Wanting proof, but afraid of stigma, Ivy took days off to get them both up there, driving past the burnt-out car without flinching, the back of the Corolla loaded with take-home schoolwork and packed lunches, white bread crusting in the sun. When she could afford it she bought big wraps of hot chips and ate them with Sam on the bench outside the shop, laughing at the mannerisms of that day’s doctor or nurse or radiologist. She tried, through a fog of worry and disruption, to make it fun.
Sam was missing days at school, but at least she was learning something. She had grown more confident away from the place. And she was good at it, a natural at being studied. Something about the positive attention suited her. Sometimes the nurses explained things to her; one even let her watch her blood separate in the centrifuge. She could identify sections of her brain on a map now, though she couldn’t spell the names. They were both acquiring a new vocabulary.
The name Sam liked most came in an email, one among many of her mother’s unanswered messages which she was happily sorting through on a hot Saturday morning. Ivy had told her not to read the articles, or pay attention to their theories, until they knew what it was one way or the other. So when she opened the attachment Dyschronia.pdf, Sam made sure she wasn’t watched. The subheading meant little to her: Idiopathic perceptual disorders and temporal dissociation of childhood. But the title had an interesting sound, its corners sharp in her mouth. It may be contended, the authors said, that pain and the perception of time have created a dissociative loop, a splitting: migraine as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Something about it made her anxious. She closed the document, searched online for the new word. A strange addition to her collection. But the search turned up only a link to the same paper. It was an invention, or she was unique. Sam erased her search history, buried the file in a folder, and kept the word in her mouth for hours like a rainbow ball that changed colour as it shrank away.
Later, when she opened a hefty medical encyclopaedia on a trip to the Hummock library, she was dismayed to find there was nothing between dyscalculia and dyscrasia. Lining up with her mother in the Social Services office next door, she read the names of pamphlets arranged at eye-height along the wall near the Medicare counter, also alphabetical: ‘Arthritis, Cancer, Dementia, Diabetes.’
‘Shush,’ said Ivy.
‘Present,’ said the man behind them in the queue. When Sam turned, he flashed yellow teeth at her and winked.
‘There isn’t one,’ she told Ivy, her voice a hot whisper.
‘Hmm?’
‘Dyschronia. There isn’t a thing for it.’
Ivy sucked air through her front teeth. ‘I thought we decided not to read the articles,’ she said.
‘What’s it mean, though?’ Sam asked.
Ivy didn’t answer. The man behind them in the queue was staring. Sam didn’t know why; his skin was even browner than her own.
‘Bad timing,’ he muttered.
‘Oh, take a picture,’ said Ivy, and shuffled closer to the counter.
The woman behind it frowned at them. ‘You were here last week, weren’t you?’
‘They said it would be fine,’ Ivy said, and pointed to a signature. Her leg was jiggling. Sam saw a red place where the strap of her plastic sandal had been repaired. It was chafing Ivy’s ankle.
‘The system isn’t infinite,’ the woman told her. She reached for her mouse and sighed.
‘You want my health care card again?’ said Ivy.
She shook her head, gave Sam a small tight smile, and entered their details.
Sam let her gaze wander, thinking of hot chips. She almost missed what Ivy was telling her as they left the Medicare office, rebate in hand: ‘That’s it now. No more tests. I’ve had enough.’
It was the tone that made her look up, more than the words themselves.
‘You’ve missed way too much school. I can’t keep taking days off work for this.’ Her hand in the air was a centrifuge, its blood pulsed out to the fingertips. ‘It’s been months of doctors, Sammy.’ It had been more than a year, but Sam did not correct her. ‘We’re better off without them, you and me.’
Ivy straightened the bedding. Sam was old enough to be left at home alone, but she still sooked. At her age Ivy had been cooking and cleaning for her father half the time, first because he’d worked shifts at the plant and then because he’d gotten sick. Children seemed much younger from the outside, much more vulnerable than she remembered feeling. How do you make them strong without hurting them? She administered aspirin, hung blankets over the windows to shut out the day, stroked her daughter’s forehead, clicked off the light in the hallway. Pain should build resilience.
