Dyschronia

by Jennifer Mills

  Then the memory ended.

  The universe spilled out around her, a jumble of infinite possible mistakes. Everything caught on pause. Something came next, but her mind was blank.

  She couldn’t move.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ Ivy had turned, was watching, and sounded like she wanted an answer this time.

  ‘Because before,’ Sam said, and stopped. This was too new, it didn’t have words yet. The pleasure of the pattern was dissolving, the comfortable clothing falling away. A dream, that was all. An interesting dream. But that did not seem right at all.

  ‘Come on.’ Ivy repositioned the pram, and the two of them went on walking into a singular time. Ivy returned to her phone conversation, smile faltering. Sam was left with a cold feeling on the back of the neck, dog but not dog. She trotted to catch up with her mother, determined to try.

  ‘That was the dog,’ she said.

  ‘That was a dog,’ Ivy corrected, looking around for the relevant animal.

  The, a, and, was. ‘No, I mean that was the dog from the before headache.’

  ‘Okay.’ Ivy turned to her phone conversation. ‘No, it’s Sam going on about some dog,’ she continued into her phone. ‘What were you saying?’

  ‘I saw that dog in the headache,’ Sam said. She hesitated at the playground entrance, clutching the pram’s plastic handle in one hand. She reached over with the other to touch the metal gate. Both hand and gate were solid, dark. They did not dissolve. ‘Last . . . now,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not you,’ Ivy said into her phone. ‘No, she’s just being silly. Look, we need some space at the moment. She’s a difficult age. Hang on.’ She held the handset away from her face and pulled the pram out from under her daughter’s clenched fingers. ‘What do you mean, last now?’

  She scratched her nose. ‘The now before.’ She watched her mother’s face.

  Ivy squinted at her, pulled her finger away from her nose. ‘There’s only the one now, my love. But I know what you mean. Everybody gets it. You think you’ve seen something before, but you haven’t really. It’s called déjà vu. It feels like magic but it’s just the brain playing tricks.’

  Everybody gets it. She’d been so sure it was hers, like a secret. But it was just a dumb trick played by the brain. ‘Why does it do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just how we’re made. It happens more when you’re tired.’

  ‘Oh.’ She was never tired.

  ‘Why don’t you go on the swings?’

  Sam went obediently to the play equipment, where she tried and failed to muster play. It was difficult to trust the chains and posts to hold her weight. Every movement was dislodged somehow, and she wasn’t right in her body. Clumsy hands and clumsy feet. So maybe this was tiredness. She tried to keep an eye on her brain for any further tricks, but it seemed to be behaving itself.

  Behind her, Ivy kept talking, her voice getting smaller and sadder. She put the phone down, lit a cigarette, and watched her serious child, her stiff and wilful movements on the swing and slide. She wondered, with a treasonous pang, whether her daughter was depressed, or maybe a bit on the spectrum; Sam looked so much like a person going through the motions, a tiny actor with no enthusiasm for her role.

  4

  We had other dreams for Clapstone. It wasn’t supposed to turn out the way it has. But who’s to say what was supposed to happen? Not us, not any more. These days we only have the past to go on, and that can only tell us so much.

  When we think of our town’s beginning, it always starts with clouds. White clouds time-lapse across the landscape in a procession, either weather or campfire smoke. There’s a puff of soft grey gunpowder. Funeral smoke. Rainclouds lingering on fresh-cleared land. Then the clouds of chalk and lime and gypsum, which made whitewashed cottages, whitewashed missions. We weren’t there, we don’t remember it in person. By the time our people settled, it was farms.

  The farms appeared from a smudge of white dust. Sandy topsoil stirred up behind a horse, then a plough, then machinery. Chemistry marched in, white mist sprayed with spreaders, leaving the black marks of birds on the ground behind. The sea kept coming to blow the clouds away. It was still reliable then.

  It was never good country; the farming was an act. Our people, or the people before them, came for a rumour. A long time ago someone found a nugget in the river, and named the river Luck. It was an optimistic moment. It must have been a nugget that was dropped from a pocket in the first place, because no-one ever found another one. People dug holes in their paddocks, turned up only bones.

