North

by Frank Owen

  Like Vida, thought Dyce, as the scientists bent to their scraping. Like Vida, going under the knife.

  28

  Ruth looked at her hands. Steady as ever. She was ready to do it – wasn’t she? She had the cleaver and the knives, all of which she’d made sure to sterilize, and which she was going to sterilize twice more, for safety, before she amputated Vida’s rotting leg. She even had a thick-based frying pan for the cauterizing, bracing herself against even imagining the smell of burnt flesh. It was the only way to staunch the blood, though it wouldn’t hold the femoral artery for long. For that she’d asked around for catgut, fine as thread, and a needle. She had found the right location, at least – there, where the library let the midday sun in. She had pried a board away to determine where it fell brightest. That was where they’d operate.

  And the alcohol, of course, the cure-all. Enough for the patient as well as the wound. Fuck foetal alcohol syndrome, she thought, you got to be alive to get that.

  And there was enough for her too, for after. Ruth was going to drink herself blind. Let Dyce change the weeping dressing and comfort the woman who was as good as his wife, the one who would never walk the same way. Let him pull his lame white-man’s weight for a change.

  Now Ruth sat with Vida, one hand resting on the slight curve of her daughter’s belly, where the human seed had germinated. She was ready to take the leg off, sure, but she also wanted to explain, to herself and to her child – and to her child’s child, who had the most to lose. What chance did an unborn baby have if its mother underwent an amputation? Surely the shock would kill it.

  Yes, Ruth told herself. Do you think I don’t know that?

  One of the scientists was knocking on the open door, polite and persistent: she meant to have her way. Ruth saw it in her high ponytail and the wide angle of her jaw.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you.’

  She didn’t look sorry, but Ruth was too gracious to say it. She nodded at the woman in the lab coat. Where had they found those things anyway? Robbing a hospital? Or did Renard still have labs somewhere close by? Never trust anyone in a white coat, thought Ruth. The needle is never far behind.

  The woman was waiting, angling herself over the threshold. Ruth had seen her before but they had had no cause to speak. She judged her unthreatening and motioned her in, raising a finger to her lips while the woman got close enough to look Vida over where she still slept, sweating.

  She sat down beside Ruth.

  ‘I’m Jill. I work downstairs. How is she?’

  ‘Not good,’ Ruth replied in a low voice.

  Jill frowned and moved her lower jaw until something clicked. There was something unpleasant about her, thought Ruth, now that she had her up close. Jill was the sort of girl who would cheat at golf.

  ‘You know Vida?’ Ruth asked. ‘I mean, from before?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Are you a doctor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then may I ask why you are here?’

  ‘I’m concerned,’ said Jill and stretched a smile over her face. ‘I just want to know how she is.’

  ‘Oh, just tell me the fucking truth. No one gives two shits about us. All they want is the mushrooms.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ Jill went into her spiel, as if she was reading from a cue card. ‘You know, we’re all in this together. And we both got just as much reason to see Renard dead.’

  ‘Now that’s not true, missy. Pardon my saying. We might both have reason, but you don’t have nearly as much of it as we do. Not even close. They send you in here to talk to me?’

  ‘Ruth . . . Can I call you Ruth?’ Jill didn’t wait for Ruth to answer. ‘We’re on the same team. We want the same things, even if it seems like we’re getting there in roundabout ways.’

  ‘Now what does that mean? And I mean specifically, what does it mean?’

  Jill turned to face her, as if they were on an old-time talk show, glowing, earnest. ‘Look. I want your daughter to make a full recovery. We all do, of course. But if it’s worst-case scenario and her leg has to come off, well, we could make good use of it.’

  ‘Of her leg?’

  ‘Think of it as organ donation, you know? The substrate . . .’

  ‘Substrate? For what?’ Then it dawned on Ruth. ‘To grow mushrooms on? My child’s leg? Are you fucking crazy?’

