Ivy held her daughter so close that she could not breathe. ‘You little shit,’ she said. ‘You’re all I’ve got, you know.’
In Sam’s head, a rushing like water.
Sliding into the capsule was like entering a space shuttle. She held her breath while they spoke to her through the capsule’s invisible speaker. When she was trundled out again, apparently by remote control, the room seemed brighter. It probably wasn’t a tumour, judging by the technicians’ jokes. When she sat up, the paper gown was ticklish.
On the road home from Hummock, they passed an upside-down car. It looked like it had sprouted between the wild barley grass, the heads of remnant wheat gone feral, like some brown weed. There were plenty of wrecks like it along this stretch, but most had been dumped there rather than crashed. One or two rusted shells adorned every former paddock, where they gently sank into the ground. But this one was fresh. Sam wriggled around in her seat to stare. It wasn’t the right car, but it was getting close to the right time of year. The weeds in the gullies were dying.
‘Joyriders,’ Ivy said, reaching a hand to still her in her seat. ‘Some people go looking for accidents.’
‘Why?’ asked Sam.
‘Something wrong in their heads, I guess.’
‘The brain plays tricks,’ Sam remembered. She squeezed her wrist.
Ivy raised one hastily pencilled eyebrow. ‘Something like that. But now you’ve seen it, right? And it’s not burning. So that’s that.’
‘Oh, that’s not it,’ said Sam. ‘Not yet.’
If Ivy made a face she did not see it; her mother’s gaze had turned from her, out towards the line of hills. From this side she could just make out the tips of the smokestacks poking up behind them.
‘What happened to the other doctor?’ Ivy asked.
‘Rotation,’ said the new doctor. His eyebrows, finely feathered, protruded over small blue eyes. He squinted into the scans. ‘Well, nothing nasty lurking up there. A fine big brain. Guess it’s just one of those things. Probably genetic.’
‘But I don’t get headaches,’ said Ivy.
He looked from her face to Sam’s face, which he studied for a while, and back again, then straightened the array of complimentary pharmaceutical company pens on his desk and frowned. ‘Does your husband suffer from migraines?’
Ivy folded her arms.
The new doctor raised an eyebrow. ‘He’s not in the picture right now, I take it? Where was he from exactly?’
Ivy cleared her throat. ‘I’m not married.’
‘That’s your business, of course,’ he said. ‘But, ah, for the sake of your daughter’s wellbeing, it would help to have a complete history.’
Ivy started looking in her bag for her cigarettes. Sam watched a reddening in her mother’s ears appear and disappear beneath the freckles.
‘Why don’t you help yourself to the play corner,’ he commanded Sam, in a voice unused to children. She had been feeling invisible since they arrived, and now wished she were. The corner was new, and almost everything in it was for babies, but Sam unearthed the same picture book she had found before, its brightly coloured illustrations now tainted by a few toddler scrawls.
‘Maybe we should cast a wider net,’ the doctor said, his voice only slightly lowered.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Mrs Warren. I beg your pardon, Ms. We’ve run the gamut, medically speaking. We should consider the possibility this is psychogenic.’
‘Right.’ Her voice was brittle. Sam felt her own limbs stiffen sympathetically. In the deep sea, tiny jellies glowed like Christmas lights.
‘I don’t want to worry you, but psychogenic headaches can indicate other issues. Does she ever have trouble discerning what’s real, for instance, and what’s imaginary?’
‘She’s a kid,’ said Ivy. ‘Isn’t that what kids do?’
Sam traced the skin of a cuttlefish, tried to imagine its shine. These foamy bones were scattered over their brown beach like tiny surfboards, one end pointed into a beak like a single claw. The cuttlefish keeps its shell on the inside, the book said. It wasn’t a proper bone at all. More like a floatie. The animal’s eyes looked kind and sad. She’d seen them before; she and Ivy had lain on the end of the jetty in the winter with their heads over the edge, and made out these dim shapes concealed in the seagrass below. When she watched carefully she could see them pulsing blue and purple. Lights in their skin, somehow, through the distortions of water. Looking down like that had made her feel seasick.
