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Off The Grid {an extract} by Inga Simpson |
the garden Søren smiled at the sea eagle soaring above her on an updraft, searching for movement in the undergrowth. It wasn’t really a garden any more. Not in the way of other people’s gardens. There were no borders or pavers, no rows of roses or beds of flowers, no sculptures, and no water features, unless you counted the creek running through the south-eastern corner. The fifty acres of bushland was a lopsided strip running from the ridgeline down to the cliff’s edge. On afternoons like this the breeze ran through, caressing the leaves, rustling the grasses, celebrating a corridor of green freedom. There was still the vegetable garden behind the house, the duck shed, and the orchard up behind that, for the things she grew to feed herself. She had hedged it off with native finger limes, their prickles discouraging animals from feeding, their fruit harvested for pickle and marmalade. The rest was as wild and as close to its natural state as she could keep it, the only tracks formed by her own feet. And someone else’s once, long ago. It had begun as a one-and-a-quarter acre plot, much like everyone else’s, with a picket fence and falling down shed. A little stone and timber house with its sprawling deck built around a pair of old man banksias, their fuzzy men always falling onto the table, mouths open, during meals. Over the years, they had gradually bought the neighbours’ blocks as they came up for sale, knocked down the houses, ripped out the fences, taken them away. Removed all foreign objects: metal, glass and tile. Pulled up the weeds and introduced species. Regrown local natives from seed, some of them species almost forgotten. Søren stood, and took the long way home. The breeze whistled in the stand of she oaks by the creek, their needles crunched under her feet. She ran her fingers over the tufts of lichen growing on the trunks and smiled; squatted to gather the prickly round pods into a bag, choosing the fresher light brown ones that still held their seeds. Picked what she could from the tree with the help of the long, hooked pole she used to bend branches down. The water burbled along in the background as she worked, telling her stories of the world upstream. When the bag was full, she crept to the edge of the bank, hoping for a bubble, a movement in the water, a sign that some frogs survived. It was still; the water shallow and brackish. They needed the rain she could smell coming. Maybe that would clean it out. She plucked out a weed that the birds had brought in, stopped to admire a crimson hood orchid showing off among the ferns. Walked though spotted gums, stepping over the sheets of bark they had shed this week, soft orange on the underside. Climbed onto one that had fallen, rubbed her hands along its drying trunk. It was only young, had seemed strong. An echidna burrowed back into soft dirt, and a blue wren bobbed about on a low branch. Søren felt the wind swing around to the south. She didn’t see him at first. He was crouched at the base of a tree, digging. The spotted gum with its branches like a hand, four long gentle fingers. She took the looping path and crept up behind him; saw the camera gear, all the equipment he had brought with him, to take things away. Cages, plastic bags, little tubes and jars. He was digging up a bandicoot’s burrow. She leaned on her pole, every muscle tight. “You’re on private property.” He stood, offering her a soft, white hand with a thumb like a finger, no muscle. “Dr Orr? I’m Peter Dalkeith. I did knock. And we did write to you.” She ignored the hand. Waited until he moved it from between them. “Please leave.” “You have some of the last remaining samples of these species. Thermal imagery suggests echidna, wallaby, possum, dunnart, bandicoot…” He edged away from the soil he had dug up. “And the birds. So many birds. Lorikeets, rosellas, and black cockatoos, we thought they were extinct –” “No thanks to you.” “Dr Orr, I’ve been writing to you for years. I’m funding the Zoosphere project. We’ve already begun populating them. They’re completely sealed and safe. We could build up the stocks of these animals again for everyone to see. For the future. I know you used to–” “It’s too late for that.” The upward shift of his eyes confirmed what booted feet and the stink of a man had already told her. There were two of them. She turned, saw this second man swinging a shovel, his face determined. Søren jabbed her pole at his throat, turned up her lip at the crunching sound it made, his pathetic gasps for air. She picked up his shovel and ran. Followed the path down toward the