‘I’ll be home before you know it,’ she said. ‘Try to sleep.’
It was sleep that had let the migraine in. Sam had woken that morning with the hint of an aura tinkling in the corners of her eyes and a subtle buzz in the ends of her fingers. A slight dizziness, a feeling of unease descending, which she knew to call dysphoria from reading everything under Dys- in the encyclopaedia. Hard to bear, it had said. It was hard to push away, even for Ivy’s sake.
She burrowed under the blanket, covered her face. The glare alone was hard to bear, before the crush of this still happening.
The glare crosses with her into the now; she blinks at the asphalt silos, brightly lit in sun. Coming into focus, she makes out the company logo: a picture-book moon wrapped in black ribbon, the trail of a smiling rocket. Beside the rocket, A and S are painted in huge letters on one silo. On the other, the nearly silent P, the C, the O carved in half by the steel ladder that reaches the height of the tower. She listens for a sound through the high, smothering whine, and finds no other.
Focus on the visible, find the clues. The air has chilled and a noonday haze has settled around the base of the stacks. The sky is blue except for one tiny cloud whirling. She can’t tell if it’s a real cloud or a puff from the smokestack or a part of the visual aura only she can see. It shifts shape: there are elongations, billowing spirals. Sam lets her eyes hinge on its dance for a while, because nothing else is moving.
Then a man appears, climbing the steel ladder that runs up the outside of the tower, a large man with gently ponderous steps. He crosses the O in his high-vis jacket, his body turning it into a Q, then an eye, then a round fruit with a stalk. At the height of the silo, he clambers up through the safety cage that encloses the top of the ladder. He turns and looks back over the waist-high rail that runs the perimeter of the silo’s roof. He reaches out a hand; he lifts his face to the sun as if he is about to sing. Sam is too far away to see his expression. He wears a dark green boiler suit under his high-vis vest and he pats its pocket before he grips the bar with both hands and lifts one, then the other leg over the final barrier. He opens his arms like he’s going to do a dance up there, and she feels laughter forming in her throat. Then he throws himself into the air, and the laugh sets like cement.
As he falls, the vest balloons out behind him in a pitiful parachute. It doesn’t slow his fall, which is very fast. He lands behind the scrubby trees that survive at the base of the plant. Sam sees a movement in the branches, feels a thud in her feet with the heft of a hay bale. She can’t hear anything except the droning sound, high and loud.
There’s a line on the silo now like a stain dripping upwards. It’s more men, a caterpillar of men; she can make out five of them, the last one a little behind. It isn’t happening together, but one at a time, over a period of time; only all the times are happening over the top of each other. The air goes hot and cold. The silo phases in and out of solidity, like the newspaper when it’s printed badly. Roger showed her once, the little shadows under all the words, the doubled pictures; he called it ghosting. A waft of shade cloth appears and disappears. Each ghost leaps by himself, and all of them fall together. Their dark boiler suits are cut-out shadows against the cream barrel shapes, merging and unmerging with t
he letters and the brand.
Five more hay bales tickle the scrub.
The plant stands quietly, bald without its little coils of smoke. The clouds come and go quickly now, brightening and darkening. The river is thin, then a black brushstroke, then gone. The images dissolve into shapes, then patterns, and finally a dilated fizz. So many doctors have explained the migraine’s aura to her, and all in different ways: swollen capillaries, pressure on the optic nerve, some tense activity in the visual cortex. Head too full of blood, said one, and it feels now like it will burst again. Then it loosens, and she’s back in her body. She’s back in a singular time.
The blanket, drawn neatly to her chin, began to scratch her. Its edge had been folded neatly over. The cool cloth on her face had been refreshed. She blinked at the tiny line of light escaping at the top of a window, and it was not agony. The pain retreated watchfully. Ivy was a shadow that held her hand.
‘Something bad is happening,’ Sam said. Too late, she closed her eyes.
‘You’re safe,’ said Ivy, pressing the back of her hand to her daughter’s face. ‘It’s okay now.’