‘Perhaps something else is at work under the surface. There are certain conditions that are consistent with her, ah, behaviours.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Special cells, they had, like traffic lights. Chromatophores, iridophores and leucophores. Words were bottomless.
The doctor sat back in his seat. ‘Well. In my experience, it’s not unusual for children from, ah, blended families to act out. They sometimes respond by dissociating. Imaginary friends, and so forth.’ He pursed his lips. The eyebrows shuffled south.
Sam turned a page and made it rustle.
‘Our family’s not blended,’ Ivy said. ‘What about the plant, aren’t there all kinds of chemicals flying around? The last doctor said that might have something to do with it. She said she was investigating a connection.’
A giant squid stretched across the page and glistened pinkly. The animal with the largest eye in the world, it said, and the eye gazed back at her, a black circle in a white, knowing whatever it knew.
‘I’m sure she did,’ he said. He paused, took a deep breath, and shifted in his chair before continuing. ‘Developmentally, most children benefit from a full-time parent at home. The evidence is pretty unambiguous.’ He smiled again, more forcefully. His teeth were chipped and yellowing. ‘There are identity issues, as well. Cultural problems. Maybe you should consider some kind of counselling.’ He’d lowered his voice a little, but Sam could still hear every word.
‘We’re right,’ said Ivy.
Under the carpet, tentacles shimmered. ‘Keep your options open,’ the doctor said.
Sam snapped the book shut just as her mother stood and said, ‘We have to get going.’
The doctor made a performance of sighs and wrote out a script. Ivy stuffed it in her purse, then took it out again, smoothed it in her hand and read it. ‘Oxycodone? Isn’t that a bit over the top? She’s eight years old.’
‘Just give her a quarter,’ he said. When he winked at Sam, she was glad for her mother’s tight grip at the wrist, pulling her up from the floor.
Ivy let go in the car park, hands shaking as she dug out a cigarette. Sam smelled the mixture of nicotine and asphalt that was home.
‘Fucking cultural problems,’ said Ivy.
‘Did you know squids have three hearts?’ said Sam. She clutched the book to her chest like a shield. It protected her for three whole seconds until she realised. She held it out. ‘I took this by accident,’ she said. ‘It was a mistake.’
Ivy’s mouth bent into a half-smile. She tossed the cigarette into the little sand-filled metal ashtray by the wall and prised the book away from Sam. She looked the cover over, then gave it back to her.
‘Keep it,’ she said.
The day was nearly windless, so the smoke rose vertically. A distant twin rose from the Aspco stack hidden behind the hills, the two lines of pale grey pointing them home like lane markings in the sky. Ivy slowed down as they approached the first, the closest fire. Sam’s body seemed to slow with a warm, syrupy feeling, the same safe sufficiency she’d felt before.
Four figures stood on the verge, watching their car burn as though at a bonfire. Sam glanced at her mother, heard her sharp inhalation, and held her own breath.
Mr Reith stomped across to stamp out a small spot fire, then turned to wave at their car.
Sam smiled as she wav
ed back to Mr Reith and also, secretly, to herself. The other Sam that was or will be watching. Sam couldn’t see her. Nobody could. She wasn’t sure this time where she’d been hiding. On the side of the highway? In the back of the car? It didn’t matter now; what mattered was that she was right. This time Ivy would see it; this time she would understand.
Joy Reith saw her husband waving and turned her head to nod at them, more solemn than he was, but her eyes were glad. Her sons stood safe beside her.
Ivy had slowed the car to a crawl. Doubled time happened in slow motion. Sam wanted it to last and last. The tyres must have caught, because the family stepped back towards the road, and in the rear window of the car, Sam saw the smoke change perfectly from grey to black.
‘I told you,’ said Sam. The air thrilled with the CFS truck’s siren, singing its rangy way across the plain.
Ivy’s hands gripped the wheel as she accelerated. ‘You’re shitting me,’ she said.
Sam glowed all the way to the welcome sign.