cliff, the tangled gums showing her the way, their branches forming a narrowing tunnel ahead, twisting, turning, dropping lower and lower. She heard the men following, heavy and clumsy, Dalkeith leading, the other one’s breath still rasping. On the outer curve of the path, where the soil turned sandy and dropped over a bluff, she climbed into the ancient Old Man Banksia that sprawled and twisted out above the narrow track. Her feet gripped the rough bark. Her clothes blended into the grey trunk, her hands were soft, apologising for the pole and shovel, for her anger, for the intrusion. She rubbed her fingers along the crimped edge of a leaf to soothe them both. She could see them coming now, tripping and stumbling, swearing at each other, at her. The gums’ branches entwined like fingers, closing in behind them, blocking their escape. When Dalkeith was almost beneath her, Søren dropped. She kicked out as she fell, punching him in the chest with her feet, knocking the air from his lungs, slamming him into the ground, and somehow staying upright enough to smash the other one above the face with the point of the shovel, splitting his head open. He fell, too, cried out. She hit his skull again, with both hands on the handle, and again. Dalkeith was up and running. The tree roots tripped him up, rushes grabbed at his clothes. Søren cut through the bush, taking her time, bent over silent feet. She drew alongside him and crouched. He tripped again, falling, as if in prayer, at the cliff’s edge. Søren threw her pole like a javelin, its hook striking the back of his neck. His head snapped forward, blood leaked down his back. She rushed up on him, used her momentum to push him over the edge. He tried to grab a tree root as he fell, but it slipped out of his grasp. She watched him crash onto the black rocks below. Watched until he stopped struggling. The sea would deal with him now.
disposal Søren levelled the dirt over the grave with the back of the shovel and kneeled beside it. She scooped out holes with her hand and planted the seedlings one by one. Three mahogany gums, they liked it down here. A banksia, the slimmer coastal variety, with smoother trunks and smaller flowers, and the quicker westringia to shelter them from the sea winds while they grew. She scattered over loose topsoil, some leaf litter, and watered them in. Big Old Man Banksia looked on. He had been here since the beginning, before her. She repaired the bandicoot burrow as best she could and stood back, frowning at their equipment. She couldn’t bury it – let all those toxins into the soil – it would not break down. She fetched her gloves and gathered it all up in cloth bags, mouth turned down in distaste as she walked back up the hill to the house. The bike leaned against the wall of the shed, offering a solution. Søren filled the panniers, tied them down. Checked the chain and brakes. Felt the rain, close now. She hurried inside as it began; large drops set far apart. It came down heavy, drumming on the roof. Often it seemed to rain only here, or more here than elsewhere, as if only for the trees. Perhaps they could sing it up for themselves. This storm would erase the men’s tracks. She placed the small black box from Dalkeith’s pocket on the bench; a key? The vehicle would have to be dealt with. She could only hope he had not told anyone exactly where he was going, protecting his own interests. She had read about him years ago. Knew they would approach her for seeds and sent some – for a good price – in the hope that they would leave The Garden alone. Cloning turned out to be less successful than Dalkeith had argued; many species contracted obscure cancers or failed to reproduce. Now they were looking for anything left in the wild. To save them. People, too, would soon be unable to survive in the environment they had created. Søren sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of red wine, waiting for night to come. * Søren rode without a light, the moon showing the way up the long, winding track through the trees to the road. The rain had cleared around midnight. Her signal to set out. She paused at the tree where the carved sign had once hung, naming their sanctuary. Before everything changed. A startled possum with a baby on her back scuttled back up into an old grey box. Søren smiled. Her animals bred just fine here. She stopped at the edge of the road. All was quiet. No sign of Dalkeith’s car in the drive or on the side of the road along the ridge. It had to be on the old fire access trail. Søren hid the bike in the trees and followed the trail down. Where the tire tracks faded into scrub, she found the car. They had not announced their