The cuttlefish could shift its surface in an instant, become a clump of reef, or nothing but a tiny pair of eyes peering out from under sand. The one on the screen declared itself to be an aquatic plant. It shimmered in a crevice, convincingly animated only by waves. All at once, it burst forth and propelled itself as muscle, on limbs that were not so fragile as they seemed; it became all animal, no trace or memory of weed.
Sam was supposed to be searching for something she recognised. Developing a concept, Ed called it. The more she watched the transformations on the screen, the less certain she became of the right shape for the creature she was supposed to be designing. It seemed to be made of changes. The form in her head was just as unsettled, just as variable. Some days it shimmered like a living opal; others, it was a pale ghost, staring from one broken eye.
The few cuttlefish that came that winter were listless and weak, and the marine scientists who came to study them seemed half-translucent themselves, drifting through town like buoys whose ropes had snapped. It had been like this after the plant had closed, this same vague, unsettling grief. She scrunched another unsatisfactory drawing into a ball, threw it across the room and missed the bin. She hit pause. Sepia apama hovered in its latest assumed shape, its droll frill frozen mid-ripple. One sleepy eye regarded her with something like amusement. She minimised the browser. Somewhere on the hard drive, Dyschronia.pdf lay hidden, its explanations cloaked in language she understood much better now. Idiopathic, psychosomatic: let them call it what they liked. It wouldn’t change what she went through.
She got up to put the paper in the recycling bin.
The cuttlefish breeding season hadn’t lasted long: three weeks, a month at most. When it was over, some of the scientists remained. They were finding other things to study now. They were looking for causes, or effects. Residual petrochemicals, heavy metals, acidification, algae, deoxygenation, damage to the seagrass. The warming they were seeing should not have been happening this far south. Oceans absorbed the bulk of industrial toxins, and that meant the life in them did too. Fish were being tested for pharmaceuticals, rare metals now. The ones they caught themselves were no longer considered safe. But there was nothing they could point to, no single source to blame. It was all interconnected. If the cuttlefish were dying, their bodies were vanishing into the sea, which swallowed everything, even the evidence.
Sam began another drawing, trying to make her clumsy lines obey her will. The idea of fate seemed so outdated, a comfort belonging to another time, like putting the earth at the centre of the universe, and saying people were chosen by God or whoever to lord it over nature. That was childish, wishful thinking. It belonged in the past.
If what she saw were warnings, then she must be free. Nothing was inevitable. She could choose a way forward. She shaded the animal’s mantle.
Everything was connected. So that idea was just as expedient. Free will was only the fact of pain, demanding meaning. More likely it was all just random noise.
There was a third possibility. Those articles, those studies, when she thought back over all the tests they’d done, surely they should have found something? But there wasn’t any evidence to show her brain could do anything special. It should be obvious they were just hallucinations, delusions, dreams. That’s what idiopathic perceptual disorders meant. It meant she was crazy.
There would be comfort in that. Another surrender. When she thought of that bleak migraine, the flat still sea, all those bodies lying out along the sand, her mind slipped on the surface of a dream. A nightmare. It would be easier if it was all in her head.
‘Piece of shit,’ Ivy said as the vehicle’s timing skipped a beat at the turn-off. It was the first thing she had said since they’d left the house.
‘You could have bought a better car with the dividends already, if you’d signed up for the second round,’ Sam said.
Ivy turned her head and glared at her for longer than was safe while driving. The cigarette flared in the wind, releasing flakes of ash between them. ‘Put that window up,’ she said.
‘I thought you quit.’ Sam didn’t move. At this speed, the wind in her face was uncomfortable. It was hard to breathe, but it was still an improvement. ‘Smoking will kill you,’ she said.
Ivy smiled bitterly. ‘Something will eventually,’ she said. ‘Look, I know what you’re doing.’
Sam turned her face to the wind, let its pressure force its way into her body. The air in her throat was volcanic. What could she know? She never noticed anything.
‘People like Ed,’ Ivy began, but then changed tack. She threw the half-smoked cigarette out onto the road, returned both hands to the wheel. ‘I’m just being cautious, Sam. I know you think it’s unfair, but I’m not going to risk the house,’ she said. Sam watched the tiny spark flip and die on the asphalt behind them, its white trail disappearing into the air. That was how fires were started.
