The Poison Garden (2019 Sphere Edition)

by Alex Marwood

  And I’m about to give it up as a bad job for the night, go out and find the boy, when Jaivyn walks in, large as life and a lot uglier.

  39 | Romy

  Whatever he’s been spending Uri’s money on, it’s not his appearance.

  He doesn’t see me. Well, he does see me, for he glances in my direction, but he looks straight through. In the six years since I’ve seen him, his blond scalp-stubble has grown out mousy brown and hangs down to his shoulders to mingle with a raggedy beard. An alky Jesus. Grey jeans wrinkle around his crotch and an oversized plaid shirt feebly struggles to disguise his bulk.

  His eyes skim over me and he goes back to his dealings. He’s bought a pint of yellow beer, and gulps from it between sentences with the open-gulleted greed of someone for whom it is more than simply a pleasure. He wipes his beard on the back of his hand, and droplets seep onto his shirt.

  I drop my head and leave, before something about me can remind him who I am.

  It’s half-past eight and the street is dark and empty and ominous. The pub looks like an oasis of warmth and hospitality in comparison, the dim light spilling through its frosted windows showing up how few lights are on in buildings elsewhere. It’s cold. Cold enough to make my breath cloud as I exhale. The air this close to the sea is damp and clings to the skin. I get into the car.

  ‘He’s there,’ I say. ‘He just came in.’

  ‘I wondered if that was him,’ he says. ‘I was just about to text.’

  ‘How did you recognise him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I just … did.’

  ‘Right, well, we’re going to have to wait. Have you done your maths?’

  ‘In about five minutes. And I’ve done my English and French, too, for the week. They don’t expect much from you, do they?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Why are you learning French?’

  He jumbles out a garble of meaningless consonants, and smirks as I stare at him. ‘You should learn it too. Then we could talk to each other without anyone understanding.’

  ‘I think quite a lot of people speak French, Ilo. I mean, how many were there in your class?’

  ‘Oh.’ He looks disappointed. Brightens up again. ‘How about Arabic, then? That way we could even write each other notes.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ I say.

  All the things that will be lost. The languages, the art, the music, the food. It didn’t affect me so much when they were an abstract concept, but now I’ve seen more of the world the thought fills me with melancholy. We must follow Lucien and Vita’s example, baby, and make sure as much as we can save is preserved. I don’t suppose Uri is thinking about that side of things at all. A world led by Uri would be a bleak old world of drilling and killing.

  I could totally go some jerk chicken right now. I’m starving. I do hope I’ll taste that taste again before the world ends.

  As if he hears my thoughts, Ilo announces that he’s hungry. I tell him we have to wait. Sometimes the job comes first.

  And we have an important job to do tonight.

  They come, and go, and come and go. Mostly by themselves, sometimes in pairs. The Old Red Lion isn’t somewhere you go with people, the way they show on the television. It’s where people with no one go to be alone in company.

  The same three men are still smoking around the ashtray. I’m not sure I’ve seen any of them go inside. The clock on the dashboard ticks on. ‘What did Aunt Sarah say,’ I ask, ‘when you called?’

  ‘She said we shouldn’t be worrying too much about cleaning a place like that and what were we going to do about food?’

  ‘And you said?’

  ‘I said it would be fine, we’d go to the shops.’

  ‘Good,’ I say.

  ‘She’s a worrier.’

  ‘Yes, but she has a lot of worries, I guess. And she’s not used to them. She’s not even used to living with people.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says.

  ‘She needs to learn to trust you.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen now. I think I might have blown my chances,’ he says, mournfully.

  ‘Well, you need to make it happen, Ilo. You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t.’

  He sighs. ‘Okay. How do I do that, then? I don’t get the impression she even likes us much. She’s very nice and everything, but it’s all so … polite.’

  ‘What have you done to make her like you?’

  ‘Make her?’

  ‘Oh, Ilo.’

  He’s only thirteen, Romy. Keep remembering that. Think how you were at thirteen.

  He looks up. ‘Oh. Is that him, coming out?’

  I look where he’s looking. ‘Christ. Yes.’

  He walks, loose-limbed and smoking a cigarette, not looking around him at all, certain of his own wellbeing. God, of course he was never one of us. Not by talent nor habit. Lucien’s or not, he was just careless, relying on everyone else to keep him safe, never really aware of the dangers we protected him from, a bit like Eden. I’ll make sure you never let your guard down that way, baby. You’re going to need every wit you have.

