The meteorite should have made a hole in the roof, but the tin was intact, the windows of the portable too, and yet Sam’s head felt just like it had been hit by some hot boulder travelling at speed. Ms Spalding quietly sorted through handouts at her desk, undisturbed; the rest of the composite class quietly completed another worksheet, except Jackson, who was trying to slice his index finger off with a pair of blunt craft scissors. No-one else seemed to have noticed that the large-print words behind Sam’s teacher had begun to wander. Vowels bent from their rounds, unhooked their stems and slithered across the blackboard. Sam’s tongue was thick in her mouth, her head swelling up like a balloon. She put a hand to her temples: they felt taut. Like a balloon blown too full. Too full of bright light.
And then it burst.
She was on the couch in a dim room and inside the room was another room made of pain. Her mother hovered, a moving shadow, then squatted beside her to stroke her head and say something soothing through the deaf air. Pictures faded in and out in the inner room, some familiar, some just angles and patterns, as if the pain was trying to make itself visible. Soon she couldn’t see anything else. Past a certain point, there was only surrender.
Words hovered in the air beside her, dampened by her mother’s sweet fearfulness. Migraine poured out between blunt silences. It smelled of bad breath, of stale sheets and asphalt gases. She let go of understanding, and her last clear thought was the sudden insight that death was possible, and obscenely unfair, before she was pulled through the surface of something black, and time came off its axis and rolled away.
It’s now but it’s a memory. Or like a memory, blurred at the edges. Or like a dream, but present to her.
Now.
The girl is walking down a street a few blocks from her house. Ivy walks ahead of her, carrying a green shopping bag over one shoulder and talking on the phone. The girl is pushing her red toy pram. In the pram there’s a doll, its head the size of a real baby’s head, with wispy blonde hair. She’s never seen the doll before, but she recognises the pram with its stiff wheel; Ivy bought it for her from the discount bin outside the two-dollar shop in Hummock. And she recognises herself walking along intently.
Then she thinks, But I’m me. And her head cannot contain it.
She can’t hear what Ivy’s saying. She can’t hear anything. The pain has shed light now, taken on the form of sound. It’s the shape of a high whirring, like a fridge on the blink but loud, loud. It erases every other sound.
A large, chocolate-brown dog runs up behind the other Sam, the walking Sam, and licks her on the back of the neck. She turns around in time to see the dog disappear around a corner. She wipes its wet touch from the back of her neck, smiles a little, turns again. Ivy’s on the phone, walking ahead, and hasn’t seen. The other Sam pauses, as though stuck in thought a moment. Then she tips the pram onto its side.
The head rolls out, and then the body, separated. Sam hesitates again, looking at the body in the road, at the blonde hair spilled on the asphalt. She picks up the head and sets it between the handles; she gathers up the rest of the doll, puts it back in its seat and fastens its small toy seatbelt. She looks around, searching for something else.
The first Sam, the watcher, wants to help her. But she can’t quite move. That high drone holds her in its fist.
The Sam who is watching and the Sam walking are distinct somehow, but in a slippery way: she’s also both at once. It’s an odd feeling, being here and there. On the one hand, it tingles all over, and on the other hand, it hurts like hell.
‘A dream,’ said her mother, when Sam tried to explain. ‘Don’t talk now.’ And it faded like dreams do, and she didn’t try to keep it.
This kind of gentle discouragement was usually enough to turn her from some interest to another, at least in Ivy’s presence. There were closed drawers in the house, some jammed and some forbidden. She preferred to touch and turn these mysteries alone. It was just the two of them. They had to trust each other.
Days later, burrowing in such a drawer, Sam turned up a knotted length of silky blonde hair. She pulled the tangle until a head emerged, and was surprised when its eyes popped open to greet her. Pale blue. Its body was buried under the rest of the fabric, its arms and legs plastic. She ran down the hall to the laundry, waving the head like a battle trophy. The dream hadn’t been forgotten, just submerged. Now it could surface.
‘When is this?’ she asked her mother.
‘You mean what.’ Ivy frowned between towels.
‘Oh yeah.’ Sam smiled, but her eyes betrayed a panic. She often got her words confused, but she was only seven; it would come good.
Ivy reached, folded. ‘I should throw all that shit away. Sorry. Rubbish.’
‘It isn’t rubbish,’ Sam said. ‘I might have needed it.’
‘Might need,’ Ivy said, mystified. The girl skipped into her own room. Her little voice trailed nonsense down the hallway.
‘I’ll fix her for you,’ Ivy called out after her.
