Jill sat up. Her face was turned to the window.
‘They’ll kill me.’ Sam was up now, opening the wardrobe, chilled through her skin despite the heat of the day. She was looking for something clean, but everything was tainted by the sea. She pulled at sleeves, let limbs deflate and fall.
‘Things will settle down in a few days,’ said Jill.
Sam released the handle of the wardrobe, sat down on her heels among the clothes that had fallen at her feet. They should both leave, do it together. Try. Her eyes hurt, but she would not close them. In the space behind them, a dead axis spun. She turned and sat and let her back fall hard against the wardrobe.
‘I can’t go,’ she said. It was years ago, now. But clear as ever. The hair spilled out along the road. It was one or the other. ‘You can, though. You should.’
Jill was sitting on the edge of the bed, facing away from her. Looking at the floor or at her own knees, she let her hair fall forward.
‘Mum and Dad are packing up the house,’ she said. ‘They’re thinking about it.’
Sam could not get up. ‘Go with them,’ she said.
Jill shook her head. ‘I’m not leaving you.’
A shadow of a word was swallowed. Sam could not fight the wave of relief she felt wash through her. That buoyancy, to be lifted by another person, even for a moment, a week, a year. There was so much time to get through. She did not have to be alone.
43
A small blue bird enters a cage so giant that it disregards the bars. It swerves between them. It appears on the rim. It bobs and sidesteps. It hooks a claw around the metal, then raises its beak to pull itself up a vertical, making a studied, trundling progress. It halts near the top to adjust itself, and blinks its eye at Sam. Sam blinks back.
‘Winter?’
She should have gone to the beach for cuttlebones. She should find seed. Winter’s hungry; he’s been gone so long. But now she’s found him.
There are no birds here, not for a long time. It can’t be Winter. Its beak is silver and it blinks with one eye. Black and faceted, the eye sits in the centre of its forehead. It looks like plastic, but it’s made of light. She can see right through it. It turns, and the eye widens. Some inner, whiter circle blinks, scanning her.
Sam’s heard of these, but she’s never seen one. They’re supposed to be restricted to the military. She must be in the migraine, looking forward at another time. How long have they been watching her? The distant, formless eye. She is too tired to think when. Her head throbs with an alien pulse. She lies still and allows the algorithm to complete its calculation.
Slowly, she feels the metal return against her back, the push of gravity. The fibre of her hair where it catches against the steel. The luxury of confusion evaporates like mist. There is rust; there is sky. She’s way up in the distance. An elbow knocks against a chip of paint, the skin of her wrist is exposed to chill. The world has all the detail it has after a migraine, and more. The exquisite, imperfect finish of now. Her stomach growls, and she can hear it. There’s no whirring, no hum to cover sound. She’s hungry.
Sam sits up. The bird teeters back, its feet touch nothing. Its wings are folded, but it doesn’t fall. It hovers in the air between two bars in a way a budgerigar could not. And then it seals its eye and flicks away.
She reaches for the seat of the gondola, finds and fixes her eyes on a clear line of shadow, not ready to look down. Distantly, she hears a car moving, a dog barking. She thinks that earlier, while she dreamed, if she dreamed, they were howling. The sound is far enough away to be a memory.
She watches the line crawl across the paintwork until she’s certain that time is moving, and doing so at a reasonable pace. The shadow is crisp on the metal, then fizzed at the edges, then it resolves. So there is a sun. The earth is turning. It takes her a space the width of her thumb to make sure she is back in her body. She is out of practice. All her organs feel displaced. Rising through time has given her the bends.
On her knees, Sam inhales quickly. She leans out over the rim of the gondola, looks down at the little model town below. How well it resembles itself: an echo town, a ghost. Nobody in sight. The barn stands with its door wide open. A clock like a driving lesson, its hands at ten and two, a station where no rails wait for no train. The field of weeds that was never going to be an avenue is still just a field. Beneath her, the white knot of the Big Thing lies curved and ludicrous, its arms open as though to catch her. Its one eye smashed a lifetime ago. And all of it familiar.
