Out of Time

by John Marsden

  At home Ellie was getting wheezy and went onto her pump for a while. Watching Ellie’s face buried in the mask and the steam made James nervous. He went outside and took a few desultory shots at the hoop with the basketball, interrupting himself only to throw the ball at the cat when it stalked past, tail arrogantly aloft. He mooned about for twenty minutes or so, then wandered back into the house. He found Ellie more settled, and reading. James began to make himself a sandwich.

  ‘What are you reading?’ he demanded.

  ‘Unfinished Tales,’ she answered, still focusing on the book.

  ‘Read me some,’ he said.

  She now paid him more attention. ‘You want me to read you some?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, as he spread marmalade onto the bread.

  ‘From the start?’ she asked, rifling back through the pages.

  He knew she loved reading to an audience. ‘No, just anywhere,’ he said. ‘Wherever you’re up to.’

  He sat at the breakfast bar as she started to read. ‘ “They were travelling through Nailwood,” ’ she began. She paused a moment to establish her breathing. ‘ “Ahead of them were three riders, but as the road began to twist into the uplands the riders were quickly lost to view. Sidetracks tempted them with soft green turf, but when Naomi tried to edge off onto one of the tracks it writhed and hissed, and the green turned into the mottled brown and yellow back of a serpent. She leapt back quickly onto the main path.”’

  ‘Holy gooby,’ said James. ‘What kind of a book is this?’

  ‘It’s a strange one,’ said Ellie. She looked at him steadily, without a smile.

  ‘It sure is,’ said James. ‘I’d like to see them make a movie of it. OK, keep reading.’

  ‘ “Creepers occasionally scratched lightly past their bodies. Naomi was startled by their teeth, and by their eyes. They had dozens of eyes, of differing sizes, spaced evenly along their length, and when one blinked, they all blinked. Caught in many of their teeth were threads of clothing, strands from earlier travellers.

  ‘ “The higher the track climbed, the mushier it became. Puddles of mustard-brown water formed in the flatter sections; they sucked and steamed whenever a foot came close to them. At one point the travellers had to walk through a cloud of insects: big black slow-moving winged creatures the size of small birds. Naomi covered her face grimly and battled on.

  ‘ “The end came unexpectedly. The track widened onto a pasture. The wind shuddered around the small, rocky expanse and trees teetered at its edges. As they arrived a tree lost its last grip and fell a thousand metres, onto a huge pile of bleached tree bones at the foot of the cliff. So far was its fall that they heard no sound of its impact.

  ‘ “The further they moved onto the plateau the more they realised that it was eroding constantly. Rocks slipped and tumbled from its sides, trees toppled with ghastly sighs down the cliff faces, powdered earth blew from the rocky surface.

  ‘ “In the centre of this plain of constant movement was a still eye. Three white gravestones stood there: dull, cracked, worn, but firm and straight. The travellers struggled towards them. The sky moved and groaned. Naomi’s face was grey with knowledge. She bent and read the first one, then the second, then the third. She stepped back. ‘What do they say?’ her companions asked. ‘I can’t tell,’ Naomi answered, ‘what they say. The words keep changing. The first one was either. . . I don’t know. . . either “Greed” or “Grief”. The second one. . . either “Ignorance” or “Innocence”, and the third one. . . I can’t tell. . . perhaps “Hate”. Or perhaps “Hope”.

  ‘ “The three stood helplessly in the listening air. Minutes passed. Then Naomi noticed a small bush at the crumbling edge of the plateau. Its small white flowers trembled as the roots of the bush were exposed by the scattering soil and dropping rocks. Naomi ran to it and repacked stones and dirt around it, making the bush secure. At last, having succeeded in her self-appointed task, she stood up. Amazingly, it took her a moment to notice that everything had changed.” ’

  Ellie seemed to have paused.

  ‘Everything had changed?’ James repeated.

  ‘That’s all there is,’ Ellie said.

