Dyschronia

by Jennifer Mills

  Most of the rubbish was being washed out to sea, but there were places where the river had deposited chocolate wrappers and old socks in the trees. As the air cleared a little, these colours became more prominent. The water had left these bright flags behind, tagging its high score. Its level was steadily falling.

  With a sudden consensus, the birds began to celebrate. Corellas, galahs appeared from hollows, rose in chorus, sailed through the streets. The harsh sounds gnawed at her temples, where the light ached. Other kids appeared from houses, wandered towards the banks to join her, but Sam hardly saw them. The clouds were clearing overhead, curtains opening on the fiercest blue.

  Soon the riverbank was crowded. The air was humid, filled with the delicious smell of wet eucalypts, and the sunlight was glorious, but on the ground the happy atmosphere seemed forced. People milled around her but kept their distance. There were a few kids desultorily rolling down damp mounds, but they had picked up the general unease, and their laughter was subdued. Younger ones played watchfully in mud, waiting for the guidance of adult reactions. Water bobbed gently against the bank, sliding ever lower as it oozed towards the murky sea.

  Ed moved from group to group. He scattered a few words here and there, or placed a hand on a shoulder. People formed clusters and spoke in low voices. Sam looked at her phone to check the forecast, but it still had no signal. If they got another few millimetres, the river might be able to manage it. But the birds had already made their announcement. It was over. It was all wrong.

  Ivy was right about her.

  She turned for home in her wet, heavy clothes. She walked past Curdie, holding his son up to his chest, Annette beside him waving one of his tiny hands at the rubbish sailing softly away. They didn’t look at her. Even the baby seemed disappointed.

  The streets were drying quickly in the sun: steam rose from the warm asphalt. Sam put her feet down on each newly formed crack in the road. She hardly noticed Ivy following her. Her mother kept her distance.

  Despite agreeing not to make what Ed had called a song and dance about it, most people had prepared their houses thoroughly, ready for the promised catastrophe. Under cover, on high ground, crates stood packed with food, water and necessities; ladders leaned against trees. Cats watched from roof gables, licking their paws. Dogs were freed to run confused circles around their owners’ legs. Beers were dug out of emergency Eskies. Curdie had reversed his boat trailer up the driveway and dragged the boat onto the grass and it listed there, pointless as a toy.

  All around her, formations of children squelched in new puddles. On front lawns, between wrecked furniture, their feet made dents in the grass that filled with water and became tiny pools. But nothing overflowed.

  Garages were open, precious items moved to high shelves, cars on blocks, but the cement floors in them were dry. The stormwater drains were full up to the gutters, but no fuller.

  People fell silent when she passed. One of Sam’s feet sank into a hole in the asphalt, soaking her sock through the broken sole. The hole bubbled with trapped gas. By the time she reached the veranda of her own house, Ivy was close enough behind her that Sam could feel the heat of her body. She paused on the bottom step, staring for a minute before seeing. The makeshift birdcage now hung open. She felt the bounce of the useless wire, pushed against the splintered timber.

  Winter and Spring were gone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Ivy reached out, placed a hand between her shoulder blades, and guided Sam into the house. ‘Well, we tried,’ she said, calm and not unkind. ‘And now we know.’

  They drove the wet streets searching for the birds. Ivy and Ed in the front, Ned and Sam in the back. Their positions were right, but the mood was dismal. No laughter, and not enough water. Sam called ‘Winter! Spring!’ into the trees, but it was useless.

  ‘I think we have to accept they’re gone,’ said Ivy, on their second circuit.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Ed. He glanced at Sam in the rear-view mirror, a small flicker of a smile. ‘We almost had it.’

  Sam grazed her knuckle against the door upholstery. There was no almost, there was only wrong. The whole thing had come unravelled before it had a chance.

  Ned had caught the mood, though it was coloured with his own alertness. He and Ed bore little resemblance, as far as she could see. She wondered dimly about her own biological father, an abstraction to whom she had given migraines now and then, but never much in the way of character. Maybe he wasn’t just an absence, a blank space on the forms; maybe he had passed this to her, this sickness or deficiency. Whatever it was, it was no gift.

