Here’s a prediction: the future never turns out the way we think it will. Simple enough, but that’s not the end of it. The past isn’t what we thought it was either.
Ed chose him through an agency, he says. Like something out of a catalogue. He says it seemed like an ideal opportunity for a young person, to take an internship in someone else’s life. He says the money was pretty good, considering, and at first it was only meant to be for a summer. He shed Greg Morton like a skin, and wriggled neatly into young Ned Williams. And then he found he couldn’t wriggle out again, or didn’t want to. The work went on.
‘But you look just like him,’ says Candace. ‘Or you used to then.’
‘Yeah.’ He touches his forehead. ‘I guess.’
‘But why? Not just for the money, surely?’
‘It was a job at first, but then it was the family,’ he says. He looks around the room, carefully avoiding the part of it where Ivy’s sitting. ‘My parents were long gone. I didn’t have a home to go back to. And I guess I felt the world owed me something, after all that time surviving on my own. Coming here, I thought it was a chance to be normal, to have what other people take for granted.’ At the end of this small speech his eyes are moist.
‘Greg,’ says Curdie, handing him a beer. ‘Mate.’ We’re still looking for resemblances, for hooks, and we can still see plenty: the cheekbones, for example, the squarish chin. The good teeth and prominent forehead. The words he uses, like nuance and projection. Only he doesn’t have those periwinkle eyes. His are brown and soft. And when we look into them, we don’t feel the way that Ed made us feel, see that promise that everything is going to be taken care of. We don’t feel much of anything but pity.
‘That bastard,’ says Ivy. Her small hand is wrapped around a bottle, not her first. She sits forward in her chair. Her body, despite being so thin, takes up a graceless amount of space.
‘Ed should have told you,’ says Greg. Looking at the floor again. ‘But I couldn’t. He took care of me, you see.’
‘Ed,’ she spits. ‘I fucking fed you. I’m the one who put you up, who picked up after you.’
‘You didn’t have to,’ he says. ‘I tried to make it easier. To pull my weight, and not be a burden.’
Ivy makes a spurting sound that might be a laugh or the fizz in her drink. ‘You’re a good liar,’ she says. ‘He taught you that at least. You and Sam.’
‘Ive,’ says Roger. His voice is quiet, and perhaps a little hurt.
‘What a con,’ Ivy says, without looking at him. ‘You can’t trust anyone.’ She empties her bottle and places it under her chair beside another. Her hand reaches for a third. She doesn’t offer anyone else one.
‘You’re really an engineer, though, aren’t you?’ Allan asks.
Greg fumbles in a pocket and brings out an ID on a lanyard. Ivy stops her rustling and clinking, leans forward to snatch the card with her free hand. Greg keeps hold of the lanyard while she reads it, his arm extended towards her.
‘Legal engineer?’ She lets go. The string dangles from his hand for a second before he pulls it away. ‘What does that even mean?’
‘It’s just a fancy title. I’m really a kind of geologist,’ he says. He stuffs the card back into the pocket. ‘I got that interest from my time here. That was all real.’ He straightens himself, he blinks and breathes. ‘It wasn’t fair, I can see that now, but Ed had his reasons. He knew a son would make him look more human. But let’s not get bogged down in the past, hey? Let’s not distract ourselves from what’s at stake here. We don’t have much time.’ His voice has crept back into its professional register.
She drags at her bottle. ‘You must be a good lawyer,’ she says. ‘I never even guessed.’
‘I’m not a lawyer, Ivy. I thought she would have told you,’ he says.
‘She just said she didn’t know,’ says Trent.
‘Not Ivy. I mean Sam. She knew. By the end of it, she knew.’
Ivy grimaces. ‘Sam knows lots of things she doesn’t tell us.’
We all freeze in our seats. Of course, we want to know what these things are, immediately. But we can’t ask her, not like this. Ivy has this volatility now, some energy trapped inside her. It’s hard to trust what you can’t predict. We notice that our bodies have leaned away from her, an instinctive withdrawal. The young man’s right. It’s not a good time to rake over all this old ground, to get caught up in Sam’s illness, to get distracted from the reality in front of us, the agreements in our laps. What’s done is done. We need to focus on moving forward.
‘If you’ll let me go on,’ Greg says. He only looks at Ivy for permission, but we all respond.
‘Maybe go back a bit,’ says Ken. ‘For her sake.’
‘She won’t be eligible,’ he says.
‘Eligible for what?’ Ivy is leaning forward again, occupying space. Throats are cleared. Seats are shuffled.
Greg does not flinch. His eyes are sad. ‘You didn’t want to be a part of it,’ he tells her.
‘Don’t try and tell me what I did and didn’t want,’ she says.
‘You’re not on the list of residents.’
‘List,’ spits Ivy. ‘I’ve been out there. Eight years. I don’t want to be on any list.’ She puts her drink down and it topples, rolls to the ground. She looks at the green spill, disgusted. ‘I just wanted her to be well,’ she says.
It occurs to us that we could be angry. Maybe we used to be, a little, after the sea. But those people have gone now. They thought different thoughts to us. We know other facts, have passed into other realities now. The sea did this to us: it changed us. Nothing can be trusted any more, and everything has to be.
‘The instability,’ says Candace, attempting to return to the subject at hand.
‘The instability,’ says Greg. He exposes his neat teeth. He sighs, and he sounds old and fallen. ‘Like I said, it was before my time. It took him a while to see the reservoir’s potential. And then to combat the pressure, even just to test the capacity, he had to pump some of it out into the river.’
‘Some of what?’
‘You remember. There was a flood,’ Greg says.
There’s a cough, and then a swallowing, and the hum of the air filter.
‘I don’t understand,’ someone says. ‘I thought that was us.’
‘That bastard,’ says Ivy.