  ‘That’s all there is?’

  ‘Yes.’ Ellie showed him the blank page in the book. James raised his eyes and corrugated his forehead.

  ‘What kind of book is that?’ he asked again.

  ‘Well,’ Ellie said. ‘It’s full of these little stories and they all seem to link together but I’m not sure how, or what they mean. For instance, the one before this was about a city where everybody lives in parks and they go into houses to play. But then people start to demolish the houses. So Naomi and her friends take the timber and plant it in the ground and water it until it grows back into trees.’

  ‘Gee,’ said James. ‘Full of opposites.’

  A car came up the driveway and James stood and peered out the window.

  ‘Dad,’ he said. Ellie closed the book and took it to her room. James went into the rumpus room and turned on the TV.

  *

  FEELING HANDS UNDER her armpits, hard hands that dug in and poked her, the girl squirmed and opened her eyes. The daylight hurt her eyes so she closed them again. Then the pain of her leg engulfed all other pain: it swept her away on a private river, until she was aware of nothing else.

  When next she was conscious of the world she found herself in a bed, a hospital bed, with a nurse standing over her. The nurse was mouthing words. The girl could hear the sound of a voice but could not make out any of the words. With the weight of a hundred years on her eyelids she wearily slipped back into sleep.

  JAMES SAT ON a wall, watching a group of off duty military men. They formed a circle around an area covered with old bricks and building material. Armed with crowbars they were levering rubble away, flushing out the rats who had been harbouring there for many months. From time to time, as a rock was prised away, there was a storm of wild movement: a rat with nose pointed forward and fur flattened dashed through the cordon. About a third of them got away but most were smashed to a halt under the heavy blows of the bars. Some died in a silent thud, some died in a squealing threshing of broken legs and bloody squirming.

  James did not know what to think. He hated and feared the rats. Whenever he saw one scurrying around the ground, with its curious mixture of arrogance and furtiveness, he felt sick, and would shake for a long time. But the wild killing of the creatures frightened him too. They were too big for such slaughter.

  Another rat was rolling in the dust while men, with excited cheers, struck it. James ran from the spot. He zigzagged through some tired weedy-looking trees and then made his way among a few older buildings, until he was at Mr Woodforde’s lab. The door was closed and barred, with a padlock through the clasp. The padlock was large and looked strong but when James poked at it he saw that it was a trick: the two parts were joined together but not locked. He opened it, took it off, then opened the door and went in.

  The room was dull and dusty. Though few of Mr Woodforde’s possessions remained, nothing new had been added. The impression was one of emptiness, bareness, and cobwebs. James circled the room gingerly, his heart beating a little faster and a little louder. He ran a finger through dust, liking the line it left but uncertain of how to finish the design he had started.

  Reaching the front desk where Mr Woodforde had done most of his work, James pulled out his old stool and sat on it. He gazed around him. It was like being at the museum and seeing the skeleton of a dinosaur. This room was the bones of a life, the dead outline of something that once had flesh, movement, a lively eye. James had been told in Social Studies of the tribute to Christopher Wren, written over the door of St Paul’s Cathedral: ‘If you would see his monument, look around.’ He remembered it now, and sighed. There was no monument here, perhaps no monument anywhere to his friend. It occurred to him that he did not even know where the scientist was buried. In the dust he wrote: ‘I am James, I am me.’ There was a mirror on
the wall, which he went and gazed into for several long minutes, until his face grew unfamiliar to him. He began to think that if he stayed there long enough he would see Mr Woodforde’s face looking back at him from the mirror. He drew away nervously, but a little reluctantly.

