‘That was weird,’ says Allan, holding his chest.
‘Cool,’ says Quayde.
Candace turns for the village, shaking her head. ‘Like some kind of omen,’ she says.
When we get home there’s a white car parked in the driveway, one of those electric ones, lightweight and so clean it can’t have been in Clapstone long. We’re pleased that another tourist has come at last, especially someone with money.
The young man at the door doesn’t look like a tourist. If we didn’t know better we’d think he was a real estate agent. He’s in his mid-thirties, dark hair and a navy suit. He’s holding a sleek tablet in a fancy leather case, and he’s about to knock at the big doors like he can’t see the buzzer. If not real estate, one of those eccentric religions from America. But those days must be gone; travel’s so expensive now, and people don’t like to let in strangers, especially not in the evening.
He turns around, sees us standing there, and almost drops his tablet. We get a bit of a fright too, because of who it is. We weren’t expecting to ever see him again.
‘Hello, everybody,’ he says.
We open our mouths.
‘I don’t know if you know who I am,’ he says.
Perhaps he needs reminding. ‘Ned?’ Curdie peers through the dark. Can it be? Everyone seems to be wandering in out of the past today. Like someone left a door open. Like a crack has appeared in the earth.
‘It’s Greg, actually.’ He tugs at his tie.
‘Oh.’ Perhaps we don’t recognise him after all. We squint. Young people are always switching identities, it’s hard to keep up. There is something different about this young man from the one we remember. Perhaps our minds are playing tricks on us. Why would he return after all this time? He looks uncomfortable, overheated, tired. He looks at our hands. We’re still clutching our letters.
He straightens himself. ‘I’m here to talk to you,’ he says. ‘All of you. On behalf of the Department. About your futures.’
24
The row of wine bottles gradually disappeared from the high shelf in the kitchen. Sam sat up drinking while the rest of her household slept, loud music fizzing in her cheap headphones. The alcohol would send her to sleep eventually but, more importantly, she would wake with a throbbing pain in her head. So far, the headaches were the wrong kind, but she had to keep trying.
When the wine didn’t work she took experimental combinations of whatever medications she could find in the cupboard. Nothing helped; most of it just numbed her. Apart from some sleeping pills she was surprised, then unsurprised to find in Ivy’s name, the pills they had were mostly painkillers, and it was pain she wanted, even the dull ache of a hangover, any dim echo that could promise something in return.
She slept and slept, and Ivy let her. Sam planned to blame Ned if Ivy noticed something missing; he’d gone back to his mother’s, so would not be here to defend himself, and she would let him get away with it anyway. But if Ivy did notice anything, she never brought it up. She seemed a little happier. She kept telling Sam how much better she looked these days, how healthy. People saw what they wanted to see.
Sam tried going without food, without water and without sleep. She pressed ice against her temples, stared into a flashing bike light, held her eyelids open until her vision blurred. She sniffed glue, ink, nail polish, huffed her mother’s cheap perfume and sneezed; she tried to chrome with proper spray-paint in a plastic bag, but ended up spraying it all over the back of the Scout hall with Jill, only high from laughing. Once, at the school gym, she fell and slammed her forehead against a metal pole. It got her sent home with a bruise over one eye, but no migraine.
Ivy said she was going through a clumsy phase. Just being a teenager. And wasn’t it wonderful she’d gone so many months without a migraine? They did say she might grow out of it eventually. Maybe now things could get back to normal.
Sam haunted the house at night. At one insomniac hour, she found Ed on the couch with his laptop open, his brow crinkled, headphones on. She sat with him, hoping to find him working on some plan for the future, but he was just streaming a TV series. She listened to the gunfire escape his headphones. He glanced at her but didn’t speak. There was a plate of cupcakes going stale on the coffee table, her mother’s lame efforts with out-of-date packet mix. A cup of tea went cold on the floor beside his feet.
Ivy didn’t see it, but Sam did. He needed more than normal. He needed something to look forward to, something to work towards, or he’d pack up all his plans and promises and leave.
Ed’s face hovered over her, a moist cloth poised in one hand. Ivy’s, more anxious, appeared beside him. Keeping her eyes half-closed, Sam caught a shift in their expressions. She squeezed them shut, and gave a small growl.
‘She’s not that pale,’ said Ivy, in a whisper.
Sam groaned more loudly, opened her eyes, then narrowed them. Her mother blurred.
‘It was all so different,’ she said. ‘I thought I was somewhere else.’
They watched her anxiously. She raised her shoulders, managed to sit up a little. The effort of it should almost have been too much for her. She’d played it over and over in her head, she knew it by heart now, but it was still a stale version, a microwave-reheated dream.
‘Take your time,’ Ed said. He shifted closer, and she un-squinted long enough to see a couple of days’ beard growth on his face. He’d been worried; he hadn’t left her side for ages. Ivy’s hand rested calmly on his back. When Sam spoke again, it was with more confidence.
‘There’s a gate,’ she said. ‘A black gate.’
‘A gate,’ Ed glanced over his shoulder, reached to make contact with Ivy’s hand. ‘A gate to what?’