She’ll be waiting.
She stands. Her head throbs but does not crack open. The gondola rocks. Sam reaches for her phone in the pocket of her jeans, wanting to check the time, but it isn’t there. It isn’t on the seat, or the floor of the cage, or under the seat when she kneels down again to look for it, her legs stiff like she’s been running. She looks around the rim of the gondola, but it isn’t there either. At the edge she looks straight down, and feels herself falling.
The ground comes up tilting. The whole wheel vibrates like a harp. Sam isn’t sure if it’s her body or the world. Whatever it is, it moves her for a few seconds, then it stops abruptly; the pulse of blood begins again. The wheel makes a cringing sound as it aches, attempts a turning, manages to move an inch or less. She reaches for her bag, rummages for the last of the water. She’s had worse headaches than this, worse pain. She doesn’t know how long she’s been out. It’s daylight now, the sun high in the sky, late morning, but without her phone there is no way to tell which morning.
The bars under her hands are icy. She tries to remember why any of it is happening, why it is all still here. Going forward, going on ahead, to warn them. Only Ivy, for some reason, she was angry, but she can’t recall it now.
Fish-like, the mind still flickers. Some image of an image, a backwards propulsion. A stump spoke, she thinks, or algae did. It was depthless.
The smell of asphalt lingers in her nostrils. Asphalt and death. That’s another time. Water and. Another time. Salt and. Another. A doll fallen in the road.
Some of this has happened, she feels certain; some of this will happen next. The trick is remembering which. Her eyes are fizzing.
And then there is a sudden elation, like she has inhaled something. Some noxious gas is lifting her.
She’s alive.
Alive now, in her body. Her mind, cracked open like an egg, an eye. The past, even days ago, is made by other people. There’s something else at the edge of her thinking, the way this throbbing pain replaced the shaking of – what was that, anyway? Some kind of vibration in the air. And what’s left is not regret but the residue of empathy, the pain of separation that refuses to heal. A longing for something not yet gone.
There’s still time. There’s always time. Its infinite credit squandered on days, on waiting, but now. Now.
She hasn’t eaten.
Everything looks normal. No rain, no fog, no nothing. She lifts her bag, drinks the last of the water, splashes it on her face. It doesn’t clear her head. Her hands are shaking from the migraine, or this height, or the other rattle, whatever that was. She feels different, oddly fearless. As if some knot has come undone inside her, loosened its constriction. Loosened her skin. Perhaps this is dying.
She slings the bag over her shoulders and tightens the straps. Empty plastic weighs next to nothing. She pulls up her hood, steps onto the rim of the cage, and begins the task of lifting her own weight down. Her limbs ache from the climb, an ache like memory. She keeps her eyes on the bars she needs to hold, one or two at a time. She moves down backwards, feet first, head up. Eventually, she finds that she is making progress. She looks down.
In the distance, just beside the hills, like a question mark at the end of a sentence, there is a tiny wisp of cloud.
44
Ivy was gone, she had left her here alone. Days had passed since the sea, and still she had not come home. Sam’
s hand hovered over the rosellas staring glum-eyed from the biscuit tin. She picked it up, opened it against her hip and took out half the money. She thought for a minute, then took the other half as well. It should be hers anyway. There was a debt.
She could not go out yet. The smell of rot was still thick, spiced with the smell of her sickness and the older tang of damp in the house. Unwashed sheets, sweat, the toxins leaked by the body in pain. Sam hadn’t left the house, waiting for it to ease. She wasn’t certain that it hadn’t. Anything might be hallucination. The knock at the door, for one.
She opened it to find Ivy there, as though summoned.
‘You left,’ said Sam.
‘I tried,’ said Ivy. She moved towards her. Sam made as if to block her entry, but reconsidered. She thrust the hand with the cash in it behind her, out of sight, and stood back against the open door. Ivy had found the time to cut her hair. It didn’t suit her.
