Hovering

by Rhett Davis

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The city was in the same place. But was it the same city?

Alice stands outside her family's 1950s red brick veneer, unsure if she should approach. It has been sixteen years, but it's clear she is out of options.

Lydia opens the door to a familiar stranger - thirty-nine, tall, bony, pale. She knows her sister immediately. But something isn't right. Meanwhile her son, George, is upstairs, still refusing to speak, and lost in a virtual world of his own design.

Nothing is as it was, and while the sisters' resentments flare, it seems that the city too is agitated. People wake up to streets that have rearranged themselves, in houses that have moved to different parts of town. Tensions rise and the authorities have no answers. The internet becomes alight with conspiracy theories.

As the world lurches around them, Alice's secret will be revealed, and the ground at their feet will no longer be so firm.

A spectacular debut novel from one of Australia's most exciting new writers. Winner of the Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award, Hovering crosses genres, literary styles and conventions to create a powerful and kaleidoscopic story about three people struggling to find connection in a chaotic and impermanent world.

Release date: February 23, 2022

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 65000

Sample

The city was in the same place. The same land lay beneath, the same river curled through and emptied into the same sea. Observed from six thousand metres above – over the waveless bay and flat stony plains; over crescent-dulled suburbs landlocked by monstrous highways and shopping centres; over ships and shoreline factories and towers of concrete and glass – the city remained roughly where Alice had left it. But now it extended into the foothills they called mountains twenty kilometres from the city centre. It had engulfed the coastline and hinterlands. It had swallowed the seaside villages and forests and fields once at its fringe. It was in the same place, but even from this height it was a different city. As she stared at one of the long arterials that led through the suburbs, she could swear it moved. It’d been a long flight.

The pilot announced the landing. The young flight attendant buckled himself in and flashed another brilliant smile. He’d been kind to her all flight, giving her free drinks and food and winking. Over Singapore she’d realised he’d been treating her the way he might treat his mother. He said, ‘Is Fraser home?’

She said, ‘I lived there for twenty-three years, but it’s hardly home.’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, I know how you feel.’

‘Unlikely,’ she said.

‘Well, you know,’ he replied, shrugging and looking intently over her shoulder as if something important was there.

‘This is my first time back in two years,’ the old woman beside her said. Alice had avoided conversation with her by wearing headphones the entire flight, but now her ears were sore. ‘They say it’s changed.’

‘Everywhere changes,’ she replied.

‘Not like this,’ the old woman said. ‘My nephew told me—’

Alice replaced her headphones and mouthed the words, ‘Sorry, can’t hear you.’ The woman kept talking. Alice listened to birdsong and watched their descent through the window. The city grew closer, until she could see the gleam of the skyscrapers and the cranes at their peaks, until she could see the processions of cars and the asphalt conveying them, until she could see the caged trampolines in the backyards, until she could see the grain on the tarmac and the wisps of ratty Australian grasses running alongside it, until she could see that endless dusty rocky plain. The land was a mix of browns and dark greens. It was almost colourless. They landed, and she was grateful, at least, to be on the earth again.

• • •

The taxi was blue, not yellow.

‘They’ve always been this way,’ the driver said.

‘They weren’t sixteen years ago.’

‘Are you sure?’ The woman steered onto the on-ramp.

‘There are few things I’m sure of. One of them is that the taxis in Fraser were yellow.’

‘I came here from Brisbane thirteen years ago and they were blue.’

The taxi was going in the wrong direction. Alice peered at the driver’s GPS over the seat. She didn’t recognise the highway they were on. ‘This isn’t the way to the city,’ Alice said.

‘Yes, it is,’ the woman replied.

‘It’s not.’

‘It is.’

‘The highway must be new.’

The woman sighed. ‘The highway to the city used to go west. Now it goes north, then west. The highway is new. The cars, not so new.’

‘It just feels like the wrong way.’

‘It rights itself after you hit Eiderton.’

‘Where’s Eiderton?’ Alice said.

‘That’s new too.’

‘I heard about the city transforming. I just didn’t think it’d be this – obvious. I thought there’d be a building or two where it shouldn’t be, but entire highways?’

‘Entire highways,’ the woman said wearily.

