The Glimpse

‘The blokes in the first car say about twenty hours,’ she said as she climbed up beside him. She could feel the windscreen wiper poking through the kapok and shifted to the left, banging up against Calvin’s thigh.

The queue was shifting into a party atmosphere as the sun too settled for the night. Everyone knew the station wouldn’t reopen until daybreak so no-one was going anywhere. Pink blushes washed over with grey, torches were lit, and outside their range, the sky was ever blacker.

‘You know, if you think about it, it’s the perfect solution,’ Ngaire began, restarting the conversation in the middle.

‘You’re mad.’

‘Lucky it’d be Jasmine’s womb then,’ she said.

‘She really said she’d do that for you?’ Calvin asked.

‘For us, her and me. We both want a child. You’re my best friend. It makes sense.’

Drums started booming somewhere up ahead. There were always drums of some kind when the queues for recharges stalled and idle hands found industry in the beat. A circle had formed up ahead, with bongos, djembe, tom-toms, portable drums talking at each other, calling across the evening. The men from the car behind roused, cracked the doors open, stretched extravagantly, readjusted belts and thongs, and sauntered forward, lassoed by the atavistic call.

Calvin bum walked forward on the mattress to follow.

‘You don’t want to discuss this?’ Ngaire asked. She didn’t make to stop him. Exhaustion pinned him back down for her.

‘Maybe they haven’t come as far as us,’ he suggested. They looked to be in their 20s like him; his pride insisted he should be able to keep up. ‘Maybe they haven’t been driving for as long?’ he said. Though where would they have come from except the coast?

They watched the men become shadows, then dissolve into the night towards the party. Closer in, a fire spluttered into existence. A small camp fire, four cars up. The heat from their car’s bonnet was leaching through the mattress into Ngaire’s bare legs.

‘A cuppa?’ called out a woman’s voice. That explained it: a fire to give that carload comfort not warmth. A domesticity the young people did not yet crave.

The partner of the disembodied woman said something back. His voice was muffled from within their vehicle. Its doors were open, flapped out like elephant ears, and his feet stuck out one side. Ngaire thought she’d seen them before. They had a stuffed cat suction-capped to the back window. It had watched Calvin and Jasmine and Ngaire for hours as they’d driven behind them that day; they’d only lost it when they veered off the highway to drop Jasmine in town. Or maybe it wasn’t them at all. Children’s toys were common enough. And all the roads and all the queues had started to look like each other.

Ngaire thought Calvin had fallen into sleep beside her. She was half there herself; the air-conditioning had conked out two days before and sweating in a tin-box-on-wheels all day had sapped them. He muttered two small words. ‘It’s cruel.’ It wasn’t the first time he’d accused her of being cruel – only this time he was reiterating the claims of millions of others.

‘You think there’s anything left for another generation?’ he added, as if she hadn’t tortured herself with the question hourly, hadn’t played devil’s advocate to Jasmine’s utter hope; the very thing that had attracted Ngaire in the first place, the part of Jasmine she loved most.

‘Far Out. Look,’ she interrupted, nudging his arm and lifting her own to trace the spectacle in the sky. A hundred shooting stars in the east. The drums fell quiet and a mighty whoop of human voices went up as the pinpricks of light exploded and showered down. For five minutes there was nothing else to think about.

‘Just another satellite breaking up,’ Calvin sighed when it was over.

Ngaire had no energy to argue his point. He was probably right anyway. It was not as if the sky wasn’t clogged with the things. A band of black cut through the stars, not because the stars there had gone out, but because satellites blocked the view out into the universe. Those unmaintained and neglected satellites yet to break up and re-enter the atmosphere.

A hymn started up in competition with the party. Hope is a star that shines in the night. The voices were thin compared to the turkey-like raucous of the drummers and their acolytes. If Jasmine had been there, she might have joined in. The hymn not the party. She wouldn’t have known the words but hymns were pretty easy to hum along to.

‘Do you want to leave the future to that lot?’ Ngaire asked.

‘What future?’ Calvin countered.

‘Well someone has to give birth to the Saviour. Why not us?’

Not even Ngaire knew if she was serious. They’d dropped Jasmine at the church in town, but only because the clergy were handing out food and it’d seemed logical to save places in two queues at once. Jasmine would be subjected to sermons of Messianic import in exchange for bread and, if they were lucky, cheese. A fair deal. Only, Jasmine had listened at many food stations along the highway and her hope made her vulnerable.

A swag of girls sauntered past. One, bleached blond of about six foot, locked eyes with Calvin from the moment features were distinguishable in the night. Calvin slid sideways off the mattress. The car shook as it regained its equilibrium without him. Ngaire didn’t try to stop him this time either, though she said, ‘of course, you’ll give her your sperm.’

He heard. He turned back. ‘Nup. It’ll be wasted. She looks normal. No way she’ll let her womb out. To God or man.’ He rubbed Ngaire’s toes. His teeth shone between his overgrown facial hair. He must have smiled before turning away.

Ngaire closed her eyes. Followed his question: what future? Her imagination floundered. None of this had been imaginable back when she and Calvin endured high school together. And when there is no future, she thought, sex is obviously for pleasure not procreation. So what were she and Jasmine thinking?

 

When Ngaire next opened her eyes there was shouting. She couldn’t make out any of the words so she climbed up onto the roof of the car. The metal bent under her weight. From that vantage, she could see breadcrumbs of small fires snaking into the distance, and there, just on the horizon, a dazzle of white light, as if an alien spacecraft had landed. The recharge station.

People flashed as silhouettes against the brilliance. Panic rippled through the queue before a reason could catch up. Ngaire got in the car and locked the doors. She wound the windows up to about a centimetre from the top, trapping the smells in with her. The metallic tang of a cooled engine, sweaty shoes, the last of her lover’s deodorant.

The party moved on to fireworks. Or there was gunfire. Voices washed against the car, mainly hushed, intent on staying invisible. Ngaire dozed. Leapt awake. Dozed.

When the dawn light arrived Ngaire could see locals patrolling the side of the road, their shotguns looking like props in a school play.

An old woman came along with a loudspeaker. Like the other locals, she was dressed in clean clothes, and her hair, swinging below her shoulders, had also been washed within the last week. Ngaire felt a wave of envy. She rolled almost forgotten words in her mouth: laundry, shampoo, fresh.

Did the church still believe cleanliness was next to godliness?

She wound the window down to listen though she already knew what was happening. It was the nightmare she’d had since the beginning of their exodus from the king tides. The station was drained. There’d be no more recharges. They’d have to abandon their vehicles. They’d have to walk.

The guns said the rest: there was no chance of staying here.

She tried to protest to the young man who hammered the stock of his repeat action rifle against the glass. ‘But my friends…’

‘You’ll find them on the road.’

She carried what she could. Regretted having to leave the thin mattress slumped over the car. The fire that had provided the cuppa for the couple smoldered, repeated again and again in other extinguished fires. The sun was the fire now.

Ngaire searched the crowds for Calvin.

Further on, past the outskirts of a town, she dawdled, hanging back in case Jasmine had the chance to catch up from behind. She adopted the pace of the woman in a wheelchair. She felt the wet patch under her backpack spread across her entire torso.

At the station, the first cars in the queue nuzzled like puppies into the dead outlets. The sleepiness of forgetting hung over them. A man sat weeping on the cement apron next to a red ute.