Dyschronia

by Jennifer Mills

  There was a pressure in the air now, a slight alteration as of electricity. Her throat was dry. Something in her head protested. The axis shifted.

  When she returned home, the house was dark. Ed’s car wasn’t in the driveway, only the van; Ivy was asleep. Even when they noticed, nobody asked her where she went at night. The nascent headache had withdrawn, become a dull pain in her neck and shoulders. It felt like something living in there. Something amphibious and parasitic.

  The medicine box had been set down on the kitchen bench and a few select bottles scattered beside it. Three different kinds of sleeping pills, all in Ivy’s name. Sam went through the other packets, found her anti-nausea pills and her painkillers, and swallowed two of each. She shook her head, waited for the headache to subside. She should eat some fruit, something light to get her through it, but she had no appetite. Everything was about to dissolve at the edges. It wouldn’t matter. Only surrender.

  She spun when Ed opened the door with his key. His face had a strange focus. When he looked up and saw her, the expression left him. All expression did. The blankness in its place was the blankness of fresh cement. He paused in his movements as if caught there.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. His smile was habitual, insincere. She could see the effort he was making to wear himself. A vertical line had appeared on his brow.

  ‘The cuttlefish,’ she said. A thin moustache grew on his upper lip. His face was damp with sweat, and his eyes had lost their turquoise edge and faded to a paler blue, the colour of an old fridge that lived in Jill’s shed.

  ‘It’s unfortunate,’ he said.

  ‘You always said,’ she said, and stopped, because she didn’t want her voice to crack. She could not remember what he’d said, or when. All his words, his messages and slogans, seemed non-specific. The evidence of memory had been stealthily flushed away. Someone had followed her all these years with a bucket of soapy water.

  ‘We have to be realistic,’ he said.

  It had been clever of them to erase her so quietly, make the doubt stretch until it covered everything. Probably it was always part of Ed’s plan. He was looking at her with the strangest expression: not disappointment or malice, a look that was bland on the surface but saturated underneath with something too complex to read. Maybe it was simply pleasure, pleasure taken in the fact she’d failed.

  He smiled sadly. ‘You look exhausted,’ he said. He didn’t move.

  It was a strange hour for him to be out. ‘You can’t sleep either,’ she said.

  The medication was kicking in, and she found she didn’t care that she was paranoid, reading too much into each small gesture. Her mind was disappearing from inside itself, an animal abandoning its hiding place. She watched it go. She felt nothing, saw nothing, only the overlay of endless transparencies blending into one image. She watched his face with curiosity as it shifted and pulsed beneath the surface. Saw its blood, its spit and mucus, its fatal puzzle of ligament and bone.

  ‘It’s only natural,’ Ed said. ‘It’s had to evolve.’ Everyone lived in their skin like this, in this intimate camouflage, projecting something so thin it could hardly be seen.

  ‘Evolve.’ She slipped on the surface of the word, could not get purchase. Her voice was numb in the shell of her mouth. Outside a breeze was rising, a breeze that might turn into the harsh north-west wind that brought the heat, or into the chill of rain. A wild pressure prickled in the room. Bushes began to rattle in the yard; the roof creaked. Dread crept up the backs of her calves like an ant trail.

  Ed was watching her face. ‘It’ll be okay,’ he said. ‘The motor will be delivered any day now, and after that . . .’ He was trying for optimism still. He couldn’t quite convince.

  She scratched behind her knees through her jeans. The feeling didn’t go away. She had a vague sense she remembered these ants. A listed side effect. If she’d read it on the box, maybe it was just the power of suggestion. She cast a look down the hallway. Her mother’s door was dark and closed. No help to her now.

  ‘And after that,’ she prompted. He wouldn’t know. The sea, and then the air.

  ‘Sam, listen to me. Things don’t always work out how you expect them to. It’s not the end of the world.’

