At the Edge Read online

  I slide one mug across the bench.

  ‘It doesn’t matter anymore. They’re both dead. And I’m…’ I take a sip of tea and burn myself. Suck in my bottom lip to relish the pain rather than quench it. After several uncomfortable minutes, I know there’s no reason to hold back with Jackson and say, ‘We needed living glass ten years ago. Instead, we got Morrison’s hybrid glass. By the time Ty’s at school, we’ll be underground. Whatever I hypothesised at uni and modelled back at Rookhurst, whatever I wanted to achieve, it’s obsolete. Pointless.’

  ‘It’s not, Annabel.’

  Jackson unrolls a tablet from a cylinder in his satchel. He waits for the molecules to switch from flexible to fixed and then hands it to me. On-screen, an epidermal breach spider-webs through the hybrid glass I helped create: triple-glazing embedded with photochromatic bacteria for block-out. It began as the hope for the new Australia. Morrison rushed it through, dumbed it down to a stop-gap measure to keep the country habitable while communities built underground. It became his bargaining chip with the Government to keep our enclave off the official radar.

  I zoom in, trying to work out why the lighting in the intrusion looks wrong.

  ‘It’s cracking from the inside out,’ Jackson says and as I zoom in as close as the programme will let me, I see the outside world; a dustbowl of red and black. ‘Morrison thought the bacteria in the middle or inside layer might have become thermogenic.’

  ‘Generating heat?’ I zoom out. The photo is geo-stamped the Seven Hills Internment Camp, The Sydney Basin, two months earlier.

  ‘How deep?’ I ask, handing the tablet back.

  ‘Morrison estimated a 50 per cent intrusion. He and Carmen left to test it but never made it there.’ Jackson turns and presses a palm against the kitchen window. The solar-darkening bacterium lightens at the touch. ‘You knew all along Morrison’s glass was substandard to what you could create.’

  ‘And now, with him gone, once the damage is done, I’m expected to fix it.’ I pace the length of the kitchen. ‘I’m not some fucking messiah.’ There isn’t enough space in the kitchen to walk off my frustration. My rage. The impossible situation Jackson has thrown me into. ‘I’m needed here. Dan died for the people we’re sheltering here. I can’t just leave.’

  ‘And help, what, ten, fifteen people?’ Jackson stands and I glare at him, but he doesn’t lower his gaze. ‘The heat creep Alice modelled when Morrison was setting up Rookhurst, it’s double what she projected. The Government knows. Dan was caught because they’re reinforcing the New South Wales and Victorian borders.’

  ‘They’re going to close it?’ As each word leaves my lips I know with absolute certainty it’s what they’re planning to do.

  Jackson doesn’t need to say any more.

  If I don’t find a way to make glass live, at best we’re going to face an unprecedented movement of people south – a humanitarian crisis to blitz the others. At worst, we’ll all be dead before we make it underground.

  ‘Dan wouldn’t think twice, would he?’ I say.

  ‘You’re not Dan.’

  ‘Mum?’ a sleepy voice calls from the hallway, interrupting us. ‘Is Daddy home?’

  *

  Dan wouldn’t think twice about a 1400-km trip north, in summer, because he did longer trips all the time. Even adding three small boys into the equation and nothing but dirt bikes to take us there, he wouldn’t have hesitated. In his mind, everything was possible. But I’m not Dan.

  I only have one photo of him: the two of us out the front of the tiny Rookhurst Presbyterian Church, newly married by Caius Morrison – me in the only dress I owned, Dan in his Hard Yakka cargo pants and shirt. He’d at least bothered to take off his hat and comb his hair. Morrison had no legal authority to join us in holy matrimony – we could have just as easily traded vows on the riverbank as in the Church – but we were the first at Rookhurst to decide to be together. So we made a big deal and Dan begrudgingly let Morrison preside over it.

  I ease the photo from the wooden frame. It goes into the old satchel along with a dog-eared manila folder, a data stick and a notebook. I fold my wedding dress and stuff it in before shoving the satchel into a pannier bag filled with clothes.

