‘What now?’ asked Carl.
Jean rubbed her upper arms and blew on her fingertips. ‘They’ll bring a freezer truck down from the museum,’ she said. ‘The body isn’t going to last long. They said the cool room won’t be cold enough. They sounded pretty thrilled.’
She took two coffees, handed one to Sam, and tried to give the other to Curdie, who had sat down beside her, but he waved it away and asked for a beer. It was early, still only eight in the morning, but Jean poured him one without comment.
‘That smell,’ he said. He’d been exposed to it for the longest, and maybe it had done something to his brain; he looked confused, like he was in shock. When their eyes connected, he looked away. The coffee smelled strange and sour and Sam couldn’t bring herself to finish it.
‘Are they supposed to smell like that?’ he asked. Jean had already moved down the bar; nobody heard him except Sam. She didn’t know what to tell him.
More beers were handed around, as much for punctuation as refreshment. Children gathered quietly just inside the doors of the pub, a small knot of trespassers under the raffle wheel. They stared through the hall at the glimpse of the cool room doors, afraid to move lest they wake the monster or, worse, alert their parents to their presence in the front bar.
‘Like the plant,’ he said.
Slowly, as the noise in the bar increased, the children crept towards the cool room doors and tried to look through the small high window. The rest of the bar watched Carl shoo them away and out to the street. Only Sam stayed within hearing distance of Curdie, who was on his third beer by this point, and still muttering to himself.
‘Asphalt,’ he said. ‘That’s what it is. Like a new-laid road.’
She left him there and went to the front veranda to wait for the museum people to arrive. When they came, there were only three of them, and they didn’t look like scientists at all, just normal people in jeans, t-shirts: two young men and an older woman with long black curls tied back in a ponytail. At first they were excited, but after Carl had let them in to look at the squid itself their faces lost their hope.
It wasn’t in the best condition, the woman in charge explained. A few years ago, it might have been a find, but more squid like it had surfaced in the Southern Ocean that year. All over the world, bodies like this were floating to the surface. No-one was sure exactly why. The museum was running out of freezer space and had been turning new specimens down for being too small, too decayed or too far away to bother retrieving. This one might be too far gone.
Jean pleaded with them; they couldn’t leave it there. The smell of asphalt and decay had filled every corner of the bar already. People were standing outside, watching from the car park. Sam edged closer to listen to the museum people, their low voices in conference; they were obviously uncomfortable being watched. She could still hear that faint humming sound, though it was fading.
‘It’s either absorbing the pollutant or it’s somehow synthesising it,’ the woman told her colleagues.
‘It could be a new species,’ said one of the men, wrinkling his nose. The woman looked sceptical, but didn’t answer.
‘The truck’s already on its way,’ said the other. ‘We might as well get rid of it for them.’
One of the young men interviewed Curdie, taking notes about the location of his find, its condition, on a tablet. When the freezer truck arrived, they all sprang into action. They’d brought their own forklift, and the head scientist drove it out of the truck, spun it, and lifted the chilled body away in one graceful movement, still wrapped up like a parcel in its blue tarpaulin. As she fastened the doors, the creature was closed away at last. Its song was silenced.
Sam felt bereft. Curdie appeared beside her.
‘I never thought I’d see something like that,’ he said into a handkerchief. When he glanced at her, he seemed surprised that she was there. ‘I guess you didn’t either,’ he said.
35
All we want to do is sleep, but when we lie down we can’t get comfortable. We keep thinking about the pressure of gases under the ground, boiling like water, lifting us up in our beds.
You have ideas for where you live, like you do for your children. You promise them safe, ordinary lives, better than your own perhaps but not too different.
It’s those dogs, the howling. That’s why we can’t sleep. Like something ancient, something animal, seeping up through the ground below us. The last time the dogs howled like that, it was after the sea. We can’t stop wondering what it means. What they know that we don’t. Whatever it is, the dogs can’t tell us.