  The wind fell silent, held its breath. Sam listened, chewed her lip. It was Ivy’s habit after quitting, not her own. He might be mocking her, but there wasn’t any humour in his face, just tiredness and grief, regret, perhaps. The pleasure had gone, if it was ever there. His transparencies were becoming opaque again. He was nothing but packaging. People were all like this. When they moved through the world they left a trail of garbage, like shed skin.

  ‘Maybe it is,’ she said.

  37

  There is a thread. A ligature. Time trundles on its axis, and it unravels. A line is a line. She follows behind.

  What follows is more than memory. In this mind, along this line, ruin undergoes a restoration. Blue paint slowly reattaches itself to the barn wall. Weeds swallow their seeds, turn green, and sink into the earth.

  Walls right themselves against their houses. Roofs unbuckle. Rats leave, possums return. Cracks in the soil close, and branches leap up into trees that seem to suck in colour in a single breath. Wild gardens self-organise, tending themselves towards order. Rust sheds oxygen, becomes metal again. Termites spit up timbers, repair and abandon them, march back along their undergrounds, into dwindling cities.

  There are no birds for a long time, and one day there are one or two birds. It’s hard to notice the change. Then suddenly, the birds proliferate.

  There are people, coming and going. Tourists. Cameras. The village. Trucks. A boot rights the gate that says reation park, which stands to match its twin. There’s talk, a lot of talk, and not much moving. Gradually, a scent infuses the air; like the birds, it returns so slowly it can hardly be noticed until it is everywhere.

  The people come back more abruptly. She sees their cars, travelling by day and loudly, or by night. They cluster at the village, but soon everyone is packing up again, moving back into the old company houses. Furniture is brought in, used to cover prints of its place on floors, the damp stains that reiterate where things go. Covering the mould and the damage. By this time, the smell is unbearable. They cover their faces with their sleeves.

  Trucks arrive with diggers on their backs and unload them into the park. Other trucks arrive with fencing, put up around the perimeter. There’s no boundary line between finished and unfinished, there are only places that change.

  Wild dogs run into yards, look undecided, enter houses, bark madly.

  The dogs are comforted.

  Time might stop, but only for a moment.

  She’s there again, three times now, at the sea.

  Her others ride away, one through the dunes, the other by the road, and she remains. She reaches for her wrist. She’s not a body, nowhere. Everyone is here, watching the place the sea will soon reoccupy. Everyone but her and Ivy. These corpses laid out on the beach, huge and miniature, spread for miles. Shock and terror slowly overwhelm, as does nausea, but they ebb away. The smell subsides a little. The corpses slowly acquire flesh, some of it spat from the mouths of birds, mostly crows, and when the crows have rebuilt their bodies, stitched their skins, restored their gases, then the dead will wake. The people get in their cars and go back to their houses and uncover their faces and sleep. They sleep with innocence and in good faith, and while they sleep the sea remembers its place. It does the right thing. The brine comes rolling in to cover the corpses, and one by one the corpses swell, inhale the water as they should, and swim away a part of it.

  Sam sleeps in the room beside them. In silence, Ivy unpacks her bag. She gets into her own bed. In the early hours, Ed climbs in beside her. Short of breath, his heart racing. The strange odour drifts away as they lie together. Sam sleeps on, safe for now. She dreams she is swimming in deep water.

  38
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  A heavy current pulled at Sam’s body, the undertow of sleep. Something tugged her from a dream of swimming. She heard chittering as beetles chewed through a rotting board; mice in the wall cavity scattered on her waking. Possums in the ceiling, thumping around. Her heart too. She opened her eyes, aware of the hypersensitivity of migraine, but without the migraine. Scent as well now, impossibly enlarged. In her mouth there was an ugliness, a rotting, a taste of old salt and older sicknesses.

  As she surfaced, the taste was redirected. It entered her nostrils; it came in by the air. She climbed out of bed and opened her window, and the stench intensified: rotten fish, or urine, or some fresh version of Asphaltica. Fresh was not the word at all. It came and went in wafts, in wavelets. This was not after. This was the early stage of migraine, when it was hard to tell whether it was getting worse or not, when it was hard to measure how much time she was going to have to lose. When she wasn’t certain if the light, the air, was some hallucination.

