Dyschronia

by Jennifer Mills

  The wind drove them back to the site office. Ed had colonised the empty shop beside the Foodtown, with wooden benches in the windows for displays that were low enough to make a kind of seat, and Ned had unfolded a trestle table in the gap beside them. He was constructing a scale model of the new developments from carefully dissected cardboard. Sam hung around, passing him the parts and glue. She liked him better now they had a space to work that wasn’t her kitchen table. He was good with measurements and scales, and careful at making things. She enjoyed watching his hands do delicate work.

  ‘You should be an architect,’ she told him. He still had not decided what his plans were for the future. He’d come back to give Ed a hand for the summer but, beyond that, seemed to draw a blank.

  ‘You should be at school,’ he said. He glanced up at her through his fringe, then frowned into the hollow of a miniature amenities block. He pressed the block into its rightful place, then sat up. Ed appeared behind him, set one hand stiffly on his shoulder. It was meant to be encouraging, affectionate, but she saw Ned flinch. There was an odd reticence about their bodies together. Even after all this time, they did not jostle against each other like the other fathers and sons she knew.

  ‘I’m sick,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yeah.’ He moved a plastic tree two millimetres.

  ‘It’s just, you’re really good at it.’ Talents, gifts, were meant to be useful.

  Ned shrugged. ‘It’s just a job for now.’ He held the wheel between his thumb and forefinger. Although most of his models had some fine detail, the wheel was simple: a cardboard circle glued to toothpick legs. Still, placed on the model it lost its contingency, threatened to become certain.

  ‘That needs to go closer to the fence,’ she said, pointing out the place.

  ‘But then it won’t be balanced,’ said Ned, indicating a gap.

  ‘The thing goes there,’ Sam said.

  ‘What thing?’ Ned asked. He put the wheel down in the centre of the field.

  Sam glanced at Ed, but he wasn’t listening. She sat on her hands. Looking at the model coming into being, the physical fact of the sites, made it hard to maintain the original images in her mind. What damage could it do, to let them make their own small changes? It was supposed to be different. It might even be a sort of test.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Wherever you think.’

  Ed’s bulk hovered.

  ‘Something not right?’ he asked her.

  She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  He watched her carefully, then straightened. ‘Right, you two, I’ve got to get back to the site. Put some more of those trees around the edge, mate. It makes it more real.’

  She hung around to watch for a few more minutes, then left Ned to his glue and walked home, checking her phone. Ivy had tried to ban her from social media, but Sam got around it with aliases. They’d given her the phone, what did they think she was going to do with it? She swiped her way through other kids’ selfies, their brags and threats. Keyboard warriors, most of them. Sam preferred to lurk without getting involved. After she busted her on there, Ivy had said she didn’t mind the fake usernames – not the few she knew about, anyway – but Sam risked too much by being who she really was online.

  It was the migraines, of course. Ivy said she had to stay in hiding, to stay safe. But Sam didn’t think it would make much difference what she claimed, not on there. The internet was full of weirdos. Reality was whatever people decided it was.

  She stopped at the site earmarked for the park to take a photo on her phone. The workers wore hard hats even though in all directions the sky was bare and the ground was flat and there was nothing whatsoever that might fall on them. They dug ditches, made trenches, until the site had begun to resemble an excavation of a building, archaeology rather than construction. The town resounded with the beeping of reversing machinery, the crunch and grind of land being sorted into piles and holes.

  Everyone who hadn’t left had opted in to the initial investment round, even Ivy, but it wasn’t enough to fund the whole scheme. Now Ed was talking about selling packages to people from out of town to raise more money. As the building progressed, this recruitment drive became his focus. There were charts and presentations, organisational diagrams, lists and numbers littering the office. He’d had a glossy prospectus printed in the city; it had a beach scene on the cover, a couple of barefoot, self-funded retirees stomping past a boardwalk with a grinning labrador between them, the stock-photography happiness of funeral parlours and prostate scares. There were thousands of iterations of this couple and their dog stacked in the old shop. The beach bore no resemblance to Clapstone’s dismal shoreline, and nothing in the booklet mentioned cuttlefish. Or Sam, for that matter.

