Children of Tomorrow, page 4
Quiet, concealing nods, bobbing beneath her guiding trees. They embolden her. ‘He always so…’
‘Obnoxious?’ Kim suggests. ‘Yes.’
There is a hum of amused agreement from Wally, Arne and John. Elbow nudges and knowing tilts. Hard-to-catch eyerolls.
‘But we’re stuck with him,’ John adds glibly, scratching his head, moving dark, thick tufts around. Evie likes him at once.
‘Stuck loving him,’ Kim adds. ‘And fucking him.’
Evie senses no boast here, just a crassness more people could do with. Maybe it’s the high, maybe the heat, but Kim starts to hover lightly before Evie.
Her words wobble. ‘Wasn’t always this way. His head has got sort of big the last few months.’
‘Oh, like Wal here,’ Evie cracks, prompting a round of laughter, none more genuine than from Wally himself.
They go on to explain collectively how Freddie has gone viral, a shredded poster boy for global environmental activism. He has mobilised people, garnered funding and support, and delivered far-reaching messages to media and government. But it has been a circus. Progressive yet deliciously palatable, networks—even those owned by Murdoch—have creamed at the chance to shoot him at the housewives of even the most conservative of households, regardless of what he was preaching.
‘I think he’ll settle down,’ Kim concludes, tired but hopeful. ‘Or maybe he’ll just be like Wal for the rest of our days!’
‘What the fuck did I do?’ Wally protests, raising his hands in a fine performance of dismay. They hush down as Freddie returns with an armoury of needless drinks, which they all take up in good faith. ‘What we all laughing about?’
‘You, sexy Ken!’ Evie bellows, raising her glass. She sees insecure vanity ringing around that beautiful noggin of his, cheeks flushed in either self-awareness or a mistaken sense of flirtation. To Evie’s surprise, it turns out to be the former, as he plops himself besides his little brother and shrinks down to size.
She blows him a petite kiss, softening the blow but deepening it in many more ways.
They drink in the calm between them, silent for an unknown time. Something eases, there in the balmy dusk; Evie steps into a tribe she feels she’s always known but never chanced upon. Children of the age of infinite growth, caught in that unfurling wake of great change, fuelling out into the atmosphere and oceans, rising each year, waiting to return. The slowest change in their short lives, the fastest in Earth’s long reckoning.
The tribe gets to talking about the thing no one seems to talk about. Evie learns of their various stakes at the table. She’s quietly kept tabs on Wally during her travels, devouring his words, making kindling of his hundreds of finished and, when rather dry, unfinished pages. And Freddie, using his large, dumb body to rail against the burning of the world. She has trouble deciphering where exactly his heart is in all this. And the three younger members—Arne, Kim, John—provide the self-conscious, clipped explanations typical of their kind. Isolated and shut off from the world, stranded on researcher island. Arne is researching something jumbled about trees and carbon cycles; Kim, greening cities with bioengineered flora; and John, something philosophical that makes her like him even more.
She’s about to become one of them, she just doesn’t know quite how yet. She thinks—hopes—that she and Wally can be that way together, for a while. Clueless until clues turn up.
Months back, flying along the east coast of Australia, she looked in wonder from on high at the largest living structure in the world, a pearl necklace draped across the big blue world. It calls to her still; she will go there soon.
Small and secret, she tells Wally about it, near to whispering.
‘There’s nothing like it,’ Wally confesses. A tense moment passes between them, before he adds: ‘It’ll be gone soon.’
Evie knows the truth of it. Like everything, she thinks. Morbid. But she can’t see any other way from here, as things stand, teetering on the edge for all the world to see.
Wally probes. ‘Do you really want to research something that is dying?’
‘Everything dies.’
‘You know what I mean.’
She pauses for a while and considers it. She looks up and the trees are just trees. They give her nothing this time. She decides alone. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Okay, then,’ Wally says, pleased. ‘We can do this together.’
Confused, she asks if he’s thinking of putting in an application to the doctoral program.
