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

by Jonathan Strahan

  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 washed 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 Tash’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

  “I suppose,” said Tash, “you expect me to give a shit whether you’re sorry or not.”

  “Natasha!” said Mum

  Deep in her wormiest, weaseliest insides Vanessa found a piece of ammunition. “It’s not my fault you forgot how to fall.”

  “Vanessa!”

  “All those extracurricular gym lessons, they were a waste of money, weren’t they?”

  Tash’s upside-down eyes widened, all but flaming

  “Vanessa, I cannot believe how insensitive—”

  “It’s all right, Mum—” and Tash spluttered there, and then the two of them, Tash and Ness, were convulsed by a horrible, painful laughter. Tears ran out the sides of Tash’s eyes, first from the laughter and then from something else—they set Vanessa off too, and she blundered past all the equipment to sit the other side. She couldn’t grab Tash’s hand—what would be the point? She couldn’t touch her sister’s head—that would be weird. “I am sorry!” she choked out hopelessly

  “Shut up, I know you are. But a fat lot of good that does me, you know?”

  And they sat there, lay there, ragged and wretched inside the situation, with Mum not quite understanding beside them, just letting them work it out as they would

  “Wipe my eyes, for God’s sake!” Tash said. “Get me a tissue to blow into!” And Mum leapt into action

  “This’s how it’ll be, huh?” Vanessa tried to laugh, mopping her own eyes. “Everyone running round doing your bidding?” Her tone finished up all resentment

  “Oh, don’t worry.” Tash had given a bitter smirk. “I promise not to enjoy it any more than you do. Oh, and if it starts getting to you?”

  She slid her eyes towards Vanessa, couldn’t quite see her, couldn’t even resettle her own head to make it possible. “You can always walk away!” she breathed. The high giggle she gave lodged in Vanessa’s head, and from then on chimed out over her whenever self-pity threatened, burning it off like so much waste gas from the top of a polluted pond

  She wakes and the room is lit gold, almost unbearably hot. A puff of dust comes in under the near-closed blind, a puff of death. The thing whines in the otherwise complete silence, summoning or questioning—investigative. Vanessa pushes up very slowly off the bed, swings her feet down, stands facing the windows and the moving light

  It attaches to the roof softly, determined, crackling the thin metal—and to the hot fibro wall, which shudders and pops. Heat pours through, and a sense of the thing’s heaviness, its care not to bear down too hard, not to break what it needs to touch

  “Maertje!” she calls out, because she feels she ought to, although she wanted this thing to visit, would have invited it if she knew how. Her voice comes out low, a slowed-down murmur, hardly more than a sigh. Maertje will never hear it through the whining. The dust churns in the window, rains onto Vanessa’s pillow, slides into the crater her head left there

  “Maertje!” She tries to force her voice loud, to force it high, to force it to be her voice, but instead it sounds like some man’s, some creepy, slow-talking, joking man’s. Maaaaairtyerrrrr—like an engine turning over without catching

  Nothing touches her but her own night-dress and the lino underfoot, but she’s being tugged on, gently, preliminary to being hauled sideways out of this existence. It’s strong; even as it tests her she sees her senses back there, and the reality of the body she’s used to, and feels herself forsaking them. It’s powerfully interesting, the crumpled handkerchief of her self-left-behind, the illusions it had of being all there is, or at least at the centre round which it all revolved. Her back, front, scalp run with sweat; the room, the bed, will foomp! up in flames any minute

  But the heat cuts out, the questioning and the pull. She slips back into her old arrangement, ordinary again, alive, ongoing. She darts to the wall and presses her hands to the fibro. The thing disengages from the other side. The room should fly apart now, but it only darkens. She pulls roughly on the blind to open it, but it’s old and delicate and it jams. She scrabbles it away from the window, pushes herself to the glass, her knee in the death-dusty pillow, stirring up the smell of smoking flesh

  Something bright snatches itself away at the top of the window. The glass is even smudgier now; the dust-clad smudges are almost all she can see, the glare of the walkway lights on them. She may as well be in the city, for all she can see of the sky

  She runs out, and around the building. A ring of the gunpowder-dust marks the sun-faded pink wall. With her arms wide she can just touch both edges. She examines the sky, brushing the dust from her fingertips, from her knee and night-dress. Nothing up there, only the moon, unexpectedly low, scooting through wisps of cloud

  She can never run far enough to get lost. She could lose sight of the roadhouse, run east or west over the horizon, or north up the escarpment and on and on—but there would always be the highway to bring her back, or the sun to direct her, or the stars, whose key clumps, whose tiltings through the night, she’s beginning to know

  She could run south. She could do it at night, choose a moonless night so that she wouldn’t see the edge when she came to it. She’d only know when, eyes on the sky, the earth refused to meet her last step and the stars snatched themselves away and then spun—underfoot, overhead, underfoot. Then the water would welcome her, or the rocks wipe out her whole past self

  She hasn’t got the courage for it. S
he hasn’t even self or shape enough to take that much control. With a kind of inner lip-curling, she watches herself fill her water-bottle at the tank before her run, notes on each outing the moment when she turns, when she heads back, when she seems to have decided to continue. How vain it is of her, how smug, how insufferably lightweightedly teenaged. The legs run, and dodge, and carry her; the little spare water sloshes in the bottle

  She hears the Boss’s story in pieces as she takes the dinners out of the fridge in their cling-wrap, microwaves them one by one and ferries them through to the staff dining room. She hears enough from these fragments: the mother babbling, making the Boss come and look at the car; the big dirty circle on the roof, and how she made him pick up some of the dust with his finger; the boys stinking of fear; the mother’s burnt hand, red one side, dust-blackened the other

  “So then we have this big fight. ‘Friday!’ she says. ‘It’s Friday! Tuesday night we were in Melbourne, Wednesday night Adelaide, Thursday we’re coming along here hoping to make Norseman, weren’t we, boys? When this happens!’ So I say, ‘You sure you didn’t get a bit of a bump on the head, lady, in among all these shenanigans?’ Well, she goes to deck me! So I come in the bar and grab the newspaper, so’s I can show her Tuesday written there—”

  When Vanessa finally sits down herself, the Boss is repeating about the light and how evil they’d said it felt—he smiles at that and everyone around the table smiles too, because he’s that kind of man, unflappable, knowing blank terror when he sees it. First they chased it and then, when it chased them, they spun the car and drove back as fast as they could—I was goin two-twenty k’s, mate! said the son. As fast as they could, and still they couldn’t outrun it