20 years ago the world went quiet. Father is stranded between the living world and the lost, he saw the end and he can’t let it go.
Finn was a child when it collapsed. He’s the young green vines growing up through the ribcage of a lost civilisation.
It’s 2053, Father and Finn live alone in a remote valley in Tasmania. Everything is about to change.
Antiscian (n.) When people on opposite sides of the world cast shadows in opposite directions at noon.
Most days, when I stare up at the sun and figure it can go no higher, I think of my antiscian who will be casting a shadow in the opposite direction to mine. I like to think the stranger knows the word too, and they wonder if there’s anyone else who stands beneath our shared sun, thinking on it, thinking of me, a shadow with a shadow.
Father had been an etymologist at a university in Tasmania for seven years before he moved away from the city. He says he brought nothing from his past life apart from books and a bunch of useless words. Words like antiscian. A word that winds itself up in a poetic cocoon and comes out all butterfly. But you can’t eat words.
I’ve lived in Father’s shadow for twenty-two years. The phrase, living in someone’s shadow, used to have a different meaning.
Father once thought of words as defenceless civilians and he’d assigned himself as their protector against nations of people bent on subverting them.
‘Decimated,’ he’d say, ‘means to kill or destroy one in every ten of something. It came from a mutinous Roman legion that was decimated as a punishment. They killed one in ten men. It’s not a word that should be diluted to mean just another word for destroyed or damaged.’
But, he reluctantly agreed; ‘All words change, it’s what I study. Not much point in trying to hold back the tide. Everything changes.’
A few years back, when it was finally cool enough to go outside. We were pulling up potatoes in the west garden, the sun resting on the broad peak of Mt Bickford behind us. We’d spent the day sheltering inside and separating radish seeds from their pods, Father soaking their empty husks in lye water. It was another attempt to find the perfect substitute for paper. He wanted something finer, something that didn’t catch the nib of his pens and spray walnut ink.
He’d crouched some feet away, dust on his patched knees, and told me his occupation was no longer an etymologist.
‘My job’s been to stand between you and the sun for years now.’ He’d laughed. ‘I guess you’ve grown up in my shadow.’
It was the year the potato scab was bad; as we followed the withered stems to the pale-skinned nuggets beneath, I’d been anticipating nothing more than peeling off the worst of the scab and eating them. Unnoticed, Father had been positioning himself so he cast his shadow across me, blocking out the sun. After that, I took note and realised—he always did.
Father removed a yellowed newspaper from a box stuffed with neatly indexed editions. He read out an article quoting Alan Winchester, the last Prime Minister of Australia. Winchester’s indiscreet comments made in front of a journalist at a party had caused a national uproar.
‘Climate Change and talk of mass starvation don’t worry me; as far as I’m concerned, future generations can eat my shadow and swallow my echo.’
Later, when asked to comment, Alan Winchester said it resulted from a gastric attack due to an adverse reaction between veal and scotch. Father tapped the article several times, drew in his breath, then carefully folded the newspaper and tucked it back in the box.
‘His was a shadow which cast no shade.’ And shoved it to the back of the shelf.
He didn’t explain. Perhaps, I thought, Father had grown up in Winchester’s.
Father doesn’t talk much about The Slope. I know it was bad. The economy collapsed. For years I thought it was a big building till Father explained it wasn’t an edifice, but an abstract human invention to allow people to exchange things, but it had become a global addiction, and like most addictions, it eventually killed the host.
There’d once been plastic notes of different values exchanged for goods. But mostly the money didn’t exist other than in computers. The computers moved them around at your request, usually with a different kind of plastic called a card. But the system strained under the weight of so many people all wanting to live like kings.
When the land, which people had been robbing for centuries, had nothing left to give, both the environment and the economy broke. People lost their jobs. They forced many at gunpoint from their homes. In the first years many people died of exposure, their bodies found huddled between garbage bins, wrapped in cardboard, the inky stain of hoarded newspapers printed in reverse on their skin. Their homes stood empty and grim.