arrival at all but had hoped to sneak in and out without alerting her. Perhaps they had hoped she was already dead. She pressed the green button on the black box to unlock the car and inspected its contents. A bottle of purified water, soft drink, packets of snack food for a long drive, papers, a map of the area with The Garden circled, car hire details from the airport. She pulled on gloves and emptied everything out, checking every compartment, under the seats, in the boot, and piled it all in her pack. The car sat, depersonalised, cool in the evening air, washed clean by the rain. It was one of the last series of hybrids; running on a combination of battery and recycled fuel. She could not leave it here. It would eventually be traced back to him and to The Garden. Søren took a deep breath. It had been years since she had driven and even if she could get it down to the town an abandoned vehicle would soon be discovered. She lifted her nose and took in the spray from the sea. It was only a few hundred metres to the cliff. Dropping it in the ocean was not ideal either, but the water was already too poisoned for swimming and fishing. Beyond recovery. She found the slot for the black box in the dash and pushed it in. Nothing happened. She squinted at all the knobs and buttons and depressed the power switch with her gloved forefinger. The dash lit up. The hand brake was on the floor; she had to slide into the seat and stretch to release it. She pressed D on the cross of gears on the screen and the vehicle rolled forward, bumping over grass tussocks and rocks. Søren let out the clutch and steered around a tree and between two scrubby pittosporum, their orange berries making a hollow sound on the roof. The little car was gathering speed, its brittle fender scratching and snapping through sticks, its bottom scraping on the furrowed track. Disoriented in the closed, rapidly moving space, Søren wished she had waited for first light. Afraid to slow its momentum in case it didn’t clear the undergrowth at the cliff’s edge, and unwilling to jump free in case it hit a tree or ripped up more undergrowth than necessary, she hurtled on. Dwarfed, wind-angled banksias flashed by. She jerked the steering wheel this way and that, touched the footbrake. Fiddled with the sticks on the steering column to try and bring up the headlights. Space and light opened up in front of her and there was the sudden updraft from the cliff’s edge. She dived out, grabbing in front of her as the car’s impetus, for a moment, pulled her with it. She-oak fronds gave way in her hands but its trunk sighed, leaned lower, planting a solid branch in her reach. She held on as the car plunged into the sea below. Spray flew up, almost reached her bare feet, hanging over the edge. She lay still, waiting for her breath to return to normal. The tree straightened as she let go, helping her to her feet. She made her way back to her bike, assessing the damage done. A pocket of saplings had snapped off. Søren caressed the injuries, apologised. Staking and binding them would only make them more obvious. The undergrowth would soon bounce back. In a few days the tracks would be invisible to most. * Søren coasted down from the top of the hill, trying not to see the bright lights of the apartment blocks, car yards, neon takeaway signs and billboards. The lines of power poles made from spotted gums, their shadings still showing. Concentrated on the wind in her long hair, her brown coat flicking up behind her like a moth’s wings, the swift descent. Tried not to notice how much had changed, how little green there was. The few vehicles on the roads passed unseeing. It was as if she no longer existed: a remnant from a time lost. Her head spun, reminded of the last time she had left The Garden, to deliver a guest lecture. Søren had blinked into the fluorescent lights, mouth dry. The students’ expectant faces in the full auditorium. It had helped to think of them as seeds, little kernels hungry for knowledge; as if there was still some hope for their malleable minds. Without the trees that usually surrounded her, it had been difficult to breathe; the light too harsh, the air too thin, the outlook completely without green. She clicked the remote to bring up a shot of a mountain ash, now extinct, overlayed with a quote:
