The Clinking

by Susie Greenhill

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From Richell Prize-winning debut author Susie Greenhill comes a tender and profoundly moving exploration of life and loss.

In the early morning, Elena woke as Orla pulled back the doona and climbed into their bed. She unfolded Elena's fingers and pressed a tiny model penguin into her hand. Still half asleep, Elena rolled over. Outside the window, black cockatoos were dropping wattle galls onto the street. The room was silent, the dawn light dull and grey. And Tom was gone . . .

In the not-too-distant future on the island of lutruwita, where the seas glow blue with bioluminescence and ancient forests wither in the heat, a young family are caught in the eye of a storm.

As an ecologist working on extinctions, Tom knows the world he loves is unravelling around him. He cares deeply for his wife Elena, a journalist, and their daughter Orla, but he is haunted by disappearing species and the news of bushfires, floods and famine. In his mind, the damage done to the Earth has tipped into the irreversible. Elena can only watch helplessly as Tom's grief consumes him. And then, one day, Tom vanishes.

Alone, Elena asks herself, 'How can I be a mother to my child in this world?' In the remote south-west wilderness, she sets out to find answers and the hope she needs for herself and her daughter. But is there hope left to find?

'A tragic love song for the natural world. A poignant and compelling search for hope in everything we're losing, everything we've lost.' BEN WALTER

'Greenhill's writing is unlike any I have encountered in its luminous effectiveness.' LOUISE WESTLING

Release date: February 26, 2025

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 304

Sample

It was the time of the tides. The red tide, the green tide, the luminescent blue. They ebbed and flowed across the black pebble beach. The glistening kelp was hissing, and the shells of abalone – coiled mirrors of silver sea – were clinking in the gulch.

The children were restless. The water-carriers they had made in the autumn from the bull kelp’s mustard leaves leaked like sieves, and their grandmother was cursing, smoking, tossing nets onto a bonfire of stinking flame. The sky as ashen as the stone. It had been like that for weeks. Clouds aching, black as bruises with rain that wouldn’t fall, and the sunlight spilling down onto the water, a sheet of fractured glass.

The children knew that the grandmother’s heart had a wound, that it was heavy, and it weighted her down like the leaden rings of her dive belt, a seven row of sinkers strapped hard across her chest. But they could still make her laugh, Grandmother, they wore the carriers on their heads and they jumped from the high ledge down into the sea, and they scrambled back out across the lichen-covered boulders, blue and naked, slipping over the periwinkle rocks, skimming oyster shells across the oily bay, barking back at the sea lions off the deep-water point.

Beneath the steps of the shack, under the palings of the porch, were the abalone heaps. Shifting dunes of the rippling, perforated shells – granite backs encrusted with salt, insides a slick silver rainbow of light. The sun beat down upon the shells, bleaching their skins into pale reflections of their underwater selves. The grandmother sank down onto the steps under that ochre evening light, and remembered the harvests, her arms burnt brown, and the stories of her mother, skin slippery with fat. The women had dived for shellfish in the cold-water coves at the edge of the world. Under the path of the sun, they followed the coast tracks, the wallaby tracks over wombat-worn moor, the fire plains nodding their button heads in the winds that swept in from the river-deep west.

This was the game. They lay the shells out across the cliff edge, the youngest and the middle child, from small up to large, then back down to small. Only in the calm, because the sea breeze would snatch up and sail those smallest of shells back into the sea.

And the grandmother’s eyes traced that abalone path, from the fingernail small to the dinner-plate large, then back down, until there on the edge of the grey daisy scrub they disappeared. She pictured the dunes of her mother, still silver with shell in their whalebone bay. She heard the clinking, and the children’s voices far across the beach.

There were always feathers, among the skeletons and fins Tom brought back to the house on the creek – eggshells of the palest blue, a tiger snake’s translucent, papery skin. With his backpack still slung across his shoulder, he appeared in the hall in the grey dusk light and wrapped his arms around Orla and Elena. His clothes smelled of peat and sweat, and the citrus of the orange peel crushed inside his pocket. Orla could feel the buttons on his flannel shirt pressed cold and firm against her cheek. Strands of her hair clung to the fur-like stubble on his chin, twined around the open fastenings on his coat.

‘These ones are for play,’ he told her, as Orla helped him sort the specimen bags into piles on his desk. ‘But these you mustn’t touch without me. They’re from species that are so rare now we might not find others like them again.’ He slid the first pile toward her, and she watched with longing as he pushed the other away.

‘These are boring.’ Orla sighed as she picked up a vial of fibrous brown seeds and gave them a gentle shake. ‘Like specks of nothing.’ She giggled as Tom reached over and tugged her ear.

