Clade

by James Bradley

  ‘Why are they showing this crap?’ he demands, his voice raised.

  Behind him in the kitchen Ellie makes an exasperated noise. ‘Just turn it off,’ she says.

  ‘I mean, why give these idiots a platform?’

  When Ellie doesn’t reply he snaps at the television to mute it, and turns to face her. ‘They blather on about representing all sides of an issue but they reduce everything to talking heads and arguments about the science.’

  ‘The media are shit, everybody knows that.’

  ‘They’re not just shit, they’re irresponsible. No, more than that, they’re dangerous. It’s not just that they’re scientifically ignorant, it’s that they work to actively obstruct change. They’re like a cancer.’

  ‘I agree.’

  He stares at her. ‘That’s all you’ve got to say?’

  She stares at him, unmoving. ‘Please, Adam.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not going to argue with you.’

  ‘I don’t want to argue. I’m just frustrated.’

  But even as he speaks he knows he’s lying, that he does want to fight. Because he’s angry, and it isn’t just the television or his work or the fact that the world is coming unravelled, it’s Ellie. It isn’t fair, but her passivity, her refusal to engage with him, to react, infuriates him.

  ‘You think it’s okay then? That they give this moron airtime?’ he demands.

  ‘No. But I think you get off on being angry. Sometimes it’s like you actually want the worst to happen because it will mean you’re right, and the world is fucked.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ says Adam. But he knows Ellie is right, that part of him enjoys the disaster, the constant confirmation of his worst fears.

  ‘Fuck fair,’ Ellie says. ‘I’m sick of it. Sick of your anger. Sick of you blaming me for everything.’

  Adam stands unspeaking. He knows he wants this, wants the confrontation, but he holds back, afraid of the consequences.

  ‘Forget it,’ he says at last. ‘I’m going out.’

  Ellie stares at him. ‘Whatever,’ she says.

  Outside it is dark but no cooler, the promised change still several hours off. Standing in the driveway he is uncertain whether to drive or walk, until the weight of the keys in his pocket decides him.

  As he reverses out he cannot help but see Summer’s seat in the back, the jumble of toys and crumbled biscuits surrounding it. They had bought the car a few weeks before she was born, and as they drove home after having it fitted with the booster seat, Adam found himself fighting the impulse to keep looking over his shoulder at it, this visual evidence that he had been transformed into a suburban father.

  That feeling returns as he pulls away down the street, intensified by the mess of the day. Before he left home in his second year of university his parents used to lend him their car, and across the long summers he would spend his evenings cruising the streets, careless in the freedom of movement. For a time he’d had a passion for the music of the late 1960s and early seventies, the back catalogue of the Stones and Bowie and the Velvet Underground, and driving alone he played them over and over, watching the city spool by through his open window, feeling the breeze, the smell of the hot asphalt, as ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ‘Queen Bitch’ and ‘Sweet Jane’ filled the car.

  Sometimes he wonders whether there is something viral about music, the way it erases the space of time between the present and the past selves that inhabit us, because even now he has only to hear those tracks and it all comes back, all that longing and desire, all that hunger for something pure and transcendent and beautiful. Wanting that now he dials up Aladdin Sane, allowing the first pulse of ‘Watch That Man’ to release him as he angles through the traffic, pushing on past the other cars in the warm dark, watching the play of their lights, the drivers caught up in their private worlds as they sit huddled over their wheels. Most nights when he does this it is liberating, but tonight he cannot shake the feeling that he is losing something he doesn’t want to lose but no longer knows how to hang onto. It isn’t just about Ellie, of course, although that’s a lot of it, it’s the sense that things are breaking down, spiralling out of control, and his own powerlessness to do anything about it. More and more he feels like he does not know the person he is becoming, that he is falling faster and faster without any idea of where and when he will land.

