The Poison Garden (2019 Sphere Edition)

by Alex Marwood

  Ilo does a shrug that consumes his whole body. ‘I don’t know,’ he replies. ‘I just … can. And I want to be a Guard when I grow up, so … ’

  She rolls back onto her front, props herself up on her elbows. ‘A Guard?’

  Ilo nods.

  ‘Really? I had you pegged for an Engineer.’

  ‘It’s the obvious thing to be, if I’m going to keep you all safe.’

  Safe. The word makes the hairs on her arms rise. I saw the brain through the hole in her skull, she thinks, and pushes the thought away. ‘We’ll all keep each other safe,’ she tells him.

  He wrinkles his nose. There are freckles across the bridge, like on their mother’s, brought out by the summer sun. ‘Yes, but somebody’s got to do it properly,’ he says. ‘Eden may be the One, but she’s a long way off being able to look after herself. I know they won’t want me, but I want them. What they can teach me. So I’ve got to be the best I can be. Be better than everyone in the Pigshed. So they can’t say no.’

  The heather hums with seeking bees and a lark sings, somewhere up there in the blue. She looks at her little brother and she thinks about how best to make sure the One survives.

  ‘Well, then, you’ll need to learn to fight,’ she says, and pushes him down the slope.

  Among the Dead

  November 2016

  26 | Romy

  The driver smells – musty. As though he’s been kept in a damp cellar between trips in his car. A headful of unruly black curls, pubic sideburns all the way down to his jaw. One of those simian faces with eyes that narrow to slits when he smiles.

  ‘Looks like someone’s having a good day,’ he says, and laughs like a barking dog.

  I pull myself out of my blur of rage and size up my situation. I’m sitting on a seat that feels, from the way the frame digs into my thighs and buttocks, as though the stuffing has fallen out of it. In the gloom of the interior, I see that this car is old. Older than I am, probably. The winding handle for the window to my left has fallen off, just a cog in the door where it should be. On the dashboard, a plastic model of a piebald bull terrier nods and nods and nods, and a length of silver sticky tape holds the glove compartment closed. Around my feet, a sea of paper and old soft-drink containers.

  I look at him. He’s grinning at the road ahead through the windscreen, his teeth improbably white.

  ‘What you been up to, my duck?’ he asks. The heater blows scalding air onto my feet, yet my shoulders are surrounded with chilly autumn draught. I pull my hoodie up to cover the back of my neck. Stupid, stupid me, letting the red mist override my ability to look before I leapt.

  ‘Been to visit my grandparents,’ I tell him.

  ‘Grandparents, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. Not sure how to play this. Friendly, so he thinks he sees a come-on, or standoffish, which would be likely to enrage? Or tough, so he knows not to fuck with me?

  ‘And what do they think to a great-grandbabby?’ he asks.

  Babby. There’s something primeval about the misuse of the word. I’m in a lot of trouble, here. ‘They’re old-fashioned,’ I say.

  That laugh again. ‘Babby got no daddy, eh?’

  I’m going for standoffish. Let him think I’m a dumb chick who thinks that grand manners are enough to keep her safe. ‘What an intrusive question,’ I say.

  The grin flashes off. ‘Oh, no offence, maid,’ he says, and turns onto the motorway slip road. We’ve not slowed down enough at any point for me to try the door. Not without risking harm to you, baby. ‘Although on second thoughts it’s a bit late to be calling you maid, eh?’

  He puts his foot down as we hit the motorway and the car roars and lurches into the centre lane. I’m probably safe at eighty miles per hour. It’s when we return to the side roads that I need to be prepared.

  Maybe if I engage him. At least I can get the measure of him then. He might just be very, very stupid; not realise how he comes across. Or I might be paranoid. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility; I was raised paranoid. And he’s not done anything yet. Much.

  ‘So where are you off to?’ I ask.

  ‘That depends,’ he says, and gives me a flash of his big white teeth. Falsies, I think. No way they’d be that white in a face so begrimed. He puts his hand on his gearstick and caresses it with his thumb.