  I’m not Dan. He’d take weeks, if possible, to plan a trip. Prepare multiple routes and contingencies for every eventuality. I can’t do that. I’d freeze into inertia if left with time to think. One night to prepare is almost one too many.

  Every minute passing is one lost.

  No amount of justification of a greater good can absolve me of the guilt twisting my guts. It’s cowardly, leaving without an explanation of where I’m going or why I’m doing this. The families I’m leaving behind deserve better than a good-bye note left on the kitchen table. I want to believe Dan’s brother, Amos, will take care of them like he has promised. But Amos is not Dan. And every word I do not write is a lie I’m left to live with.

  Before I wake the boys and prepare them to leave, I carefully remove a new shoot from the fig tree and drop it into a seven-day incubation tube – the last I have. It’s the most fragile of hopes that it will survive the trip. I try not to think of us the same way.

  *

  My heart skips a beat when I see the warped Rookhurst sign in the bike’s headlight, but exhaustion precludes any actual emotion. I follow Jackson off what’s left of Thunderbolt’s Way and through the gate of the former principal’s house, now a common living space. The windows in the old school buildings are lit up: everyone’s working. It’s like I never left.

  I kill the engine, kick down the stand and help Max slide to the ground. Only then do I stiffly climb off and loosen the bindings strapping Ty to my chest. Every part of my body aches and vibrates. Brian and Alice wait at the bottom of the stairs to the old school master’s house. Two little girls peer around them, lit with fascination. As I walk towards them, I stumble and almost fall. Alice rushes to me, steadies me. With her arm tightly around my shoulder, my jelly legs strengthen enough to keep me upright. Tears wash through me and down the shoulder of my oldest friend.

  ‘I’m just exhausted,’ I blubber, but it’s more. So much more.

  She relieves me of Ty so I can remove my jacket and ice vest, then do the same for Max and Ty.

  ‘Do you like Superman?’ asks Max of Alice and Brian’s eldest girl when he’s free of his coat and vest.

  ‘Who’s Superman?’ she asks.

  Jackson opens his rucksack and retrieves a slab of Dan’s old Superman comics he must have found in the garage at home. ‘This is Superman!’

  The four children run upstairs to find somewhere to read, even Jamie, who’s still unsteady on his feet from the sedatives Jackson gave him to keep him on the bike.

  I follow, dragging myself up the stairs and slumping into the old leather lounge. Ty feeds lazily at my breast and I stop thinking about the trip. We made it and that’s all that matters.

  Josephine and Alex join us as coffee is served. Josephine sits next to me and offers her breast to the tiny baby girl cradled in her arms. The contented infant slurps and murmurs smooth over the doubts I’ve had; for better or worse, Rookhurst is now our home.

  Josephine smiles as her fingers slip between mine. She tips her head to me and whispers, ‘I’m glad you’re back.’

  Jane and Keith are the last to arrive, with their twin daughters, and at first the lounge room seems full: nine adults and a tumble of kids talking, laughing, crying, arguing. All my old friends are here: the people I committed to live the rest of my life with. Then an overwhelming emptiness descends. Those who are missing become sinkholes in the floorboards: Morrison, Carmen and Dan. Memories crowd in, rushing up like the ocean in a blowhole, soaking me in the brine of regret. It tastes of Alex’s greenhouse coffee beans. The guilt pulls like the outgoing tide, and I’m drowning.

  ‘You need to sleep,’ Alice says, taking Ty out of my arms.
‘C’mon. We prepared the room out the back for you and the boys.’

  I try to argue, to tell her Dan is waiting for me in the shipping container we’ve made our home, but it’s too hard.

  *

  The following night, I stand in the centre of Dan’s workshop with the fig tree cylinder in my hand. Through the window, I watch the last brown smudge of twilight silhouette the skeletal outline of trunks, the lifeless remnants of the bush that once enclosed the tiny township of Rookhurst. Max is outside on the jungle gym, laughing and shouting with Alice’s daughters. When we lived here, heat-resistant vegetable vines hung from the bars my little monkey now swings on.

