The forcing, p.5
The Forcing, page 5
‘Why do you persist with this, May?’
‘Because he owes it to me,’ she breathed, still attached to the TV screen by an invisible umbilical.
Hammering on the door now, something hard against the wood frame, and then a voice, deeper; not the bailiff. ‘Get out here, now.’
‘Coming,’ I called over my shoulder.
I reached for her arm. This time she didn’t react, just let my hand rest there as if it was of no weight, no consequence. I waited there a moment and then got to my feet and turned off the TV. She stared at it as if it were transmitting still.
Flashing lights from the street pierced the gap between the front curtains and clanged over the ceiling and the walls, painted the back of May’s head in red and blue. A megaphone blared, more police cars arrived, sirens squalling.
May turned to look.
‘It’s Steven,’ I said. ‘I told him this would happen.’
‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ she said. Her look was hard, her mouth set in a flat line. ‘Always lecturing, always predicting the future, never doing anything about it. Steven is fighting for his property, for his rights. That’s what we should be doing.’
‘The government has promised—’
‘And you believe them? In my life I’ve never met anyone so gullible.’
How many times had she levelled that one on me over the years? ‘We have no choice,’ I whispered, taking it. ‘Please, May.’
A detonation shook the windows, making her jump. Me too. She grabbed my arm in reflex, but recovered quickly and snatched her hand away. A few moments later two more loud bangs ripped through the neighbourhood. We watched as a cop darted from behind his car, sprinted across the road and through the front gates of Steven’s place.
A flurry of shots banged out, followed by an explosion.
‘Look,’ she gasped.
Smoke bloomed from one of the top-floor windows, billowing white in the high-powered beams of the spotlights. And then silence. We stood transfixed, May’s hand viced around my arm.
A few moments later two cops appeared at the front gate, dragging a limp body face down between them. Stephen’s head hung so that his forelocks brushed the ground. There was a big hole where the back of his skull should have been. As they dragged him his legs painted a dark stain on the pavement.
‘Jesus,’ was all I could say.
‘I. Hate. You.’ She said it like that, slowly. Emphasising each word. Her eyes flicked back and forth between mine, left and right, as if comparing the imperfections and flaws of each. ‘That should be you.’ Then she turned and walked out of the house, past the armed soldier standing by the door and straight onto the bus, leaving her bag on the front porch for me to carry.
I stood there, fixed to the floor, unable to move. I guess I’d known for a long time, even if I had never wanted to admit it. This truth revealed in sidelong glances, the slow closing of her eyes when I’d say something particularly inconsonant. And yet May’s words opened me up, pulled me apart. I closed my eyes, felt the future closing in around me, the inevitability of it. I switched off the lights and walked to the front door and closed it behind me.
My hands were shaking. Stephen’s limp body was loaded into the back of a police van. I stepped back to look at the home we’d bought the year we were married, worked and saved hard to pay off, the master bedroom dormer I put in eight or nine years ago, the studio I built for May, the shiplap siding I repainted while watching Steven’s wall go up. I slung my pack, picked up her bag and walked to the kerbside, loaded our bags under the bus in the designated slot, handed the house keys to the bailiff, initialled the form on the clipboard, and boarded the bus without looking back.
Across Miles and Decades
The morning sun streams through the windows, warming my face. I look out along the now familiar line of the headland and past the old lighthouse to the easternmost reaches of this protected sound that welcomed us so long ago, gave us sanctuary.
And yet, so much has been lost. More than I could ever have imagined. That it actually happened, not in some theoretical alternate universe, but here, in the only reality we will ever know, and that I of all people was witness to it, still shocks me profoundly.
I re-read what I have written so far, a few dozen longhand pages. Events captured, moved from the quantum dreamworld of memory to the physical reality of ink and paper. Names and faces and places that I have locked away for far too long, exhumed and honoured in the only way that is left to me.
I look out to sea, past the horizon, across miles and decades.
A touch on my shoulder. Are you alright, chéri?
I look up at her, the pages trembling in my hands.
She touches my face, wipes a tear from my cheek.
It is difficult, I say.
It will get worse.
Yes.
And then it will get easier.
Yes. And then much more difficult again.
7
The bus moved through the suburban streets, stopping regularly to take on more people. They carried duffel bags and suitcases and were very quiet as they got on. Some cried. Most did not.
This is the shudder, I thought, the precursor of chaos.
Soon the bus was full, and we were making our way along the parkway through town, the mostly empty skyscrapers of the central business district on our left. We crossed the Kensington Bridge and turned west. May hadn’t said a word since getting on the bus. She just sat staring out of the window. By the time we arrived at the bus terminal the sky was lightening to that colour of nausea that even now I find impossible to describe. The colour of the sky gone to hell.
There was a big crowd waiting outside the station. Held back by uniformed police, they clogged both sides of the street, swarmed around the busway. As we approached, I could make out the first placards, see the odium in the faces, all so young, like children, all of that fresh battlefield beauty of youth, their white teeth and full, springtime lips screaming hate.
