When she reaches the top of the ladder, she stops to catch her breath. She won’t look down, uncertain if heights are going to affect her. She’s sweating and the heavy backpack is tight under her arms. She could take a long drink of the water that’s in there, it would lighten her load, but she doesn’t feel steady enough to unfasten the straps and turn. This tingle beginning in her fingertips is just adrenaline and rust. She forces her eyes up, makes herself look out along the arms.
For a minute everything is a choice again. The options radiate, each one wrong. But if there’s a decision, it was made a long time ago. What comes down must go up. She’s a precondition for established fact. And now the fact is right in front of her.
The metal limb looks fatter and safer from here, despite the rust and the row of smashed lightbulbs lining the outside. Any copper that could be reached was stripped a long time ago, the plastic baubles knocked off, sold or stolen or smashed just for the pleasure of it as tourism ran its course. She reaches out with one foot to test that the steel will take her weight. It shakes slightly, shedding particles of rust and paint, then settles. A moth wakes and dazedly vacates a broken socket.
She’s not the first person to climb up here. The little shelf she’s standing on smells of old piss and stale beer. Initials are scratched into the paintwork at the hub. The usual Texta genitals. A pair of hurled sneakers dangle from a rail. They did their best to encourage gentle visitors, but something about an abandoned place, or near-abandoned, makes people rough with it. It’s like an anger.
Between the bars with the lightbulbs, there are crossed lines, steel welded to the spokes, close enough together that she should be able to span them easily. There’s no wind, at least. Sam shifts her weight and reaches for the bars. They are thinner than her wrists, which ache already. The space between them is bigger than it looked, but it’s really just another angled ladder.
She does not look down.
She knows what she’d be able to see. A blank patch marking the reserve where the plant used to be. Old grey trees along the dried-up Luck, some fallen in. The river’s question mark, the thin black line that used to be the water. Beyond that, the scarred hole of the old quarry, then the row of pink hills. In the other direction, her gaze would be drawn past weedy dunes to the car park at the stump of broken jetty, then down to the place that used to be the beach. Maybe all the way to the sea. Her stomach lurches.
Everything around here used to be something, or was poised, about to become something. But it was always growing towards its own decay. Maybe that’s just Clapstone, she thinks, not for the first time. Her disorder is a product of geography, a disease of place. She’s only ever lived here, seen this place’s futures. Dyschronia springs from a crack in its earth.
The label sounds stale and strange now, past its use. Up here, she feels weaker than she has in years. She’s only twenty-five; her arms shouldn’t ache. At this age Ivy was delivering her to school each morning, most mornings anyway, and going to work, a responsible head of a household. Sam can’t think of herself in that kind of role. The headaches have prevented it, have taken her destiny whole. Her part is all laid out for her. Pain made sure she would always be the one who needed looking after. She doesn’t need it now, not from anyone. She should have been nicer to her mother, taken better care of her. It’s easy to know this now, when it’s too late.
She pulls herself along, and her arms find muscle. The metal creaks and shivers. Her knuckles are white against the rust, traces of dust on her hands. She focuses on going forward. When she thinks these words, she hears Ed’s voice. She listens out for a snatch of his music. There are creaks as the bars accept her outstretched hands, the metal scolding like a bird.
There aren’t any birds. Not here.
She remembers the fanfare of the wheel arriving like enormous flatpack furniture on the back of a wide-load truck, two escort utes flashing orange and cops on bikes on either side. Cranes, scaffolding, activity, work: the excitement resounding with each hammer and whirr. It’s hard to imagine it now, the town so full of people working. Men and women hanging up here like filaments of high-vis cloth caught in a web, pissing sparks. These things seeming to matter. Sam would look even flimsier against the frame, if anyone was looking. Like an insect.
She was looking, of course. Or will be.
She inhales quickly, the dizziness of memory encroaching upon the present. Time rears to meet itself. Less like déjà vu than inverse nostalgia. It’s what makes her different. Unique. But it’s not the same, not any more.
At last she reaches the hinge where the gondola dangles. Gradually, she rests her full weight on the knuckle of steel. She’ll be able to slip down onto the gondola’s roof, but if it tips too fast she’ll slide right off it. The bars beneath are too far away, too far apart to catch her. The fibreglass cover looks weak and grey. She’ll be okay if she moves slowly, distributes her weight. She flexes her shaking hands, feels the exertion up her arms. There’s a chance she’ll fall, but of course that won’t be what happens.
It used to feel wonderful, the doubled time. The experience was warmer, deeper; somehow, it made her feel beloved. Not by a person, conditionally, but by the universe itself. She misses it. It isn’t love, not really, but it’s in the same family. Homesickness maybe, for a place in time that feels right. For a present tense.
She dangles one leg onto the lid and slowly turns her body. Ivy crawls on the driveway, an arm outstretched for scattered twenty-dollar notes. The concrete resonant with heat and shame. A real memory, a past memory, lurching up through her body. It hasn’t felt wonderful for a long time.
