Finally, she sent Sam back to school.
There, the fatherless outnumbered the dead. They walked solemnly, spoke with the awful credibility of grief. You could still see the silos from the playground, the cheerful moon logo visible through grey-green shade cloth. The counsellor was a lingering influence. Sam kept coming home with permission forms.
‘I’m not signing that,’ Ivy said. ‘You’re not talking to those people, it’s got nothing to do with you. This has to stop.’
Sam left the form on the kitchen counter and sat at the table, opening the laptop and her unfinished homework. She opened and closed the folder with Dyschronia.pdf in it, selected and deselected the file, dragged it into the trash and dragged it out again, listening for the clicks. It could not stop, not until it was time. She watched her mother over the top of the screen, caught her watching back over the top of a magazine. She didn’t have a choice.
‘There’s one more,’ said Sam. Her voice was small and croaky, and she wasn’t sure Ivy had heard. But she sat forward, dropped the magazine on the table.
‘The plant has shut down now, love. The place is closed. It’s over.’ She reached across and pressed one warm hand over Sam’s. ‘Go outside and get some fresh air. I want to check my email.’
‘I can do it,’ said Sam, but her mother herded her to the door.
Outside, she found Roger standing in the long evening sun in the middle of the road, taking pictures of the silos. They rose darkly in the distance, visible over the red roofs of the company houses.
‘Hey, kid,’ he said.
Sam looked over her shoulder. Her mother’s outline didn’t move against the computer screen. She sniffed the air. It smelled better since the plant had closed, though the tang of asphalt hadn’t gone away; it lingered like the cigarette smell in her mother’s clothes.
Roger crouched down beside her. ‘You saw something, didn’t you,’ he said.
Sam took a step back. She tried to clear her throat.
‘You can tell me,’ he said.
Sam watched him carefully. There was a thin, clear seriousness running through her like a river, a hint of some good feeling. Ivy just needed a second opinion. She nodded. ‘There’s one more.’ Her voice was so small he had to bend close to hear it.
‘One more,’ he said, and did not straighten. His stubble had a few white hairs.
‘Ivy says it’s impossible. It’s all locked up. She says it’s not real. Not dyschronia.’ The whisper grew in volume. She waited for a reaction.
Still crouching, Roger fidgeted with a lens, then pointed his enormous camera at the plant in the distance. The shade cloth flapped in a breeze, rose and deflated. When he was satisfied, he turned to her, his eyes searching hers.
‘Dyschronia,’ he said. ‘Is that what they called it?’
‘Something’s wrong with me,’ she said, and looked at her hands. Now the feeling bubbled from beneath like warm water, filling her shoes. The hands were damp.
He turned his brown eyes on her. ‘It’s going to be all right, Sam. It’s not your fault, you hear me? You’re different, is all. You have a gift.’ His breath smelled of chewing gum and tobacco. His face, large and friendly beside her own, did not seem mocking.
‘Ivy said I couldn’t tell anyone,’ she said.
‘I’m not anyone,’ he said, ‘I’m on your side.’ Roger’s attention was diverted by the squeal of the screen door.
‘But I never see anything good,’ Sam mouthed, almost soundlessly.
‘Get in here,’ barked Ivy. ‘Now.’
Sam waited out the suspension like the rest of the town, hovering between hope and worry. When the plant was officially recertified as safe, everyone assumed they’d have work to go back to; the mood lifted briefly. But the gate remained bolted, the silos shrouded. The Caller’s pages began to thin.
The school year had finished by the time they made the announcement. They explained it all in the paper, a special edition. In the end, it had nothing to do with safety. Opening sources in the melting Arctic and rising wages locally meant that oil was getting expensive. The refinery process was shifting to new, cheaper markets. CSG, LNG; somewhere such an acronym spelled energy salvation. Renewables would take over, eventually. And there were these new portable asphalt plants that could be transported to wherever you needed them, cheaper. A place like Clapstone couldn’t last forever.