If there was a moment when they might have embraced, it was deflected. Neither spoke. Ivy’s eyes searched her face. They were the same height; Sam might even be a little taller. They were each other’s mirror, one dark, the other light.
‘Why did you knock?’ Sam asked. ‘It’s still your house.’ The precious emphasis.
A look of hurt or defeat moved across Ivy’s face, and she did not answer except by exhaling, impatiently, and moving past her daughter down the hall.
Sam looked out before closing the door. The air seemed a little better. A dog trotted down the street, shaggy and grey, its mouth agape. Sam watched it break into a run.
‘I couldn’t find my key,’ said Ivy, turning in the kitchen when Sam entered. She scanned the ransacked shelves, the missing books and papers.
‘He took off, then,’ she said.
‘Days ago,’ said Sam, looking with her.
Ivy swallowed. ‘What did he say to you?’ she asked, addressing the empty shelves, the empty table.
‘Not much,’ said Sam. He hadn’t meant it anyway.
Ivy turned, leaned back against the shelf, her arms folded. ‘Did you see this?’ she asked. Her face was drawn, tired-looking, her lips determined. For a moment Sam thought that she was showing her something, looked for an object in her hand. But then she understood.
‘It’s happening everywhere. You know that.’ It made no difference now what she claimed to have seen. Ivy had made up her mind a long time ago.
‘That’s not an answer,’ Ivy said. But she didn’t press her.
‘Are they angry?’
Ivy sighed, ran her hand through her hair. It hung just to the ears now. Silver-blonde strands fell away. ‘I don’t know. People have a right to be. But Roger doesn’t think so.’
‘Is that where you’ve been?’ Ivy didn’t owe her anything. Not her days, and not an answer. But she looked apologetic anyway.
‘It’s not like that. I’ve been trying to get things clear in my head,’ said Ivy.
‘Oh.’ What might a clear head feel like? Sam thought of snow.
‘I wasn’t going to leave without saying goodbye.’
Sam tried not to move her face. Her throat was burning. Ivy swallowed. Her fingernails were fighting with the seams of her jeans, moving faster than they should be. She was leaving, then.
‘It seems to me that none of this should have happened,’ said Ivy. ‘It got so out of hand.’
‘I couldn’t stop it,’ said Sam. She’d never seen snow, except from a can. Perhaps she’d go and find some and lie down in it.
‘Did you try?’
Sam looked away.
‘Thing is,’ said Ivy. Her eyes flicked to the arm Sam held behind her back. Something like pity crept into her expression, but it crept out again. ‘Thing is, I think we both need some space right now.’ Her voice was shaking.
Sam dragged herself out of the cold dream. The air in the room was humid, suffocating. Had she heard that right? ‘It sounds like you’re breaking up with me.’
Ivy looked at her hands. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’
‘Ivy, this isn’t funny. It’s fucked up. You’re my mother.’
‘I know, Sam. But you’re seventeen now, and this illness, it’s too much. It has its own force field. It sucks everything in. I need some time, I need to remember who I am.’
Who she was, before migraine. Ivy could still get free. Sam gripped the wad of money, her fist warm against the small of her back. Her fingers shifted on the grimy plastic. Ivy looked again at her arm, then at the bag in the hallway. She blinked twice.
‘Were you on your way out somewhere?’
‘No.’ The biscuit tin lay open on the counter behind her mother. She stared at the rusted geometry of its rim. Then she turned and put the money down on the table.
‘Illness,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Ivy.
‘So that’s it.’ She had chosen a side, an explanation. May it be of use to her.
‘I only wanted to help you. You have to deal with it, Sam. All this business with the future, it’s not a game. It’s got to stop.’
‘Who says it’s a game?’ Sam faced her. It wasn’t that Ivy was staring at the small pile of cash, just that her gaze was affected by its presence, like water by the moon.
‘You know what I mean. You’re still young. When you get older, your sense of time changes. It gets faster. You can see how some things start to matter, and other things don’t.’
