Dyschronia

by Jennifer Mills

  ‘Jill said we can monetise the traffic,’ he says.

  18

  Ed took the bag from Ivy’s hand and tumbled apples into a bowl. ‘It’s just remarkable,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ivy, washing her hands. She removed her name badge, placed it on the counter with her keys. Her work shirt always smelled like asphalt, cigarettes, the shop. On the table, waiting laundry crowded in with dinner.

  ‘At least give it some thought,’ Ed said. He did not see her flinch.

  She lifted the bag and began to load potatoes into the drawer. Her hands were clumsy, tired, but it wouldn’t matter if she dropped a few; Trent had been about to throw them away. Their bodies were aging, softening. Long mauve tails broke off in her hands. They would have to be eaten now.

  The bag left a starchy milk behind on the counter. Sam traced a finger through the tracks. ‘You’re there too,’ she said. ‘You’re enjoying it like everyone else is.’ There was a pre-teen sulk in her voice which seemed to have appeared overnight.

  ‘I get it,’ said Ivy. ‘I’m glad you’re feeling better. Can we just leave it alone?’ She slid the drawer closed with a foot, caught the look that flew between them, and let it pass without comment.

  ‘I don’t want you to feel I’m pushing you,’ Ed said. ‘I’m just saying maybe it’s worth playing along.’

  Ivy glared at him.

  ‘It won’t be forever. Christmas, she says, at the latest.’

  Ed touched his hand lightly to the top of Sam’s head as he went back to his desk. It wasn’t his desk, just a corner of the kitchen table that he’d annexed for his purposes. A stack of his motivational business books took up half a shelf now. His thick fingers skittered across the laptop keyboard. Sam drew another X in the potato starch and scrubbed it out with her sleeve, which would now need washing.

  ‘Thought you were going to the site today,’ Ivy said.

  ‘Got caught up here.’ He didn’t raise his head.

  ‘Don’t get her all worked up, Ed, please,’ Ivy said. ‘This isn’t a game.’

  ‘What about the Reiths?’ he said. ‘The insurance. That happened.’

  Between them, Sam took an apple from the bowl and began to polish it against her shirt in a studied fashion.

  ‘She gave them the idea. Anyway, they had to get into debt to pay for the policy.’ Ivy took three potatoes back out of the drawer and began rinsing them in the sink.

  ‘They got that back, though, didn’t they? And enough for a holiday.’

  ‘It could have gone the other way. It was a risk.’

  ‘Then we’ll offset it,’ he said, his face blue in the glow of the screen. ‘Trust me, I’m good at this. I’ve already done some preliminary figures.’

  ‘These are floury,’ Sam said, spitting out a mouthful of apple.

  ‘Yeah? Well, suck it up, they’re cheap. I can’t afford the good ones if I keep losing shifts, and whose fault is that?’ Ivy said, instantly regretting the anger in her voice. She took the apple from Sam’s hand, returned it to the bench. Sam watched as Ivy took a cloth and wiped the potato juice patterns from the countertop. When the water dried, the chalky stripe reappeared.

  ‘You’re not trying,’ Ivy said. She was sure there had once been a simplicity in household work that gave her pleasure.

  ‘I am so,’ Sam said.

  ‘You have to try harder.’ Her voice was harsh, raspy with old smoke. It was unfair to put it all on Sam. ‘I’ll make a crumble. How’s that?’ she offered, softening, but Sam had already defected to the kitchen table.

  Apple peelings piled up in the colander. Ivy’s hands worked out their stiffness. Age was not linear; her thirties had these sudden sinkholes. Across the room, Ed leaned back in his chair and scratched his head. Sam leaned back in hers, too. He tapped keys with his fingertips. Sam put hers against the table and looked at the nails.

  ‘The trouble with this is the river,’ Ed said at last. ‘I just don’t see how it’s possible.’

  ‘There you go,’ said Ivy, leaning into the knife.

  ‘Rivers flood all the time,’ said Sam.

  ‘Yeah, on paper they do. But not this one. The reservoir would take care of it.’ He rested a hand on top of his report. The skin was a tender white beneath the cuff.

