‘You all right?’ Ned took a step into the room. His eyes were wide and frightened, dark as a marsupial’s. His mother’s side, she thought dimly, shifting in the boat. He’d never seen her go through this before, never seen it all close up; no wonder he was staring. Well, now he’d seen her at her worst, her sickest. Now he would know what she was.
She glared at him, ready for judgement, but his eyes had softened to her suffering. He was watching her with a different interest now. Like she was some naked creature, an animal that had shed its skin. Sam turned her face against the pillow, pushing back the heat.
29
Here’s a prediction: the future never turns out the way we think it will. Simple enough, but that’s not the end of it. The past isn’t what we thought it was either.
Ed chose him through an agency, he says. Like something out of a catalogue. He says it seemed like an ideal opportunity for a young person, to take an internship in someone else’s life. He says the money was pretty good, considering, and at first it was only meant to be for a summer. He shed Greg Morton like a skin, and wriggled neatly into young Ned Williams. And then he found he couldn’t wriggle out again, or didn’t want to. The work went on.
‘But you look just like him,’ says Candace. ‘Or you used to then.’
‘Yeah.’ He touches his forehead. ‘I guess.’
‘But why? Not just for the money, surely?’
‘It was a job at first, but then it was the family,’ he says. He looks around the room, carefully avoiding the part of it where Ivy’s sitting. ‘My parents were long gone. I didn’t have a home to go back to. And I guess I felt the world owed me something, after all that time surviving on my own. Coming here, I thought it was a chance to be normal, to have what other people take for granted.’ At the end of this small speech his eyes are moist.
‘Greg,’ says Curdie, handing him a beer. ‘Mate.’ We’re still looking for resemblances, for hooks, and we can still see plenty: the cheekbones, for example, the squarish chin. The good teeth and prominent forehead. The words he uses, like nuance and projection. Only he doesn’t have those periwinkle eyes. His are brown and soft. And when we look into them, we don’t feel the way that Ed made us feel, see that promise that everything is going to be taken care of. We don’t feel much of anything but pity.
‘That bastard,’ says Ivy. Her small hand is wrapped around a bottle, not her first. She sits forward in her chair. Her body, despite being so thin, takes up a graceless amount of space.
‘Ed should have told you,’ says Greg. Looking at the floor again. ‘But I couldn’t. He took care of me, you see.’
‘Ed,’ she spits. ‘I fucking fed you. I’m the one who put you up, who picked up after you.’
‘You didn’t have to,’ he says. ‘I tried to make it easier. To pull my weight, and not be a burden.’
Ivy makes a spurting sound that might be a laugh or the fizz in her drink. ‘You’re a good liar,’ she says. ‘He taught you that at least. You and Sam.’
‘Ive,’ says Roger. His voice is quiet, and perhaps a little hurt.
‘What a con,’ Ivy says, without looking at him. ‘You can’t trust anyone.’ She empties her bottle and places it under her chair beside another. Her hand reaches for a third. She doesn’t offer anyone else one.
‘You’re really an engineer, though, aren’t you?’ Allan asks.
Greg fumbles in a pocket and brings out an ID on a lanyard. Ivy stops her rustling and clinking, leans forward to snatch the card with her free hand. Greg keeps hold of the lanyard while she reads it, his arm extended towards her.
‘Legal engineer?’ She lets go. The string dangles from his hand for a second before he pulls it away. ‘What does that even mean?’
‘It’s just a fancy title. I’m really a kind of geologist,’ he says. He stuffs the card back into the pocket. ‘I got that interest from my time here. That was all real.’ He straightens himself, he blinks and breathes. ‘It wasn’t fair, I can see that now, but Ed had his reasons. He knew a son would make him look more human. But let’s not get bogged down in the past, hey? Let’s not distract ourselves from what’s at stake here. We don’t have much time.’ His voice has crept back into its professional register.
She drags at her bottle. ‘You must be a good lawyer,’ she says. ‘I never even guessed.’