Sam laid the doll on the narrow bed and covered it with a blanket. When that didn’t suit, she sat it on a chair. She propped the head in the doll’s lap, and the blue eyes stared.
She saw the dog a few days later, running down the street pursued by Mr Ellison, its tail high and tongue flapping, jaws wide open with delight at its escape. Jill, who had pestered her parents for weeks, was in her class at school; Sam thought she must have seen the dog before, and then forgotten till she dreamed it. But when Jill introduced her to Milo, caught and shamed, she said they had picked him up from the shelter only that morning.
She ran her finger over the familiar spines of the old exercise books where the daily accounts were kept, the fatter ones stuffed with invoices of stock ordered, loose payslips, unhinged lists. She stroked a jar of paperclips, a roll of stickers from an expired promotion, the remote for the air conditioner, the key to the cigarette cupboard, piles of business cards for tradespeople. She left grubby prints on a can of Christmas snow. The space behind the counter at the Foodtown was a cabinet of curiosities.
‘Do you have to get under my feet?’ Ivy herded her into the dark storeroom. Sam wasn’t supposed to hang around the shop after school – the insurance – but Trent didn’t really mind. Roger Quirk, who worked with his father in the Caller’s office two days a week, sometimes babysat, but he wasn’t reliable.
Ivy flicked a switch. The lone, dim bulb cast shadows. A curl of handle, a flake of polyester blonde. Sam’s throat was frozen.
‘Brought this for you. Sort of fixed it,’ said Ivy.
The head had an eerie lilt. They looked at each other, the doll and the girl, wary as cats.
‘Well, I didn’t have much time,’ said Ivy.
‘It’s okay, I like it,’ Sam managed. A knot was forming somewhere in her chest. Her mother’s relief loosened it slightly, but it didn’t go away.
‘Go on. Play quietly. I’ve only got an hour to go.’ Ivy pushed her gently on the back with a warm hand and disappeared into the shop. Sam waited for the register to ring before she approached the toy pram. Its seatbelt undone, the doll’s legs flopped out of a neat blue dress. The knot writhed. A warm-milk feeling ran through her body from crown to ground; she had to look down to make sure she hadn’t wet herself.
The doll’s eyes were closed. Sam pushed them open and made sure they were still. She lifted the head until the clumsy threads were visible, then pulled at one loose end. It came out easily. When she had it separated, she placed the head on top of the body. The milky feeling turned and snaked back up her brown legs. She sat on a pallet of shrink-wrapped tins and opened her homework. Quietly, Sam pencilled words into amputated sentences. The, a, and, was. The doll’s head watched. Its proper blue eyes in that fixed stare.
Proper blonde hair and white skin, too. Like Ivy.
The other kids’ questions were confusing. They asked her where she was from, as if she hadn’t been born right there in Hummock hospital, same as them. As if they hadn’t all been playing together on the same swings and throwing tantrums at the same birthday parties for the first seven years of their lives. Now they made faces behind her back, tugged their eyes and grunted. One minute they’d offer a friendship bracelet, the next a fist. Some of the words they used were new to her. Afraid to upset Ivy, Sam had to ask her teacher what they meant.
Ms Spalding had told her not to worry; being different made you interesting. Unique as a snowflake, she said. Sam decided to try accepting this as interesting. To imagine snow from a can making the pretty formations it had in cartoons, in paper cut-outs. But it came out in a foam, and was white, and they still threw pine cones at her from the upper storey of the rocket frame that stood in the asphalt playground. If not pine cones, then tennis balls. A couple of times, to her horror, it was pellets of dried-up dog shit. That was when she told Ivy.
‘Least it was dry,’ Ivy said. She’d combed the dust out of her daughter’s long dark hair, tucked it behind her protruding ears. ‘Sticks and stones,’ she said. ‘Just be proud of who you are. Hold your head up.’ She tilted her daughter’s chin with a strong-boned hand to examine her. ‘And try to stay out of the sun.’
In the storeroom, Sam looked down at her incomplete homework. An hour was an age when it began. Still, time got away somehow. It crept into the corners of a room and hid there. Hours were filled with it, the way this room was filled with empty boxes. She pinched herself at the wrist, hard. Nothing changed.
Ivy collected her, a shopping bag slung over one shoulder. She glanced at the homework book, and then at the doll’s re-separated head. ‘What have you been up to?’ she asked, but not in a way that an answer mattered. She picked an insect out of the doll’s yellow hair and flicked it into the shadows. ‘Guess I’m not cut out for surgery. Come on, we’ll go to the playground.’ Her smile was an opened box of oxygen.
