Dyschronia Read online

  About Dyschronia

  An electrifying novel about an oracle, a small town, and the end of the world as we know it . . .

  One morning, the residents of a small coastal town somewhere in Australia wake to discover the sea has disappeared. One among them has been plagued by troubling visions of this cataclysm for years. Is she a prophet? Does she have a disorder that alters her perception of time? Or is she a gifted liar?

  Oscillating between the future and the past, Dyschronia is a novel that tantalises and dazzles, as one woman’s prescient nightmares become entangled with her town’s uncertain fate. Blazing with questions of consciousness, trust, and destiny, this is a wildly imaginative and extraordinary novel from award-winning author Jennifer Mills.

  Contents

  Cover

  About Dyschronia

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 1

  Acknowledgements

  About Jennifer Mills

  Also by Jennifer Mills

  Copyright page

  Tell the emperor that my hall has fallen to the ground.

  Phoibos no longer has his house, nor his mantic bay,

  nor his prophetic spring; the water has dried up.

  The Pythia’s last oracle at Delphi, 362 AD

  1

  At first Sam thought the scratching was an animal. The sound tugged at her through sleep; it took some time for her to surface. No possums any more. Still, there was a thunk of feet landing, too big to be a rat. She was reaching for her phone on the floor when the animal cleared its throat, and she lunged instead for the wheel brace she kept under the bed.

  The noise was coming from the other bedroom. Sam rose slowly, keeping her movements quiet. The cool metal warmed in her hand. She stepped over the creak in the floor, slid her fingers along the wall past the light switch without pressing it. There was a grunt, familiar now, then a heavy crack, the crunch of splintering wood, and the breath of a swear word.

  Sam crept along the hallway, one hand trailing the wall to gauge her distance in the dark. The door was slightly ajar and she opened it further with the pads of her fingers. The intruder had her back to Sam and was trying to close the sash with one hand. Sam watched her for a moment, her outline fragile in the moonlight, then clicked the light on. The woman turned, but did not let go of the stubborn window. In the other hand she held a leg of the old chair she’d broken on her way in.

  ‘Leave it,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll do it.’ She tossed the wheel brace onto the empty bed.

  Ivy smiled, crook-toothed. ‘Hello, love. The door was locked. I didn’t want to wake you.’

  They sat over tea at the kitchen table. Ivy’s face wasn’t much softened by the low lamplight. She’d be forty-five, but looked older. Sun, anxieties. Her hair was bleached or greyed to a paler blonde and it made the dark moons under her eyes more prominent. The eyes themselves wouldn’t settle: they darted from Sam, alighting on the hanging saucepans and stacked plates like the honeyeaters that used to fly in and out of the bottlebrush when she was small. Lost birds on tins and tea towels now. Sam slid the sugar across the table and watched as Ivy deposited two heaped teaspoons into her mug.

  ‘So you’re back.’

  Ivy squinted at the teaspoon as if she was trying to read its meaning. Photophobia was one of the side effects of her old medication. The slips in the boxes hadn’t mentioned break and enter.

  ‘Just for a visit,’ Ivy said.

  ‘Staying how long?’

  Ivy smiled at her with lips pressed shut. ‘You look well,’ she said. Her voice was cracked like old glaze. The wind made its birdless chatter in the dry trees, and her face seemed to let go its hold for a moment.

  ‘You right?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ivy said, already recovered from the lapse. ‘Just tired from getting here.’ She yawned expressively into the back of her hand. Her arms were whittled sticks.

  ‘How did you get here?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Still got that van,’ Ivy said. ‘Oh yeah, sorry about the chair,’ she added, folding the arms across her chest.

  Sam shrugged. ‘It’s a chair.’ It was the least of broken things. Three years since she’d seen Ivy, maybe four. Twice that long since she had left, saying she needed time, as if time wasn’t everywhere, seeping into every crevice. The house might not have changed much on the inside, but outside the garden was a sprawl of dry weeds. Like the rest of the houses in town it was slowly being dismantled by gravity. Clapstone was a shell crumbling at the edge of a dry plain. It hadn’t taken long.

  Ivy cleared her throat. ‘I suppose you’ve been busy with everything,’ she started. ‘The park and everything. Visitors. Your friends.’

  Sam stirred her tea. ‘I guess.’

  Ivy watched her for a long moment. ‘You been well?’

  ‘Yep,’ Sam said, and then, ‘You’ve lost weight.’

  Ivy’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’ll go up to the pub for the night, if I’m imposing. It was cold in the van, is all.’ She didn’t put down her tea. Through the kitchen window, the outline of the vehicle was just visible. Its arrival should have woken her, but lately Sam slept so long and deep it was hard to return.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. You gave me a fright, that’s all.’ There was no point telling Ivy the Commie was never open any more; the vacancy sign was just for show. ‘I’ll make up the spare bed. The rest of it will keep until the morning.’