‘Nothing is nothing, Or.’ He took the vial out of her hand and smoothed his thumb across the loose upper corner of the label.

‘Are they seeds?’

‘Uh huh, from an alpine boronia. See the label? Out of everything here, they’re the only things that hold the potential for life, to germinate in the right conditions.’ Orla watched him turn the vial in his fingers, then glance into the lounge room where her mother was reading by the light of a candle, her head bowed, her black hair falling over her face. ‘There’s nothing boring about a seed.’

Before he took them to work at the CSIRO labs in the city, the rarest of the specimens were stored in his study, a narrow sunroom between the kitchen and the street. After dinner they sat together and he opened up the cases and lay the feathers across Orla’s gloved fingers.

‘Hold them to the light,’ he said, showing her. ‘Like this. See those veins of green? The reddish sheen across the wing?’ And Orla turned them over and stroked them gently across her chin. They were freckled and downy and smelled of something like life, although the birds they belonged to, her father told her, were so much more than dead.

‘Maybe there are more of them? Maybe you just didn’t see them?’ she said.

‘Not these ones, Or. I wish I could tell you there were others. But these birds have died out now. We’re almost certain they’re extinct.’

And while she tested the vowels of that word – that heavy, too-familiar word – her father lay the feathers one by one inside their case, and stared into the darkened forest that waited above them on the hill.

When he looked back, Tom couldn’t identify the moment his research had transformed from a largely predictive science – identifying threatened species, issuing warning – into something different, something present and urgent. There was no apocalypse, no singular cataclysmic event, not back then – just the passing of each day under the accumulating weight of evidence, of change. The fears that had been cast into the future for so long had materialised before them in the present – in the swelling of the oceans, in the capriciousness of the skies above their clear-aired, estuarine city, in the heat-death of forests, and the fires that burned through the ancient alpine plains. With every altered migration, and every shift in currents, behaviour and habitat, everything that had once been understood had now become uncertain. Conservation strategies that had worked in the past were no longer effective, and knowledge of the way the biosphere functioned, accumulated over centuries, was forced to undergo its own internal metamorphosis, a bending. This transition had been painful, particularly as it was largely unsupported by government funds. The first difficult years had collided with ideologically driven cuts. Many of his colleagues, some of them close friends, had been casualties of the upheaval.

While the offices around him had emptied overnight, Tom studied models of the movement that was occurring beyond their walls. He lay awake in the heat with the image of the spinning Earth still there in his head: every species that could move seeking altitude, streaming poleward.

Just focus on your work, Elena had said. And for a time, it helped. Don’t extrapolate, don’t let yourself draw conclusions beyond what you have here. There are others for that, there should be others.

He kept his gaze upon the small things, the insects, the winged pollinators who had extended their range away from their habitat of flowering leptospermum, the colonies of native bees that were adapting and failing under the pressure of invasive bees and wasps, who continued with their tasks unfalteringly, faithfully.

He walked with Orla through the grasses of the open sclerophyll forest, the spare pale trunks of silver peppermints as tall as clouds. They peeled back the bark to search for the insects who had lived there – the arthropods and silky moths – who had fed on the pollen-flowers and fed the forest birds who flew among the branches. He showed Orla how the trees showed signs of stress in response to the drought. The tips of their narrow leaves curled and dark, the insects feeding on the sap, the borers drilling deep into the smooth of the wood.

‘And they’re making a different sound than they were when we came here before …’ Orla whispered.

She pressed her ear against the trunk and fell silent, then looked up into its mass of shivering leaves.

Tom nodded. ‘The wind is dropping. And it’s hot. You know in some trees you can hear the seedpods cracking open in the heat? It’s sometimes really loud. Like the sound the lorikeets make in the berries, or the shrimps you can hear through the hull of Ashok’s yacht.’

‘Does everything make a sound?’

‘I’m not sure … I suppose so. But there are lots of sounds that humans can’t hear.’

‘Because our ears aren’t good?’

‘Yeah, in some ways. They’ve evolved to only hear certain things. And sometimes we just don’t pay attention.’

Orla picked up the bunch of wilted daisies she’d dropped, then leaned her head against the bark once more. She yawned and kicked at a clump of seeding grass. ‘Give me a piggyback home?’

‘Okay.’

‘I can hear the world getting quieter,’ he’d told a friend over the phone, on the night he’d returned from his final research trip into the south-west. ‘And that feeling … it’s everywhere. It’s in everything.’

He’d tucked Orla into bed that night and she’d asked to see the photos he’d taken during the trip. He lay beside her under the window in her narrow quilted bed, the glow of the camera flickering across her face, her small knees folded up over his legs.