‘It’s not about the house,’ Sam said. ‘It’s about trust.’
Ivy started coughing and wouldn’t stop. Sam let the wind sting her in the eyes. Ivy was still keeping Sam from telling anyone outside Clapstone. She was still persisting with these doctors, even now. It was a waste of time. She wanted to ask her mother to turn the car around, but they were already at the turn-off. Maybe they would find something wrong with her this time, but Sam doubted it.
Ivy stayed out in the waiting room, and Sam followed the doctor down the corridor. A softly spoken man with glasses, he told her the tests for an ulcer had come up clear. Physically, there was nothing wrong. It could be stress-related. ‘Anxiety,’ he said, scrolling through her file. ‘Hardly surprising, given your history.’
‘History,’ she repeated. She had heard all this before. Dr Liu would be anxious too, if he had seen what she had seen. But he had a kind face. She didn’t want to waste his time.
‘If you want, I can recommend someone for you to talk to,’ he said. ‘If there’s anything worrying you.’
‘No, thank you,’ said Sam.
He watched his screen. ‘Are you still getting those migraines?’
She smiled, shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she said. If they decided she was crazy, what could they do about it? It wouldn’t change her reality. It made no difference what she told people. They believed what they wanted to. Most people were lucky, knowing nothing about what was coming, walking through life backwards. She shouldn’t take that away from them.
While they waited for the pharmacy to fill her script, Sam watched Ivy peruse a range of nicotine gum and patches. She felt a tenderness for her mother that she didn’t know how to express. They weren’t the kind for hugs and demonstrations. Maybe it was up to her to make the effort. She walked up and stood beside her.
‘Do we have to go straight home?’ she asked.
‘I guess not,’ said Ivy. ‘Why?’
‘I thought we could get hot chips.’
‘All right,’ Ivy said. ‘You’re on.’
They wandered around the shops for a while, looking in windows at books and clothes and notices, not talking much. The air was still and sunny, not too hot, the kind of perfect day that sneaked in before summer. Once, Sam caught Ivy looking across at her with a veiled expression, but there was nothing sinister in it. It was shy, almost like they were on a date.
They stopped at the shopfront with the sign above the window that broadcast Shares Still Selling. Beneath it, the model park sat quietly, subdued in white, a stack of glossy brochures beside it. There was a gap in the park where the cuttlefish should be. The Ferris wheel had been moved to make room for it, but there was still nothing there but a fine layer of dust. It didn’t look like anyone had been in there for weeks.
Ned and Ed were back in Clapstone. The last meeting had spooked them, spurred them on to work. The house was crowded, but would not be so for much longer. Ned had been accepted into a few different engineering courses, even one for architecture. He just had to decide.
Sam found she could not finish the chips.
‘We better go,’ said Ivy. ‘I need to get the dinner on.’
‘I’m not going to be hungry after this,’ said Sam, scrunching up the paper.
‘I know. But we should try and eat together more. You know. The four of us.’
Sam shrugged, followed Ivy back to the car, tossing the rubbish in an overflowing bin on the way. There was no four, there wasn’t even two any more. Just herself, and everyone else.
Despite Ivy’s efforts, it was hard to get everyone at the table for a meal. Ned and Ed were absorbed in their phones, their papers, Sam her homework. None of them professed an appetite.
Ned and Sam flicked glances at each other, flicked them away again. Sam had a notebook in front of her, a page waiting blankly for two thousand overdue words on The Merchant of Venice. It was impossible to decide to waste her time on something so pointless, and yet each minute she did not decide was a vaster waste of it. She was paralysed.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Ivy asked. She poured a jar of pasta sauce into a pan. Sam noticed that her hands were shaking, gripping everything too tightly.
‘We still need you on board,’ Ed said. They weren’t even talking about her homework, Sam realised. Ivy didn’t turn, just shook her head. Strands of pale hair fell from a tangled braid.
‘I’m not risking the house,’ Ivy said. ‘I don’t care how it looks.’
‘It’s only a house,’ he said, and thumped the wall behind him. Sam flinched as dust fell from the ceiling. ‘Bricks and mortar. We’re building you a better one.’
Sam wiped crumbs of plaster from the page.
‘This place is all I have,’ said Ivy. ‘My childhood.’