  The car was slowing. Under the low purr of the engine, Sam could hear a strange, high humming, almost like the migraine’s drone. Her head was clear.

  ‘Genius,’ Ed said.

  She looked up. There was water everywhere. Water running over the streets, filling them. It poured down driveways, filled the gutters, overflowed. It seeped under doors, pooled in gardens. It shimmered and crept. People grinned, their faces bright with energy, waving delightedly. They weren’t just looking at her, they were looking for her, training their searching gazes at the car’s window. In their hands were green garden hoses, scribbling over yards and up on roofs. She recognised the sound now: it was the high hum of pipes straining under pressure.

  ‘Look at that,’ Ed said, and set his hand on Ivy’s leg. Sam couldn’t see her face in the mirror. She didn’t say a word, but she didn’t move away.

  He drove on. Carl waved from the entrance to the Commie’s front bar, holding up a bucket. At the Foodtown, leaking gutters had drawn stripes through the fake snow on the windows, just right. Trent was out on the kerb in the sunshine, sorting ruined goods into piles. When they turned a corner, the rest of the vision spread out before her.

  Another flood was loosed inside her, its warmth spread through her body. Her chest unknotted, and her breath came clear and strong. It was like coming home, this doubled feeling. Returning to a place she hadn’t known was missing, a place where everything belonged. There was Matt Gable coughing and waving from his porch; there were the joyful arcs rising from under their wheels; there, at last, was the sound of Ivy laughing unreservedly, inviting Sam’s own happiness to clamber free.

  Neighbours bailed out their houses, dragged their old kitchen cabinets apart, smashed up furniture, destroyed whatever they’d decided was expendable. Garage floors were covered with water, just as she’d seen them. But the mud that marked the walls was plastered there with hands and brooms. Sam sat forward, wanting to pay attention, though it couldn’t matter now. Ed skimmed puddles with the car, lurched around fresh potholes. Roger bounded over, camera in hand, to wave them down.

  ‘We’ve blocked up the gutters all the way down to Curdie’s place.’ Breathless, he raised his camera, snapped a few shots of a broken vacuum cleaner leaning on an old chest of drawers. He turned to grin at Sam through the window. ‘People get awards for this kind of thing,’ he stage-whispered. She sat back in the car seat, her body humming.

  ‘Nothing incriminating,’ Ivy said.

  ‘I know that.’ Roger’s eyes shifted, and Sam glimpsed a hurt in them she knew. Her mother could be rough with those she loved. The insight was one among a field of them. Every thought had the intensity of revelation. The world was full of sudden sense, rich with beauty. But there was too much, a complex system. She couldn’t hold what was already breaking apart.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ called Bob, waving as he strode towards them, his phone clamped to an ear. His trousers were rolled up to the knees and he had left his shoes behind somewhere; it made him look like a castaway. ‘Hummock SES is on its way,’ he said. ‘Just left the station.’

  Ed blinked at him. ‘We have to stop,’ he said, a little stunned.

  ‘We’ll be right,’ said Bob. ‘So this must be your young fella.’ He leaned in through Sam’s open window to examine him. Ned re
ached across her to shake his hand with that odd formality of his. When he let go, Bob clamped her by the shoulder. His breath was close.

  ‘Now you’ve done it,’ he said.

  21

  The mail service has trickled away, but Trent’s been on a run to Hummock, where they still get a van every other week, and he’s come back with a stack of these letters under his arm. The letterhead has a bold, dark brown SH at the top, a paler shadow repeated after the H like a ghosting effect. Once again, they’re all addressed Dear Resident.

  The letter is very short.

  Due to a restructure, some assets pertaining to Belemnite Enterprises have been acquired by Sepia Holdings. Most investors will remain unaffected but some liabilities may impact variably.

  ‘What does that mean, impact variably?’ we ask Jean, and she shrugs.

  ‘Maybe changes,’ she says. ‘Maybe nothing. Corporations move in mysterious ways. Sometimes a merger like this is just about rebranding. Changing the letterhead.’