‘No fucking way!’
Evie clues up. ‘The thing you’re writing?’
‘Thinking of,’ he admits.
‘Tell me about it.’
Wally squirms a little, and runs a hand through his ever-so-slightly thinning wild mane. Through the hazy heat, eased only a little by the cool change, more drinks arrive, courtesy of no one, it would seem—John, Wally guesses, given the silent delivery.
‘Well?’ Evie asks, prodding once more.
‘I don’t really know. Not yet.’
‘You got a few years of money to write about something you haven’t even figured out yet?’
Wally responds with an ambiguous head wiggle. Evie is as impressed as she is incredulous. ‘Well played, cuz. Good hustle. But I shouldn’t be surprised—white dudes can get anything.’ Wally concedes this. ‘So, what have you got so far?’
‘The money or the writing?’
‘The writing, you idiot! But I’ll happily relieve you of some of those funds.’ She looks over at the three young scholars—a doomed species she’s wary of joining. ‘It’s harder for foreign students to get funding. Not sure I will.’
‘Please, take some of mine. It’s an absurd amount. And to be honest, I have no idea what I’m doing.’ Wally relays how, on the eve of departing this strange land, well over a year ago now, he applied on a whim for a creative environmental writing fellowship—loosely connected to the university, but actually provided by an anonymous private donor—named after one of those German philosophers who was actually a Nazi, a detail overlooked by academia. When they offered it to him, Wally tried to turn it down. He had already arrived at the next electrifying point of his never-ending circuit—Phnom Penh. But the university, on behalf of the benefactor, upped the offer and expanded the contract to the distressingly fortunate timeframe of ‘ongoing’. He could write from anywhere in the world he so pleased, but for the odd event here and there with Melbourne’s moneyed elite. A few years of this and he could afford a decade of aimlessness, penning pabulum and getting high on the world before it all disappeared.
‘Hah! Nice!’ Evie struggles to contain her laughter. ‘The Nazi fellowship. Place like this—of course!’ They laugh at this together.
‘What do they mean by ongoing?’
Wally looks up, gravely embarrassed. ‘I mean just that. There is no end date.’
Reeling, she takes a dramatic swig of beer, acting at maintaining her balance. When she windmills the glass back down on the table, she hollers, ‘What in the actual fuck! That’s absurd. Did you even finish uni?’
‘I did—just. BC, Vancouver. It’s not really a university position—I just have a space to write here.’
‘But why you? Because of the climate reporting?’
Wally raises his palms to the air, uncertain.
‘Sounds like the kind of pretentious shit my father would pour money into,’ Evie concludes.
‘How is Uncle—’
‘Don’t change the subject. He’s fine—the boomer wanker will always be fine. What are you writing, then?’
Wally considers pointing out that, according to Liam, Evie has been getting by largely on the generosity of her boomer wanker father, but resists. Instead, he rolls another one and considers how to convey the impossible to this cousin he once knew so well.
‘I want to narrate what we’re doing to the planet,’ he says plainly, flattening his palms on the table.
‘You want to write a novel about climate change?’
‘No,’ he says emphatically, throwing his hands about as if they might help him to explain. ‘Something…sufficient. Record it. Chronicle it—a ledger, a witness statement, of sorts. For posterity. Something large. Just not sure what it is yet. Maybe I never will be.’
Evie is suddenly intent, perched and smoking and ready to arrow ideas into that part of his brain that has for months now only managed to conjure dross. She shifts a little, sober and sombre. ‘That’s a big ask. I don’t think you can quite.’
He nods. He wants nothing more than to spend the next year writing a shitty whodunnit and thumbing tweets off to satellites up above.
‘Yeah, I guess not,’ he mumbles.
‘What I mean is, it’s all just too immense. And at a scale humans can barely comprehend. Why else haven’t we done anything about it yet?’
The rest of their company look up from their ramblings, as if this were a topic for which they had a search warrant. Freddie and Kim were, until a moment ago, readying to leave. Arne and John were locked in some kind of gesticulatory warfare they seemed to be enjoying, pulling out their phones occasionally to flick things each other’s way. Now they swarm.
