470

By Linda Woodrow

Climate scientists tell us that some level of climate change is now baked in. So what will life be like in this climate-changed world?

In 2031, Zanna is housesitting a beachside house in Byron Bay, living the kind of life that inspires gloating selfies. She isn't thinking about climate change - it's just something in the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melliodora Publishing
• Release date: Jul 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648344254

Book preview

Part 1: Tipping Point

14th to 21st February 2031

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‘Sometimes, however much you plan, however many precautions you take, something happens, and in a minute the world is changed. After that, you’re the person on the other side of that minute.’

Teller: A Novel, by Frederick Weisel

Chapter 1 - Zanna

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Just as Zanna rolled out her yoga mat, her phone buzzed. She turned it off. It would be Kat and she could get stuffed. She called the dogs and locked them in. They ran up and down inside the big glass doors that led to the deck, whining and yapping. But if she let them out they would lick her downward-dog face and piss on her yoga mat. She took a few deep breaths to settle herself and raised her hands into a mountain pose.

Far off in the ocean she could make out Jamie’s red kayak. Well behind him, three other kayaks followed, yellow flashes against the blue of the ocean. Jamie had already left by the time she woke up this morning, optimistic – like he always was – that there would be a dozen sign-ups to his new bootcamp, but it looked like just the three.

Two doors up, the big Rottweiler guard dog barked and growled and rattled the fence as he charged at it. It set Pookie and Lila off. They were Pomeranians, little neurotic things that chased and bit their own tails if they got excited. They had never seen the Rottweiler. She wondered how they imagined him, if they thought he was their kin. She resisted an urge to look, see what had set off the Rottweiler. The house was unoccupied most of the time. It kept getting burgled, but it was daylight. Surely there were too many people about already for burglars?

She raised her arms over her head, arched her back, inhaled. She had to look. This housesit only existed because Cecelia was worried about burglars. That and the dogs. There were high concrete walls on three sides and an electronic gate to the road, but storms had undermined the wall on the ocean side leaving just rock stairs down to a beach that got narrower with every king tide. An intruder could easily get in that way. She walked over to the glass balustrade to peer down. There was no movement in the garden, and the Rottweiler had calmed to occasional barks.

And, early as it was, there were people about. Up the beach, where it was a bit wider, a group of older women did tai chi. A jogger ran along the strip of hard sand left by the receding tide. Surfers sat astride their boards out the back watching waves too lazy to ride. A dog chased a ball out into the surf. It was all calm and peaceful, quite idyllic really, the sky and the ocean both brilliant clear blue, the morning air just beginning to thicken with heat. Zanna went back to her yoga mat to try again.

Every morning she had to fight the impulse to imagine the selfie it would make. Her friends envied her this gig. They all lived on side hustles and piecework, hand to mouth in squats and vans and crowded share houses. Housesitting a Byron Bay beachside house only happened in fantasy, and yet it had fallen, unasked for, into her lap. Who knew how long it might last? Cecelia was a Pilates client, not even really a friend. Zanna just happened to be in the right place at the right time when Cecelia and her husband moved to the US for some experimental cancer treatment. Their money must be in places that had bounced back from the corona recession better than her father’s super account, but still, it couldn’t go on forever.

She exhaled and bent forward, touched her palms to the mat, blew her ponytail out of her eyes as it swung down. The good life is sticky, she thought. It traps and holds you. It wasn’t that she didn’t want this life; it was just that if she had a choice, which she didn’t, this wasn’t the life she would choose. But who has that many choices? Be grateful, Zanna lectured herself as she dropped into a lunge.

Grateful or indifferent? Which was the proper spiritual stance?

India. Her choice would be India. Trash filled streets and beggars and prayer flags, yoga and meditation and Buddhism. Her sister Kat had been to India in 2019, over a decade ago. She’d travelled up through Bhutan in the few years that the border was open, sent back pictures of snow-covered mountains and white temples perched precariously on hillsides, met the love of her life at a snow leopard festival. How romantic was that? Zanna was only fourteen then. She remembered her own excruciating envy, and her parents’ daily terror as Kat backpacked her way through countries that scarcely had time to draw breath between disasters.

Kat seemed to get the last of every good thing going in the world. That was an unworthy thought. She exhaled and visualised it exploding like spent fireworks and fading away.

Her father had been to India too. In 1979 he backpacked overland from London to Kuala Lumpur, flew to Perth then hitchhiked all the way to Cairns, stringing his last twenty dollars out to make it home. It was hard to imagine her dad being that reckless. For all her life he had dressed in a collar and tie and caught a train to work every morning. He would never let either of his daughters get down to their last twenty dollars. Zanna still had the keycard with $1000 last-resort, get-out-of-trouble money he gave her when she turned sixteen. She’d never used it but it was nice to know it was there. Kat had chopped hers into little pieces one time in an epic row with their mother.