  On his way out of the lab James paused to examine the noticeboard near the window, where Mr Woodforde had pinned various notes and reminders. Nothing much was left on it now except a calendar, a yellowing memo from the Security Department about night-time movement around the Centre, and a newspaper photograph of a one-legged high jumper. The calendar was three years out of date but James took it down anyway and thumbed through it, for the sake of seeing Mr Woodforde’s handwriting again. Sure enough there were occasional notations on it: a dental appointment, a committee meeting, a lecture by a man named Tipier. James finished his desultory scanning and prepared to pin the calendar up again, but as he did so something on the back of it caught his eye. He turned it over and read with pleasure the familiar writing:

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

  James set off slowly for his house, closing the lab door behind him. His mind was crowded with images: the rats, the bare room, the poem. He was confused.

  GILES GREW SLOWLY in the suburb of Elmo. His father was an accountant and his mother a kindergarten teacher. His first memory was of a tree, in the garden across the road, being struck by lightning. It was a vicious storm. Giles heard the thunder ripping apart the sky but did not know until the next morning that the tree had been split. He went across the road and fingered the burnt trunk in wonder. Uneasy thoughts came to him and he returned home to find his blanket.

  His blanket was pink and had a name. It was called Zella, though no-one knew where the name was from. The blanket had been Giles’ companion and solace for a long time. He was so attached to it that it was wearing away: it had become dirty and torn. Every time his parents had washed Zella Giles had made a scene, until eventually they cut the blanket in two. Then, while one half was being washed, Giles could comfort himself with the other half. He hugged it and held it and dragged it behind him.

  Many things defined Giles. His build, for instance, his appearance. At nine he was a metre sixteen tall, which was small for his age. One doctor said he was a ‘failure to thrive’ kid. He had brown hair and hazel eyes and was a good-looking child: not an arresting face but a pleasant one. There was an alertness about him that suggested intelligence. He was a Gemini; his hobbies were playing pool, collecting keys, reading and swimming. He liked computers. When he grew up he wanted to be an engineer or a sports commentator or an Air Force pilot.

  He loved his dog, Choof, a sort of shocked-looking terrier. He loved, he supposed, his parents, yet there were things he said and did that made it seem he might not like them very much. He had no brothers or sisters. Both his grandfathers were dead, and one of his grandmothers. The other grandmother lived nearby; she was a formal, well-mannered lady who did not converse easily. She spent a lot of time watching current affairs programs on television.

  Apart from his blanket, which became less important to him as he grew older, Giles’ favourite possessions were a painted egg that had belonged to his grandfather, a wounded Teddy Bear named Jed and a pair of bookends. He had bought the bookends with his own money at a fete. Each bore a figure, which appeared to be reaching towards the other through the books.

  At school Giles’ best subjects were Maths and Sport, though he also liked Cooking, which they did every second Tuesday. He was learning to play piano and had passed his Grade One exams. His best friends were Hamish Woodholme and Ben Jefferson and Georgie Hatcher. His teacher was Mrs Collinson: Giles thought she was all right.

  Giles didn’t think about God much, taking it for granted that He existed. He thought about a lot of other things though. He wished he would be elected as a kind of world President who could get everyone to stop fighting and restore the planet to the best possible condition. But he got really bored and annoyed by politicians on TV. He wondered if his parents were really his parents, or if he might have been adopted when he was a baby. He wondered when he’d reach puberty and if he’d have pimples and if he’d be big and tough. He imagined he was the world’s best skateboarder, doing handplants and McTwists in front of huge crowds. When he crossed roads at traffic lights he pretended he was a racehorse, and so were all the other pedestrians, and they were racing to be first to the other side, and he usually won, except when he was with his mother or someone he knew, and then he couldn’t play that game.

  When eating licorice allsorts Giles always took them apart, layer by layer, and ate the licorice first, so he could enjoy the candy parts without black interruptions.

  The deepest, biggest thought in Giles, however, was something so bleak and frightening that he could never look at it. He knew it was there: always there. Like his dreams, like his doubts, like his lies, it occupied a large part of him. It was a sense of being incomplete, of there being something missing. It yawned inside him, gaping most hungrily when he was alone or tired or cold or scared, but always there.