She closed her eyes again and recalled what she could: the peeling paint, the stopped clock, the weeds rising from the cement. The place it must have been was a ghost inside the memory. She focused until she could see that place: the blue barn, the station clock, the wheel that shone above it all, red and yellow and green. It wasn’t an invention. She’d seen it, and not so long ago. Restoring the image within the image in her mind, what was she doing but rehabilitating that unspoken vision for them, repairing a mistake she should not have made?
‘It’s a fairground,’ she said. ‘It’s a park.’
Speaking made the world, and her words made time pull back, reversed the process of decay. The black gate’s other half rose in its field. Long weeds receded subtly into the earth. The peeling paint healed itself, restored its sheen. In the distant hills, a faint fog could still be seen, but she worked on it until it was no longer rising. Growth and decay were the same process, moving in different directions. If time was only a straight line, it wouldn’t hurt to reverse things just a little.
It shouldn’t hurt, it couldn’t, but her body had its own reactions. As she spoke, a crawling sensation travelled up her neck, chilling her. She reached a hand to banish it, but her shoulders were tense and the motion shot pain down through her elbow. The face she made would only add conviction.
‘It wasn’t finished,’ she said. ‘It was still being built.’ While she was speaking, Ed had produced pen and paper and began to scribble furious notes. She added scaffold to the wheel, people up there working in high-vis gear, sparks flying. She made herself disappear. It was wrenching, this erasure, but it had to be done. She had to have something to offer.
‘It was a wonderful place,’ she said, already losing it.
Nobody found the past tense strange, or noticed the air of nostalgia in her voice. She was always mixed up after a migraine anyway, sensitive and fragile. Ivy glanced at Ed, then out the window, her mind on something else. It seemed to Sam that she was disappointed; maybe she had hoped for more.
‘And what about housing?’ he asked. Sam struggled to process the question. There was a nagging shape, some other monstrosity she hadn’t mentioned. She meant to keep it vague, vaguer tha
n this, so that nothing important would change. She hadn’t anticipated these specific questions.
His frown was almost imperceptible. ‘Sam. Where do the people live?’
Sam scanned the weeds, the broken houses through the gate, the white fog marching from the hills, then vanishing into them. In its wake, the fresh glare reflected from a curved surface.
‘There’s a new building,’ she said. ‘It’s too far away to see. It’s past the houses.’
He wrote hastily, the pencil scratching. ‘What else? I need more detail.’
‘Ed,’ said Ivy quietly. ‘You have to give her a bit of time to process.’
Sam had too much time. She was drowning in it, treading time, her legs entangled in its drift of rust and paint and gravel; all that garbage, all that noise. Confused now about what she had said and omitted, what she had changed or restored, she wished she could close her eyes and start again, having thought it through more carefully. But what would it mean to make each small change, what were the consequences? There was still time to say she wasn’t sure, to back away.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Ivy asked her. Her voice was kind enough, but her eyes were narrowed with suspicion, and her head tilted like a crow’s.
‘Absolutely,’ said Sam.
Ivy turned and left the room, one hand over her mouth as though she was going to cough or be sick. Sam tried to go on, but her voice fell away, dissolving. A wave of nausea came over her, and then another, deeper, tossing her with casual power. But she wasn’t sick. It was only hunger.
Ed read over his notes, requesting additional details here and there. And Sam provided them, careful not to hesitate. She tried to make the image coherent, make it reconcile with itself. She had meant to stay as close as she could to what she had seen. But now that she’d begun to invent around the edges, she found she didn’t want to stop. The idea of changing something became less frightening, and more exciting. She might not have to watch the future coming, passive to it. She might make an alteration. Her vision would become transforming.
She was getting better, but not in the way that Ivy wanted. Her power was maturing. She was fourteen now, and that meant more responsibility, adult choices. This was what they all did, their sightless version anyway: they made the world bend to whatever images lived in their head.
Although the headache had gone now – it had been real enough, though hardly overwhelming – Sam felt as though her brain was rattling loose in her skull. The wave of hunger came back for another pass. Now, when she tried to call the park to mind, the images were flatter, less sure. They were overlaid with other memories: the plastic on the beach, those garbage islands floating in the sea, a bird’s stomach cut open, the yellow, artificial hair spread out across the asphalt where someone would fall. Ghosting. It was hard to know what was necessary, impermeable, and what could be altered. She was trying to name these shapes that were shifting too quickly to see.
‘Cuttlefish,’ she said.
Ed touched his fingertips to his stubble. His eyes were glass now, pale and reflective. He looked worn out. He put the pencil down on the bed beside him. One arm pressed his weight into the mattress behind him, caging her knee beneath the covers.
‘Sam,’ he said. ‘Be careful now. You’re certain?’
The bones spread out along the shore in their thousands. Blood bruised to ink in her head; ink thickened to crude oil. She couldn’t think straight, not like this. Not with him watching.
‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I need more time.’
25
He’s an engineer now, he says. ‘For Aquifer and Ink.’
‘Oh,’ we say, ‘that’s great. Good on you.’ There’s a pause. We smile with our teeth showing.
