It was always the worst hour, night coming on, and the dog missing from the circle of firelight. Nothing was said between them, but Nelly lit the lamp and placed candles about the kitchen while a lurid sunset was still smearing itself across the horizon.
With her hand on the blind, she paused.‘Cows. I always want to go over and talk to them. It’s something about their faces.’
‘You could tell them how terrific they’ll look on a plate.’
He had not yet quite forgiven Nelly her assessment of Mick Corrigan.
When they were eating, she said, ‘It used to be solid dairy country round here. Then one day Jack sold off his herd and got sheep in. He’ll tell you that all of a sudden he couldn’t bear to watch cows he’d known all their lives go off to the yards.’
She said, ‘He didn’t sell them all either. One of them, Belle, was still around when I got to know the Feeneys. She ended up with the rest under Jack’s old potato paddock.’
‘So what’s that mob doing out there?’
‘They’re Mick’s. He got them in when wool prices were down. Jack doesn’t really want anything to do with cattle, which is why they’re up here.’
‘Because sending sheep to the abattoir is a different thing altogether.’
‘Yeah, I know it doesn’t add up. And everyone pointed that out, Jack’s wife, the neighbours, everyone. He was a joke throughout the shire. Like it still comes up when people talk about him.’ Nelly said, ‘I’m sure he hated being called sentimental. And irrational. But in the end he wasn’t ashamed to be those things.’
In bed Tom lay thinking about the power of shame.
On learning that he intended to keep searching for the dog, Audrey had said, ‘There’s a limit to how much you can do.’ She was attuned to limits, especially other people’s. Patting the back of her hair, she added, ‘It’s not like losing a kiddy, is it? Count your blessings he’s only a dog.’
Love without limits was reserved for his own species. To display great affection for an animal invariably provoked censure. Tom felt ashamed to admit to it. It was judged excessive: overflowing a limit that was couched as a philosophical distinction, as the line that divided the rational, human creature from all others. Animals, deemed incapable of reason, did not deserve the same degree of love.
Now Tom wondered if the function of the scorn such love attracted was to preserve a vital source of food: because to love even one animal boundlessly might make it unthinkable to eat any. Bodies craving protein justified their desire as a matter of reason. But perhaps the limit at risk was in fact the material distinction between what was and was not considered fi t for consumption.
It was a topic that aroused unease. When eating out with friends, Tom had noticed a fashion for naming the animal that had supplied a dish. I’ll have the cow. Have you tried the minced pig? An ironic flaunting was at work: I know very well that this food on my plate was once a sentient creature, and that doesn’t bother me. Euphemisms are symptomatic of shame; to avoid them was to deny shame, deflecting it with cool.
Another familiar urban scenario: on seeing a beggar, Tom’s first impulse was to reach for money. Then he would imagine being observed in the act of placing a coin in a hand; a sentimental act, an act of feeling. The shame this occasioned was so strong that it triumphed over charity. He would walk on, ignoring the beggar.
Now he realised that what he risked in showing empathy was to appear unironic. Irony was the trope of mastery: of seeing through, of knowing better. And it was a refl ex with Tom. He had invented himself through the study of modern literature, and it had provided him with a mode; the twentieth-century mode. To be modern was to be ironic. Among the things he was ashamed of was seeming out of date.
He came awake all at once, and knew he was alone.
In the kitchen, the fi re was out. He went into the passage, where his torch showed the yard door ajar.
It was not as cold as the previous night; still, Tom was glad of his jacket. He stood by the water tank, and eventually urinated. Then he walked up the drive.
There was a sound; he realised it had been going on for a while, growing fainter all the time, the motorbike heading down into the valley. The stars glittered, fixed as a malediction. After standing at the gate for some minutes, he went back into the house.
In the kitchen, he stumbled over something propped against a chair. Nelly’s bag appeared in the wavering circle of his torch; and peering from it like temptation, one corner of a small cardboard folder.
Afterwards, Tom made himself look at the photographs again, shining his torch on each in turn. There were thirteen of them. They lay on the table like an evil tarot. Nelly’s Nasties: they were before him at last. Most of all he was aware of wanting to protect his gaze with his hand; to filter the force of what he was seeing through his fi ngers.
He resisted the instinct. But it trailed an ancient horror.
On a long-ago morning, Tom had caught sight of a paperback beside his father’s chair as he crossed the verandah on his way to school. So his first view of the book’s cover was glancing; and then, when he looked again, at once he looked away.
That evening he returned to it, and the next day, and the next. On each occasion his methodology was the same: a sidelong approach, followed by flickers of vision. It was seeing and not-seeing at the same time. The child felt that to behold that picture in its entirety would be his undoing. But as long as it exceeded him, he was compelled to return to it.
Wholeness was in part what was horrifying about the image. A furry black face filled the cover of the book. Raised by the table, it loomed close to Tom’s own face. He was six or seven at the time.
Among the words on the cover was one that was larger than the rest. The child associated it with excretion; with what was at once necessary and repellent. It was spelled out plainly in thick dark letters: P-O-E.
Patterns of light on the verandah shifted with the sun’s journey across the sky. Brightness and shade worked their own dissection of the image. Tom took it in in glimpses. A slice of black fur, a sectioned snarl. Perception was jerky, a series of shudders. Straight after the flash, his eye lowered its shutter. If it happened often enough, he might assemble what he had seen; hold it steady in his mind.
On that night in Nelly’s kitchen, the trace of an old dread persisted in Tom’s desire to place his hand over his eyes: a child’s protective gesture.
The fireplace was silent and cold. Tom rocked gently back and forth, and wrapped his arms about himself. Opposite him was the window, with the blind down. After a little while, the notion came to him that something was pressing its face to the glass. The idea gathered strength, swelling to a conviction that kept him nailed to his chair.
At last he tore free. When he turned around, a fi gure was watching him from the door.
Nelly did practical things: lighting candles, getting the fi re
going, pouring whisky into glasses.
‘The photos fell out of your bag. I kicked it over and…’
‘It’s OK.’ She said, ‘Obviously, they’re not for general view. Nelly’s Nasties, like they say.’
Tom said quickly, ‘They’re great.’ But his gaze slipped to the image closest to him. There was something of Fuseli’s Nightmare behind it; something also of The Night of the Hunter. Yet the stance of the man in the photograph might have been protective, and the Akubra shading his face made it impossible to read. And who could say why the girl, on the edge of the scene, had flung up her head? But there was a carousel horse, gaily coloured, with a flaring eye. Situations revolved in the mind. Altogether, it was not an image Tom wished to look at for very long.