Beads of sweat snaked down my back and my chest. The insects had paused, and a water dragon crouched, staring at me from the other side of the creek. The sky was such a bright blue that it didn’t look real. I focused on the dark water below me.
I leant forward until my hair trailed in the water. The reflection of my face stared back at me, and I saw the creek mirrored back and forth to infinity.
I breathed in and kept leaning forward, passing softly through the surface of the water. I floated down and down, impossibly deep, and the cool water filled my mouth. I couldn’t see the beast, but I knew it must be there.
Waiting. Watching.
‘I want to make a different deal with you,’ I said, the words passing like silvery fish from my mouth. ‘But first you need to promise to leave my mother alone.’
The water stirred around me, but still the bunyip did not emerge.
‘You take people into you,’ I said, ‘so maybe people can take you out of here too. I will take a part of you with me when I leave here, and you can walk with me—wherever I go—for as long as I live, but you can’t feed on anyone. I will sustain you. I will keep you alive, but you must not hunt for as long as you are on land.’
I held out my hand. ‘You can come with me. You can make sure your stories are heard.’
The bunyip’s face was on mine, and I closed my eyes. I felt its hot breath swirling through the water and I breathed it in.
‘Mina, there’s no going back.’
I opened my eyes to see Talia, floating like a mermaid in front of me.
‘We can’t come out of the water,’ she said, ‘but you can stay.’
Before I could reply, there came a muffled shout from above the water—Mum was there at the surface, calling my name.
I opened my mouth to shout back, to tell her to stay where she was, but then her hand reached down towards me and, without thinking, I grabbed it and she floated down with me.
She drifted silently underwater, eyes wide, staring at me and then Talia.
‘How is this possible?’ she said.
‘I wrote a story,’ Talia replied. ‘I tried to see things from the bunyip’s point of view, and I realised how lonely it must be to be a legend—a dying mystical thing—in a world where people either know you’re there but won’t acknowledge you, or don’t believe you’re there at all.
‘The bunyip deserves its legend. It deserves its stories. Don’t we all want to be known and remembered? Stories give this beast its breath and its life. At the heart of Australia is the oldest story of them all, and it flows through everything.’
She took both our hands in hers.
‘I don’t think the bunyip will come after every person who reads my diary. I think it wants to be remembered, and I think if it knows that people believe in it, it won’t need to keep hunting for the next storyteller. I knew it was coming for me, Mina. I want to be remembered too.’
I looked to Mum, but she had the same dreamy smile I had seen the night before.
‘We all want to be remembered,’ she said. ‘Tell me, Talia, what do the stars look like from underneath the water?’
‘They’re beautiful.’ Talia smiled back. ‘I feel as if I’m in a spaceship swimming through them. It’s so peaceful here, and there is no loneliness. We are all here together. Mum will be with me soon.’
‘That’s the bunyip talking,’ I said. ‘This isn’t how you really feel, Talia. You’ve just become a part of it and now you want to infect everyone else with it too.’ I tried to pull my hand away, but Mum and Talia held on.
‘What an adventure,’ Mum said. ‘To be immortalised as a legend forever—never to lose the ones you love. Think about it, Mina, we could swim through the starlight together forever.’
‘You’re both thinking like the bunyip,’ I said. ‘We need to get out of the water.’ I kicked my legs hard but could not rise up to the surface.
‘Just relax,’ Talia advised. ‘Close your eyes, and let it settle all around you. Breathe it in.’
I clung to Mum, and we breathed the water in, and the stories of a million years swam through our veins. A feeling of peace flowed through me, and I could once again hear the birds calling from above the water. Mum and I smiled at each other.
‘An adventure,’ she said.
‘An adventure,’ I agreed.
We swam as one, me, Mum, Talia, and countless souls, in a joyful dance through the water.
‘Are we it?’ I whispered. ‘Are we the bunyip?’
Talia nodded. ‘Wait for night-time,’ she said. ‘We are a dragon, shooting through the stars. There is nothing like it.’
