scholar’s hunched existence.
    Palms on the desk, he stretched, relishing the voluptuous ache along his spine.
    He wondered how his mother was faring that morning. Age, he thought. The undistinguished thing.
    L ESS THAN a month earlier Osman had said, ‘I’m forty-seven. I won’t die young.’ He had been allowed to go home at the beginning of November, the cancer in remission; although, as he told Tom, the respite would almost certainly be brief. A hospital bed filled the living room, where chairs had been pushed against walls and a new flat-screen TV set up on the sideboard.
    ‘My welcome home present,’ said the effigy on the bed. ‘We watch DVDs. I can’t read any more. And who can bear the news? This election they will win for leaving people to drown.’ He looked at Tom. ‘Tell me a poem.’
    ‘ Yet might your glassy prison seem / A place where joy is known, / Where golden flash and silver gleam / Have meanings of their own .’
    When Osman closed his eyes, the curve of the ball was prominent under the lid. Cancer had made him thin-skinned. His face was in the process of being replaced by a skull, an ancestor stepping forward to claim him. Yet his ability to bring ease into a room remained.
    Afterwards, he said, ‘So many poems. How come you know so many old poems?’
    It was a question he had asked before, but the medication had made him forgetful. So Tom told him again about evenings with anthologies; seeing a vein-blue binding in Arthur’s hand. ‘My father taught me to read a poem aloud, and repeat it line by line. You learn without noticing that way.’
    Tom could still hear entire poems in Arthur’s voice; a good voice, clear and unaffected. Arthur Loxley had been an indiscriminate reader. He had pages of Keats and Browning and Hardy by heart; also much his son would learn to call third rate. In resentful moods, Tom saw his mind as an attic crammed with an incongruent jumble. Groping for treasure, he was just as likely to come up with a gimcrack oddment.
    Nevertheless, what had stuck was delight in words arranged well.
    On a chair wedged between bed and bookcase, he said, ‘Even the Gatling jammed and the colonel dead is a lesson in rhetoric.’
    ‘You know, a thing that astonishes me. How quickly poetry has slipped from the culture. I mean what lives in memory. The remembering of poems: a collective inheritance, vanished.’ Osman shifted, trying to raise himself against his pillows. Tom sensed Brendon, squeezed in beside him, grow tense; watched love fight itself down to grant its beloved the dignity of struggle. ‘I have seen this happen in my lifetime,’ Osman went on. ‘In democracies, with no dictators to burn books. So many centuries of poems, and then—’
    He looked at Tom. ‘There are people when I say this who think, how come this Turk lectures us about poetry?’ His