by Frank Owen
NORTH
Frank Owen is the pseudonym for two authors – Diane Awerbuck and Alex Latimer. Diane Awerbuck’s debut novel GARDENING AT NIGHT won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize and Diane was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2014. She has long been regarded as one of South Africa’s most talented writers. Alex Latimer is an award-winning writer and illustrator, whose books have been translated into several languages.
Also by Frank Owen
SOUTH
NORTH
Frank Owen
First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2018 by Corvus Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Frank Owen, 2018
The moral right of Frank Owen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Trade Paperback ISBN: 9781782399001
EBook ISBN: 9781782399018
Printed in Great Britain
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A single virus permeating a membrane is all it takes for a full-blown infection to take place. A single virus, tiny as it is, can bring death to systems infinitely larger than it. And yet, death in this instance is not the end. It is a pruning so that systems much larger than that individual might be healthier as a result.
DIDIER RENARD
1
You’re not even born yet, but if I don’t set this down, I’m afraid that I’ll forget exactly how it was. Ma had her recipe book, but you’re going to have your own history written plain and clear.
Baby, I want you to understand some things about the people you came from, how they fought and struggled so that you could be alive and here and with me. The world is going to be different by the time you’re grown up in it, and for that I can only be grateful.
It was bad. And the War was only the beginning.
After it ended, and Renard built his wall between the North and South, the wind still blew the sicknesses from above. And it wasn’t like bird flu or Ebola or the plague or something where you knew how it worked, even if it was terrible. The viruses took everyone differently. The worst were the brain viruses, because there wasn’t a whole lot you could tell from the outside: no peeling flesh or blackened toes. Mama – that’s your grandma Ruth, and don’t you forget her – said it was like they were burrowing into the soft meat and chewing through the wiring that made us kind to one another. The men always had it the worst, because they had more juices to turn sour. Testosterone makes you brave and adventurous, but when the worms get in it also makes you want to rip other creatures limb from limb.
We learnt that the hard way.
So when the wind blew, Ma and I would camp in the sitting room and tell each other stories to pass the time. Ma was real keen on passing on her baby-birthing know-how, but sometimes she also told me bits of her life. The details would change between tellings, and she’d get to a point I’d recognize and then change tack completely so I could never tell what was true and what was wishing.
Baby, there are times when you can feel change coming. I mean, actually feel it, like history is being made and you’re right in the middle of it. My moment like that came when I first saw your daddy. I felt something when I looked him in the eyes that wasn’t romance and moonlight, but some other thing, unpretty as a weed, and just as tough. Love can be like that.
That was my first moment. The next one came not long after that, when he’d gone away and left us. He said he’d be back. The rest of us from the ghost colony – Ma and me, but also Sam and Pete and a whole bunch of the other Southern survivors – were resting against a rock face on the bank of the North Platte, trying to keep the brewing storm at our backs, deciding what to do next now that we’d arrived. I was tired, baby, in a way that I hope you will never be. It’s not only about the body, and one day you’ll understand that too. A person on a horse gets just as tired from looking back over their shoulder, and I was, for sure, worn down with sorrow and with hoping that Dyce would show. I remember the white lightning in the distance, and how it made the horses restless. They were just as hungry and frightened as we all were, and they were tiptoeing on their hooves that had gone soft as rubber from the time spent wading in the water.
That lightning gave me another moment. It showed us the Northern border wall, and the strange orange of electric street lights beyond it, and after that the glow of high-rise apartment blocks, now and again hidden by sheets of water. Baby, none of it seemed real. It was like looking across onto another planet, or back through time to how things once were.
We were really going to cross into the North! It was unbelievable. It made everything I knew seem wrong. The Wall had always been part of us. When Renard had set up the concrete and the border guards after the War, he had in mind to stop anyone crossing one way or the other. He knew that it would strangle the South. And it worked. We got poorer. And angrier.
But it was the winds that killed most people. We were trapped in the heart of the South, hiding and watching as people took ill and wasted away. No two corpses that I ever saw died from the same disease. You could tell by the way the eyes bulged or sank, were milky or bloodshot, the red trickling like jewelry down to their ears.
For a long time those winds, loaded with their viruses, whittled us down. Millions of people died, I guess. Our immune systems were weak – but there was something else too. You have to want to survive. That’s the most important thing. You have to believe there is a future you want to be in. Not everyone does.
Some folk headed for the coast, hoping to find boats to take them across the Pacific or the Atlantic: anywhere, like the slave ships all those years ago, but going the other way. Dyce’s brother Garrett – your uncle Garrett, he would have been, and your aunt Bethie too – had that grand plan. But the thing was, the sea air was worse. It was wet, and so it actually nurtured the viruses, kept them living for longer, suspended in the air like poisonous pollen. It wasn’t fair.