  Nor is it just him. All summer Ellie has been working on a project about Alzheimer’s and the erasure of the past. At first it was a series of sculptures created out of the faces of sufferers, their features smoothed away here and there, but it has developed to incorporate other components: brain scans showing the plaque on the dendrites; books filled with pages from which most of the text has been obliterated, leaving only random phrases and words; video loops of people shouting and weeping, or lost in the arrested rigidity of advanced Alzheimer’s, their faces collapsed in on themselves, the only expression the flickering of the eyelids, the occasional protrusion of a tongue or the restless formation of some incomprehensible muttering.

  Exactly why she is doing this now is not clear to him, but it frightens him to see her so absorbed in a project which is about the loss of the self, the annihilation of memory, suggesting as it does some desire to escape the present.

  Yet he also knows it is not she who is to blame. He is the one who seems unable to adapt to family life, to find an equilibrium that will let him be the parent he knows he should be. It is not that he doesn’t want to, just that no matter how hard he tries, it seems to elude him. And so he removes himself emotionally, physically, only returning in order to provoke scenes like tonight’s.

  It is almost midnight by the time he eases the car back into the drive. Inside, the house is dark, the only sound the low whirr of the fridge. Halfway along the hall he pauses at Summer’s door. She lies sprawled sideways across the bed, face down; for a moment he stands unmoving, marvelling at the wonder of her, of the way sleep seems to take her so completely.

  Outside his and Ellie’s bedroom he hesitates, uncertain whether he should turn around and sleep on the couch, but then he steps in, undressing quietly and sliding in beside her.

  Although she does not move he can tell by the rhythm of her breathing that she is awake, the cool flesh of her body alert. In the darkness he can see the outline of her hip beneath the sheet, the pale skin of her shoulders. He could reach out, let his hand touch her; that would be enough to make her turn to him, let them begin to dissolve their anger in the familiar intimacy of each other’s body. But he knows already he will not; instead he will lie here staring at the ceiling, waiting for her to slip away into sleep next to him.

  Somewhere in the distance thunder rumbles. Overhead the first drops of rain.

  It is almost five when Maddie hears the car on the drive, and the afternoon wind is already up, the trees shifting and breathing in long restless waves. For a few seconds she doesn’t move, just sits listening, unwilling to relinquish her privacy quite yet. Then, steeling herself, she sets down her screen and stands.

  Summer is out of the car by the time Maddie reaches the door, looking around with the awkwardness of the thirteen-year-old she has recently become. Her ears are covered by bulky headphones, half concealed by a striped woollen hat, its presence incongruous given her bare legs and thongs. Seeing Maddie, her face creases into an uncertain half-smile.

  Although its source has never been clear to Maddie there has been a core of sadness and restlessness in Summer for as long as she can recall, and looking at her now she sees it has not dissipated, has if anything grown more pronounced.

  On the driver’s side Ellie has emerged as well. Maddie has not seen her stepdaughter since Tom’s funeral and she knows she should go to her, embrace her, but before she can the moment passes.

  ‘Sorry we’re late,’ Ellie says, her voice tense. ‘It took forever to get away.’

  ‘I was worried you’d changed your mind.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You
’re still planning to stay then?’ Maddie says, catching herself too late. ‘I mean, I hope you’re still planning to stay.’

  Ellie regards her warily. ‘Only if it’s okay?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Maddie says, stepping forward. ‘Here, let me help you with the bags.’

  Because Summer is eager to swim they unpack quickly and head down to the beach, following the road to the bend and then cutting sideways through the blackbutt trees to the wooden pathway that extends over the old creek bed. Out over the water the sky is already a deep, gorgeous red, legacy of the eruptions in the Philippines and Indonesia and the fires in Malaysia and Borneo, and Maddie remembers a holiday with Tom in Kashmir, the colour of the lakes at dawn.