Ivy drove past their corner. She turned down Kurrajong Street and pulled up at the low, yellow-brick building which housed the Clapstone Caller.
The Caller was a small enterprise, composed of the father-and-son team of Bob and Roger Quirk and a young woman from Hummock who came in part-time and was referred to as ‘The Girl’. The Girl wasn’t there, so it was Bob who appeared when they rang the bell. He pressed a button on the wall and the tinted glass doors slid open.
‘What have we got here,’ he said, smiling at Sam in a hungry way that made her blush. Bob wore jumpers with jagged stripes of colour. His head was too big for his body; he looked like he’d been assembled incorrectly, from mismatched parts. The jumper in the middle of summer looked strange, but the air in the office was freezing cold.
‘This is going to sound weird, Bob, but I think it’s worth your while.’
‘Come in, Ive, come in out of the heat and sit down.’
They went into his office, past Roger, who was squinting at a computer and ignoring the ringing phone. He didn’t look up. Sam waved at him anyway, and he raised a hand without taking his eyes off his screen. Ivy hurried her past.
Bob listened patiently to Ivy’s story while massaging his temples. The phone in the other room rang out, and began again almost immediately. Sam watched as he pressed a portion of his scalp between his fingers. When he let go it stayed in position for a long moment. The phone went on ringing.
‘Where’s your proof?’ he asked, kindly enough, but Ivy looked offended.
‘I didn’t – I suppose I could have recorded her. But she knew, Bob. I thought maybe you’d have contacts in the industry – other journalists or something – I was thinking that A Current Affair might –’
‘Sure,’ he said, and picked up the phone. He pressed a button.
‘Hello? Oh, hello . . . no, we don’t take classies today, Ken, ring back Thursday.’ He pressed another button and began again, his face flushing slightly.
‘Hello, is that A Current Affair? Yeah, I have a seven-year-old soothsayer here who can see through time, really talented kid – oh, gee whiz, they hung up.’ He wrinkled his mouth, put the receiver down and leaned forward.
‘She’s eight now,’ said Ivy. Bob turned to Sam.
‘Hey kid,’ he said. ‘Guess what number I’m thinking of.’ He stared intensely into her eyes, raised a hand beside his head and twinkle-twinkled the fingers.
Sam giggled. The lines on the jumper bounced. Her legs felt ticklish in the cold air.
‘Go on, guess.’
Goosebumps rose on her bare arms. Bob’s fingers withdrew into a fist the way a hermit crab tucked itself into its shell. She said the first number she could think of.
‘Nine?’
The hand dropped into his lap and opened like a flower. ‘Thirty-seven,’ he said. Ivy made a face.
‘Bob,’ she said. ‘I never said she was a mind reader.’
‘Sorry.’ His expression slid into its own misery for a minute, then slid back.
Ivy hesitated. ‘What about the plant, though? Is there anything we should know? I mean a lot of people here get headaches, don’t you think? The first doctor seemed to think they were connected, and then she disappeared.’
He leaned back in his chair and his head tilted towards the ceiling. Sam read the framed covers of the Caller on the wall behind him, the flowery writing under the masthead that said The Independent Voice, and then the headlines. One celebrated the opening of the plant, another its cricket club’s recent victory in Hummock. The bottom half of each front page was advertising.
‘That sounds like a conspiracy theory,’ he said.
‘Don’t laugh,’ said Ivy, though he wasn’t.
He sat forward. ‘Sorry. I’m finding this hard to take seriously.’
Ivy lifted her purse from the desk, hesitated. ‘Maybe Roger knows someone.’
He raised the hand again, a big flat plate. ‘I have contacts coming out the wazoo, but look, the Caller doesn’t run the horoscopes,’ he said. The effort in his grin was patient. He glanced at Sam for the briefest of seconds, then attended to his desk. ‘Anyway, it’s officially an accident. The insurance.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Reithy lit the damn thing. Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.’
‘But I didn’t tell them,’ said Ivy.