The small wheels rattled and stuck on the asphalt. The warmth in the day had sunk into the ground underfoot and the road was slightly sticky beneath Sam’s shoes. They followed the road past the Quirks’ place, their garden a restless mess of barely tended succulents. Ivy’s phone rang and as she answered it Sam fell behind, steadying the doll’s head against the edge of the pram.
‘Hey Roger,’ Ivy said, grinning. ‘I was just walking past your house.’
A warm feeling ran through Sam. She’d been here before, in this very scene. This time she was the other Sam, and this time she knew what was happening. She could hear the words. She listened out for the humming sound, but there was only warm wind, flies or bees, a puff of sparrows scattering behind a fence.
Sam looked for herself between the houses, but no-one was hiding there. She almost tripped on the footpath, had to look at her feet. This double moment had strange purpose, but it was confusing. Had she stumbled before, in that other now? Were these pre-laced sneakers the right shoes? If only she had paid attention. That’s when she felt a wet sensation on the back of her neck. As she turned, some part of her was pleased to find the right move, to remember. She watched Milo bound away, an echo of himself.
He must have escaped again.
She made a noise. Ivy didn’t turn around. Sam glanced at the place she thought the other girl should be, but there was no evidence of her. She was singular, then, but doubled somehow, too. She found she knew what she had to do. First, she gripped a handle of the toy pram, tipped it over. It fell on its side, just so.
The doll’s body landed on its front. The head rolled a little further, as it should. Its hair spilled. Sam bent to scoop the head and set it in place between the handles; then she gathered up the body, reconnected the tiny seatbelt. It was neat and good, like finished homework. Put the words on the lines where they belong. A kind of completion settled over her, and even though she’d never felt anything like it before, it fitted her like familiar clothing; she was safe.
Then the memory ended.
The universe spilled out around her, a jumble of infinite possible mistakes. Everything caught on pause. Something came next, but her mind was blank.
She couldn’t move.
‘What did you do that for?’ Ivy had turned, was watching, and sounded like she wanted an answer this time.
‘Because before,’ Sam said, and stopped. This was too new, it didn’t have words yet. The pleasure of the pattern was dissolving, the comfortable clothing falling away. A dream, that was all. An interesting dream. But that did not seem right at all.
‘Come on.’ Ivy repositioned the pram, and the two of them went on walking into a singular time. Ivy returned to her phone conversation, smile faltering. Sam was left with a cold feeling on the back of the neck, dog but not dog. She trotted to catch up with her mother, determined to try.
‘That was the dog,’ she said.
‘That was a dog,’ Ivy corrected, looking around for the relevant animal.
The, a, and, was. ‘No, I mean that was the dog from the before headache.’
‘Okay.’ Ivy turned to her phone conversation. ‘No, it’s Sam going on about some dog,’ she continued into her phone. ‘What were you saying?’
‘I saw that dog in the headache,’ Sam said. She hesitated at the playground entrance, clutching the pram’s plastic handle in one hand. She reached over with the other to touch the metal gate. Both hand and gate were solid, dark. They did not dissolve. ‘Last . . . now,’ she said.
‘It’s not you,’ Ivy said into her phone. ‘No, she’s just being silly. Look, we need some space at the moment. She’s a difficult age. Hang on.’ She held the handset away from her face and pulled the pram out from under her daughter’s clenched fingers. ‘What do you mean, last now?’
She scratched her nose. ‘The now before.’ She watched her mother’s face.
Ivy squinted at her, pulled her finger away from her nose. ‘There’s only the one now, my love. But I know what you mean. Everybody gets it. You think you’ve seen something before, but you haven’t really. It’s called déjà vu. It feels like magic but it’s just the brain playing tricks.’
Everybody gets it. She’d been so sure it was hers, like a secret. But it was just a dumb trick played by the brain. ‘Why does it do that?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just how we’re made. It happens more when you’re tired.’
‘Oh.’ She was never tired.
‘Why don’t you go on the swings?’
Sam went obediently to the play equipment, where she tried and failed to muster play. It was difficult to trust the chains and posts to hold her weight. Every movement was dislodged somehow, and she wasn’t right in her body. Clumsy hands and clumsy feet. So maybe this was tiredness. She tried to keep an eye on her brain for any further tricks, but it seemed to be behaving itself.
Behind her, Ivy kept talking, her voice getting smaller and sadder. She put the phone down, lit a cigarette, and watched her serious child, her stiff and wilful movements on the swing and slide. She wondered, with a treasonous pang, whether her daughter was depressed, or maybe a bit on the spectrum; Sam looked so much like a person going through the motions, a tiny actor with no enthusiasm for her role.