  ‘I’m just saying that if it’s coming off anyway, don’t . . . don’t bury it out back.’

  ‘Now you listen to me, and listen good,’ hissed Ruth. ‘I would sooner burn my own daughter up on a funeral pyre than let you vultures touch her. Just get out.’

  Jill got to the door in record time, and just as well. Ruth unclenched her hands and looked at her palms, where the nails had dug crescents into the paler flesh. That fool girl with her bouncy ponytail and her white lab coat and her lack of basic feeling!

  Adams. Ruth bet it was that asshole. All holy-roller on the outside, but every now and again you got a look at the real man underneath. She had seen his kind before – in Renard. She shuddered. How had she ever loved him? Let him touch her? And worse than that. Much worse.

  But the past was the past, and for better or worse – mostly worse, when it came to Renard, and that was no lie – here they were. Ruth couldn’t afford to let her old lives swallow her up. What was she supposed to do about it all? Cry? It was what it was. She took a deep breath to steady herself. Vida was hers: blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh. She would have to fight the infection. She would. There was no other option now. No way the leg was coming off. No way she and Dyce were creeping out in the darkness and burying it only for Jill to come sniffing, shovel in hand.

  Ruth grabbed her daughter’s hand again and squeezed gently, willing her energy to cross over the lines of her body into Vida’s, as if they were still joined by the umbilical cord. Maybe it never snapped, Ruth thought. Maybe your children really were bound to you by a fine silver ribbon of suffering and care for ever and ever.

  In the caul of her sickness Vida slept, and inside her limp body the struggle went on.

  Near midday Dyce came in, face set in an older man’s lines, ready to confront the operation. He had decided he could do it – hold her down – if that was what would save her, but his shirt was ringed with sweat at the armpits and neck like a hanged man.

  He raised his eyebrows as Ruth prepared to redo the rough tacking sutures, neat and thin as embroidery this go-round – the kind you don’t waste time doing right before an amputation; the kind that was meant to last.

  ‘It’s staying on,’ she said. She kept her head down to hide her eyes, and she kept stitching.

  Dyce slumped into a chair, his thighs shaking. ‘Thank you,’ he said. Ruth still wouldn’t look at him.

  ‘She won’t come round. I dosed her up good.’

  ‘Any left for me?’ Dyce asked, eyeing the bottles of hooch on the floor.

  ‘Touch it and die,’ Ruth said. ‘I mean it. I’m going to get real drunk now, Dyce, so you make sure you’re the one who’s clear enough to change the dressing in a couple of hours. Specially if the smell changes. You do your duty. You’re the man of the house. You got that?’

  He nodded, the responsibility and the relief settling on him like a cloak. He didn’t care how bad it got.

  ‘I’m staying for a spell first,’ Ruth told him. ‘You go on and get some rest, because you’re going to need it when she comes round. But me and Vida, right now we got some catching up to do.’

  He saw how she was tying off the thread, as proud of her handiwork as a fine lady in a turret, proud as Gracie had been of the testifying samplers she’d had up on her walls when the plague came.

  ‘You still here, boy?’

  ‘All right, all right. I’m going.’

  And he did. Ruth sat down again and sighed. She examined the homebrew – what was it? Bourbon? Men couldn’t brew worth a damn. No creativity – and then took a sip. The rotgut was milky and smelt of damp, but it was strong and that was all t
hat counted. She let it rinse her tongue and throat like mouthwash, burning and cleansing as it went.

  ‘Ugh. You taste as bad as you look. But as long as you get the job done. Just like Renard used to say. Now. My turn to talk while you sleep, Vida,’ she told her daughter softly. ‘Just like Horse Head.’ She looked at her own hands and thought of the work they had done in her lifetime, the small, defiant bodies they had cupped while their injured mothers writhed. ‘It’s time to talk about babies.’