I flinched as the first projectiles rattled onto the side of the bus. At first, I thought it was hail pelting the windows. But these were stones, twigs, clumps of earth, bottles. An apple disintegrated against the window near my head, the juice running down the glass carrying pieces of yellow pulp, and I remember thinking how strange to be wasting food when everyone was so hungry. As we got closer to the terminal building some of the protesters broke from the crowd, jumped the barriers, ran towards us. A young man dressed in a green army jacket hurled himself at the side of the bus, a baseball bat raised in his left hand. His eyes were deep brown, the whites heavily bloodshot. It was as if he was looking right at me. His hair was long and wavy, the colour of rapeseed, like Lachie’s, and I thought of how much he looked like my own son, except for the crudely stitched scar that gaped from the hinge of one jaw to the other, as if the boy’s mouth had been torn open and then sewn closed again. His right sleeve was pinned back to his jacket, empty.
The crown of the bat hit the window with a loud crunch, crazing the glass into a soup-bowl blister. Someone screamed. The man sitting next to the point of impact flinched, knocking the woman sitting next to him into the aisle. Cubes of glass pelted my face, sprayed the back of May’s head. One of the protesters had plastered a sign up against the wire that covered the windows. Big red letters, crudely drawn, spelled out: PAY FOR YOUR SINS. Omission and commission both.
As the bus reached the station entrance and left the crowd behind, May turned to face me. She said nothing, just sat and stared at me, pushing all the disdain she felt for me out through her eyes.
The bus pulled into one of the diagonal bays and stopped with a hiss. The front door opened. A uniformed man got on. He stood at the front of the bus and raised a bullhorn to his mouth. ‘Get off’, he said. ‘Collect your bags. Get in line.’
‘Don’t you see what’s happening?’ May said, getting to her feet. She grabbed my elbow, squeezed hard.
‘Exactly what they told us would happen,’ I said.
May stared at me as if I had just escaped from an asylum.
‘Keep moving,’ said the man with the bullhorn. ‘No talking. Collect your bags. Get in line.’
‘We heard you the first time,’ said May, not loud enough that he could hear her.
We stepped down from the bus. I got our bags. We stood in line. We did as we were told. The line snaked its way around to the far end of the bus terminal, where big Greyhound coaches were taking on people. We shuffled along with everyone else, a few steps at a time.
‘This is what the Nazis did with the Jews,’ said May.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘This is Canada, or what used to be Canada.’ I was going to have to monitor her medication carefully. ‘You voted for it.’
‘Everyone voted for it. Except you.’
‘Do you think this would have happened if we’d stayed independent?’
‘And you’ve never forgiven me for it,’ she said before looking away.
We shuffled along in the queue. All the people were old. Many could barely carry their own bags. Some had canes, a few shuffled along on walkers. There were hundreds of them, thousands maybe, implanted with who knew how many hearing aids and pacemakers and artificial joints, loaded down with skin creams and hair dyes, beta-blockers and renin inhibitors, thousands of daily doses of lisinopril and Zocor and Prilosec and azithromycin, all of it to be ingested and pissed out into waterways and sewage systems from Texas to Arkansas.
I don’t remember how long we were there. It could have been an hour, could have been six. But I do recall the sounds: the coughs, the laboured wheezes, the hushed breeze of a thousand frightened whispers. And I remember that sense of distance that has struck me so many times before and since, a feeling that life was somehow unfurling at the wrong scale, light years instead of arm spans.
By the time we were finally herded aboard an old Greyhound bus and our luggage loaded, a least two dozen of our number had fallen from the queue and were being treated in a temporary medical station at the far end of the station. The bus left the city and headed South on Highway 2. By morning our remaining neighbours would wake and everything would look as it had the day before, but we, the eighty-niners, would be gone. All of us. No exceptions.
8
Just before noon we crossed the old border, the customs buildings empty and boarded up, the flagpoles bare. It had been portrayed as a marriage, ten more states for the Union. The papers had reported an eighty-five percent acceptance. With the world going crazy, we had sought shelter under the still-formidable American umbrella. And yes, she was right. I still hadn’t forgiven her. I realised that her vote had been cast, in a way, for the same reason that she hadn’t left me. As the world got more dangerous, as technology’s hold on our lives diminished and things we had once considered ‘everyday’ got more expensive and harder to come by – things like access to the mobile telephone network, food, the internet, medicines – independence became a steadily more frightening proposition. I had a good job. And when she was balanced, she felt safe with me. That’s what I told myself anyway.
We moved steadily south on the deserted highway. There were very few cars on the road these days, with gasoline rationed and so expensive. I thought she might lay her head on my shoulder, as she had done in the first years of our marriage, driving through the night across the dark prairie, but she leaned up against the glass of the window instead. The sky was darkening. I guessed we must be somewhere in Montana now, maybe Colorado, miles and miles of dry scrub, this whole area depopulated now according to the news, the forests burned away, the soil dried up and barren, and all the wild animals gone, another example of what May called God’s punishment.