Sam looked for the child remnant in her mother, but she was all adult angles. She remembered the doll she’d fixed for her, brought to the shop. It felt strange to think of it after so long, its hair spilled out on the footpath, that wet sensation on the back of her neck, and Ivy saying it was déjà vu. She blinked the memory away. It was true that it was hard to imagine her mother living anywhere but this house. She never had much ambition for change.
‘I think you’re being sentimental,’ Ed said.
‘You wouldn’t know,’ said Ivy. ‘You never talk about where you grew up. Sometimes I feel like none of us really know you, Ed.’
‘You know me,’ he said. ‘I’m a man of action, is all. Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s all going ahead now, with or without you. There’s no stopping it.’
It was true the work was progressing fast. Parts of the barn were going up, a big blue shed that was supposed to fill eventually with what Ed called ‘retail entertainment opportunities’. The park’s weeds were trampled down again by bobcats, and the space had lost its empty look. But the real progress was happening up at the village. Housing was the priority. Ed and Ned had been up there all week, supervising. It had its own momentum now.
Sam caught Ned watching her again and quickly looked down. On the page, she saw she had drawn a cuttlefish in the margins of the unanswered essay question. Its fins rippled at her. She scratched it out.
She wanted that warmth of double time, the secure satisfaction of arriving in a perfect re-enactment. Pure, hers, for a small moment. But afterwards, Sam felt bereft and cold. They lay in the quiet house, resting side by side in her single bed; there was no space between them, but still she was alone. She’d proven nothing. The shameful sensation in her belly was just as she remembered it, a dreadful buzzing like a knot of hot wasps. Ned lay on his back, but his head was turned towards her.
‘That was weird,’ he said.
‘Thanks.’ Sam shuffled closer to the wall. He was right, it had felt strange, and not in a good way. It was all wrong. She tried, but the vision had shed its cloak of pleasure. The migraine had lost its glow.
‘Are you okay?’ He shifted beside her, peered over her shoulder.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, turning away. ‘But yeah. It wasn’t right.’
‘It’s not like we’re brother and sister,’ Ned said. He pushed the tangled sheets aside and sat up. When she turned he was already up, looking for clothes, ready to get away from her. His awkwardness was common, homely. He was normal people.
‘That’s not what I mean. I mean I saw this happening.’
He paused with his hands holding up his pants. Shock on his face made him look younger, almost ugly. There was a pimple on one side of his chin, below the mouth.
‘I saw all of this,’ she said, dismissing the room, his body, with a hand. It was mean, but she wouldn’t baby him, she wouldn’t take care. He kept looking at her, making a calculation of his own.
‘Everything seems to disappoint you lately,’ he said.
She leaned back into the warm space of her bed. ‘It’s not as good,’ she said. Then, because it was her fault to begin with, she put more gentleness into her voice. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.’
He sat on the end of the narrow bed, put his hand out to touch her leg through the blanket. Her skin prickled. She wanted him to leave. She wanted to be mad at him for making her apologise, but could not muster much emotion. Beyond disappointment, all was boredom.
‘You could have warned me,’ he said.
‘What would you have done?’ She moved away, pulled her shirt down over her chest beneath the blanket, tried to shrink herself to something near absence. ‘You wouldn’t have been able to avoid it,’ she said. ‘I just . . . I wanted to get it over with.’
Ned sighed. ‘We both need someone,’ he said, speaking almost to himself. ‘Just not like this.’
‘I don’t need anyone.’ Sam sat up, ready to argue. ‘And you’ve got Ed.’ He was proof of nothing; he was only his father’s spy.
He got up and went to the door, but he stopped there, looked out into the corridor, then closed it again and turned. ‘Ed’s not my real dad.’
‘What?’ Sam felt a wave of sickness lift in her, swallowed it down.
‘I’m not his son, I’m his employee. He hired me.’
‘You’re joking,’ she said. But he was serious. She re-examined his stranger’s face. He was so careful with his expression, even now, calculating. ‘Why are you telling me?’
‘I want to help you,’ he said.
‘You can’t help.’ She was sick of people trying to protect her. Everyone lied, she thought, and perhaps when you realised that it made things simpler, at least on the surface.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Just be careful. Don’t tell him everything. Keep something back for yourself.’
He didn’t need to tell her that. She could take care of herself. But she saw through his composure that he expected something in return; he felt she owed him something now, for this piece of useless advice. Everything was debt, taking and giving, like an economy. There had to be more to people than a set of transactions and bargains. But at this moment it was hard to see how else to get through living.