  We pass Reading, then Slough, in silence. He weaves in and out of the fast lane while I stare ahead through the windscreen. Then he hits his indicator and turns off, goes through a tunnel under the motorway, and takes us along a road leading south. Winter trees, scrubby undergrowth, no people.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

  ‘Short cut,’ he says.

  Every bone, every hair, on my body, is alert now. ‘Short cut to where?’

  ‘I told you,’ he says. ‘That depends.’

  I look out through my side window. We’re entering an area of scruffy old storage units. The sort of dead zone that lurks on the edge of every town I’ve ever been through. Streetlights illuminate shuttered doors and blank, windowless corrugated walls. Weeds grow up through potholed concrete; skips are filled with wooden pallets and broken chairs. The Outside is full of places like this: places where buildings have lost their purpose and everyone who used to come there has moved on and left them behind.

  ‘Costs me a lot in petrol, this,’ he says, and that thumb strokes, strokes, strokes.

  Oh, Romy, you are in so much trouble. Don’t say anything. Don’t speak. Anything you say will sound like you’re afraid.

  ‘How you going to pay me back, maid?’

  In a broad stretch of emptiness, a crossing signal turns red and he pulls to a halt. Nowhere to run to, but I grab my chance, pull on the door handle. It flips loosely in my hand, and nothing happens. That face turns towards me and he grins: a death’s head that smells of tobacco smoke and sebaceous secretions.

  He pulls away. Swings the wheel and pulls into a cul-de-sac. Metal walls and a high brick border, no light. Elder and buddleia shedding fading leaves, their roots embedded in the gaps between the walls, their feet buried, like mine, in litter. That wall in the headlights is too high for scaling, even if I were fit.

  ‘Back in a minute, maid,’ he says.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Need a slash,’ he says. ‘Don’t you be going anywhere, eh?’

  I test him. Make a move to put him at his ease, give him reason to think he’s the one with the power. ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ I say.

  The grin again. ‘Why, maid, whatever makes you think I’m going to do that?’

  Options. I cycle through them as he stands with his back to me in the headlights, raising himself up and down on the balls of his feet as though the better to pump urine from his bladder. Wriggle myself behind the steering wheel to his door and trust that I can do it fast enough to get out before he’s back on top of me? Run? Not an option. I could outpace him with ease, even as I am, but I can only outpace a moving car if I have somewhere to run to. Steal the car? He took the keys with him when he went. Talk my way out? He doesn’t seem like a talker.

  I slide my knife from its holster and slip it into my hoodie pocket.

  I see him zip his jeans up, and then his head drops and he becomes immobile. I wait. It’s gone silent inside right now. Where there should be a person, a personality, is a howling void. All that empty blackness, waiting to be filled. I put my hand in my pocket, caress the handle of my knife, rest my thumb on the button that will make it spring open. It feels solid. It comforts me.

  When he comes, he comes fast. His head snaps upright, and then he’s running towards me, and in the headlights his face is the face of the devil.

  Three steps is all it takes to cross the yard and get his hand on the door handle. And then his fingers are buried to the palm in my hair and he’s pulling me out onto the concrete.

  Despite myself, I am taken by surprise. I’d forgotten, so long is it since I last had it, how vulnerable hair makes you. And I remember Jaivyn d
oing this to me when I was five, and I am filled with rage. My scalp shrieks with pain. He’s strong. Manual-labour strong. No dexterity to what he does, just brute force and indifference to my humanity. I buck and try to grab at the hand. He hauls me into the open, drags me backwards into the shadow of the building. I try to dig in my heels, but it’s useless against the backward impetus. And then he punches me sharply in the side of my head, and the world goes white.

  Play dead. I have two things to my advantage: that he thinks I’m unconscious and that he believes me harmless. I let my body go limp as I wait for my brain to recover, hear him grunt with the effort of dragging my dead weight. Not yet, Romy. Not yet. Not while he’s behind you.

  He drops me. Throws me onto a bed of gravel and broken things. Stands over me in his big old boots. They are covered in drips of paint and plaster. I wait. Release a noise between a groan and a whimper.

