When Sam said here, Ivy made a clicking sound in her throat and kept driving. Sam spun in her chair to stare out the window at the empty place. She watched it disappear, then kept her back turned all the way up to the turn-off and down the smooth of the highway, until the first close-together houses of Hummock lurched by and Ivy pulled over on the gravel.
‘So. Where are they?’ The engine idled, died.
‘I don’t know,’ Sam said, turning and letting her shoulders fall back into the seat. ‘It isn’t time yet.’
Ivy held the handbrake. ‘You see what you’re doing?’
‘No,’ Sam said. ‘You don’t understand. It isn’t now.’ She put one hand under the other in her lap, pinched herself at the wrist.
‘Sam.’ Ivy’s voice was soft on the outside, hard on the inside. Sam pinched harder, then let go.
‘This is wrong. It’s meant to be summer.’ She kicked at the wiring that snaked out from beneath the dash.
‘You’re impossible.’ Ivy hit the clicking indicator, restarted the car and turned sharply on the narrow verge. The gravel crunched beneath the tyres, and the gears got stuck. ‘You know it’s impossible, right?’ She waggled the gearstick until it found its place and pulled out onto the highway again, heading back to Clapstone. ‘Telling stories,’ she said, almost under her breath. She was a hard frame leaning over the wheel. Sam felt punctured.
‘I don’t mean to,’ she said.
Hearing the hurt in her voice, Ivy’s angles softened. She glanced across at her. ‘I know you’re not trying to be dishonest. You’re just confusing it. Maybe you saw something on TV and now you’ve got your memories jumbled.’
Sam counted the white poles with their little red reflectors until they were going too fast to keep up. She put her feet up against the dash. Ivy didn’t mention them.
‘But the dog was,’ she said.
‘A coincidence,’ Ivy replied, scrabbling in the console for her cigarettes. Sam reached down and found the box and got one out for her, but Ivy didn’t light it; she was watching the empty highway.
‘Time’s like a road, see?’ she said finally, pointing her unlit cigarette at the windscreen. ‘And now’s like a car. It goes straight along in one direction. You can’t jump around on it willy-nilly.’ She felt in the dusty console again until she found a lighter. The Aspco road was beautifully smooth. Hadn’t they just been up and back?
‘I know,’ said Sam. ‘But –’
‘No buts, Sammy. I told you, it’s impossible.’
‘It’s not impossible,’ Sam said, pressing her heels against the glove box, right in their marks from before. ‘It’s just not here yet.’
6
That first day, we turn our backs on the sea. We try to remember what we’ve read about tsunamis, about drought, about the ice caps. Nothing makes sense. Nothing like this has ever happened to us, not here on the uneventful instep of Australia, facing away from the world. There were never earthquakes and there hasn’t been one now. We go back to our houses, we shut ourselves in, and the water doesn’t come back. We know it won’t, somehow, without Sam having to tell us.
That first day, we don’t go outside again. We stay with our families, we follow each other from room to room. We don’t say much at first. Maybe it’s shock.
Whatever it is, the quiet doesn’t last long. We don’t talk about the bodies, but we have to talk about the smell. The smell needs organising, it has to be dealt with. We close curtains, plug drains, spray fragrances. Children and dogs get under our feet. The dogs keep barking at the doors, so we lock them in laundries. When it goes away, when it evaporates, they will settle. The children make faces, emit pained noises, cover their ears. The smell is everything at first, but soon the smell is only place and time, and then it becomes particular: a location, a description, an object in space. Something that we might manage to live with, tamp down if not control.
Words begin to help. When the kids are in the next room with the TV on we stand in our kitchens, try out descriptions, names. We talk in a whisper about what might have caused it, making guesses. Some of the guesses are familiar to us. We weren’t expecting this, but on some level we were expecting something, and so this is like remembering. We have heard a great deal that’s new about the world in recent years. Weird tides, bad weather, mass die-offs. We are well prepared for this swell of fear at what the landscape’s capable of, though not perhaps this level of disgust with it. It’s nature’s way, we say, this awful behaviour; it’s all part of a cycle. Fire and flood, round here. The sea will be back. The sea.