Wally turns pensive, mulling his way towards tired defeat. ‘Maybe it is all just too large—larger than us,’ he says, drifting off into some horrifying place, years from here.
As quickly as Wally’s friends flock to the darkness, Evie wants to drop the topic—her cousin’s pained expression, frayed and greying along the waves of his hair just above the ears, prompting something inside her. A slow but powerful wave of exhaustion, complete and unrelenting, washes over her.
Closing time approaches. The stars roll across the sky, tumbling down the universe. Ancient dots break through the canopy of palmate leaves, large and lobed, all avocado and bronze in the bar’s dying light. They seem to bend down in immense green handfuls, reaching out to Evie. She transfers the feeling—that new heaviness—across the table to him. The others have no idea anything is happening at all.
‘Can I crash at yours?’ Evie asks.
3
Bleach
Carbon dioxide parts per million: 409.4
From the safe haven of the emptied beach, Arne watches Evie treading watchfully beneath the mangroves. She sees something and dives after it. He tracks her, following her silhouette as it glides through the clear seawater that skirts the dense and tangled maze of mangrove roots, into which she calmly enters, vanishing. An uncomfortable amount of time passes—minutes of infinity—and a sharp panic surges through Arne, numbing his extremities.
Fidgeting, he rises and legs it through the shallows, scurrying about in nervous wait, only to have her come up, as if watching for him through a periscope, from a nearby fist of roots. Laughter—a lovely laughter he can make out even while tumbling backwards through the water—takes hold of him. It trills, cracks and scatters throughout the undercurrent, rumbling low. He stays for it, drifts a lazy half-minute below, before righting himself.
Evie stands tall, her curls dripping like seaweed dangle about her, draping across the tattoos along her dark, muscular shoulders and arms. Arne tries to laugh, to feign cool, but that only makes it more awkward. She can see how unfortunately eager his care for her is becoming.
The warm wind picks up and he feels the saltwater drying on him, tight and stinging over his skin. He is growing fond of it, though, Evie and her waterworld of creeks, coastlines, reefs and open ocean, always moving, always flowing. He would like to show her the rugged, birded bushlands of inland Victoria one day, where everything seems quiet until you actually stand still and listen.
Arne ventures back in, tests the water with his toes—a reflex from living in Tasmania and Victoria most of his life. Wading clumsily toward her, he looks out beyond their boat to the majestic expanse of blue, immense beyond imagining, full of life we’ve barely begun to count. He is only beginning to appreciate it when it is fading from the world.
Out there, great reefs of coral are turning pale, dying in the hot sea year after year. An underwater ossuary, Evie’s supervisor, a distinguished marine biologist, had called it.
The night before, when Evie was rummaging through the cabin to check on various pieces of equipment, the names and purposes of which Arne could not hope to identify, she explained how ocean temperatures had risen alarmingly over the past summer, meaning the corals, and the marine life that relied on them, were under threat. While changing the lens of her garishly red underwater camera, Evie sang one of her improvised tunes: Bushfires for the birds. The ocean is burning too. Corals they are bleaching. It will all be gone soon. The fish. The whales. The sharks. It’s all one big thing. They are me and you.
Later, after dinner, they lay on the deck of the boat drinking cheap wine. Arne fell into flirting. Evie laughed him off, not unkindly, telling him he’d had one too many. But then she did something unexpected: she asked him to hold her. She rolled into his arms and, after a time, told him how when she was little—when her mother would take them on holiday back to Jamaica—she and Liam would lie on the beach at night looking up at the stars, reaching out and renaming the constellations, all with new lines and names. She then pulled Arne’s arm tighter around her and asked if he would like to play this game.
Now, abuzz and lost in last night—the warmth of Evie, the moon like a grapefruit in the night sky, and the fruitless constellations he proposed and traced across the stars—he is stumbling through the shallows, stepping haphazardly around sharp clumps of coral, following her lead.