  ‘What reservoir?’ asked Ivy.

  ‘They don’t tell you much, do they,’ he said.

  ‘Sam, don’t lean back in that chair. Go and give this to the budgies.’

  Sam slid her chair to level with a thunk, gathered the colander of apple peelings and took them away. The adolescent slope of her shoulders made Ivy’s throat ache.

  ‘You mean you. You don’t tell us much.’ She went over to him, planted her hands on the table. The timber under her palms was warm, familiar as skin. ‘None of this is possible, Ed. All those doctors, and they found nothing wrong with her. Her brain’s just the same as yours or mine. I know you want to build her up, and that’s great for her. But you’re going to set her up for a fall.’

  He looked like he was listening; he scanned her face while she was speaking. When she finished, he looked down at his paper. ‘More things in heaven and earth,’ he said, almost inaudibly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s just a logistical issue. We couldn’t get the Luck to flood unless the reservoir was full again, and it’s already been –’ He stopped mid-sentence, picked up a pencil. He or Sam had bitten a tooth mark into the end of it.

  ‘What? Been what?’

  ‘Ha.’ The pencil turned in his fingers.

  ‘Ed.’ She nearly reached across and shook him.

  There was a snap. ‘It’s a possibility. We’re still measuring the stability.’ He dropped two pencil halves on the table and his face went grave. ‘You’ve been dealing with this on your own for far too long, Ivy. I just want us to be able to find a positive outcome for everyone.’

  ‘And all I want is for Sam to have a normal life,’ she said. ‘A normal childhood.’

  The screen door closed with a bang, but Sam didn’t reappear.

  ‘Not everybody gets that option,’ Ed said. He kept his voice low. ‘But you know I will do my best. You’ve got to trust me.’

  She returned to the potatoes, dug out their eyes and began to wrap them in foil. There was a little mould on top of the sour cream, so she scraped it off with a knife. It wasn’t much of a meal but it would do until payday. ‘She just needs some stability. She needs a chance to get well.’

  ‘But she’s not sick,’ Ed said. ‘She’s extraordinary. I mean, imagine it. A gift like this. She could go anywhere, be capable of anything. Imagine her in futures!’

  ‘She’s just a kid,’ Ivy said. ‘She’s not a project.’

  When she turned, Sam stood in the doorway, eyes on Ed, the empty colander dangling from her hand like a toy helmet. She was growing stealthy, becoming remote. This age was portentous with loss, but that wasn’t linear either; one day she was aloof, the next a wilderness of needs. Right now, her attention was all Ed’s.

  ‘What’s futures?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll show you.’ He beckoned her, and she sprang to his side, her grave face pale in the screen’s light.

  Ivy cranked the oven and left the room without a word.

  On his screen a bar graph rose and fell. Numbers below it clustered, swam together and apart. The bars dripped down the screen and rose up again, in blocks of grey and yellow and blue against the grid. Ed pushed his laptop closer. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s what futures look like.’

  ‘Like maths,’ Sam said.

  ‘That’s because it is maths.’

  ‘Oh.’ She tried not to sound disappointed. After all, he was doing this for her. Extraordinary, he had said. A gift. She squinted at the screen.

  ‘You’re looking at algorithms. Predictions. This is software for managing
the risks on upcoming trades.’

  Sam shuffled forward on her chair, closer to Ed’s warmth and the clean smell of him. ‘How does it work?’

  ‘The trader will decide on a fixed price for something in the future, to counteract the instability. And then he’ll be able to buy or sell the money he thinks he’s going to make.’

  ‘Can’t girls do it?’ she asked.

  ‘Pardon me. He or she. Say you think potatoes will cost around fifty cents a year from now, but everyone else thinks it’ll still be a dollar. You promise to sell them for seventy-five, and then if you’re right you keep the difference.’

  ‘But the potatoes will go off,’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘They can’t, the farmers haven’t planted them yet. Anyway, you don’t have to deliver the spuds. You never actually hold the stock; you get out before the contract’s up. It’s like buying a promise.’