We come to the shore of our thinking, only to find it strewn. Scattered with decomposing forms. Lucky for us, the dogs won’t let us think. Our houses, damaged by flood, badly repaired because we thought them temporary, are letting the smell in everywhere, and the dogs won’t stop barking. We’re not sure what to do with their fixation, their panic that must be hunger, animal hunger for the scent of rot and death. They are wild for it.
We wait for the smell to go, to leave town like an obnoxious tour bus. We keep our windows closed, we run the air conditioner, we spray our freshening sprays. We ring and ask each other if we think it’s gone down a bit. We watch television with the kids and the news says scientists are baffled. That worries us. Only the police are supposed to be baffled, and only in certain kinds of daytime television. But we try not to let our worry get to us. We stay indoors for twenty-four hours, then we open those doors a crack and sniff the air. It’s still bad, so we stay indoors another day and night. Then another. It’s a bit like the old days, when the plant rang the siren, except the wind doesn’t seem to want to change. It goes on and on. And there’s no siren now, no alarm but dogs, their barks becoming hoarse and rhythmic. We can’t let them out when they’re like this, but we can’t hear ourselves think while they’re inside.
At the end of the third day, we go to the pub. Either the smell’s better by then or we are getting used to it. We are adapting our breaths, our movements, our thinking to the new reality, as we know we must. Someone on the news said maybe our brains will rewire themselves, maybe they’ve already begun. It’s hard to know who to believe. Anyway, we’re thirsty.
It’s only a few blocks but we drive. The pub looks desolate. The whole town does. There is already an accumulation of rubbish on the road: leaves in the middle of the street, the contents of bins ripped apart by crows. It looks like Clapstone’s been abandoned for years. How quickly the order of life decays! The detritus is gathering in potholes, as if to highlight them. To emphasise just how much of the flood-damaged asphalt has cracked and broken and has not been repaired. We were going to get these roads resurfaced, once we finished the park. After the trucks were gone, after we had the money. Empty promises, empty afters. We glance out of our car windows at the stunned bobcats, the paralysed scaffolding, the equipment lying bright and dead as toys. Over it all the new wheel shines like a gracious crown, painted bright red and yellow and green, sparkling under the sun. Everything’s still and silent, no reversing beeps, no construction noise, nothing but the known growls of our cars and that muffled barking behind us.
When we get to the bar, we count heads. Most of us are still here. We greet each other noisily, until the Commie is hot with voices, moisture, oils, like the inside of a whale. All of this noise says, we remain. We persist, we endure. As if our talk will sweep the streets clean and drag the sea back to its proper place.
It’s not a decision, more a habit, to convene a sort of meeting. Those of us who were in the committee huddle at one end of the bar, and we settle in to waiting. We’re not sure what for. Jill and Ash and Snow are sitting down the other end of the bar, drinking, but there’s no sign of Sam.
Carl says we should drink up in case the fridges go. Carl is always happiest in social emergencies. He runs tabs for us and keeps them coming. We still have power, at least. The front bar still has air conditioning. We go over what we h
ave, not what we’ve lost. It’s not such a disaster. None of us have died. The trick is to still think of it as nature. We can’t decide anything just yet, not until after.
Curdie arrives breathless, pushing the raffle wheel aside with more than his usual nuggetty wheeze. He sinks two beers before speaking.
‘He’s gone,’ he says. ‘Cleared out. Well and truly.’
Then we see that it was Ed we were all waiting for. Of course he wasn’t coming. It’s Curdie who has thought of driving all the way up to Hummock, to the office in the main street. He tells us the door was wide open, the equipment gone. The scale-model Clapstone, with its neatly finished cardboard park, was smashed to pieces in a corner. Curdie has salvaged what he could find of the paperwork, and he spreads it out along the bar with his dog-paw hands: a half-dozen copies of the glossy prospectus, two water-damaged business books, and a pile of graphs and spreadsheets. Finally, he pulls a tiny model cuttlefish from his pocket and rests it on the bar, where it glitters feebly. Instinctively, we scrunch up our noses.
