The first night, Ivy answered her phone when it rang. ‘How dare you,’ they growled, their voices smoky, badly disguised. She kept her own voice calm and her words even, knowing she would see these same people tomorrow, and every day. It was just so predictable. On the second night, she switched off her phone. They came in person and called through the gaps in the louvre windows. On the third, she turned out all the lights, locked the windows, closed the curtains and deadbolted the door.
Their voices entered the house like scent. ‘We had a right to know,’ they pleaded. ‘You should have told us. You have to let us see her, Ivy.’
‘It’s too late now,’ said Ivy. ‘And, anyway, there’s nothing we could have done.’
‘What else is coming?’ they asked Sam, faces milky through the dirty glass. ‘What else do you know?’
‘Leave her alone,’ Ivy called back, stretching herself between her daughter and the glass. ‘She doesn’t know anything. She’s just a kid.’
Every night she slept in Sam’s room, the two of them curled on the single bed, which despite its narrowness seemed too large for them, like the hull of an empty boat. At night, neighbours whose cars they knew, even with the lights off, drove slowly past the house and threw eggs and bottles at their front veranda. One morning Ivy found witches spray-painted across the front fence, the letters dripping fresh enamel polyps, and her whole body began to shake. She raided Trent’s expired hardware stock, painted the white fence a grim grey-brown, and replaced the broken louvres before Sam got home. She hammered chicken wire around the veranda to protect the glass.
Sam herself said nothing about any of it. After school she sometimes ran into the house in tears, but more often walked home slowly, heel to toe, until she could control her expression.
It broke Ivy’s heart to see her like this, but she understood the other side of it. People had to express their grief somehow. They couldn’t get angry at Aspco, which had simply left Clapstone, outsourcing the rest of the site rehabilitation to the local council. Now no-one knew if it would ever happen. Until then, the exclamation marks at the end of the hills were still there, accusing. It was a bad year for everyone. They had to go on living. The threats at night were easier to take than the silences, the cold looks she got in the shop and in the street, looks that sometimes made her feel like packing up and leaving.
She worked her way through tins of paint, bottles of window cleaner, boxes of aspirin. She had always kept some loose bills in an old biscuit tin, but now she started putting money away more seriously. They ate badly, instant noodles and toasties in front of the television, avoiding the shop. She kept a bag packed with necessities stashed in the hall cupboard with the vacuum cleaner. Sleep loss and anxiety held an arms race. She shared Sam’s pills out carefully between them. The medication wore them both down but it let them sleep. In her head and to Sam, Ivy kept repeating what the doctor had said a long time ago: that she’d grow out of it. That lots of girls suffer while they’re young. That they either get better or get used to it.
‘What’s wrong with me,’ Sam whimpered, the lights in her head like small, cruel explosions.
‘Shhh,’ said Ivy, stroking her hair.
She shook out a tablet, bit it in two and handed half to Sam. She took the other half in her teeth and swallowed with a grimace. Within minutes she had curled her body around her daughter’s, her back facing the wall, her breathing even. Sam lay awake, eyes closed, the dancing lights mesmeric and inviting, the bursting feeling all over her skin.
A beer bottle bounced off the chicken wire and landed on the driveway, then rolled noisily into the street. The rattling mixed with the whine of a car. She kept her eyes closed on their pulsing kaleidoscope. Sam could hear her own noise, the faint, high drone, pressing in at the world’s edges. Like bad plumbing, the squealing of her brain’s pipes battled with their fittings. There was too much pressure inside her head. Something had to give.
Now it is now and at first Sam thinks she’s nowhere real at all. It looks so different. Flimsy buildings, hardly more than sheds, stand angled on a broad dirt street. There’s the front of a railway station, just the facade with no sign of a track. A flat tower clock with its hands at ten and two. In front of it, in the street, cement bricks lie threaded with weeds like the ragged trim of blankets. The street is just a field. In the centre stands a red Ferris wheel like a huge segmented skeleton, green and yellow carriages dangling from its bones. Rusted bars make angles for the sun. Beneath it lurks a pale monster, indistinct in form.
Sam touches the wall behind her with her hands. She has hands, a body now. Blue paint flakes from the ply and settles on her fingers. At the wrist, the curved hem of a pyjama sleeve. Something shakes her from the heels up. The buzzing drone, but something else as well. She mustn’t look at her feet in the gravel. She must look out at the world, take note of everything.
The monster, there. This strange enormity, stranded in the park like driftwood. It is a white thing, curved and tentacled, laid out on a slab. A single broken eye. Looking into it, she thinks of dead things washed up by the sea, their smells of rot and vinegar. Not her memory, just a ghost.
Above it hangs the wheel. A Ferris wheel, so this must be a fairground. But there’s no-one here, no fair and no festivity. Half a gate stands alone in the field. Ornate black iron with letters she has to squint to read:
Over the letters, the points of the bars are bent and twisted.
Everything is too small, set too close together. The hands on the railway station clock don’t move, and the whole edifice lists slightly. She can see where the light comes through between the panels. There’s no back to it. It’s all fake, even the hands of the clock. The time’s been painted on, and it’s useless.
She scans the puzzle of red-brick and weatherboard houses, suburb-solid, that lie beyond the park. The browned trees. In the distance, the familiar barren hills brushed pink. The same old hills, the same houses. But something’s wrong. The hills hang unfinished, like a sentence with no full stop. It’s here, it’s home, but so much has changed.
