Dyschronia

by Jennifer Mills

  ‘You look pale.’ Ivy pressed her hand to Sam’s forehead. The hand had an eerie coldness, like the skin of a reptile.

  ‘He can watch me,’ she said, opening her eyes. She could feel her own pupils shrinking painfully, but the room wasn’t spinning. Ed was already watching her anyway, over the rim of his laptop’s screen.

  Ivy didn’t move. She stood between them, balancing her keys in her hand.

  He already knows.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Ed told her. ‘I can work from here.’

  Ivy hesitated. The first flash of their attraction had stabilised into long negotiation. It was friendly, but it still wasn’t fair, these daily encroachments on the same small piece of territory. In the months since he had moved in – he hadn’t taken much convincing – there seemed to have been no time to settle things properly. Assumptions were being made, and she had no time to point them out, to drag them into conversations. It was hard enough just keeping up with the housework, the endless demands of the present moment, this sickness and its relentless distress.

  Ivy turned her back on them both. She shuffled tins in the cupboard, annoyed by their disorder. She found the box with the soluble aspirin and pulled it down from the shelf, dropped one in a glass. ‘Come on, you’re going back to bed,’ she said.

  Sam reluctantly lifted her body, stone-heavy, and let Ivy lead her into her bedroom. She felt Ed’s shadow behind them, keeping its distance.

  As Ivy poured the aspirin into Sam’s mouth, tucked the sheet to her daughter’s chin, she was aware of his eyes on her back. This was a part of their routine he hadn’t had to deal with yet. More than a routine: an intimacy. The irritation she felt now was probably just protectiveness. She should try to let it go. She stood and gathered up a small stack of blankets from the end of the bed.

  ‘Ivy, I can manage,’ he insisted.

  ‘Are you sure?’ He wouldn’t know this trick of covering the windows. She reached and fitted the blankets to the hooks she’d hung there specially. She hadn’t intended to wound him, but when she turned he shifted out of her way, his expression clouding.

  ‘I’ve got a son of my own, don’t forget.’

  Ivy didn’t say that absent parenting was not the same. The boy was fifteen, in a boarding school somewhere, no doubt a picture of health and sanity. Ed didn’t even carry a photo of him, and now he was wheeling him out to make a point.

  ‘It’s just a headache,’ he said, his gaze angling. He didn’t know the first thing about it.

  Ivy shook her head slightly, raised a finger to her lips. She had to relinquish some of this anger. She tugged the blankets to seal in the dark, then brought a damp cloth to cover Sam’s forehead. When Sam’s breathing grew less laboured, her sleep apparently more natural, Ivy left the room. Ed remained, stood over her a moment, and then followed.

  ‘All right?’ Ivy asked him. She checked her watch. She would be late, but he would be useless if he didn’t know.

  Sam floated on the surface of it. Voices coasted past. This will sound crazy. The rattle of pills in bottles. She sees things. Keys landing on the counter. Been to every doctor. The hush of the deserted streets. A coincidence. The birds’ feet, their beaks; minutiae resounding. I don’t think I believe in it. Reverse-cycle humming from the lounge room. The future. Eventually, the door closing. A miracle. Ed’s clicking keyboard. She’d known he was coming, known this overlap was on its way. This time, the doubled time was less satisfying. She felt on edge.

  ‘Tell me,’ Ed said. ‘All the details.’

  Sam’s eyes fluttered open. There was no-one else in the room. He hadn’t asked what he already knew. A cupboard closed in the hall. The birds had chattered something insistent enough to wake her, that was all.

  They chittered and squealed in their enclosure. Sam usually found the sound reassuring, but the migraine’s hold amplified everything until it was unbearable. He’d bought Sam the pair of budgies for her birthday. One was blue, the other green; Sam had named them Winter and Spring. They had made the chicken wire on their front veranda look less defensive. Although people had long ago stopped throwing things at the house, the birds were prone to sudden fits of raucous, neurotic chatter. It was hard to tell if their behaviour was bird PTSD or just bird.

  The fan was on, but the early summer’s heat was settled in the room with her; there was no evicting it. She could feel its fingers massaging the walls, pulsing through brick. With it came a high-pitched vibration in her skull. This whine would soon become the drone. She listened, waiting for the slippage, then the coming pain.