‘Some of it was blowing out along the road,’ he says. We examine the spreadsheets, then push them across the bar to Jean, who might be able to make sense of them. She straightens them out, wipes off the condensation, and hunts beside the till for her glasses. After a while she shakes her head.
‘This is all geology,’ she says. ‘Pressures and depths. Nothing about the accounts. If there’s anything else, if any of you kept any records, maybe . . .’ But we all shake our heads. We never liked to get too mixed up in paperwork; Ed took care of all that. It was all on his computer. The investors he brought in, the dividends he’d started paying. We don’t know how to contact them. We suppose they’ll want some of it back.
It still looks inviting, that glossy prospectus. We can’t bring ourselves to sit our beers on the old-fashioned couple holding hands, on the artefact of their sunny day. We’d probably buy shares in that dream right now, if someone asked us to.
‘Ivy must have gone with him,’ says Allan. He wipes a particle of ale from his cement-grey moustache. Roger, standing shaggily beside him, looks at the floor. ‘Well, her van’s not there,’ Allan adds.
‘And Sam?’ Carl says. He pinches the model cuttlefish between thumb and forefinger, then raises it thoughtfully to his eye. The light glitters on it, and on the sweat of Carl’s bald head. But the skin’s display has faded; it emits no light of its own.
‘Gone too, I suppose,’ Allan answers. We look over at the young people.
‘She’s at home.’ Jill’s voice carries clear across the room, and ours must too. She’s perched on this side of the twins, her bleached hair pulled into a high ponytail. Snow and Ash are naturally white-blond, and now all three of them look related. All three of them are nursing cans in the same way, hunched over them like hundred-year-old barflies.
‘Are you sure?’ Roger sounds doubtful.
‘You won’t see her in here. She has a migraine.’ Jill lengthens the last word with more than a hint of sarcasm.
There is an intake of breath.
‘Since when?’ we ask.
‘Since the sea,’ she says. ‘She passed out in the road by the park. I found her.’
Three days, for which the sea is shorthand. It has already become a time mark, the way the flood did, or the jumpers: events so destabilising they have taken the place of clocks. Three days is a significant amount of time. It is a resurrection’s worth, long enough for her to come back knowing something. We all wait for Jill to say the next thing, to tell us. She looks at our expectant faces and frowns.
‘And?’
‘And nothing,’ Jill says. ‘She’s sick, is all. She needs to sleep.’ The twins look into their cans. They might be smirking.
‘Should you be drinking?’ Candace asks, glancing over at Jean.
‘What difference does it make now?’ says Jill. She raises the beer to her lips, and when she swallows it her mouth is twisted. She’s grown up, but her round face is a child’s still. We wonder how at that age we ourselves felt capable of anything. We had so much future then.
‘It’s light,’ says Jean, faintly.
‘You’ll let us know,’ says Bob. His smile is perhaps too quick.
‘You’ll tell us if she sees something,’ says Jean. She fingers her glasses.
Jill looks back at the twins and tucks a lock of fallen hair behind her ear. Then her eyes are on us. She leans towards us, one fleshed elbow pressed into the damp bar towel. She crosses her legs.
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘And you’ll tell us what you’re planning to do about this.’
7
‘Don’t tell them anything weird,’ Ivy said. ‘I’m not having them set Family Services on us.’ Ivy pulled the handbrake and unclipped her seatbelt. Every sound was amplified, and her voice too bright. It was hard to tell if she was being funny or mean.
The medical centre was just like all the other houses, but with parking down the side instead of a garden. Inside there were chairs lined up against the wall, venetian blinds pulled down behind them, a counter opposite, chilly air conditioning. Sam pulled a picture book out of a plastic tub while Ivy talked to Mr Gable from down the street. An older man with neat, combed-back hair and trouble breathing, he kept a steel comb in the top pocket of his polyester shirt, and the weight pulled it down; in profile it looked like he had a single angled breast. She turned the pages beneath her hand without reading, glancing now and then at the illustrations. The strangest neon creatures lived in the sea, a world of them; it was frightening.