Sam’s hands were pressed against the table. She felt the grain print itself into her skin. The cracks in the grain polished by years of hands.
‘Which am I?’ she said.
Ivy pretended not to hear. She turned, pacing. ‘You start to see the threads. The patterns. The way your actions have consequences. I just wanted to tell you that it’s not too late. If you have to cope on your own for a while, maybe you’ll see a way to move on. You can grow out of this.’
Sam heard the break in her mother’s voice, and with it all the decay that hung in the air was not outside her any more but in her body, emanating from some wound. She remembered the days of broken bottles, broken glass. The two of them always took care of each other. But they didn’t have to.
‘You grow out of it,’ said Sam, the words burning her throat. Her mother’s face crumbled.
‘Honestly, I’ve fucking had it. I’ve had enough.’
‘I didn’t make this happen,’ Sam said, gesturing out the window. But the gesture was feeble against the weight of what she knew. The wheel already held her in its spiderweb embrace. She glanced back at the money, smiled sadly. A couple of thousand, a shitty life’s savings.
‘You should take this,’ she said. ‘Compensation. For wasting your time.’
Her mother stepped across the room, reached for her arm. Her eyes were red but her expression was controlled. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what else to say. It’s been so impossible for so long.’
Sam thought of snow. Clean, white snow. The bloated dead lay stretched out in her throat, a barren coast, run to acid. She felt the notes slip in her fist. Loose, multicoloured plastic spread in her hand like scales.
‘Take it,’ she said, and thrust the money at Ivy. ‘Here.’
‘Sam.’ Ivy’s voice had softened, but it wasn’t weak. She pushed the money away with her palm. ‘Don’t be like this. You could still come with me, if you wanted to. We could go somewhere new. Start again. We’ll get work somewhere. Fruit picking, or a shop. You can finish school. No-one will know you.’
The life was flimsy, too unthought out. A dead end.
‘You’ll know me,’ Sam said.
If only she had seen something good. Lottery numbers, a cure for sickness, something worth knowing. The anger in her body now was worse than any migraine. Sam wanted only to climb back inside the shuttered room of her pain. Inside its walls, no actions could be taken, no consequences made. Th
is desperate wish to be too weak to matter. To find herself no more responsible for the mess they were in than anyone else.
‘I told you not to punish yourself,’ said Ivy, cool with proof.
‘I’ll leave that to you.’ Sam held the notes out.
‘Sam.’ Ivy stepped back, began to move towards the hallway. Sam followed her, took her by the shoulder.
‘You’re just like him, you know.’ Her anger surprised her. There were reservoirs of this, all buried. She could not help it.
‘Stop it,’ said Ivy, and twisted from her grip. Her hand was on the front door.
‘Here,’ Sam said. So calm now, and yet with such compulsion. She couldn’t stop moving towards this. Some machinery in her body did the work for her: it pushed her fist, threw the money out onto the concrete driveway. This automation turned, slammed closed the door. It slid the bolts behind her. She leaned her back against the wood, hid from her reflection, and felt her vision cloud black. For a moment, action, consequence were gone. Only her heart’s insistent metronome.
When her vision cleared, she watched through the narrow window. Ivy crawled on the ground collecting money, stuffing it in a pocket. As she reached out for a twenty, Sam’s stomach flowered with a small, pale sorrow.
She watched her climb into the van, yank at the seatbelt. It didn’t stick like the old one had, but habits like that were hard to break. They went into the body somehow and made a home there. This was for the best. It was the only way. There was still a long way to go, and Ivy at least should be free.
‘Don’t come back,’ Sam whispered, her forehead pressed against the glass.
45
She reaches the hub of the wheel, its axis. She turns, drops down onto the tiny platform where the ladder begins, then turns again, crouching. She can see the ground below, the Big Thing’s smashed eye and waiting limbs. In the formation of the hills, the river, glimpses of geological ages, the frozen moment. Nothing has changed. Nothing’s been rewound, undone. A little whiteness in the air that also isn’t there.
Dyschronia Page 27