  Until the summer before last the pathway was the easiest way onto the sand, but as the storms have grown more frequent the rising water has carried off more and more of the beach, meaning the pathway now hangs suspended a metre or two above the ground, its frame twisted and buckled like a broken rollercoaster. There have been meetings about the situation, petitions demanding the sand be replaced and anti-erosion measures strengthened, but Maddie has not joined the protests. At first that was because she could not find it in herself to care, but more recently it is because she has come to feel there is something beautiful in this ruination of the beach, a sense in which its destruction answers a need within her.

  As they reach the sand Summer bounces ahead, pulling off her singlet. The whole way down she has been distant, dawdling several metres behind the older women, avoiding their attempts to engage her in conversation, but now she is like a child again.

  ‘Leave your stuff over there,’ Ellie says, pointing to a spot down by the rocks.

  But Summer is already off, sprinting across the sand towards the water. As a child she was amazingly physical, her thin body tense with a restless energy that only seemed bearable when she was able to lose herself in motion. Seeing her sudden joy as she runs, the careless fluidity of her stride, Maddie realises little has changed.

  ‘She looks happy,’ she says.

  Ellie stares after Summer’s receding form. ‘She’s been in a foul mood all day.’

  ‘About what?’

  At the water’s edge Summer bounds out into the waves, her long steps shortening as the water grows deeper, until at last she drops into a low, clean dive and disappears.

  ‘Just the usual teenage shit,’ Ellie says, putting her bag beside Summer’s towel. ‘I’m sorry she was so rude on the way down. She’s been looking forward to seeing you for weeks.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m always pleased to see her.’

  ‘The past couple of months haven’t been easy for her. She was close to Dad.’

  When Maddie doesn’t reply she glances after Summer. ‘I sometimes wonder what it means to someone her age. She keeps so much inside I worry about how it’s affecting her.’

  ‘She spoke beautifully at his funeral.’

  Ellie smiles. ‘She did. He would have been proud of her.’

  ‘He was proud of you as well. You know that, don’t you?’

  Behind her sunglasses Ellie’s face tightens and Maddie knows she has overstepped, assumed too much.

  But Ellie just says, ‘Do you want to swim?’

  ‘Sure,’ Maddie replies.

  It is growing dark by the time they get back to the house, and while Summer disappears to her room and Ellie takes a shower, Maddie prepares dinner. Although she eats at home most nights it is strange to be cooking for others again, the rhythms somehow off. As she is chopping tomatoes Ellie appears, a towel wrapped around her head.

  ‘Do you need a hand?’ she asks, but Maddie shakes her head.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Really,’ Ellie says. ‘I’d like to help.’

  ‘No need. It’s almost done.’

  ‘Are you sure? I could do the salad.’

  Ellie picks up an avocado and before she can stop herself Maddie snatches it back.

  ‘I said I was all right,’ she snaps.

  Ellie doesn’t move, just stands staring at her. Maddie flushes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she begins, but Ellie is already backing away.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she says.

  It is more than fifteen years since Tom came back from a weekend surfing trip to tell her he had put the deposit down on a beach house. At the time they had been married for almost five years, and although she had grown used to his impulsiveness this was a new order of recklessness, even for him. But when she accompanied him the next weekend she found herself won over, both by the place itself and by Tom’s unfeigned enthusiasm for it.

  At first the idea was that it would be a retreat for the two of them, but as the months passed and they began to spend more time here, Tom took to inviting friends to join them. For Maddie these visits were often stressful, but Tom revelled in the unstructured days and long afternoons and evenings of rambling conversation they gave rise to.

  Yet while they regularly had friends down, Ellie never came. It wasn’t for want of trying: every few months Tom would suggest she and Adam join them for a few days, but Ellie always found excuses, evading her father’s invitations in the same way she did all his overtures.