  Ivy waited in the kitchen while Sam rummaged in the wardrobe, spread sheets and blankets on her old childhood bed. She took a pillow from her own bed, which used to be her mother’s, and smoothed the made bed with her palms. The single bed was narrow and cold. Some weak sense of longing surfaced for a time, a future or a past, when she and Ivy might have become close. She moved through the motions of hospitality. She printed the dust with her feet.

  Ivy appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Bed’s made,’ Sam said. She went to the window, kicked the rest of the broken chair under the bed, and pulled the sash down with the right degree of force and the slight sideways jerk it needed, a two-handed shove that had become a habit. It closed easily. ‘Mind the splinters,’ she said.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ Ivy said. The hands fidgeted against her jeans.

  Sam felt the air thicken. ‘Don’t go overboard,’ she said.
<
br />   ‘Sam.’

  She was already in the hall.

  Sam had coffee and toast on the table and was looking for milk when Ivy came into the kitchen. In the daylight her mother didn’t look so old, just skinny and hunted, like one of those last-animal videos: the last thylacine, the last scrawny lemur or tree kangaroo, the last black rhino or scabby devil staring out from its final days in captivity. Ivy had long red scratches down one arm, some fresh. She was shaking slightly, but there might have been a chill in the air.

  ‘Sleep all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam lied. ‘You?’

  ‘Great.’ Ivy returned her look.

  ‘I only have artificial,’ Sam said, waving the carton.

  ‘That’s all I’m used to,’ Ivy said. ‘I suppose I should learn to drink it black.’

  They sat and ate in silence. The bread tasted flat in Sam’s mouth, the coffee sour. Her mother hardly ate. The quiet swelled beneath the skin of the room.

  ‘Sam,’ Ivy began, ‘I want to ask you something.’ She swallowed the last of her coffee with a grimace. Her teeth weren’t good.

  ‘Go on,’ Sam said, aligning her cutlery. She made a quick calculation. The biscuit tin with the birds on the front, bright rosellas long rusted, was empty now. The rest of her cash was stuffed in the back of a drawer; there wasn’t much of it. Tourists didn’t come here any more. Last time, Ivy had stolen from the house like a junkie. She’d left the tin behind. Maybe she had hoped it would be full again.

  Ivy hesitated, clutching the handle of her cup. A strand of pale hair fell across her face. Sam’s ankle began a jagged rhythm.

  ‘How much do you need,’ she said.

  Ivy tugged the hair behind her ear. ‘I don’t want money. I want to ask you about your migraines. If you still get them.’ The twig-arms twitched. Her voice was hushed and croaky. She would not meet Sam’s eyes.

  ‘Not for years.’

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if you remember this from before. If you’ve already seen it, I mean.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Sam. She tucked her own hair, black, behind her ear: she was still her mother’s mirror.

  ‘Come on, love.’ Ivy’s eyes were serious, narrowed with need. She turned the cup in her hands. ‘I’ve had a lot of time to think, you know.’ Her gaze dropped. ‘I’m not too well.’

  ‘Join the club,’ said Sam.

  ‘It’s hepatic,’ Ivy said. A hand to her abdomen.

  Whatever warmth had seeped into the conversation now withdrew, leaving her mother exposed: her smoker’s skin, her bad teeth, the thinness, the grey under her eyes. Objects strewn across the sand. Sam dropped the toast, her throat dry.

  ‘That’s liver,’ Ivy continued.

  ‘So see a doctor,’ Sam said.

  ‘Seen them,’ Ivy said. ‘Doctors told me.’

  Sam looked at the square of toast and its crumbs on her plate, the dark pool of coffee. She usually didn’t mind the cheap substitute, but right now it seemed undrinkable. She tried to imagine a hospital, but could only see the scans and tests and questions that had peppered her own life, the life she had before the sea.

  ‘I don’t have that kind of money. Not for treatment.’ Her tone was unfair, even harsh. An hour with her mother and she turned into a teenager.

  Ivy shook her head. ‘Thing is they can’t tell me how long.’ She turned the cup. ‘They don’t know, or they won’t say. You know the health system now. So.’

  A pain began in one side of Sam’s abdomen, a connective nausea. Her body, at least, was sympathetic. Psychogenic, even. She did not know the system any more, but she had heard enough to wonder what people did instead.

  ‘So?’ Sam would not let the pain show on her face.

  ‘So who knows.’ Ivy glanced at something in mid-air, then on the table before her. Her hands stopped moving, and her voice became small. ‘I thought you might remember something you hadn’t told me. I thought you might still be able to see things.’ She shook her head, disappointed already.

  Sam said nothing. A pain throbbed at the back of her eyes, but it was the wrong kind of pain.

  Her mother looked up at last. ‘I wasn’t always fair on you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.’

  At once, the room was full of another time: the sharp smell of cheap Chardonnay and newsprint, her mother’s face too close to her own. The row of circled numbers in the margin of the paper. It wasn’t right the way these moments, the worst moments, could rear out of their resting places. As if nothing ever passed into history, as if everything was only another layer of now, sticking over and over itself like old wallpaper. The past kept showing through. She just wanted it gone.

