Ghost Species

by James Bradley

  Claire stumbled into the room, blinking in the light. Grabbing Kate she embraced her, kissing her and telling her she loved her, over and over again. ‘I was so scared, so scared,’ she said, her breath sickly and sweet. Finally she let Kate go, and straightening, began to talk, explaining that she had been attacked, and although she had escaped she’d lost her handbag and purse. ‘I think they took it,’ she said. ‘All my money, everything.’

  She had heard her mother apologise before, many times, but that night it was different. Perhaps it was the presence of Emily’s parents, perhaps it was simply that it was late, and Kate was tired. But as Claire spoke Kate could not help but notice the way she swayed from side to side as she spoke, the looping, frantic nature of her story, the way it kept changing, the way she slurred her words. Nor could she help being aware of Emily’s parents’ silence, the way they looked at her as they said goodbye.

  On Monday Emily would not speak to her, and neither would her other friends. Nor was she invited back to Emily’s house. On the street a few weeks later she came around a corner to find Emily and her mother walking towards her; seeing Kate, Emily’s mother placed a hand on Emily’s shoulder and steered her across the street.

  Even now, Kate has trouble disentangling which of her mother’s stories were truth and which were lies. When she is angry she tells herself there is no point believing any of it, that what little of it was true wasn’t worth knowing or, as she once said to Jay, ‘if her mouth was moving, she was lying’. Half a lifetime later she is still able to surprise herself by coming across new evidence of her mother’s compulsive deceits. Just six months ago, she stood on the threshold of Eve’s room and found her mind snagging on the time when she was four, and they had to leave all her toys behind and move because their apartment building was being demolished, and realised that made no sense. What had happened? Had her mother not paid the rent again? Or was it something else, some conflict with a neighbour or a former lover?

  Harder in many ways has been forcing herself to understand that her mother’s drunken professions of love, her weeping apologies and promises to change or get sober were just empty words, that in the end the only person her mother cared about was herself. Jay always said she had to let her anger go, but what he could not understand was that without the anger she was afraid she would have nothing left.

  Nor has she ever really been sure how much of her own bullshit her mother believed, to what extent her lies and fantasies consumed her. When she was thirteen she went away on school camp – the trip paid for by the school – and arrived back to discover that her mother was not waiting to pick her up. Her friend Lily’s mother was worried, and offered to drive her home, but Kate assured her it wasn’t a surprise, that she had always intended to catch the train.

  It was dark by the time she got home, and as soon as she got out of the lift she knew something was wrong. For the past six months her mother’s boyfriend, Paul, had been living with them, but the night before Kate left for camp he and Claire had fought, and Paul had stormed out. Kate had assumed he would be back, but as she pulled her bag down the corridor she saw a pile of what looked like his clothes heaped against the wall.

  The apartment was dark but the front door was open. Kate stopped in front of it, staring in. The floor inside was wet and a trickle of water had leaked out onto the landing, soaking the carpet so it squelched beneath her feet.

  Uneasy, she called her mother’s name, then Paul’s, but there was no answer. Finally she placed her bag against the wall, and went in. She trod carefully, quietly, afraid that if somebody had broken in they might still be there, waiting. Outside the living room she stopped and scanned the room; seeing no one, she took another breath and moved on. By the door to her mother’s bedroom she stopped. It was half-closed. She lifted her hand and, before she could lose her nerve, pushed on it, her heart leaping in her chest at the sound of it against the carpet.

  Nothing moved. The room seemed to be empty, though it was difficult to tell in the darkness. Taking a breath, she followed the stream of water towards the bathroom. Inside, the room was empty but the shower was running, water spilling across the floor, its surface reflecting the yellow light that shone through the window set high in the wall. Frightened now, she turned and ran into the kitchen.

  At first she thought it was empty as well, but then she caught sight of someone slumped against the stove.

  ‘Mum!’

  Claire jerked away, her eyes unfocused, confused.

  ‘Mum?’ she repeated, moving closer and kneeling down. Although the kitchen was dark, some light fell through the window, enough for her to see that her mother’s hair was dripping and her sodden dressing gown clung to her pale skin.

  Her mother flinched again, then turned to stare at her. Her eyes were wide.

  ‘Kate?’ she said, disbelievingly. Kate recoiled from the rank stink of vomit on her breath.

  ‘It’s me, Mum,’ Kate said. ‘What’s happened? Are you okay? Where’s Paul?’

  Claire stared at her again, then looked away. ‘Not here,’ she said, almost to herself.

  ‘Why are you wet, Mum? Why’s the shower on?’

  Her mother looked at her, and for a moment Kate saw something else there, something cunning and cruel. ‘They were outside,’ her mother said. ‘I had to hide.’

  ‘Who was outside?’

  ‘The men.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘They wanted to come in. I wouldn’t let them.’

  ‘What men? Do you mean Paul?’

  ‘Not Paul. Other men.’

  Kate looked around. ‘Are they still here?’

