Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever (7 page)

“I thought you loved that car,” Craig says to him, and he can’t think how to answer. He did love that car. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

Terry takes him to one side, says that his
heart’s
obviously not in it at the moment, it’s quite understandable, it’ll be all right in time, he should take some time for himself. John nods.

The next day he takes the photograph from the mantel and drives down to the coast. He’s sure that the picture was taken in Brighton. He pushes through the Lanes and down to the seafront, and when he gets there he holds up the picture of her and tries to calculate where it was taken.

The wind has a sting to it, and it whips the sea into splintering peaks. He doesn’t remember being here. He holds the picture in front of him and tries to match the two horizons, to picture her before him, to imagine how it might have been. He wonders why she didn’t say anything about him spending time away, working on the car, chasing parts across Europe. Or maybe she did, and he just didn’t hear it.
Didn’t want to hear it.

The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

The seafront is busy. People flow around him, into him sometimes,
sorry, sorry,
then on, huddled against the wind and clinging to one another as if they were falling, tumbling down the street. Then, in the polished glass of a shop front, he sees her.
Just for an instant, behind him, looking right at him.
Wide brown eyes, dark hair moving in the wind. He turns, looks, but sees behind him only the promenade and the greying sea. He looks back at the window, but is confronted only by his own reflection, standing ghost-like behind the glass. He looks again, but there’s nothing.

He buys fish and chips, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper, and returns to the car. When he gets there, on the driver’s side window he sees a face. Not a real face; a cartoonish approximation of dots and curves, as traced in breath with a finger. She drew something like it on the bathroom mirror once, so that in the mornings, when he got out of the shower, he’d have a smile to cheer him up. It’s a sweet gesture, and he doesn’t really mind that it’s slightly distracting to have one on a car window. He doesn’t remember it being there before.

He lays out clothes for her every night before he goes to bed now, and sometime the next day they are always gone. He finds them eventually, days later, in the washing basket, so he washes them for her and hangs them in the wardrobe. He replenishes the feminine toiletries as they dwindle in the bathroom. He has taken to cooking two meals in the evening.

He doesn’t like looking at himself in the mirror any more. The reflection that stares back at him with those sagging eyes is a lie. The images in the old photographs are the real him, caught in an intangible past. The images are the real her.

He comes to the workshop after hours now, to rebuild the car.
To be away from Terry and Craig, though he’s not sure why.

It’s finished now, the car. The parts all installed. He’s got the engine working. He’s polished the paintwork, and the mirrors and the windows. He’s vacuumed the seats.
Dusted the dashboard.
He’s filled the tanks with oil, brake fluid, petrol. It gleams, frozen and impenetrable.

Except it isn’t finished.
The leather at the side of the passenger seat is cracked and thin. The rear bumper is pitted with coppery blooms of rust. Already the perfection is crumbling.

It isn’t finished. It’ll never be finished.

~~~

It’s a Saturday, and he’s in the High Street, on his way to the supermarket. He sees Craig coming the other way, with his wife. She’s pushing a pushchair with a young child in it. He smiles at them, but they don’t respond. He waves, but still they don’t react. He’s certain they haven’t missed him, certain they aren’t deliberately snubbing him. It’s more that they looked right through him, as though he were transparent.
As though there were only blank space where he was standing.

It’s a Wednesday, and he’s at the crematorium. It’s the anniversary of her death. He’s come here alone, but there are other mourners here, and they collect in drifts, like black snow. None of them is here for her. He places the bunch of fresh dahlias in the vase by the plaque and steps back to admire them. He knows they’re what she would have wanted, because her diary told him so. She told him so.

Scattered people fill the streets on the way back from the crematorium, walking in ones and twos and threes. Some of them look at him as he passes in his ash-coloured suit and black tie, a man dressed to meet the dead, and he suspects them of talking about him, quietly plotting condolences and excuses.

He hears someone fall into step with him.
High-heeled shoes, clapping along the pavement, a rhythm and timbre that he recognises.
Familiar, comforting.
The moment feels fragile, so he keeps walking and looks straight ahead, fearful of shattering it.

Just then a silvery car sweeps past, and for a second, just for a second, he wonders if it’s the Facel II. Perhaps Terry’s taken it out for a spin, to get the engine warm, blow out the cobwebs.

He’s aware of these thoughts, but it’s as though he’s outside his body, eavesdropping on himself. He’s dreamed of this moment for years, of releasing the Facel II into the wild, yet this passing confection of metal and glass stirs no emotion in him. It feels as though … he doesn’t know what. Something feels different now.

“Was that the car?
The Facel II?”

“I don’t think so,” he says. He keeps looking straight ahead.

“Is it finished now?”

“I thought it was, but it’s not.”

“What do you mean?”

He closes his eyes for a second, shakes his head.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter? I thought you said it was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen.”

He walks on for a few steps before replying, just to listen to her footsteps.

“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

~~~

SIMON JOHN
COX
 
was
born in Tunbridge Wells, and has a degree in chemistry, a job in marketing and a black belt in Taekwon-Do. He has been writing fiction for as long as he can remember. He has had short stories published in various places, and is editing his second novel whilst trying to interest agents in his first. Simon is a founder member of the Tunbridge Wells Writers group and is currently starring as the protagonist in his autobiography.