“From Dr Tim Flannery’s essay ‘What is a Tree’. If you haven’t read his works, you should.” She took a sip of her water and coughed. “Trees … are smarter that any of us.” She pulled up her favourite slide, a Banksia after fire; blackened trunk, apparently dead. The next slide showed the same tree sprouting new growth from inside its bark, and new shoots from the lignotuber at its base. She showed the grey box, crown burned away, trunk scarred. In the next slide it was fuzzy with epicormic growth. “They are designed to survive fire, drought, flood. The only thing trees did not count on was us. That we would be so … thoughtless.” A few heads went down. “But then, who among us hasn’t made that same mistake about a fellow human?” She showed her teeth, an attempt at a smile, and they laughed a little. She clicked over to the shot of The Garden and moved out from the dais. “Trees offer a solution to many of the problems we’re facing today. My name is Søren Orr. I’m a sivilculturalist and environmental botanist and I’ve been asked to talk to you about my work growing trees. Their way.” Søren shook the images away. There had been a few young people who had come up and talked to her afterward, but somehow she had failed to convey the beauty of The Garden or the importance of the work. She had needed to inspire a generation, not a single lecture room. Behind the supermarket, she emptied the panniers and her pack, spreading the items between three dumpsters, making sure not to touch anything with her skin. She heard the shouts of young men unloading a transporter and smelled instant supermarket bread cooking. Clouds hid the moon while she worked, invisible in dark clothes. She began the long ride home, uphill this time, tears stinging her cheeks. The pedals were heavy, the chain slow. Her energy drained away. Dalkeith had tracked the outside world into The Garden. Despite her efforts to remove the traces, a man’s body lay decomposing in its soil. The moon was dropping fast; racing away from the sun. She stopped in her driveway. There were the usual rustlings in the trees, the creaking of trunks and limbs, but something had changed. A new unease from the disturbance she had caused. He had caused. Søren dismounted and wheeled the bike beside her, humming as she did when she worked outside during the day, trying to reassure everything their world would return to normal.
supplies She waited for the delivery woman at the top of the driveway, as she did every week. The hum of the little brown van came ahead on the wind. Søren was fond of the old thing. Mia was always complaining, but it was quiet and ran on solar. Crept along, nose down, like some sort of animal. “Hey, Søren.” “Morning.” Mia started unloading boxes and cloth bags onto Søren’s wagon, letting out little grunts. “I got you two cases of that wine. But it’s the last of it, I’m afraid.” “What?” “They’ve stopped production. Didn’t even harvest this year’s grapes. Lost their organic status. Just can’t be done, there are chemicals in the rain, the air and everything, and she said she won’t make any more. You know what she’s like. Said she wasn’t going to grow things in a bubble. She gave you the second one for nothing. Said to thank you for the seedlings, and tell you there’s a vineyard up north still working, but their wine’s shit and they probably won’t last long. I wrote down the name.” “It’s that bad out there?” There had been the dieback in the she oaks this year, brown tips on the white ash up on the hill, and the last ghost gum passed away in the autumn. “Flour’s finished, too. Organic, anyway. I bought up as much as I could. We’ll store it for you. There’ll be plenty of my other customers disappointed, too. Probably shouldn’t even be breathing the air, I suppose. I read that in Asia everyone wears face masks. They can’t grow anything in the open; it has to be under glass, in purified air. All that. We’re doing the same here. Building sustainable cities in the desert.” Søren snorted. Mia handed over a square parcel wrapped in brown paper. “I got the books you asked for.” “Thank you.” Mia reached back through the window to the front seat. “And your mail, I know you say not to bring it, but …” “There was an election on the weekend. A bit of violence to go with it. Government was returned.” She studied Søren’s face for a reaction. “I meant to remind you but it’s not compulsory anymore.” Søren shrugged. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been down to City Hall. “Complacency works in their favour.” “Exactly.” Søren handed over a square wooden box of seeds, each compartment labelled in scratchy block letters. “I’ve written out the address. This one’s going to Paris, some new climate-controlled hothouse, like you were saying. This should cover postage.” She handed over the notes. “And for the rest.” “A woman rang asking about you during the week.” Søren looked up. “Asking what?” “If you still lived up here.” Mia flicked flour off her shirt. “She said she knew you.” “What’d you tell her?” “Nothing, of course.”