I let out a laugh, but the noise that echoed from the creek sounded like a howl.
Stories can kill, but stories must be told. If legends are forgotten, then who knows what monsters will appear to fill the gaps? There is no fear in this story anymore. Come and see for yourself.
I’ll breathe it out. You breathe it in.
Florida is underwater. Shanghai continues to choke on the world’s mess, its skyscrapers left standing like magnificent monuments. Half of Tokyo’s urban sprawl lies crumbling beneath impenetrable fog. The infected and the injured—bird, dog, rat, human—are cowering beneath the fortifications of the elite.
Here is the world, drowning in rubbish.
Clots of landfill scattered over every line on every map.
I remember the old days, but I remember them through other people. Or through written words, or traces of memories. I collect the history of what was, and try to imagine it into the what is. The Old Days don’t exist anymore. Back then, the seasons were shorter and the weather was milder and the food tasted better—although not everyone had it, not even then. There were more animals but fewer human animals, and more colours, too—particularly green. Particularly blue. Cold and hot existed but there were happy mediums as well, like spring afternoons and summer showers, or the smearing of pastel colours during the sunrise.
Not like today.
I chew on these stories as I hear them, and try to focus them into existence, as if it’s possible to digest the past in order to feed a future. I like the sound of this middle ground. I want to taste it.
These days, the grey areas have seeped through all the cracks in the hard, barren earth, and all we’ve got left are extremes: the black and the white. Flood. Drought. Burning sun. Violent storms. No life, or too much of it. Daytime. Night-time.
Sleep. Awaken. Repeat. The world sits, blanketed in debris, struggling to breathe.
This will hopefully be a nice story.
Grandma zips up her suit and gives me one last kiss, although with her purifier on there’s no real physical contact, it’s more a bop of the head. She doesn’t look at Dave before she leaves, because Dave never approves. The whole process is short and routine.
‘Stay safe,’ Aunty Gina says, her usual farewell. Her hair is coming loose from its bun, strands sticking to her neck. She’s been close to the surface already today, working all morning at the compost, sorting out plastic and metal scraps that have been gleaned from dumpsites up above. Hot work. Dirty. The heat of the sun cooks the air through the ceiling of rock, so it’s always humid, what with the hundreds of bodies crammed into such a tight space.
Grandma acknowledges this—and dismisses it—with a brisk nod, and then winks at me. I’m always the last one she winks at before she ascends.
Ascending is considered risky business, especially during the light of day. Children are banned from doing it without parental accompaniment and, even then, it has to be for a special reason. No one ventures out onto the surface while the sun is up unless they have to. Even with our suits and purifiers, we hear stories from others about those who go missing, those who must have suffocated or dehydrated or come out badly against a spliced animal. Some may have just burnt, despite their layers. Fried by the UV, like an egg.
Grandma ascends quite regularly. She’s considered odd for that. It used to be only so often, maybe once a month or so,
and only when there was new information, or a new idea or a new hope, and someone needed to check it out. Back in her younger days, she studied in a field called ‘biochemistry’. It’s how she and my grandpa met. When Grandpa died two years ago, Grandma started ascending more regularly. I think she misses him less when she’s out there, somehow. I don’t understand it. This is all speculation.
Grandma exits via the valve with her back to us, so all I can see is her white suit and her white travel pack strapped into place. As soon as the red light above the valve winks back to yellow, signifying that the cylinder is empty once more, we resume our usual activities.
No one really monitors who comes and goes in our encampment, not anymore. Only the nutters want to get out, view the plains from a goldfish tank. The officials don’t care who takes risks, so long as people are only gambling with their own lives. If their palm print checks out and they’re over eighteen—and new people aren’t coming in—then it’s all fair game.
I watch the others trickle away. It’s just like every other time we watch Grandma leave and say goodbye. Dave makes no noise except a slight grunt in his throat as he returns to the latrines. My family retreats, burrowing back into their underground nooks, trying not to worry about Grandma because ‘you can’t waste time worrying about everyone’.