Website:
www.simonjohncox.com

Twitter:
http://twitter.com/SimonJohnCox

When a single mum returns to her island home of Tasmania with her young son Jack in tow, things don’t turn out quite the way she expects. In fact, her efforts to settle back in take a strange twist…

A DARK FOREST

by
Jen White

On the way over, a man, who had been muttering and pacing for a good half hour, climbed onto the rail of the ferry and dived into the black water.

“What’s he doing?” Jack asked.

“Jumping in,” I lied. “But don’t you do it. It’s dangerous.”

All around us people shouted and ran to the place where the man had been standing only a moment before. I didn’t move, just stared at the empty rail, at his after-image.

I led Jack inside to the snack bar. I knew he would not forget what he had just seen. It would emerge days, or even weeks, later, rising up from somewhere deep and dark. “Remember that man, Mum?” he would say.
“The one who jumped into the water?
Remember? I had a dream about him last night.”

I had not set foot in Tasmania for a decade or more, that deep, dark island, as vivid as a fairytale. Ten years ago I moved to the mainland to seek my fortune. I had blamed the total mess my life had become, the damage that I had inflicted on myself and others, on the place rather than on myself. I know now that nothing is that simple. Oh, I was right to leave. I still believe that. The island and I had been a poisonous mixture, producing something airless and angry and desperate. But, with time, the damage in me had healed as much as it ever would, and distance had enabled me to see that there was something pure about the island, as if all that was extraneous had been filtered out and what remained was heady and overpowering, the distilled essence of Australia. Now here I was, returning with a child, and on my way to a new job as an historian with the museum. I no longer had family on the island, but I had memories of family. And I wanted Jack to see the place. It was as much his heritage as mine.

That man jumping, I told myself, it wasn’t a warning. It was merely the kind of thing that was likely to happen when one undertakes a perilous journey.

Soon after we arrived, Jack and I found a cottage on the edge of a forest and we made efforts to settle into our new lives. Several times a week Jack would ring his dad and tell him about everything.

“I saw snow, but it’s hard,” I heard him complain softly into the phone. “It’s cold and grey. In real life it’s dirty.”

I had never really talked to my wild, untethered son about the island. I hadn’t known how to. “Once upon a time,” I should have begun, the story unreeling from there, ending finally in, “And everyone lived happily ever after.” But I had never been able to find the words. I decided to show him instead.

I took Jack to see the house I had grown up in, a sprawling white weatherboard with a stone verandah. We searched and searched for it. Eventually, we found its location, but the house was no longer there. It had burned down, a neighbour told me, one moonless night, and all that remained now was a blackened hole, as if a rotten tooth had recently been removed.

“Maybe this isn’t the place,” Jack kept saying. “Maybe it’s the next street up,” as if I had misremembered the map of my entire childhood. I know memory is malleable, but surely not to that degree.

Jack did not do well at school. His teachers said he always seemed distracted, as if he had dog-hearing and he was listening to sounds no one else could hear. On weekends, we drove through the mountains and camped beside crystal lakes. Jack hated it. He froze. Sun child, he despised shoes and socks and the big, fat, larval jackets we wore against the wind.

It was months before I made any friends. I felt down and dark, like a wrong decision. No one would talk to me, barely even smile. And I, mirror-like, lost the knack of smiling myself. People moved slowly here, as if the air itself weighed upon them. I had forgotten that. Here, nothing was superficial, nothing light.

And then Robin, a scientist who had been employed by the museum for decades, showed me the foetus.

“Come with me,” he whispered.

I had finally past some test I hadn’t known I was sitting.

He ushered me through silent corridors and locked doors. It felt as if I were being admitted to some exclusive private club. After many long minutes of walking, we reached a temperature-controlled room somewhere in the centre of a maze of offices and labs.

Robin brought the object out carefully. He put me in mind of medieval monks handling holy relics. He told me of how they had taken many samples from the creature in an effort to reconstruct the architecture of its existence.

The thylacine itself resembled a baby rabbit more than anything. Its blind eyes, as opaque as peeled grapes, reminded me of my mother’s preserves. This animal was so young when it was taken that it had still been in its mother’s pouch. And now, long dead, it could yet become a mother itself. Imagine that, I thought, a mother who has never lived. It’s the kind of thing you read about in the bible. It has to be a miracle, surely.
The equal of the Immaculate Conception, almost.

It wasn’t the only thylacine that had been preserved, Robin told me. There were at least half a dozen others, some of them siblings to this one, raided from the same pouch. But this one, unlike many of the others, was in excellent condition. It had been kept all these decades on the back shelves of a cool, dark room, safely forgotten. Robin let me briefly hold the jar. I tilted it. The animal had fur and the first signs of stripes. The stripes were its camouflage. The animal belonged in the shadowy mosaic of a dry eucalypt forest, a jigsaw of wetlands and grasslands, not a laboratory jar. You could see, even in its infant
state, that
its jaw was heavy, reptilian, mythical. Its paws were stretched out as if begging, its eyes huge and open, as if it were staring at something unbearably sad, like life.

I had read somewhere that dogs always showed great fear in their presence. On the surface, they were such similar creatures, but underneath there were vast, unseen differences. That dissonance between expectation and reality had thrown everyone.

Robin replaced the jar and led me back through the long hallways. I memorised the way.

One afternoon, as he stared out the kitchen door at the forest, Jack told me he wished we’d never come. “I miss my friends so much,” he said. “Whatever I do here, it ends up bad.”

“Life’s like that sometimes,” I replied. “But it’s not like that forever.”