There’s a movement in the corner of the Ferris wheel; she thinks maybe it’s turning. All she can hear is the drone, the drone, and her head hurts. It’s hard to pay attention. She watches it until it’s clear the circle’s not revolving. But there is something moving up there. Something crawls on one of the spokes, a dark insect in silhouette. Sam watches it stretch itself, creeping in along the limb until it reaches the hub of the wheel. It curls, descends. The insect grows two legs, two arms, resolves itself into the shape of a person.
She feels sick. More deaths, more falling.
She closes her eyes but it hurts her head to keep them closed. And when she looks again it isn’t climbing up, the body, it’s climbing down. Whoever it is has reached the centre of the wheel and turns at the top of a metal ladder set against the frame. Then they calmly begin to descend that too. She watches them until they reach the bottom, step onto concrete, still holding the ladder, shaking. White marks on their jeans, their hood over their head. They turn and push the hood back with a hand.
It’s a woman, her features dark, her ears protruding from straight black hair. Familiar, though it’s hard to see from here. She sways, lets go of the ladder. She stumbles to the edge of the cement, and her hair falls across her face in a wet tangle. She shakes her head at something, then steps off, one hand to the edge.
She lands on her own feet, then disappears behind that white monster. Its plaster tentacles stretch out, its broken eye is darkly watching. Sam feels a shudder run through her, so deep it might come from the earth under her feet.
When the woman appears again, a man is with her. Half-hidden in the weeds, a clean stranger in navy suit pants and a straw-coloured shirt, he moves his arms to help her walk. She pushes them away. She takes a step. She lifts her face in Sam’s direction.
Their eyes should meet, but they don’t. There’s no connection. She looks and looks without seeing. It’s so unsettling.
Sam feels a drop of sweat run down her back, a warm thrum of fear. She sinks onto her heels to steady herself. She has never felt so known.
The unfamiliar man, dark hair in a neat fringe, too well dressed, out of place. A small orange box at his waist, like a tape measure, but blinking. He puts a hand across the woman’s back and tries to guide her. He is speaking to her, reaching a hand to her face, but he’s looking down at his orange box. The woman’s eyes are large and hollow through a crosshatch of hair. The ears. First, Sam thinks of her mother. But she’s darker, her skin. And her mother’s right here, in the room with her. Another here, pressed against this one, like that warm hand against her back.
From where she crouches Sam can see herself shiver. Her hair is wet, stuck to her forehead; it must have been raining. The ground is uneven, weeded with prickle-bush and the high stalks of wild barley. Walking it Sam wavers, almost falls. Then she stops to retch into the tall grass. One of her hands pushes against the shoulder of the brother. Sam makes a guess at brother, though she doesn’t have one. It’s just that Sam touches him in a familiar way, like family.
There’s another rattle in her body, from her body or the earth beneath, or from the struggle to remain. Like the feel of drilling somewhere below. The others feel it too, this rattle, she sees them flinch with it, reach for each other. They turn their heads as a tentacle drops from the body of the monster and shatters on the ground. The plaster makes a tiny white cloud, but no sound. The shaking stops.
They make their way across the field now, edging closer. The detail is present, excruciating. Sam can feel the splintered wood prick her shoulder blades through the t-shirt. She can feel the paint scatter at the small of her back, the concentration of her own weight in parts of her feet. Her bare toes press into the sharp gravel. Touch, vision are clear, even the edges of smells, but like always this drone noise, drowning out all sound.
They come close enough for her to read their faces. Sam opens her mouth. The mouth says something like Same. So far the same. The shapes exaggerated. She knows she can’t be heard.
The eyes look through her.
Pain, for certain. Fear. And something else, a sort of laughing at the spell of the words. Same, she says again. She’s saying her own name. Sam wants to wave, yell out, to help somehow, but she can’t move. They have already turned for the gate.
‘Fuck,’ she says. She swallows. It’s not a word she’s used to; she doesn’t know why she’s said it. Her voice doesn’t work, it hasn’t made a sound, but even so she is worried that Ivy can hear her, in the room at her back. Time tugs her back there like a hook tugs fish. But she wants to stay.
The figures are rushing now. No fence; they step around the gate. Through the iron, the houses are known but wrong, walls false or broken, their gardens overgrown, windows smashed, some with sections missing or collapsed. That place with the tree growing through the garage roof, she knows that house, the tree’s limbs going grey. She glimpses some other structure to the north, curved glass winking just enough to guess it’s there. Then the hills disappear.
A chalky cloud takes shape, spreads out and down. Sam feels that rattle through her feet, jarring up through her heels and spine, the belch arriving on delay. The chalk fog eats the land beyond the town, swallows the strange building with its glass curve perched beyond the houses.
The fog creeps, quick then slow. The houses seem solid again through its filter, then they go.
Someone runs through it, stumbles, falls like a doll in the road. Blonde hair spreads thin and still across the broken asphalt. The doll doesn’t move now. She can’t see it move.
Fog curls through the gate like a thousand hands. Silences the world.
All of this now will be gone.
The sound of the bottle cut into the pain, and Sam felt Ivy flinch beside her. She pressed her slight body against her mother’s back, protective of its turned warmth. Her heart stumbled in her chest. The things she had seen made little sense, but the images were clearer, they were more sustained than they had been before. She had to concentrate, to think about what they meant.
‘Are you all right?’ mumbled Ivy, in her sleeping voice.
The fog was dissipating. The noise had all but gone. Piece by piece, that world dismantled. No more harm and no more damage. Just a heart punching too much blood, and an echo in her head of breaking glass. There was no relief in speaking.
‘It’s nothing,’ said Sam. ‘A bad dream.’
‘Good girl,’ Ivy muttered, curved in sleep.