‘There is a future,’ she said, approaching. She stood over him. He was down on all fours now, his shoulders rounded.
‘It’s blocked up,’ Ed said. ‘No need to worry yet. But without the water, who knows. It can’t last forever. This is no time to wait and see. Just got to get away.’ She saw the sweat at his neck and smelled his fear. She backed away.
He staggered up again, knocking into furniture. He shoved a chair aside and it clattered backwards onto the floor. Sam stepped out of his way. He had never been violent or aggressive, but he was not a small man, and in this state he might be capable of anything. When he stood and hurried past her, she pressed her back against the wall.
Still bent, he carried his papers and cables, his gadgets and monitors, out to the car. The open door let the rank air into the house, and despite the strength of it she followed him into the rot and heat. He clambered into the driver’s seat and opened the window a crack. His eyes met hers through the gap and it was as if all feeling had drained from them, all colour. Two pale points of calm. She squinted, breathed shallowly through her mouth.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘There’s still time.’
She leaned a hand on the car’s hot bonnet. For a minute Sam tried to imagine he was really asking her. Offering her another life, or a string of other lives, in other towns. Another purpose.
She tried to picture it. She went that far. But all the towns she saw looked just like this one. All the people in them were just like the people here, and Ed slipped into place among them, easy in the world as she’d never be, knowing. He dropped a pile of books on the front seat. How simple it was to disbelieve, once you’d begun.
‘It’s a scam, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘The park. It’s always been a cover.’
Ed’s lips stretched, neither smile nor frown, and he stroked the wheel compulsively.
‘We had to give them something,’ he says. ‘We had to bring them with us, you know that.’
‘There’s no us,’ she said. If there was, he wasn’t in it.
He clicked his seatbelt, started the engine. Although his eyes were still clear, she saw from his movements that she had hurt him.
‘What about Ivy?’ she asked. She could not have left them both.
His leg jiggled. He let down the handbrake. ‘You’ll have to tell her.’
‘Tell her what?’ The air was cloying, the sun too hot on her skin.
When he looked up at her, his face was peaceful. The panic had fallen away like it was never there. He would always be free like this, pitched forward, unattached. He was a man without a place in the world.
‘Make something up,’ he said, and shrugged, and grinned a cover version of the old, infectious grin. As he pulled out of the driveway, he waved. She caught one last flash of hand disappearing as the sun hit the glass, and he was gone.
The smell advanced like a fighter, no sooner becoming predictable than assailing her again with a new move, a new flavour: old fishing boat, off prawn, a memory of tar and flood and garbage lifting over the drains. It parried as she dragged her bike out from the back of the house. It thrusted as she pedalled down the potholed streets of Clapstone, past the Commie, the Institute, the vacant shop with its cataract windows, and the deserted Foodtown. No cars passed; the few she saw were parked, one with a driver’s door left wide open to the street. She peered inside as she rode past, but it was empty. None of them was Ivy’s van. She turned past the park site. The bobcats stood in the dirt, the facades of buildings curtained their empty stomachs, and the wheel cast its angular shadow over the exposed flesh of the Big Thing. The barn had been freshly painted, and it shone: more blue sky–coloured than the sky. The heat ached against her skin. Sam rode on in spite of it.
The closer she got to the shore, the stronger the smell became. Its stamina exhausted her reserves. Sam went on towards it with a will to bruise, to get hurt, but her nausea abated. People could get used to anything.
A few cars passed on the road, heading back to town. Faces peered, spectral, from windows streaked by hands and by the snouts of struggling dogs. She took the short cut through the dunes, her tyres jagging in the sand. She kept her eyes on the ground to avoid skidding. The path should have led to the water’s edge and petered out into the grey beach, but the sand just carried on. Only when her tyre jammed deep did she see it. The tideline flotsam spread out at her feet. The sand she was in should have been wet. The sand should not have been visible. It should have been water.