  Sam logged in to the park’s account. She and Jill had taken it on as a sort of project. There was an art to it. She posted some photos of the model, created a circular trail of links that hyped each other across platforms. Someone had mistakenly tagged Ned as ‘Greg Morton’ in a photo, and she corrected it without thinking, making the habitual adjustments that told the right story, that made the world match its description.

  The site’s official pages lent some weight to Ivy’s argument about anonymity. There’d been a slow trickle of the usual kooks and trolls, people who’d read Roger’s little article. She usually blocked them. Sometimes there were messages from people who called themselves journalists or investigators. She declined the requests with a pre-written form email that denied she was anything other than a normal teenager. It was all just a rumour. A stupid joke. She was sorry to disappoint.

  She found Jill smoking a joint on her garage roof and climbed up the ladder to join her. They had a good view of the park from there, and the two of them sat looking at the bald patches made by the bobcats parked between ditches in the afternoon light. Jill’s parents usually headed straight for the pub after work, and often Sam ended up eating with them when they got back, surrounding herself with their ordinary warmth. Ivy knew where to find her if she ever wanted to look.

  Jill offered Sam the joint but Sam shook her head.

  ‘Gives me headaches,’ she said.

  Jill almost laughed. She held the joint in her mouth while she did something on her phone. Sam lay down on her stomach with her head over the gutter so she could see down to the garage below. ‘There’s a tree growing out of your floor,’ she said. The crack in it was at least a centimetre wide.

  ‘Yeah, Dad keeps saying he’s going to pull it out. But we’re supposed to be moving into the new housing, so why bother?’ Jill’s head jerked back towards the park, and beyond. The village was still just a foundation. It would be ages before it was ready.

  And how long afterwards, before it all disappeared? She glanced at Jill, who was pulling her hair into a bun. Long, pale hair. Sam shivered. Old memories came floating through the new, like a second surface under water. Her eyes went cold. She swallowed.

  ‘Are you right?’ asked Jill.

  The blood was going to her head. Sam sat up quickly, and her vision clouded black. Just hunger, thirst. Making her see what she was afraid of, that was all. It was hard to sort the world into categories, certain and uncertain, real and unreal.

  Jill tossed the stub of the joint into the guttering, where it fizzed out. She seemed preoccupied.

  ‘What about you?’ said Sam.

  Jill frowned, traced the roof with a hand. ‘Mum said we’re running out of money, is all. There’ll be nothing left if this doesn’t work.’

  ‘Of course it’s going to work,’ said Sam. Her palms felt damp; she smoothed them on her jeans. ‘It has to.’

  ‘I guess you’d know.’ Jill picked up her phone again. Its pale glow lit her skin at the neck and chest, blushed where the sun had hit it. A fringe of hair had fallen across her eyes. Sam’s nausea rose again, swept through her like a tide.

  ‘There is someth
ing the matter with you. You look green,’ said Jill, blowing her pale fringe away from her eyes. Sam felt something move in her chest. Then Jill’s phone sang its jaunty message tone, and she turned away.

  ‘The twins are coming over,’ Jill said. ‘We could watch a movie or something.’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ said Sam. The blood in her skull was swarming now, breaking the surface images down. The light was pulsing. She touched her face, feeling the cool sweat at her temples.

  ‘It’s just an idea,’ Jill said.

  Sam looked down at her hands. Blue flakes of paint fell behind her. That monstrous eye cracked. The world beneath the world lay waiting.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said.

