The Poison Garden (2019 Sphere Edition)

by Alex Marwood

  A tiny strip of three photos of my mother and me. She said they came in a strip of four and she had them done in a photo booth. Cut one off and posted it to my grandparents. She’s seventeen or eighteen there. Thin and scared-looking, holding baby-me as though she’s afraid I’ll break, staring at the lens with wounded eyes. Gone is the make-up, the backcombed hair of the earlier photo. Now she looks like a small albino mouse.

  It’s one of only two photos I have of myself. Somer gave them to me because she said that she had the memories and I didn’t, that I should have something of my infancy. We didn’t do photos. Or mirrors, beyond necessary medical or firestarting purposes. Narcissism, Father said.

  The other photo: me and my friends Kiran and Eilidh, ready for our first solstice. The one exception to the no-photography rule was that they recorded us as we reached legal adulthood. It was like branding us as Real People, people with a place at last in history, worth recording for the descendants. We kept them as souvenirs of this rite of passage, like our puberty flowers, to be handed down to those who come after. Ursola had a clunky machine that whirred and spat out a piece of white card that gradually, as you waved it in the air, took on colours and shapes and turned into a photograph. She took three, one for each of us. We look so young. Eilidh and me with our crowns of flowers, me still watchful, Eilidh with her big open grin, Kiran standing between us looking straight at the lens, his half-smile that preceded his laugh. Three young people, ready for a party. I miss them. So much it physically hurts.

  I look at the pictures for a long while, touch the faces with a fingertip. Want to howl at the sky, for I will never see them again. I don’t know what they’ve done with my mother’s body. No one asked if I wanted to claim it – and what would I do with it if I did? – and I don’t suppose any of the family that didn’t want her when she was alive have done so. I don’t know what they do with bodies like that. Just burn them up and never speak of them again, I guess.

  I lay the photos aside and go on.

  A wreath of flowers, dried and pressed and stored between two sheets of cardboard to keep it from falling apart. A souvenir of the day I reached womanhood, worn over my hair as I walked to have it shorn.

  A small wooden horse, whittled painstakingly by Kiran over the course of a long, dark winter when he was twelve. It’s clumsy, energetic, mane and tail flying out as it heads into the wind, and he gave it to me because … because I don’t know. I never even questioned it.

  And then I am crying, for there will be no more Kiran, no more Ursola or Somer or Vita, no more any of them. I don’t cry. I never cry. But there has been so much loss, so much.

  And, when I’ve finished crying, I put the horse on the little mantelpiece for decoration and I hang my crown on an old picture hook and this dreary flat feels suddenly more like home.

  I go back and find something else that makes the tears come. Wrapped in a piece of cloth lies my mother’s ring. They threw it away when she got pregnant with Ilo, as though it were tainted, and I sneaked out and retrieved it from our tiny landfill in the medieval quarry from whose stones the house was built – not such a hard task, as we produced barely any rubbish – and slipped it into my box. I’m not sure why. I had a feeling, just a feeling, that it might have a function later. I guess it does, now. I slip it onto my own finger, left hand, third from the right, and look at it. It fits as though it had been made for me. And I stare at it and let the tears fall.

  When I’m calmer, I change the channel on the TV and watch a programme about people who are unable to stop collecting things – rubbish, clothes, bits of wood, old newspapers – and whose houses are so cluttered that they have to climb through tunnels of trash. A woman has been collecting cats, out of control, shit everywhere, and the house-clearer has just moved a pile of books to find a batch of tiny kittens, dead and mummified, behind them, and the floorboards rotted by urine.

  And I half-watch and wonder about the billions and billions of us and the millions of the Dead who must be living like this, and I feel around for the marram-grass tab at the bottom of my empty box. My finger grasps it and I lift. The false bottom comes away, and there they are, my last treasures, nestled in their niches and quietly gleaming. The police and the social worker would never have let me have the box if they’d known they were there, but I feel instantly safer when I see that they still are. Wrapped in tissue paper, two items from the modern world: a bank card, and a tiny flat shard of metal and plastic the size of my pinkie nail. A SIM card, to put in a phone and make it one’s own.