Alice put her elbow on the window and rested her chin in her hand. A billboard advertising a hair removal product followed a billboard displaying a hair retention product. Then an ad for a new phone. A single hairless poreless thigh advertised a men’s club. Then a football team – the Queens Park Boaters – glared angrily and demanded membership fees. She’d never heard of them, but she hadn’t followed football for decades. The sky was as grey as it had been on the day she left. She looked for things to celebrate. The road surface was immaculate, there were plenty of lanes, and the signs gave drivers lots of notice when they needed to exit. Beyond that, it was hard to say. The highway was walled off from the surrounding suburbs and landmarks. They may as well have been travelling in a tunnel. It was impossible to know where she was and what might have been good about it.

‘Is it still a shithole?’ she asked.

The driver looked at her in the mirror, pursed her lips and turned up the radio, where a pair of men who were possibly local identities joked about taking over the weekday breakfast show.

The city skyline came close enough to disappear. Alice scrolled through her emails. A few from the bank, one from Claude wondering where she was, and promotions for photographic equipment, industrial supplies and a birdwatching group in Sussex. The email that had prompted her hasty departure from Berlin was still there. It was from Curt and said, Have been arrested. Dissolve the group. She deleted them all. The car slowed. She looked up. She was home.

• • •

Ormond Street used to be lined with old, broad plane trees; the kind that lined London’s commons and heaths, perfumed the air with pepper in damp autumns and filled it with allergens in spring. In summer they had cast deep shadows and protected the street from the worst of the heat, but in winter had opened their canopies to let the sun warm homes that had been poorly insulated and groaned in surprise when the wild Antarctic fronts arrived. Alice had loved those trees. They had been replaced by spindly ghost-white gums, which thickened the air with the scent of lemon. Otherwise, the street was the same. The corner cafe remained at the intersection. The little park had been upgraded to feature safer, brighter-coloured plastic equipment. The swings and the seesaw she had once goaded Lydia on had disappeared. A few letterboxes seemed strangely out of place and some houses had been renovated, but 1950s red brick veneer remained the dominant style, with their long backyards, well-kept front lawns and matching brick fences.

The taxi stopped outside one of those red brick veneers and the driver said, ‘Ninety-five dollars.’

Alice winced and paid.

The driver helped with her bags. The house was the same and yet it was otherworldly. She’d thought about it a lot in sixteen years, and her mind had exaggerated some features and ignored others. In her darker moments – when she had not known where to go or whether she could keep moving at all – she had longed to see it. She’d craved its comfort. There were times when all she wanted to do was lie on the grass in the front yard and watch towering clouds traverse the sky. But now the house seemed small and defeated. A sleek black SUV was parked in its driveway. Her sister had always liked new, expensive things. Alice tried to remember what she did for a living. Worked for a software company? Maybe. Part of Alice had hoped to find a beaten-up car in the driveway. An old ute, or a bubbly Hyundai from the ’90s.

‘This the right place?’ the driver called.

‘Fabulous question,’ Alice said.

The taxi drove off. Alice didn’t move.

There was no going back after this. Once she was through the door, she’d be home. Officially. Undeniably. A returned daughter of Fraser. Once she crossed that threshold, she’d never be able to leave. The city would wrap its tentacles around her and drag her down to its cold dark depths. She’d be drowned like the rest. There was still time to run. The train station was just down the street.

She sighed, picked up her luggage, walked up the concrete driveway while avoiding the thorny rose bushes that lined it, as she had sixteen years earlier. She carefully navigated the pebblestone steps, cracked and mossy, that she’d slipped on regularly as a child but more often as an adult. The beautiful old door with its stained-glass window her father had taken from his parents’ house, the security gate, the doorbell.

She took a deep breath, knocked jauntily, and put on her most delighted smile. The door opened. ‘Lydia!’ she called, raising her arms for a hug but not moving towards her sister.

• • •

It had been a rainy day, sixteen years earlier.

Alice had shut the door of the taxi and waved goodbye to her sister. She said she’d come home soon but knew she wouldn’t. Lydia didn’t return her wave, just stared.