  She had nowhere to go but home, and was relieved to find it empty when she got there. The migraine was returning, circling back on her like some carrion bird. She filled plastic bottles with the water she knew she would be thirsty for when she resurfaced. The ceiling was already dancing. She closed her bedroom door, put a chair against it, breathed the phosphorescent air. She knew how to take care of herself. This time, if she saw anything, she did not want to be interrogated about it. She needed time alone to think, to put it all in place. To figure things out for herself, with some degree of certainty. How could anyone act out of ambiguity, out of doubt? How did any of them go on living?

  If there was any certainty, it was bound somehow to the white monster, that cracked eye that watched her descend. Its body lay out in the open, exposed and waiting. That’s what she needed to see clearly, that unspoken body, or the body in its place. She sank gratefully into her bed, and let the wave of pain push through her.

  Now she sees. The light on the sand, too bright, the harm of its sharp suffering. There’s no-one around but her, and her, watching from the dunes: an anticipation, a ghost.

  Watching the dead.

  The corpses lie stretched out on the sand, a range, an assortment of sizes, shapes. The crows hop around, over and between them; they peck at huge, aquatic eyes. The flies drone in their buzzing. Decomposition’s music. But it’s her drone. The drone that hides all sound inside it like a spiral shell.

  Nothing hides the smell.

  The sea is supposed to clean this, take it away. The sea accepts its duty, always. Launders, brines, preserves, discards. Between her toes the grip of fine sand, the cling of seagrass, the rough scattering of broken plastic that marks the boundary line. There is a treaty between land and sea.

  The ground is dry.

  The other Sam stands at the rim of the car park, her bike fallen beside her. She has covered her face against the smell. She is older, maybe a few years; she looks afraid, or in pain. And, if only because she can’t see herself there, breaking through, she’s alone.

  Behind her, the surface of the water should be shimmering and lively. But the sea is static, just a bright reflection. It’s as though time has stopped completely.

  She can’t have imagined this.

  When she woke, she was sick. It was easy to say it was just a stomach bug, something she picked up at school. She’d laid the groundwork, complained of something similar. She needed to think. To figure out the logic somehow. But first she needed to throw up.

  The vomit came rolling from a deep place inside her. A place of horror, shame. What the migraine showed her couldn’t be true. This was too brutal, too bizarre. Her mind refused to focus on it. It slipped on the surface, sought other possibilities, explanations, like liquid searching for a crevice. This wasn’t fate at all. It had to be a warning.

  27

  Sam blows hot air into her hands, stretches her legs out across the cage. Dusk is settling around the horizon, making its eerie rainbow of muted blues and pinks. Something should be happening by now. In her head, and on the horizon. But the hills are just sitting there like always, the only change their colour, which darkens in the dusk. As for her head, it’s hard to tell.

  It’s been so long since she had a real migraine. She remembers the signs, but not the sensations themselves. She can’t be sure if what she feels is genuine or wishful thinking. There might be a buzz in her jaw, a chill in her fingertips. A taste in her throat that’s both sour and cold.

  She’s never been good at waiting.

  Sam peers cautiously between the bars. A tree grows through the garage roof of Jill’s old place, its trunk as thick now as her arm at the shoulder. Everyone abandoned their old houses to the elements, everyone except her. Someone stripped the copper years ago, they took whatever they could use, but there was not much there worth stealing. And then vandals, tourists, bored of the endgame.

  In the distance lurks the cockroach shape of the village. It isn’t new any more, and it doesn’t shine much. The solar panels are only a dim shape in the dust. There’s a car parked out the front now, pale in colour. She squints, but it’s too far away for her to recognise. The light is fading quickly. The wind brings a faint sound of dogs barking.

  The dark falls dully. There’s no movement in that light at the peripheries, nothing like the visuals she should be getting. Maybe this buzz in her bones is only adrenaline, the rush of being so high up and looking down. There’s a shiver in her skull, like someone’s pushing pins into the skin at the sides of her head. She looks at her fingers. Damp palms, the smell of metal. Small flecks of fragmented paint.

  Too big, these hands. And clumsy.