  Scratching wheat out of bad land just made it worse; once all the trees were out it started to sag, and with each consecutive year the topsoil washed further out into the salty swamp that separated the farms from the dunes. Crops slumped around half-filled holes in sandhills. The swamp rose up and the holes festered into tiny poisonous lakes, salt and algae painting them pink. Sheep were tried, but drought ruled the country, sweeping through at will to transform the animals into decorative skeletons. The dams turned sour with salt and sulphur, and the swamp spread and dried. People dug a little quarry upriver, pretending they weren’t still looking for a nugget, and found a few bits of decent bluestone. Once they’d built a pub out of it they wandered in and sat down, and that was more or less how they decided to stay.

  Clapstone.

  That river, the Luck, which curled its question mark around Clapstone’s waist, should have kept its promise. There might not be gold but at least there would be water. Lots were staked. Funds were borrowed.

  Water was fickle.

  It rained everywhere but Clapstone. One year, wheat was too hard to grow; the next it was too cheap to sell. The Luck River turned out to be ephemeral. Drought came and went, and came and overstayed its welcome. Big farms bought small farms, ran them at a loss, tried to inflate prices. Eventually people drifted east to work, or west to mine, or north to drink and disappear. The big farm was sold offshore and then abandoned. Clapstone was left with a quarry hole and a watering hole, a little strip of main street. Most families moved on without bothering to tack their surnames on signs above the unsealed roads, but a few stayed put.

  There was still the river, sometimes. Luck could change.

  West of here, the earth was more generous. The resources boom was in full rattle, and it thirsted for energy. People had known for years that there was oil in the gulf, but now there was the technology and the incentive to extract it. A huge refinery sprang up to process the results, just near enough for what was left of Clapstone to catch the stink when the wind was right.

  Expectations were adjusted. The country was already damaged. Jobs were hard to come by, and the oil refinery’s by-products had to go somewhere. Aspco Asphalt’s plans were fast-tracked.

  It was another optimistic moment. Two big barrel-shaped silos of hot mix and a metal stack piping cheery white vapours into the air like a cartoon train. From Clapstone, the silos looked like punctuation marks at the end of the row of pink hills that separated us from Hummock, the big town on the highway sixty kilometres north. They gave the old hills a declarative mood, even a jovial one. Aspco brought jobs at last, right to our doorstep. Times were good; we felt we had made the right choice to stay. We were newcomers then, or our parents were, but we already valued loyalty, tenacity. Facing forward into the future with our feet planted firmly on ground we knew would hold us.

  The roads were surfaced. Prefab houses went up fast, in neat rows. The Commercial Hotel’s bluestone facade was rendered with cement, painted ochre yellow, and inside it was filled with men in grubby boiler suits and high-vis vests that smelled of crude. An institute was built beside it, because other towns had them, but no-one was really sure what it was for; we mostly used it for funerals. The old general store was converted to a bright new Foodtown. A primary school was trucked in by the company to encourage families to take up residence in th
e houses, owned by Aspco but leased at a reasonable percentage of the plant’s wages. As kids we trudged up metal steps and into one of those two tin portables. In each classroom, teachers had pinned a huge flow chart of the refinery process: crude to sour water, kero to residue. We absorbed our hydrocarbons with our times tables, and our own kids did the same.

  For our generation, the course of life seemed tilted towards growth. The boom was infinite, like the ocean. Asphalt was in demand; highways and freeways were being rolled out across the country, roads widened and overtaking lanes expanded for the monster-truck traffic to mines and refineries. There were so many roads and car parks laid with Clapstone asphalt, it was said that if you put them end to end you could wrap them round the moon, and so Aspco took this idea for its logo: a little rocket was painted on the side of the silos, its black trail looping a cartoon moon that looked down kindly on the little town below.

