The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  Between these events—these leisurely minutes of come and come on, and go, and gone—hours can pass, lit only by the glow from the walkway outside, travelled only by Vanessa’s perfectly circular thoughts spiraling on towards dawn

  A bright fog descends, sunlit, an old family movie with only patchy sound. Sometimes it rushes, sometimes it freezes, mis-catching on the spinning spokes that play it. It closes Vanessa in, hollows out the earth underneath her. She’s very stiff; she doesn’t want to move, not until Tash moves. Through all the Oh God Tash Tash Say something Tash and Don’t touch her! and people running and sand kicking up into the sunlight, and the lifeguards, and Brett dashing for the phone box—through all that, she stands watching, hugging herself and the fog hugging her. Every detail burns itself into her brain—the faded tag sticking up at the back of Dan’s T-shirt collar as he bends over motionless Tash; Tash’s eyelids fluttering and her eyes looking out, trying to put it all together from a very long way away; a crumpled Sunny Boy tetrapak, worn and bleached, wedged into a crack of the wall. She picks up Tash’s green thong from the concrete, where it dropped when Tash fell; it seems like the only thing she can do to help

  The escarpment—scrubby on the lower slopes, bare on the upper ones, scrubby again along the rim—hides all the country to the north. Southward the saltbush and bluebush speckle the flat spread of dull-orange ground; eventually, out of sight but not too far beyond that, the country drops in sheer cliffs to the Bight. Famous cliffs, they are, although Vanessa had never heard of them before she came here

  Dave drove all the roadhouse girls there in his ute once. It was something he thought that Maertje should “have a look-see of,” being a tourist

  Along the way they saw trees—“Actual trees!” crowed Nora beside Vanessa—a few thin-legged things throwing feeble shade over a grayed caravan, a dead fireplace. A dogger’s camp, said Dave. The dogger had gone to Norseman; one of his wife’s relatives had died

  The scrub went on as before, and they arrived above the sea. The dust of their driving floated off the cliff top, pale against the blue-green ocean and its trailing dabs of cream. After all the weeks of baked-hard land, of blazed-clean sky, the sea was a breathing thing—it almost mused, full of mysterious depths

  Maertje peered along the cliffs. “Broken off like a cookie.”

  “Like a biscuit,” said Nora. “We say ‘biscuit’ here, not cookie. You and your crazy Yank English lessons.”

  Maertje and Nora took pictures of the cliffs east and west, then made the group stand together for a photo with the western cliffs angling out into the Bight behind them. “Like a tour group!” said Nora, and everyone made the right faces and was boisterous for the cameras. Then there was nothing left to do: look at an indigo horizon instead of a scrubby orange one, kick a pebble off the cliff, lean on the ute bonnet. Some joke of Nora’s set Dave off on one of his long, unhurried stories, this one about a feral cat that wouldn’t die; behind his dry delivery, his cobbled-together not-sentences, Vanessa heard his whole life in huge landscapes like this, hardly any people and all of them a bit mad from the emptiness. Plenty of room here for madness to flap around in

  Vanessa felt more foreign even than Maertje. The girls laughed and bowed around Dave, hardly believing the awfulness of the staggering staved-in-headed cat. Dave kept on delivering, pleased and embarrassed together, near motionless, elbows hooked back on the tray side. Vanessa smiled to show she wasn’t a snob, or in a mood, or in a hurry to go. It was a good story. She could picture a different Vanessa, a truly lucky Vanessa, carrying it into her future and retelling it, and people laughing, her unimaginable friends

  “Can you believe that guy?’ Nora said when Dave dropped them back at the roadhouse. “You can see how much he loves this place.”

  Vanessa loves it too, but only for what it’s not. Everything, she can pretend, is wiped off the slate. There’s only the one shelter in the entire landscape, if you don’t know about the dogger’s van; there’s only the one possible livelihood, and everything is spelt out in the chores list. There’s the desert up there, then this shelf of scrubland, and away down south the sea. The world skims at you along the highway, manageable parcels of it. It stands around for a while stretching its legs, refreshing itself, marveling at the absence of everything, then climbs into its vehicle and beetles away

  The ambulance glides down the ramp and sits there flashing; a crowd gathers. What happened? She fell off the wall. Everyone’s voices are foggy. The ambulance officers—she loves them. They wear crisp uniforms, they’re paid to be grown-up, they know what they’re doing, they’ll fix things. Natasha? they say, Tash? They speak conversationally, as if they’ve known her for years. Wriggle your toes, they tell her. Squeeze my hand.

