Hummock was a bigger town with clean and decent streets, a water feature outside the council building, an industrial area tucked politely out of view. They had proper buildings at the school, art rooms, a gym, strict rules about truancy. At the enrolment meeting Ivy warned them about the migraines.
‘We’re unlikely to send her home for that,’ the deputy principal explained. ‘There’s a sick bay here where she can rest.’ She took the two of them on a tour, showed them the grim room under the stairs that smelled of heat cream and stale laundry. Sam tried not to look horrified.
‘They’re sometimes quite severe,’ Ivy said, ‘but she’s getting better.’
‘They say girls grow out of it,’ said the deputy. Ivy shot Sam a sidelong glance that she pretended not to catch.
It wasn’t too hard to stay out of the way at high school. She was careful to excel at nothing. Most of the other kids left her and Jill alone. If Hummock kids spoke to her at all it was to ask her where she was from. Clapstone was never the right answer. She felt like she had started over in kindergarten, facing the same stupid questions. There were other kids with no dad, or two, or who lived with grandparents or an aunt. There were brown kids and black kids and Asian kids. But they all knew each other. They’d all gone to primary school together, established all their roles and rituals and in-jokes. And they knew where they were supposed to be from.
Being from Clapstone meant something else. The air conditioning on the bus was always breaking down, so the Clapstone kids had a scent to them, a mix of sweat and decaying vinyl. They smelled poor. When her new classmates talked about their parents’ jobs as teachers, accountants, plumbers, engineers, Sam realised almost everyone she knew was out of work. Most of Clapstone had been living on a combination of welfare and severance since the plant closed; now they were living on insurance money. There was still work to do up at the Aspco site, but only day by day, and even that was winding down.
Ed was right. They needed a plan.
Returning home hot and tired, Sam could find nowhere to unpack her homework among the papers spread out on the table. She lay on the couch, playing a game on her new mobile phone, trying not to listen to Ed and Ned going back and forth about the site.
‘The pressure’s stabilised,’ said Ed, ‘so we can probably look at capping it this week.’
In the corner of her eye she could see their elbows poised over the paperwork, their faces lost in conspiracy. Ned had moved into the Commercial after the flood but he was still at their house all day, taking up space. She was sick of them both.
‘It’ll be over soon,’ said Ed.
Sam flinched and lost a life. She hurled her phone into the couch. ‘Then what?’
Ed closed his laptop. ‘I don’t know, Sam,’ he said evenly. His eyes stayed on her a moment longer than was comfortable, searching. She broke the deadlock, got up to search for a lemonade iceblock in the freezer. She’d convinced Ivy they could afford to buy the name-brand kind now, but there were none left in the box. These two had eaten them all.
Ivy might bring some home if she texted her. She was working extra shifts lately, making up for lost time, and Sam hardly saw her before dinnertime, when the shop closed. She didn’t mind; her mother was moody lately, short-tempered and tired, prone to sudden anger. She was trying to quit smoking. It was safer not to be around her too much. Sam returned to the couch and dug her phone out.
‘Ivy’s working late again,’ said Ned. ‘She’ll be home soon.’
‘It’s not your home.’
‘Sam.’ Ed didn’t bother to look at her.
She burrowed down, ignoring their talk. Pressure and reservoirs, cement. They weren’t even going to celebrate the opening of the reserve as a park, let alone rezone it for housing. Ed never talked about that idea any more. Since the flood, something had changed; he had a quiet focus. If he’d bothered to explain it to her she would probably have found it boring. Well, let him play around with his reservoirs. Ned was going back to his mother’s soon, and then she would have her house back; she would have some room to think about what came next.
‘Check this out,’ Ed said, pushing the laptop across to Ned. ‘Brilliant, isn’t it?’
Sam expelled a packet of air, and went outside to get her bike.
She leaned the bike against a boulder and climbed down the rocks to the sand. There was an ache in her knee; the bike was getting too small for her now. She added it to the list of things she could have claimed were lost in the flood, if her mother had let her.
