‘I meant that it is not an imagined fiction. It is researched. All the characters lived and left records on tape and in data banks. There are descriptions, even pictures and police records providing detail.’
A true story. The artist’s kiss of death. The terror of publishers’ readers.
She said, ‘The flat we saw today . . .’ and trailed off, to try again. ‘I’ve written it around the Tower Boss, Billy Kovacs.’
‘You have?’ His sudden vehemence startled her. She could not see the surge of images latent, waiting for the name to release them.
The Renaissance Man from the gutter.
Loved and feared.
From a crowded hovel in a termite heap ruling an immured nation of 70,000 suffering ghosts.
Teaching himself from old books while children screamed and scampered around his feet.
Fighting for – for what? – For some decency and order while the ocean rose?
A symbol.
‘Where is it?’ She found herself facing a man lost in a need. ‘Give it to me!’
Back in his room his preparation amounted to no more than kicking off his dress shoes and piling cushions on the bed to prop himself for reading. A small voice at the back of his mind suggested that he had been overbearing, discourteous and precipitate in rushing off with his prize, but surely the woman understood devotion to an idea. Hadn’t she spent twelve years on hers? In any case, said a more urgent mental voice, he had the book and could deal with hurt feelings later.
It was on a recorder block no larger than his palm which meant, presumably, that it was in final draft; he might have arrived just in time to intercept it. He slipped the block into its vent under the screen, took up the remote control, settled himself on the bed and set the scanner operating. The screen turned black and the first dull yellow letters appeared:
The Sea and Summer
A Historical Reconstruction
by
Lenna Williams
No parade of doctoral honorifics. He flicked off the title page and a cluster of Acknowledgments, passed quickly over the Contents – mainly uninformative proper names – steadied the first page of text in the frame and enlarged the image until at five meters he could read easily.
He was a thoughtful reader rather than a fast one, a visualizer who might take a full day over a playscript, creating each scene and movement as the dialogue set the author’s dummies in motion. A novel was, to him, a playscript with more explicit stage directions.
The first short chapter was atmospheric stuff, nice enough as an introduction, a lulling of the reader into a specific receptivity. In dramatic form it would disappear altogether, replaced by lighting, music and subliminals.
The second chapter got smartly down to business. He recognized a screen-based technique at work, selective rather than consecutive. It seemed very simply presented . . .
. . . until he came without warning upon an attitude of mind, unheralded and unexplained, which balked his immediate perception. He thought about it. It’s no use saying we don’t have social distinctions, because we do, but they tend to be lateral rather than vertical, a partitioning-off of equals. This Sweet/Swill cleavage is hard to take, too final, too artificial. But it seems central to the Greenhouse Culture.
It made better sense when he came upon mention of the Fringe, the interface between the lordly and the lorded over. The Fringe did not figure in the popular folklore which concentrated on the savageries of the cleavage. Audiences, he admitted sourly, like their subtleties simplified; they demand intellection without the need for thought.
He rolled off the bed to hunt for the pens and pad which should be in supply, found them in a desk which unfolded from the wall, returned to the bed and made a note: How did this division arise? Why no revolution?
He read very slowly for two hours, making several pages of questions for Lenna. At this snail pace he would occupy two days ingesting this novel of ordinary length, stopping and starting and at length visualizing in enormous detail.
As his concentration flickered, he switched off. Visualization was the hurdle; he must study archive pictures of the Fringe houses, assuming they existed, obtain accurate details of dress and re-examine those decrepit towers at close range, perhaps dive to street level. Only with a grasp of background could he make Kovacs move amid the heaving squalor and latent violence of his time.
THE SEA AND SUMMER
1
1
Alison Conway
AD 2061
When I was a little girl going to Kindergarten we had the annual glories of the sea and summer. We brats – at that age we are all brats with angel smiles hiding the designs of demons – paddled from the beach at Elwood while the sun showered down bright splinters on the blue-green bay.