As he reaches her, he makes out something red and wimpling in the water, fibrous, like cotton being pulled apart in slow motion.
Blood.
He rushes to her, but she immediately raises a hand for calm: ‘Chill, Arne.’
‘Are you okay?’ he asks.
‘I’m fine,’ she says, pushing him away.
‘What happened?’
‘Just cut myself,’ she explains, unbothered. ‘On a rock.’
‘Will you be alright?’
She is clearly annoyed by the question. ‘Yes. Stop being dramatic. Don’t go getting all chivalrous.’
Arne steps back, raising his hands.
‘It’s a fucking scrape,’ she continues, looking directly at him now. ‘It happens. I can take care of myself.’
‘I know you can.’
‘So act like it then. We aren’t characters in some shitty movie.’ She bends down, peering through the seawater to inspect the cut along her ankle. ‘Just be you. I kind of like you, when you’re just you.’
Without warning, Evie plunges forward and freestyles towards the boat. He dashes after her, lifting his head occasionally to admire her graceful, strong strokes. She is getting away from him. As the water gets deeper a primal panic sets in, quickening his own clumsy movements.
By the time he pulls himself up onto the hot deck, Evie is already tending to the wound, which appears to Arne horribly extensive and infectible. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘Stop asking questions,’ she huffs. ‘Go make something for us to eat.’
A few minutes later, he returns with some water and a few salad rolls. Evie moves to sit alone on the gunwale. She pulls her knees up to her chest, keeping her eyes on the water. So intense and determined. Vigilant. So absolutely committed to the ocean and the life it holds, right to the end. Whatever that might be. And though he feels he has committed himself to all things arboreal—has studied them deeply, looked out for them and felt a slow grief at their various and different rejuvenations and die-backs—he cannot say that he is quite like Evie. Over the past few months, since she crashed that night at his and Wally’s place, he has steadily learned that nobody is.
He has sensed this many times, day after day, as they’ve proceeded north along enormous stretches of the Great Barrier Reef.
Arne and Evie sit in silence, feeling the slow rise and fall of the boat, watching for life. Evie has the gift of stillness, unprompted periods during which she can descend into a kind of meditative state, pulling Arne through to the other side, showing him things he completely missed before—as she does right now. Avian exchanges. The location of an incoming gust upon the surface of the water. Fish jumping. The breath of another. The more you do this, the more you see.
‘Arne,’ she says, startling him.
‘Yes, Evie?’
‘Thanks for coming with me.’
*
Over the next few days they continue their assignment. They dive down and survey the extent of the coral bleaching at designated locations. It is a eulogy in the form of data.
The nights, however, are for forgetting. They binge Netflix. They talk for hours. Laugh about nothing in particular. They get baked and lie next to each other, taking it in turns to throw a ball against the cabin roof while spouting the most ridiculous names they’ll give whales when they spot them.
Tonight is different, though. Evie is serious. And sober. She is perched on her stool and glued to the receiver, waiting for acoustic signature relays from her hydrophones, the locations of which she selected based on the migration patterns of previous years. Earlier that day, another team reported seeing a pod of dwarf minkes, and another spotted a humpback whale mother and calf. Evie is waiting for their call. Epochal songs made of keening melodies and creaking percussions. ‘Like Björk,’ Evie states, as if that might mean something to Arne.
On his bed in the opposite corner of the cabin, Arne looks up from his sketchbook, pausing midway through a greylead rendering of a sacred kingfisher caught on camera a few days ago near Herron Island, trying to put Evie’s campus lawn drawing lessons into practice, and shakes his head.
‘You don’t know Björk? How!’ Evie blares, distracted for a minute. ‘That can’t be right. Like, at parties, I’m sure I’ve played some of her stuff.’ Evie had a habit of taking over the music selection at just about any kind of gathering, usually improving the party no end. ‘You’d recognise her voice if I played you some.’ Evie knocks on her headphones and promises, ‘I’ll blast some later.’