‘Can’t complain,’ he wheezed at Ivy. ‘Lungs hurt in the night, but some blokes got it much worse.’ Ivy coughed, then covered it politely, touched her smoker’s fingers with a thumb, and looked relieved when the doctor appeared with a yellow sticky note on the back of her hand.
‘Samantha,’ she read from it, and Sam put the book regretfully back in the box and followed her mother into the room which would have been a bedroom. Her bedroom. Skeletons grinned from the walls. A macro photograph of a louse, grey and strangely hairy, made her scalp itch.
‘It’s Samandra,’ Ivy said as they sat down. The doctor’s short silver hair stood up in spikes. She scrunched the sticky note into a ball and dropped it somewhere under the desk. She smiled at Ivy, but addressed Sam.
‘Well, you’re not the first person to complain of headaches,’ she said.
‘It’s only because of time,’ Sam said. Ivy’s hand landed in her lap, and her mother’s fingers wrapped around her wrist. It was sore where she’d been pinching it.
‘She has an overactive imagination,’ Ivy said.
‘I see. What do you mean, time?’ asked the doctor.
‘It hurts,’ said Sam, her voice from under water. ‘It’s like I’m splitting.’
The doctor smiled, mouthed the words, clicked her pen and made a note. The hand dropped, the eyes lifted. ‘Interesting term, a splitting headache,’ she said, serious now. ‘In fact, medically speaking –’ She glanced at Ivy. ‘Migraines are very common here. I want to send her for some tests, if you don’t mind.’
‘Long as it’s on Medicare,’ said Ivy. Sam stared at the louse’s limbs and felt her mother’s hand relax its grip.
‘There might be something going on. A common factor,’ the doctor said, and her smile, though kind, became uncomfortably persistent. ‘I don’t want to be premature here, but I’m looking at the possibility that it’s got something to do with the emissions from the plant.’ She squinted at her computer screen. ‘I just have to . . . sorry. It’s a new system,’ she said, typing with one finger. The clock ticked noisily. Sam watched the second hand going around, but couldn’t catch the minute hand moving.
‘How long have you been a doctor?’ asked Ivy.
The woman looked surprised. ‘Oh, long enough,’ she said. ‘Samandra, is there anything else you wanted to tell me?’ Sam tried to look grateful
while she thought. There were many substantial mysteries: the whirring noise, the car on fire. But they might qualify as weird, and she did not want to be disloyal.
‘Sam’s really very healthy,’ Ivy said. ‘She doesn’t get sick. I mean apart from this. But she bounces back pretty fast, you know what kids are like. It’s not that bad, is it? Won’t she grow out of it?’
‘She might,’ the doctor said, smiling at Sam. Sam smiled carefully back. ‘It might be nothing,’ she continued. ‘Growing pains. I don’t mean to worry you with my theories.’
‘I’m not worried,’ said Ivy quickly. The doctor looked from her to Sam, and back again.
‘I’m going to send her for a CT scan up in Hummock, though. If that’s okay.’
Sam had heard about these scans. A kid at her school had had one, bragged about it, then disappeared to the city. Her face turned up again, pinned to a memorial noticeboard that hung beside the refinery chart. ‘Have I got a brain tumour?’ she asked.
‘Who told you that?’ Ivy’s voice was sharp, and her eyes searching.
‘Nobody,’ said Sam, sinking back into her chair.
‘The other children,’ said Ivy evenly, addressing the doctor. ‘There’s been a few –’
‘Tragedies,’ said the doctor. ‘I know. It’s all right. I don’t think that’s what this is, but I don’t want to take any chances. Go and get the scan and you can come and see me again in a few weeks.’ She kept smiling as she printed the referral. When the smile finally went away she looked older.
‘Now, Samandra, could you step outside for a minute so I can talk to your mother?’
Sam slid off her chair and stood just outside the door, leaning against the wall. She couldn’t hear them well enough to make sense of what they were saying. A couple of times, Mr Gable looked like he was going to speak, but then a wrinkle would appear above one eyebrow and he’d start coughing. Sam smiled at him until her jaw hurt. When Ivy and the doctor came out, they both looked sad.
Dyschronia Page 4
