Dyschronia Read online

  When we get down to the shore, to the car park on its jut of rock, we pull our handbrakes, open our doors and cover our mouths with our sleeves. Someone retches. We blink against a burning in our eyes. Some of us are briefly blinded. We close car doors, we stand at the edge, we try to look out over the beach. We all hear how quiet it is, but some of us think the quiet is weird and some of us don’t think anything at all.

  We squint at the sand, expecting the usual shallows, seagulls, weeds. There is a strange, painterly quality in the light. There are birds down there, but they aren’t right either. They shouldn’t be crows, or this busy.

  The light, however admirable, is all wrong. The sun shines too brightly, giving the scene a strange exposure. There is too much sand. The birds are stark shadows, attacks without pattern. The sun has misjudged things. This much clarity is in poor taste.

  Gradually, the smell is revealed, as if the clear light marks it out as visible against the beach. The details build a complex of memories: bait left out in summer, maggot roadkill, freezer failure, vinegar and, finally, our asphalt squid. With that last, we realise what it is we’re looking at. The light isn’t shimmering off the sea like it’s supposed to. The light is bouncing off hard, still sand, and something else, many things, slick and lumpish things.

  How do we see what we can’t imagine?

  We swallow mouthfuls of air and breathe through our sleeves. We stare at the mess before us, at the sheer ugliness strewn across the seabed, and we look from side to side, at each other, and back at our cars, and again at the sprawl of what-the-fuck. The field of there-is-no-nice-way-to-put-this. We blink our eyes against the bleachy tingle. And one of us is the first to speak. We don’t remember who it is. But one of us says, ‘That stinks.’

  Down on the beach, there are bodies. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. The bodies are all sizes, lying like pieces of raw chicken on the sand and weeds. The lumps stretch out into the distant haze. An uncountable number, disappearing into the distance. We cannot fathom how, how many, how.

  And they stink. How they stink! The smell is baroque; it is white noise, it is aggression. We keep blinking, covering our faces, but we can’t make it go away.

  ‘Fug, that reegs,’ Trent says, through the thick of his sleeve.

  He’s the second one to speak. We all say something similar. Something to the bloody hell effect. We say it through our sleeves and palms and under our thumb-shut nostrils. Even the squid wasn’t like this, though maybe we’ve forgotten, in a single year, what she really smelled like, and can only remember the oily magic, the promise of her appearance, that sick belief in rescue: Asphaltica. A joke. But played by whom?

  Hurt now, we look across for the waves. We turn on them, ready to accuse. If this is some attempt at comedy, we want to say, it isn’t funny. Enough now. Come on. Wash this up.

  But the waves aren’t there.

  We look to the known exposure of low tide.

  It isn’t there.

  How can we see what we can’t imagine?

  In the sea’s place, patches of shallow seagrass compost, loosing their gases to the air like a side dish to the main perfume. Rocks poke out of the shredded weeds. Exposed molluscs gasp. The sun hits the still, glistening land-that-was-water and is merciless in its attentions. We watch a group of crows working this part of the buffet as a team, poking the eyes from distant corpses. There will be more of them. It is going to smell worse. It is not yet dry, only beginning to decompose; it is only a matter of time.

  Oh, in the distance there’s a silver splinter edging the base of the cloud; it’s indistinct, too far away to see if it’s moving. And so (we breathe in, delicately, just to the throat) it hasn’t evaporated. Not a whole ocean. That much couldn’t be lost.

  We are nearly grateful.

  But the fact of it is that the waves – the shore – the water itself has recoiled. It has pulled away, embarrassed, from the mess it has made. Its cowardice shocks us as much as the bodies. It feels personal.

  It is personal.

  Why didn’t Sam tell us?

  We turn around. We open our mouths to ask her, since we can’t very well ask the sea, but she isn’t where she should be either.

  There’s no sign of Ivy, but Ed is with us, behind us, and we feel safer seeing him here, fleshy and material. He’s standing at the open door of his car, and before we can speak he presses his lips together, blows up his cheeks and sighs through his teeth like a man who has eaten too much. Pffffff.