Where the water had been was sand and more sand and rocks and more rocks. There was rotting seagrass and other, unidentified forms. She lifted her gaze. Scattered across the shore were piles of debris, bits of old junk coughed up by the water, and other shapes. She looked out past them to the water.
The water wasn’t there. A scrawl of trash and matter. No, not matter. She forced herself to see what couldn’t be contemplated.
Glistening skins, covered in crows. The white noise of flies.
Her mind began to categorise, identify: huge squid, lumps of seals, a hump on the horizon the size of a dune, black, that might be a whale. Thousands of fish; there was no way to count them. There were not enough names in her head. She gave up, let her bicycle fall and walked among the corpses.
As she walked, there was a little life between them: crabs ran out of holes near her feet and dashed for the blur in the distance, an impossible distance for something that size. Many more were strewn across the sand on their backs, dead in their shells. Sam felt smaller than the smallest of them. When she allowed herself to breathe properly, she found that she did not feel sick any more. Around her, the sound of flies rose to an erratic drone.
A pair of dolphins smiled, their bellies half-buried in sand. A seal lay bloated like a dog-faced bladder, its helpless struggle marked out in the sand. It wasn’t just large mammals, fish. There were old birds too, leathery strips of penguin, distorted jellies. A whole menagerie, a dead aquarium.
Nothing so finite.
She walked out towards the dune of whale, and then stopped and let her shoulders slump. It went on and on; she could walk in it for days. She turned for the car park where the road met the water, except the road and the water now stood miles apart. There was no-one there.
She went back for her bike, carried it up the rocks and stood sweating in the heat. She could tell they had been here. There were footprints, a rolling can of cola, a few patches of vomit. The hint of petrol exhaust, evaporating into the rot. If Ivy had been with them, she was not here now. Just the hot asphalt radiating.
The torn-off pegs of the old jetty were dimly visible in the sand, jagged spikes sticking between jagged rocks, ragged as tombstones. Beyond them, the sea was only a faint blur on the horizon, a graphite stripe between dead sand and sky. She glanced back towards the dune where she was standing, months and lives ago. Where she could still deny what she was seeing.
That time was gone.
Sam pedalled back to town along the road. The asphalt was badly patched but easier going than the track. The stench was a heavy blanket over the air, the sun a weight on her shoulders. The road went on, the horizon never closer. It was perverse to live like this, pedalling hard, hurtling in one direction. By the time she reached Clapstone, her breathing was laboured, her eyes and skin burning, and her throat dry. The air itself might choke her. She had to find her mother.
As she turned into Kurrajong Street, the park loomed at the edge of her vision. Above the wheel’s sharp symmetry, a quarter of the sky burst open. It splintered with a jagged light, red, green and white, shifting quickly. Its zigzag marched towards her, dancing a brutal, shimmering dance. She rode faster, trying to outrace the sight of it.
The right side of the world was all blur and fizz. There was no outrunning it.
The strength of the aura was a shock. The light shattered everything. These were the worst and grandest visuals she’d ever experienced
. They brought joy so sharp she held her breath and gritted her teeth in readiness. For absolute suffering, release. Pain’s radiant medicine. Surrender.
Home.
Now she can see through the back wheel of her bicycle to the Ferris wheel, and now the wheels are locked together, spinning against each other, in opposite directions. The zigzag lights switch into that spoked pattern, spinning, and time spins. The raffle wheel ticks past its nails. She holds her breath, but it’s not stopping. Time spins on, the clocks of ocean currents, stars and planets. She is here and there, now and then. There’s no horizon, no going back or going forward. Only the atom of the moment, spinning. An axis, a nucleus. That broken eye.
The enclosure contracts, and it cracks open, crystalline. The wheel comes off its axis, spins into the air. Gondolas hurl outward like test tubes in a centrifuge. Turning, turning. Never let go.
The blood won’t separate; she can’t catch it in the act. The weights of time spin out in some relation with her thoughts that can’t be seen, that will never be visible. This isn’t the future. She can’t hear it humming. It’s useless artifice, party-trick magic.