There is an impact before she knows she has fallen, then the gondola answers with a squeal. It gives slightly beneath her limbs and she spreads her body over it, starfishes out, on instinct. The fibreglass doesn’t crack. The hinge groans, its rust resistant. She slides one leg then the other to the rim. Her jeans provide a friction grip against the weathered surface, and her arms are strong. At the edge, she slips one sneaker over the rim and feels with it for the bars below. There’s no foothold in reach. She’ll just have to swing and hope.
Sam inches down until her feet hit something, her hoodie rucked up against her chest, her stomach exposed to the breeze. She has to let go of the roof. The basket tips further, groaning. She half-wriggles, half-falls, grabs the rim, twists herself and reaches for bars that aren’t there. It’s an awful act of trust.
The boat catches her. She’s on her knees, on all fours against the rocking and squealing of the dreadful hinge. She holds her position, head to the floor, waiting for the falling to keep falling. The hinge overhead makes a sound like the bleating of old swings. The rocking slows and the creaking subsides. The bleat skips down to a mournful refrain, then gradually departs.
A noise escapes her throat. Sam rises to her knees, checks her hands for grazes. Pink palms stained with rust and paint. Her arms and legs are shaking. There’s a sour taste in her mouth.
But she’s still alive. And nothing broken.
Sam wriggles out of her pack, opens a water bottle and drinks deeply. Then she peers out across the rim of the seat back, into a complex crosshatch of rusted bars, towards the hub. From this angle, the wheel’s symmetry is dazzling. She can’t see the ground from here, not yet, which suits her fine. She’ll have to look down sometime, but right now it’s enough just to hold still. She listens, waits for her heart rate to settle. Slowly the adrenaline leaches from her blood. Euphoria leaves its tideline mark. The gondola rocks itself still. It’s more like a birdcage than a boat.
Sam puts a hand on the seat and prepares to rise. Her legs are two bent springs reluctant to straighten. She slides onto the bench, keeping her eyes on the false floor. The cage wobbles beneath her. She rubs her palms against her thighs, but the orange rust stains don’t come off. The bench is cold to her touch.
She checks her phone. No answer. It’s only taken nineteen min
utes to get up here; it felt like hours. She spreads her hoodie out across the metal seat and sits on the fabric. When the hinge groans, she slides the water under the opposite bench as a counterweight. A few litres are hardly enough to balance her, but they should be enough to keep her alive. She has a day or two, if she’s lucky.
Then white chalk.
And after that, maybe nothing.
17
Our post boxes at the shop are still serviced by a young man from Hummock in a red van; the postal system is as constant as the power company has been. So we all get the letters on the same day. Ken collects his first, out on his morning walk, and returns breathlessly to show us; then Allan and Trent go down together, and Trent opens the back of the row of post boxes and takes out the rest. They all say the same thing:
Dear Resident,
Debts pertaining to Renewal Industries have been acquired by Belemnite Financial Services. Due to significant realisation all payments have been suspended. You will be informed of developments as they occur. Welcome to a Brighter Future.
The letters aren’t signed. We have no idea what payments they might be referring to, or what the realisation is. But that last part sounds promising.
‘This is interesting,’ we say. Imagine how nice it will be when this new company comes in and invests in fixing the place up again. We think of the letter as a declaration of intent. We walk around holding our copies, re-reading them, folding them up and straightening them out on our laminate countertops. We stand at our courtyard doors, waiting for significant realisations. A more decisive, more specific invitation must lie ahead of us. Welcome to a Brighter Future; it says so right there.
We don’t hear anything else from them for weeks. We thought they’d send someone round to look at the place, these new owners, if only out of curiosity. Finally our own gets the better of us, and we ring the number on the letterhead.
We get a call centre, press the sequence of numbers we hope will lead us to a human being. The woman who finally appears on the other end sighs when we tell her we just want to know what’s happening. She spends a lot of time entering our details on one of those clickety keyboards and, just when we’re starting to think it’s an all-percussion hold track, there’s a crackle and she gets back on the line.
‘No plans pending,’ she says.
‘What does that mean?’ We are huddled around Curdie’s phone, which is on speaker.
‘As far as I am aware there are no developments pending in Australia,’ she says.
‘What are they doing with it then?’ Curdie asks.
‘We have tens of thousands of investments,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head.’
‘Can we talk to someone who can?’ Curdie asks. The rest of us inhale sharply but quietly. The room feels small.
There’s a fuzzy pause and we think she might have hung up on us. But then her voice appears more clearly than before, as if she’s come halfway down the cable to greet us. ‘I guess that’s possible in theory,’ she says. ‘There’s no-one at head office now.’
‘Aren’t you the head office?’
‘Head office is in Montevideo. It’s three in the morning there.’
‘Oh.’ There is a pause. We remember the way our dogs would turn and settle in these kinds of moments, always trying to get comfortable. We do not want to interrupt. ‘How do we get in touch with them?’
She sighs. ‘How should I know? I’m just the info line.’
There’s a static hiss as we digest this. Through it we can hear an orchestra of other telephones. We don’t know what country she’s in. It might be rude to ask. It’s hard to know these days where the responsibilities begin and end.