  She heard Ivy moving around in the bedroom like a trapped animal. ‘Is that allowed?’ It seemed to break some law of promises.

  ‘It’s encouraged. It’s really about prediction, see. If you can make a good prediction, you have a strong advantage,’ he said, swallowing.

  ‘So you don’t need to be good at maths,’ she said, giving her attention to the screen.

  Ed drank a glass of water. ‘Leave that to the quants,’ he said. ‘It’s all done with computers now, like this. High frequency. They do a lot of complex work with probability. But just between you and me, I don’t think they can match the human instinct.’

  ‘Let me have a go,’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘This is just an illustration. It’s not for people like us.’ He closed the screen. The laptop’s sleep charge blinked, a watchful eye. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you about this yet,’ he said. Sam heard a tremble in his voice, some old regret or sadness. It made her restless, but he brightened quickly.

  ‘Anyway, futures aren’t really my area. I’ve always specialised in pasts.’

  Sam turned to him. ‘What do you mean, pasts?’ He’d told them so little about his own, shying away from stories of his time in London, Hong Kong; she thought he was trying not to brag, not to embarrass them. But Sam wanted to hear about it. It was all impossibly exotic, compared with Clapstone.

  ‘They used to call it toxic debt. I’d buy up bankruptcies, clean up legacies. Had a lot of work after the crisis, doing rehabilitations. That’s what made me tender for the site, I suppose. Similar principle.’ He shot her a quick glance.

  ‘But you can’t change the past,’ Sam said.

  Ed was about to reply when the oven timer buzzed, startling both of them.

  It was another record-breaking summer. Their house was like a bunker, the three of them dashing out in the mornings and evenings, but hiding during the day. Ed did his work at night, tied up the landline with his whispered conversations, and usually left for the site before she was out of bed. They were running tests; a series of trucks came and went in the dawn light.

  She wasn’t allowed to go up there with him – the whole area was cordoned off for safety – but sometimes they worked together on the flood planning, a map of the town laid out in front of them. Sam tried to get the details right in her head. They wanted to make a clear presentation to the whole town at once, to prevent any confusing rumours from spreading. Sam wanted to be there; she insisted that she had to be there, but Ivy wavered.

  ‘I just want to be useful,’ she told her mother. ‘Ed says I would be.’

  ‘You remember what happened last time,’ she replied. The two of them had a version of this conversation most days, and Sam was tired of arguing. But she was sure that she or Ed would wear her mother down eventually. After all, Ivy was in the car with them when it happened, laughing, as happy and excited as the rest. It would take time, that was all.

  Some nights Sam heard them arguing, their voices never raised enough for her to catch the meaning through the wall. It was a claustrophobic summer, accompanied by the air conditioner’s rattle, the syrupy drone of cricket on the television, and newsbreaks warning of fires to the east and west. They were far away from Clapstone, but the haze could be seen above the cricket oval, staining the sky an eerie, greyish orange. Play had to break a few times because so much ash was falling on the grounds.

  Ivy opened the house in the evenings, tried to coax some air in after dinner. She stood out with the birds and smoked a cigarette, admiring the pretty dusk. Behind her, she could hear Sam’s strained laughter, a high-pitched sound she was affecting now. Too much stress on her was dangerous. Ivy put her hand to the chicken wire. For someone with her abilities, Sam had too short a memory.

  That’s if it was an ability at all, and not a disability. It was hard to see past the crippling nature of her pain. Ivy wanted to see it logically, to see her family as someone would from the outside. She tried to for a moment, putting herself across the street, a stranger looking in. They all seemed mad, herself included. Well, she was outnumbered now by these two dreamers.

  The beauty in the light was only there because of someone’s worst day. Maybe it wasn’t about right or wrong but whether some good would come out of it. Even if it was a total disaster, a hard landing, maybe that would make Sam see the reality. Because Ivy herself could not convince her.

  She checked and refilled the birds’ water, turned back into the house. Walking in, she felt like an intruder. None of the lights were on; only the laptop cast a blue glow from the bedroom. She went to the bathroom, washed the nicotine off her hands, brushed her teeth. She found Ed stretched out on the bed with his shoes still on, Sam sitting on the edge beside him, watching him work.