  Hope flares with the fractured thought and dies. She listens out for her old drone, but can’t hear it. How does she remember what it sounds like now, and when should it come, that dead music? Nothing will ever feel entirely present, not for her. There is no being, only escape and returning, moving forward, moving back. Other people have stories. She has repetition, regression. Fate, which is the same as being dead.

  The steel makes a sound like flocking parrots.

  Her thinking’s not right. There’s something she’s supposed to focus on. There’s a speck in the sky like these specks of paint – what is it? Some light. They used to read birds, there was a word for it. Words are fading, don’t connect. Patterns flicker and erase. There are no birds. Not now.

  It’s only a star. Sam lets her eyes lose focus, and the air blurs. The blur is forgiving, almost a revelation. People are like this, living out of focus, not made to see clearly. If clarity comes, it’s only with hindsight. Each moment is a critical appraisal of the last, its failure. Or there is going on without thinking. We walk backwards.

  Strangely exhausted. She should try to sleep. She closes her eyes. The place behind the retina relaxes, and now she senses something else is dwelling there, pulling. A sharpness answers at the corners of her temples, like a blade has loosened in her skin. The dark opens its wet cloak to cover her; it wants to enclose. Sam feels her way around the rim of her head. It is just possible that something is happening. It is just possible this isn’t nothing.

  She opens her eyes again, tries to pull her focus, and the dark glares back. Nothing’s sparkling with her eyes open, there’s nothing in the world that sings. She’s just hot and tired and thirsty, stressed and emotional. She can’t see straight, she’s up high and, admit it, frightened. The light’s not playing tricks, and all she can hear are the dogs below.

  Much closer now, and howling.

  She doesn’t want to look down again.

  Sam’s fingers scrabble for her phone. She slides it from the seat where it’s slipped. There’s something on her screen, but she can’t read the text. The words swim around like bugs under a microscope. Green, she feels green. She hopes it says that Jill has gone, that it wasn’t too late to tell her. It’s feeble, glimmering, a half-extinguished light in shallow water. A life for a life.

  She should have told her long ago. It was selfish, but she was always selfish. Selective, unclear. Told herself it wasn’t lying, when she thought she could change things. Believed herself, even. Believed what she wanted to. But the sea took that away. T
he sea explained: there’s no escaping. After that, it was just the sad fact of not wanting to be alone.

  She’s waiting for rain, it’s supposed to rain. She remembers that. Clings to a single artefact of time. Just at the rim, the horizon has a pale haze to it. Or else it’s her eyes.

  The dogs keep barking, moving below. It is hard to concentrate. Sam drops her phone at her feet. She could climb down right now, she could go and talk to her, make sure she knows what’s coming. Better: she could fall, escape it all that way. But every choice is cowardice, and Sam can’t move. Too tired. Trapped up here, in this dull air. All she deserves.

  Something is coming. The wheel creaks again, an eerie sound, a sideshow haunting. Circles form around themselves. Sam’s herself now. She knows her mind best by its pain. She stands poised there, breathing the first breath at its rim.

  Nothing moves, unless her vision makes it.

  It’s her last chance. Moving forward. One clear moment in time.

  As if time wasn’t muddy, silted, swept-up dust all scribbling into liquid. Moments creep, they breed and die, they’re never still. Water runs into crevices. People drown. Sam can’t even get her thoughts to clear now. She doesn’t remember what’s right any more, her head’s too full of light. If time’s a line or if it’s a river, a boat in the river rocking from side to side. Or is it a wheel. Is it a wheel that rolls over you.

  The floor begins to swim. Her body rocking by itself. Tick-tock.

  She lets her legs drop down and follows them, bending until her hair touches the water, until she feels the blood in her face, her head flooded from within. She gives up, lets her mind go dark. Lets the pulsing water take her. Like always, this surprise of pleasure in surrender, an old almost-happiness. She tumbles like a doll, like a body tipping in a boat. Her awareness is at some other altitude or depth now. This lies curved inside her. The body in the hull rolls onto its side. The black glitter spills out. There is light.