  Streets without trees were given the names of flowers: Kurrajong, Grevillea and Lilly Pilly. Playgrounds grew asphalt tennis courts and asphalt squares for handball. A Scout hall rose like an island in an asphalt lake. Aspco installed a metal rocket in the school playground, a fortress for tiny tyrants. A roundabout was built on the main street. Mayors came down from Hummock to set plaques, cut ribbons, say jobs and growth and depart wiping the dust from their hands.

  Aspco Asphalt might have been a mouthful, but it was one we got used to spitting out. The company sponsored the Christmas parades and Junior Fire Brigade and Scouts, the netball teams and football teams and public parks, the RSL shed and the Institute, even kept the local paper going, right down to the colouring-in competitions on the Fun Page. Black Textas always ran out first.

  On the outskirts of town, the old farmhouses sank into the soil, crippled by termites and subsidence; dust buried their barbed-wire fences, covered their backyard dumping grounds. We got punctures if we rode down to the sea, our wheels making brown marks in the soft earth where nothing much grew but pigface and saltbush and the three-cornered jacks that made our tyres flat and the walk back hazardous. Thorns punched through the soles of our cheap canvas shoes.

  It was hardly worth the trip. The shallow coast was spiked with rocks, the odd industrial shipwreck in the distance. It wasn’t pretty; it wasn’t like a beach at all, really. The water stayed tepid and knee-deep a long way out, muddled by the gulf’s protection. Past the flaccid wavelets, it went deep all of a sudden, the seagrass frightening and full of life. The company built an asphalted jetty, a surfaced road on stilts with its own car park at the land end, to get out to the deeper water. Soon a few little dinghies knocked against the far end, jostled their outboards and Eskies, their nets stuffed into empty beer cartons.

  Masses of cuttlefish swam up to breed in winter. We knew about it before, but only in the abstract. Now there were people who came to Clapstone just to see it, diving from the end of the jetty. Each to their own. We preferred to drive away to swim at a decent beach. We sometimes waded in the crabby shallows, joined to the slack mouth of the Luck, but the water never smelled right. You wouldn’t let your kids put their faces in it, in case it stung their eyes.

  The plant didn’t make it any cleaner. There were emissions, gases, but we thought we knew the risks. Aspco had processes, monitors, masks. The company knew how to keep us safe. There were procedures for bad air in the town: when the wind turned, the school bell rang two short blasts and the children ran into their classrooms. Teachers slid closed their windows, pushed fabric snakes against the cracks under the doors. The new houses all had filtered air conditioning. Anyone left in the street could go into the shop, but to do so in a hurry felt ridiculous.

  There were lung problems, here and there. A few children lost to tumours, but that was just bad luck. Everyone had headaches. Only Sam claimed there was meaning to them. We don’t blame ourselves now for getting caught up in her stories. We wanted meaning, direction. We wanted this place to be special somehow. But it’s just like everywhere else. Perhaps that’s what Ed meant when he said it was only a matter of time. On some level, through all the plans we made, we always expected something like this to happen to us instead. Something to go wrong, like the sea. A town is like a child, see: you might have dreams for it but it makes its own way, out of spite sometimes, and always out of your hands.

  5

  Sam was seven and three-quarters when it happened again. Small for her age, in no other way outstanding, she was surprised when she leaned over and vomited cheese snacks onto the asphalt playground. Classmates scattered howling from the long aluminium bench. The ground swam. There were spots in the corners of her eyes again, that tingling in her legs. She held herself at the knees and stared as the black grains danced below. Any minute, the throbbing would begin in the temples, then the pressure from swelling veins, the inflated feeling. Light would burst the world. Jill was somewhere, running for help across the curved lines painted on the asphalt for games, pale ponytail swinging. Something came over her, the shape of a sound. She couldn’t let it get its tricks inside her. But, oh, the secret place that opens. All those lines that fold and unfold themselves. Into grids, curves, angles. Into doubles, circles. A lifted cup.

  Another now. The next. This time, a white station wagon burns on the highway. Flags of fire flicker from its black shell. She’s close enough to feel the heat of it, but she’s not afraid.

