From the school bus windows, Sam could see a group of people gathered around the Giant Cuttlefish. Someone was sitting up on its mantle, cutting off one of its arms with a chainsaw. Another arm lay curved on the ground like a strange horn.
‘Shit,’ said Jill. ‘They’re wrecking it.’ They climbed down the steps and ran across the road to watch the spectacle. The statue could not be called a cuttlefish any more, but neither was it Asphaltica, not yet. That’s what everyone said the new species would be called: Architeuthis asphaltica. A new source of energy. Sam watched the transformation through the fence. The chainsaw roared; the dust flew. Gleeful shouts scattered on the wind.
The idea of Asphaltica was thrilling. If the squid was really producing crude oil, it would put Clapstone on the map again. The cuttlefish were shuffling off. They’d been too focused on the past, and this was the future: biosynthesis. Adaptation. The new world.
They were acting on rumours.
Their movements were voracious now, a pack of hyenas tearing at a carcass. Ed lifted his head, scenting something in the air. Seeing her, he grinned and waved without apparent malice, and Sam lifted a hand in return.
‘Shouldn’t we stop them?’ Jill asked.
Sam shook her head. ‘It’s meant to be like this,’ she said. The new shape, the proper shape, was emerging clearly from beneath the old disguise. It was close now, and getting closer fast. Her hand clutched the fence. She felt the weight of her fingers in the chain link, the sour taste in her mouth. It was bitumen, pitch. The mouth of an animal, or of a river. It was stale air.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I tried to make it different,’ said Sam. ‘But it’s turning out the same.’
She had been wrong about warnings. She couldn’t be free. Time was at war with her, and it would always win.
Jill’s hand reached for a close link in the fence, landing light as a bird. She leaned one shoulder into the wire.
‘The same as what?’ she asked.
‘The same as always.’ Some part of her was glad of this, but she could not have said why.
‘It’ll be okay,’ said Jill, moving her hand to cover Sam’s.
Sam turned to smile at her, her eyes unseeing. ‘It won’t,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t matter.’
Her body felt caught; the fence was a net that would not let go of her. The useless power boiled in her, rose as sickness. Her heart ached in a way she knew was not her heart, just acid. She tore her hand away.
‘I have to go.’ She stumbled, took a step, and squinted at the ground, dizzy again.
‘You want company?’
She shook her head. She didn’t want to be alone, but that didn’t matter either.
When she pushed open the screen door, the house was quiet. Ivy must have been at work; she wasn’t with the pack. There was a pain at Sam’s temple, just on the left side, small but tightly hooked into her skull like a burrowing seed. Its demand was the same as always, a matter of surrender.
She glanced at the calendar in the kitchen. She could not mount another battle, start an argument with time. Tomorrow the wheel would come, and then it would be assembled. Soon everything would be ready, in sequence, in place. She was only one tiny particle in the endless wash of history. To think in any other way was madness.
A convoy of trucks huffed and bleated down the main road. The frame was split across several flatbed semi-trailers, moving with a whirr and creak. When it was unloaded, the wheel seemed diminished, like a jumped-up children’s toy. Sam stood watching from behind the fence, alone this time. She had begged for the day off school and Ivy had caved without a fight. Neither had the energy for argument.
She could not take her eyes off the construction. The legs of the wheel were erected first, two A frames reaching to an enormous hub at the centre. The legs towered over the monstrous thing, an unfinished blob laid out on its slab. It was a papier-mâché mess now, a ruin, whiter than white. It took its true form. They had even given it its one great plastic eye. One day something would crack it open.
Her legs were weak; they could not hold her. She knelt on the asphalt, staring through the wire at the scaffolding, the working crane. A memorial, it was. A promise.
Once the legs had been raised, the wheel was assembled from its axle outward, crane and scaffold reaching to the metal, then people in high-vis jackets crawling up there, orange flies caught in a huge web. Fireflies, as the welding sparks flew. When the circle was closed, the separate parts of the carriages – gondolas, that was their proper name – were unpacked and lifted into the frame. Joins were made, bolts tightened, hooks twisted, wires made taut. The steel was bound to the concrete below, the tension screws tensed, the roofs and doors hinged to their cages and winched up into the sky. A viewing place. A panorama.
It would never turn.