But if Dyce had made it to the coast with Garrett, he would have died before we had even met, and then you wouldn’t have happened. It was fate that your parents met in that world carved down to the bone. Do you believe that, baby? Fate that two people, so different, could fall in love in a time when love was a useless thing?
But love always leads somewhere else.
Now your daddy, Dyce, was only alive because of the hard work his daddy did. Your grandpa was no fool: he saw what was coming, clear as day, and when their mama died, he got to spending a whole lot of time teaching his boys survival. Just like the scouts. No one survived by chance, do you understand what I’m saying? We were there and we were there for a reason, and that reason is you. There were the books and there was the teaching – same as what I’m doing here, writing all of this down for you. We can’t ever forget. We are our stories, and when you’re all grown, maybe you’ll have a better handle on what I mean by that, but in the meantime, let’s go back a bit. There’s something real important about this part
.
When I first met him, your daddy had caught a terrible virus, which made him blind and weak, like an old-time vampire in the daylight. I carried him – carried him – and I cared for him when I got him to a cabin we found. Belonged to an old guy named Felix. (You know what, baby? The Weatherman’ll probably still be around when you’re grown. He’s like a piece of beef jerky. Tell him I say hi.)
It turned out that I had got myself into more trouble than I knew. Dyce and his brother Garrett were trying to outrun some folk who fancied themselves lawmakers. The Callahans. Maybe they’d been lawmen once upon a time; now the laws were whatever they figured might serve them best. I saved Dyce’s skinny ass that day.
We all decided to travel together, your grandmama too, and we ended up in the ghost colony, a lazaretto where the sick were gathered to die. Except that here at Horse Head they seemed pretty healthy. Mama got right in there and started organizing everyone, and we found out – guilt makes you lucky – that a lot of viruses had opposite numbers. It sounds weird, but it makes sense: hair of the dog. The alchemists used to think it, and those guys believed in mathematics. You could, in theory, find someone who was living with the cure for your disease in their own body. Sometimes, when the viruses combined in the right way, you could heal yourself. A bit like falling in love.
Because another thing happened at Horse Head too. When you spend a lot of time with a person, you get to know them. They can rub you up the wrong way, like me and your grandma, or it can turn the other way. As your daddy got healthy, he grew on me, baby. It was those eyes. He had the longest, darkest eyelashes, and one day he kissed me until I cried.
We set out to find a life for ourselves – and to lead the Callahans away from the good folk of that colony who’d taken us in. We found ourselves in the bowels of a town called the Mouth. We had heard it was the Promised Land: no one was sick there.
Instead, we found ourselves hunted deep under the earth and into the old mines where they were growing medicine mushrooms. But, baby, these mushrooms were different. They grew from the corpses of men and women who were being sacrificed. Can you believe that? We saw things there and after that turn a person bitter. But you’ve got to fight against the bitterness. What else is there?
Dyce saved us that time: he could see in the dark. And we took some of those mushrooms with us when we got out, baby. We packed them up like a picnic and took them back to Ma, to Horse Head, and la-la, happy ending, we survived the winds that should have ended the South. We lived because he and I met and were kind to one another.
But there’s never an ending, not as long as there’s someone there to tell it, and we had no idea what was in store for us beyond the Wall. Whether we’d be shot dead as we climbed out of that river, North-side, we didn’t know.
I got the rest of the story that afternoon, curled up and resting against the rock, when Ma finally told me her side. She was a hard woman, your grandma Ruth, but I guess she thought she owed me. Besides, we never knew just how it was going to pan out: every time we said goodbye might have been for keeps. So that day she spoke for a long time about her life before Renard, back in South Africa, about how she’d escaped apartheid with her man, Wilson, who ended up sacrificing himself so that she could get on the last boat they let dock at Ellis Island. And she always kept her book of remedies with her. You’ll know it, baby: it’s the one with the pages that are swollen and warped, because they’re packed with writing, along with all her seeds and dried cuttings and petals.
But that recipe book was all your grandma had. She was alone and foreign in a country where black people weren’t high on the list. Renard sure wasn’t the first president to have some funny ideas about the equality of human beings; being from South Africa prepared her.
And she was a smart cookie, your grandma Ruth. She found work in a hospital and then trained as a nurse, and when she wasn’t emptying bedpans and holding dying hands, she was adding to her recipe book. Adding American herbs and recipes to her African ones, trying – and often failing – to match local ingredients to the ones back home so that her past and her present sat side by side. And being in the hospital helped: they weren’t as careful with the dispensary keys back then.