‘Anything else I can do for you?’ she says. We thank her politely and let her go. When the phone’s screen displays call ended and the time, we stay huddled around it until it goes dark.
‘The people who bought it probably don’t know they own it,’ says Allan.
‘If they are even people. Maybe it’s computers,’ says Jean. None of us is sure whether she is joking. She reaches for the sleeping phone.
‘Why would anybody buy something but not develop it?’ Curdie asks.
‘You think anyone’s going to finish this place? That park?’
‘Who knows. It must be worth something. The tourists.’
‘Maybe.’ The tourists are regular, but not very lucrative. It’s possible something more could be done to encourage them, some enhancement of the experience. We have tried to enhance it by staying out of the way.
‘Maybe some kind of a resort,’ Allan starts, but his voice fades. We know our tourists are the wrong kind. And to make a resort you need water, preferably a pretty bit of coast. Summers have come and gone and the sea has come no closer. The river hasn’t flowed in years. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a Brighter Future waiting for us.
‘Could be sitting on a gold mine,’ says Candace.
‘They tried that,’ says Carl, shaking his head. ‘The Luck was picked clean a hundred years ago. Nothing there. The only thing I can think is that they’re keeping it as a tax dodge.’
If that’s the case, then Clapstone is still valuable to someone, if only as a place to neglect. We won’t know any more until they come and tell us. In the meantime, we may as well get on with our lives. That is where we live now: in the meantime. The interim.
We all have to live somewhere.
The best part is that Belemnite doesn’t bother us about the visitors. Because soon after the first letter, they hit something of a peak. Roger has always told us, and anyone else who will listen, that he’s freelancing, even though he lives just like the rest of us do, on pocket change and credit. But he’s been taking photos of the park all this time, and all this time he’s been sending them away, mostly getting nothing back. Finally he posts them himself, sets up what he calls a social media presence. Bob says it’s a waste of time. Roger says we have a surplus. And one day Roger shows us an article in a Sunday city paper, in the glossy magazine that arrives in his mailbox wrapped in what claims to be biodegradable plastic wrap.
It is ages since we’ve seen a newspaper, though we read them online from time to time, when we can stomach the disasters. We are surprised they still make copies of it; we rub the pages between our fingers, consider the trees. If this shiny paper stuff is even made from trees any more. It feels like a luxury item, the kind we’ve never associated with our lifestyles.
So it takes us a moment to recognise that’s our Ferris wheel on the cover, with the whited shell of the Big Thing underneath. Life in a Haunted Town, it says. Roger lets it fall open at the spread. The article doesn’t actually say much; it’s mostly photos. There are a few words: Stranded, under a picture of the half of the gate that is still standing, the letters clapstone rec looking lovely and stark against the pale sky. Even Bob clicks his tongue and murmurs admiration. The yellow tint in the clouds gives everything a sinister look. The curve in the lens makes it all look sweepingly important, not land any more but real estate.
‘I can’t see your byline on this,’ says Bob. ‘How much did you get for it?’
‘Twenty cents a word,’ Roger says. ‘But they didn’t print many words. It’s more of a picture special.’
‘These are very good,’ we say, flipping through the spread. There are even some pictures of us in there, moving our things into the village. ‘Look, there’s you,’ we say to each other. We laugh at ourselves with our goods roped to trailers, our shirts swirling in the wind; we look like refugees.
There’s a story of sorts in the captions. Living in the Ruins, it says. We squint at our ambiguous facial expressions. These shots are from the beginning, when we still came out and greeted people. We thought we were friendly, but we look exhausted. Australia’s Wasteland, the next one says. That’s laying it on a bit thick. The park looks quite picturesque in the pictu
res, bent out of shape by the fancy lenses. Roger has caught the light beautifully. It isn’t a waste at all. It’s lovely.
Clapstone’s only hope is redefining itself as a macabre attraction, one caption says.
‘They cut down the paragraph,’ Roger says. ‘It was about the death of industry.’ There’s a close-up of the Big Thing above that, its grey plastic eye a vast bauble reflecting the sky above, its plaster tentacles flayed and swollen. In the background, blurs of a couple of tourists, their cameras raised. Beside that there’s an image of the shore, what used to be the shore, with a curve of something’s skeleton. Its rib bones neatly match the arc of the Big Thing’s mantle.
Shoreline of Death, that one says.
‘Four dollars,’ says Bob, who’s been counting on his fingers.
‘A bit over,’ says Roger, reaching for the page. ‘There’s another one.’
We turn the page, see the falling tin of our own former houses, and close the magazine.
‘It’s very good,’ we say politely. ‘Very dramatic.’
‘They took you to the cleaner’s,’ says Bob.
‘It’s gone viral,’ Roger says, and he shows us on his tablet. The pictures look much flimsier on screen, much less impressive, but as we swipe through them we can understand why the text is so reduced. All the news is like that now, big images, little captions. We scroll on and look for the number of shares. Celebrities and catastrophes attend each other in the sidebar. Down the bottom there are a few links to opinion pieces about the collapsing economy, the land crisis, whether relocations should be voluntary. There are places with no chances left. It could be much worse.
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