… midwinter, 2012. The dark heart of the year. The sun slides to its northernmost point. It appears to snag on the horizon. Stops.
Drops freeze on the leaf. Puddles lie unruffled under a brittle meniscus. Worms curl motionless in their winter dark burrows of sleek clay.
The city lies bareheaded beneath the wide arc of the sky. Its houses, some whole, some brokenbacked, line the grid of streets laid down across the plain, or stare, blank-eyed from the hillsides. At the centre, the muddy rectangles of demolition await their opportunity. The figures are good, says the man surveying the city from the highest tower: record freight movements are being reported through the port and airport, unemployment is down 5 per cent, demolition companies are flooding into the city, 150 of them at last count, scrambling for business and the 43.1 million dollars’ worth of contracts being let by the government. It’s a boom, he says to the reporter. It’s a bonanza, a gold rush! The city is going gangbusters, it’s flat out. The investors will soon be here, the big overseas investors with the very deep pockets who will drop like gods from the machine.
The city is being reconfigured. A new map is taking shape, a blueprint for the future. At present it exists as little cardboard cutouts of anchor projects which the Minister, who is a tactile man, can move about at will. Sports Precinct here. Rugby stadium here. Convention Centre there. The city is going to be rebranded. It is on its way to becoming The City of Sport.
The sun snags and a chill winter wind blows in from the sea. It crosses the city, rattles the windows of a room that smells of orange peel and the damp wool of winter tartan. Youth taps the abbreviations of hope and love and C U while the old man scrapes at the glass with his wild, mad claws saying poor, bare, forked animal. Poor, bare, forked animal, as thou art. Youth takes no notice. That’s for later. Right now, they are certain they will never join him, unaccommodated in the storm. Nor will they ever set off to war to die for some grand delusion. Nor will they suffer too greatly in its opposition. They will never give way to despair, they will never risk too much. They will hate sometimes, and lie and deceive. That’s inevitable. Everybody does. But not for long, and not too disastrously, and not in a fashion that will cause lasting harm to others or themselves. They will not love unwisely, nor die at the hands of fanatics. They will be wise and avert disaster. They will save the planet. They will spread a net and capture the sun.
The wind stirs the long grass by the river where Zitto pauses, paw raised, listening, eyes alert, every muscle tensed to spring. The wind eddies about an office block in a new business park by the motorway where an adjustor pauses, too, hands raised over the keyboard, waiting for the spreadsheet to shift a point. That tiny shift that means profit again after the unfortunate events of last year, the little hiccup, but all is well once more. The company is charging higher premiums. And away from the city, in other offices in other cities, in other countries, the points are shifting, too, up and up, and the great invisible flood of capital is flowing as it should, like an ocean current, in its customary direction.
The sun snags, the wind blows, and beneath the city streets, beneath the silt and layers of shingle, beneath clay and rock in the deep, dark belly of the earth, the god baby waits, forever curled in the dark, forever in a state of being about to be. He breathes within the skin of his big dark mother who reclines holding everybody on the surface of her body: tiny inconsequential creatures, like naked kits.
When the baby kicks, mountains shimmy and hills leap and all the structures the tiny creatures have built for their shelter creak and snap. The framework of their lives stretches, adjusts, weakens. Their houses with all their evidence of living: their scratches and cracks and scuffs, their layers and patches and fallen brick. They creak whenever the god baby kicks out. Things break.
The sun snags. Pauses. The wind blows, a bird sings, a siren wails along a city street. And then at 11.09 a.m. precisely, the sun and earth make some adjustment. At least, that’s how it seems from here. There’s a turning, a revolution, and the sun begins its long rolling progress back along the shining line toward …