  ‘Well,’ he says. He looks down at his open hands. ‘I suppose it was only a matter of time.’ Our mouths are still open, so we close them, then open them again to breathe. He puts his sleeve over his face and inhales through it. Over the cuff, the eyes have the same upbeat sparkle in them as always. They reassure us, those dear periwinkles, even as he gets in his car.

  ‘After all, she’s just a kid,’ he says, as if marvelling. Then he closes the door.

  Nobody tries to stop him. When he raises a hand to give us a wave through the tinted glass, we raise ours back. What else are we supposed to do? We are decent people. We watch dumbly as his flash car backs out of its spot and exits the car park. We watch as its rear end shrinks, bouncing on the broken road, and we keep watching as it vanishes into the distance.

  The smell makes it hard to think. We can’t make out his meaning. Later we will break it up, try to consider its components. In the moment we can only reach for the surest rail. He must be going on ahead to make announcements, adjustments, to find a way forward, a solution, to notify the right people. This belief brightens and dims like the apparition of light on the distant waves. We look over our shoulders at that light, and it beats sharp lines into our retinas.

  The light only strikes the surface. The water beneath says no no no. The water beneath and far, far away says this ruins everything.

  3

  The meteorite should have made a hole in the roof, but the tin was intact, the windows of the portable too, and yet Sam’s head felt just like it had been hit by some hot boulder travelling at speed. Ms Spalding quietly sorted through handouts at her desk, undisturbed; the rest of the composite class quietly completed another worksheet, except Jackson, who was trying to slice his index finger off with a pair of blunt craft scissors. No-one else seemed to have noticed that the large-print words behind Sam’s teacher had begun to wander. Vowels bent from their rounds, unhooked their stems and slithered across the blackboard. Sam’s tongue was thick in her mouth, her head swelling up like a balloon. She put a hand to her temples: they felt taut. Like a balloon blown too full. Too full of bright light.

  And then it burst.

  She was on the couch in a dim room and inside the room was another room made of pain. Her mother hovered, a moving shadow, then squatted beside her to stroke her head and say something soothing through the deaf air. Pictures faded in and out in the inner room, some familiar, some just angles and patterns, as if the pain was trying to make itself visible. Soon she couldn’t see anything else. Past a certain point, there was only surrender.

  Words hovered in the air beside her, dampened by her mother’s sweet fearfulness. Migraine poured out between blunt silences. It smelled of bad breath, of stale sheets and asphalt gases. She let go of understanding, and her last clear thought was the sudden insight that death was possible, and obscenely unfair, before she was pulled through the surface of something black, and time came off its axis and rolled away.

  It’s now but it’s a memory. Or like a memory, blurred at the edges. Or like a dream, but present to her.

  Now.

  The girl is walking down a street a few blocks from her house. Ivy walks ahead of her, carrying a green shopping bag over one shoulder and talking on the phone. The girl is pushing her red toy pram. In the pram there’s a doll, its head the size of a real baby’s head, with wispy blonde hair. She’s never seen the doll before, but she recognises the pr
am with its stiff wheel; Ivy bought it for her from the discount bin outside the two-dollar shop in Hummock. And she recognises herself walking along intently.

  Then she thinks, But I’m me. And her head cannot contain it.

  She can’t hear what Ivy’s saying. She can’t hear anything. The pain has shed light now, taken on the form of sound. It’s the shape of a high whirring, like a fridge on the blink but loud, loud. It erases every other sound.

  A large, chocolate-brown dog runs up behind the other Sam, the walking Sam, and licks her on the back of the neck. She turns around in time to see the dog disappear around a corner. She wipes its wet touch from the back of her neck, smiles a little, turns again. Ivy’s on the phone, walking ahead, and hasn’t seen. The other Sam pauses, as though stuck in thought a moment. Then she tips the pram onto its side.

  The head rolls out, and then the body, separated. Sam hesitates again, looking at the body in the road, at the blonde hair spilled on the asphalt. She picks up the head and sets it between the handles; she gathers up the rest of the doll, puts it back in its seat and fastens its small toy seatbelt. She looks around, searching for something else.