‘I’m not a lawyer, Ivy. I thought she would have told you,’ he says.
‘She just said she didn’t know,’ says Trent.
‘Not Ivy. I mean Sam. She knew. By the end of it, she knew.’
Ivy grimaces. ‘Sam knows lots of things she doesn’t tell us.’
We all freeze in our seats. Of course, we want to know what these things are, immediately. But we can’t ask her, not like this. Ivy has this volatility now, some energy trapped inside her. It’s hard to trust what you can’t predict. We notice that our bodies have leaned away from her, an instinctive withdrawal. The young man’s right. It’s not a good time to rake over all this old ground, to get caught up in Sam’s illness, to get distracted from the reality in front of us, the agreements in our laps. What’s done is done. We need to focus on moving forward.
‘If you’ll let me go on,’ Greg says. He only looks at Ivy for permission, but we all respond.
‘Maybe go back a bit,’ says Ken. ‘For her sake.’
‘She won’t be eligible,’ he says.
‘Eligible for what?’ Ivy is leaning forward again, occupying space. Throats are cleared. Seats are shuffled.
Greg does not flinch. His eyes are sad. ‘You didn’t want to be a part of it,’ he tells her.
‘Don’t try and tell me what I did and didn’t want,’ she says.
‘You’re not on the list of residents.’
‘List,’ spits Ivy. ‘I’ve been out there. Eight years. I don’t want to be on any list.’ She puts her drink down and it topples, rolls to the ground. She looks at the green spill, disgusted. ‘I just wanted her to be well,’ she says.
It occurs to us that we could be angry. Maybe we used to be, a little, after the sea. But those people have gone now. They thought different thoughts to us. We know other facts, have passed into other realities now. The sea did this to us: it changed us. Nothing can be trusted any more, and everything has to be.
‘The instability,’ says Candace, attempting to return to the subject at hand.
‘The instability,’ says Greg. He exposes his neat teeth. He sighs, and he sounds old and fallen. ‘Like I said, it was before my time. It took him a while to see the reservoir’s potential. And then to combat the pressure, even just to test the capacity, he had to pump some of it out into the river.’
‘Some of what?’
‘You remember. There was a flood,’ Greg says.
There’s a cough, and then a swallowing, and the hum of the air filter.
‘I don’t understand,’ someone says. ‘I thought that was us.’
‘That bastard,’ says Ivy.
30
The cuttlefish could shift its surface in an instant, become a clump of reef, or nothing but a tiny pair of eyes peering out from under sand. The one on the screen declared itself to be an aquatic plant. It shimmered in a crevice, convincingly animated only by waves. All at once, it burst forth and propelled itself as muscle, on limbs that were not so fragile as they seemed; it became all animal, no trace or memory of weed.
Sam was supposed to be searching for something she recognised. Developing a concept, Ed called it. The more she watched the transformations on the screen, the less certain she became of the right shape for the creature she was supposed to be designing. It seemed to be made of changes. The form in her head was just as unsettled, just as variable. Some days it shimmered like a living opal; others, it was a pale ghost, staring from one broken eye.
The few cuttlefish that came that winter were listless and weak, and the marine scientists
who came to study them seemed half-translucent themselves, drifting through town like buoys whose ropes had snapped. It had been like this after the plant had closed, this same vague, unsettling grief. She scrunched another unsatisfactory drawing into a ball, threw it across the room and missed the bin. She hit pause. Sepia apama hovered in its latest assumed shape, its droll frill frozen mid-ripple. One sleepy eye regarded her with something like amusement. She minimised the browser. Somewhere on the hard drive, Dyschronia.pdf lay hidden, its explanations cloaked in language she understood much better now. Idiopathic, psychosomatic: let them call it what they liked. It wouldn’t change what she went through.
She got up to put the paper in the recycling bin.