  She sniffed, blinked. It was still there.

  She closed the windows, looked out across the park. The new wheel glinted in the sunlight. The whole town was still. She couldn’t hear a single car.

  Migraines could change shape; the smell could be neurological. She had heard of this happening with epilepsy, tumours: the brain played tricks. When she leaned towards the glass and sniffed, the stink was stronger. It was overwhelmingly external, seeping in between glass panels. There were flavours in the stink, information she could read if she tried to look for meaning. A distinct nose of ammonia – that was Asphaltica; an after-odour of rotten corpse, laced with a tang of tar. But there were other memories too. Unprecedented memories. Sam’s chest lurched and she expected to retch, but her nausea retreated just as suddenly as it rose. She dressed and closed her bedroom door behind her. Let the air be grounded.

  ‘Ivy?’

  She rapped at the door of her mother’s room. There was no answer, but that wasn’t unusual; Ivy was always hard to wake these days. With a jolt of fear Sam remembered the medicine box, and pushed open the door. The bed was unmade and empty. She peered out the window. There was no-one in the yard.

  She went to the kitchen. The smell was more intense. Sam closed the casement window above the sink, which seemed to make no difference. Outside, Ivy’s van and Ed’s silver car were both gone. She rinsed her mouth with a cupped palm of rainwater, metallic and warm from the low tank.

  ‘Hello?’ she called out, knowing that the house was empty.

  The kitchen clock said it was eight-thirty. She could already feel the baking heat radiating through the glass and pressing against her forehead, into her hands, weighing down her shoulders. The day was going to be a scorcher; everything was singing with the dread of it. Sam filled a glass and drank it standing at the sink, making a face at the taint. She sniffed the water. If an animal had died it would have to be a large animal, bigger than a cat or dog or possum, something too big to crawl into the tank. Beneath the house perhaps. In the pipes. She peered into the plughole, sniffed the drain, but its faint vegetable rot was inoffensive. She put the glass down and went to the front door, opening it just in time to see Ed’s car mounting the driveway.

  The air that rushed in had an odour so strong that she recoiled. He came pushing past her, covering his mouth with a sleeve of his shirt. When she inhaled, her throat locked in a spasm. Ed’s rank sweat mingled with the dead.

  ‘Shut the door, for Christ’s sake,’ he said. His voice was harsh. Dully, Sam was annoyed to find it stung her. She followed him into the kitchen, where he repeated her water-drinking, the whole performance, with the same sniffing and grimaces. As he gulped he raised a hand to silence her. There was a stiffness in his body and a grey sheen to his hair that she had never noticed before.

  ‘What died?’ she asked.

  Ed pulled closed the blinds, sinking the house into darkness.

  Whatever it was, it had leached him of colour. His face was luminous in the dim room. Not so much like someone who had seen a ghost as a man who was becoming one. All of his movements were urgent and strange. The skin in his face was sagging, and his clothes hung off him loosely, marked with sweat. He slumped. Perhaps it had always been there, this bagginess, this slouch, and she had never seen it. Perhaps he had been holding it at bay by force of will.

  The rot in the air had swept that will away. He gave her a hopeless look. She recognised disappointment, even failure.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asked. She looked towards the door.

  ‘Don’t go out there,’ he said.

  Sam opened and closed her mouth. The nausea rose in her throat again, and she battled it down.

  ‘Just don’t,’ he said. His voice had stones in it. His eyes could not control their pleading, but he did not ask her to trust him.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. Though she knew before he told her. The question was only when.

  His throat made a small, brittle noise. It sounded damaged; he might have been crying earlier, or shouting. He began to bend, as if he wanted to talk down to her, forgetting she was almost as tall as he was now. The bending was not for her sake. His body was collapsing, the knees and hips losing their hold, and she stepped forward and reached for his elbow without thinking, holding him steady, supporting his weight.