Aspco wouldn’t leave the town with nothing. They promised the site would be rehabilitated, made useful again. In answer to a petition by the lately reformed Clapstone Development Association, a monument to the dead was raised at one end of Kurrajong Street: the company’s last act of community sponsorship. A natural obelisk was towed down from the old quarry in an Aspco tilt trailer and tipped out near the roundabout, where Allan of Allan’s Concrete concreted it in. A plaque was engraved in Hummock, brought down and bolted into the side of the rock, veiled then unveiled. A squinting mayor spoke of loss, of new opportunities, of revitalisation. One by one the widows left, except for Edith and the twins. The three of them leaned flowers on the obelisk every morning, and kept it clean, but soon Ash and Snow remembered to be ashamed of flowers, and Edith was sweeping the dust away on her own.
There couldn’t be another one now, thought Sam. Ivy was right. It was just a coincidence; it had nothing to do with her. If she felt the shrouded silos watching her, if they seemed to loom over her as she walked home from school, it was just her brain playing tricks again. It was all in her head.
The company brought in contractors to close the operation down. It was one of these men, dismantling the railing, who became the sixth to fall. He probably should have had a harness, they admitted, but temporary workers weren’t required to wear them. Vedanayagam, his name was. From somewhere foreign. With no-one around who knew how to pronounce it, talk of adding the name to the plaque was brief and came to nothing. It would have been just that bit too wide. People were relieved when the family didn’t want to be associated with the place, and flew him back to the city to be buried.
Roger had been waiting for the sixth man. Once the obituary – sixty words this time, without a picture – was written and spellchecked, he opened another file and read through it three times, holding his breath. Since the special memorial edition, the paper was down to a single folded sheet, half of it a charity of ads for the Foodtown, which he knew Trent couldn’t afford. He pressed send.
An editor at the Caller’s parent company opened the email. Roger had mentioned the idea to her before. At the time, she’d spoken enthusiastically, thinking it might have enough eccentric charm for a feature story in the city paper. But now it disturbed her. With current budget constraints, she explained, it wouldn’t be possible to send someone, or fill a whole page. In the end she ran a hundred words in the briefs along with ‘Woman spits milk at police officer’ and ‘Croc hitches 3000 km ride’. It got syndicated around the country, in the novelty columns of other papers: ‘Child “psychic” predicts plant closure’. She forwarded this happy news to Roger. He should have been delighted with the reach.
It wasn’t in the Caller, but it was online, the kind of speculative news that amused people for long enough to forward via social media, to share a bit of a laugh at the strange world’s expense, and so it eventually came back around to Clapstone, where it was received in another spirit entirely.
10
Ivy is still asleep when Sam tiptoes through the house, her sneakers in her hand, in the silent minutes before dawn. She’s turning into her mother.
At the door she hesitates. She has an impulse to cough in the hall and wake her, but what for? To say goodbye, or to explain? She doesn’t know which, or how to do either, and then she has the front door open, and the cool air of morning comes rushing towards her. When she glances back into the kitchen, her eyes snag on the rosella tin on its high shelf. She remembers Ivy telling her that time gets faster as you get
older. But it doesn’t, not for Sam. For her it gets heavier.
Sam closes the door gently, wades through weeds to the side of the house and fills two plastic bottles from the rainwater tank. She packs them into her small backpack. Three rust-tainted litres. It should be more than enough. She makes her way down the path, out the open gate, past the abandoned rows of company houses. She steps over potholes, turns at the memorial on Kurrajong Street hidden in its overgrowth of rosemary, hurries past the Foodtown’s dusty windows and the peeling yellow warmth of the Commercial. There is no need to hurry. There’s no-one around in the street this time of day, or any other. But now that the time has come, she’s burdened with urgency. She crosses the field.
