Ghost Species

by James Bradley

  Lukas glances at her. ‘I said to Eve you should get another prescription as soon as possible. Nobody wants to say it but things are going to get very bad very quickly, and medical supplies are already breaking down.’

  Kate nods, although something in her expression makes Eve wonder whether what Lukas is saying seems real to her. Perhaps she no longer believes in the future.

  ‘I’ll talk to the doctor.’

  Lukas hesitates. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, why doesn’t Eve have ID?’

  Kate stares at him over her cup. ‘It’s a long story,’ she says.

  Lukas doesn’t reply, but Eve can feel him looking at her.

  She takes another sip of tea.

  When Lukas leaves, Kate asks Eve to help her to the door. ‘Lukas?’ she calls after him as he is opening the door of the van.

  He looks back.

  ‘I appreciate you helping Eve and me like this.’

  Lukas nods, his expression guarded. ‘Let me know if you need anything else.’

  Kate stares at him thoughtfully for a few seconds. ‘We will. And please visit if you have time.’

  Once Lukas is gone they turn back towards the house. By the door Kate unwinds her arm from Eve’s grasp, steps free. In the dark glass of the sliding door Eve sees their reflections, transformed by the past weeks: Kate grown old, frail, Eve rangy, powerful, her thick hair coiled above her wide-browed face. For a moment Kate turns, looks back down the hill towards the road. Over recent days she has looked shattered, uncomprehending, riven by her diagnosis, but as she stares across the space outside the house it is not shock or grief Eve sees in her expression, but something more like determination.

  The medicine makes things easier. But two nights later the pain returns, and Eve wakes to the sound of Kate moaning and sobbing. Running to her room she finds her twisted on the bed. Eve gives her a spoonful of the medicine, then another, but it does not seem to help.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Eve asks her. ‘Should I call the doctor?’

  Kate whimpers and shakes her head, and so Eve climbs in next to her, cradling her until she sleeps.

  In the morning she wakes to find Kate still asleep in her arms. Getting up, she goes through to the kitchen and calls Lukas.

  Lukas brings food and supplies, pocketing the cash Eve gives him without speaking. He is businesslike, efficient, but also careful somehow. When she first met him, that sense that he was always calculating, always thinking bothered her; now it is almost reassuring.

  Once he has left, Eve makes a cup of tea for Kate, then disappears to her room. She scans the feeds on her phone, sees the chatter has not changed: so many people frightened, fighting, looking for somebody to blame. She heads to Kate’s room to offer food, only to find Kate still asleep. Behind her the window is open; the pale light falls on her face, silvering it.

  Eve closes the door quietly behind her, heads out. She is tired, exhausted by lack of sleep and anxiety, so she follows the path upward, into the trees.

  The following weeks are brief yet endless. The weather is bright and blue, although nobody seems to know how long it will stay like this. On the feeds the talk is all of collapse, shifting tides of fear and denial. From time to time Kate seems to rally; one day after she has not left her bed for three days Eve rises to find her seated in the kitchen, her screen open in front of her. When Eve enters she smiles, and for a brief second Eve sees her as she was, only a few weeks ago. In her bed that night Eve lies awake, wondering how she failed to notice, what might have happened if she had realised earlier, if she had pushed Kate to see a doctor more often, if, if, if.

  Eve does not leave the house except when she has to, preferring to spend time with Kate out on the lawn, in the sun.

  She knows Kate is concerned about her, about what will happen to her once she is gone. But one evening, when Eve is watching her screen, Kate appears in the doorway. Eve takes off her headphones.

  ‘I’ve been talking to Lukas,’ she says. ‘He was telling me about his farm, this compound he’s been building up in the hills.’

  Eve doesn’t answer.

  ‘He’s right, you know. It’s all slipping out of control. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but you’re going to need help.’

  ‘I’ll be okay.’

