The mail service has trickled away, but Trent’s been on a run to Hummock, where they still get a van every other week, and he’s come back with a stack of these letters under his arm. The letterhead has a bold, dark brown SH at the top, a paler shadow repeated after the H like a ghosting effect. Once again, they’re all addressed Dear Resident.
The letter is very short.
Due to a restructure, some assets pertaining to Belemnite Enterprises have been acquired by Sepia Holdings. Most investors will remain unaffected but some liabilities may impact variably.
‘What does that mean, impact variably?’ we ask Jean, and she shrugs.
‘Maybe changes,’ she says. ‘Maybe nothing. Corporations move in mysterious ways. Sometimes a merger like this is just about rebranding. Changing the letterhead.’
You are notified of this within the thirty-day notification period according to DSC regulations. Sepia Holdings and its subsidiaries accept no liability for lost notifications.
Sincerely.
Then there are three days in a row so windy we don’t leave the safety of the village. We breathe the circulated air and watch the dust collect in the corners of the dome like one of those sand paintings, until the wind blows it away again.
After the dust clears, a few of us go for a drive up to the reserve in Curdie’s ute, bumping along past the open gate, tracing the marks of other wheels. Apart from a couple of pegs and a bit of safety tape, we can’t see any evidence of changes, present or planned. Most of the tape has been torn by the wind and blown up into the dead branches of the remaining red gums. There’s a pile of beer cans spilling out of a carton at the base of one trunk, and a campfire stain nearby. We get back in the ute and sit there.
There wasn’t any mention of a brighter future this time.
‘Let’s go into town,’ says Curdie.
It has been months for many of us. Years, for some. The shortages, the roads have had an influence, of course, but it’s mainly that we haven’t had the urge. Now it overtakes us like a flood. A quiet drive to Hummock’s just what we need. A little perspective, stretch our legs. The ute curls out of Clapstone, taking the potholes with a few hard thunks. Now the day has the feeling of an adventure, taken at lavish expense.
‘Put some music on,’ Jean says, reaching for the console. But the radio only gives static.
Just up from the stretch of wrecks, a man in overalls flags us down. He’s standing beside a white van. At first we think he’s broken down out here, but when we stop he doesn’t want our help.
‘Where are you off to?’ he asks, leaning in the driver’s side to look over the three of us squeezed in the back. His hair is thick and black, though when we look closely we can see flecks of white at the temples.
‘Just going into Hummock,’ we say.
‘What for?’
‘Shopping,’ we say. ‘Are you the police?’
He walks around the back of the ute and looks in the tray. It’s empty. He seems satisfied. We start to wonder if he’s the same man from the ute. We can’t quite remember his face. But the other one was greyer in the beard, and this one’s freshly shaven.
‘Don’t worry,’ Curdie jokes. ‘We’re not trying to escape or anything.’ The man doesn’t laugh. The overalls are made of the protective orange fabric that the firefighters used to wear, back when Hummock had a brigade. If it wasn’t for the vehicle, we might have guessed he’d parachuted in, or else escaped from prison.
‘You’re not with that Belemnite mob, are you?’ asks Curdie, when the man returns to his window.
‘You mean Sepia Holdings,’ the man says.
‘That’s the one,’ says Curdie.
He sniffs. ‘Nope.’
‘Somebody else, then?’
He squints off into the hills. ‘Private security,’ he grunts.
‘Oh.’ Curdie thinks about it for a minute. ‘Why do we need to have security?’
‘You don’t have it,’ the man says. ‘The company has it.’
We look for an insignia on the van, but there’s only a single sharp grey vertical that might be an arrowhead or a tear in the paintwork.
‘But what is it for?’
‘I couldn’t tell you, mate. I guess it wants to protect its assets like everybody else,’ he says, and gazes into the distance. Eventually he lets go of the car, and steps away. We wait for him to wave us off before we pull away: a courtesy, is all.
He’s on the road behind us all the way into Hummock, but we lose him when we drive up the main street and around the shops.
‘They must have found something good,’ Allan muses. ‘Maybe there’s a resource up there. Something worth protecting.’
Half the shops we used to go to are closed, some boarded up. Nobody’s done anything with Ed’s old showroom except spray-paint rude words on it and break all the glass. A few families straggle past, wrangling prams and children. Women look up at us, suspicious, and even the children’s faces are set in fierce defence. Many of the houses are boarded up, and others have been left unfinished, flapping ragged tarps instead of walls. We spot some laundry hanging in one of these, sheets slung over the beams. There’s a mattress in a burnt-out garage. It’s hard to tell which houses are abandoned, which badly neglected by their occupants. We would never have let things get like this in Clapstone.
‘I didn’t realise it was so deserted,’ says Jean.
‘Least the parking’s improved,’ Curdie replies, pulling into the supermarket. Since Trent’s not with us, we collect some of the luxuries we can’t get at the Foodtown. Our guilt at this makes us greedy: chocolates, canned goods pile up in the trolley. There are empty sections, but the big supermarket seems decadent; we keep exclaiming at what they still have. When we get to the counter, we’re teasing each other over our nostalgic choices, laughing like children.
The automatic checkout machine talks us through the scanning cheerfully, but at the end it refuses our cards.
‘Says insufficient funds,’ says Jean.
When we look around for help, there’s no staff except security guards. The few other customers are watching us with mixed expressions.
We put a few things back, and try again. It is embarrassing, though to be fair, the prices are ridiculously inflated. None of our cards work, and eventually we decide the machine has broken. We scrape together some cash, pour all our pocket change into the socket, and carry a few items in our arms. The rest we push along the counter, back into the shop. The security guards watch us leave, and we feel their gaze, or someone’s, follow us all the way home.