The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  She only wants to keep him from breaking things—from breaking her, yes, while there are no men about and no Kim, but mainly from hurting himself, by word or action. “Well,” she says slowly and calmly, “I guess you’ve got that to look forward to, then.”

  That seems to make sense to him for a few seconds. Then it doesn’t, and he turns bewildered towards all the empty tables and chairs

  She goes to the kitchen, makes the tea. When she comes back, he’s sitting head in hands by the window, at the first table, right at the carpet edge. He’s realized about the parka and taken it off; powerful body odor has joined the dead-meat smell. She’ll have to air the place out, spray Glen 20 around

  He straightens as she comes, sees the blackness he’s shed on the table, brushes some of it into his lap

  “Here we go.” The pot crunches as she sets it down, the milk jug, the cup and saucer

  “Good on you.” He doesn’t tell her to sit down so he can explain. Just as well; she doesn’t want to know about his boy, about his confusion, about anything. And besides, she’s got a lot of chores still to get through

  Holidays. She sits on the wall at the end of the row of them, Tash and Tash’s friends. Her own mates have left town or gone straight into summer jobs. Come with us, Tash said, not realizing what she was inviting, and now Vanessa sits swinging her legs and eating an ice-block, next to her sister, included in her sister’s group

  She stepped on her sunglasses yesterday and broke them, so the world is bleached-out like an old home movie. Happy families, handsome surfers, bikini girls, big old tums-on-legs men with white chest-hair—all these people are arranged along the beach like ornaments, like props in a movie about how free she is now, how school’s finished, and the world is waiting, and she might go anywhere from here

  What are she and Tash talking about? They don’t talk, really, when they’re out with people; they only hunt for things to say that will start everyone on long series of jokes at each other, the girls leaning about laughing, the boys shouldering each other. Once Brett even tumbled Brendan off the wall, dropped after him to the sand and wrestled him there. Everyone laughed; everyone cheered them on. Which is why, when Tash beside her tips back with the giggles and wobbles and shrieks, Vanessa gives her that little elbow-nudge that sends her backwards, over

  That little nudge. Nobody made her do it. It was completely her own idea. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Tash, better balanced than she seemed, had righted herself, pushed her back—if she herself, Vanessa, had fallen. That would have been fairer

  She runs through the saltbush—or the bluebush. She can’t tell the difference in the dusk, and does she care anyway? She runs because she can, running away from the fact that she can—running is the problem and the cure both at once, the same mess as everything

  The bushes grow well apart, but they’re only knee-high; she can just jump over them if they get in the way. Jumping is good, dodging is good; it gives her just enough to do to keep her from thinking. If she runs far enough, she leaves the roadhouse and all its nosy people behind her. The moon seems less as if it’s watching. The escarpment stops hulking and goes back to the dream it was having before she burst out here and pitched herself at the distance, disturbing the silence with her melancholy rage

  Tash upside-down, falling, irreversible. Tash’s neat bottom, perfectly tanned thighs. The wall-edge has pressed red marks into the skin—has pressed some sand, too, which glitters in the sunlight, either side of the triangle of bikini-bottoms, sun-yellow, printed with crimson hibiscus flowers. Afterwards, hibiscus were everywhere. They shouldered forward on their bushes out of every park and garden, thrust themselves at Vanessa, reminding her. Everything reminded her, everything accused her

  The pretty bum, the neat bikini parcel—they’re a snapshot portrait of everything that’s on its way out: dressing for summer, or even caring what season it is; sex, ever; color; flowering; this group, carefree like this, because afterwards it’ll turn into a competition for who’s the goodiest two-shoes, and then fall apart from the strain of the tragedy. Everyone’ll fly off in different directions—as she’s flown off (but she’s different, has different reasons)

  Beside these great losses, what Vanessa’s lost—sound sleep, unstained optimism, the last shreds of childhood—looks like nothing. She can lose all that and still be the lucky one. She can be an embarrassment to everyone, and disgusting to herself and a complete waste of space, life and moving parts, and still she can walk away

  Tony Tripp, the copper from Eucla, comes in for a can of drink and a toasted sandwich, because they’re there, because they’re the closest roadhouse. They might have seen something—that’s his excuse. What he really wants is to gossip

  He stretches his legs out under the tea-room table. They always look too big for this room, men in uniform, even just the Greyhound drivers. Their stiff, crested epaulettes command more space than the curling, often-washed ones on the Boss’s khaki work shirts

  “Slewed off the road just near the first cattle grid there, down by Dave’s.” Tony shows with his hands how the car ended, facing the highway ninety degrees on. “Hasn’t rolled or anythink. There’s no dammidge.”

