When the celebrant stopped for breath, Sam could hear voices and laughter carrying across from the pub. She shifted in her seat, unable to get comfortable. Though they had unstacked enough plastic chairs to fill the Institute, most of them were empty.
She supposed that people had built up a thirst waiting for the insurance to come through. It was decent money. Less than people had hoped, though more than they’d been prepared for. The company had been slow to part with it. It had been a bad year for natural disasters, what with all those fires, and they claimed they’d go bankrupt unless the state government matched some of the funds.
The celebrant said there was a time to laugh and a time to weep.
Clapstone was a happy place after the flood. People had banded together to clean out garages, take ute-loads of broken furniture up to the old quarry and throw them over the side, to rebuild and repair each other’s homes. Ed said you couldn’t contrive team-building activities like these. People really came together in difficult times. They stopped Sam in the street to clasp her hands between their own and thank her. They were all so grateful.
A time to keep silent, and a time to speak.
And it was fun, living as though they were camping. Last night she’d sat on a milk crate at Jill’s place, toasted marshmallows over a camp stove on the bare cement floor while the Ellisons told stories about other natural disasters they’d witnessed or heard about. It did feel by now like the flood was a natural event. It was how they talked about it. It had affected them all as something inevitable, unstoppable. Really puts things in perspective, that’s what Mr Ellison had said. Reminds you what’s important, where you stand.
They talked as if they had no hand in it.
Apart from a few leaks, Sam’s own house was undamaged. Ivy hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw anything away. There had been arguments about it, the waste of not claiming damages, but these arguments never lasted long. Ed and Ivy were seated beside her now, her mother’s hand in his. On the far side of Ed, Ned was scrolling through his phone. A burst of laughter from across the street made him lift his head to the window, a distant expression on his face.
Everyone’s time would come, according to the celebrant. It was all part of a plan. A few heads turned to look at Sam, but only with affection. Finally Mr Gable’s coffin was wheeled back down the aisle and loaded into the hearse to be taken to Hummock for cremation. The old man had died in his sleep. Natural causes.
If Sam felt a tug of guilt or shame, some lingering dread or confusion in her stomach, she blamed it on being about to start high school. Soon she would be travelling up to Hummock on the bus, walking into rooms full of strangers. No wonder she was nervous.
No-one there would know her story. No-one could be told. The secrecy made sense to Sam, or at least it had while they waited for the insurance. Now she wasn’t sure what else they were waiting for. ‘Be patient,’ Ed kept saying. ‘We’ve got to make a plan.’ But the planning never seemed to eventuate.
The four of them didn’t follow the hearse back to Hummock for the cremation. They stood with the others outside the Institute to watch it go, then joined the rest of Clapstone at the pub. When she entered the cool air of the front bar, a few of her neighbours patted Sam’s shoulders or ruffled her hair, and others clinked their glasses against the red lemonade that Ed handed her. ‘Enjoy it,’ he said, as around her the noise lifted to a happy pitch. And she did, even if the sugar made her feel a little sick.
Hummock was a bigger town with clean and decent streets, a water feature outside the council building, an industrial area tucked politely out of view. They had proper buildings at the school, art rooms, a gym, strict rules about truancy. At the enrolment meeting Ivy warned them about the migraines.
‘We’re unlikely to send her home for that,’ the deputy principal explained. ‘There’s a sick bay here where she can rest.’ She took the two of them on a tour, showed them the grim room under the stairs that smelled of heat cream and stale laundry. Sam tried not to look horrified.
‘They’re sometimes quite severe,’ Ivy said, ‘but she’s getting better.’
‘They say girls grow out of it,’ said the deputy. Ivy shot Sam a sidelong glance that she pretended not to catch.
It wasn’t too hard to stay out of the way at high school. She was careful to excel at nothing. Most of the other kids left her and Jill alone. If Hummock kids spoke to her at all it was to ask her where she was from. Clapstone was never the right answer. She felt like she had started over in kindergarten, facing the same stupid questions. There were other kids with no dad, or two, or who lived with grandparents or an aunt. There were brown kids and black kids and Asian kids. But they all knew each other. They’d all gone to primary school together, established all their roles and rituals and in-jokes. And they knew where they were supposed to be from.
Being from Clapstone meant something else. The air conditioning on the bus was always breaking down, so the Clapstone kids had a scent to them, a mix of sweat and decaying vinyl. They smelled poor. When her new classmates talked about their parents’ jobs as teachers, accountants, plumbers, engineers, Sam realised almost everyone she knew was out of work. Most of Clapstone had been living on a combination of welfare and severance since the plant closed; now they were living on insurance money. There was still work to do up at the Aspco site, but only day by day, and even that was winding down.
Ed was right. They needed a plan.
Returning home hot and tired, Sam could find nowhere to unpack her homework among the papers spread out on the table. She lay on the couch, playing a game on her new mobile phone, trying not to listen to Ed and Ned going back and forth about the site.
‘The pressure’s stabilised,’ said Ed, ‘so we can probably look at capping it this week.’
In the corner of her eye she could see their elbows poised over the paperwork, their faces lost in conspiracy. Ned had moved into the Commercial after the flood but he was still at their house all day, taking up space. She was sick of them both.