The jetty was gone, and a few small boats with it. No-one had thought of insuring them, and only Curdie had bothered to drag his tinny out of the water. The jetty had been a gift from Aspco, which meant it belonged to everyone and no-one. No matter; it was gone now. The wind that came with all that rain must have made the water wild, and the waves had snapped the jetty free. At the shore end, there was a sort of a stump now, the asphalt car park sitting on a pile of rocks. A few wooden poles still stuck up out of the sea, but they were slowly being eaten away by whatever lived in them. Somewhere out there, the cuttlefish would gather in the winter. At least now they would have some privacy.
If she had seen it coming, she might have saved it: told them to reinforce the structure, or at least to bring the rest of the boats to shore. But she couldn’t see everything. She could only tell them what she knew for certain. And even then there were things she missed.
She avoided the water’s edge. The sandy flat that passed for a beach was covered in washed-up weeds, drying unevenly in humps. It was like walking in salty tea leaves. Scattered among the humps were balls of knotted plant fibre like dreadlocked hair. She climbed over and between the mounds of seagrass, following the line of high tide, picking up cuttlebones for the budgies before remembering the birds had flown away.
She dropped them in a clattering pile.
It was still too early in the season for people. There were usually a few around in the winter: recreational divers, or scientists studying the cuttlefish. She kicked the pile of cuttlebones with her toes, and a strip of plastic turned up in the sand beneath them. She bent to pick it up and kept on walking, collecting bits and pieces of rubbish: a thong, a chunk of polystyrene, a bit of frayed rope. The sea might look gentle and shallow now, but after the flood it coughed up everything it swallowed: string and bones and pipes and cans and plastic, so much plastic. Sam found an old shopping bag and tipped everything into it. The bag was full within minutes, and the weight of it against her leg was satisfying. But when she looked along the length of the beach, she saw that she had only covered a few dozen metres. The task was infinite. Even in her own small stretch of the visible world there was no end to the garbage. She knotted the plastic handles tightly before throwing the bag into the dunes.
How much of this was washed out by their flood, and how much came from somewhere else? Could you trace any of it back to a single source, a cause? There were swirls of rubbish in the oceans now, in gyres. There’d been a documentary shown at school. They were like islands out there, floating trash islands where birds nested, feeding bits of plastic to their young. She’d seen footage of cut-open albatrosses, their bellies filled with pellets. In Japan they were studying tiny microbes that would eat the plastic. This was the world she was going to inherit. There was no other future.
Mutate to Survive. She’d seen it written on a toilet wall at school. But her science teacher told them mutations were random, like static on the radio. The vast majority of changes were accidents without purpose, useless at best. There was something ruthless about evolution, and it wasn’t the survival of the fittest; it was the sheer waste of energy, of all that possibility.
Did asphalt float? If so, maybe the whole jetty had sailed out to one of the gyres too; maybe it had found a home there. More likely it was sunk somewhere close by, a toxic chunk of underwater furniture.
Something would find a way to live
on it.
The young are plastic, Sam remembered one of the doctors telling her. And then that teacher saying that girls often grow out of it. As if there was some female stubbornness behind her migraines, a biological failing she ought to be capable of overcoming, with a little maturity. Were her genes the cause? They’d never been able to find a connection between the asphalt plant’s emissions and her headaches, or the tumours, or the suicides. Coincidences, every one of them, just random mutations. She shook her head and headed back up the rocks to retrieve her bike. Out in the gulf, the sea flashed and glinted like a luminous animal.
23
The next envelope has the same logo on it, the SH with all the drop shadows after it that looks like it’s saying be quiet while you open this. We hold our breaths.