‘There’s more coming,’ she said. ‘There’s this fog.’
His eyes were darker for a moment. She watched his brow accordion and settle. She waited for him to ask the only question: When?
‘Can you describe the fog?’ he asked instead.
‘What difference does it make?’ She wanted him to go now, to leave her alone with her own body, complete in herself. Let him tell Ed that she had lost her mind. It would only confirm what he anyway suspected.
‘I want to know what it looked like.’ Another spot appeared above one eyebrow. The more you looked at people, the more blemishes you saw. She curled her legs beneath the blanket. He sat down on the edge of her narrow bed again, making himself at ease.
‘I don’t know. White. Like chalk, sort of. It stays close to the ground. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Denser than air,’ he said.
‘What do you care?’
‘The question is when,’ he said. ‘But you can’t answer that, can you?’
She sat up, let the blanket fall to her waist. ‘Don’t worry, it’s years away, and you’ll be long gone.’ She reached across for her phone.
‘White chalk,’ Ned said, as though in wonder. ‘And I’m not here. You’re sure about that?’
The memory, fragile as a cuttlebone, dissolved inside her. It was not so far between there and here, but so much could be lost in transit. She was worn down by the weight of visions, the drag and drift in her. There was no point to all this sickness, no logic in it. No-one who could share it, and nothing to be gained by it. Let them all go, let the old facade of memory tumble down around her. It already lurched and shifted at the joints. All it needed was a little tremor, a little kick.
‘I’m sure,’ she said.
Ned decided very quickly after that, surprising everyone by choosing geology. The course was in Brisbane. He was moving as far away as he could get.
Sam put him out of her mind; she had enough to do. Ed needed her to come and check the village, to see if anything needed adjusting. If Ned had told him anything, he wasn’t acting like it. In return, Sam behaved just like he expected her to. A fair transaction. She followed him up to the village with something resembling enthusiasm.
There was already a structure you could walk in and out of. ‘Shaped like a trilobite,’ is how Ed described it as he went, but Sam, following him through its open mouth, saw the segments and thought of a cockroach. He was already moving on, talking fast. Some of his old glow was back.
‘Looks great, don’t you think?’ One periwinkle glinted under its shell.
She looked up at the frame, searching for something she recognised, then for something she might criticise. ‘It’s smaller than I thought,’ she said at last.
He frowned. ‘It will look bigger again once the walls are on. Is something wrong with it?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘This is right.’
Ed moved to put a hand on her shoulder, but to Sam’s relief withdrew it.
‘This will be the dome. Special filtered glass, air purification.’ He carried on, apparently unconcerned, stepping through the empty walls. Steel frames held the roof up and, between them, timber frames cross-hatched with wiring. Sam could see the hills through this composite of lines and boxes. The same shade of dusty pink as ever, though without their smokestack punctuation they always seemed unfinished.
She watched him wander off through the frames, still talking.
‘Fifty per cent of the power will be generated by inbuilt solar,’ Ed said. He was making a speech to the building now, not to her. ‘I’ve already ordered them a three thousand dollar barbecue. Room for an indoor garden, if that’s what they want.’ He dusted his hands against his trousers. ‘I mean, they’ll have to consider the maintenance.’
Sam blinked against the sharp sun. ‘Don’t you mean we?’
‘What did I say?’ He turned his head, half in shadow.
‘You said they.’ One retina clouded with ink.
‘Well, I meant we. All of us.’
Sam gazed past him at the hills. A tiny cloud passed over the sun, and she felt the air turn cooler.
‘Ivy won’t change her mind,’ she said.
‘She will. She’ll see the benefits.’
He was so convinced of his version of reality. That was how he did it. There were no cracks in his self-belief; everyone who hit it just slid down its smooth surface. Ivy couldn’t challenge him, anyone could see that. He simply went on as if his version was the right one. He stood with one hand on a post, solid and unmoving.
Sam couldn’t see herself living here either. She never had. There was nothing after that spill of white chalk. Either her vision couldn’t reach past it or there was nothing else to see. No after. No world.
Unless it could be changed.
Ed grinned, and turned; his eyes were gold in the evening sun. ‘Come on, Sam. Let’s go. I’ve got a surprise for you.’