  And, beneath those, my comfort. My protection. My knife.

  Before the End

  2002–2003

  12 | Romy

  March 2003

  The month before each solstice, the tension grows among the women. They eye each other, assess their own chances, assess those of others. Romy is a long way from understanding this burning urge to reproduce, to fill themselves with baby, but it pours off them like body odour as the nights lengthen and shorten.

  A six-month window. It’s likely all you’ll ever get here. There are more women than men in the Ark, and the chances are that if you fail in your first conception window it will be too late by the time your turn comes round again. Lucien, standing on the Great House steps, watching, playing God. He doesn’t like his mothers over thirty, his fathers under. And all the women, even the older ones with their fading wombs, pray, as he passes them by: me, me, this time let it be me. Let his eye light upon me, let him see me strong and young and healthy. If not for himself, let him choose a mate for me.

  Lucien knows best. Who’s fittest, who’s ripest, who will make the best babies. Their future depends on his choices, for they can’t afford to carry weaklings. The Ark will need strength, intelligence, endurance, to carry them through the Great Disaster, and Lucien can tell, by eye alone.

  Sometimes, when the choice has been made, when Lucien has announced the names of the lucky pairings at the choosing ceremony, Romy sees the unchosen women turn and walk away, bury their faces in their hands and weep.

  A change has come over her mother, she’s noticed it. She’s gone quiet, turned inward; flinches if someone touches her unexpectedly, crosses the yard whenever one of Uri’s new squad of swaggering, bumptious Guards appears. Walks with her eyes downcast and sometimes, weirdly, wrings her hands. On the morning after solstice, her eyes were red when she came with the other women to let the children out of their overnight confinement in the Pigshed. And later, in the washroom, with the other women turned away, Romy noticed bruises on her shoulders, her thighs. A fall, said Somer. It’s nothing. Silly me. I tripped on a stone and went for a burton. That’ll teach me, eh? No more cider for mamma. And she was seven and careless, so she laughed at the thought that she should have come from such a clown. Then Farial died, and everyone in the Pigshed was sad, for never speaking of someone is not the same as never thinking, and she just assumed that Somer, who was there when it happened, was sad as well. And then she thought no more of it.

  By the spring equinox, one of the current breeders is already confirmed – has adopted the waddle and back-pressing of late pregnancy though she can’t be more than a few months gone – and glowing with pride. The other’s eyes are ringed with dark circles from her sleepless nights, and her chosen mate walks as though he’s carried the good news from Aix to Ghent.

  Three days after the equinox, the bell in the chapel tower begins to ring to call a Pooling – the summoning ring, long slow tolls – and the compound drops its tasks and hurries to the courtyard. They know they’re not in danger – a double ring, repeated around two-second gaps – and that the End has not begun – fast tolling, constant until everyone is safe – but that something momentous has happened. A betrayal or a triumph, a water leak in one of the food godowns. They eye each other silently. Will someone be disgraced today? Is it you? Is it you?

  Busy planting beans below the trellises surrounding the Pigshed wall, Romy jumps to her feet and runs inside to scoop up Eden
. She’s barely beyond the goo-ga stage – but everyone has to come to a Pooling. She is heavy, though, and wriggles, and Romy’s progress is slow. When she realises that they are the last ones left in the orchard, she ignores the squawks of protest and jogs the rest of the way. She weaves a lengthy path around the flowerbeds to get to a place where she will be able to see.

  They count off, so everyone knows who’s here, and there’s a gap after 141, before Romy calls out her own number, and her vague sense of unease, the one everyone shares when these gatherings are called, gets a whole lot worse. She and Somer arrived on the same day, so of course they have consecutive numbers. She calls out Eden’s number for her, but she can barely make herself heard, her mouth is so dry.

  And then the Great House door opens and the compound sees that the sinner is indeed Somer. A murmur runs through the crowd.

  Somer. It’s Somer. Eden Blake’s mother, for God’s sake. How are the mighty fallen.