  The first Sam, the watcher, wants to help her. But she can’t quite move. That high drone holds her in its fist.

  The Sam who is watching and the Sam walking are distinct somehow, but in a slippery way: she’s also both at once. It’s an odd feeling, being here and there. On the one hand, it tingles all over, and on the other hand, it hurts like hell.

  ‘A dream,’ said her mother, when Sam tried to explain. ‘Don’t talk now.’ And it faded like dreams do, and she didn’t try to keep it.

  This kind of gentle discouragement was usually enough to turn her from some interest to another, at least in Ivy’s presence. There were closed drawers in the house, some jammed and some forbidden. She preferred to touch and turn these mysteries alone. It was just the two of them. They had to trust each other.

  Days later, burrowing in such a drawer, Sam turned up a knotted length of silky blonde hair. She pulled the tangle until a head emerged, and was surprised when its eyes popped open to greet her. Pale blue. Its body was buried under the rest of the fabric, its arms and legs plastic. She ran down the hall to the laundry, waving the head like a battle trophy. The dream hadn’t been forgotten, just submerged. Now it could surface.

  ‘When is this?’ she asked her mother.

  ‘You mean what.’ Ivy frowned between towels.

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Sam smiled, but her eyes betrayed a panic. She often got her words confused, but she was only seven; it would come good.

  Ivy reached, folded. ‘I should throw all that shit away. Sorry. Rubbish.’

  ‘It isn’t rubbish,’ Sam said. ‘I might have needed it.’

  ‘Might need,’ Ivy said, mystified. The girl skipped into her own room. Her little voice trailed nonsense down the hallway.

  ‘I’ll fix her for you,’ Ivy called out after her.

  Sam laid the doll on the narrow bed and covered it with a blanket. When that didn’t suit, she sat it on a chair. She propped the head in the doll’s lap, and the blue eyes stared.

  She saw the dog a few days later, running down the street pursued by Mr Ellison, its tail high and tongue flapping, jaws wide open with delight at its escape. Jill, who had pestered her parents for weeks, was in her class at school; Sam thought she must have seen the dog before, and then forgotten till she dreamed it. But when Jill introduced her to Milo, caught and shamed, she said they had picked him up from the shelter only that morning.

  She ran her finger over the familiar spines of the old exercise books where the daily accounts were kept, the fatter ones stuffed with invoices of stock ordered, loose payslips, unhinged lists. She stroked a jar of paperclips, a roll of stickers from an expired promotion, the remote for the air conditioner, the key to the cigarette cupboard, piles of business cards for tradespeople. She left grubby prints on a can of Christmas snow. The space behind the counter at the Foodtown was a cabinet of curiosities.

  ‘Do you have to get under my feet?’ Ivy herded her into the dark storeroom. Sam wasn’t supposed to hang around the shop after school – the insurance – but Trent didn’t really mind. Roger Quirk, who worked with his father in the Caller’s office two days a week, sometimes babysat, but he wasn’t reliable.

  Ivy flicked a switch. The lone, dim bulb cast shadows. A curl of handle, a flake of polyester blonde. Sam’s throat was frozen.

  ‘Brought this for you. Sort of fixed it,’ said Ivy.

  The head had an eerie lilt. They looked at each other, the doll and the girl, wary as cats.

  ‘Well, I didn’t have much time,’ said Ivy.

  ‘It’s okay, I like it,’ Sam managed. A knot was forming somewhere in her chest. Her mother’s relief loosened it slightly, but it didn’t go away.

  ‘Go on. Play quietly. I’ve only got an hour to go.’ Ivy pushed her gently on the back with a warm hand and disappeared into the shop. Sam waited for the register to ring before she approached the toy pram. Its seatbelt undone, the doll’s legs flopped out of a neat blue dress. The knot writhed. A warm-milk feeling ran through her body from crown to ground; she had to look down to make sure she hadn’t wet herself.