  29

  For the second night in a row, Felix didn’t sleep in the same room as the other Southerners. That first night he’d curled up and slept high in his crow’s nest, safe and removed, his body craving the rest. Now he had found a forgotten stairwell and set up his bed at the top – blankets and a few cushions he’d taken from one of the rooms. Somebody would be pissed about that.

  When he woke to pee, he fumbled for an old army canteen he’d found in the kitchen. There was no way he was stumbling around this place in the dark, not with those shackles on the walls, like some torture chamber. He pissed into the canteen and tried to be quiet, his ancient prostate making the urine spurt and judder when it came at last. It had smelt strong – like wet clothes and chemicals – ever since he’d had those mushrooms.

  ‘Like an evil genie,’ he whispered. He closed the lid of the canteen tight. ‘Now just remember what’s in there when you wake up looking for a drink, you old fart.’

  He lay down, but he couldn’t get back to sleep. He’d slept in worse places, but there were solitary noises every now and again that reminded him just how many people there were in the building. Like lab rats, Felix thought. He turned over.

  All that commotion in the early evening – the siren and the men with guns funneling down to the basement – had definitely meant something, and he had a bad feeling about it. They’d captured one guy, the patrolman, he figured, and he’d looked pretty beat up already. Right now he’d be in one of those horrible little rooms, for sure. Maybe even shackled. Because that was what the shackles were for, right? Keeping people in their place.

  It was no good. He had to go and see who it was, whether it was his business or not.

  ‘Better to find out both sides of the story, right? Ain’t that what the Wall’s taught us?’ he muttered.

  There were people asleep in all the chambers now, rolled up in a dirty rainbow of sleeping bags and wedged together for warmth. Felix could remember a time when camping gear was designed for blending in rather than standing out.

  He crept past them and some mumbled in their sleep, but no one, he figured, had seen him. And even if they had, he could just tell them he was looking for the john. It was almost true. All the way there he kept his ears tuned for guards or a watchman of some kind, but Adams’s people were either arrogant or stupid, because he found no one on duty.

  The doors of both prison rooms were shut and locked, the deadbolts running parallel down the edges of the doors, all in place. Felix began with the room on the left. He bent to bring his eye close to the keyhole to see if there was anything discernible, but as he leant in, something hairy slammed against the door from the other side and he fell back in fright. Then the shouting began.

  ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!’ The heavy chains clinked.

  Christ, that was weird! What the fuck was going on there?

  There was something else, as well, that was ringing little bells in the back of Felix’s brain – a familiar smell, some trace he had caught over the ordinary stench of urine, something that reminded him of stale cakes.

  Vanilla.

  Mother of God. It was the basketball car freshener from the De Luxe. Or something very much like it. Was it coming from him? He held out his own shirt and sniffed, but the scent was wafting from whatever had thrown itself in rage against the door.

  There was another bang on the door and Felix flinched. He was spooked. That shouting had been loud enough to raise the dead. Why was he still hanging around?

  He scurried all the way back to his nest of blankets, and found after all that he did need to piss again. Old age and fear. Man, it was a bad combination. The canteen was too full to pee into without risk of overflow, so he took it with him down to the rest room.

  In the toilet he emptied the canteen down the drain and tried to wash his hands quietly, but they were shaking and he splashed his clothes.

  There were two rooms, weren’t there? Two sets of shackles. One for the patrolman, but who besides him was being held captive? They had only gone out to catch one man, and they had returned with him.

  But somehow the other cell was occupied now, occupied by someone from within the building. Someone who was part of the Resistance.

  The same impossible name kept circling back. The smell from that fucking car freshener, sweet as marijuana, was only on the clothes of two men that he knew.

  His own, of course.

  And Adams’s.

  30

  Ruth felt Vida’s forehead. Hot. She checked the room once more to see whether they really were alone. It was an old habit, to keep checking. Things changed down South faster than Ruth was comfortable with. You just never knew. Then she settled her back against an ageing chair and told her daughter everything. There was relief in knowing that Vida was only half aware. If she remembered nothing of this, at least Ruth could say she tried. More than once, in fact.