  He laughs into the darkness. He believes me. He thinks he’s won. That’s good. My right arm is half-pinned beneath my body, the hand still safely in my pocket. No power to swing it like this. Wait, Romy, wait. One chance is all you get.

  With the tip of a boot, he rolls me onto my back. I open myself up, lie with my eyes half-closed, and watch through my eyelashes. And, when he raises a leg to step over and straddle me, I strike.

  It’s not accurate, but it doesn’t need to be. The femoral artery runs close to the surface at the groin, and my blade is wide and sharp. Flat-out on the ground isn’t the best angle to hit from, so I hit with all my might, while he’s off balance. Feel my glorious blade glide through denim and flesh as though they were made of butter, feel the tip hit the bone, slide sideways. Artery, testicles: either one will stop a man stone dead.

  He screams. The sound bounces off the metal walls. I pull the knife out, quickly, before he crumples. Scoot backwards with my heels as he falls to his knees. He’s no longer looking at me. He’s gone inside, where the pain is. His eyes are shut and his hands are clamped over the deep black stain that spreads over the tops of his thighs.

  ‘You cunt!’ he screams.

  Not down yet. Not entirely out. One chance to make sure. No need to torture him, but you need to be sure. Go for the side of the throat. Don’t waste energy on the gristle of the oesophagus. Go for the artery. If you’re going for a swift kill, arteries are your friends. I flip the handle of the knife across my palm and slash.

  He dies quietly. I wonder, as I elbow my way backwards, if he feels proud that his last words in this world were ‘you cunt’. Maybe he has other things on his mind. Or nothing at all. Blood loss affects the brain quickly, especially if the leak is near the head.

  He spurts. Warm, salty liquid smacks my face.

  He moans. No more of that barking laughter now.

  Another spurt. It spatters my hoodie, the front of my dress, my skin. There’s disease in blood. I don’t have time to worry about that. The front of his jeans is soaked, all the way to his knees. Blood drools from the cloth, creeps across the concrete. So much blood. There’s over a gallon in the human body. I scoot back once more, and his final pump spatters harmlessly to the left of my legs.

  He crumples. To knees, to face. His hands have not left his groin.

  I blink. My eyes sting as his cooling blood slides off my brow.

  One last groan, and nothing more.

  You kick, deep inside me. The man spasms a couple of times and lies still. I pull my sleeve down over the heel of my hand and wipe my face. Roll over onto my hands and knees. There was a time when I could get to my feet from the ground without the help of my arms. Not now.

  I wait five minutes, but he doesn’t move again and the blood slowly stops spreading. Out on the road, the swish of car tyres, a brief change in the pattern on the shadows in our yard. No one comes to investigate the noise. In the bleaching light from the headlamps, the man looks silver-grey, the viscous pool that surrounds him a deep, reflective black. In the morning, when daylight comes, it will be dirty, flaking red-brown.

  I pick my knife up. Take it over to a skip that squats further back between the buildings. Fish around until my hand finds a dirty rag and wipe it off. Blood is bad for metal joints, and hard to remove; gluey, once it’s dry. I cleaned mine every night at Plas Golau, regardless of whether it had seen use. Love your weapons and they won’t let you down.

  I fold the rag up and put it in my pocket. It’s twelve miles to Hounslow from Slough. I can dispose of it on my walk, along the top of the motorway embankment, where nobody ever goes. It’s a long walk, but I should make it before morning.

  Before the End

  2012

  27 | Romy

  2011

  The latrines are built into the south wall of the courtyard, where on the outside the land slopes sharply off into the woods and a path runs down to what was once a piece of useless bog by the main road. It’s far away from the house and far enough below the reservoir that it’s ideal for their discreet little bio-gas plant and slurry pit.

  Eight latrines serve the main compound: little stinky sheds that no one would dream of using to snatch a moment’s privacy. Rough wood planks suspended over blue plastic barrels in the hole beneath and tubs of water and ladles for washing off once your business is done. The barrels can be accessed via wooden doors off the path, and doing so is one of the Dung Squad’s duties.