Winds wrenched off roofs and toppled trees over power lines. Eventually, the cost could not be borne, and the trees lay where they fell and the power was not reconnected. Parts of the country grew dark.
Mail deliveries stopped and rural areas went without fuel. People who’d never grown anything before tried to grow their food under an unforgiving sun. It was not unusual to hear families survived a harsh summer by eating dandelion leaves and zucchini. The rat population plummeted.
To begin with people stood by each other and made sure their elderly neighbours ate too. But when there was nothing left to give they hoarded what they had beneath boards, in false backed cupboards and plastic tubs in holes dug in the backyard. Nothing was wasted.
The elderly were the first to go. The economy didn’t care if it was a baby on the street or a ninety-year-old with no shoes. If you didn’t have economy, you had no food.
Things wound down till the increments of loss were barely noticeable. The beauticians and hairdressers, the shoe shops and travel agents, all their doors closed. Next came the bookshops, the clothing retailers, and the interior decorators. The hospitals were the last to go, like a fish left on a bank, the last gasp.
Starvation was no reason to go to the hospital; the emaciated were turned away. If you broke a leg, required stitches, or suffered from jaundice, perhaps then. Hospitals no longer provided food, families of the ill were to bring it with them.
One doctor, a hero, Father said, ran courses on how to deliver a baby, how to stitch wounds, set bones. He was widely criticised by many who said he was undermining the medical profession. But within a year, there wasn’t one.
When my parents left the city I was three years old. I place the words in the same order Father gave them to me. I have no pictures to match them with. A retailer—was it someone who stitched on detached tails? Interior decorator—an alien phrase.
I don’t remember much about the oil days. Sometimes the feel of them comes in wafts. They smell like vinegar and flowers. Shiny, plastic-wrapped. Clean. Cars were strangely muscleless, with no rolling haunches as they moved. I recall being in the back seat of Mother’s car. It was blue. She buckled me in; her necklace, a gold cross, tapped against her chest as she reached over me. The buckles were tools to reduce the likelihood of death from any sudden stops, because cars travelled faster than humans were designed to. But things stopped suddenly anyway, and in the end it was driving that increased our likelihood of dying.
My mother played the piano. Father said she’d been gifted. I always thought it meant her music had been given to her. I found articles about her saying she was a talented pianist who’d played at concerts. People knew her name.
It always struck me as odd that people knew my mother. She was a practitioner of invisibility: she was small, she was quiet; I never saw her shout, only ever smile or laugh. I never saw her angry. But when she sat at the piano stool, her eyes focussed on the wall beyond it, I would wait to hear the music she chose. A playful mood and I’d creep closer, lean against her leg and feel the shift of muscles beneath her clothes as she pressed the foot pedal. If it was a dark storm cloud of sound, something Russian, I’d retreat. The cords in the back of her thin hands stood out like piano wires. I remember thinking she was related to it, they were distant cousins, communicating.
The piano, subjected to heat, then cold, contracted and stretched till the sound became discordant. Mother tinkered with its dusty innards in a futile attempt to tune it. The intricate arrangement of strings fascinated me, the dampened keys like bloodless ligaments stretched out in rows and pinned.
Mother used handmade implements to operate on the piano, I angled a mirror from the living room window to illuminate her work. At first optimistic, as the day wore on, her frustration grew. My arms ached from holding the same position. She loosened and tightened and plonked on keys, listening for some subtle magic in their sound. It was a spell she could not cast.
Father and I went for a walk to check traps and returned to find the piano lying on its side in the front yard, its lid half torn from its hinges.
‘Recumbent,’ I said. Hoping the use of the word would ease Father.
‘I believe your mother has suffered an autoschediastic* moment,’ he smiled and together we struggled to lift its dead weight—and failed. We marvelled at how the bird-like body of my mother had rolled this wooden beast across the room on its rusty castors and challenged it to cross the threshold. Once it was more out than in, its own weight had taken care of the rest, Father explained. We settled its lid as best we could.