It had been years since we had driven down to Utah this way, the year before Lachie was born, before we were married, before everything started to go wrong. I was still at university, finishing up my teaching degree. May was at art school. It was summer, and we had camped beside lakes and in mountain forests in my little two-man dome tent, watched the stars come out through the pines, made love in the early morning when the air was prismed with dew. We were going to make a life for ourselves. I was going to change the world one young mind at a time, May was going to paint like Camille Pissarro. It was still hard to believe that we could have changed so much in twenty-five years, that the world had changed so much. But it had. All of it, and so much more still to come. I could feel the icy fog of sadness spreading inside me, and I breathed hard and fought it back in the dark although no one could see me.
The change of speed woke me from a fitful sleep. May’s head was now on my shoulder. It was just gone seven pm. We had been on the road for over ten hours without a stop. The bus stank of sweat and bad breath. Thankfully, we were near the front, away from the increasingly disgusting rear toilet.
The bus pulled into a floodlit roadside compound and rolled to a stop in front of a row of fast-food outlets. We filed off the bus into the parking lot and were ushered by the guards towards the restaurants. The brightly lit plastic boxes looked like cheap children’s toys, the joyful primary colours cloistering sullen uniformed staff old enough to be my parents. May slumped into one of the moulded plastic chairs, and I went to the counter and stood in line, and when it was my turn ordered the least horrible thing on the menu. The lady behind the counter had thinning grey hair and bad teeth. She frowned and handed me two red cardboard boxes and two bottles of water.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘From Canada?’ she said.
I nodded. ‘We all are. This whole busload.’
‘I figured.’
‘How far are we from the border?’
She leaned towards me, lowered her voice. ‘If you’re thinking of running, don’t. A couple tried last week. They didn’t get a hundred yards.’ The woman leaned back again, crossed her arms across her chest. ‘Voucher,’ she said.
I fumbled through my pockets, found the little books of tickets we’d been given at the station.
‘Top one from each.’
I tore them off, placed them on the counter. She handed me the food. ‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Canadians,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Always so damned polite.’
I didn’t respond, turned away and started back to the seating area.
‘Took your time,’ someone said.
I put May’s box on the table in front of her. Without looking up she opened the box and took a bite out of the sandwich. She chewed it a moment before spitting it out in disgust.
‘I think I’m going to be ill.’ She stood. ‘I am going to look for the restrooms.’
She was gone a long time. I ate my fried vegetable sandwich in silence. When she returned her face was pale, and I could see that she had been crying.
I reached for her hand. ‘Are you alright, May?’
She looked up at me through red swollen eyes but did not reply.
I left her there and followed the signs to the back of the restaurant. A dimly lit hallway led past the kitchen and its suffocating smells of frying oil and animal fat to the men’s room. A strong odour of commercial-strength detergent barely masked the stench of urine and faeces. I opened the far cubicle door and stood staring down at the toilet bowl. The porcelain was adorned by a brown ring of slime that extended from water level almost to the lip. The seat was sprinkled with piss, as if someone had squatted above the seat to avoid sitting on it. The other cubicle was worse, the bowl filled with a thick brown sludge.
On the wall just above the empty toilet roll holder, someone had written in ballpoint pen: ‘Welcome to a hell of your own making. Don’t forget to flush.’
What Matters
We reach the top of what we still call Chicken-Head Rock and gaze out across the water. Pearl-strings of puffy white cumulus shunt in from the sea, shadow us for a moment, and then are gone. I take a swig from my water bottle, offer it to my wife. She takes a long drink, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, flashes me a smile. I nod, smile back.
There is a spring behind our house that flows all year round. We found it on our first day here, tucked into a break in the slope near the base of these very cliffs, set among a grove of weeping tea trees and fragrant windblown peppermint. I can see it clearly from where I stand, a telltale shock of green cradled among a henge of pillared granite boulders. After months skirting the continent’s seemingly endless coastline, surviving on the meagre trickle from our portable solar desalination unit, the occasional windfall of a passing raincloud harvested with desperately deployed tarpaulins and buckets, and the foul, brackish water we sometimes managed to scoop from mossy depressions within walking distance of a safe anchorage, the delicious purity of what trickled from these fissures was nothing less than a miracle. It was one of the reasons we decided to stay.
I stow my water bottle, hoist my pack. It was Kweku who named this place, that day we first sailed into the cove. He was sitting in his favourite place, astride the bowsprit, his harness tied into the deck cleat, his little legs dangling over the side so he could feel the sea spray on his toes. I had just finished bagging the jib when he looked back at me and pointed at the strange pillar of time-worn granite that towered over the bay. Look, Daddy, he said, it’s a chicken head. And so it was, beak, comb and all.
We keep going. I must have walked this path a couple of hundred times, wearing a narrow but visible thread up through the bottlebrush gullies and between the big, weathered Cambrian boulders to the summit. Every twist and turn, every tree and shrub, each rock-strewn mesa is familiar and yet changing. The living grows and dies and is born anew, the inanimate weathers and reaggregates in turn. Wood becomes soil, shingle sand. Sea creatures die and are reborn as birds, winging their way across vast oceans. Plutons erode and reaccrete and after millions of years are driven skyward to birth jagged new Anapurnas and snow-capped Kilimanjaros. Metamorphosis is everywhere, measuring the forward impulse of time, unwavering, constant, and yet, within us, completely malleable.