Dear Resident, it begins, and we all exhale and unfold, expecting we’ve been sold again: that Sepia Holdings has already let go. But this time, the letter informs us of some new findings. Well, we say informs. They’ve done some tests and found some findings, but they don’t say what they are in the letter. It goes on for a page and a half about how further impact assessments could indicate contravention of the Relocations Act and further consultation with the Department of Sustainable Communities going forward suggests the monetisation potential of the former Clapstone site has deteriorated and the region has been among several to receive rezoning confirmation as future non-residential availabilities expand. We try to make sense of that but get distracted trying to remember what we’ve heard about the Department of Sustainable Communities before. We’re not sure what rezoning could signify – wasn’t it rezoned already? – but we recognise what the next part means right away. Consequent relocation of current residential positionings is what it says.
‘Fuck that,’ Bob says. ‘They can’t evict us. We’re not renting.’
‘We don’t own it either,’ says Jean.
‘Here, it says they’re sending a representative to discuss our options with us. But it doesn’t say when.’
Our voices grow smaller, more cautious. We fold the letters back into their envelopes, put them on top of fridges, open the fridges to think. The cool air makes us shiver and study the labels of our mid-strength beers. It’s late afternoon, and we’re tempted to open them, but some speculation stops us.
Maybe Sam got one of these letters too. She might have some insight into what’s happening. She might have access to other facts, to other evidence. That’s what we’re thinking, reasonably enough. On no other level do we need to consider it.
We’ll just go and see her. There’s no harm in asking. What harm can still be done to her, after all this time?
The door is opened before we get a chance to knock, but it’s not Sam who stands there frowning at us. It’s Ivy. We’re shocked to see her like this, not only because it’s been so long, but because she’s so thin. She looks pale and ill, like an apparition of herself. We peer over her shoulder and try to see into the house, but we don’t learn much from an empty hallway. It looks just the same. There’s a bag in it, half-packed or half-unpacked.
‘Yeah?’ she says. She leans back on a heel. When she frowns, it emphasises her crow’s feet, the dark moons under her eyes.
‘Hello,’ says Edith. ‘You’re back.’
Ivy retreats a step into the hall, but she does not invite us in. We should not have come in a pack like this. It is probably menacing.
‘I thought I heard barking,’ she says. Probably she has not been sleeping. They say the quiet takes some getting used to. She lets her eyes rove over our faces, making judgements of her own, then looks out to the street behind us, as though we might be about to multiply. We follow her gaze to where her van stands parked. In our haste, we didn’t notice it.
‘I don’t think so,’ says Edith.
‘We were wondering if Sam was in,’ says Ken.
Ivy sets her head at an angle, narrows her eyes. ‘What do you want her for?’
‘Don’t worry. We only want to ask about the letter,’ says Roger.
‘What letter?’ Her eyes dart to our hands, and back again. We hold the letters up. We waggle them a little.
‘Didn’t you get one?’ Edith hands hers to Ivy, and Ivy unfolds it, skim-reads, considers, then hands it back to Edith.
‘Doesn’t make much sense to me,’ she says. She seems distracted. There’s a smell of stale coffee in the house. Her hair is tangled, with an artificial shine. She touches it self-consciously when she sees us looking, in an odd way, splaying her fingers at the crown.
‘Sam’s gone out for a while,’ she says.
We watch her face. There’s something she’s not telling us; she doesn’t look us in the eye.
‘Gone where?’ asks Candace.
‘I don’t keep tabs on her. She’s not a child.’ But she looks out past us again, towards the park, and we begin to wonder.
Ivy clutches the edge of the front door, and it shifts on its hinges. There are scars in the frame where the termites have eaten away the timber; it is surprising this old place is still standing. We try to think of something else to say, to keep the conversation going.
‘Ivy,’ says Candace. ‘Did she mention anything?’
There’s a minute where we think she’s going to slam that door in our faces. We’re braced for it; Candace even backs away a step and stands on Trent’s toe. But when Ivy speaks we don’t hear anger in her voice. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she says.
‘Never mind,’ says Candace. ‘We were just. You know. Wondering.’