  You are notified of this within the thirty-day notification period according to DSC regulations. Sepia Holdings and its subsidiaries accept no liability for lost notifications.

  Sincerely.

  Then there are three days in a row so windy we don’t leave the safety of the village. We breathe the circulated air and watch the dust collect in the corners of the dome like one of those sand paintings, until the wind blows it away again.

  After the dust clears, a few of us go for a drive up to the reserve in Curdie’s ute, bumping along past the open gate, tracing the marks of other wheels. Apart from a couple of pegs and a bit of safety tape, we can’t see any evidence of changes, present or planned. Most of the tape has been torn by the wind and blown up into the dead branches of the remaining red gums. There’s a pile of beer cans spilling out of a carton at the base of one trunk, and a campfire stain nearby. We get back in the ute and sit there.

  There wasn’t any mention of a brighter future this time.

  ‘Let’s go into town,’ says Curdie.

  It has been months for many of us. Years, for some. The shortages, the roads have had an influence, of course, but it’s mainly that we haven’t had the urge. Now it overtakes us like a flood. A quiet drive to Hummock’s just what we need. A little perspective, stretch our legs. The ute curls out of Clapstone, taking the potholes with a few hard thunks. Now the day has the feeling of an adventure, taken at lavish expense.

  ‘Put some music on,’ Jean says, reaching for the console. But the radio only gives static.

  Just up from the stretch of wrecks, a man in overalls flags us down. He’s standing beside a white van. At first we think he’s broken down out here, but when we stop he doesn’t want our help.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ he asks, leaning in the driver’s side to look over the three of us squeezed in the back. His hair is thick and black, though when we look closely we can see flecks of white at the temples.

  ‘Just going into Hummock,’ we say.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Shopping,’ we say. ‘Are you the police?’

  He walks around the back of the ute and looks in the tray. It’s empty. He seems satisfied. We start to wonder if he’s the same man from the ute. We can’t quite remember his face. But the other one was greyer in the beard, and this one’s freshly shaven.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Curdie jokes. ‘We’re not trying to escape or anything.’ The man doesn’t laugh. The overalls are made of the protective orange fabric that the firefighters used to wear, back when Hummock had a brigade. If it wasn’t for the vehicle, we might have guessed he’d parachuted in, or else escaped from prison.

  ‘You’re not with that Belemnite mob, are you?’ asks Curdie, when the man returns to his window.

  ‘You mean Sepia Holdings,’ the man says.

  ‘That’s the one,’ says Curdie.

  He sniffs. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Somebody else, then?’

  He squints off into the hills. ‘Private security,’ he grunts.

  ‘Oh.’ Curdie thinks about it for a minute. ‘Why do we need to have security?’

  ‘You don’t have it,’ the man says. ‘The company has it.’

  We look for an insignia on the van, but there’s only a single sharp grey vertical that might be an arrowhead or a tear in the paintwork.

  ‘But what is it for?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you, mate. I guess it wants to protect its assets like everybody else,’ he says, and gazes into the distance. Eventually he lets go of the car, and steps away. We wait for him to wave us off before we pull away: a courtesy, is all.

  He’s on the road behind us all the way into Hummock, but we lose him when we drive up the main street and around the shops.

  ‘They must have found something good,’ Allan muses. ‘Maybe there’s a resource up there. Something worth protecting.’

  Half the shops we used to go to are closed, some boarded up. Nobody’s done anything with Ed’s old showroom except spray-paint rude words on it and break all the glass. A few families straggle past, wrangling prams and children. Women look up at us, suspicious, and even the children’s faces are set in fierce defence. Many of the houses are boarded up, and others have been left unfinished, flapping ragged tarps instead of walls. We spot some laundry hanging in one of these, sheets slung over the beams. There’s a mattress in a burnt-out garage. It’s hard to tell which houses are abandoned, which badly neglected by their occupants. We would never have let things get like this in Clapstone.

  ‘I didn’t realise it was so deserted,’ says Jean.