‘Something very bad,’ said Sam.
Ivy’s frown was hidden in the dark room, her voice shaded. ‘It’s a migraine,’ she said. ‘It’s a bad one, but it’s just another migraine, I promise.’
‘It’s the plant,’ Sam said. ‘People are falling.’
‘Shh.’ Ivy smoothed the blankets, took the cloth from her face and straightened the folds. She sighed. ‘It’s fell, Sam. Or will fall.’ She shook her head. ‘But nobody’s allowed up there. It’s too dangerous. So don’t worry. Nobody’s going to fall.’ Then she leaned forward, wiped away the hair that clung to her daughter’s forehead.
‘But they will. A whole line of them,’ Sam said. ‘I saw.’
The chill in the air, it was here in the room with her. It was very crowded, this room.
‘You had a nightmare, Sam.’ Ivy’s voice was quiet, almost a hiss. She wouldn’t look at her.
Sam shook her head, sending tentacles of pain across her temples. There was a tearing sensation in the surface of her skin. The little plumes of smoke returned, the black river, echoes and ghosts.
‘It does something to the river,’ she said. ‘I think I hurt the river.’
‘You’re not making sense,’ said Ivy, her voice distant. Her hand had stopped its comforting.
If a dog was awful, letting a whole river die must be worse. And how many people were there? Six? Were any of them real? A warm tear hesitated at the threshold of her cheekbone, then rolled into her ear. The weakness of it sickened her, but there was no holding it in. ‘I have to say,’ she said.
‘It’s always got to be a disaster,’ said Ivy, already leaving her. She took the cloth away, went to the kitchen, returned after some minutes with the Clapstone Caller. There were no reports of anything going wrong at the plant. No-one at the shop had mentioned anything either. She shook the paper out and spread it on Sam’s chest, too close to see clearly. Only the row of numbers in their circles lingered below, vibrating in her migraine-tempered sight.
‘There’s nothing in here.’ Ivy could not keep the dismay out of her voice. She sat and thrummed her fingers on the bed. The row of numbers marched along the bottom rim of the page, wobbled slightly, stank of newsprint.
‘Not yet,’ said Sam.
‘You can’t believe this,’ Ivy started, then paused. ‘You can’t tell anyone about this.’
Sam lifted, tried to shake her head. ‘There were six of them.’
‘Six,’ said Ivy, chewing her lip. She pushed the paper away. The numbers hid behind a curve of sheet.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sam. Her voice was feeble. ‘I tried to see better.’ She searched her mind for evidence, but behind her eyes everything had gone the wrong colour. The sky might have been violet, the ground an oily blue. If it was a dream, it should disintegrate.
Ivy’s hand landed on her chest. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to happen. You’re not going to say anything. This stops now.’
Roger walked to the shop a hundred words in. Even though it wasn’t quite summer, the sky was blue enough for ice-cream, with only a wisp of cloud, and he needed a break from the obituary.
‘The poor family,’ said Ivy, but she did not look him in the eye.
He lifted an ice-cream cone out of the fridge and peered at its label. Trent was known to keep things past their use-by dates. He replaced it, picked out a Gaytime, held it up to the light. ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ Roger said.
‘They say he was on antidepressants,’ said Ivy. She didn’t mention the migraines, though he’d come in often enough for painkillers and on more than one occasion asked her advice. It didn’t seem relevant. Surely a headache couldn’t push someone that far? Some days she looked at Sam and wondered.
Roger angled his head like a dog thinking. He opened the ice-cream, took a bite. Slid the fridge closed. ‘Sam saw something, didn’t she?’
Ivy shook her head. ‘Are you going to pay for that?’
‘Talk to me,’ he said, fishing in a pocket and handing her a two-dollar coin.
‘I can’t.’ She gestured towards the shop’s other customers. Curdie, scratching around in the hardware section, rattled some bolts and looked away.
‘Give me a ring then. Anytime. Day or night.’
Ivy shook her head. ‘It’s another forty cents,’ she said, in a normal tone.
He stared.