Since the sea, since that great disappointment, we have known that none of it was true. We have reasoned with our past selves, we have learned from our mistakes. And so we are surprised now to find that we still carry a little glimmer of what-if, like an ember glowing in a burnt-out stump that won’t let itself be extinguished.
‘Wondering,’ says Ivy. ‘Yeah.’ For a second she looks like she is going to cry, but then her smile breaks through. We wonder if perhaps she is a little damaged now, a little mad. Who knows what kind of life she’s had out there, what has been done to her, what ruin visited? She looks so hungry.
Roger clears his throat. ‘Why don’t you come around for dinner?’
One side of her mouth moves down. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks.
‘At least a beer?’ His voice is plaintive as a boy’s.
She shakes her head, but it’s not a straight refusal. There are two different barks, quite distinct now. Then the wind shifts.
Edith pushes forward. ‘Are you sure Sam didn’t say anything?’
‘No,’ says Ivy. ‘I guess I’ll see you later,’ she adds, and closes the door. It doesn’t slam.
‘Yeah, I doubt that,’ says Ken.
We walk back the long way, past the park. It’s waist-high in weeds now, the barn’s ply walls are warped and faded, the old fake station barely stands. We’ve seen Sam out here some evenings, sitting on the concrete slab reading, or with Jill. We don’t see either of them now. No lights slip through the gaps in the barn wall. The horizon is aglow with the rare pinks of evening, delicate as antique tinted photographs. The wheel is gently creaking in the breeze, the grass is rustling. Through that grass, the dogs come running.
We probably should have had them put to sleep when they went wild on us, but we were afraid then, and sad, and nobody wanted to face more death after the sea, and nobody wanted to drive up to Hummock to go to the vet and explain. We thought they would leave when we let them go, find somewhere more suitable, but they’ve hung around the periphery of Clapstone, scavenging, as wary of us as we are of them. Sometimes at night they will set to barking if there are foxes around, or dingos, or whatever else is left up there. But mostly they are away in the hills, ranging in their feral silence. They hardly ever come to town, and certainly not in these numbers.
Now they are right here in the park, and they are howli
ng.
We stand at the edge of the field, at a safe distance, near the gate. On the model, this is the place where the main thoroughfare began. It was supposed to be an avenue; we would have planted pretty flowering trees, set park benches between the sideshows and ticket booths. The cardboard version seemed so real, so inevitable. We were so sure of the world ahead back then. It looked nothing like this.
The dogs stop howling and bolt through the tall grass towards us, leaping over obstacles. It’s like that archival footage of the last red wolves. They’re so muscular, we can’t stop our hearts from lifting at the sight of their freedom, even as they’re beating hard with fear. They were our dogs once. We loved them.
These aren’t our dogs at all, of course. It’s been eight years since we released them. This is a new generation, entirely feral, with no affinity for people. We watch them, all sizes, flyblown and flea-bitten and strong, and the fear works its way from our chests down to our thighs, shimmering into the soles of our feet.
We swallow. Our throats are dry. The dogs come nearer, and we feel ourselves tremble under their animal gaze. The rules have changed between us now. The flimsy contract of domestication has expired. We can’t be trusted any more. We might even be prey.
But the dogs look away, and they move past us. They have a destination, a mission and logic of their own, and we’re as easily dismissed by them as we are by the young. An old brindle hesitates to sniff at the Big Thing, looks up, stretches his jaw, then ripples on with the pack, past the gate and across to Kurrajong Street. They turn at the shop and head up towards the roundabout. We watch as a blue and black one pauses at the memorial, tests the air, plants his legs in the overgrown rosemary and pisses on it. They cut through the rubble of the Institute. When we see them again they are brushstrokes darting between broken houses, a clutch of impressionist shadows heading up the Hummock road. We watch until they are clear past the village. We watch until they are gone from sight. We hear their barking drift in and out on the breeze.
Dyschronia Page 15
