I drive to work but find the road blocked by wreckage. There are pieces of glass and plastic strewn across four lanes. People have abandoned their vehicles to stand on the asphalt, their hair whipping faintly in the breeze.
Even in the early morning the heat is punishing. I watch the city shimmering ahead of me, the light waves dancing as they pass through the air. The longer I sit the more I feel drowsiness settling upon me, freeing me from the burden of consequence.
I kill the engine and wait for the sound of sirens but the road is still deathly silent over half an hour later. A nervous energy begins to grip me. I think of the boy on the highway. The stationary traffic, the great mass of bodies surging forward over the hoods of cars. The scene feels so eerily familiar that I abandon any hope of making it into work and turn round, crossing the grass median to head back the way I came.
I leave the freeway and opt instead for a more scenic route. Half of the shopfronts I pass have their shutters drawn, the rest are in the process of closing. People stand in the street arguing over groceries. Children hold cardboard signs offering fair rates on bottled water and canned goods. Homeowners nail wooden boards across their windows as if preparing for an approaching storm.
I drive largely unimpeded, all of the traffic heading out over the water in the opposite direction. I can see the sun shimmering across the top of a long convoy of cars. The families I pass sit and fan themselves in the heat, their roof racks full with camping supplies and hunting equipment, the tools necessary for a new type of survival.
When I get home Simone is working in the vegetable garden. She watches me approach without emotion. I bend and kiss her forehead.
‘People are uneasy in the city,’ I say. ‘They think it’ll be here soon.’
I stand and lean against the greenhouse, fanning myself. I notice the flowers inside are all long dead, the soil cracked and broken. At the back of my eye socket I feel a migraine beginning to stir, waking itself from some dormant phase. ‘My God is it hot,’ I say.
Simone shifts restlessly, inspecting the palms of her hands.
‘I think we’ve got a decision to make,’ I tell her. ‘We either leave with the rest of them, or we dig in here.’
‘I won’t leave,’ she says, folding her arms defensively. ‘I won’t leave him.’
‘We wouldn’t be leaving him, we’d be leaving this place.’
‘I can feel him here.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I can feel him here.’
She sits on her knees among rows of pockmarked peppers and tomatoes. I notice for the first time that the vegetables are all slowly succumbing to blossom-end rot. I pick one up and hold it in my hand, its base sunken, its skin discoloured, and it’s only then that I realise the significance. The cause of her anxiety.
Each year she would harvest the vegetables with Phineas. They would sit together in the kitchen and squeeze the pulp into Mason jars. When the juices fermented they would sieve them through and collect the seeds, ready for the next season. It was Phineas’s favourite part of the entire process. He would label each jar with jagged lettering and she would keep them stacked in the pantry. The crop had been born from the last of those seeds, and now the heat was trying to take them from her.
‘It will be here soon,’ I tell her. ‘Do you not understand?’
‘Just go if you want to,’ she says. ‘Leave. Go on one of your drives.’
She turns her attention back to the vegetable garden. I stare at her incredulously. She seems to have resigned herself to her fate. As the rest of the country fights for its survival she instead chooses to stay and languish. She is sick, I tell myself. She is sick but she makes no effort, no attempt to get better.
‘Don’t do that. Don’t make me out to be the villain. I’m not callous. Do you think I want any of this? Do you think I want to leave?’
‘I think that’s exactly what you want.’
I grit my teeth so hard that I can hear them grinding in my skull. For a moment I imagine wrapping the garden hose tightly round her neck. I imagine her fingernails raking my skin, digging into the tops of my thighs as she tries desperately to relieve the pressure round her throat. How long would she suffer, I wonder? Would she apologise in her final moments?
‘I am not leaving,’ she says again. ‘I can feel him here. I feel his presence.’
‘Well, I feel his absence. It’s like a stain on this place.’
I leave her and skulk round to the side of the house. I walk along the stone path where Phineas first learnt to ride his bike. I pass beds full of plants slowly wilting in the heat, their stems hunched, their petals drooping. I turn on the spigot, kneel down and place my head beneath the freezing water. It soaks my hair and runs down the length of my back and for a moment the afternoon heat abates.
When I stand I notice the paintwork of the house is chipped and faded, bleached beneath the baking sun. I run my fingers over it and small flakes come away in my hand. I crush them in my palm and let the powder sift through my fingers.
I look at Phil’s house. I see his manicured lawn, his immaculate house, and I wonder if he was born with a sort of internal GPS. A divine navigator. Something that helps him glide so casually, so effortlessly, through life.
I think of the rotting vegetables in the garden, the peeling paintwork of the house, and I feel a great pressing weight. Houses, lifestyles, relationships. Everything in need of such constant maintenance.
I consider for a moment abandoning Simone. Just taking the car and leaving. My shame radiates through me. I stare up at the sun, the sweat rolling down the length of my back, soaking a gradient into my shirt, and I feel my vision begin to tighten. I see the world around me vignetted at the edges. My vision, my entire body, funnelling downwards. The light around me growing ever dimmer.