  The doll’s eyes were closed. Sam pushed them open and made sure they were still. She lifted the head until the clumsy threads were visible, then pulled at one loose end. It came out easily. When she had it separated, she placed the head on top of the body. The milky feeling turned and snaked back up her brown legs. She sat on a pallet of shrink-wrapped tins and opened her homework. Quietly, Sam pencilled words into amputated sentences. The, a, and, was. The doll’s head watched. Its proper blue eyes in that fixed stare.

  Proper blonde hair and white skin, too. Like Ivy.

  The other kids’ questions were confusing. They asked her where she was from, as if she hadn’t been born right there in Hummock hospital, same as them. As if they hadn’t all been playing together on the same swings and throwing tantrums at the same birthday parties for the first seven years of their lives. Now they made faces behind her back, tugged their eyes and grunted. One minute they’d offer a friendship bracelet, the next a fist. Some of the words they used were new to her. Afraid to upset Ivy, Sam had to ask her teacher what they meant.

  Ms Spalding had told her not to worry; being different made you interesting. Unique as a snowflake, she said. Sam decided to try accepting this as interesting. To imagine snow from a can making the pretty formations it had in cartoons, in paper cut-outs. But it came out in a foam, and was white, and they still threw pine cones at her from the upper storey of the rocket frame that stood in the asphalt playground. If not pine cones, then tennis balls. A couple of times, to her horror, it was pellets of dried-up dog shit. That was when she told Ivy.

  ‘Least it was dry,’ Ivy said. She’d combed the dust out of her daughter’s long dark hair, tucked it behind her protruding ears. ‘Sticks and stones,’ she said. ‘Just be proud of who you are. Hold your head up.’ She tilted her daughter’s chin with a strong-boned hand to examine her. ‘And try to stay out of the sun.’

  In the storeroom, Sam looked down at her incomplete homework. An hour was an age when it began. Still, time got away somehow. It crept into the corners of a room and hid there. Hours were filled with it, the way this room was filled with empty boxes. She pinched herself at the wrist, hard. Nothing changed.

  Ivy collected her, a shopping bag slung over one shoulder. She glanced at the homework book, and then at the doll’s re-separated head. ‘What have you been up to?’ she asked, but not in a way that an answer mattered. She picked an insect out of the doll’s yellow hair and flicked it into the shadows. ‘Guess I’m not cut out for surgery. Come on, we’ll go to the playground.’ Her smile was an opened box of oxygen.

  The small wheels rattled and stuck on the asphalt. The warmth in the day had sunk into the ground under
foot and the road was slightly sticky beneath Sam’s shoes. They followed the road past the Quirks’ place, their garden a restless mess of barely tended succulents. Ivy’s phone rang and as she answered it Sam fell behind, steadying the doll’s head against the edge of the pram.

  ‘Hey Roger,’ Ivy said, grinning. ‘I was just walking past your house.’

  A warm feeling ran through Sam. She’d been here before, in this very scene. This time she was the other Sam, and this time she knew what was happening. She could hear the words. She listened out for the humming sound, but there was only warm wind, flies or bees, a puff of sparrows scattering behind a fence.

  Sam looked for herself between the houses, but no-one was hiding there. She almost tripped on the footpath, had to look at her feet. This double moment had strange purpose, but it was confusing. Had she stumbled before, in that other now? Were these pre-laced sneakers the right shoes? If only she had paid attention. That’s when she felt a wet sensation on the back of her neck. As she turned, some part of her was pleased to find the right move, to remember. She watched Milo bound away, an echo of himself.

  He must have escaped again.

  She made a noise. Ivy didn’t turn around. Sam glanced at the place she thought the other girl should be, but there was no evidence of her. She was singular, then, but doubled somehow, too. She found she knew what she had to do. First, she gripped a handle of the toy pram, tipped it over. It fell on its side, just so.

  The doll’s body landed on its front. The head rolled a little further, as it should. Its hair spilled. Sam bent to scoop the head and set it in place between the handles; then she gathered up the body, reconnected the tiny seatbelt. It was neat and good, like finished homework. Put the words on the lines where they belong. A kind of completion settled over her, and even though she’d never felt anything like it before, it fitted her like familiar clothing; she was safe.