  She can smell the by-products of melting upholstery as they spill into the air, taste the smoke on her breath, even recognise the car and the figures beside it, but all she can hear is that strange high whine. The fire shimmers mutely. A pall of grey smoke rises over the bleached field. When the tyres catch, it turns black. It smells like danger, but she’s not afraid. She’s only passing. And almost as soon as she’s seen it, it’s gone.

  ‘Feeling better?’

  She opened her eyes a crack and made a tiny motion that sent stars of pain shooting across her forehead. Ivy grabbed her by the armpits and raised her to her chest. ‘You’re all right,’ she said, a little desperately. The stars clustered. Sam felt loose, her muscles floppy. It was hard to tell where she began and ended.

  ‘Ow.’ She struggled out of her mother’s grip and put her hands against the neutral sheets. Like coming up from the bed of the sea, the dark down in the grasses. The pain was the same whether or not she moved; this was an improvement. She closed her eyes, returned with the water.

  While she slept, the pain dragged out invisibly, like tide. On waking, the world was made of plastic. Pain still lingered, wriggling like fish under the surface, but everything else was freshly conjured: the bed, the room, had been replaced while she was sleeping. She stumbled out into a bright reproduction of her kitchen.

  ‘How you feeling, kid?’ asked Ivy.

  ‘’Kay,’ said Sam.

  Her mother appraised her, then patted the kitchen stool. ‘Hop up, I’m making us banana smoothies.’

  Sam obeyed, though it was more a drag than a hop. She tucked her legs around the stool’s for balance. ‘There’s a car on the road,’ she said.

  Ivy glanced out the kitchen window to the street. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘The Corolla.’

  ‘On the Hummock road,’ she said.

  A long spoon landed in a glass with nearly deadly decibels. The blender whizzed, and Sam’s head with it. The machine went on pulverising. When Ivy clicked it off her face was kind again.

  ‘What’s the story this time?’

  ‘A white car,’ Sam continued, hands to her eyelids. She thought for a moment. ‘White station wagon. It’s hard to tell, because it was going to be on fire.’

  ‘Is going,’ Ivy began to correct her, then stopped. With her father, before he died, the nurses had said it wouldn’t help; it was better just to go along with it. But this was different, surely. She busied herself with pouring, rinsed the blender jug at the sink. When she put it in the drainer, her hands were shaking. ‘White station wagon. Like the Reiths’ c
ar?’ she said.

  Sam swallowed. ‘It was them. They were standing there watching it,’ she said. Her voice was weak but clear. If she told her mother everything now, then she could remember it too, and when it happened – if it happened – they’d both know what it was.

  ‘When did you see this? When did you go out there?’

  Sam drank, looking at her smoothie. ‘Just now.’

  ‘You didn’t go out when I was at work? You’re not telling fibs?’

  Sam shook her head as forcefully as she could manage. The remnant throbbing reared and subsided. She liked Mrs Reith, who worked in the Foodtown. She was familiar with her stockinged calves, her smell of vitamin cream and menthol cigarettes, her gangling sons. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to them.

  Jill’s dog had been a singular, a happy animal, until he licked her on the neck. Full grown but with the bounding energy of a puppy, Milo would not be contained by Mr Ellison’s efforts at a front fence. He had bitten wires from their pickets all morning. He had licked her neck, and run, and been hit by a car out by the roundabout. She should have seen it. These were not just dreams, they couldn’t be. She was supposed to help.

  ‘You have a moustache,’ Ivy said.

  Sam wiped her hand across her upper lip. ‘I thought it was now already,’ she said. She licked the liquid from her hand and told it, ‘Time goes funny for me.’

  Ivy was careful not to watch her too closely. ‘You’re the funny one, kid.’

  Sam drained her glass, suddenly ravenous.

  They climbed into the Corolla, and Ivy yanked the seatbelt past the place where it always jammed. She turned through the town’s few streets, the plant stacks circling them like gulls, and headed out towards the pink hills, past the welcome sign and the scrubby trees and the swamp with no swamp, just salt and mosquitos. Out of town, the land turned bruised and treeless, cracked into deep gullies. Sam knew it was wrong before they made the highway. These gullies were weed-green; she’d seen the pale dry of a summer that was months ago, or months away.