  Downcast eyes with shadows beneath, the skin on her face red-raw from crying, she emerges from the gloom behind Lucien and Uri, Ursola to her left and Vita to her right, four grim Guards in a row behind as though they expect her to make a break for it. Romy doesn’t recognise half the Guards these days. The original corps was made up of people she remembers from the Pigshed, but Uri has brought several in from the Outside, recruited from among his old colleagues in the army of the Dead, some strangers from the Cairngorm compound. Loyalty, he says. The first thing I need from my Guards is loyalty.

  Somer’s head is bald as an egg. Someone’s cut her hair off and shaved her right down to the skin. Vita, probably, because it is usually Vita who carries out this harshest of all penalties.

  Minutes pass. Lucien’s eyes rake the crowd, search for signs of prurience. His most recent handmaid, a woman so honoured that she bore his child, brought so low that he cannot even look at her. But the Ark see. Oh, yes, they see, now that they’re looking. She carries so little flesh – they all do – that it’s hard to hide the signs of pregnancy once someone is looking: the swollen breasts, the filling belly. A three-month gestation is impossible to hide. Somer looks as though her uniform has shrunk. Yet she herself is also diminished.

  Romy is scandalised. Burns with shame. People nearby have edged away from where she and Eden stand, leaving them in a little pool of space as though her mother’s disgrace might be infectious. How could you? she thinks, and her memory floods with images of mating pigs, of the squalls of the semi-feral cats who live around the godowns. How could you? Can you not stop yourself? Do you have no willpower? She’s filled once again with the ignominy of her own conception. She’s like a rutting animal, she thinks, always on heat, always waiting for her chance to mate. Only a couple of children in the compound have brothers and sisters, but they were all conceived when their parents were still Dead. Nobody has two. Nobody. She will be marked forever, a freak. They all will, all three of them. Even blessed Eden.

  Poor Lucien. Her heart burns for Father. What an honour he gave her mother, she thinks, and look how she’s repaid him. Eden lets out a squawk, and Romy realises how hard her fingers are digging into the child’s tiny arms.

  Lucien clears his throat, and speaks. ‘What shall we do?’ he asks. ‘What shall we do?’

  He speaks of betrayal. Somer’s not the first. The shame is on all of them. They stand where they have landed and listen as the day’s light changes, as the fires go out in the smithy and the bread, proving, overflows the pans. Romy wishes she’d brought an overcoat, as the wiser, older hands paused to do before they ran to the courtyard, for once the sun passes behind the house-eaves she starts to shiver. Eden struggles in her arms and, when she realises that she is not going to be let down, begins to wail. Stop, oh stop, Romy begs silently as her neighbours glare at her as though she could, by some magic, shut her up. Her arms are hurting and so are her knees and, for the first time in her life, her back, from the weight of her wriggling burden. And still she holds her, because to do anything else will bring punishment down on her head.

  And still he speaks. Vita, Ursola, Uri, the Guards, still like statuary around them, Somer staring at the step on which she stands as the blood crusts on her naked scalp. ‘Liars,’ he says. ‘Lying and thieving and cheating. You swore to us all when you came here that this was an end to that, for you. This woman has stolen from the wombs of her sisters. Every one of you who has done as she has done has stolen their child from somebody else.’

  In among the crowd, a woman begins to sob. Because of Somer, one fewer of them will get her own turn, come the next solstice.

  ‘Does anybody else have anything to confess?’ he asks. Looks out over their heads in the gathering gloom, as they draw in their breaths and search their souls.

  ‘Not a single one of you? What shall we do?’ he asks, as they shiver in the dark, beset by hunger and thirst and cold and the deep, deep wish to sleep. ‘What shall we do?’

  Ursola steps forward. ‘We’ve all betrayed him,’ she says. ‘I’ve looked at my fellows with wicked eyes. I’ve stolen extra bread. I’ve rested when I could have been working for all of us. I am no better than many, no worse than many.’

  From the bag tied to her waist, she produces the hair clippers. Hands them to Vita, undoes the tie that holds back her mane of hair and drops to her knees before her.