Back then though her father had driven a Mercedes from Berlin to Tehran for some car dealers importing luxury vehicles in the days when oil wealth was thrown around, then caught buses and trains through Afghanistan and Pakistan to New Delhi where he came down with hepatitis and spent a month living on bananas and tea. You couldn’t travel through any of that area any more, not since all the long series of Middle Eastern droughts and wars, and then the Great Melting in the summer of 2029 when birds dropped dead out of the sky and temperatures hit 56 degrees for four days running. Zanna tried to imagine 56 degrees.

Breathe out and visualise peace and safety rippling out over the ocean. She raised her head into the eight limb pose and sent the affirmation out through the glass balustrade. It was the wrong direction but it would get there eventually.

Out to sea the red kayak with its trailing yellow minions had turned back towards shore. Zanna exhaled and rose into a Cobra pose, her back arched and her head high, feeling the stretch along her neck. Jamie was well out in front. He would be working up a self-talk full of terms like ‘refuse to lose’ and ‘attitude is everything’. By the time he got to the beach, he’d be punching the air with go-getter fervour.

Why did Kat have to tell their parents about him! Zanna lost count of where she was up to in a flash of momentary fury. Had she done the lunge yet? Never mind. Just start again at the beginning. She stood in mountain pose, hearing her breath loud in her nose. Kat had no right to share confidences like that. Now her parents wanted to meet Jamie and that could not end well. Zanna could just imagine her mother in a heart-to-heart with him about how young couples could get into the property market. She waited for her breathing to slow.

Her parents were suggesting they come up to visit, spend Easter at ‘the farm’ with Kat and Sophie. ‘The farm’. Zanna shut her eyes and breathed in slowly. Her parents never knew what to call the steep bit of mountain with its pockets of rainforest where Kat and Sophie lived in a home-made house in a community of retro hippies and zealot permaculturists and bug-outs. ‘Farm’ was as close a term as they could manage for ‘not city’ but the only real export crop was marijuana.

She couldn’t imagine Jamie there. He would be charming but oh so alien in that world. Her mother would love him but Kat would make too-clever jokes at his expense. Her father would secretly think him tame but stop short of wishing she would hook up with someone less domesticated. Sophie would be trying to keep the peace by keeping everyone’s mouths full and Kat would get another tattoo and smoke dope on the verandah just to be deliberately provocative. Zanna worked her jaw to unclench it. Kat could stew a long time, forever even, before she would forgive her this time.

Far up the beach Jamie paused to chat with someone. Zanna held her gaze on a ship off on the horizon. A little part of her wished for it to be someone in a bikini. She breathed out and closed her eyes. The Rottweiler started up again. She could imagine the long flecks of foamy saliva spearing out through the fence as he charged at it. It was hard to resist the urge to go look over the balustrade again. Come on, monkey mind, only one more round to go. She tried chanting the asana that went with each pose.

She’d nearly made it to India once. Had her flight booked and a place at an ashram learning yoga and ayurvedic healing. But then the India–Bangladesh water war broke out, ironically over the fate of that same snow as it melted off the mountains. She’d come to Byron hoping that if she saved money and showed the universe she was ready, it would conspire to get her there, but it hadn’t happened yet.

And the money saving wasn’t going well. If she could get one or two more Pilates classes a week, she might be able to save some money. There was still a core population of the obscenely rich, immune to bankruptcy or nerves, living in beachfront houses despite lawns that toppled into the ocean every storm. They came and went and took long European vacations but enough of them took the job of staying beautiful seriously to keep her with a basic client list.

Her classes made enough to live if she was frugal, even enough for a plane ticket to Melbourne to see her parents occasionally, though she always felt guilty about it. She always paid the few extra dollars for carbon offsets but she didn’t for one minute believe that they actually offset the carbon. She had never met a single other person who paid them so she suspected it was just greenwashing and she should give up flying altogether. But she’d given up red meat, and dairy, so perhaps that offset enough carbon? Somewhere there would be a calculator: how bad was meat and dairy compared to a cut-price ticket on a flight to Melbourne?

She pulled her focus back and tried to centre it in her diaphragm as she exhaled into a lunge. The question was academic anyhow. Her clients had dropped off so much that she wasn’t going anywhere.