  ‘You don’t know that. I know Jay has made arrangements with the Foundation, that they have contingency plans, but perhaps you need a backup plan, somewhere you can go if something happens at the Foundation, and that falls through. I have money I can leave for you, but I don’t know how long that will last.’

  ‘Please,’ Eve says. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Fine how? There are no jobs, things are coming apart. What happens when you can’t pay for food? Or power? I can’t leave you alone. I need to be sure you’re in contact with the Foundation, that they can help you. And that there will be somebody else if they’re no good.’

  Eve does not reply. She does not want to think about the future Kate is describing.

  Over the next few weeks Lukas becomes a regular visitor to the house, bringing food, news. Every time things are worse. Overseas there are stories of riots, governments falling. It is as if everything is gathering momentum, slipping downhill.

  ‘It’s over,’ he says one day.

  ‘What is?’ Eve asks.

  ‘The government. The world. All of it. We need to be ready.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ Eve says.

  ‘Nobody does,’ Lukas says. ‘That’s part of the problem.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I have my place, up in the mountains. I think we can make do there. Grow food.’

  Eve remembers Sami talking about Lukas’s parents, the accident. ‘You own it?’

  Lukas glances at her, his old antagonism briefly visible again. ‘I do.’

  Eve nods. ‘When will you go there?’

  Lukas relaxes. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But soon.’

  In the last fortnight, time becomes elastic, the days blurring into each other. One afternoon Yassamin visits, sitting with Kate through the dusk and into the night. Several times Kate wakes, and they talk, and laugh. In the days that follow the seizures come more often. Her speech is slurred, the effort of speaking making her work and strain, as Eve once did, and there are moments when she seems distracted, confused. At other times she seems just like herself, only more so. In those moments it is as if some magic trick or transformation has taken place, as if the more Kate’s body fails the more vividly she inhabits it, the presence within burning brighter, faster. Perhaps we are all just spirit, Eve thinks more than once, the body simply a vessel, something that can be pared away. Yet with each new seizure Kate gets weaker, her capacity for speech slipping away until one day they seem to stop, and instead she lies still, the only sound her breathing, until just before dawn one morning that too falls still, and quite suddenly, she is gone.

  Eve does not know how long she lies next to Kate after she realises she is gone. It is still dark outside, the wind moving in the trees. Lukas is supposed to be coming later, but there are hours between then and now she does not know how to fill. Finally she gets up, goes out to the kitchen.

  Lukas arrives mid-morning, pulling up in the drive with a box of groceries. Something in her face must tell him what has happened before she speaks, because he crosses to her, enfolds her in his arms, the gesture surprising her, seemingly surprising him.

  ‘What now?’ he asks, once he releases her, but Eve cannot answer.

  But later, with Lukas’s help, she begins the process of working out who to tell, and calls Jay, Yassamin.

  When she is done Eve walks outside. The air is hot and dirty, the smoke from the fires inland and on the mainland burning her eyes, her throat. She does not know what will happen now. Things are chaotic, not just here, but everywhere, the panic of the past months giving way to violence, fear.

  On the day before Kate’s burial she walks
a trail that used to lead through the forest to the beach. The water has already risen high enough to cover the sand and poison the trees, which stand bare and dead, their branches winding skywards.

  The tideline reeks, the stink of rotting seaweed mingling with the smell of rotting birds. But finally she rounds a headland and comes upon a small patch of bone-white sand. She gathers shells: the sculpted curve of clams, the reddish ridged coarseness of scallops, with their purplish interiors. Back in the trees she picks up lumps of ochre, and from the stiff spray of the scrub she takes the striped feather of a kookaburra and the white feather of a cockatoo.

  Back in the house, she decorates Kate’s body, tracing lines on her hands with the ochre, stringing the shells and feathers around her neck. Kate’s body has grown stiff, the skin waxen, its matter pulling back so her face seems too tight, like a mask – whatever Kate was, now fled. One by one Eve pushes the feathers into Kate’s hair, letting her hands linger on it; when she is done she ties the flowers together, just as Kate taught her on their lawn, so many years ago, and winds them around her neck. She is crying as she works.