  Collecting the barrels and taking them down the hill was once a communal duty done on rotation. It was Uri who came up with the idea of Sanitation Engineers. The fact that Squad membership can double as fatigues goes almost unremarked. The Sanitation Engineers clean out these, and the Guard House latrines, and the little septic tank behind the Great House, muck out the pigs and the cattle and the horses and the poultry in the winter, pick up after them in the meadows in the summer and, in February, dig out the digested manure and give it back to the land.

  They may be called the Sanitation Engineers in official language, But Uri quickly coined the epithet ‘Dung Squad’ and allowed it to spread through the compound like muck on a field. And now they have their own separate table at the back of the dining hall and a dedicated dormitory, for, try as they might, the stink never really washes off.

  The narrative of equality rumbles on. Everybody talks the talk, but when it comes to walking the walk it’s different. Though no one would ever call it demotion out loud, everyone knows that wrongdoers are invariably sent to duties agricultural. And, when they’re already wallowing in mud, the Dung Squad is the only way down. There is no level below Dung Squad, beyond leaving, quietly, in the night.

  Somer is their Leader. It was her choice. Stay a Farmer, or become a Leader. Go down, to go up. Leaders get to attend the Council. She may smell of shit, but she’s back, in a way, in the inner circle.

  Uri’s getting stronger. They all see it. Lucien came off his horse a couple of summers ago and spent the night unconscious on the moor before they found him, and there are people among them who wonder occasionally if he has truly recovered. He walks with a cane now, and spends more time in his quarters, and when he appears he seems mellowed, somehow: distant. Though smiling. Always smiling. And then they dismiss it straight from their heads because he’s Lucien, Leader of Leaders, and everything they are and everything they will be comes from him.

  Romy and Ilo train every day, slipping off together when the Pigshed lets out. Down in the woods, up on the moors, in the hive compound, in the godowns. Step and kick and step and kick. She can stand one-legged like a stork for fifteen minutes and still kick out to head height when she stops. Can pull herself up all the way to her breasts on the barn crossbar a hundred times. Shin up a tree trunk all the way to the branches on thigh power alone. Lift a cider barrel above her head. She works her knife as she harvests: the slash and the slice; the upward cut and the twisting stab. All theory, so far, but muscle memory is a wonderful thing. If I have to fight, she thinks, I will be able. My arms and legs and hands and torso will know what to do, even while my brain is catching up.

 
; She has been volunteering to help the Farmers butcher the livestock when they’re brought in for feasts and preserving for a year, now. She’s watched, quietly, through the window. Seen Fitz and Jacko and Willow dispatch animals with single, skilful, unhesitant lunges – a guard duty and privilege, to accustom them to the shock of death. She has yet to bring about the act of slaughter, but Romy knows how it feels to slice from groin to sternum, to have still-warm innards tumble out onto her slicing hand. She knows how it feels to bury her arms to the shoulder in a stag that had been strutting proud on a mountainside an hour before, to hack through the trachea to pull out the lungs. She can strip the pelt from a rabbit with two cuts and a single wrench of the wrist.

  Ilo has a natural talent, although he’s only eight. Old enough to learn. An hour each day, the two of them, dancing their dance of secret violence, hitting with all their might and rarely making contact. She’d like to train Eden too, but Eden’s not interested. She’s ten and knows her status. She’s done her carpentry apprenticeship, but no one has asked her to hammer a ploughshare or stoop down in the fields. Eden will go straight into Leadership training when she’s grown. But she’s never seen the poison in their garden, as Romy has. Never seen the secret graveyard. Doesn’t know how unlikely it looks that she will ever be grown at all, unless her siblings form her bodyguard.

  They practise stalking, in the woods. Take turns to be pursuer and prey, practising camouflage and silent movement. Sometimes they follow a Guard on patrol, track them all the way from the gate to the dam, or wait with frozen limbs to catch a squirrel, tickle a fat brown trout out of the water and watch it gape for water on the bank.

  They’re returning to the compound over the wall by the privies when Ilo touches her arm and presses his finger to his lips. She stops, listens. Someone is down there, talking, and their mother’s voice, low and submissive, replies. Romy signals her brother to work his way along the bank and climb the old Scots pine twenty feet along so they can see.