  ‘I don’t do that any more,’ Sam said quietly. ‘You never believed me, anyway.’

  Ivy slurped the last of her coffee and wiped her mouth. ‘Sam, you don’t have to punish yourself.’

  ‘You were right not to,’ she said. She watched her mother’s face. ‘I’m sorry you came all this way.’

  ‘I came to see you,’ said Ivy. It was a weak protest, an afterthought.

  Sam stood and took the plates and cups from the table and rinsed them in the sink. Memory shouldn’t take up so much space, but it infused the water, humidified the air. She glanced at the back of her mother’s head. Her hair white-gold now, threaded with light. She sank the plug, squeezed detergent. It wouldn’t matter; she wouldn’t stay.

  Another pattern surfaced. A memory of hair spread out along a road. She shook her head. After everything, she couldn’t let that image wash up again. She would hold it underwater like her hands now, drown it.

  It was no use.

  ‘I wasn’t sure,’ said Ivy.

  A plate slipped from Sam’s hand, startling them both. She retrieved it shakily, stacked it beside the sink, wiped the rest, watching her hands carefully. They moved with an independent simplicity. Her body’s force, its motion through time, was a mystery. She shook the drips from her fingers and turned.

  ‘Nobody knows how much time they have, Ivy. You’re not supposed to.’ The small noise of suds deflated behind her. ‘You can’t live like that, knowing things like that. It isn’t fair.’

  Her hands had moved, the words had been spoken. And still there was something else in the room with them, another layer pressing. Not memory: some greater agency. A kind of echo.

  Sam had learned to avoid the word fate, if not its nature.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ said Ivy. Her hand moved over the old table, caressing it like skin. ‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ she told the weathered timber. Her voice was cracking.

  Sam turned, the dishes resolving under her hands. An old pain twitched in her shoulders. It should be easy just to make something up. Pick a number, give her enough to send her home, wherever that was for her now. Ivy’s heel drummed on the floor. Maybe the tic was genetic. Termites would take this floor back to splinters, dust, before too long. Ivy would be gone by then. Sam could go away too, somewhere up north, and be done with this place.

  But there was no escaping it. She was always going to be here.

  Neither spoke for minutes. Sam pulled the plug and listened to the drain’s reproach. Ivy turned in her chair, her lifted face pathetic as a dog’s. The blonde hair wasn’t dyed; Sam could see it was synthetic, a cheap wig. Chemo, or maybe just vanity. If she could afford treatment, Ivy had her own money, and she wasn’t here for information. She’d come back out of habit, the habit of an animal returning. People were results, circumstances. People didn’t choose what happened to them, or where they belonged.

  Outside, the wheel was poised, half of it visible through the kitchen window from where she stood, a huge steel bracket in the air. Gondolas dangled over the roofs of empty houses, over the broken roads, the dead trees. The sky was a cheerful, old-car blue. Eight
years living alone here, trying to get on with the effort of it, learning not to think about what anything had meant, getting better, and all that time she had just been waiting. Like a long sleep. Well, she was awake now. A fresh alertness gathered in her shoulders and her back; it paced behind the bars of her rib cage. Her own last days in captivity, she thought, almost smiling. Of course, after that there was extinction.

  ‘I’ll try,’ said Sam.

  A shadow crossed Ivy’s face, not for long, but long enough.

  Sam righted her cup, filled it with water, drank. The tank was low and the water didn’t taste good. She wiped her hands on her jeans and leaned against the bench. ‘I have to go somewhere,’ she said.

  ‘Sammy, you don’t have to go.’

  Sam did not flinch at the childhood name, just tilted her head to glance out the window at the edge of the wheel. An awful satisfaction crept up the back of her neck, like a creature emerging from mud. ‘I can’t do it here.’

  Ivy’s hands were fidgeting again. ‘I could come with you,’ she began, but the words caught. Too much had changed. ‘What can I do?’ she asked, her voice like a girl’s.

  Her need warmed Sam like sunlight. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I just need a little time.’

  2

  It’s a hot morning, strange for the season. There’s a smell in the air we don’t recognise, and it wakes us in our beds.

  Initially it’s almost pleasant, ammoniac and slightly sweet, a bit like a hospital after the cleaner’s been. We get up and peer out windows, merely intrigued. But when we open those windows and inhale the full force of it, we know something’s not right. Under the bleach there’s another, deeper smell, seething like an infection. We pull on our clothes, sniffing the fabric; we check the kitchen, look in on pets, gaze down at our own suspect bodies. It’s not us. It’s coming from outside.

  We get in our cars and go down to the water. We don’t know why we go that way, only that everybody else has made the same dreamy decision. We drive slowly, looking from car to car and into mirrors at each other, smiling odd, still-waking smiles, trying to keep a calm camaraderie, but soon enough we have to wind up the windows and concentrate. Our children in the back seat, still half-asleep; the dog’s snout pressed urgently against the window we won’t open. The land spreads out on either side, flat and sandy and unaltered. The dull hills watchful in the rear-view mirror.