We sleep in fragments, we wake like falling. Our bodies are loud, they insist on their aches, their coughs and tendernesses, sweats and shivers. Our lungs and hearts are stuck in place; they shout like prisoners. Our bowels rebel, our livers protest, and we wheeze, restless in the grip of air.
When the sea went away, when it gave us its dead like an animal’s gift dragged to shore, it felt like the end of the world. That was eight years ago, and the world’s still here. In the end it wasn’t so bad. We adapted to it, like we were supposed to. We were doing so well. After the worst had passed, it became just another mark, a dash on the rim of a clock face. The hands go round and round. Time doesn’t stop.
Money doesn’t either. Doesn’t matter where it comes from. It just flows and flows, finding the low ground, the crevices. Doesn’t matter which was real and which was promises, which was dirty and which clean. We’re in its river. We move with its logic. Growth, growth: the logic of the world.
We’re not stupid. We chose what to notice, what to think about, believed what we needed to. We prioritised. We were realistic.
We don’t want to think about the past, we want to move forward, time heals all wounds. But now we can’t get rid of it. The past, and the future. They rush together like tributaries, fan out again as a delta, spread through the world like blood.
We toss and turn, and the body of Asphaltica, her tar smell, launches at us, surfacing. She’s in bed with us, damp, grotesquely writhing. We can’t breathe, we thrash around, she covers us, we’re sweating. In so deep and up so high, the water always rising.
Then she falls away and we are stranded, just like the rest of them.
Sam should have warned us.
What she knows and hasn’t told us.
And Ivy now, what does she know? Why is she back? What is her message? We turn in our own moist warmth, in the fate of our bodies, which are old now, growing older. Time doesn’t stop until it stops for good. It only heals until it kills. If we could sleep, even for an hour. Just sleep, and be forgiven. Go down deep, and wake in safety.
But there’s no safe, not after tomorrow. We exist between emergencies, emergency responses, more emergencies. That’s what it’s like to be alive. Nobody comes to help until the worst happens, and often not even then. We’re lucky. We’ll be safe for a while, wherever we’re going, until the next wave crashes.
We sleep in shallow trenches; we dream of the sea. Her old permanent promises. The fresh smell of her. The edge of the world in our nostrils, the taste of salt in our mouths. We could go down and put our feet in the water, and listen to her sing to us. Something so far beyond the scale of our lives, so alive in its movement, its mystery. We miss it, and it still hurts that we can’t touch it, or be held again. That weightless light, too bright, too far, shimmering. This is a grief that goes deep, goes wider than any other. It travels over the horizon and keeps going, circling the wet world until it hits you again from behind.
We wake with salt in our mouths. The dead are still with you first thing in the morning. When the brain wakes, it is not too late. We’re still turning the sea’s loss over like a choice, as though it hasn’t happened yet. As though its moment is still waiting out there, able to be stopped. Grief plays these awful tricks with time. Takes you outside it, brings you back. Then memory mixes itself with the salt,
and we remember where we are, and when, and we want to be sick. The taste of asphalt, the taste of rot, rises in our gullets.
The sea turned its back on us. Now the earth is turning against us, too.
All that’s left is the air.
36
From the school bus windows, Sam could see a group of people gathered around the Giant Cuttlefish. Someone was sitting up on its mantle, cutting off one of its arms with a chainsaw. Another arm lay curved on the ground like a strange horn.
‘Shit,’ said Jill. ‘They’re wrecking it.’ They climbed down the steps and ran across the road to watch the spectacle. The statue could not be called a cuttlefish any more, but neither was it Asphaltica, not yet. That’s what everyone said the new species would be called: Architeuthis asphaltica. A new source of energy. Sam watched the transformation through the fence. The chainsaw roared; the dust flew. Gleeful shouts scattered on the wind.
The idea of Asphaltica was thrilling. If the squid was really producing crude oil, it would put Clapstone on the map again. The cuttlefish were shuffling off. They’d been too focused on the past, and this was the future: biosynthesis. Adaptation. The new world.