  In her hands Ed seemed to fall through flimsy layers of time, rushing through his ages all at once. He became an old man, a baby. She saw the trail of sweat across his hairline, where the hair was marching a quick retreat. His shirt was frayed at the collar. He lifted his head and tried to look her in the eye, but his eyes wouldn’t stick to her. They wanted to run.

  She felt the strength of her grip on his arm. Like someone else’s hand.

  ‘You know what this is,’ he said at last. ‘You knew this was coming.’

  She let go. He sank into a crouch, bent over his knees. He looked at those knees, dusted their imaginary dust.

  ‘Where’s Ivy?’

  The closed blinds trembled, rustling like weeds. The memory rattled through her, kicking her heart awake like water hammer in an old pipe. The panic of time, its sheer unfairness. She went to the window, pushed the blind aside and looked up to the hills. They were still there, and so was the curve and shine of the village in the foreground, not quite finished but intact. She could see that far, so the air was clear. Anyway, it couldn’t be now. She wasn’t old enough. The paint had hardly dried on the barn, let alone had time to flake away. There was still so much time to wade through.

  ‘Don’t open that,’ said Ed. He stood up, gripping the kitchen counter for support.

  Sam let the blind fall. ‘Tell me what’s happening,’ she said.

  He swallowed. ‘It’s the sea. The sea’s gone.’

  Sam felt it in her stomach.

  ‘Not gone. Moved. You know,’ he said. A smile appeared on his features, then disappeared; expressions shifted in time-lapse fashion, like expressions on a baby’s face. He was so changed, it was hard to read him. He might be anyone at all, now. Old, young, powerless, menacing. Good, not good. The eyes far off.

  She was so tired. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She must be down there. Down at the shore. Everybody’s gone to the water,’ he said. ‘What used to be. We’ve got to get out of here.’ He didn’t move.

  She looked more closely at his face. He still rippled through his ages, personalities, his skin a moving composition. But under the layers there was a constant. He wanted something from her. A word, agreement, comfort. Something.

  ‘I’m going down there,’ Sam said. She started looking around for her shoes.

  ‘There isn’t there.’ He pushed the back of his hand into the air, once, twice, a gesture of distance. The hand settled on his brow, then he lifted it and looked at the fingers, as if afraid they had been stained. ‘It’s all gone. Finished. The water.’

  She found her shoes in the h
allway, but stood holding them. The back of her throat filled with pity. Pity, and a strange calm.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  His eyes were through her. The need in them had gone cold. Ed seemed to make some calculation. ‘Of course you do,’ he said.

  Sam took a step back. There was no feeling in his voice at all now. Only the teeth seemed to smile.

  Ed shook his head. He walked to the bookshelf, stared at the piles of papers, books, and began to fill his arms with them.

  ‘We’ve got to get rid of all this.’ He held his papers to his chest like a shield. Clouds shifted in his eyes. ‘You couldn’t have seen this coming. You would have said if you’d known, you’d have to be mad not to. You would have told someone.’

  Sam shivered, knelt. Her shoelaces felt like wet rope in her hands. She twisted them into rough knots and was standing again. She was at the door.

  ‘We have to think about salvage,’ he said. He was speaking to his paperwork now, facing the shelf he’d colonised, the stacks of reports and books that overflowed, a tide of them. Sweat trickled down her ribs under her shirt. There was nothing to save.

  Ed turned to her. ‘Come with me,’ he said. The words weren’t right; she had to mouth them to herself before they made sense.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Shenzhen. Dubai. I don’t know. Where do you want to go?’

  He turned back to his papers and collected some of them into the crook of his arm. The carpet beneath his feet was frayed with old stains. Her mind was blank.

  ‘The world, Sam. There’s no future here.’ There was desperation in his voice, but he was speaking from another time, a time that had long passed. ‘We can do this again, we’ll do better next time, the reservoir was a mistake, it’s too late, but somewhere else. A fresh start.’ He knelt to collect something, rummaging through pages.