  I am, Tash says through her teeth. I’m squeezing. But she isn’t; Vanessa can see her hand in the officer’s and it’s not moving. Vanessa presses her hipbones against the wall above, hugging the thong, watching. If she pays attention to all these details she’s collecting, gathers the full picture, she might be able to reach in and change it, like editing a movie. She doesn’t blink through the whole thing. Clare has an arm around her—it’s just what she needs, but it’s also a cold weight, a terrible necessity. Clare doesn’t know yet, none of them know. They don’t know to feel so terribly awkward around Vanessa. They don’t know yet that they should cast her out. That’ll all come later. No one will say anything, of course, no one will mean to be mean. It’ll just happen that way, that she’ll find herself alone

  She knows about the other light, too—without noticing, without worrying or understanding or caring very much. How often has she seen it? Maybe she dreams it, and dreams its recurring-ness, too

  It’s never surprised her, this different light. Yellower, brighter than car lights, it throws a larger, softer-edged rectangle onto the wardrobe—so it must be closer, no? Does that matter? It doesn’t follow the same path as the others; it moves as if something’s veered off the highway and is bashing about in the scrub for the way back

  She welcomes it, even, maybe. Every time she sees it, it leads into a dream that ought to be a nightmare, but isn’t. The landscape ought to be daubed and shuddering with anxiety, but instead it sits back patiently while the gnarled giant carries his lamp about searching for his sheep; while the lost family in the car, the kids clinging wide-eyed to their parents’ seatbacks, throw frantic advice, the scrub rearing into the beams, roos bounding across; while Tony and his team from the city, with their special elaborate mobile light from HQ, cast about grim-faced for a body; while a great golden eye peers and peers, seeking something more to alight on than saltbush, than bluebush, than dust

  “In the bar, of a night,” Kim said, trying to unlock Vanessa’s room, “first drink’s free but you pay for any after.” She swapped keys and tried again

  “I don’t drink,” said Vanessa, still dazed from the bus trip, from arriving here, from the emptying-out of the world. She heard Mum’s sigh of relief in her head; she realized, then, that this was why Mum sent her away: so that she could say that, and hear it as her own words, not Mum speaking through her

  “My God,” Kim said. “There’ll be bugger-all for you to do in your off-time.” And she stepped into the hot-box of the room, threw the folded sheets onto one of the two beds, pushed the key at Vanessa and left

  A broom stood in the corner, and the floor crunched underfoot. So as not to just lie down on the unmade bed and pass out, Vanessa swept. The bed was low, and she had to get down on her knees to reach right back under it. Modest spiderwebs bridged three of the corners between the bed-legs and the base, and in each sat a small black spider with a clear dab of red on its back. She blew on the nearest one; it scrambled in its web like a fist assembling, then stilled. She would leave them there, she decided

  She swept the dirt over the doorsill, moved her case onto the floor and shook out one of the sheets. It had a small hole in it; it was a cast-off from the Smoking rooms in the motel. Grabby from being wa
shed in bore water, it smelt strong and sweetly of detergent with an overlay of rotten eggs. She flung it over the sad bed and began to straighten and smooth

  Libby brings the other thong up from the sand, following the ambulance officers and their trolley, with Tash on the trolley neck-braced and blanketed

  She gives the thong to Vanessa; someone else brings Tash’s beach bag, with the towel slopped through the bamboo handle. Vanessa takes these brightly colored items and hugs them. Let them not be relics; let Tash use them again

  “This is her sister.” Tash’s mates push Vanessa forward at the ambos

  “You better come too, love. Hop in the front,” says the officer, backing past Tash’s sandy foot-soles into the complicated room of the van