Speculation. Imagination. So many metres above my head, my grandmother touches the earth, body frozen beneath an awakened sun.
I find it difficult to picture.
So many noises—voices, footsteps, music—clutter the landscape. The earth no longer breathes with the tides but asphyxiates to the oppressive sound of humankind. Sirens blare in the distance. Endless streams of cars and engines create an impenetrable thrum-thrum on clogged freeways, churning out blackish smog, smudging out the sky. Impatience, excitement, despair, joy: the synchronicity of expression, the rising crescendo of chaos. Silence has lost its meaning. Lights shine everywhere. Billions of artificial flares, beaming without a break. The stars must still exist out there, but does anyone bother to look up and check?
My days are split between my duties and endless free time. Somewhere over in the east side, informal classes have started up, but they’re not mandatory and I don’t think my family likes the idea of me travelling that far. What is there to learn, anyway, that isn’t hidden in the past?
I collect stories from the mouths of old ones and patch them together during my morning shifts cleaning equipment at the kitchens. While I sanitise and reseal the shiny metal tubes of Chlorophyll—tasteless, but high in nutrients and easily grown, so why complain when at least we’re fed?—I try to mentally catalogue the tales. It’s hard to keep track of so many words, especially when they convey such foreign concepts. But I don’t have any paper, so my memory is all I’ve got.
Here in Australia, all of us live underground. Or at least, those of us who escaped the cyclones up north do. It’s not terrible—we’re not like the poor souls in Mumbai or Bangkok—but I’ve heard there are small pockets of the earth where people still live outside, can still feel sunlight on their skin, so long as they bathe regularly in anti-UV cream.
I’m nostalgic for times that preceded and surpassed me. I want the stories imprinted on my future.
I used to share these stories with my friend, Siti, before she left. We grew up in neighbouring segments, and our duty shifts overlapped. I would finish packing distribution kits just as Siti would arrive for cleaning duty. Talking is restricted during commute times because of the noise and the amount of people that flood the halls. Most people sign or lip read. But Siti and I would meet up after her shift and make rude mockeries of our duty leaders. We were young, and we didn’t have much else to do, so it didn’t take long for us to bond.
‘When I grow up,’ she would say, sitting cross-legged on the ground, ‘I’m going to be a communicator.’
After just sharing what I’d heard that morning about the old communicators—the hoards, the billions, who could send instantaneous messages and codes to anyone ready to receive them—I was in awe of this idea too. While communicators rarely used the web to interface anymore (too many encryptions, too much hacking, nothing was safe, what were other countries plotting with it?) it was still considered an aspirational job. Only those with the highest level of clearance graduated to communications. Tracking and monitoring information, relaying messages to foreign settlements; tasks like these were shrouded in mystery. Common folk weren’t told much about what was going on in the encampment, much less about what was going on above their own heads. Grandma told me it was so nobody would panic. My mum seemed angry at her for having said that; she pursed her lips and ended our discussion. But I still remember it.
Siti found these stories interesting, like I did. The youngest of seven children, she liked to dream about a certain kind of freedom. When she left—back when you could leave, when they were still allowing a select few to go and search for family members who were masked in silence overseas—I stopped being able to talk so freely to anyone but Grandma. Old Times talk was seemingly reserved for those who had experienced it, the ones whose eyes had been open to the world once, and therefore had reason to miss it.
‘It’s silly to waste so much time talking about it,’ Dave would say to me, stepping out of his boots so they could be sanitised. ‘It’s futile—the past just gets people depressed.’ Working in the latrines was never very pretty, but he didn’t appear to mind so much.
I try to like Dave, I really do. He’s my cousin, Aunty Gina’s oldest. He’s sharp as a tack and can make anything with his hands from anything, so long as he can’t find a reason why he doesn’t want to.
I love him, I guess. I just get frustrated by the things he says. Mum says it’s because we’re both too stubborn. Grandma said it was because I like to dream, and Dave is afraid to.