  When Ed came in to check on her, she was not too far gone to ask for water, and he brought a bottle from the fridge. It tasted wrong, too hard, too chemical. When she pushed the bottle back, it fell on the blanket. Her arms were clumsy. The fingers on the hands looked like someone else’s fingers – too big, too small – and they were tingling. Everything was wrong-sized and too close together. Nothing belonged. Her body was weak; she had a flash of fear that Ed could hurt her in some way, quickly replaced by shame.

  It was hard to know which impressions to trust. Although the room was dim, its upper corners sparkled. This was the aura, it wasn’t real. The lights moved away when she looked at them directly, but in the corners of her eyes spots squared themselves, made zigzag patterns, multiplied. Sam tried to connect her fog thoughts to each other, form some shape, some sequence, but like these sparks they refused to condense. Words were out of order. Past moving, past speaking, thought became a curious challenge. Someone watching, Ed or not Ed. A slice of herself. The room was inside, her body out.

  With her eyes closed, the sparks moved faster. Photophores, she thought. No, phosphenes, that was the word. The other kind was from that book. Doctors had told her, something swam in the visual cortex. It was nothing to fear. I don’t think I believe in it, said Ivy.

  The lights disappeared, regrew as pain. She sank inside it. Held herself like a mollusc in a shell, fiercely closed. Somewhere outside, a hardened part of her stood watch.

  Now the Luck is flowing, the brown of iced coffee, spilling out of its carton onto the asphalt. Now she sees it sliding smooth over the ground like a flat creature, a sleepy lizard sneaking under doors, spreading itself wider. Scaled, darkening. A water dinosaur.

  The river takes the town street by street. Neighbours stand on their porches with buckets, bailing out their rooms. Some sweep the cement floors of their garages with scratchy brooms, sending water out in long tongues. Ruined furniture stands stacked out on the kerb: the stained lumps of couches, waterlogged chipboard swelling inside its laminate, soiled bedding, stringy nets of bathroom tiles, old newspapers, rolls of sodden carpet. Clothing is piled haphazardly on the muddy grass. The asphalt is cracked in places. Sam watches its cracks pass from the back of a car, Ed’s car. Dry as toast. Jagged lines like measures on a ruler. She sees him calling out to someone, old Mr Gable waving a fist in the air, a happy salute. The high whine of headache soaks away all sound.

  Sam watches arcs of water fly from the wheels. Her mother in the front seat, and the boy beside her. But the happiness isn’t theirs. It rises from the ground. It splashes into the cracks it has crafted in Clapstone’s asphalt streets, it makes zebra stripes in the snow on the Foodtown’s windows. It looks like a disaster, but everyone’s so cheerful. Mr Gable flashes a golden tooth at her, and she falls into the spark.

  The sparks in her head are shifting now, moving into her joints. Photophores, chromatophores. Nerve-death tingles into fingertips and toes, enters knees and elbows. Pulses like a song. Now it is sight, now sound. Now it is retreating. All things spread together now, they liquify. Time has a volume which cannot be contained. Water is an adding. An eddying. Pain bubbles up from underneath. Black ooze rises from the plumbing and glugs back. The door swings open with a yawn.

  Sam shot back into a body which still felt heavy and misshapen. Huge, dumb hands weighted the
bed. Her elbows tingled, a loose collection of cells. The pain pressed into her temples as if a cold steel spike ran through her head, someone turning it in circles. But she was herself, in her skin again, distinct. Intact.

  ‘Hey.’ Ivy’s voice sounded tired. ‘You’re back.’

  ‘So are you.’ She smiled.

  Ivy slid a hand beneath her head, lifted gently and tipped a glass to her lips. Sam opened her mouth to accept it, drinking the bitter suspension. Ivy let her down again, placing a wet cloth over her eyes and forehead. The cold feeling brought a memory of water which subsided, drained away. It was hot here. Humid. Dark. Sam was swollen, her skin evaporating light.

  ‘Actually, I’ve been back and forth a bit. You’ve been out for a day and a half,’ Ivy said.