The cuttlefish breeding season hadn’t lasted long: three weeks, a month at most. When it was over, some of the scientists remained. They were finding other things to study now. They were looking for causes, or effects. Residual petrochemicals, heavy metals, acidification, algae, deoxygenation, damage to the seagrass. The warming they were seeing should not have been happening this far south. Oceans absorbed the bulk of industrial toxins, and that meant the life in them did too. Fish were being tested for pharmaceuticals, rare metals now. The ones they caught themselves were no longer considered safe. But there was nothing they could point to, no single source to blame. It was all interconnected. If the cuttlefish were dying, their bodies were vanishing into the sea, which swallowed everything, even the evidence.
Sam began another drawing, trying to make her clumsy lines obey her will. The idea of fate seemed so outdated, a comfort belonging to another time, like putting the earth at the centre of the universe, and saying people were chosen by God or whoever to lord it over nature. That was childish, wishful thinking. It belonged in the past.
If what she saw were warnings, then she must be free. Nothing was inevitable. She could choose a way forward. She shaded the animal’s mantle.
Everything was connected. So that idea was just as expedient. Free will was only the fact of pain, demanding meaning. More likely it was all just random noise.
There was a third possibility. Those articles, those studies, when she thought back over all the tests they’d done, surely they should have found something? But there wasn’t any evidence to show her brain could do anything special. It should be obvious they were just hallucinations, delusions, dreams. That’s what idiopathic perceptual disorders meant. It meant she was crazy.
There would be comfort in that. Another surrender. When she thought of that bleak migraine, the flat still sea, all those bodies lying out along the sand, her mind slipped on the surface of a dream. A nightmare. It would be easier if it was all in her head.
‘Piece of shit,’ Ivy said as the vehicle’s timing skipped a beat at the turn-off. It was the first thing she had said since they’d left the house.
‘You could have bought a better car with the dividends already, if you’d signed up for the second round,’ Sam said.
Ivy turned her head and glared at her for longer than was safe while driving. The cigarette flared in the wind, releasing flakes of ash between them. ‘Put that window up,’ she said.
‘I thought you quit.’ Sam didn’t move. At this speed, the wind in her face was uncomfortable. It was hard to breathe, but it was still an improvement. ‘Smoking will kill you,’ she said.
Ivy smiled bitterly. ‘Something will eventually,’ she said. ‘Look, I know what you’re doing.’
Sam turned her face to the wind, let its pressure force its way into her body. The air in her throat was volcanic. What could she know? She never noticed anything.
‘People like Ed,’ Ivy began, but then changed tack. She threw the half-smoked cigarette out onto the road, returned both hands to the wheel. ‘I’m just being cautious, Sam. I know you think it’s unfair, but I’m not going to risk the house,’ she said. Sam watched the tiny spark flip and die on the asphalt behind them, its white trail disappearing into the air. That was how fires were started.
‘It’s not about the house,’ Sam said. ‘It’s about trust.’
Ivy started coughing and wouldn’t stop. Sam let the wind sting her in the eyes. Ivy was still keeping Sam from telling anyone outside Clapstone. She was still persisting with these doctors, even now. It was a waste of time. She wanted to ask her mother to turn the car around, but they were already at the turn-off. Maybe they would find something wrong with her this time, but Sam doubted it.
Ivy stayed out in the waiting room, and Sam followed the doctor down the corridor. A softly spoken man with glasses, he told her the tests for an ulcer had come up clear. Physically, there was nothing wrong. It could be stress-related. ‘Anxiety,’ he said, scrolling through her file. ‘Hardly surprising, given your history.’
‘History,’ she repeated. She had heard all this before. Dr Liu would be anxious too, if he had seen what she had seen. But he had a kind face. She didn’t want to waste his time.
‘If you want, I can recommend someone for you to talk to,’ he said. ‘If there’s anything worrying you.’
‘No, thank you,’ said Sam.
He watched his screen. ‘Are you still getting those migraines?’
She smiled, shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she said. If they decided she was crazy, what could they do about it? It wouldn’t change her reality. It made no difference what she told people. They believed what they wanted to. Most people were lucky, knowing nothing about what was coming, walking through life backwards. She shouldn’t take that away from them.