Summer! Paradisal time of cold drinks and coloured salads, skimpy frocks and games under the garden hose, days at the seaside with sunburn and jellyfish, sand and seaweed and lush wavelets of cuddling water. Playtime without end!
Yet every year there was an end called winter with lead-heavy clouds and storms on the bay, long woollies and cold mornings, rain on window panes and the fear that summer might not return.
Summer always returned. It was winter that faded imperceptibly from the around of the planet’s seasons while magical summer grew humid and threatening and tropically wet. There were mild winters, then warmish winters, then short winters that merged into extended autumns without any real winter at all. Sleet and hail and frost became memories of ‘the old days’ and their occasional freak appearances disturbed us, menacing the new order of perpetual summer, perpetual holiday.
Lovely changes came to our gardens as plants were tricked by the falsehoods of the weather and some grew to extraordinary sizes. Roses like sunflowers, dandelions half a meter tall, pansies like velvet plates! It’s the extra CO2 explained the neighbourhood know alls, it feeds some plants but it kills others. Which others? We saw no others; they had died off and gone away. They explained, too, that the CO2 was a farming disaster, that the wheat belt was shifting south and being crammed against the coast and the old wheat belt was already a dust bowl, forcing whole populations to move and leave ghost towns whispering in an empty countryside.
Didn’t they know it would happen? Oh, yes, ‘they’ knew; back in the 1980s ‘they’ were warned but ‘they’ were busy. ‘They’ had the nuclear threat and the world population pressure and the world starvation problem and the terrorist outbreaks and the strikes and the corruption in high places shaking hands with crime in low places, and the endless business of simply trying to stay in power – all to be attended to urgently. They weren’t attended to; ‘they’ tried but the troubles were too big, too well entrenched to be amenable to sense or force – and the emerging troubles of the next decade had to be left until there was time, until feasibility studies could be made, the problems seen in proper context, the finance found . . .
Suddenly the next decade was here, with urgent new disasters and no sign of containment of the old. It couldn’t all be blamed on the CO2 but the saturation level surely helped. Helped us on down to misery and want.
How wonderful it would be now to wake one morning to a near-zero temperature and a wind of winter heralding the old world’s return.
Instead we have the sea and summer. The sea is rising over the beaches of the world; the coastal cities face death by drowning. Day by day the water advances up the streets from the shores and rivers; our placid old Yarra was long ago forced over its banks by the rising tides. The coast roads have vanished and the lower floors of the tenements are uninhabitable.
The aging woman has what the child desired – the sea and eternal summer.
2
Francis Conway
AD 2041–2044
1
In 2041 the population of the planet passed the 10 billion mark. My life has been determined by the webs and progressions of numbers and this one impressed itself on me because it had been reached a decade earlier than the pred
ictors hoped, and because it was sufficiently frightening for the how and why to be discussed by my parents, and probably by whole nations uneasily aware of their world closing in on them. But the how and why were beyond me and anyhow irrelevant to a six-year-old’s concerns.
Teddy, three years older, pretended understanding, but Teddy always pretended understanding and I didn’t believe him. As things turned out I should have paid more attention to his boasting.
Aside from my sixth birthday (birthdays were major events then) and my first sight of the sea (something of a non-event) the marker memory of that year is the shame put on me at school when the single talent that distinguished me from others was derided and shown to be a waste, a nothing. More of that in its right place; it had much to do with shaping my life.
But first the non-event, the sea which meant so little then but is now the hungry maw on whose lip we teeter.
2041 was a golden year. Dad would say that things had never been worse, that the whole damned human race was drifting to destruction, but Six-Year-Old had only to see sunlight on the grass to know that this was Dad talks, just as complaint about the meat ration was Mum talk.