  ‘Go through it again,’ said Ivy. She sat down beside Sam and flicked the bedside light on.

  ‘Which part?’ Ed asked.

  ‘Give me the numbers.’

  He tilted his laptop, switched windows.

  ‘Here’s how much you’d have to borrow. But it’s a solid investment. All you’re doing is getting a loan from your future self,’ he said.

  ‘That doesn’t sound like good logic,’ said Ivy.

  ‘It is, though. It’s how everything works. Look at this place, it’s dry as toast. No insurer is going to expect a flood. The outlay will be minimal.’ He closed his laptop, passed it to Sam. She lowered it gently to the floor, somehow intimate with his intentions.

  ‘What if it doesn’t happen?’

  ‘Then you’ve only lost the initial spend.’ He reached for his phone on the side table, checked the time and put it down again. ‘But she’s not going to be wrong, Ive. Trust me. Sam’s gifted.’ He patted Sam on the leg and she smiled faintly.

  ‘Then it’s dishonest.’ Ivy was suddenly flustered. ‘You’re suggesting a scam.’

  ‘It’s not a scam, it’s how the world works,’ said Ed. ‘You know that as well as I do.’

  ‘This isn’t fair on her, you know,’ said Ivy, crossing her legs. She saw how Sam shifted her body away from her, resisted the urge to rest a hand on the arc of her back.

  ‘What’s fair?’ said Ed. Sam got up to go. Her pyjamas were too small, exposing her ankles and her skinny wrists; she looked almost comical. She needed new clothes. She was starting high school in the new year, and she needed books and uniforms and whatever stuff the other kids would have, Hummock kids. The doorframe was splintered where she held it with a small, brown hand. A crack above the lintel had sprouted polka dots of chipped paint. Ivy gave her daughter a pleading look and patted the cover beside her. When Sam trotted back, she smoothed her hair with a calm, liquid relief.

  ‘You know I’m only trying to protect you,’ said Ivy. She took her by the shoulders, kissed the top of her head. Her heart would break. But you had to let them make their own mistakes.

  ‘I know,’ said Sam. ‘I just want to do something good.’

  Ivy let go of her shoulders. ‘Okay. I’m not saying I’m commit
ted, but you might as well have your meeting. See what they say.’ And there was her daughter, the warmth of life, leaning against her like a grateful animal.

  19

  It’s mostly young people for the first few years, but then we get older ones, the kind we used to call grey nomads. They would take six months, a year, out of their lives in other places, to pack everything up and drive the lap of the country. Clapstone’s a tangent, so it only ever attracted a few eccentrics before, the type who had to see every inch, or the special interest ones who took a detour for the cuttlefish. Now a lot of them are living out of their caravans, just driving, never going home.

  The older people don’t find meeting us so embarrassing. They like to have a chat, ask about good places to camp around here, tell us about how bad the roads are nowadays, wonder at the dwindling birds. They tell us there must be some food source, or a weather issue, or a dip in this particular breeding season; there’s always a cause. They tell us there are good years and bad years everywhere, and some places just aren’t recovering. They tell us the relocation policies are not as harsh as some people say. It’s a kind of freedom, really, when someone else decides it’s time to go. Liberating, finding out you didn’t need a house, a mortgage, all that junk.

  One day a group of women come, three of them squeezed across the front bench seat of an antique station wagon. The whole back is full of boxes. After they’ve gone around the park they come to take pictures of us. They shake our hands and then they ask us if we’re doing okay, like we’re old relatives of theirs. But maybe that’s just their way of talking.

  ‘It’s a wonder the DSC hasn’t moved you,’ one of the women says. Grey curls balance on her forehead. The skin beneath them crinkles with dark lines.

  ‘Yes,’ we say. ‘It sure is.’

  There’s a long pause.

  ‘What’s the DSC?’ asks Fiona.

  ‘You know,’ the woman says. ‘Sustainable Communities.’

  ‘Ah,’ we say. They keep changing the name.