While they waited for the pharmacy to fill her script, Sam watched Ivy peruse a range of nicotine gum and patches. She felt a tenderness for her mother that she didn’t know how to express. They weren’t the kind for hugs and demonstrations. Maybe it was up to her to make the effort. She walked up and stood beside her.
‘Do we have to go straight home?’ she asked.
‘I guess not,’ said Ivy. ‘Why?’
‘I thought we could get hot chips.’
‘All right,’ Ivy said. ‘You’re on.’
They wandered around the shops for a while, looking in windows at books and clothes and notices, not talking much. The air was still and sunny, not too hot, the kind of perfect day that sneaked in before summer. Once, Sam caught Ivy looking across at her with a veiled expression, but there was nothing sinister in it. It was shy, almost like they were on a date.
They stopped at the shopfront with the sign above the window that broadcast Shares Still Selling. Beneath it, the model park sat quietly, subdued in white, a stack of glossy brochures beside it. There was a gap in the park where the cuttlefish should be. The Ferris wheel had been moved to make room for it, but there was still nothing there but a fine layer of dust. It didn’t look like anyone had been in there for weeks.
Ned and Ed were back in Clapstone. The last meeting had spooked them, spurred them on to work. The house was crowded, but would not be so for much longer. Ned had been accepted into a few different engineering courses, even one for architecture. He just had to decide.
Sam found she could not finish the chips.
‘We better go,’ said Ivy. ‘I need to get the dinner on.’
‘I’m not going to be hungry after this,’ said Sam, scrunching up the paper.
‘I know. But we should try and eat together more. You know. The four of us.’
Sam shrugged, followed Ivy back to the car, tossing the rubbish in an overflowing bin on the way. There was no four, there wasn’t even two any more. Just herself, and everyone else.
Despite Ivy’s efforts, it was hard to get everyone at the table for a meal. Ned and Ed were absorbed in their phones, their papers, Sam her homework. None of them professed an appetite.
Ned and Sam flicked glances at each other, flicked them away again. Sam had a notebook in front of her, a page waiting blankly for two thousand overdue words on The Merchant of Venice. It was impossible to decid
e to waste her time on something so pointless, and yet each minute she did not decide was a vaster waste of it. She was paralysed.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Ivy asked. She poured a jar of pasta sauce into a pan. Sam noticed that her hands were shaking, gripping everything too tightly.
‘We still need you on board,’ Ed said. They weren’t even talking about her homework, Sam realised. Ivy didn’t turn, just shook her head. Strands of pale hair fell from a tangled braid.
‘I’m not risking the house,’ Ivy said. ‘I don’t care how it looks.’
‘It’s only a house,’ he said, and thumped the wall behind him. Sam flinched as dust fell from the ceiling. ‘Bricks and mortar. We’re building you a better one.’
Sam wiped crumbs of plaster from the page.
‘This place is all I have,’ said Ivy. ‘My childhood.’
Sam looked for the child remnant in her mother, but she was all adult angles. She remembered the doll she’d fixed for her, brought to the shop. It felt strange to think of it after so long, its hair spilled out on the footpath, that wet sensation on the back of her neck, and Ivy saying it was déjà vu. She blinked the memory away. It was true that it was hard to imagine her mother living anywhere but this house. She never had much ambition for change.
‘I think you’re being sentimental,’ Ed said.
‘You wouldn’t know,’ said Ivy. ‘You never talk about where you grew up. Sometimes I feel like none of us really know you, Ed.’
‘You know me,’ he said. ‘I’m a man of action, is all. Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s all going ahead now, with or without you. There’s no stopping it.’
It was true the work was progressing fast. Parts of the barn were going up, a big blue shed that was supposed to fill eventually with what Ed called ‘retail entertainment opportunities’. The park’s weeds were trampled down again by bobcats, and the space had lost its empty look. But the real progress was happening up at the village. Housing was the priority. Ed and Ned had been up there all week, supervising. It had its own momentum now.
Dyschronia Page 20