  Although she tried, Maddie found it difficult to hide her irritation with her stepdaughter. She had not been naïve enough to think Ellie would like the idea of her father marrying a woman only five years older than herself, but from the outset Ellie had been unwelcoming, even hostile. At the time she told herself she was annoyed on Tom’s behalf, angry at Ellie for pushing him away, hurting him. But looking back she wonders whether it wasn’t more complicated than that, whether in fact she preferred not having Ellie around. Although she knew Tom loved her she was also uneasy about the way his and Ellie’s shared memories of Ellie’s mother bound the two of them together, connecting them to a past Maddie could never be a part of.

  Summer’s birth changed all that. From the moment he saw her Tom was smitten with his granddaughter, and so, despite both Ellie and Maddie’s separate resistance, she found herself and Tom spending more time with Adam and Ellie.

  Usually these meetings took place in neutral settings – in parks or cafés – but sometimes there were visits to Ellie and Adam’s house, or, less often, lunch at Maddie and Tom’s place in Bondi. It was at one such lunch when Summer was eighteen months old that Tom suggested they all spend a weekend down the coast. While it wasn’t the first time the offer had been made, it was the first time it had been made to Ellie and Adam together. Maddie felt herself stiffen, uncertain whether she was angry with Tom for not consulting her first or for making the invitation at all, but Adam grinned and glanced at Ellie and said that sounded great, they’d love to come, as if he couldn’t see the way Ellie had fallen still beside him.

  When the agreed-upon weekend arrived she headed down a day early and spent the afternoon cleaning and arranging the house and buying food and flowers. Organising the adult bedrooms was easy, but when she came to the room Summer was to stay in she found herself hesitating, brought up short by the realisation she had no clear idea of what was needed. After half an hour’s prevarication she drove back into Nowra and bought a cotton bedspread decorated with cartoon bees and old-fashioned hives.

  The next day Ellie and Adam arrived late, barely able to look at each other after driving the whole way with Summer screaming in the car. Conscious of how much Tom wanted the weekend to be a success, Maddie insisted it didn’t matter, and tried not to look too relieved when Ellie said she had a headache and went to bed early.

  She wasn’t surprised: she’d been expecting the weekend to be difficult. What she hadn’t expected was how much she’d enjoy being with Summer. Although she had friends with children, she’d never really had a lot to do with them, and so tended to be stiff and formal, frightening them off. But when Summer woke up the next morning she was so delighted with the house and the bush at the back it was impossible not to share her pleasure. For much of the first day she
rambled about on the lawn picking up sticks and leaves, pausing only to sleep or eat.

  After lunch, while Summer slept, Tom asked who wanted to go for a walk. Knowing he wanted time alone with Ellie, Maddie declined, electing to stay behind with Adam. Left alone the two of them chatted, Adam’s relaxed mood a relief after the strained atmosphere with Ellie, until eventually Summer emerged, bleary with sleep. At first she clung close to Adam, but as her good humour returned she approached Maddie, leading her to the backyard to join her in some sort of game involving pebbles and shells and sticks, so that when Ellie and Tom returned and Summer ran back to her mother, Adam grinned at Maddie.

  ‘You’re good with her,’ he said.

  Maddie laughed. ‘Really?’ she asked.

  ‘Really,’ Adam said.

  That night she lay beside Tom, aware of him awake beside her. Because of their age difference the two of them had only rarely discussed children, and when they had it was usually couched in terms of her ambivalence about the idea. But charged as he was with the success of the day, with the sense of connection and family, she knew it was on his mind.

  ‘That went well,’ he said at last, his voice quiet in the dark.

  Outside a nightjar called, the sound echoing through the trees.

  ‘Summer is so like Ellie at the same age,’ he said when she didn’t respond.

  She felt a hollow in her belly at his words, an ache almost, and rolling closer she laid her head on his chest. She could hear him holding the words back, knew the struggle it was for him: by nature Tom wanted things to be in the open, to talk about his feelings and to know her mind. It was a desire she often found herself obstructing with little acts of withholding, refusals that shamed her in retrospect not just for their pointlessness, but for their compulsiveness.