Alice told the driver to drive and didn’t look back. She had to move, to find cities that were not like this provincial outpost she was born in. It was nothing, this city. It was no New York, or London, or Hong Kong, or Rome. No child wondered where it was in the world, imagined what it would be like to go there. Its residents lay languidly on beaches, screamed in football stadiums, jostled for position at auctions, exercised aggressively and fought drunkenly after losing money on the horses. They aspired to enormous homes with lots of natural light, as if housing gave life its purpose, as if there was nothing more to life than to live it comfortably and beautifully and make your neighbours jealous. They lived fearfully and voted conservatively, terrified that it would all be taken away. She was twenty-three and she’d been there too long. It was all starting to seep in, to get into her bones. She was getting used to it. She couldn’t stay, not a minute longer.

No one watched her depart. No one saw her arrive. It was Heathrow and London at first, but it became many other places. Continental Europe, Asia, the Americas, the new islands and some of the sunken ones. Cities bisected by parks through which blond aristocrats galloped on white horses, oblivious to pedestrians. Cities of bicycles and ash and moving terraces; cities of dancing lights and weeping gardens; cities where students smoked whatever they could find under ancient aqueducts; morose cities filled with sound installations of waves and laughing people; tall cities that made her feel small; small cities that made her feel sad; cities that wept over blasted hillsides and sniper nests; cities that grew fat off their own memories; cities that talked and argued and fucked and argued again; cities of forgetting and drinking sweet berry liqueur in bars at the tops of buildings, perched above the great sea in which so many had been wrecked; cities of powder and light and neon; cities upon cities; people piling upon people; an immense tower of something like civilisation, leaning, teetering, disgusting and filthy, but alive.

She only stayed for moments. There were loves that didn’t last. Friends who were intimate for a summer, or a winter. Some that lasted longer, but now all gone. There were nights sleeping in collapsing brutalist housing; months spent shovelling shit, metaphorically and – once – literally. For a while some stable work in London. She filed documents, conducted campaigns, delayed projects and shopped at Tesco, until a chance meeting at an exhibition in Edinburgh, and then the five of them trying to remake the world. She didn’t know when the remaking had stopped and something else had taken over. For years, she ran on a travelator, watching people move in slow motion beside her. The world spun and she had done her best to outrun it.

What remained? How long before the atoms of Berlin, where she had almost settled, left her body? How long before it was all swept away by the dust and grass seeds of south-eastern Australia? How long before the dread bright sun rasped her skin and she reverted to the nasal Australian drawl she’d all but neutralised, being mistaken for Canadian by the English and English by North Americans? How long before she could no longer feel the world spin? How long before she became, again, what she had hoped to leave behind?

[…]

Alice: Hi Lyd, this is Alice. This is my new email address. I’m flying home tomorrow. Can’t wait to see you. You don’t have to pick me up from the airport, I’ll make my own way home.

Lydia: I haven’t heard from you in ten years. How do I even know this is you?

Alice: Patrick McKenzie.

Lydia: Fine. The house is at the same address.

Alice: Where else would it be?

[…]

On hearing her sister was returning, Lydia had hoped for swift deportation. She imagined receiving a terrified phone call from the airport announcing that Alice was being turned back. They wouldn’t even be able to finish the call before Alice was marched away. The scene helped Lydia sleep. She refined the fantasy perfectly: the panic in her sister’s voice; the mood of the day. It was going to be partly cloudy, the sun would break through just as they were hanging up, her son would come down the stairs and ask her to go for a walk along the river, and the river would sparkle all afternoon.

The doorbell rang and through the stained glass she saw Alice, twenty-three, tall, bony, light-filled, waving goodbye. She opened the door to a familiar stranger, thirty-nine, tall, bony, pale, saying hello. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

‘Lydia!’ the woman screamed, eventually embracing her with surprising strength. The hair still wild and curly but now silver. Probably still bumping into things all the time, like their father. The woman pulled back. She held Lydia’s shoulders and beamed. Those eyes. Slightly puffy and tired and wrinkled but still so bright. Her skin a little mottled. Her sister was unrecognisable but exactly the same.

‘Hi, Alice,’ she said.

‘It is so good to see you,’ Alice effused. Her smile, broad and full of teeth. When Alice smiled, she smiled with her whole body. Here was her lost sister and Lydia knew her immediately, as if she had never been away. And yet.

‘You don’t look a day over forty,’ Lydia said.