Exhale and hold prayer pose and remember how good her life was. The still, blue air was unnerving, like the hush of a crowd listening to something far off and strange. The ship’s outline was beginning to blur in the heat haze. Jamie disappeared out of sight up the track at the end of the beach and she felt a knot in her belly loosen. A thought bubbled up. Just go. Have an adventure. Get on a plane or hitchhike out of town. Leave the gate open for Pookie and Lila and a note on the bench for Jamie. But her friends would think her nuts to leave this.

Chapter 2 - Kat

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Kat woke spooned around Sophie, and lay for a minute breathing her hair, feeling her warmth, listening with her fingertips to the soft pulse of Sophie’s heartbeat. Sophie always slept on her side like a child curled around an imaginary stuffed toy. Kat slept stretched out, restless, arm flung out over her head, long lean muscles demanding movement. But often she woke like this, her body curved around Sophie’s like a brightly coloured shell.

Were they doing the right thing? She’d told Sophie she was terrified, but the feeling was more complicated than that, a tumble in the bottom of her belly that fluttered and sparked. She could see fear in there but it was just one of many obstacles to be sat on its arse. On the other side of it was a family of their own. Her mother called her reckless, harebrained, but she never felt inclined to charge blindly, just a stubborn determination not to give in. Conception was the first problem, then money and security and bushfires and dengue fever and whether to go for public education or home schooling. Kat wished she had more of the bases covered. Sophie murmured and shrugged off her arm. The last of the stars were dim in the pale grey sky and a rooster tried out a few notes.

Kat was nearly always first up. She eased herself out of bed, tucking the sheet in around Sophie to cover the move, and went to make the coffee. When she and Sophie first became a couple ten years ago, people often mistook them for sisters. Sophie was a little shorter, a shyer smile, her skin and hair a shade darker. Kat was a little leaner, a louder laugh, more piercings and tattoos. But they gave the same first impression - fit young women who had seen a dentist every year of their childhood and had school lunches packed by a mother who paid attention to posts about nutrition.

Over the years though, as they settled into bodies shaped by use, they’d morphed in different ways. Sophie drew, tended the garden, cooked, took long rambling walks where she filled her pockets with seeds and leaves and strange fungi. She cut her hair short, softened and curved. Kat chopped wood, played volleyball, danced, ran. Her hair lightened and her skin darkened in the sun. Her heels developed layers of tough skin.

Making the morning coffee was a little ritual that Kat treasured. Fresh water in the pot, grind the beans, tamp them down, wait while the oily syrup dripped through filling the whole house with its aroma. Heat the little jug of goats’ milk, pour it gently over the coffee in Sophie’s favourite blue porcelain cup, present it to her like a gift. The ritual steadied and anchored her. They were safe. They had everything they needed. They were ready. A little bubble of excitement floated up from her belly and burst in her mouth.

The sweet luxury of having coffee at all was a kind of triumph. Kat planted the first coffee bushes the very first year they moved to the mountain, a dozen young eco-warriors calling themselves an eco-village. Sophie had been working as a gardener at the university and she’d potted up twenty or so un-named seedlings thrown out of a research greenhouse, for no real reason but a soft spot for plants that looked like they truly wanted to live. The seedlings were already busting out of their pots a year later when they moved into a caravan on a lantana-infested hillside near Mullumbimby. So she planted the spindly, struggling things out, haphazardly, hopefully.

It was five years before the bushes started bearing, and then another three before Kat started getting serious about harvesting and processing. Processing coffee by hand was slow and laborious and didn’t make sense until the price hike in coffee, and then it did. One day Sophie picked up a packet of their favourite brand in the supermarket and the price had doubled, so she put it back. The news sites said el Niño had caused a drought and a heat wave in Brazil that killed off a quarter of the world’s coffee bushes in one bad month. Lots of trees in their garden had died that year too but the coffee bushes survived. The immature berries shrivelled and the bushes dropped most of their leaves, but they survived.

That was the year that Sophie learned how to roast dandelion roots. It was a bit of expertise that thankfully she’d never had to use again. Suddenly the semi-wild coffee bushes took on a different light. It was worth fertilising them with compost and charcoal, pruning and mulching and watering them, buying a pulper to process the berries. The next year they harvested nearly a year’s frugally used supply, probably not true Arabica coffee – it was the Arabica variety that had proved most vulnerable to heat spikes – but half a million times better than roasted dandelion roots.

And now, here they were on a bare subsistence income and they could afford to drink coffee every morning. Proof they were resourceful enough to be parents. Kat drew a heart in the coffee froth.

The sun cleared the ridge and the pecan tree outside their bedroom window sent leaf shadows dancing across the wall. Kat climbed back into bed, handing Sophie the blue porcelain cup. Sophie cradled it in two hands and breathed the steam. Zanna talking to you yet?

Yep. All swear words though, answered Kat.