  Vanessa amazes herself, dealing with the door handle, climbing in, strapping herself to the seat. She’s a wonder of self-propulsion and coordination. The driver gets in opposite, gives her a small serious smile that tells her: This won’t be all right. Quiet, incomprehensible murmurs and tinkering happen in the back. They move off as smoothly as a limousine. Vanessa stares straight ahead at the dodging holiday-makers, at the picnickers, at the world she’s leaving behind

  She’s been in that ambulance ever since, really, its slow quiet glide, her sister in the back silent, being attended to, everything bright beyond the glass, and the weight of her own foolishness on her shoulders, bearing down, crushing

  Drinking used to be fun, part of the great joke of life. She and her mates did it, and it only made the girls more dazed and pretty, the boys more recklessly handsome. It brought them closer as a group; they propped each other up, helped each other home if they’d had too much, told the stories afterwards. She heard of bad things happening because of drink, but none of her mates ever really lost it and hurt themselves. Everyone came back fresh as daisies next day. Or looked a little more tousled, a little paler, held their head and groaned to get a laugh. Then someone gave them a couple of Panadol and they were okay

  But Joe and some of the others who work at and visit the roadhouse, some of them are really old and still grogging on hard, and she sees how un-pretty it is, clearly and coldly through her lemon-lime-and-bitters. Kim gets loud and argumentative and only talks to the men; Joe snarls; that truckie Arnold Ofie who brings the Frigmobile through, he turns into this horrible soppy weeping creature. You have to keep away from him; he paws the girls or flings his arm around the blokes, bellowing in their ear and crying. The conversations grow more passionate the less relevant they are to anything out here—private schools, the Labor Party, the new Princess of Wales. Effortfully, people grasp after the second halves of sentences. Beyond them, the windows show the lit-up gravel drive, the insects dancing around the lights, then black nothing. The clean empty distance that feels so wonderful during the day is gone, and Vanessa’s trapped in a box with a bunch of slippery minds half off their leashes. Only the Boss, combed and sober behind the bar, holds everyone back from making some savage attack on each other, or on themselves, or on her—why not? She’s here. Only the rawest luck protects her, the merest custom of politeness, and why shouldn’t it run out, at any moment?

  She goes to her room—some nights, she’s been in her room all along—to read a book, or just lie in the dark and watch the lights on the wardrobe. Only her watch on the drawers next to the water jug and glass shows that this room’s hers

  She thought there’d be silence out here; she hoped for it. But the generator roars on; Joe’ll shut it down at one in the morning. The air-conditioners rattle out over the beaten dirt yard, cooling the Boss’s house and the bar. Maertje’s taken charge of some kittens, horrible half-feral things that have developed mysterious dry warts all over their bodies, and they squeal and mewl in the next room most of the night, Maertje herself cooing over them now and again. Silent as Vanessa might be here in her room, life keeps going on beyond it

  The first few days, she couldn’t stop crying. It was too unfair, how little she’d meant by that elbow-nudge, how much she’d ruined, the blind bad luck of it, the pointless cruelty

  Then there came a moment, her in Mum’s arms and Dad behind her saying in the coldest of cold voices, “Crying won’t help. Just buck up and do what you can. Show you’re sorry with concrete action. Nobody’s counting your tears.”

  “Gary,” Mum said

  “There’s no getting past it. One moment’s silliness, four lives stuffed. She has to face what she’s done, what it is.”

  “Well, it’s only natural to be distressed by it.” Mum drew back and held Vanessa’s shoulders, her own face red and eyes dewy

  “We’re all distressed. Who’s got time to cry? Tash’s distressed, but she’s got rehab to get through. We’re distressed, but all this new stuff has to be sorted out. Don’t waste everyone’s time, Ness, I’m telling you. Just be as big a help around the house as you can.”