They were acting on rumours.
Their movements were voracious now, a pack of hyenas tearing at a carcass. Ed lifted his head, scenting something in the air. Seeing her, he grinned and waved without apparent malice, and Sam lifted a hand in return.
‘Shouldn’t we stop them?’ Jill asked.
Sam shook her head. ‘It’s meant to be like this,’ she said. The new shape, the proper shape, was emerging clearly from beneath the old disguise. It was close now, and getting closer fast. Her hand clutched the fence. She felt the weight of her fingers in the chain link, the sour taste in her mouth. It was bitumen, pitch. The mouth of an animal, or of a river. It was stale air.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I tried to make it different,’ said Sam. ‘But it’s turning out the same.’
She had been wrong about warnings. She couldn’t be free. Time was at war with her, and it would always win.
Jill’s hand reached for a close link in the fence, landing light as a bird. She leaned one shoulder into the wire.
‘The same as what?’ she asked.
‘The same as always.’ Some part of her was glad of this, but she could not have said why.
‘It’ll be okay,’ said Jill, moving her hand to cover Sam’s.
Sam turned to smile at her, her eyes unseeing. ‘It won’t,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t matter.’
Her body felt caught; the fence was a net that would not let go of her. The useless power boiled in her, rose as sickness. Her heart ached in a way she knew was not her heart, just acid. She tore her hand away.
‘I have to go.’ She stumbled, took a step, and squinted at the ground, dizzy again.
‘You want company?’
She shook her head. She didn’t want to be alone, but that didn’t matter either.
When she pushed open the screen door, the house was quiet. Ivy must have been at work; she wasn’t with the pack. There was a pain at Sam’s temple, just on the left side, small but tightly hooked into her skull like a burrowing seed. Its demand was the same as always, a matter of surrender.
She glanced at the calendar in the kitchen. She could not mount another battle, start an argument with time. Tomorrow the wheel would come, and then it would be assembled. Soon everything would be ready, in sequence, in place. She was only one tiny particle in the endless wash of history. To think in any other way was madness.
A convoy of trucks huffed and bleated down the main road. The frame was split across several flatbed semi-trailers, moving with a whirr and creak. When it was unloaded, the wheel seemed diminished, like a jumped-up children’s toy. Sam stood watching from behind the fence, alone this time. She had begged for the day off school and Ivy had caved without a fight. Neither had the energy for argument.
She could not take her eyes off the construction. The legs of the wheel were erected first, two A frames reaching to an enormous hub at the centre. The legs towered over the monstrous thing, an unfinished blob laid out on its slab. It was a papier-mâché mess now, a ruin, whiter than white. It took its true form. They had even given it its one great plastic eye. One day something would crack it open.
Her legs were weak; they could not hold her. She knelt on the asphalt, staring through the wire at the scaffolding, the working crane. A memorial, it was. A promise.
Once the legs had been raised, the wheel was assembled from its axle outward, crane and scaffold reaching to the metal, then people in high-vis jackets crawling up there, orange flies caught in a huge web. Fireflies, as the welding sparks flew. When the circle was closed, the separate parts of the carriages – gondolas, that was their proper name – were unpacked and lifted into the frame. Joins were made, bolts tightened, hooks twisted, wires made taut. The steel was bound to the concrete below, the tension screws tensed, the roofs and doors hinged to their cages and winched up into the sky. A viewing place. A panorama.
It would never turn.
It seemed to take minutes, not days. Sam must have come and gone, eaten and slept, but the park had its own continuous presence. Nothing else entered her memory. Days blinked now, and minutes ballooned. She stood unmoving through them. She didn’t see her neighbours laughing, Roger taking photographs, Ed waving his arms like a director. Only the slow construction of the wheel before her, and the white thing that lingered beneath, its arms open, its one eye watching. Waiting.
When Sam went home at last, the phone was ringing. She listened as Jill explained what she had heard from her parents, who had heard it from Curdie, who had got it from Jean. She was one of the last people in Clapstone to know what she knew already.