  ‘She’s been talking a lot about water,’ Ed said. He was still there. Sam lay resting, trying to recover and forget at the same time. Someone pressed a bottle into her hand. There was some reason she had to remember, some reason the dread lay heavy on her like a blanket. In the remote background she was aware of an excitement in Ed’s voice that had not been there before. It was like hearing a television on next door, only the laugh tracks and advertising. Muffled enthusiasm, blue flickers. And wondering what was the joke.

  ‘Thirsty,’ said Ivy. Her voice was dry with doubt.

  Ed was watching Sam. She watched him back through a blur of eyelashes.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ivy,’ said Sam. Her hands took their time becoming her own small hands again. She pushed them tentatively against the bed, then wriggled up. ‘He already knows about it.’

  ‘I know,’ Ivy said, puzzled. ‘I explained everything.’

  Sam blinked Ed into focus, but his expression was hard to read. She felt the blood in her body like that water, rising and receding. Not everything could be explained.

  He knew enough to smile.

  The steel spike shrank to a barbecue skewer, then two pins. Sam heard the hushed prowling of her mother leaving for work, saw the cracks of light between the window blankets, listened to Ed’s car purr away, then heard Ivy returning what felt like minutes later. Still the pain didn’t leave, but it frayed, making itself into a knot of knots, like the dreadlocks of fibre spat up by the sea. It slowly tightened in her throat. At last she slept in a long, deep trench, uninterrupted by dreams.

  When she woke again, Sam was alone in the house. The birds outside were bickering. Winter and Spring: Sam recovered the names; tentatively, she remade the world. She named the sounds, the newly plastic objects. The world was sweet with sensation, and the effort of description calmed her. The morning was hot and bright at the window, and she could look out at it without agony. Ivy had taken the blankets down, knew she could see before she knew herself.

  Her mother’s smell lingered in the room – makeup, the cigarettes she kept promising to quit lately – but Sam couldn’t hear her in the house. Her own body’s scent was sour and damp.

  She showered gingerly, the extraordinary sensitivity making the process at once painful and delicious. Slowly her mind returned. Her face in the mirror looked normal, its serious mouth, its dark eyes, though the beat in her head was stronger than the one in her chest, like a misplaced heart. Balling her pyjamas into the washing basket, she dressed at the foot of her bed. The clean clothes she dragged on were as stiff and slow to soften as her body.

  The birds screamed again, and the front door clicked open. She listened for Ivy’s footsteps, but the ones she heard were heavier.

  Ed knocked lightly before he entered her room. ‘Need anything?’

  She shook her head carefully. The throb reared in her temples, but the pain was all but gone.

  ‘Bit better?’

  She moved her head again, cross-ways, slower. ‘I thought you left,’ she said, blinking.

  ‘I came back. Got a few things to do here before I head up to the site, if you don’t mind,’ he said. He was watching her with interest. She was suddenly ravenous.

  Ed patted the sheaf of papers under his arm and left her. Sam listened to him settle at the table. When she heard the tap of laptop keys, she came into the kitchen. He was poring over a pile of photocopies with a pen in his mouth, the laptop open at arm’s length, and he didn’t look up. She opened the fridge. The chilled air escaped and gave her skin its full attention.

  Finally she took out a jar, a packet. ‘You want a sandwich?’

  ‘Yeah. Why not.’ The laptop cast a grey-blue pallor over his face.

  ‘Are you nearly finished?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Just about. Few weeks, unless this extra project comes through.’ He scribbled something on his paper.

  ‘You don’t talk about it much,’ she said. ‘About what you’re doing up there.’

  He smiled vaguely, engrossed in his report. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. She couldn’t quite calculate action and reaction. Cause and effect. Something far away was so predictable, but the next moment was not. They were already driving through the wet streets, laughing. But before that, there was a mess of conversations to be had, a mess of disbelief.

  She tried to remember what he’d told her about it. It wasn’t housing, not any more. There’d been a meeting with geologists. It had some challenges, the rehabilitation was taking a lot longer than anticipated. She had gathered that at least some of the delays were false, that he was using this extension as an excuse to spend more time with Ivy; recognising this deceit had made her feel sophisticated.

  ‘Maybe I’m not too sure yet either,’ he said.

  She split the plastic skin from a cheese slice with her teeth.

  ‘You’ll still be around for the flood,’ she said.