‘Oh, that is hilarious,’ Alice replied. There was a formality to her tone that hadn’t been there before. And an edge, a nervousness. She’d always been so confident, unflappable. The hopeful thought crossed Lydia’s mind that the real Alice had been replaced by a clone – perhaps one with a better personality.

They measured the years in a single second. Alice had never been happy in Fraser, had always been unsettled. Once she said they were going to go everywhere together. They would picnic in castles, drink wine on yachts, swim in the Aegean. But she went and Lydia stayed. It wasn’t a surprise that Alice left, but a surprise that she left so completely.

‘Are you going to let me in, sister, or am I to sleep in the front yard?’

Lydia felt the old resentment rise: a resentment she couldn’t completely place, couldn’t put into words, or actions, or specific moments – but it was there still, unmoved and resolute. She pushed her delight down and swallowed the tears. She couldn’t trust her sister’s smile. She couldn’t rely on her. She’d be gone again very soon. It was up to Lydia, and Lydia alone.

‘Your room’s where you left it,’ she said. She went inside, leaving Alice and her bags on the porch.

• • •

Lydia didn’t remember how Alice liked her coffee or if she even liked coffee, so she made it strong, put the cup in front of her and said, ‘Here.’

Alice eyed the cup suspiciously (or did Lydia imagine that?), took a sip, grimaced (that too?), then said, ‘It’s good to see you, Lyd.’ She sat in her usual seat, facing the kitchen with her back to the wall. It was as if a ghost or an uncanny video game version of her sister was sitting there.

‘Your hair’s faded,’ Lydia observed.

‘Yours is redder than I remember.’

‘You sound like a Brit.’

‘Whereas you sound as though the northern suburbs have taken root.’

‘They have,’ Lydia replied, pouring herself another cup. ‘Or I have.’

‘This company you work for,’ said Alice. ‘What’s it called again? Sciatica? Scallion? Scallops?’

‘Scintilla,’ she said.

‘What do you do there?’

‘I’m a senior trend innovator.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Widening her eyes, Alice conveyed a secret disdain to someone who was not there.

Lydia ignored her. ‘How long are you staying?’

‘Not sure. I thought I could help out.’

‘Help out,’ Lydia repeated. She wondered why this person who claimed to be her sister was here.

A silence settled between them. Alice tapped her foot, finished her coffee, went to the sink and washed her mug. ‘This is so odd. The taps are the same. The water makes the same sound going down the drain. It’s like a museum.’ She picked up a can of air freshener. ‘Have you been buying the same air freshener for sixteen years?’

‘Never occurred to me to change it.’

Alice rolled her eyes and Lydia clenched her teeth.

‘Heard from Mum and Dad?’ Alice asked.

‘Constantly. Well, Mum.’

‘Think they’ll ever come back?’

Lydia shrugged. ‘They’ve been back twice. I think they’re happier in the sun.’

‘Where’s Georgie?’ Alice asked.

‘His name’s George and he’s in his room.’ She picked up her mug with both hands to warm them. ‘He doesn’t speak.’

Alice stopped inspecting the pepper grinder – a pepper grinder that Lydia now wished she had replaced – and looked at her. ‘He can’t speak, or he chooses not to?’

‘He chose to stop speaking two months ago.’

‘Why?’

Lydia shrugged. ‘He said he was protesting information pollution through passive resistance. Like Gandhi, apparently. And then informed me he was giving up piano.’

‘Was that related?’

‘You know, I’m not sure.’

‘How on earth do you communicate?’

‘The protest only applies to the spoken word. He texts me sometimes. Sometimes emails. It varies.’

Alice frowned. ‘That is a little …’

‘Backwards? Yes, I suggested as much. I haven’t had a response to that email.’

‘Hmm. Let’s see what we can do about that.’

‘Mmm-hmm.’ Who’s ‘we’?

• • •

Lydia made dinner and introduced Alice to George, who waved awkwardly and exchanged phone numbers with his aunt. As they ate, Alice told wildly inappropriate stories of her travels until Lydia asked her to stop. Alice frowned, added salt to her already perfectly well-seasoned spanakopita and didn’t say another word. They ate the rest of the meal in silence. This wasn’t unusual for Lydia and George, whose dinners had been quiet e. . .