Surf barrelling in across Tempest Bay from a strong south-easterly. A wind like this used to help lift ships out of the lower latitudes, far down near the ice. It felt good, crisp, unpolluted. Without that touch of oily taste that hung on the air in most ‘civilised’ places.
The two tattered foldout chairs six feet back from the cliff edge. Bacon on the fire by the caravan. The ruined tower casting its shadow along the grassline. From here you could see it all. The hills, sea, sun, sky, earth. The tiny gridline imposed in the 1930s. Around it the more organic flow, the cottages along the shoreline, the flow of the inlet known to locals as The Splash. Houses dotted through the hills and along the flat, down to the main road intersection with its cafe and bookstore and shops and the tunnel road leading under the northern hills.
It was two days since they got off the bus. There had been no solution to anything, no sign of the missing Dramolite, nothing but rising tension between the inhabitants of the clifftop and the town below. But here he was, eating fire-cooked pig, sitting on the caravan’s lower step. A new temporary home on the road he and Lucia travelled, that seemed so full of necessary diversions.
• • •
Hedy spent her days deep in obsession. Roaming the clifftop and digging in her memory garden, a stubborn fury flaring.
They want to steal my things, she said. They can bloody well have me dig up their cliff.
Sometimes she would lapse into black moods but he wouldn’t follow her down them. That wasn’t part of any help he was prepared to give.
Other than that, the three of them quickly settled into a weird, fractious, but somehow workable arrangement. They lived simply, with small food supplies and outdoor cooking straight on the fire or in a small copper pot. Lucia removed the alcohol bottles and scrubbed down the caravan insides and made it her own fort. Hedy kept sleeping out under the stars, though one morning he woke to find her curled on the benchtop in the caravan, impossibly balanced, shivering.
Romance and sex did not emerge. He thought sometimes that Hedy might have someone down in the Bay, maybe a woman in one of the shoreline cottages along the shoreline, but that was one thing they never talked about.
Other than that, everyone had what they needed. For a moment.
People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom, Hedy said one afternoon beneath the tower base.
He agreed. Freedom first, and then the real adventure can begin.
But stasis was not an endpoint, he knew.
• • •
He tore one final piece of bacon off, feeling the savoury burn on his tongue, and threw the remnants aside. Went across the grass to the cliff edge by the folding chairs and the emerging tangle of shaped earth.
The tower hung over everything, squat and broken. He’d forbidden Lucia from exploring it. She ignored him as he knew she would. Earlier that morning she’d been scrambling around it again. He’d given up trying to warn her about the danger of a rotting timber or falling from a height. She was as wilful as the weather itself.
He began to climb the tower. The stone was cold and rough. The shattered railings and wrecked staircase offered broken ankles everywhere but he picked his way through. Someone had drawn a graffiti on the inside of the structure. A bird, and a person in a cage, and something reaching up for them.
He reached the top and looked out.
From up high the memory garden was growing more complex and far-reaching than he’d realised. An evolving geography of trenches and string and gadgets and animal bodies and trinkets, dug into the earth with obsessive care.
Hedy couldn’t be drawn on its meaning or purpose. But the man sensed deep twisted pain there. Real but beyond comprehension, an attempt to navigate unseen territory with rough tools. It hurt his eyes.
He looked further, out over the water. The ocean was a distinctive blue-green here. Those tales of Antarctic expeditions. Crews stranded on ice floes. Trying to climb mountainous walls of ice that protected the interior of that vast continent. He shivered.
Down below, a hundred yards from shore, a shape sat below the waterline. A moment of black in a washed-out sea. Disturbing the waves but not moving.
On the second day, his first up in the tower, Hedy had come beside him with a mug of cocoa that smelt like drinkable mud.
There’s a wreck down there, she said. Some expedition ship from the 1860s. People swim out to it sometimes. When the sun’s well up.
He watched the tide lapping over it. Shifting on the lost hopes of souls who had once piloted the ocean so bravely.
Overseas, things were getting worse. Three more governments had collapsed. Riots. Pandemics. Breakdowns. Algorithm-fuelled spirals of hatred and insanity, mounting high like a fever that won’t ever stop rising and never broke. And New Zealand wasn’t immune. Over in Wellington, incidents had begun. But Tempest Bay seemed curiously unaffected. Even the people with jobs in the city, it seemed, would still come through the car tunnel at the end of the day and breathe a different sigh. You could still pretend, here. Or ignore. For now.
• • •
A thin small shape down there in the water. Was it swimming back from the wreck?
He followed it to shore. The shape emerged from the water completely nude. Even at this distance it was unmistakable: Jessica’s tiny, ancient form. She strode with purpose in from the beach, utterly unapologetic, no hint of a shuffle or infirmity. Following the inward line of The Splash.
Just as she neared a tiny picket fence house on the edge of the northern woods, it felt to him as though she looked right up to the clifftop tower and saw him, and laughed. But she was too far away, it was impossible.
• • •
He looked down again at the earth Hedy had been digging. An emerging twisting shape, almost like a word, something being uncovered rather than dug. An archaeology of the strange, here at the ends of the earth.
Watchers on the edge of an apocalypse no one could see. Even though this world still wore many of its old familiar clothes, its shell of pretending, the reality underneath was like a naked river that had begun to boil.
His heart ached and he sat down suddenly in the tower. Stayed there a while, just not moving, until Lucia’s voice returned and he found a way to move again.
• • •
Lucia had gone for peanut butter breakfast at the Doris Cafe, having weirdly taken a liking to the place. Returned full of food and news.
I saw Cassy Roma down this morning, she said. Coming out one of the shoreline cottages, the one that doesn’t have a name, but where Mister Rowan’s been staying while he fights with his wife.
Lucia, for perhaps the first time in her life, had discovered gossip. For the most part she seemed to be enjoying the town, oblivious to the rising tension felt among the adults. Though it was always hard to know what was going on with her. She was so unfiltered, so natural yet orthogonal in her reactions and understanding of everything. Cross-sectional to the world, the old world at least.
Cassy looked like she’d been right fucked, Lucia continued delightedly. I’m surprised Mr Rowan has it in him, what with his hip and the way his moustache smells.
Lucia. The light of his life and the pain in his arse. Always.
People’s business is their business, he began in reprimand—
Also, Lucia said fast, someone gave me this down at the shops.
A photograph in her tiny hand. Faded. Torn. A woman with blue hair in a green skirt amid rocks on the beach. Something distant in her eyes. Holding the Dramolite.
He stared—
Snatched from Lucia’s hand. Hedy, returned from her latest roaming. Eyes red and hands shaking.
Who gave you this? Hedy demanded.
I don’t know who, Lucia said. A man, maybe? People all look alike, sometimes.
Hedy strode to the cliff’s edge, photo against the light and landscape, comparing, searching. Found something. Turned back to him.
East end of the Bay, she said. We’re going. Now.
That blue haired woman in the photo. That look in her eyes. Hedy’s Mum, he’d have bet anything on it.