  Claire closed her eyes again and lolled back. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, her voice slurred and sleepy. ‘I think they’re gone.’

  Her mother hiccoughed, and began to snore. Kate stood up, suddenly disgusted by the gross physicality of her.

  ‘I’m going to turn the shower off,’ she said, but Claire didn’t answer.

  When her mother appeared the next morning she seemed to have no memory of the night before, instead sitting next to Kate and peppering her with questions about her camp and school. When Kate could take no more she went back into her room and took out her homework. She had a high, thin headache and had barely slept: after getting her mother to bed the night before she had spent several hours trying to dry the carpet and tidy up. Her mother had clearly barely eaten in the week Kate was gone; instead the bins were filled with empty bottles and cigarette butts.

  Paul was gone as well. Not just his clothes, but the television he had brought with him and his collection of DVDs. Kate wasn’t sorry – if anything she was relieved, grateful she would not have to avoid him in the bathroom or listen to his dirty jokes or feel his eyes on her when he was in the room. Paul had a way of sitting still and staring at her that made her skin crawl. But through it all the thing she had not been able to put aside was the image of her mother staring at the empty doorway, the look of cunning on her face, the growing awareness that whatever it was her mother had thought had happened had not actually happened, that she had invented it, or worse yet, imagined it. Had she meant to punish Paul somehow? Or perhaps to show him and Kate how wounded she was in some desperate bid for sympathy? Or were the intruders phantoms she half-believed were there? Seated there, in the ruin of her mother’s apartment she realises she will never know.

  She spends the night in a hotel opposite the train station. Once she could have called a friend, but she has long since lost contact with everybody she knew up here. She knows it should worry her, to be so alone, that her lack of social connection echoes her mother’s, yet it doesn’t, or not in any way she can easily describe.

  She also knows she is not alone in this. A few years earlier, before the baby and Davis and Eve, she had received a call from a woman who began by saying, ‘Kate? Hi, it’s me, Vanessa,’ as if they were picking up a conversation from the day before. Kate recognised her voice, but it was several seconds before she realise
d she was a school friend Kate had not seen in more than a decade.

  Like Kate, Vanessa had been an outsider, though in her case it was by choice. Her parents were always easy to spot at school events: her father – immediately recognisable by his mane of grey hair and meticulously tailored vintage suits – was a painter, and was almost thirty years older than Vanessa’s mother, who composed music for films. In retrospect Kate understands their bohemian cool was sustained by family wealth, yet at the time she mistook their sprawling, shabby house and separateness from the world of the school for a principled rejection of convention.

  In her last few years of school Kate took to spending long periods of time at Vanessa’s, sleeping over most weekends and doing homework at her kitchen table rather than going home in the evenings. At the time she assumed Vanessa’s parents were just being kind, although now she suspects they knew enough about Kate’s circumstances to understand that Kate needed help. And although Kate and Vanessa weren’t particularly alike in temperament or interests they became close, falling into a friendship of convenience that was, in many ways, genuine.

  Kate had only been back from America for a few months, and had few contacts in Sydney, so they agreed to meet for a drink. Kate arrived early, worried she might not recognise Vanessa. But when she appeared she knew her at once.

  Seated at a table in the corner of a bar in Newtown they had no trouble finding things to talk about, moving from old friends to their own lives. Vanessa had been living with a man she had met at university, but they had separated a year ago, and now Vanessa was living alone.

  Finally Kate asked about her parents. She knew they had separated not long after she and Vanessa finished school, her mother moving away somewhere, leaving her father alone. A look of pain passed across Vanessa’s face, and she looked down at the table. Finally she shrugged.

  ‘My mum is living up in Blackheath, she said. ‘But my father died last year,’ she said. ‘Not long after Ben and I broke up.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said. ‘I didn’t realise.’

  Vanessa looked at her. Her eyes were bright, the grief still close.

  ‘No reason you should.’

  ‘Was it quick?’

  Vanessa shrugged again. ‘Not really. He was eighty-five, his body just gave up.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. I always liked him.’

  Vanessa nodded. ‘You think because you know it’s coming it will be easier, that you’ll be prepared. But you’re not. It’s like one day you’re somewhere you know and the next day you’re standing on another shore looking back at this world.’

  Kate didn’t reply. A moment later Vanessa collected herself and smiled, her manner suggesting the subject was now closed. Half an hour later she left and Kate never heard from her again.

  She wakes early, eats alone. A quick search leads her to a funeral company a suburb away; after making an appointment for later in the morning she settles in to trying to tie up her mother’s affairs.

  The process is strange, the business of death rendering the loss itself almost banal. On one call she is put through to an actual human being, a woman with a broad Australian accent who delivers a checklist of things to look into in a bored, businesslike voice, then pauses and asks how she’s coping, and the simple humanity of the question almost undoes her.