One day she met the man himself – Didier Renard. You know what she told me, baby? She said he wasn’t the monster then that he is now. He seemed so ordinary – sympathetic, even, and of course a brilliant doctor. But he was also a cheater, and they had an affair. She was flattered, she said, though at least she looked ashamed when she told me. His wife was blown up in a bomb, you know that? His people say now that’s what turned him bad. But it takes more than that, baby. We all have to decide what to forgive and what to forget.
After she told me all that, we hugged for the first time in forever. I remember the hot iron smell of the horses, the rain stinging our faces and the thunder vibrating in my chest. Soon our little gang of Southern survivors would get back up on those poor, tired horses, and then we would wade into the Platte and try to find an entrance point in the barbed wire and the concrete. The same water that was rushing toward us now came from up North. It was right there. Surely we could pass over.
But that wasn’t the whole story, or even the end of my part. That was only the bit that I knew then.
2
There were dead bodies caught in the barbed wire under that churning brown water, Ruth knew, but the only person she cared about was Vida. Through the pelting rain she was sure she could see her daughter from here – trapped near the other side of the river.
It was Vida. It had to be.
Ruth breathed. Everything hurt. The burning in her bony chest wouldn’t go away, but she sucked in as much air as she could. That burn meant her bruised lungs were still working, and it meant that she had a chance to save her daughter – and she would, by God, busted rib or no busted rib.
She screwed up her eyes. The body on the far side of the North Platte rolled and bobbed, helpless under the churning floodwaters, a dark shape riding the current.
‘Vida!’ Ruth screamed, but the storm stole her voice.
Someone was trying to hold her back, to keep her from wading into the water again, but she pulled loose from their grip, driven by the red maternal urge. She staggered forward, one step, then another, and now the river was all around her. In she went: deeper, and deeper still, like a baptism, and then the chill stink of the water was rising to her neck.
Ruth felt her feet freed from the riverbed as she was upended, and the branches of the smashed cottonwoods – old growth, too hard to bend – caught and tore at her arms as they rushed on with the floodwater. She tried a few strokes, but she was too slow and the current was too strong. Of course it was! Her exhausted limbs against the might of the Hundred-Year Storm. When it took her along with the jumbled mess of horses and branches and bodies, she let it. She felt the air rushing from her lungs.
She fought against blacking out, replacing the panic with insistent pictures like an old-time movie reel: Vida, tiny and bloodied and screaming, newborn in the back of a rusted minivan, the one place that Ruth had felt safe after her escape from Renard and the North.
Then Vida at ten, fierce and chubby-cheeked, checking her traps or bagging the last of the locust swarms, chasing them with a pillowcase that loomed white against her skin.
And then a couple of months ago, from her sweaty sickbed cocoon, Ruth watching her grown daughter set off on her daily foraging round, her hair braided like a warrior’s. The everlasting satchel was slung over her shoulder, and her legs were long and strong with muscle. That time she had come back with Dyce and his brother Garrett, and things had never been the same after that.
But she always came back, didn’t she? She couldn’t be dead.
Ruth wiped her eyes, coughing out a mouthful of cold water that tried to choke her. Surely that shape – right there, within reach – was Vida. She felt it. Let it be her, Ruth told the universe. Please let that be my child. Let her live. She was no stranger to begging. Before sh
e had met the people from the ghost colony and found the Resistance, Ruth was long used to praying and bargaining away everything she could think of – her house, her beloved recipe book, her memories, her life – to the bored and faceless gods.
The reply now was the same: only the water that roiled and pounded in her ears, and the knowledge that God helped those who were quick enough to help themselves.
3
Kurt Callahan, thin with teenage hunger, lifted himself out of the foaming water of the North Platte and heaved himself, panting, onto the lip of a concrete pylon that had once supported the railway bridge. There was just enough room around the pillar for him to keep out of the floodwater that surged and sucked at his ankles. He could feel his toes, wrinkled like prunes, inside his shoes – soft and ready to blister. He took off his water-heavy shoes and socks, and hung them above his head on spikes of wire to dry. Then he sat, slicked his straw-blond hair out of his face and wriggled his ghost-pale toes.
Under his spread fingers the rusted rebar held the failing structure together like the bones of a dead bird. Above, at the very tops of the pylons, he could see where the vanished arches had once upon a time been connected. Exhausted, he rested his back against the pillar and stared up at the sky with its rising thunderheads thick with rain, trying to trace the path of the winds that tormented the clouds. Kurt no longer had to fear the poison those winds carried. He raised his fist.
‘The last surviving Callahan on the fucking continent, and the first to make it to the North,’ he told the sky.
That made him special, didn’t it?
But then he’d always known he was special. Growing up, he was taller than most kids his age. Faster and quieter too. Those were the two most important things when it came to trapping. But there was something else about himself that he’d known but hadn’t let on about, especially not to his mother. Perspective, he called it.