  Sam felt his eyes on her, a hunger in them. It was so in contrast to Ivy’s reaction, always some wariness, some sadness hovering. It took some strength to stop it all from spilling out of her at once.

  ‘Flood,’ said Ed. He made a noise like a laugh, then tapped at his screen and cleared his throat. He closed what he was working on. All pretence at concentration left him. ‘When?’

  It was the hardest thing to answer. She pressed the white bread down, sliced it into quarters, put the sandwich on a plate. She felt enormous among these sounds of plates and knives and plastic rudely amplified. Her gravitational field extended. A glimpse of memory shifted back into the blur of the domestic. ‘It was still summer.’

  ‘Will be,’ he said. She could hear his breath, short and shallow. She had to tread carefully, to get it right this time. She needed that telling detail. But which was it? Furniture out on the street, the zebra stripes on the Foodtown’s windows. Mr Gable had been there. He’d grinned at her, his gold tooth shining. But everyone knew old Matt had emphysema, bad. He’d begun to give away his possessions, knew he wouldn’t last another year.

  ‘This summer,’ she said. ‘Before Christmas.’ Her words turned in the roll of time like weeds in the sea. The bread was papery in her hands. She checked the use-by date, and realised she didn’t know what day it was.

  Ed rose from his chair and approached the counter. He tapped his fingertips along its edge, he jiggled a trousered leg. He pulled up a stool and put his elbows on the counter, clasped his hands. Her own hands were shaking, the knife in them loose.

  ‘Is that for me,’ he said, indicating the sandwich. Sam pushed the plate towards him. He sat forward formally and ate a quarter.

  ‘Cheese and Vegemite,’ said Sam. She watched him as he chewed and swallowed. He was like a calm animal, a big friendly dog or an old horse. ‘Kid food,’ she said, by way of an apology.

  ‘Delicious,’ he said. His jaw was firm. When he finished he reached for another quarter, lifted it, but didn’t bite. ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘It’s . . . good,’ she told him. ‘Everybody seemed okay. They were all laughing. I mean will be.’

  ‘What about the houses? Does it get inside anywhere?’


  She nodded, remembering the furniture piled on the kerb. It was like describing things to doctors, never knowing what they might do with the information. The difference was that Ed was assuming she was telling the truth. ‘I didn’t see ours but everyone was pulling their carpets out and sweeping.’

  ‘You mean they will be,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’ She smiled tentatively.

  ‘That’s good.’ He turned the sandwich over as if reading it. ‘Actually, it’s perfect.’ He took a bite, and again Sam watched his broad mouth chew and swallow and bend into a smile. ‘We can work with this,’ he said.

  Was it possible that she had met by chance the one person who could help her? ‘There’s more,’ she said. ‘I can show you.’

  He interrupted her, raised his crust to the light. ‘Can you hear that?’

  She screwed up her nose. She concentrated. The air conditioner, a fly knocking into the kitchen windowsill, the birds rattling against the wire, a truck in the distance, the wind. Her blood shifting inside her skull. A car turning into a driveway, a dog barking. His breath, her own.

  ‘What?’

  Ed waved the crust like a conductor.

  ‘Music,’ he said.

  16

  It is simple to climb like this, to move in a straight line towards a known point. She goes up hand over hand, keeps her opposite sides outstretched, distributes her weight. The thin bars press into her feet through the soles of her sneakers. She thinks about the silos, their rubble, all that waste. What drove those men to climb up there and fall? Something in the air they breathed. Some unrelenting chemistry inside them, puppeteering hands and feet. It must have felt simple, inevitable, at last to surrender.

  The first part is easy. The ladder’s strong, the climb at a comfortable angle. But when she gets to the hub of the wheel, she’ll have to turn around and crawl out along one of the arms to where the highest intact carriage hangs in the frame. Most of the gondolas are broken in some way. Some of the arms, too. There are gaps between the bars, missed lines where the frame’s rusted out. A few efforts were made to flag these gaps with safety-orange tape, years ago, but most of it has blown away. This arm must still be strong enough to take her weight. She reaches, lifts. And for a moment isn’t sure she’s chosen the right one. Isn’t sure she remembers it correctly. That warmth, if it’s coming back, isn’t with her yet. Not knowing, it’s vertiginous. It passes.