Plastic bottles. Fishing wire. Broken dreams. Forty-six thousand acres of e-waste form Ghana’s landscape along the Korle Lagoon. Nothing left but trash. Hundreds of scavengers who spend hours sifting through wires and plugs and cords and dead devices, a sea of dead bodies, of hard metal shells. Shipments roll in from the UK, from Australia, from Hong Kong, places hunting for more space. But there isn’t any. There are more products produced every minute than there are humans, so where does it all go? Into the dump, skyward bound, a one-way ticket to disaster. Meanwhile—
Stop. There is nowhere for it to go.
‘Melody.’
Someone says my name in such a way that I hear it for the first time.
Melody.
My eyes open in the dark, but I can’t see anything except the distant glow of the solar-powered orb above. I’ve fallen asleep in the communal room by mistake—it’s obvious that it’s past light-out.
I go to sit up, groggy. There is someone crouched next to me.
‘Melody,’ they say again, and I realise it’s Aunty Gina. Her voice sounds strange.
‘What is it?’ I whisper, aware that our whole segment is likely asleep. I can’t sign; there’s not enough light to see by.
Aunty Gina makes almost no noise as she leans towards me to press her lips against my ear. Her breath vibrates as she mouths the words: Grandma isn’t back yet.
Electricity crackles along my cheek.
I follow her out of the room, hurrying. We know the layout of our segment so well that we make almost no sound. At the end of one of the main passages is the ascension dock, where I said goodbye to Grandma earlier that day. Or was it yesterday? We have no concept of time outside light-on and light-off and the regularity of our shifts. It’s not as concrete as it used to be, not important.
My family is at the ascension dock when I arrive. We’re unusually large for an intact family; not many survived so whole. Even so, the room feels empty and cold. The light above the ascension pod is dead, just as we all are. Inanimate. Silent. Filled with dread.
Dave breaks first. Of course.
‘This is just the sort of thing—’
‘Hush,’ Aunty Gina s
ays to him, taking a quiet step towards the others.
‘There’s no point worrying yet…’ Tom, my mother’s brother-in-law, is often the mediator. He always keeps a calm head.
I notice then that not all of my family is in the room, after all. The young ones haven’t been woken, and although my gut is clenched tight, I feel a small surge of pride when I realise I’m the youngest one there, the only child among adults. I’ve been chosen to participate in this conversation. I cling to this thought, refusing to notice any others.
‘Maybe she got lost,’ my mother murmurs. She wears her usual brown smock; clearly, she never changed into her sleepwear. Her fingers worry the stone around her neck, the stone from my dad, from a different life.
‘Or just lost track of time,’ Tom suggests.
It’s a quiet conversation, pressed in between the walls of the earth. Being awake after light-out isn’t an unsanctioned activity, but it’s an offence to make an audible disturbance, and the soundproofing in our zone is dodgy, always has been. Not that noise is an issue right now; everyone’s voices seem choked by anxiety. Grandma should have been back long ago.
I watch their faces, wondering what will be done. It’s too early yet to alert the authorities, but if she’s not back within the two-day shift, it will be too late to do anything at all.
‘So what should we do?’ Dave asks the blank room. We’re all empty spaces. ‘Did she say anything to anyone before she left?’
The whole episode is a whisper, a secret shoved in between a dream. I think of Grandma’s face, and her white suit, and her glow above the red earth.
Do we ever really say what needs to be said?
China’s economic collapse results in the deaths of some ninety-four thousand people and triggers the strikes—the first ones. Barrels of protesters screaming, fists clawed, pictures on the news (if they still have the news) of bodies and faces and fear. Whole swarms of people, buried beneath their own waste. Russia happens next, then India. Is this the beginning of the end?
Of course not: there is no end.
Some start to bury their heads in the sand and go underground, lucky ones try (more die) fleeing. People reach out to relatives in Sweden or Iceland or anyplace they think might stand a chance, but the world is one place, there’s no escaping it.
Underdog Page 5
