Anarchy by James Treadwell Page B

it immediately gave up any further pretense of being a highway and debouched almost shamefacedly into Hardy proper, kicking around an entirely unnecessary roundabout and dropping down the hill like any of the town’s other wide, badly surfaced, unpopulated roads until it ran into the strip of park at the edge of the bay, where its last gasp was marked—for reasons Goose has never got to grips with, even after she’d paused in her jog one morning to read the sign—by a meter-high wooden carrot.
    Hardy was an invisible frontier. You could get in your car there and start driving and never have to worry too much about how far it was to the next gas station or flush toilet or place where you could pay money and get what you needed. You’d be on roads with laws and fellow travelers, and within a few hours you’d be looking out the window at somewhere that bore no more indication of proximity to the wilderness than a retirement suburb in Florida. (Goose’s maternal grandparents wintered in one of those, the setting for family Christmases that had turned her Anglo as well as atheist.) Here—she drove over the pass and down toward the east coast and Hardy Bay, passing blitzed disaster zones of freshly logged land—you still had a toehold on the asphalt. But beyond . . .
    Beyond was the north. At this time of year you could still feel it, the huge darkness coming down too early and leaving too late, not quite willing to retreat into its arctic lair of permanent ice, and the ocean air blowing over the top of the island, heavy with the memory of storms. South of where she was there were schools, jobs, houses that got bought and sold, wireless networks, which meant that anywhere might as well be anywhere else, local differences erased by shared information. North were canneries (but the salmon runs were failing), logging (but the age of paper was ending), tourism for a third of the year, the government’s guilt at having abandoned the remnants of the coastal passage’s aboriginal nations to their “heritage,” and otherwise only the great inhospitable emptiness where tourists came to fish or to look at from the safety of their ships.
    People told her Hardy had seen better days. She found it hard to believe. Although she had to admit that its parking lots were hilariously optimistic. Virtually every building that wasn’t a private house lorded over wide concrete skirts with parking spaces neatly painted out, as if it expected tens or hundreds of visitors to show up at any moment. When she closed her eyes and thought of Hardy, it was those white-striped grey wastes she saw, tragically deserted, filling up with puddles when it rained (it often rained), coming to life only late at night when drunk kids used them to practice handbrake turns. She drove slowly into town. People didn’t walk around, as a rule. With all those empty parking spaces there wasn’t much call for walking. Pedestrians tended to be the old native guys, not usually looking their best, or young couples, also usually native, pushing strollers. If Jennifer showed up here, scurrying across the concrete wastes, she’d stick out a mile. Goose circled a couple of times and then pulled over opposite the market.
    It felt wrong. She couldn’t have said why. Maybe it was just the after­effects of a bad night’s sleep (she was trying not to think too much about the look on the girl’s face as she slammed her computer shut). She did a few more circuits, watched a couple of other spots, left town to drive a few kilometers south along the highway and back again. The longer she spent looking, the harder it became to imagine the silent, intense girl from the cell skulking around town trying to steal some pop and a candy bar. There was a mismatch somewhere. Jennifer had opted out of all this, the dreary stores with too many parking spaces, the kids her age pushing strollers, the little that was going