‘Inflation.’
‘But it’s astonishing, Ivy,’ he said, and leaned across the counter as he handed her the extra coins. ‘She’s gifted. Can’t you see that?’
Ivy turned to the register, tapped it open.
‘Roger. I’ve told you. Let it go.’
Suicides were regular enough: one man had gassed himself in his car the previous summer, another had shot himself in his own bathroom only a few months ago. They were both Aspco employees, but so was half of Clapstone. Depression wasn’t easy to find a cause for. It was just there, like bad weather, best waited out. No-one had jumped from the silos before, and the consensus in town was that it was unfair on everyone else who worked there, on the man who found him lying on the concrete in the morning, on the people who had to clean it all up.
And on his family, who were having some trouble, they said, but you could never tell. No-one seemed to have known him well, even those who thought they had. It was a mess, they told Ivy over the counter at the shop, and she agreed with whatever was said to her, contributed nothing new.
There was a funeral in the Institute, followed by drinks. Ivy told Sam she was too young to go.
When the second man leapt from the same ladder, people said it was a tragedy, but in a hushed manner; secretly, they felt it lacked originality. A new process was put in place at the plant, so two people had to sign for the keys. The third death came days after the second, and that made it a pattern. The front page of the Caller, which Ivy had to stack on the counter in front of her, had pictures of them; inside there was an opinion piece that asked if we, as a society, were doing enough for the men. She didn’t take a copy home.
They were talking up at the school about what was happening, now there were kids left behind. She kept Sam home for a few days. She wanted to talk about it with her in her own time, in her own way. When they were both ready. Once she had figured out what the hell this was, and how it was happening. Once the emotional impact had died down.
The fourth man jumped before she had a chance.
Aspco closed the ladder, rolled out the hazard tape and hung a length of shade cloth over the railings. They bolted the gate at the base. In the Commie, in the shop, people were talking about closing the plant altogether. By this point it was an epidemic. Journalists drove up from town; there were stories in the city papers. They liked the details of it. How they’d got someone to hel
p sign for the key, stepped over the striped plastic tape, broad daylight. No-one admitted to talking to the media, but everyone did; in print they were concerned neighbours, close friends, who preferred not to be named.
A woman from a government agency was sent to do grief workshops in the Institute and at the school. She left a stack of leaflets with a hotline on the back, on the front a grey-faced man with his head in his hands. Ivy didn’t bring those home either, not even the one about talking to your children. She wouldn’t sign the forms until she knew where she stood. There was going to be an inquiry, they said, it might be the emissions. It would all make sense then. And, anyway, there had only been four of them. It was a coincidence, that was all.
The fifth man was the closest to them: he had twin sons a little older than Sam, tall boys in the back of the upper primary class photo. Ash for Ashley, Snow for David Junior, freckled boys with their mother’s white-blond hair. Ivy didn’t know how anyone could do it, leave them in the world like that. Fathers were different. On the day of his funeral, the plant closed. In the front-page announcement, Aspco claimed that it was temporary; they were going to do a full review of all the safety procedures, and then everyone would have their jobs back.
When Sam’s teacher rang, Ivy told her it was chicken pox.
Pay was sustained for the first two weeks after the closure, but then that too had to be suspended. In the midst of its grief, half the town was out of work. Carl and Jean opened the Commercial earlier each day, and the tow-haired twins wandered solemnly up and down Kurrajong Street, grief giving them immunity as truants. Ivy watched them from the shop. They looked like lost souls, but they were only fatherless. They would get used to it.
The Foodtown was never empty. It was the post office, the Centrelink counter, the bank. People wandered in to check their empty mailboxes, lingered in the hardware section with their keys in their hands, talking in low voices. Ivy couldn’t stand it. She gave up her shifts to other families, made lasagnes, pies, and took them to the homes of five new widows. She spent money she didn’t have on new baking dishes to replace the ones she couldn’t ask them to return. Everyone did this kind of thing in Clapstone when there was a need, but Ivy gave it her full attention. She had to do something.
Dyschronia Page 6