  This is a Rookhurst Dan could have loved.

  I never understood why he resented it. He’d come of his own free will, though last to join the collective: a builder and an amateur storm chaser who wrote poetry in the margins of his blueprints. To me, he was a strange fit for Morrison’s enclave of scientists. Whatever it was that lured Dan to say yes to Morrison’s proposal, he never confided in me.

  I switch on the light and everything is exactly as I imagine he left it. A mausoleum, sealed up, waiting for him to die. I pick up a hammer and some nails, try to remember what he was building the day he argued with Morrison for the last time.

  Eyes closed, echoes of the heated discussion fall from the rafters.

  ‘If we don’t leave, I’ll kill him and we won’t be able to stay.’

  ‘If we go now, we’ll never be able to come back.’

  ‘I can’t live anymore with what he’s done.’

  I didn’t care that Morrison claimed my breakthroughs as his own. I was motivated by the hope of a new building material, strong and heat-resistant, to enable shattered communities to rebuild where they were. So no one else had to flee south. It didn’t matter to me who put their name to the innovation. Dan, though, couldn’t move past it.

  I scour the drawers, crates and other piles of Dan’s hoarded junk. Always the excuse that it was the end of the world and he wished he was just saving for a rainy day. I want to go slow, savour each of the little things of his, but I’m afraid if I stay too long I’ll never leave. It’s not until I have it in my hand that I know what I’m searching for: his old leather tool belt, the one with the busted strap, soft and stained with sweat. It goes in my satchel and as I close the lid on the suitcase, I see the corner of an old primary-school scrapbook, buried beneath a pile of even older manuals. Dan refused to talk about his childhood and I feel a certain betrayal lifting the book out.

  It’s brittle, stained with insect faeces and filled with the yellowed newspaper clippings of a trial dating back three decades. I read without comprehension. The name featured in the headlines means nothing until I see the photo: Morrison, a much younger Morrison, going by the name of Caius Morgensten. I crouch in the dirt, turn back to the beginning and carefully read every article. It ends with an alleged paedophile released back into the community on a legal technicality.

  In the dust I scrawl dates. Confirmation comes with the photo that falls out of the scrapbook when I stand up: a messy cluster of young boys in soccer uniforms. The middle one – with a face that could belong to an older Jamie – holds a trophy. Morrison stands to the side, leering at the camera.

  *

  The breeze blows away from the old school buildings and I’m grateful as I dig a small but deep fire pit behind the Church. I don’t want to incite the fear of a bush fire in anyone that might smell smoke. Each page of the scrapbook comes away easily and nestles together in the bottom of the hole, like eggs that will never hatch their vile secret. Fire dances along the edge of one page, then another, and the entire book is consumed in half the time it took to dismember it. The photo melts and warps on top before it ignites. Smoke wheels around towards me and I’m drenched in the stink of lies and secrets. In it I find a belated empathy for Dan, an understanding of what drove him to risk everything for the most vulnerable.

  When the fire is nothing but hot ash I fill the hole and then dig a second one, a smaller one. I open the tube and slide out the Moreton Bay fig cutting. It now has a furry, inverted crown at the base, the tube accelerating the growth. The delicate roots are pale against the dark, dry dirt. In years to come, perhaps the boys and I will be able to sit in the buttress roots and pretend Dan’s arms are holding us.

  Back at the compound, I stand at the falling-down fence with my hands wrapped around the rusted top bar and remember how Dan said Rookhurst was too small. I never understood because I relished the isolation and the lack of distractions. I was relieved and grateful to have escaped the atrocities on the coast for a chance to do something to alleviate the suffering and dislocation of whole cities of people. I was so wrapped up in my research, so preoccupied with doing good I couldn’t see the pain in the man I loved.

  At the door of my lab I know I’m no longer driven by altruism. In making living glass from the hybrid glass, I obliterate the last evidence of Morrison’s existence.