Mother avoided looking at the pale shape on the wall where it’d once stood. She made no mention of it. Father, taking her cue, said nothing either, and when I made to, he compressed his lips and rested his finger against them.
Over the months the piano faded, sparrows took to shitting on it, the sun to bleaching it, and the thin veneer cracked and retracted. Late one night I heard its muffled keys beneath the shattered lid. Father heard it too and said it was nothing more than a mouse. The next morning I found the black pellets of rat shit. Father removed the wires from the piano, the screws, thin strips of metal, robbing its helpless carcass. It made no sound after that. I’d raise the lid and press the loose keys, listening for a sound that never came.
Father asked if I wanted the keys. Perhaps they might prove useful? He pried them away like dead fingers and dropped them in a wooden box. But I didn’t. I told him to burn them. ‘I can’t son, they’re made from a type of plastic, Ivorite; they’d give off fumes.’
He told me they were once made from thin strips of ivory, stolen from the tusks of elephants. Elephants have been extinct for a long time. I have images of them in a book. They were grey, immense, with ragged blankets for ears. Father attempted to move and sound like an elephant, raising his head, rocking it from side to side, and waving his arm like a trunk. Mother looked up from shelling beans and quickly bent her head again.
I remember watching a drop of water from a tap. As it grew, the world viewed through it did too. Suspended, upside down, was another world within. A bird flew through—mirrored. The drop, so gently close to falling, the light-trapped prisms of colour shimmered with the breeze. The shining world fell too quickly.
I don’t remember my mother dying. Father told me later it was a matter of grinding months, the loss of her by degrees. A stroke paralysed her. She found it difficult to eat, to move, and talking was impossible, her words slurred, soft, and covered in drool. Her quietness was exchanged for silence. I filled it for her. Read her books. She stared past me.
It was wild outside the day she died. We’d both startled when a bird was thrown against the window, sliding sodden and dark down the glass. After watching it from inside—its still and gaping beak, its loosened claws—I decided it was beyond my help. I didn’t want to step into the wildness anyway. Father once told me if you opened your mouth into the wind, it would inflate your lungs like balloons, and you’d blow away. I didn’t believe him, but I wasn’t so sure I’d risk trying.
I turned my attention to a tin of wooden pegs, slotting them into one another, making a circle of them around a scrap of cotton. Making towers. I’d turned to smile at Mother. Her lips twitched wanly in response. I placed a peg on the tip of each finger, turned my fingers into the claws of a bird, and turned to show her, my fingers dipping and rising in waves. But she wasn’t there.
I remember Father covering her shrunken frame with a blanket. First, he tucked it around her neck, smoothed it over her shoulders, and leaned against her. Rocked. The salt of a last tear drying across her cheek. When he pulled away, he drew the blanket from her, straightened it, and laid it over her face. When I could no longer see her eyes, I thought of them, the flat, drying sheen. The weariness. For me, she died in moments.
Memories are like that. They rise above the river like flattened rocks, and when you think back on your life, you jump from one to the next, never peering too deeply beneath the water’s surface, not wanting to stir the muck, to dredge up those sodden things best left beneath. You never plunge in lest you go over your head, become so mired in them the present is lost. Instead, you leap between pivotal moments, either good or bad. The electrified flashes in time. Like the moment of my mother’s death, like the clarity of a drop of water.
I think it’s where mother lived, in the water, always trying to pull herself from it. The river left her chilled, and although she struggled against the flow, it inundated her. She drowned by degrees. She’d lived in a different world, one I’d not inhabited, and couldn’t understand.
Once she told me, ‘I worried about other things then, silly things. Never about whether we’d be safe or have enough to eat. I worried about how long the grass had grown, how I’d find time to clean the car, and whether, when a visitor came, the sheets were clean. It was stupid.’
She did not stop worrying, she merely changed what she worried about.
I’ve read of worry beads, some people used to count them. Mothers were looped around her neck so many times they choked her, yet still she’d counted them, on a closed string that never ended.