An empty dance.
39
Although we didn’t sleep well, we wake at last determined. We meet in the courtyard, ready to talk.
Those nomads were right, there is something liberating about it. Having someone else decide. We are already looking around at this place like an old shell we’ve discarded. We see its disadvantages, its flaws, all the trappings. It is hard now to imagine how we became attached to such a flimsy, temporary place. Leaving would be a wise choice, and an easy one.
But we have spent so much of our lives accepting. Adapting. Being the consequences, not the cause. We need to consider all our options carefully, now. We’re more than just results, circumstances. And so we tell Greg that we can’t give him an answer.
‘Not yet,’ says Jean. ‘We need to talk it through.’
Greg is wearing the same navy suit but a different shirt from yesterday’s. This one has a faint yellow check in it, the colour of fresh straw. That bright orange box is attached to his belt at the hip now, and he doesn’t look up from its display. ‘You’ve got until five,’ he says. He seems unsurprised, and a little distracted. On the box, one green light is gently flashing.
‘What does that do?’ Candace asks, bending to examine it. The green light begins to flash more quickly now. A small, old-fashioned LED display beside it is flickering some spell of digits.
‘Gas monitor,’ Greg says, raising it with a hand to squint at its screen. He gives the little box a vigorous shake. The green light calms, returns to its slow blinking.
‘Ah,’ says Allan. He glances up at the dome, and our eyes all follow his. The sky is perfect, cloudless.
‘Don’t worry,’ Greg says. He lets the box fall back against his hip. ‘It’s safe for now.’
He speaks with certainty. He must know the state of the rock, of the seal. The box tells him something, makes signs he can interpret. To us, it looks like a cross between a tape measure and an old clock radio.
‘Maybe we should just sign,’ says Fiona. Her voice is soft, airy, a tempting zephyr.
‘Let’s get everyone here first,’ says Jean. We look around, count heads, and though the number’s right it’s not complete. When she says everyone, she means the rest.
‘Has anyone seen Ivy?’ asks Roger.
Ivy is not with us. She’s not in the guest room either. Ivy, it’s true, is not on the list. But some of us still think she should be included. There must be a policy about this, an official protocol. Greg would know what it is.
‘I’ll go and find her,’ says Roger, quietly. He puts a hand on his father’s arm. ‘I’m not leaving her out there on her own.’
‘She’s made her choice already,’ says Candace. ‘She didn’t want to be involved.’
There are bad feelings in our stomachs. Something we ate, perhaps, or the poor night’s sleep. We do not like to disagree. If there is a policy, it ought to say clearly what our obligations are. To each other, to the past, to the future.
We look at Greg. He doesn’t volunteer any information.
If there isn’t a procedure, well, we ought to make our own decision. For that, we need everybody here. Not just Ivy.
‘I’ll send Jill a message,’ says Jean, already taking out her phone. ‘What about Sam?’
‘No-one’s seen Sam in days, except Ivy,’ says Roger. ‘I’ll ask. But text her anyway.’
We stand in silence, watching Jean type the messages into her phone, peering through her glasses. Greg has moved discreetly out of our way and stands across the room at a table in the corner. He’s arranging contracts in their envelopes, neatly labelled with our names. There won’t be enough for everyone.
‘I saw Sam,’ says Quayde.
Fiona straightens his unruly hair, hushes him with a whisper.
He looks up at his mother. ‘I’ve seen her. She climbed up in the wheel,’ he says, impatient.
All our eyes are on him now. His rosy, underestimated cheeks.
‘She went like this.’ He reaches his arms up, pulls a fist down, left then right, like a man pulling bells.
We look up at the dome over our heads again. The blue is impure; gradually, it gives way to our reflections. Sometimes, when the dome does this, we feel like we’re underwater, looking up at the surface. Fish in a bowl. But the dome purifies the air we breathe. It doesn’t hold us here against our will.
The air in here feels cool, still.