  Lukas helps her organise the funeral. It will just be her, him, Yassamin, a handful of colleagues from the Foundation. No Jay, no Cassie, no Sami. They stand on the back lawn, wind whipping around them, the smell of smoke in the air. There is no priest or celebrant: instead they take turns speaking, stepping forward one by one. When it is Eve’s turn she finds she cannot, and instead stands, overwhelmed, until finally Lukas and Yassamin step forward and, placing an arm each around her, draw her away.

  They bury her wrapped in a blanket, lowering her into a grave dug by Lukas. As the dusty earth covers Kate’s swaddled form, slowly erasing the faded patchwork, Eve feels something give way and realises this is what grief feels like. Shock, absence, and something else. Not the wrenching pain she imagined but something deeper, less easily articulated. She feels as if she is being unmade, forgotten, her past slipping away.

  Afterwards, when the last of them have left, Eve is surprised to realise Lukas is still sitting outside in the darkness. He is smoking, the acrid stink oddly comforting.

  ‘Thank you for being here,’ she says. ‘For everything.’

  ‘I wish I’d had a chance to get to know her better,’ he says.

  Eve looks at him, surprised. ‘Thank you.’

  Lukas looks out at the tree. ‘I saw the photos of your father on the screen. You don’t look much like him. Her either.’

  She glances around. In the darkness his eyes glitter, the tip of his cigarette glowing. ‘I’m adopted.’

  Lukas smiles a strange, secret smile, his expression suddenly reminding Eve of his manner when they first met. Not for the first time Eve wonders how much he has guessed.

  ‘When I met you with Sami, I didn’t like you,’ she says.

  Lukas exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘I know.’

  ‘You didn’t like me either,’ she says.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘You don’t like anybody.’

  He laughs. ‘No. But that’s because most people aren’t worth liking.’ He drops his cigarette and grinds it into the ground with his boot. ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do now? Because you need to. We’ve been protected up until now because we’re reasonably isolated, but that won’t last. What’s happening in America and Europe and on the mainland, it’s going to start happening here as well. People are scared, the systems are failing.’

  ‘My mother arranged for me to go to the facility, stay with the Foundation. She says I’ll be safe there.’ She trails off.

  ‘But?’

  Eve shakes her head. ‘I don’t want to go. Not without her. I don’t belong there.’

  Lukas watches her. ‘You can’t stay here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You won’t be safe on your own. Not once things start getting really bad.’

  ‘Then, what?’

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘To your farm?’

  He nods.

  ‘And what will we do there?’

  ‘Try to make do. We won’t be alone: there are others up there as well.’

  She looks around. The house so familiar, yet already not. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Of course. I understand. But don’t leave it until it’s too late to decide.’

  Eve nods, but does not reply. She can feel the ground shifting beneath her.

  A week passes, then another. Eve stays in the house, alone, unspeaking. Occasionally she hears cars moving past on the road outside, once or twice she sees smoke rising on the horizon. She feels empty, hollowed out.

  In the night, she wakes. Something has woken her but she does not know what: all week she has felt time collapsing, the past bleeding into the present, the future already here. She sits up, looks around. Through the window the lights by the road have gone out. There is an audible click, and the house falls silent, the fridge spinning down. And just like that the world is over.

  The Forest

  Eve is working in the vegetable garden when she spots movement at the bottom of the hill. Pushing her trowel into the dirt, she stands up, sees a figure beneath the tree by the gate.

  Whoever it is has their back to her, but something about the way they are standing, their uneasy, feral posture is familiar. Dusting off her jeans she begins down the hill. It is quiet, the only sound that of the wind in the grass, the shifting branches of the tree, but still, she is almost upon him before he finally turns.