  ‘On the banks of the North Platte, right before we rode our horses into that fierce water, I tried to tell you everything. I got further than I ever managed before, but I missed some things. I’ll blame it on the timing, that we were pressed for time and hunkered down, pinned below that storm. But the truth is that for me to tell you everything, I’m going to need to numb the pain some. And maybe more than some.’ Ruth sipped the hooch and swallowed hard. ‘You know there are some things I never told you. You’re going to ask me why that is, so I’m going to do my best to explain. I was scared. Believe it. Your scary, tough-as-nails mama was scared of what you’d think of her. But there was something else too. I was scared of what you’d think of yourself.

  ‘You asked me a couple of times why you never caught any of those viruses that came on the air. And it’s true. You weren’t sick a day in your life while everyone else coughed their lungs out and the world went to shit.’ Ruth drank and winced, drank again. ‘Well, brace yourself, because here it comes.

  ‘You always knew I worked North-side before the War, didn’t you, baby? You knew I was a nurse at the same hospital as Big Bad Renard: I made no secret of that.’ A fit of coughing overcame her as she spoke, as if even his name was enough to choke her.

  ‘Excuse me. I thought I would be able to tell it all straight, but now it’s time, there isn’t an easy way to say it. Okay. What you don’t know is that we had . . . an affair, I suppose it was. It sounds ridiculous now, hindsight being twenty-twenty and all that. But you have to understand. I was new to the place, young and out of my depth, and what we were working on in that hospital felt important, like we could actually save the world. He was doing government work, secret work, engineering viruses to live airborne for months, then engineering the antivirals. He had real power back then. And he was . . . charismatic. Drew people to him, wherever he went. He could be charming, Vida, in his own way. Isn’t that the real horror? Like the snake in the garden who just wanted some company. Tired of being alone, tired of being the only one sliding on his belly through the dirt.

  ‘But Renard didn’t even have that excuse. He was already married. You believe that? Someone had married him. I pity that poor woman. Queenie, they called her. People talk about that bomb like it was the worst thing that could have happened to her, but I’m telling you here it was a mercy. Saved her years of suffering under his hand. Something wrong with her insides: that was the rumor. She couldn’t have children. So Renard, he felt free to be spreading his seed around, and I guess . . .’ Ruth paused again, closing her eyes tight against what she was about to say next, ‘I got lucky.

  �
�Don’t judge me, baby. I was engaged too – that publisher man I told you about, the one who was the reason I ended up in the US of A at all. It wasn’t his fault, either. Renard, he just had this power over me. Neither of us sinners was free, and I’m truly glad I wasn’t the one who ended up with him for richer, for poorer, because I know which side of that vow she got.

  ‘Does it sound like I’m sidestepping my responsibility? Maybe I am. But being young and confused is bad, and it makes a person do strange things. You know that as well I do, Vida.’ Ruth leant into her daughter’s side. ‘I want you to know: back then I was a kind of lonely I never want to feel again. And I won’t. But in a way Renard saved me.

  ‘I was pregnant. Pregnant! By Renard himself! Having a baby in my belly, the way you have in yours right now – well, that made things clear for me. I started thinking about what we were really doing in those labs, and I knew it was just wrong. People change, baby. Never forget that. At the beginning of the War, long before the Wall went up, back when the North figured they’d win the usual way, with guns and men and God on their side, I could live with it. I always knew what those viruses were for, what they would do to little babies like the one I was carrying myself.

  ‘Once you find yourself in charge of a real human life, there’s a kind of hope and terror that can suffocate you, Vida. Some nights I’d wake up and the panic would send your little legs kicking against my ribs like another heart. So I made up my mind to run away – to make myself unfindable. I would leave everything. I would leave it all and just go and there’d be nothing anyone could do to find me. Even Renard. When he found out that I had taken his one precious baby, he was going to look under every stone in America until he could hunt me down.