‘But they tickled my feet,’ she had said when an image of a single galaxias appeared on the screen – the small, freshwater fish that lived in the island’s lakes and streams. Shy, insect- and larvae-eating fish who hid in the shade of reeds and ferns, who swam to keep still in the current, the dark water streaming over their fins. Tom reached over and brushed the tears off her cheeks. ‘They did. They were lovely little fish.’

‘But they can’t just disappear? You said they put them in the zoo?’

Tom nodded. ‘Some of them. In an aquarium. To try to keep the species alive, and they moved some of them into colder places too. But they belonged in their home, in the mountains. The things we try don’t always work.’

He remembered the last galaxidae he had seen, its body still perfect in the cool of the stream. It had been caught on a branch on the surface of the water, mountain shrimps gathering in the shadows below. He knew it was unlikely to have been dead for long as he’d seen a hunting eagle glide over the stream as he made his way up from his tent after dawn. Crouching over the water with his camera, he positioned himself on the rocks so his body wouldn’t block out the light. He noticed the way the snowberries, which should have been fruiting, looked withered and dry, and the creek flow was shallow and lethargic.

That day in the mountains, he had gone through the motions of recording the circumstances of his find. He put the camera back into his backpack and shook out a pair of gloves, then reached into the water and cupped the fish in his hand. Its body was limp, almost weightless, its skin still smooth under his touch. It was a juvenile female, small and only just developing her adult colouration. Her dark back flecked with brown; her stomach pale and silky, the colour of sand; her rounded, translucent fins. He slid the fish into an insulated container and sat crouched at the edge of the stream. The wind rose and circled through the pencil pines at his back. For a long time he stared into the pool, longing to see the silhouette of a tail disappear beneath the ledge. But although the stream was flowing, the pool was still, the only movement coming from the reflections of the clouds.

There was still love, even with the scent of loss intermingled with the others that filtered through the house; the garlic and cilantro in Elena’s ajiaco chicken soup, the smoke from the fire that Orla would curl her small body around. And there was music. While Elena wrote articles on migration at the library in the city, Tom taught Orla how to play his acoustic guitar.

‘I haven’t played it for a long time,’ he told her, when he first pulled the guitar down from the shelf.

‘Why not?’ Orla frowned.

Tom shrugged. He blew the dust off the top of the case. ‘Adults forget to do the things that make us happy sometimes.’

‘Well, that’s stupid,’ Orla muttered

They sat together on the couch in the early morning sun. He showed her how to balance the guitar across her knee, to hold the strings against the frets with the tips of her fingers and strum them gently with the pick. The distance between the fretboard and the bridge was too long for Orla’s arms, so they took turns using the pick to strum while the other held down the chords. E, C, E minor.

‘When did you last play it?’ Orla asked him.

Tom turned around on the couch. ‘It was actually up there,’ he said, looking up at the slopes of the mountain. ‘On kunanyi, with my friend Kit … We walked up with our instruments and watched the sunrise from Sphynx Rock.’

‘Where the mountain-berries are? The pink ones?’

‘Yep.’

A bus pulled up on the street. They heard their neighbour, Olaf, laughing with the driver. Orla leaned over the neck of the guitar, her hair tumbling over her face, and slid her fingers up and down the strings.

‘When was the first sunrise?’ she asked quietly, not looking up.

‘Four billion years ago,’ Tom said, tousling her hair. ‘But the sun is so much older than the Earth. The Earth is young.’

‘And life is very young.’

‘Yes.’

‘Just like a blink.’

Tom nodded. ‘In terms of the universe, it’s like the blink of an eye. But for you and me, life is old, so old we can barely imagine.’

The small, yellow timber house stood in the foothills of kunanyi, on a winding road that ran between forest and creek. The mountain marked the border between the western fringes of Hobart city, nipaluna, and the south-west wilderness beyond, which rolled in wave after wave of mountain ranges out to the Southern and Indian Ocean coasts.

‘The end of the city, the beginning of the wild …’ Elena folded her fingers through Tom’s as they lay together in the dark on the night that she’d moved in.

‘Pretty neat spot, huh?’ Tom ran his thumb across the tips of her fingers. He could feel the delicate ridges of skin that formed her fingerprints under his own. ‘It was just a stroke of luck that I got it. A friend from work used to own this place, Helen. Olaf, the old bloke next door knows her well. She built this house herself and sold it to me off-market because she didn’t want to see it demolished.’

Elena looked over to the window opposite the bed, the bamboo blind half-open. ‘Was it her who planted the rhododendrons?’ she asked.

Tom nodded. She sat up and tucked a pillow behind her back. ‘Let’s plant fruit trees this winter. Apricots and peaches, and a mulberry down by the clothesline. Maybe a fig? Will they get eaten by the animals, do you think? I noticed something gnawed through the net over your lemon tree again.’