  ‘Least the parking’s improved,’ Curdie replies, pulling into the supermarket. Since Trent’s not with us, we collect some of the luxuries we can’t get at the Foodtown. Our guilt at this makes us greedy: chocolates, canned goods pile up in the trolley. There are empty sections, but the big supermarket seems decadent; we keep exclaiming at what they still have. When we get to the counter, we’re teasing each other over our nostalgic choices, laughing like children.

  The automatic checkout machine talks us through the scanning cheerfully, but at the end it refuses our cards.

  ‘Says insufficient funds,’ says Jean.

  When we look around for help, there’s no staff except security guards. The few other customers are watching us with mixed expressions.

  We put a few things back, and try again. It is embarrassing, though to be fair, the prices are ridiculously inflated. None of our cards work, and eventually we decide the machine has broken. We scrape together some cash, pour all our pocket change into the socket, and carry a few items in our arms. The rest we push along the counter, back into the shop. The security guards watch us leave, and we feel their gaze, or someone’s, follow us all the way home.

  22

  When the celebrant stopped for breath, Sam could hear voices and laughter carrying across from the pub. She shifted in her seat, unable to get comfortable. Though they had unstacked enough plastic chairs to fill the Institute, most of them were empty.

  She supposed that people had built up a thirst waiting for the insurance to come through. It was decent money. Less than people had hoped, though more than they’d been prepared for. The company had been slow to part with it. It had been a bad year for natural disasters, what with all those fires, and they claimed they’d go bankrupt unless the state government matched some of the funds.

  The celebrant said there was a time to laugh and a time to weep.

  Clapstone was a happy place after the flood. People had banded together to clean out garages, take ute-loads of broken furniture up to the old quarry and throw them over the side, to rebuild and repair each other’s homes. Ed said you couldn’t contrive team-building activities like these. People really came together in difficult times. They stopped Sam in the street to clasp her hands between their own and thank her. They were all so grateful.

 
A time to keep silent, and a time to speak.

  And it was fun, living as though they were camping. Last night she’d sat on a milk crate at Jill’s place, toasted marshmallows over a camp stove on the bare cement floor while the Ellisons told stories about other natural disasters they’d witnessed or heard about. It did feel by now like the flood was a natural event. It was how they talked about it. It had affected them all as something inevitable, unstoppable. Really puts things in perspective, that’s what Mr Ellison had said. Reminds you what’s important, where you stand.

  They talked as if they had no hand in it.

  Apart from a few leaks, Sam’s own house was undamaged. Ivy hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw anything away. There had been arguments about it, the waste of not claiming damages, but these arguments never lasted long. Ed and Ivy were seated beside her now, her mother’s hand in his. On the far side of Ed, Ned was scrolling through his phone. A burst of laughter from across the street made him lift his head to the window, a distant expression on his face.

  Everyone’s time would come, according to the celebrant. It was all part of a plan. A few heads turned to look at Sam, but only with affection. Finally Mr Gable’s coffin was wheeled back down the aisle and loaded into the hearse to be taken to Hummock for cremation. The old man had died in his sleep. Natural causes.

  If Sam felt a tug of guilt or shame, some lingering dread or confusion in her stomach, she blamed it on being about to start high school. Soon she would be travelling up to Hummock on the bus, walking into rooms full of strangers. No wonder she was nervous.

  No-one there would know her story. No-one could be told. The secrecy made sense to Sam, or at least it had while they waited for the insurance. Now she wasn’t sure what else they were waiting for. ‘Be patient,’ Ed kept saying. ‘We’ve got to make a plan.’ But the planning never seemed to eventuate.

  The four of them didn’t follow the hearse back to Hummock for the cremation. They stood with the others outside the Institute to watch it go, then joined the rest of Clapstone at the pub. When she entered the cool air of the front bar, a few of her neighbours patted Sam’s shoulders or ruffled her hair, and others clinked their glasses against the red lemonade that Ed handed her. ‘Enjoy it,’ he said, as around her the noise lifted to a happy pitch. And she did, even if the sugar made her feel a little sick.