These complaints were mysteries, anomalies, for Mum was all fun and laughter and Dad had a job and all was right with the world. Dad had a job . . . so we were Sweet. Not Big Sweet, only a sort of Middle Sweet, but certainly not Swill. Nobody knows how and when those two words twisted themselves into the language. We kids were born to the knowledge that Sweet had jobs and income while Swill lived on State charity. Even servants could look down on Swill. Actually, very few Sweet kids of the day had ever seen a Swill person; the ghetto lines were firmly drawn by the time we arrived. Nine of every ten of Australia’s population were Swill and many other countries were in worse case. Living familiarly with such knowledge, the horror of it passed us by; it was the normal condition of the world.
Swill was only a word. Reality was our life, secure against fate. We had our own four-roomed house on our own standard block, with two meters of lawn strip in front and three meters of backyard and a share in the community satellite dish. We were the equals of any in our district and more equal than most because Dad owned a car.
Battery hovercraft, or indeed any modern private transport might be owned only by Very Big Sweet, but Dad was a member of Vintagers and loved the Old Bomb he had inherited from his own father, who had loved it for forty years before that. (In Grandfather’s time, Dad said, everybody had a car. It’s hard to imagine.) It was an expensive love. He spent most of his spare time tuning the engine, polishing the ‘duco’ or searching the hobby markets for parts; it was a 1986 model and one of only a few hundred petrol burners in the whole country. He drove it only once a month because petrol was unobtainable on the open market and he paid a lover’s price for contraband; also, there was only one place in Melbourne where tires could be laboriously retreaded and none where they could be bought. Mum grudged the cost of that monthly outing but enjoyed the little edge of superiority over the next-doors.
On my birthday I was allowed the choice of where to go on our outing and this year I, no doubt with some recent triv program in mind, demanded a trip to the beach. Nobody showed enthusiasm and Teddy said with weary condescension, ‘There isn’t any beach.’
For once I knew better. ‘I’ve seen it on the triv!’
‘That’s some other place. There isn’t any on Port Phillip.’
Dad interfered. ‘It’s Francis’ choice and we’ll go to the bay.’ He didn’t seem to look forward to it.
Teddy decided to stay home. ‘There’s nothing to see. I’ve been there. I know.’ He went through his routine of removing his attention but we knew that he would change his mind, boredly pandering to a younger brother’s whim. I wasn’t big enough to risk hitting him.
Usually our trips took us to the Dandenong Range at the city’s edge, where from the middle slopes we could see its whole huge sprawl without at all comprehending the intensity of life and movement concealed in the concrete canyons. The various Swill Enclaves were easily visible, grim high-rise blocks towering over all the rest, ten close-packed groups of monoliths snuffling blunt snouts at the sky. I did not wonder then how nine-tenths of the city’s 10 millions could be squeezed into one-tenth of its area.
On this day Dad drove in the opposite direction. Road surfaces were still reasonably good in Sweet suburbs and we arrived at the bay quite soon. I saw why we had not come here before; as Teddy had said, there was no beach.
The triv plays often showed beaches with yellow sand sloping to brilliant blue water and children playing while their parents lay in the sun or under bright awnings. On the water there would be yachts with coloured sails and swimmers in the gentle swells.
What I saw was a street of houses like our own, save that one side of the street was simply a concrete wall stretching out of sight in both directions. Dad pointed to steps that led to the top of the wall and I got out of the car while Teddy sniggered. The wall was about two meters thick at the top and on the water side it sloped down and out about twice as far; it was a rampart. At the foot of it lay a meter or so of wet, greyish sand amid rocks and gravelly shingle and filthy mats of seaweed. Beyond these, the sea.
In the distance the water was blue but at the shoreline it was grey and unpleasant-looking and choked with more of the seaweed, which writhed in the tide like something not quite dead. And it smelled. Disappointment was too great; I cried out my anger to the sky: ‘It stinks!’
Behind me Teddy said, ‘Like a blocked sewer.’