  She stifles a gasp. He looks older than the last time she saw him, his face gaunt, black hair shaved close to his scalp.

  ‘Sami?’

  He smiles. ‘Hi, Eve.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  He darts a look over her shoulder and shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. His right eye is bruised and blackened, and he has a raw contusion on one cheek.

  ‘I thought Lukas might be around.’

  She hesitates. There are rules about visitors. ‘Does he know you’re coming?’

  Sami folds his arms and shakes his head.

  ‘He’s out at the moment. Do you want to come in?’

  Sami glances up the drive towards the house, then nods jerkily. ‘Sure.’

  It is warm in the kitchen, the sun bright through the high window. Sami stiffens as he enters, staring at the loaf of bread sitting on the table.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asks and he nods.

  She fetches a bowl and ladles some of the soup they made the night before into it. Sami spoons it hungrily into his mouth.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asks while he eats.

  He shrugs. ‘In the city.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  He slurps down another spoonful. ‘Surviving.’

  She doesn’t reply. She has heard stories about the chaos. Lukas says martial law has been imposed, but that doesn’t mean a lot.

  ‘Is your mum here as well?’

  Eve looks away and shakes her head. ‘No.’

  Sami puts down his spoon. ‘Did something happen?’

  Eve pauses. ‘She died.’

  Sami stares at her. ‘Oh. I’m sorry. When?’

  Eve looks past him, her face impassive: she had hoped her grief was mastered but here it is, as raw and immediate as ever.

  ‘The winter before last. Just when everything was falling apart.’

  Before Sami can reply they are interrupted by the sound of the front door opening, and footsteps in the hall. A moment later Lukas appears. He greets Eve and then comes to a halt, staring at Sami.

  For a long time neither speaks. Finally Sami extends a hand. ‘Hey, man.’

  Lukas shakes his hand, his face hard.

  ‘How did you find us?’

  Sami shrugs. ‘I asked down in the town. They told me how to get up here.’

  ‘Who did you ask?’

  Sami looks vague. ‘I don’t know. Some guy with a beard.’

  Lukas turns to Eve. ‘Di
d you know he was coming?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not until now.’

  He turns back to Sami. ‘So, what brought you?’ Eve tenses at the note of aggression in his voice.

  ‘I thought I could stay for a while.’

  ‘We work here, Sami. All this—’ Lukas extends an arm, taking in the vegetables in the larder, the stove, ‘—we made it ourselves.’

  ‘I can work,’ Sami says.

  Lukas looks at him. ‘And there are no drugs.’

  Sami nods. ‘I know that. I’m clean.’

  Lukas stares at him for a few moments.

  ‘Jesus, man,’ Sami says, pulling up his sleeve. ‘Look.’

  Eve winces. Sami’s forearm and bicep are blotchy and ulcerated, the skin scarred and discoloured. But the damage is old, a legacy.

  Something quickly suppressed passes across Lukas’s face. He looks towards the back door. Eve can see he is thinking. Finally he shakes his head. ‘All right. You can sleep in the room at the back. Eve can find you some blankets.’

  Eve leads Sami to the back of the house, shows him the room. They have been using it for storage, boxes and bags and old equipment stacked along the wall. But by the other wall is a mattress, which Eve pulls down and sets out for Sami. He looks around, an assessing expression on his face. She has never pressed Lukas about what came between him and Sami. ‘Some friendships don’t last,’ is all he has ever said, although Eve knows there is something else there, some betrayal.

  ‘How many of you live here?’ he asks.

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘And Lukas is in charge?’

  ‘No. We talk about things. Make decisions together.’

  Sami snorts. ‘But it’s Lukas’s place, isn’t it? So if Lukas says no, that means no?’

  Eve hesitates, surprised by the anger in his voice, how close it is to the surface. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Then Lukas is in charge.’

  She looks away. She does not feel comfortable with this conversation, or Sami’s tone. ‘We should go outside,’ she says. ‘I have work to finish.’