You should apologise to her. It wasn’t your news to tell.

I know. It slipped out. Dad was carrying on about how neither of his daughters is ever going to give him grandkids. I didn’t want to tell him our plan. I did apologise.

And?

She’s not ready to hear it yet.

It’ll serve you right if your whole family descend on us for Easter, Sophie teased. Phil and Maureen, Zanna and her boyfriend…

Oh please God no. I love them to bits but Melbourne to here is about the right distance between me and Mum. Zanna’s likely to have broken up with what’s-his-name by then anyhow. If I get my way we’ll stay home on our own, just you and me.

Ah, you’ll get your way. You usually do! Sophie ribbed her. What’s up today? It was a familiar ritual, this quiet morning check-in and patterning of their day over coffee. The rooster had another go, this time a full-throated crow, answered by another one not too far away.

I thought I might go for a run this morning before it gets hot, said Kat. The fire trail needs checking, and I can see if the bunya pines on the ridge are bearing. As she spoke, she was weaving the hair falling over one shoulder into a rough plait. Sophie cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. Kat caught herself, wrinkled her nose. The plait was a dead giveaway.

Go on then. Run it out. You’ll feel better, Sophie said.

Kat gave her a grateful hug. They’d played sport every weekend of their childhood, she and Zanna. Zanna had gone on to yoga and Pilates, Kat to aikido and football. Sophie could sit for hours drawing, deep in concentration, emerging like a cave explorer blinking and confused into the light. Kat squirmed with frustration if she had to sit still for more than minutes. She needed to run, to feel her muscles as part of her body, to stay in her right mind.

And a run might get rid of this feeling that she should be doing something, urgently. Where was it coming from? Her father had mentioned bushfires around Melbourne in his phone call, but he said they weren’t in any danger. Her sister’s boyfriend sounded like a douche but so what? The webcast news was all bad but that was nothing new.

I’ll be back before it gets hot, replied Kat. There’s that meeting about gun licenses after lunch. I’m not looking forward to it but I should go. Maybe that was where the jitters were coming from?

Craig? asked Sophie.

Yep. He’s saying he wants a gun to shoot foxes. I mean, it would be good to have a better way to deal with foxes. But opening up that whole gun thing is a big step. I don’t know if I want to go there. And he makes it so black and white - agree with him or you’re personally guilty of causing extinctions. She mimicked Craig’s drawl, the current rate is two dozen species a day. Anyone who hasn’t got the balls to shoot foxes is just adding to it.

There’s really not much difference between a gun and that crossbow of his, said Sophie. She was already out of bed, gathering up the empty coffee cups, opening the French doors to the verandah, letting the smell of sun wash through the room.

Kat sat on the edge of the bed, tugged on the laces of her running shoes. He shouldn’t have the crossbow either, but it’s all he needs for foxes. It’s just not so good for mowing down marauding looters. We need to talk to Craig about his prepper arsenal, his whole prepper thing. He’s getting dangerous with it.

You’re going to try to talk Craig down from his fantasy of caped crusader Craig versus the zombie apocalypse? said Sophie, teasing, smiling.

Kat grinned back. Yeah, well. He’s lived alone too long, no-one to tell him when he’s talking crap. An audience of one in total agreeance with the pure genius of his arguments.

Sophie changed the subject. Gertie and Bess need a new paddock. The bottom paddock’s sodden, and there’s a cyclone forming up north, might bring us even more rain.

I’ll move them before I go. There’s good goat feed in the top paddock now. How about you? What’s your day?

Garden, bread, bottling tomatoes, book, if I’m lucky. I woke up with a picture for the book in my mind. I want to get it down while I can still see it. Sophie was working on the illustrations for her third storybook, about a baby orangutan who had somehow survived deep in the forest. She’d never seen an orangutan but her parents had met in Borneo as volunteers at an orangutan orphanage. A photo of them had been sitting on her worktable for months while ideas percolated, a skinny long-haired bearded youth in flared jeans with his arm around the shoulders of a dark-haired waif in a hippy skirt. An almost human looking baby orangutan, sparsely covered in orange hair, clung to her, its eyes wide and fearful.

I can get the tomatoes going this morning too. You do some book, said Kat.

Okay. We going to the potluck tomorrow? asked Sophie. Because if we are, you don’t need to bottle all the tomatoes. I can use some for vegan, gluten-free, paleo chilli beans to take. That should cover everyone.

Or we could make lasagne with lots of cheese and stay home, said Kat. I don’t know if I can cope with a double dose of Craig in one weekend. Let’s see how we feel. He might surprise me and be nice, or at least reasonable.