‘I’m sorry. I’ve never heard of it,’ Edith says, with a high sort of laugh.
‘It’s a subsidiary of Sepia Holdings,’ he says.
‘You’re the representative,’ says Carl.
He has prepared a presentation, he says. There’ll be time for questions afterwards. We all file into the home cinema and he syncs his tablet with the system. He has to scroll back through the slides, looking for the first one. We see diagrams: a picture of a hole with some arrows going out of it, then one that looks like soundwaves coming out of the ground. That one’s animated. We watch the waves pulse and throb away.
‘Is that supposed to be an earthquake?’ asks Trent.
‘Not as such, no. It’s the instability.’
‘Oh,’ we say. ‘The instability.’ We eye each other.
‘It’s a bit technical,’ Greg says. He goes back to the start, the company logo, and with a sigh he begins his lecture, flicking through the slides. After the initial specifics about Clapstone he doesn’t have to refer to the screen; he’s done this before, enough that it’s become routine. His language is formal and his tone surprisingly impersonal. When we look around the room we can’t see each other’s expressions in the dark. Our eyes are little points of reflected screen. It takes us a while to absorb what he’s saying.
‘The upshot of it is the landscape is shifting with the dryer climate. The Department of Sustainable Communities has rezoned this site as an unviable region for settlement.’
‘But we’re already settled,’ says Carl. ‘Look at us.’
‘The point is you can’t stay here. It isn’t safe.’ Greg tugs at his collar.
‘But it’s been fine here,’ Bob says. ‘We’ve got our dome. It’s not like one of those dead zones, is it? It sustains life.’ In the dark we see his arm lift, tilt something towards his lips.
‘What if we don’t want to move?’ asks Curdie. We’re surprised at how much emotion we can hear in the room, in each other’s murmuring voices. This place was supposed to be temporary, an interim solution, but it seems we have become attached to it.
‘I’m sorry, but it’s really not my decision. Once the rezoning’s gone through there’s got to be a relocation, or the company’s liable. But it’s not as if you don’t have options.’ There’s a silence; we can hear Bob crumpling an aluminium can between his knees, and the fan on the projector whizzing quietly to cool the bulb, and the air conditioning using up our electricity, which in turn is running up our debt somewhere, and we haven’t asked about credit limits, about investments, because if we don’t mention it, maybe he won’t either.
‘There’s compensation,’ says Greg.
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ someone up the back can’t help sighing.
‘What exactly are they offering?’ asks Curdie.
‘Obviously we’d like to keep everyone happy,’ he says. ‘We’d love to be able to offer more than this. But the budget is very constrained just at the moment, with so many of the regions in crisis, and the added stress on first- and second-tier cities, and we have, unfortunately, had to prioritise. So there’s a stringent needs assessment.’ He’s just a shape silhouetted against the screen, which is displaying a neutral, calming olive green and the words Your Options Moving Forward.
‘Just give us a figure,’ says Allan.
‘Well, after you consider the extant deficit, you’re probably looking at a hundred thousand, bit over,’ Greg says. He turns his eyes to the screen, steps aside from it into the dark.
‘Each?’
He shakes his head. ‘All together,’ he says.
‘That’s not much,’ says Jean. ‘I mean, if we have to start from scratch.’ There’s a drumming in our chests like heavy rain.
‘It’s better than nothing,’ says Roger. ‘We can rent a truck, at least.’ Are there still removalists who would come out here? The idea of packing already makes us feel tired.
‘I’m not sure you understand,’ says Ned/Greg. ‘That figure represents the net financial obligation.’
‘Eh?’
‘It’s what you’ll owe Sepia Holdings.’
The room is stuffy. Our mouths m
ake round owes, we can’t get air. Our hearts are thunderous, our skins hot.
‘I don’t understand, Ned,’ says Jean. Her voice sounds slow and spacious, like she’s speaking underwater.
‘Greg. Look, obviously you don’t have to sign the paperwork right away. I mean we might be able to rejig some of the details here and there. But we thought – I thought – that you might appreciate the opportunity for a fresh start. The Department’s boosted the compensation quite significantly, but the subsidies won’t last forever. Not in this economy. And the company’s been generously supporting you, out of the kindness of its heart. Next year, maybe the year after, as the options narrow, we’re looking at having to charge people to relocate.’
‘Its heart,’ Jean says. She lifts one hand to her own.
‘So they are declaring it a dead zone, then,’ Bob says. His lower lip has the blue tinge it gets when he is stressed lately, the colour that makes us think of resuscitation. How many breaths is it, how many pumps? We can’t remember.
The representative frowns at his screen. ‘That’s not a term we use these days. The approach now is more nuanced.’
‘Where are we supposed to go?’ Fiona takes Quayde’s hand in hers, as if he’d wander off. He’s just as fascinated as the rest of us.
Greg lifts the pointer again and takes the tablet in his other hand, swiping another slide. He talks into it, his face lit by the blue of the screen. He’s grown into his own man now. His eyes are dark. His hair is already receding. He looks nothing like his father, apart from his teeth, which shine with rare health. We feel for molars, cavities; our memories spin like broken compasses. We begin to whisper.
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