It wasn’t that bad, only a whiff really, but sewers were part of it. Dad and Mum had come up, Dad patting and stroking as he did when things were too wrong to put right. ‘I’m sorry, lad, but it was best to let you see.’
A streak of obstinacy in me persisted, ‘But there are beaches. On the triv.’
‘On the triv,’ he agreed, ‘but not near the big cities. The nearest decent beach is two hours away.’ He wouldn’t admit it, but the car couldn’t be trusted so far.
Mum surprised me by saying, ‘This is Elwood and there was a beach here once. I used to paddle here. Then the water came up and there were the storm years and the pollution, and the water became too filthy . . .’ She broke off, realizing that I didn’t grasp any of this but Teddy followed on as if he knew all about it, ‘It’s the Greenhouse effect.’
‘Only partly,’ Dad corrected him. He always corrected Teddy as if it were important that he get things exactly right, as if he were someone special. ‘The global temperature hasn’t risen enough yet to cause all this, though the Antarctic ice cap has begun to melt and the sea level has risen very slightly, but changes in the weather pattern have laid us open to tremendous storms.’ He lost track of what he was saying, and one thing led to another. ‘I remember when the worst storm would only wash a few waves across the road. We didn’t need an embankment. And there was a beach . . .’
I could always remember what I didn’t understand and recall it later to fit in with new knowledge; I could remember absolutely accurately if it seemed worth the effort. I still can. Numbers and memory have been my salvation and downfall.
Dad recovered briskly. ‘One day the ice cap will melt completely and all the coasts of the world will drown. Most of Melbourne will go under sixty meters of water.’ He said it like a comment on something that didn’t affect him. I did not understand but it sounded huge and memorable. I remembered.
‘Not in our time.’ That was Teddy, sure as ever.
That phrase haunts all our lives. It has been the cry of the people and of their politicians as well as of scientists who calculated the imminence of disaster and then sought reasons why it should not happen just yet. Refusal to believe is our surety that disaster cannot happen – at any rate, not today. And, every time, it does.
It was left for Mum to say, ‘It must be terrible over there in Newport when the river floods.’ Dad grimaced because the Swill Enclaves were not much mentioned in polite society; you knew of them and
that was enough. But Mum went on, ‘A high tide covers the ground levels of the tenements.’
She sounded sorry for the Swill and Dad said, ‘Please, Allie,’ in his that’s enough voice.
Across the bay I could see the Newport towers, though not too clearly in the heat shimmer, three kilometers of gray obelisks. Teddy wondered aloud what the Swill would do when the water rose over their heads but Dad had declared the subject closed and would not answer. Perhaps he had no answer.
I tried to imagine the towers peeking through sixty meters of smelly water and millions of washed-out Swill swimming like mad, though I didn’t really know what Swill looked like. Like us, I supposed, only ugly and dirty as in a triv play.
After that we went to the hills and had iced cakes and fruit drinks and watched performing animals at an Entertainment Center and the birthday was saved. But the disappointing sea stayed with me as the reality behind a joyous myth – and later as destiny biding its terrible time.
2
I did not like Teddy but neither did I positively hate him. He drove me to fits of helpless temper, but they passed. We ‘got on.’ I think that he didn’t bother to dislike me then, only saw me as a cross to be borne, a trial to his nine-year-old serenity. The worst of him from my point of view was his determination to monopolize Mum, to establish ownership. Dad he left to me; Teddy’s unsentimental eye perceived weakness there before I did. I was welcome to the Old Man.
He was an engineering draftsman, a designer of machine components, on a computer screen. Today it is hard to imagine such work being left to human fallibility but it was so. The occupation was classified as medium skilled and chances of promotion were slim but, as Dad put it, with 90 percent of the nation – in fact, of the world – unemployed, it wouldn’t pay to raise your sights too high. Memory of him had dimmed. I recall only a balding, worried man who made time to be a loving friend to me.
The Sea and Summer Page 3