  At the funeral parlour she is interviewed by a woman whose performance of fake sympathy sets her teeth on edge. Clearly unwilling to believe Kate is genuine in her claim to know almost nothing of her mother’s life – or perhaps pruriently hoping for some admission as to the reasons for it – she keeps circling back to the question of whether the smallest chapel will be large enough, and pressing Kate on the question of numbers and speakers. Finally Kate sets down the tablet and pushes it back towards the woman.

  ‘She was quite isolated,’ she says, her voice hard.

  The woman stares at her, and for a brief moment Kate glimpses the mix of stupidity and belligerence that lurks behind her simpering manner. Then the woman smiles and picks up the tablet.

  ‘Of course,’ she says.

  Back at the apartment, though, she finds herself unready for the rush of emotion that greets her as she goes through her mother’s things. She has come equipped with plastic bags and cleaning products, but once she is inside she finds herself overcome by the wretchedness of the place. The kitchen is the worst: its cupboards almost bare, save for the bottles stuffed in here and there, some finished, others half-empty. In one drawer she finds two empty bottles of vodka and half a dozen pieces of cutlery, in another three plates and a chipped bowl. In a box in a drawer she finds a half-eaten pizza, the pieces dessicated and dry with age.

  When she is done she steps out onto the balcony. This complex is supposed to be mixed use, a combination of public housing and high-cost development, and through the windows of the building next door she can see people moving around, talking and laughing, a young boy doing his homework, a pair of teenage girls in headsets dancing. Families, she thinks, normality. Not something she ever knew, not something she can ever provide. She feels weightless, untethered, unsure why she is here or where she is going.

  After she locks up she heads back towards the hotel. The sky is yellow, the air heavy with smoke. It is August, and there are fires, though that is no longer new. A solitary bird flies fast against the sky. Sometimes it seems the whole world is burning. A few days ago she watched a report on one of Davis’s projects, a vast park in Lithuania he had hoped to re-wild with wolves and auroch and giant sturgeon, as well as mammoth and other creatures. The mammoth are beautiful: vast russet mountains that tower over the landscape and sway slowly as they walk, the wonder of them undiminished by the decade that has passed since they were first created. The first specimens were raised by African elephants, whose social structures the mammoth were thought to share, and though that was successful, as their numbers have grown they have formed their own clans, some larger than those of the elephants, some smaller.

  What the report didn’t reveal is that Davis’s efforts seem to be making things worse rather than better. Jay is careful in his assessments, but she knows the reforestation programs have not been working, and while some of the resurrected fauna seem to be thriving, other animal populations in the regions Davis’s programs are being implemented are not recovering. If anything, rates of mortality have risen. In Canada, moose and deer have been dying in their millions, their bodies scattering the tundra, while in the Pacific, seals and walrus have been dying in waves as well, seals lying down on the rocks and not waking, the starving walrus struggling onto beaches to fight and perish in their thousands. Elsewhere, other populations are simply disappearing: insects, reptiles, amphibians, fish. Sometimes the causes are clear: habitat loss or pesticide or warming waters; more often they just seem to vanish.

  This sense of accelerating collapse haunts her. Online somebody has started something called the Extinction Diaries, a site on which the details of these disappearances are catalogued. Sometimes there will be video, images that dance across the screen, ghostly reminders of the lost; more often there will simply be a photo or two; sometimes there will be nothing more than a name. Despite herself Kate has taken to checking back, daily, sometimes more.

  There is something numbing about this process, a sense that with each new diminution the world slips further out of alignment. Yet while Jay and Cassie and many of her colleagues feel the same, few of them talk about it, except in the most guarded terms, and out in the street or the supermarket it is as if nothing has changed. Do people not feel it, the way death shadows them? This sense the world is coming apart? This sense they are all a part of it?

  Back at the hotel she calls Jay, asks to speak to Eve. When Eve comes on, her voice is soft, faraway.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ Kate asks, and as Eve details her day, Kate’s heart clenches. She only wants this to be finished, to be back there. And when Eve is done, Jay picks up again.

  ‘How is it?’ he asks.

 
Kate swallows and stares out the window. ‘Difficult.’

  ‘But you knew that.’

  ‘It’s worse than I expected. It’s just such a waste.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  She pauses. ‘I know. How’s Eve?’

  There is a brief pause. She knows Jay is looking at Eve.

  ‘She’s well. Busy.’

  ‘Has she been doing her lessons?’

  ‘Of course.’ A moment passes. ‘What is it?’ Jay asks.

  ‘Do you think she’s happy?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘But what will happen to her? Once she grows up? Once we’re gone?’

  There is a long silence. They have talked often, both within the team and privately, about her education, about her future. For years now they have cleaved to a strategy devised when she was young, in which she is taught privately and then assisted into some kind of role with the Foundation. Yet this is not a plan, not a blueprint for a life. Who will love her, befriend her, share her days? And what if there is no world left to grow up for? When Eve is asked she says she wants to be a scientist, or a ranger in one of the parks, but Kate knows these ideas are not really real to her.