  And she had stood there, the sobs stopped in her throat but the tears still crawling down, and Mum looking at her all concerned and yet agreeing, somehow, with Dad—not telling him off, anyway, not telling him to go away and let Mum handle this. Things had changed, in that moment. All Vanessa’s fear and franticness and beating up of herself had turned as rocklike and cold as Dad’s voice. She had stopped being a silly girl and had turned instead into a bitter old woman, instantly, at Dad’s bidding

  She likes the evening shift best. It quietens as it goes, rather than building to the panic of the lunch rush. And at the end is her favorite bit. She closes the restaurant and turns the sign around. Vacuuming is tedious around all those table legs and the noise is horrible, but then the worst’s over. Back in the kitchen, she sprinkles Bon Ami generously along the counters, and scrubs them with a damp square of toweling, putting her back and arms into the job. The powder melts and leaves blue streaks, which she scrubs away to white. Then she takes a new towel, clean and dry, and rubs it all even harder to get the residue off, leaving each bench polished spotless behind her. The fluorescent lights show that she’s done a perfect job, again. She sweeps the floor. She mops it with bleach-water. All the while the bar buzzes and muzaks on the other side of the double doors, but she doesn’t have to go there if she doesn’t want to

  She lets herself out and crosses the beaten-dirt yard. Halfway across, she stops, because all that awaits her is the room, the heat there, the kittens mewling through the wall. She stands in the cloud of sweet chemical air she’s brought from the kitchen, turns her face up. Night has thrown open its black door and sprayed its milk-bucket of stars across the dark. She could reach up and pull out a chunk of thousands of them, dislodge thousands more; she could stand here in the cold sparkling cataract of them. They might cleanse her, of smells, clothes, flesh. Finally, perhaps, the ground underfoot would weaken and crumble and fall away. She would owe no one anything, no work of her hands, no bite of her conscience. She would just be tumbling bones with the rest, pouring darkness, thoughtless, memory-free

  The worst thing had been how useless she was. Nobody needed her help to do all the things necessary to deal with what she’d caused. She couldn’t fix anything, and she didn’t know what to organize. All she could do was obey orders: clean, shop, try to get better at planning and cooking dinners. She sat over cookbooks and worried and made lists, and tried not to bother Mum with nervous questions, while everyone else rushed about doing appallingly adult things that she was incompetent to do

  The house had to change shape. There had to be ramps, and a lift put in, and doorways had to be widened to get the wheelchair through. Tash had to have the main bedroom; equipment had to be installed for getting her in and out of bed. Everything cost staggering amounts of money; Mum would have to work full-time again. Tash would have to have a caregiver, and Mum and Dad and Vanessa would have to be trained too, in all the equipment, and Tash’s new rituals. Vanessa didn’t think she could bear that; at the same time, it seemed like the most perfectly, exquisitely calculated form of punishment, that her own limbs should be put to the work that Tas
h’s could no longer do. It’s only fair, after all, she thought with dread

  She always starts her run along the highway, in the cool of the evening or the cool of the morning, depending on her shift. But if any vehicle lifts itself onto the plain, ahead of or behind her, first she runs onto the shoulder and then, well before the driver can spot her, into the scrub. She doesn’t want to be buffeted by their passing, or their noise, or to meet anyone’s eye, or hear anyone’s horn, or be waved at

  “You can use my Walkman if you want,” says Nora. “With ear plugs. They won’t fall off you like a thing.” She mimes a headset on herself. “And heaps of cassettes you can choose from. You’ve seen my collection.”

  Vanessa wrinkles her nose for a second and shakes her head. “Thanks, though.” It’ll sound weird if she says she can’t stand music, anything passionate, anything with singing particularly, anything in English. It’s exhausting, other people’s emotions, especially piped straight into her head. It makes her want to curl up into a ball

  “Don’t you get bored, just you and the wind?” says Nora

  “I guess. It’s okay, though; it doesn’t bother me.”

  “Kind of like a meditation, I guess.”

  “Oh, no,” says Vanessa. “I’m not chewing over anything.”

  “That’s what I mean. A meditation. Where you try and empty out your head of all thoughts.”

  “Oh.” That doesn’t sound right, but “Yeah, pretty much,” she says

  Nora smiles at her. Her steady eyes make it a smile of sympathy, of curiosity, an invitation to confide

  “Thanks anyway,” says Vanessa. She doesn’t want any of that, either

  Vanessa approached the bed. Tash was immobilized by the neck brace, but awake. Her eyes met Vanessa’s upside-down in the mirror. “Oh, it’s you.”

  In a cold little silence Mum went forward and kissed Tash’s cheek. Vanessa watched Tash not react, the mirror eyes unblinking