Jean’s phone beeps.
‘Jill’s away,’ she says. ‘She left town yesterday.’
We look over at Greg, who is smiling quietly to himself in the corner, irritatingly composed.
‘Sam hasn’t replied,’ says Jean.
The room is silent.
‘Well, do I go and get Ivy or not?’ Roger asks.
Greg comes back to us and sighs. Without speaking, he puts his tablet on the table in front of us, wakes its screen, and makes a motion with his hand. An image appears, an image of blue carved into segments, its edges surrounded by receding stalks that blur and shift. At first it is difficult to make sense of this abstract picture. He presses a symbol in the corner and it’s replaced by a map, a map of Clapstone, one blue teardrop marking its place.
‘She must have dropped her phone,’ Greg says.
‘That’s the park,’ says Jean. ‘How did you do that?’
‘DSC clearance,’ he says. He presses another symbol and the image returns to sky, segments, weeds. There are circles in the segments, receding. We see it now: it’s the wheel, if you look up from below.
We all swallow, and consider the possibilities. We feel for the phones in our pockets, wondering about their cameras.
‘Not much we can do if she’s still up there,’ says Allan, rubbing his screen against his trouser leg to clean it. Our images of her falling lift neatly away.
Everyone’s eyes are on Greg. Young, strong. Responsible, official. If there is a policy, a protocol, we will find out about it now.
‘I’ll send a bird,’ he says.
A few of us titter at what must be a joke; everyone knows there haven’t been any birds around here for years. But he doesn’t laugh. He waves another set of gestures at his tablet. And to our amazement, a small hologram appears, blue, the shape of a budgie but about half the size. It only has one eye, set at the front above its beak.
‘Is that –’
Greg nods. ‘Bifocal Reconnaissance Drone. The Department has obtained an early licence.’
‘It’s so lifelike,’ says Candace.
The budgie stands to attention, opens and folds its wings. ‘I am a limited-licence drone,’ it says, without moving its beak. It has a feminine robot voice, nothing like a bird’s – more like an automated bank helpline. ‘Please confirm your authori
sation to command this drone.’ Its single black eye widens, and a circle inside turns white.
‘Bureaucracy,’ Greg says to us, wincing. He puts his thumb against the pad of his screen and lets it scan. The bird blinks its eye, opens it again. The white has disappeared. Unexpectedly, it takes off, rises to the dome overhead, then vanishes and reappears on the table in front of us.
Greg frowns. ‘Still in beta,’ he says. ‘I have to do this outside. You should stay here. Finish reading those contracts. Just stay indoors. Do you hear me? Stay inside. This is serious now.’
When he goes out, he glances at the dome as though it might have shattered.
Of course, we can’t resist following him outside. We watch the young man’s hand as he repeats his spell, pressing the thumb against the tablet. We watch the blue bird zip into the air, and then we watch Greg take his tablet and his paperwork, return a few things to his car, straighten his shirt and climb in. He checks his face in the rear-view mirror and then waves us away with the back of his hand. The electric engine is quiet, but we can’t hear him speak through the window. We can read his lips, though: Go. In. Side. We wave back at him, and he drives away.
The bird will take Sam a message. Its voice will talk her down, as per the protocol. If she is really in the wheel, that is. It seems suddenly unlikely, an almost inconceivable stunt, an act of madness. As we watch his car cover the few blocks to the park, we begin to doubt that what we saw on his screen was really taken through her phone. It could have been a recording. It’s all too unreasonable to be true.
Burying gases, for that matter. It’s so unnatural, trapping air under the ground. There have been some odd ideas, in recent years; we’re sure at some stage they were talking about shooting tanks full of toxins into space. Most such ideas turn out to be too expensive, unsafe or uninsurable. But each time they give us little shots of hope.
What if this is all just a story to prise us away from Clapstone? Maybe they want to frighten us off. Maybe there’s something really valuable up there they don’t want us to know about.
Dyschronia Page 25