  “And no one around?” says Kim. She’s the Boss’s girlfriend, tough as nails. Never had a moment’s doubt in her life

  “Not a soul. Walked all over. Cooee’d. Sounded the siren. Drove up the top past Dave’s and checked it out from up there.”

  “Send a chopper over?” says Theo. “Bloke could’ve collapsed in the scrub miles off. Never get found.”

  “Could’ve hitched out of there,” says Kim. “Could’ve set the whole thing up to disappear himself. Or herself, some crazy broad.”

  Vanessa leafs through a magazine unseeing. The pages are soft with use, soothing to turn. Film stars smile strenuously; chicken pieces lean in enticing piles in gluey apricot sauce

  “Exactly,” says Tony. “Might not wanna be found.” He tilts his head at an engine sound from the west. “Here comes Jonesy now. Come and have a squizz. Don’t touch anythink, but.”

  A lot of dusty cars roll up here—not often on a tilt tray, though. And this isn’t orange desert dust; this is that black stuff again, gunpowder-grit, still whispering onto the tray from this curve and that crevice. The stink of it fills up the driveway

  “Gawd, what is it? I won’t touch, don’t worry.” Covering her mouth and nose, Kim walks up and scowls into a wheel-rim. “Did he try to torch it or somethink?”

  “Looks like that, dunnit?” says Tony. “But you look at the akshul car, none of it’s burnt? It’s like someone burnt something else, then come and dumped the ashes of that on him.”

  Vanessa stands halfway to the truck, within smell of it and not wanting to go closer. A daggy blue sedan, she thinks, for a dirty gray-eyed man. / A half a pot of tea / was all that was left to see.

  She was surprised to find him gone, and disappointed—she’d been going to offer him a shower in the campground block, fetch him a towel and everything. She would have washed the used towel with her own things so no one would remark on any dust on it, any smell; she’d had it all worked out. She didn’t know why. He was troubled, that was all, and she would have been glad to be able to help him in some little way—not too much, not to get involved. And she would have been glad to show—to show whom, if she was going to keep it so quiet?—that she could respect his silence

  But he went. He must’ve gone out with that couple who came in while he was drinking his tea, or she’d have heard his separate bell. She cleared the table, wiped it down, and the gritty chair; she went at the black spillage on the carpet with a dustpan and brush to get the worst off. He wasn’t out in the driveway, or down the highway either way with his thumb out, or under the awning keeping a lookout for a ride. He must have driven off with that couple, though she hadn’t heard them talking. They must have come to their agreement outside

  “And no luggage no nothing,” says Kim, sauntering hands in pockets b
ack to Tony

  “Not a sausage. Who knows who the bastard is?”

  As she tips, Tash holds Vanessa’s gaze, her face changing from giggles to fear and back to laughter, cueing Vanessa to stop laughing, start again, to clutch her face in theatrical terror. She can feel her hands again any time she wants, hot, rough with dried salt, the right one tacky with ice-block melt

  You bitch! Tash shouts on the way down. Vanessa treasures that shout more than anything, the sharing-in-the-joke tone, the edge of I’ll get you back for this! The trust. Tash believed, just as much as Vanessa did, that everything would be all right

  What were glimpses, reassuring, have stretched out to forever in Vanessa’s memory. Tash turns slowly head-down, still in a sitting position, her arms out, left wrist pretty with bangles, right hand holding the ice-block stick. Her hair and shirt, weightless as an astronaut’s, flag out, and still she smiles. Her golden legs kick from the knee, as if she could swim her way out of trouble; the shine of her lacquered toenails claws a little light into one side of Vanessa’s vision

  Idly Vanessa looks ahead of Tash’s fall. It’s shady down there; that will be nice for Tash, to be out of the glare. And look at that sand, so soft, mounded all aglow in reflected sunlight. It’s almost as good as falling into a pile of feather pillows

  She lies awake a lot of nights; whether she runs or not doesn’t make much difference. She leaves the blind and the window a quarter open for any breath of breeze. Cars and trucks from the west make faint, gray window-squares on her wall, doubled up and overlapping if both headlights work. They rise first on the wardrobe and creep across it slowly-slowly, slowly. Engine noise joins in at some stage, steady sometimes, sometimes just wafts, swipes of sound, depending on the wind. Then the engine reaches its peak, and the light-squares rush along the wall up to her head; the lights cut out and the noise drops by half as the vehicle roars past beyond the roadhouse and rumbles on eastward

  If two cars travel together, the lights of the one behind throw shadows of the driver and passenger into the mix of rectangles on the wardrobe. These heads never talk to each other, or sing, or laugh, or glance across. The driver grips the wheel and they both look ahead at the highway with its nothingness either side. From one horizon they labor across to the other, then drop out of sight and hearing, out of Vanessa’s world, out of the night altogether

  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