‘We’ll have to build some cages,’ said Tom, rolling onto his side. ‘I’m always surprised by this garden though – what grows, what gets eaten to the ground. What gets weedy. We’re definitely on an interesting kind of boundary here, between the city and the bush. It’s an ecotone of sorts, a convergence point. Plants and creatures do unexpected things in these kinds of places.’

He let go of Elena’s hand as she climbed out of bed and pulled open the blind. Outside, the sky was still dark, the garden and the forest blue in the moonlight, silver-edged by the light on the street. Tom watched her trace a crescent moon across the film of condensation on the glass. ‘Ecotone sounds like a musical term,’ she said, turning back toward him.

‘I guess it might be.’ Tom propped himself up on his elbow and smoothed out the sheet beside him. ‘“Eco” comes from the Greek for “home”, and “tone” from “tonus”, which means tension. It probably has the same roots as tone in terms of music.’

‘Tension,’ Elena said under her breath. She pictured the tightening of a string under the bow of a violin. ‘Interesting … In Spanish, the word “canto” means singing or song, but it’s also a masculine noun for “edge”.’

‘You could probably find all sorts of correspondences between ecology and music if you looked.’ Tom yawned. ‘Come back to bed? I’m pretty sure there’s a whole field of study in that area. Boundaries are places of amazing fertility and interaction, in music as well as nature. They’re landscapes rich in evolutionary possibility … or they should be.’

Elena grinned at him.

‘Sexy, huh?’ he laughed, taking her hand and pulling her back into the bed.

During the evenings when the sunlight lingered, or the power stayed on, Tom worked at his desk until late into the night. Often, Elena and Orla wouldn’t see him for hours. But he would call out sometimes – ‘Orla, check this out.’ And he’d show her a slide under the microscope, a copepod shining with green iridescence, a certain species of plankton – all tiny fins and claws – a fungus colonising an endemic violet’s filmy, heart-shaped leaves.

‘All these things had their place,’ he would say. ‘All of the animals and plants, and everything in between. They were all in their right place, but everything changed.’

‘They got mucked up?’

‘Yeah. And now they’re trying to fit together again.’

‘Like a puzzle.’

‘Something like that.’

‘And can’t we fix that ourselves? Fix things again?’

‘No, because now they’re … adrift … homeless, you could say. Pieces of the puzzle are missing, and the places they belong to are gone.’

The blackouts were so frequent now that urban life had shaped itself around them. The overloaded grid, the unfinished transition and the country’s isolation from energy production and research left the problem unresolvable. The dark became the status quo.

In the house on the creek, the solar batteries that had hummed through the outages of the past began to decay. The darkness inspired a nagging mix of relief and frustration. It interrupted their daily routines, those unthinking dependencies they all still shared. But there was also a tension, a kind of foreboding, during those long nights of heat.

When it was too hot to sleep, they took their bikes – Orla tucked into a seat behind her father – and rode down to the night markets outside the esplanade’s empty warehouse hotels. Along the river, rows of stalls sold clothes and food by the light of candles and kerosene lamps. There were drum fires, yams and corn cobs blackening on the coals, the arcing river behind them a shimmering mirage of heat and smoke.

At the markets Orla stayed in her seat on the bike, listening, watching with half-closed eyes. She drifted in and out of sleep as one language entwined with another, a tangle of words dissolving into laughter, into arguing, into the lyrics of the buskers who sang there in the dark. Elena’s hips swayed involuntarily to the music. And Orla watched her face, glistening with sweat, and how she smiled at the stallholders, at the carnies, at the olive-skinned women with their silver guitars. And she watched the way they all smiled back at her mother, as her father pushed the bikes between stalls. And sometimes she looked up at him, her father, and she watched his face too but he didn’t smile, not in the way her mother did. She gazed at his eyes as they shifted from the dragon fruit to the change in his hand, the children dancing by the wall.

After, as they followed the rivulet path home, the voices and music of the market folded into the sound of the wind in the trees, the smells of food and smoke and the acrid taste of incense and oil fading. Some nights, above the hiss of the traffic, they still heard the calling of the currawongs circling over the foothills – a haunting, clinking sound that seemed to echo in the chest. In the laneways the pulsing shrill of crickets was so loud that when it stopped, Orla felt the city holding its breath.

In those first years of dark after the floods, bioluminescent blooms of Noctiluca scintillans, a form of dinoflagellate from the north, had appeared along the saltwater shores of the harbour. It collected in the nutrient-rich shallows off beaches and coves, in a flush of stagnant warmth. Its light was unlike anything Tom a. . .