‘It’ll be over soon,’ said Ed.
Sam flinched and lost a life. She hurled her phone into the couch. ‘Then what?’
Ed closed his laptop. ‘I don’t know, Sam,’ he said evenly. His eyes stayed on her a moment longer than was comfortable, searching. She broke the deadlock, got up to search for a lemonade iceblock in the freezer. She’d convinced Ivy they could afford to buy the name-brand kind now, but there were none left in the box. These two had eaten them all.
Ivy might bring some home if she texted her. She was working extra shifts lately, making up for lost time, and Sam hardly saw her before dinnertime, when the shop closed. She didn’t mind; her mother was moody lately, short-tempered and tired, prone to sudden anger. She was trying to quit smoking. It was safer not to be around her too much. Sam returned to the couch and dug her phone out.
‘Ivy’s working late again,’ said Ned. ‘She’ll be home soon.’
‘It’s not your home.’
‘Sam.’ Ed didn’t bother to look at her.
She burrowed down, ignoring their talk. Pressure and reservoirs, cement. They weren’t even going to celebrate the opening of the reserve as a park, let alone rezone it for housing. Ed never talked about that idea any more. Since the flood, something had changed; he had a quiet focus. If he’d bothered to explain it to her she would probably have found it boring. Well, let him play around with his reservoirs. Ned was going back to his mother’s soon, and then she would have her house back; she would have some room to think about what came next.
‘Check this out,’ Ed said, pushing the laptop across to Ned. ‘Brilliant, isn’t it?’
Sam expelled a packet of air, and went outside to get her bike.
She leaned the bike against a boulder and climbed down the rocks to the sand. There was an ache in her knee; the bike was getting too small for her now. She added it to the list of things she could have claimed were lost in the flood, if her mother had let her.
The jetty was gone, and a few small boats with it. No-one had thought of insuring them, and only Curdie had bothered to drag his tinny out of the water. The jetty had been a gift from Aspco, which meant it belonged to everyone and no-one. No matter; it was gone now. The wind that came with all that rain must have made the water wild, and the waves had snapped the jetty free. At the shore end, there was a sort of a stump now, the asphalt car park sitting on a pile of rocks. A few wooden poles still stuck up out of the sea, but they were slowly being eaten away by whatever lived in them. Somewhere out there, the cuttlefish would gather in the winter. At least now they would have some privacy.
If she had seen it coming, she might have saved it: told them to reinforce the structure, or at least to bring the rest of the boats to shore. But she couldn’t see everything. She could only tell them what she knew for certain. And even then there were things she missed.
She avoided the water’s edge. The sandy flat that passed for a beach was covered in washed-up weeds, drying unevenly in humps. It was like walking in salty tea leaves. Scattered among the humps were balls of knotted plant fibre like dreadlocked hair. She climbed over and between the mounds of seagrass, following the line of high tide, picking up cuttlebones for the budgies before remembering the birds had flown away.
She dropped them in a clattering pile.
It was still too early in the season for people. There were usually a few around in the winter: recreational divers, or scientists studying the cuttlefish. She kicked the pile of cuttlebones with her toes, and a strip of plastic turned up in the sand beneath them. She bent to pick it up and kept on walking, collecting bits and pieces of rubbish: a thong, a chunk of polystyrene, a bit of frayed rope. The sea might look gentle and shallow now, but after the flood it coughed up everything it swallowed: string and bones and pipes and cans and plastic, so much plastic. Sam found an old shopping bag and tipped everything into it. The bag was full within minutes, and the weight of it against her leg was satisfying. But when she looked along the length of the beach, she saw that she had only covered a few dozen metres. The task was infinite. Even in her own small stretch of the visible world there was no end to the garbage. She knotted the plastic handles tightly before throwing the bag into the dunes.
How much of this was washed out by their flood, and how much came from somewhere else? Could you trace any of it back to a single source, a cause? There were swirls of rubbish in the oceans now, in gyres. There’d been a documentary shown at school. They were like islands out there, floating trash islands where birds nested, feeding bits of plastic to their young. She’d seen footage of cut-open albatrosses, their bellies filled with pellets. In Japan they were studying tiny microbes that would eat the plastic. This was the world she was going to inherit. There was no other future.
Mutate to Survive. She’d seen it written on a toilet wall at school. But her science teacher told them mutations were random, like static on the radio. The vast majority of changes were accidents without purpose, useless at best. There was something ruthless about evolution, and it wasn’t the survival of the fittest; it was the sheer waste of energy, of all that possibility.
Did asphalt float? If so, maybe the whole jetty had sailed out to one of the gyres too; maybe it had found a home there. More likely it was sunk somewhere close by, a toxic chunk of underwater furniture.
Something would find a way to live on it.
The young are plastic, Sam remembered one of the doctors telling her. And then that teacher saying that girls often grow out of it. As if there was some female stubbornness behind her migraines, a biological failing she ought to be capable of overcoming, with a little maturity. Were her genes the cause? They’d never been able to find a connection between the asphalt plant’s emissions and her headaches, or the tumours, or the suicides. Coincidences, every one of them, just random mutations. She shook her head and headed back up the rocks to retrieve her bike. Out in the gulf, the sea flashed and glinted like a luminous animal.