lemon thyme Søren stood at the kitchen bench, looking out at the storm whipping in, the squiggly upper branches of the gums swinging their green tops. She sliced potatoes, carrots, and parsnips and scraped them into the stock with the back of the old knife. Ground some peppercorns. The first rain drops splattered on the window pane, big and heavy. Søren opened the door down to the cellar, the steps cold and dusty. A good bottle of red would cheer her up. Something light and herbaceous to match her soup. She chose a Languedoc red from a decade and a half ago, when she still travelled. The woodstove smoked around the door, the seal worn down to nothing. She threw in more wood, poking at the red coals. The soup needed more time. The wine was as surprising as the first mouthful they had tasted at the vineyard, but deepened and softened with age. The label revealed nothing but the vineyard and appellation, they’d had to ask, in painful French, what grapes were used. “Grenache, Mourvedre, and Syrah,” he’d shrugged, as if they should know. She put on a CD Kara had made for her years ago, songs of an old love that had always felt new. Happy tears now, in her warm kitchen with the wind and rain driving at the roof, remembering so many storms borne out at this table, by the hearth. The love that had filled the kitchen whatever the weather. Søren wondered if Kara still thought of her here. If she still cooked with lemon thyme. * Søren had lain awake all night worrying about the creek, wondering what she could do to slow the flow of pollutants from upstream. Before the sun was up, she was at the kitchen table with a pot of strong black coffee, sketching out a design. She filled two large flour bags with charcoal she had saved from the stove, tied one on each end of her pole, and lifted it up onto her shoulders. Near the border with the neighbour’s place she moved more cautiously, stopping twenty metres inside the fence, where the creek was narrow. She dropped her pole and sat for a while getting her breath back. The water was cold. She sipped some from cupped hands and spat it out, contaminants prickling her tongue. It was stronger than unfiltered rainwater, although that was probably full of chemicals too, even here. Søren waded in, got her balance on the rocks below, and braced against the flow; eager after all the rain. She piled up stones, building two walls half a metre apart. It was difficult to keep her footing while swinging the heavier rocks across. She frowned: she was not as strong as she had once been. When it was finished, she lined it with fine mesh, waiting to see if the water would still run through. She poured in the charcoal and packed it down as best she could. It made a terrible mess at first, turned the water black. She climbed out, sat on the bank, and waited. The sun was warm on her skin. A lizard darted across a rock, snared an insect. She took the cheese sandwich from her satchel and chewed slowly. After a while, the creek began to clear. She stood back and admired her weir. The charcoal would have to be changed regularly, and the whole thing would probably need rebuilding after storms, but it might work. In a few weeks she would come back and take samples, see if it had made any difference. Already tired but wanting to finish the job, Søren ferried mulch, seedlings and tools from the potting shed to the weir. The light was fading as she planted rushes and sedges along the creek’s edge, bedding them down with buckets of sand from upstream.
seedlings Søren poked finger holes in the damp soil of each of the hessian seedling pots. Blew gently over them as she placed Banksia serrata seeds in one by one. She covered them with damp earth, patted them down, watered them in, slid a wooden label in one corner and placed the first tray at the sunny end of the potting shed. She hummed while she worked, and the bush hummed back. The late winter sun climbed higher in a clear sky, until she had five trays laid out. She refilled her old metal watering can and fed the spotted gum seedlings; their tender tips already peeking through the soil. Soon they would twist and squiggle their way toward the sun, lignin building woody trunks. So much life. It still filled her with the same joy and wonder she remembered as a student; bringing trees to life from seed. The old potting shed sagged here and there, twisted by falling limbs and exposure to the elements, but it still did the job. She washed her hands at the tap, the water cold. During their first building attempts, Søren had dropped the roll of shade cloth from the roof, sent Kara tumbling down in green-meshed giggles. Only with a second ladder and both of them on the roof had they completed the job, three days later. They launched it with a bottle of champagne drunk from crystal with tired arms and dirty hands. * Unable to sleep, Søren rose early and walked along the cliff path. In better times, they had paused here at the edge, looking down into the water, still and clear. When the swell pounded into the other side of the point, their bay always remained calm. They had watched schools of fish dart and swing, dolphins surfing the break. In summer, young people from the