It seemed to take minutes, not days. Sam must have come and gone, eaten and slept, but the park had its own continuous presence. Nothing else entered her memory. Days blinked now, and minutes ballooned. She stood unmoving through them. She didn’t see her neighbours laughing, Roger taking photographs, Ed waving his arms like a director. Only the slow construction of the wheel before her, and the white thing that lingered beneath, its arms open, its one eye watching. Waiting.
When Sam went home at last, the phone was ringing. She listened as Jill explained what she had heard from her parents, who had heard it from Curdie, who had got it from Jean. She was one of the last people in Clapstone to know what she knew already.
The museum had released their findings. Asphaltica wasn’t a new species. That would never be the official name for what they had decided was an ordinary Architeuthis dux, albeit with a rare genetic mutation. She was a freak of nature. It was all online already. Sam looked it up while Jill was talking.
They called it fatal genes: a mutation that could not be passed on. Had she lived to set her eggs wherever giant squid were supposed to set them – probably the sea floor, though no-one knew for certain – none of them would have hatched viable young. Asphaltica’s DNA had been transformed by something, that much was true. Maybe it was evolutionary risk-taking, a wild stab at adaptation in a changing world. Maybe she was poisoned. Either way, she was a dead end.
The article tried to finish on an upbeat note. These changes could now be studied in greater detail. Toxins, warming, could be looked at in a new way. There could even be applications for the future, in terms of cleaning up spills.
Because she wasn’t producing oil at all. She’d been trying to digest it.
‘Sam?’ Jill’s voice came down the line as if from underwater. ‘Are you still there?’
Sam could not sleep. At night she wandered around town, drawn to the park’s unfinished construction. Patches of weeds had grown and dried around the facades of buildings. The weeds weren’t tall enough, the place didn’t look right; it wouldn’t for years. She had taken one of Ivy’s cigarettes – she claimed to have quit but there were always a few packets stashed around the house – and carefully kept the flame away from the tinder growing around her, conscious of the heat. There were more fires burning around the state. It had been another year of magnificent sunsets. In the moonlight, tinted by the smoke, the wheel resembled the spine of some strange, curved fish. Sam ran her hand along the chain-link fence, walking the length of it to the gate.
The wheel loomed above her. Sam saw a shadow corona, blinked it back. Migraines hadn’t left her, not really. They had swum into the wash of her mind and were suspended like ink in water. They were part of her DNA.
The park’s gate had arrived, and someone had installed it. Sam didn’t remember it happening. She wanted to examine it up close. The barrier it connected was still just a temporary cyclone fence, but the new gate was ornate iron, the tips of the posts moulded in the shape of tiny tentacles. It was a detail she recognised. She must have told Ed about it, but she didn’t remember doing so. Beneath the tentacles, wrought-iron letters spelled out clapstone rec on one side, reation park on the other. If a part of her was still looking for evidence, it was disappointed.
It didn’t matter now. Sam pushed the gate open, touched the iron with her fingers, then replaced the bolt. It fitted perfectly. She stood in the enclosure. Something in her skull was gently pulsing. She approached the thing that was nothing now, neither the Giant Cuttlefish nor Asphaltica. She touched its skinless plaster, and her fingers came away coated in dust. Her nostrils curled against the smoke as she inhaled again. She thought, with a shudder, of the surfacing squid, that sense she’d had of a song. How strange it must be to feel the water heat around you, to be drawn to the surface by some shift beyond the scale of your comprehension. To eat and drink and breathe what your body knew it shouldn’t. Maybe it happened so slowly you didn’t feel it. The slow poisoning by Clapstone’s asphalt plant, and then by her fatal genes. She drew on the cigarette, coughed hard, and stubbed it out against the cement with a vague feeling of sacrilege. It had only made her feel dizzy.
In the bauble eye, which was larger than life-size, her own small self stared back at her. She was distorted by the plastic. Seeking a flaw in its surface, she saw instead the barren field waving above her, the waist-high grasses shifting beyond like ghostly witnesses. Somewhere past that, there was a place – a time – when everything went white.
The end.
She stumbled back into the field, turning from the monstrous thing. When she reached the gate she buckled, retched into the dry grass at its feet. She was not meant to be a smoker.
Looking back, swallowing the acid in her mouth, she saw it. Sam was already up there, already beginning her descent. She was here at ten, crouched against the barn wall, knowing almost nothing. Here at twenty-something, climbing down from that height. Here now, but what did it matter which of these she chose to call her present?