  13 | Romy

  September–November 2003

  He squalls his way into the world when the fruit harvest is at its height and Romy doesn’t hear about it, or notice that her mother is missing, for two days. Anyone at Plas Golau who can walk and understand simple instructions is out in the orchards, and his birth has attracted none of the pleasurable anticipation that Eden’s did. In fact, Romy only realises that it’s happened when Somer, long since demoted to Farmer, returns to the fields looking like a popped balloon. She doesn’t go up and ask. She has barely exchanged a full sentence with her mother in six months, even though they sleep in the same dormitory. The shame is almost unbearable, the shaved heads all around her a constant reminder of her connection to the sin.

  In the Pigshed, Eden’s other siblings have quietly stepped in and taken over her care, and Romy has let them do it, for she knows that this bastard child has effectively cancelled out the status gain of having a sister in the Family. She’s no more of a figure to Eden now than any of the older children are. Eilidh is probably as important to her now as Romy is. At least it means she no longer has to fight her indifference. If Eden is the One, it would be useful if she knew who Romy was, but she no longer has to pretend to be devoted to the sister who has never seized her heart.

  She doesn’t bother to go and visit her new brother. Lucien has called him Ilo, but he just sent the name by messenger to the Infirmary.

  He comes into the Pigshed in November, when the frost makes it impractical for him to stay with his mother in a Moses basket in the fields. Ursola arrives, hands him to a Teacher, and the Teacher puts him on the rug in front of the stove and goes back to leading the recital of the Pieties.

  Knowing the Pieties off by heart, Romy has the space left over in her brain to allow herself a little curiosity. Standing in the third row, smaller children in front and taller ones behind, she has a good view of the bundle in the hearth.

  ‘A liar is a thief,’ she recites. ‘Who lies to his brethren steals food from their mouths.’ And she sees a little red hand creep out from among the wrapping and wave in the air.

  ‘A promise is an empty vessel,’ she says. Eilidh, standing next to her, has lost her front teeth and has particular difficulty enunciating this one. The bundle by the fire wriggles its limbs inside its wrapping. It looks like a maggot, thinks Romy. Like a fat maggot sucking the goodness from the harvest. They’ll want me to see him. They’ll probably want me to look after him, but I won’t. He’s not my baby, not my mistake. I won’t be punished for it.

  Eden, two tiers in front, recites clumsily, but with pious verve. ‘Everybody is a nobody, everyone is a someone,’ they intone.
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  ‘We are the Ark,’ they say. ‘We are the future. Mankind depends on us,’ and then they applaud, as they do at the end of the Pieties every day, and they stand down for morning break.

  She’s putting on her coat to go out and run off the morning’s energy build-up with the others before chores begin, when the Teacher pulls her up. ‘Aren’t you going to say hello to your little brother?’ she asks.

  Reluctantly, Romy pauses, arm in sleeve. It’s not a question at all, really, but an order. Eilidh stops dressing, too. Always her friend, always loyal, despite her disgrace.

  ‘Ooh, yes,’ she says enthusiastically. ‘Come on, Romes.’

  Romy considers, just briefly, refusing, and then she sighs and lays her coat aside. Eden runs out into the farmyard with Heulwen and Roshin, laughing as though she will never bear a burden. She won’t, of course. No one is telling Eden to love the bastard. She has a higher purpose.

  They go over to the fireplace. She’s glad she has Eilidh, because she knows that, without her, doing this alone, with no one but the Teacher watching to see that she shows the correct responses, it would be so much harder.

  He is wrapped in linen. No angora from the special herd for Ilo. We have more in common than he will ever know, she thinks. The odd ones out from the very beginning. The outcasts. But that doesn’t mean I have to … oh.

  Eilidh has pulled the head-covering back so they can see his face. Romy’s first thought is that he is less ugly than her sister was. Her next, piling in on top like a second wave, obliterating everything, is that she can see all of them in his face. Her mother. Eden. And herself. A blond version of me, she thinks. The first time I’ve ever seen someone else who looks like me. I keep trying to see myself in Somer and Eden, but I can’t. But in him, I do. I see me in him. My God, I see me in him.

  And his eyes open and they’re blue, and they wander for a moment and then they fix upon her face, and he smiles.