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When Kat came back from her run, Sophie was toasting sourdough and chopping spring onions and zucchini and little sweet cherry tomatoes for breakfast. A bowl of pumpkin-gold eggs sat ready to be added. Kat caught the odd word of a song Sophie sang to herself. It was maddening that Sophie wouldn’t sing in public, not even covers let alone her own songs. Kat had wished on shooting stars and birthday candles and dandelion seeds right through her childhood that she could sing.

There was just enough time to milk Gertie before breakfast. Kat loved the milking, her cheek against the goat’s warm, coarse-haired belly, the sweet grassy smell, the sound of the milk squirting into the bucket, her mind free to wander. How could she convince her parents that Easter was a bad idea? Without upsetting them? Her mother’s pursed lipped disapproval always made her behave like a rebellious sixteen-year-old. It was mortifying, humiliating, and it would be doubly awkward if Zanna brought what’s-his-name. Should she go to the potluck just to show Craig didn’t bother her or stay away because he did? And their plan, hers and Sophie’s, their still secret, scarcely believable pact. It was a decision now. What was the next step for putting it into action?

Chapter 3 - Phil

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Maureen was picking up her keys and bag as Phil came in from watering the garden. I’ll be home by 5.30 tonight, she called as she headed out the door. I’ll take an umbrella just in case. Talk to Katherine again about Easter – we need to book if we are going – but it’s not worth the expense unless Susannah and her young man are going too. Your breakfast is getting cold.

Jack and Denise are coming for dinner, don’t forget, he called after her. Can you get wine on your way home? He’d be willing to bet she’d forget the wine and wouldn’t need the umbrella. The day was already blistering hot. The only hope of rain would be if it brought on an afternoon thunderstorm. He picked up his phone and flicked through to his weather app. The icon was a big smiling yellow sun that made him happy even though it meant no storm. It reminded him of the suns his daughters had drawn as children, curly rays around a Buddha yellow face. Maureen’s app had the new angry-face orange sun icon for heat-warning days. He refused to update.

He poked at the porridge in the pot. Maureen was a terrible cook. Prunes for his bowels and oats for his heart and linseed for his blood pressure, all of it congealed into a grey glob. He put the kettle on and poked at it again. Oats weren’t even cheap any more. The drought. The fracking for gas. The plague of locusts last year like something out of the Bible. He lit the gas under the pot, stirred it, and thought about what he could make for Sunday breakfast. Pancakes? Or bacon and eggs with fried tomato, thick cut toast and real butter, treat themselves to a pot of coffee? The porridge belched and he scraped it into a bowl.

The kitchen floor felt warm under his bare feet. It was supposed to be two degrees hotter than it ever used to be, so they said, but he didn’t mind the heat. It was the dry that set his teeth on edge, the hot winds that cracked his heels and made his skin feel thin and stretched. The air conditioner just made it worse. He sat on the back step with his porridge and tea. Droplets of water clung to the hairy underside of the zucchini leaves in his garden. He could smell damp compost, clean and mushroomy.

Melbourne people didn’t know what hot meant. In the canefields and crocodile country where he grew up, hot meant scampering across the road to avoid scorching your feet even through your thongs, swimming in pools that felt like tepid bathwater, air that hit you like a wall the minute you opened a door. People survived fine through Cairns summers when he was a boy. He’d cut cane by hand in that kind of heat as a sixteen-year-old. Long blond hair and brown muscles and eyes peeled for taipans hunting rats in the cane. He still measured his fitness by imagining cutting cane.

Maureen came from Melbourne and she felt the heat. Probably had more to do with her insulation really, but she moved around in a bubble of air conditioning, from the car to work, back to the car and straight into the living room. He would have the living room at twenty-seven degrees by the time she got home – the temperature they recommended to keep the bill reasonable. She would turn the air conditioning down to twenty-two and complain that every other room in the house was uninhabitable.

Cairns was not just hot but also humid which made it feel about ten degrees hotter. He loved the feeling of sweat-slicked skin, standing in a breeze with his arms and legs apart and his chin up feeling it evaporate. It took him back to being a teenager. He knew it could kill you. A human could survive dry heat up into the fifties, but more than a few hours over thirty-five wet heat was deadly. That was what had killed all the Iranians along the Gulf of Persia in the

Reviews for 470

[Dale Lee Newling · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Optimistically classified as dystopian, the narrative set just over a decade from now is unsettlingly plausible, the events portrayed more like portents rather than fiction. Far too near to home, far too close to an unthinkable not-too-distant-future reality. A brilliant and terrifying novel.

[d-fbuser-559205116 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An amazing and thought provoking read. Such complex issues meshed together in beautiful storytelling.