Capital had crawled over the rocks peering at sea urchins, red jellies and the occasional starfish. They swam naked in the inlets, their skin white and their towels bright on the pebbled shore. She followed the path around, hopping over a fallen branch and swinging under the trees. Crouched down to move through the banksia thicket. The trees here were thin and spindly, bonsaid against the sea winds. Their braches meshed to form an arching tunnel. Fallen leaves – some silver side up, some green – lined its floor. Out on the point she braced herself against the updraft and breathed in the salty spray. The unmanned lighthouse that had once signalled ships stood blind. Metal-grey ocean lashed at the land, foaming and spuming. Container ships hulked up the coast. She had fished from here, on calm mornings, for morwong and sweep, and spiked crabs for bait but the water could no longer give her any food or peace. She returned on the inland path, stood in the waist-high sword grass clearing and watched the sun slide in, lighting leaf tips and warming her Garden to life. Søren examined the ground under the grove of original old man banksias. She had tried to simulate fire by spreading ash and smoke water but they hadn’t been fooled, only a few seedlings had germinated. The last real fire had been twenty years ago and, for reasons she had yet to understand, most of the resulting seedlings had not survived. Perhaps the wallabies and kangaroo rats had eaten them. She leaned on a gnarled trunk, touched its grooved bark. Whispered into its leaves. These trees were the oldest; The Garden’s heart. Their limbs were dying and dropping each year and they would not reproduce. Did they know what was happening outside, and not want to go on? Or were they waiting for the big fire they knew would eventually come? A pair of yellow-tailed black cockatoos landed in the branches above, tilting their comical heads. One squawked while the other fed on banksia men. She watched seeds spill from its beak, scattering on the ground in careless abundance. None of these ever grew either. Her cultivated seedlings were now almost big enough to plant out but she worried about insulting the trees. Interfering. * Søren herded the ducks into their timber house, throwing in a bucket of scraps and a handful of grain. They honked and chattered in mild protest, but complied. For years she had let them roam the vegetable patch and orchard until one was taken by a fox. The creeping proximity of the city brought new hazards. While native animals faded into extinction, more hardy species adapted, living on the refuse of humanity. The wood pile was fast diminishing. She filled the barrow and pushed it to the back door. Some of the pieces would be better split, but chopping wood was a job better left to the young and the angry. Near the creek, long shadows reached toward the sea; thin fingers searching for the edge. The bank was soft with fallen she-oak needles; a noiseless mat suppressing any undergrowth. She slapped a mosquito from her ankle and frowned. If mosquitoes were breeding, frogs might return yet. She leaned out over the water, hand on the bole of a tree. Tiny mosquito larvae wriggled and curled through their short lives. The grasses and sedges she had planted were doing well, the water tea-coloured but clear. No frog eggs that she could see. She sat a little way off, among bracken ferns, and listened. She waited until after dark but heard no calls. *** BIO Inga has a PhD in Creative Writing from QUT, which included her detective novel, Fatal Development, to be published in the U.S in late 2009. Inga is the winner of a Scarlet Stiletto Award for her short story 'Operation Bluewater', published in Scarlet Stiletto: the First Cut. Inga also has a Masters in Australian Literature from the University of New South Wales. She has published academic and non-fiction articles, including articles in Clues, and entries in the Dictionary of Literary Biography on Australian writers Gillian Mears and Marele Day. Inga's novel Off the Grid, was shortlisted for the 2009 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. THE JUDGES SAID ... A novel told in four parts, Off the Grid is a dystopian, lightly speculative novel, exploring the ways in which a range of characters respond to the growing threat and reality of environmental disaster. The strength of this entry was the quality of the writing and the author’s ability to illuminate the key characters’ relationships and the novel’s setting. It is also provides some interesting ideas on the moral and ethical dilemmas around the future of our environment. The writing is charged and powerful in places and exhibits a confident and promising literary style. |
Søren sat at the end of her garden staring out to sea. The bench was fashioned from a fallen log, carved out with hand tools and now worn smooth. The grey trunks of the mahogany gums formed a natural arch, framing the view up the coast. Søren didn’t look that way anymore. Not during the day. At night it was all blinking lights: white, yellow and orange. She could pretend it was something beautiful, stars fallen to earth, or phosphorous creatures dancing at the ocean’s edge.