‘Sam did, though, eh, kid?’ The head approached across the desk like a stray balloon. Her mother’s stare bored into her side. Sam felt a rash of heat rising at her throat.
‘I had to say something,’ she said, assailed. ‘I couldn’t waste it.’
Ivy drank white wine from a tumbler while she flipped through yesterday’s paper. If it wasn’t for the hand moving angrily across the pages Sam would have thought she was calm. She hovered near her mother, but not too near. She had tried to explain in the car and it had done no good.
‘How come Roger doesn’t come around any more?’ she asked, trying to change the subject.
‘People change,’ said Ivy. ‘Different people want different things.’ She put down her glass. ‘Or sometimes people start to want new things. They get ideas in their heads about the future, and –’ A hand swept a curve of air.
‘Oh,’ said Sam.
‘I don’t mean that,’ said Ivy. ‘I don’t mean you.’ The words were not forgiving. She poured deeply, and let her eyes sink closed when she drank. When Ivy folded the paper, Sam could see the bottle in front of her was nearly empty.
‘See this?’ She put down her glass, pushed the Caller across the counter and showed Sam the row at the bottom of the page. Lotto numbers lined up in their bubbly circles. She leaned down, her face uncomfortably close. ‘Next time, try and get a look at these. Then we’ll see what you’re made of.’
The wine smelled sour on Ivy’s breath. Sam reached for the corner of the page and held it between thumb and forefinger. It was warm and damp, like skin.
8
Over the next few days, some people choose to leave. We know not to believe them when they say they will see us later. They fill their cars with their belongings and wave at us in rear-view mirrors. Those with young families are first. Our own grown kids go next, and fair enough: there won’t be any work for them here. We have heard that things like this are happening everywhere, that people everywhere are shifting.
That’s nothing new. We were moving too, before the sea. Our cars are already filled with boxes; our garages are stacked with them. We stand outside now, looking in, hearing the dogs make a racket. There’s no going back, is there. You have to be practical. Unsentimental.
The dogs first.
We unchain them. We open laundry doors and shoo them out.
They hesitate in driveways, some of them, looking back mournfully. But then they flee. We watch them run and find each other, greet and sniff. Maybe they will go down to
the water, to the source of the scent that lingers. They are animals, after all; they will do better out there, with their own kind. Resources will be short and space will be limited. We all need to make adjustments; we all need to adapt.
These houses were damaged years ago, and we adapted to living in them, after the flood; we swept the bare concrete, we fixed old furniture, we sank every penny into the new. We have already been living like survivors, in the shell of a nostalgia for a life that no longer exists. There is no point dwelling on the past, not any more. What’s done is done. We need to keep moving forward, as Ed would say. So we are ruthless. We take only what we need. We wrap crockery in old copies of the Caller, newsprint Ed and newsprint mayors shaking hands, photographs of progress and plans, the asphalt-coloured colouring-in of our children’s childhoods. It feels good to be doing something, taking action. We pile more boxes into the back seats of our cars, we carry kitchen tables out and strap them onto roof racks. We climb into our cars and drive.
We detour past Ivy’s house. There is no van hulking in the driveway, and no silver hybrid shining in the street. The blinds are drawn. Sam must still be inside, asleep or awake, seeing whatever she sees and will not tell us. We hope she will tell us, but we won’t hold our breath, except with the windows down. The air still smells like the things we’re trying not to think about. But it’s fading, and so is our horror. It’s surprising how fast you get used to things.
There’s freedom in it, going forward. The sea has drawn a line between now and then. And time only goes one way, it can’t be cheated. We face the road ahead. We don’t look back, not even in our mirrors. We don’t have far to go.
9
Ivy developed a fever for second opinions. Each specialist she consulted sent her to two more. There were appointments with neurologists and interviews with psychiatrists and sessions with sharp-eyed child psychologists. The letters said psychopathology and atypical indicators and inconsistent, possibly pre-schizoid delusions. They were making up new ways to say they didn’t know, but at least they were interested. They wanted to study Sam, to name her.
Dyschronia Page 5