When she gets to the gate, the sky is turning golden. She touches the bars with one hand, looks up through them at the barn. Blue paint is flaking from the ply now, as it should; the colours remember their places. She steps around the gate, over the fallen half, and heads for the wheel.
The body of the Big Thing looms at her, and she approaches, places the back of her hand against its night-cold plaster. Its remaining limbs are spread out like tree roots that have escaped their soil. It is ridiculous, half cephalopod, half indecision, but somehow it has seemed more solemn with each passing year. The more it ages, the more it looks like it belongs here: part of the scenery, a natural extension of the land. Like Sam remembers it, the way it will be now.
She picks a lump of grass seeds off her sleeve, some invasive species growing chest-high in places. She’s read about abandoned landscapes where the plants grow wild again; she’s seen pictures where lush trees take over old buildings, collected beside Roger’s pictures of the park. For a while it seemed like the worse things got the more these images were flourishing. It’s a fantasy, that belief the earth will heal itself. Here, most of the stuff that tries to grow doesn’t make it. Young trees last a season, then turn brown and die. Even the gums by the river, geriatric now, have turned a ghastly grey.
Those first few years they even thought they could make something out of it. Now Clapstone is just one among a thousand abandoned towns. Most people moved into the cities, where they had more of a chance. Sam hears things now, about sicknesses, police, that suggest otherwise. It’s hard to know who to believe.
She lifts her hands from the creature, and it leaves a residue of white dust on her skin. She sees the dead eggs that fell into the sand when they lifted Architeuthis asphaltica on her tarpaulin into the ute. She should have been a warning, that squid, but people read her surfacing as a different kind of sign. How can anyone keep track of all the portents, or of time itself? She sees the crack that has formed in one plaster arm, and remembers white chalk falling.
The plastic eye is still intact; that isn’t right. She has to walk in her tracks. She wipes the dust from her hands against her jeans, and hoists herself up onto the slab.
She reaches up to touch the eye with a finger. She could try to leave it there, but it would break somehow regardless. She could have tried to leave Clapstone, but there was never any point in that; she would always have to be back. She’s always had a direction. These limits in which to move. She’s never stepped outside them, and now she never will.
Sam climbs up onto the great creature’s back. She gets to her feet on its fragile shell, which curves in front of her like an upturned canoe. She stands over the giant eye, raises one sneakered foot and lets it fall. Her shoes are thin and soft but the plastic is brittle and it breaks easily. The shattering sound hardly disturbs the empty air.
She peers down into the grey after the shards, which have fallen inside the hollow of the thing. Digital life flickers there, a memory. A grave of an idea. Of course there’s nothing in it. Turning her away, she climbs down, collecting more white dust.
When her feet are back on the ground she looks up at the wheel. Chooses a gondola, or remembers one. It waits patiently for her to step inside, into the space she’s going to occupy. But first, she takes out her phone. She should have told her years ago, but what would that have mattered? One thing about predestination: it is always ready with an excuse.
Sam moves with purpose now. She hoists her knee over the edge of the second concrete slab. She reaches for the bars above. She finds the best place to put her hands, choosing those details that can be chosen. Her heart is fast in her chest, the bag on her back heavy with water. She grasps the rungs. The first leap up is the hardest, but she’s strong.
She waits for the satisfaction to come, the relief of stepping into double time. The comfort that she used to feel, returning. Come on, she tells her body, this is it.
This is stupid, says an inner voice.
If there is anything else, it is a glimpse of migrainous light: leucophores, iridophores, chromatophores, swimming backwards through the dark. Cellular interference, strange signals, like a language lost to the rest of her species. On the surface, she’s a woman climbing a broken fairground ride. But in the ocean beneath, there are other, less articulate desires, perhaps less human: flickering things, dimly lit from somewhere within.
She starts to climb.
11
The first night, Ivy answered her phone when it rang. ‘How dare you,’ they growled, their voices smoky, badly disguised. She kept her own voice calm and her words even, knowing she would see these same people tomorrow, and every day. It was just so predictable. On the second night, she switched off her phone. They came in person and called through the gaps in the louvre windows. On the third, she turned out all the lights, locked the windows, closed the curtains and deadbolted the door.