  *

  I shift from mother to working mother to full-time scientist as the seasons once moved effortlessly from one to the other. The boys spend all their time with Josephine and Alice and while I don’t see them it’s easy to pretend I’m at peace with the arrangement. I fall into bed exhausted, well after dawn each day, and comfort myself with the knowledge that they’re young and adaptable and it’s not forever. Until Josephine appears in the door of my lab, her daughter tied to her back and Max lingering at her side.

  ‘Max was telling me about how he used to help you,’ she says and I can tell from the look on Max’s face it’s a lie. ‘Can we come in?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say, playing the game. I turn to peer down the barrel of the microscope so she won’t see how it bothers me that Max is with her.

  They stop at the bench where the test plates are arrayed in three rows of twenty, waiting for the first three strains of the bacteria. Each piece of glass is compromised – ranging from a scratch to epidermal shattering of all three layers. Every square has a tiny number and letter in the right-hand corner, carefully drawn by Max after hours of practising letters and numbers small enough on every piece of scrap paper he could find across the compound. The weeks of asking him to wait, trying to explain things didn’t happen quickly in science no matter how much you wanted them to, led him to wander off. Distracted by the urgency of my work, I’d let him go.

  ‘Mum’s going to smear gel stuff on the glass and the germs in the gel are going to get into the cracks and infect the glass,’ he tells Josephine.

  ‘What kind of germs?’ she asks.

  When Max doesn’t answer, I say, ‘I’ve created a new bacterium from the original, spliced it with Acacia peuce and cambagei genes.’

  I don’t look up, my attention fixed on the reaction of the final bacterial strain to temperature changes.

  ‘The theory is the new bacteria will invade via the cracks and replace the old. The glass will heal as the colony grows and stay photochromatic like the hybrid version, but also become photosynthetic and endothermic. The three layers will evolve into a self-supporting ecosystem that will use heat as part of its life cycle.’

  ‘Do you mind if I take a look?’

  I step away from the microscope and let her watch the bacteria multiply. Max looks everywhere but at me.

  ‘I’m going to start the experiments in a few days,’ I say. ‘Can I count on you as my lab assistant?’

  He shrugs. ‘I think I’d rather dig with Josephine and Alex, or help Alice with Ty,’ he says.

  ‘Max—’ I reach out to hug him and he slips through my arms and out of the lab.

  Josephine straightens, but her shoulders stay hunched.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I say, but blame lingers in the hollowness of the words.

  *

  Each test fails like the one before, the new bacterium multiplying, then merging with, rather than
destroying, the existing colony. Within twenty-four hours each strain dies regardless of how much heat or light it receives, and the bastard bacterium left weakens the molecular structure of the glass.

  I take the final sample from beneath the microscope and place it with all the other failed samples. At the end of the bench, I rest my cheek against the stainless steel and stare at the checkerboard of failure. There’s a dull throb behind my eyes threatening to escalate to a full-blown migraine before the storm rumbling outside hits.

  It takes me longer than it should to work out the noise I’m hearing isn’t just thunder, but something being dragged across the floor. Jamie appears in my line of sight, standing on the step Alex made for Max so he could work alongside me at the bench.

  ‘Play, Mummy.’

  When did he start speaking in two-word sentences?

  While I’ve been buried in the lab, absent to children who have already lost a father.

  And for what?

  My efforts are nothing more than a wasteland of good intentions and flawed theories. The pointlessness of it all desiccates my vision. And into it a small hand reaches and takes the sample square closest to the microscope.

  ‘Ji’saw,’ Jamie says and rotates it in one direction and then the other.

  In the window behind, lightning flashes and wind drags at the edges of the roof iron, trying to prise it from the steel trusses. I close my eyes and imagine the dust outside becoming mud; puddles become a stream, and then a raging river that sweeps everything away.

  ‘Ji’saw.’ When I open my eyes, he has a square in each hand, trying to fit them together in the space in front of his face.

  ‘It’s not a jigsaw.’

  ‘Yes. Ji’saw.’ He batters the two pieces together, trying to join them. In his mind, sheer force of will joins them, just as I believed mine would animate glass.