  Giles didn’t understand. He never understood, even when he saw the photograph of the two babies, even when he found a birth certificate with a strange boy’s name on it and a photocopy of another birth certificate with it. He didn’t understand why the certificates bore his own birthdate. He didn’t understand how the two babies could be the children of the same parents.

  Giles kept telling himself that it didn’t matter, that it was nothing, that he’d ask about it some day. He never did ask and he never quite understood.

  GISELLE GREW AND grew in the small coastal town of Casterton. She moved quickly through the events of each day, gobbling one before rushing to another. Nothing seemed to satisfy her. She roamed through the moments: as she stood in one her eyes were looking for the next.

  She played games with her shadow. She tried to jump away so quickly that she and it would be separated for an instant, perhaps longer. She sidled into the shade of buildings, watching her shadow being gradually taken from her. Walking down the street she would spin suddenly around, hoping to catch her shadow by surprise as it tried to slip away.

  Giselle liked some of her parents’ old music, like Simon and Garfunkel, and the Beatles, and the Supremes. She wished they hadn’t all broken up. Giselle played piano and had passed her Grade Two exams: and she went to Jazz Ballet on Wednesdays after school. As well as music she liked Maths and Sport and the few Science lessons that they had.

  Although Giselle had no sisters or brothers she had a family of her own. This consisted of Tatlow, a large round toy echidna; Stocky, a purple hippopotamus who was coming apart at the seams; Loretta, a Barbie doll; an injured Teddy Bear named Jed, who looked disgruntled and had been degrunted; Louisa McKnight, a nineteenth century doll of Giselle’s mother’s; and Chippy, a black and white elephant. Each night Giselle had to choose which of her family could fit into bed with her: there was only room for one. She was scrupulously fair, making sure they took it in turn, though deep in her heart she knew she liked Jed best.

  Giselle’s father was an agent for a fishing co-op: her mother was a pharmacist. Her parents were strict churchgoers so Giselle had to go too. She believed in God but wished worshipping Him wasn’t so boring. The hour spent sitting still each Sunday was a torment to her.

  For all her quickness of movement Giselle had a thoughtful face. Deep in her hazel eyes something sad and serious hid. Her hair, cut short, was brown, but in summer the same sun that tanned her skin bleached her hair, so that the darker became the lighter. It was astonishing that she stayed still long enough for the sun’s rays to strike her but they somehow did find her and darken her.

  What did Giselle think about behind those thoughtful, frightened eyes? She thought about her friends, Kate Nash, Sarah Scott, Nick Gibbons. She thought about how badly she
wanted a horse, a dog and a cat, in that order. She thought about becoming Prime Minister, about whether she was maybe adopted or not, about what would happen if she found out she had leukaemia and the doctors gave her six months to live, about what would happen if her parents got killed in a car accident. She wondered when her breasts would grow, and how big they would be, and whether having her period would be good or bad. She dreamed about going on television and how proud everyone would be to know her.

  When she crossed roads at intersections Giselle pretended that she was a horse in an important race, competing with the other pedestrians to be first to the other side. She usually won, except when she was with her parents or people she knew, and then she couldn’t do it.

  The deepest, biggest thought in Giselle, however, was something so bleak and frightening that she could never look at it. She knew it was there though, always there, like her dreams, like her doubts, like her lies. It occupied a large part of her. It was a sense of being incomplete, of there being something missing. It yawned inside her, gaping most hungrily when she was alone or tired or cold or scared, but always there.

  Giselle didn’t understand. She never understood, even when her mother one day at breakfast, talking about Giselle’s ears, which stuck out, said, ‘But your brother’s were the same.’ Her mother went red and quickly began clearing the table. Giselle went red and pretended she hadn’t heard. Though she never understood, she carried a secret knowledge in her heart always. The knowledge fed on the hunger and the hunger fed on the knowledge.