Their voices entered the house like scent. ‘We had a right to know,’ they pleaded. ‘You should have told us. You have to let us see her, Ivy.’
‘It’s too late now,’ said Ivy. ‘And, anyway, there’s nothing we could have done.’
‘What else is coming?’ they asked Sam, faces milky through the dirty glass. ‘What else do you know?’
‘Leave her alone,’ Ivy called back, stretching herself between her daughter and the glass. ‘She doesn’t know anything. She’s just a kid.’
Every night she slept in Sam’s room, the two of them curled on the single bed, which despite its narrowness seemed too large for them, like the hull of an empty boat. At night, neighbours whose cars they knew, even with the lights off, drove slowly past the house and threw eggs and bottles at their front veranda. One morning Ivy found witches spray-painted across the front fence, the letters dripping fresh enamel polyps, and her whole body began to shake. She raided Trent’s expired hardware stock, painted the white fence a grim grey-brown, and replaced the broken louvres before Sam got home. She hammered chicken wire around the veranda to protect the glass.
Sam herself said nothing about any of it. After school she sometimes ran into the house in tears, but more often walked home slowly, heel to toe, until she could control her expression.
It broke Ivy’s heart to see her like this, but she understood the other side of it. People had to express their grief somehow. They couldn’t get angry at Aspco, which had simply left Clapstone, outsourcing the rest of the site rehabilitation to the local council. Now no-one knew if it would ever happen. Until then, the exclamation marks at the end of the hills were still there, accusing. It was a bad year for everyone. They had to go on living. The threats at night were easier to take than the silences, the cold looks she got in the shop and in the street, looks that sometimes made her feel like packing up and leaving.
She worked her way through tins of paint, bottles of window cleaner, boxes of aspirin. She had always kept some loose bills in an old biscuit tin, but now she started putting money away more seriously. They ate badly, instant noodles and toasties in front of the television, avoiding the shop. She kept a bag packed with necessities stashed in the hall cupboard with the vacuum cleaner. Sleep loss and anxiety held an arms race. She shared Sam’s pills out carefully between them. The medication wore them b
oth down but it let them sleep. In her head and to Sam, Ivy kept repeating what the doctor had said a long time ago: that she’d grow out of it. That lots of girls suffer while they’re young. That they either get better or get used to it.
‘What’s wrong with me,’ Sam whimpered, the lights in her head like small, cruel explosions.
‘Shhh,’ said Ivy, stroking her hair.
She shook out a tablet, bit it in two and handed half to Sam. She took the other half in her teeth and swallowed with a grimace. Within minutes she had curled her body around her daughter’s, her back facing the wall, her breathing even. Sam lay awake, eyes closed, the dancing lights mesmeric and inviting, the bursting feeling all over her skin.
A beer bottle bounced off the chicken wire and landed on the driveway, then rolled noisily into the street. The rattling mixed with the whine of a car. She kept her eyes closed on their pulsing kaleidoscope. Sam could hear her own noise, the faint, high drone, pressing in at the world’s edges. Like bad plumbing, the squealing of her brain’s pipes battled with their fittings. There was too much pressure inside her head. Something had to give.
Now it is now and at first Sam thinks she’s nowhere real at all. It looks so different. Flimsy buildings, hardly more than sheds, stand angled on a broad dirt street. There’s the front of a railway station, just the facade with no sign of a track. A flat tower clock with its hands at ten and two. In front of it, in the street, cement bricks lie threaded with weeds like the ragged trim of blankets. The street is just a field. In the centre stands a red Ferris wheel like a huge segmented skeleton, green and yellow carriages dangling from its bones. Rusted bars make angles for the sun. Beneath it lurks a pale monster, indistinct in form.
Dyschronia Page 7