There was a pressure in the air now, a slight alteration as of electricity. Her throat was dry. Something in her head protested. The axis shifted.
When she returned home, the house was dark. Ed’s car wasn’t in the driveway, only the van; Ivy was asleep. Even when they noticed, nobody asked her where she went at night. The nascent headache had withdrawn, become a dull pain in her neck and shoulders. It felt like something living in there. Something amphibious and parasitic.
The medicine box had been set down on the kitchen bench and a few select bottles scattered beside it. Three different kinds of sleeping pills, all in Ivy’s name. Sam went through the other packets, found her anti-nausea pills and her painkillers, and swallowed two of each. She shook her head, waited for the headache to subside. She should eat some fruit, something light to get her through it, but she had no appetite. Everything was about to dissolve at the edges. It wouldn’t matter. Only surrender.
She spun when Ed opened the door with his key. His face had a strange focus. When he looked up and saw her, the expression left him. All expression did. The blankness in its place was the blankness of fresh cement. He paused in his movements as if caught there.
‘Hey,’ he said. His smile was habitual, insincere. She could see the effort he was making to wear himself. A vertical line had appeared on his brow.
‘The cuttlefish,’ she said. A thin moustache grew on his upper lip. His face was damp with sweat, and his eyes had lost their turquoise edge and faded to a paler blue, the colour of an old fridge that lived in Jill’s shed.
‘It’s unfortunate,’ he said.
‘You always said,’ she said, and stopped, because she didn’t want her voice to crack. She could not remember what he’d said, or when. All his words, his messages and slogans, seemed non-specific. The evidence of memory had been stealthily flushed away. Someone had followed her all these years with a bucket of soapy water.
‘We have to be realistic,’ he said.
It had been clever of them to erase her so quietly, make the doubt stretch until it covered everything. Probably it was always part of Ed’s plan. He was looking at her with the strangest expression: not disappointment or malice, a look that was bland on the surface but saturated underneath with something too complex to read. Maybe it was simply pleasure, pleasure taken in the fact she’d failed.
He smiled sadly. ‘You look exhausted,’ he said. He didn’t move.
It was a strange hour for him to be out. ‘You can’t sleep either,’ she said.
The medication was kicking in, and she found she didn’t care that she was paranoid, reading too much into each small gesture. Her mind was disappearing from inside itself, an animal abandoning its hiding place. She watched it go. She felt nothing, saw nothing, only the overlay of endless transparencies blending into one image. She watched his face with curiosity as it shifted and pulsed beneath the surface. Saw its blood, its spit and mucus, its fatal puzzle of ligament and bone.
‘It’s only natural,’ Ed said. ‘It’s had to evolve.’ Everyone lived in their skin like this, in this intimate camouflage, projecting something so thin it could hardly be seen.
‘Evolve.’ She slipped on the surface of the word, could not get purchase. Her voice was numb in the shell of her mouth. Outside a breeze was rising, a breeze that might turn into the harsh north-west wind that brought the heat, or into the chill of rain. A wild pressure prickled in the room. Bushes began to rattle in the yard; the roof creaked. Dread crept up the backs of her calves like an ant trail.
Ed was watching her face. ‘It’ll be okay,’ he said. ‘The motor will be delivered any day now, and after that . . .’ He was trying for optimism still. He couldn’t quite convince.
She scratched behind her knees through her jeans. The feeling didn’t go away. She had a vague sense she remembered these ants. A listed side effect. If she’d read it on the box, maybe it was just the power of suggestion. She cast a look down the hallway. Her mother’s door was dark and closed. No help to her now.
‘And after that,’ she prompted. He wouldn’t know. The sea, and then the air.
‘Sam, listen to me. Things don’t always work out how you expect them to. It’s not the end of the world.’
The wind fell silent, held its breath. Sam listened, chewed her lip. It was Ivy’s habit after quitting, not her own. He might be mocking her, but there wasn’t any humour in his face, just tiredness and grief, regret, perhaps. The pleasure had gone, if it was ever there. His transparencies were becoming opaque again. He was nothing but packaging. People were all like this. When they moved through the world they left a trail of garbage, like shed skin.
‘Maybe it is,’ she said.