The museum had released their findings. Asphaltica wasn’t a new species. That would never be the official name for what they had decided was an ordinary Architeuthis dux, albeit with a rare genetic mutation. She was a freak of nature. It was all online already. Sam looked it up while Jill was talking.
They called it fatal genes: a mutation that could not be passed on. Had she lived to set her eggs wherever giant squid were supposed to set them – probably the sea floor, though no-one knew for certain – none of them would have hatched viable young. Asphaltica’s DNA had been transformed by something, that much was true. Maybe it was evolutionary risk-taking, a wild stab at adaptation in a changing world. Maybe she was poisoned. Either way, she was a dead end.
The article tried to finish on an upbeat note. These changes could now be studied in greater detail. Toxins, warming, could be looked at in a new way. There could even be applications for the future, in terms of cleaning up spills.
Because she wasn’t producing oil at all. She’d been trying to digest it.
‘Sam?’ Jill’s voice came down the line as if from underwater. ‘Are you still there?’
Sam could not sleep. At night she wandered around town, drawn to the park’s unfinished construction. Patches of weeds had grown and dried around the facades of buildings. The weeds weren’t tall enough, the place didn’t look right; it wouldn’t for years. She had taken one of Ivy’s cigarettes – she claimed to have quit but there were always a few packets stashed around the house – and carefully kept the flame away from the tinder growing around her, conscious of the heat. There were more fires burning around the state. It had been another year of magnificent sunsets. In the moonlight, tinted by the smoke, the wheel resembled the spine of some strange, curved fish. Sam ran her hand along the chain-link fence, walking the length of it to the gate.
The wheel loomed above her. Sam saw a shadow corona, blinked it back. Migraines hadn’t left her, not really. They had swum into the wash of her mind and were suspended like ink in water. They were part of her DNA.
The park’s gate had arrived, and someone had installed it. Sam didn’t remember it happ
ening. She wanted to examine it up close. The barrier it connected was still just a temporary cyclone fence, but the new gate was ornate iron, the tips of the posts moulded in the shape of tiny tentacles. It was a detail she recognised. She must have told Ed about it, but she didn’t remember doing so. Beneath the tentacles, wrought-iron letters spelled out clapstone rec on one side, reation park on the other. If a part of her was still looking for evidence, it was disappointed.
It didn’t matter now. Sam pushed the gate open, touched the iron with her fingers, then replaced the bolt. It fitted perfectly. She stood in the enclosure. Something in her skull was gently pulsing. She approached the thing that was nothing now, neither the Giant Cuttlefish nor Asphaltica. She touched its skinless plaster, and her fingers came away coated in dust. Her nostrils curled against the smoke as she inhaled again. She thought, with a shudder, of the surfacing squid, that sense she’d had of a song. How strange it must be to feel the water heat around you, to be drawn to the surface by some shift beyond the scale of your comprehension. To eat and drink and breathe what your body knew it shouldn’t. Maybe it happened so slowly you didn’t feel it. The slow poisoning by Clapstone’s asphalt plant, and then by her fatal genes. She drew on the cigarette, coughed hard, and stubbed it out against the cement with a vague feeling of sacrilege. It had only made her feel dizzy.
In the bauble eye, which was larger than life-size, her own small self stared back at her. She was distorted by the plastic. Seeking a flaw in its surface, she saw instead the barren field waving above her, the waist-high grasses shifting beyond like ghostly witnesses. Somewhere past that, there was a place – a time – when everything went white.
The end.
She stumbled back into the field, turning from the monstrous thing. When she reached the gate she buckled, retched into the dry grass at its feet. She was not meant to be a smoker.
Looking back, swallowing the acid in her mouth, she saw it. Sam was already up there, already beginning her descent. She was here at ten, crouched against the barn wall, knowing almost nothing. Here at twenty-something, climbing down from that height. Here now, but what did it matter which of these she chose to call her present?
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