  I turn on my engine, but don’t turn on my lights. No point trying to follow on foot. He’s a hundred yards ahead already and we’d have to run to catch him up, and even someone as drunk and complacent as Jaivyn would probably be alerted by the running footsteps of a pregnant peg-leg. I turn the car round and watch till I see which way he turns at the corner before switching on the lights. Then I follow and pass him, and he sends not a glance in our direction.

  A couple of corners on, I pull into a space up ahead of him. Drop Ilo off and he melts into a doorway. Bleak façades of red brick, pools of dreary sulphurous light from wide-spaced street lamps. Every city has one, I guess. These places where the world has moved on and left nothing but rot in its wake. Where you can be surrounded by 615,000 people and still be completely alone.

  One day the whole world will look like this.

  Jaivyn walks past and turns the next corner. When I turn, I see that this street is empty, desolate, perfect. A dead end with only a narrow alleyway leading out at the other end. I drive up to the end, park. Get out of the car and hear his footsteps hesitate for a moment, then speed up again as I turn side-on to show him that all that’s ahead is a slight and pregnant woman fiddling with a door lock. I walk towards him with my head bowed and my hood still up, and my hands buried deep in my pockets. My right hand clasps the handle of the filleting knife I took from Aunt Sarah’s kitchen drawer, and my thumb caresses the back of the blade.

  Men are meant to cross the road when they see a lone woman in the dark. Simple etiquette, really.

  Sometimes, though, they should cross the road because not all lone women are potential victims.

  Jaivyn just keeps coming. Too drunk, perhaps, to think of other people. Or maybe that domineering streak he showed at Plas Golau, the brushing past, the slamming of doors, the pulling by the hair, has turned, in the Outside, into a genuine pleasure in frightening women.

  I stop ten feet from him and lower my hood.

  He stops, too. Peers at me through the gloom. ‘Do I know you?’

  I raise my chin and look into his face. It takes him a moment, then ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he says. Then, ‘Why aren’t you dead?’

  And then he says ‘Oh, you’re pregnant,’ and Ilo comes up silently behind him and his lovely blacksmith knife slides into Jaivyn’s back as though it were made of cream cheese.

  ‘Oh,’ says Jaivyn.

  There’s a brief period, when someone is taken by surprise, when you are completely in control. It takes them anything up to five seconds to fight back. That’s what my training was for. To cut out the what-do-I-dos and make use of every second. He’s teetering and gawping, and I step forward and bury my own knife in his abdomen, slice down towards his groin, to make room for my fist to enter his body. Like gutting a pig. And then I bury my hand to the wrist in his pulsating viscera and turn the blade up to meet his heart. Not the best knife I’ve
ever used, but it does the job.

  ‘Oh,’ he says again, a coil of gut slipping out through the hole in his trunk, and then he falls to the ground and my hand and knife slip, with a smooth sucking sound, back out into the air.

  Ilo looks at me and his eyes have gone dark.

  Jaivyn is dead already. I’ve opened up too much of him to ever put it back. A waterfall of blood cascades into the gutter and I step back, watch as he twitches, and wipe my blade on my left sleeve, for my right is already too bloodied to salvage this top.

  Ilo takes the photos. His first kill. He deserves the honour. And besides, he already knows how to work his camera. Uri won’t trust me enough to believe I’ve got the job done based on the medallion alone. I feel around inside Jaivyn’s collar and my hand closes on a leather string. Even after all these years, even when he must long since have given up on being the One, he’s still wearing it. I cut the string with my blade and slip it into my pocket. One down.

  In the outskirts of Bristol, before we hit the motorway to Hounslow, Ilo spots the golden arches and bleaching halogen of a fast food restaurant and I pull in, because our hunger is as bad as it’s ever been. They seem to be everywhere, these places. I park and go in in my clean clothes and buy four things called Big Macs, which we eat in the car park, leaning against the car, washed down with a bottle of water. They’re bland yet highly flavoured, a strange mix of slimy, dry and crunchy, and I eat mine in three bites each.

  ‘So how do I make her like me?’ he asks.

  I learned a lot from Lucien, shut up in that room with him, listening to him ramble.

  ‘It’s easy to make someone like you,’ I tell him. ‘You ask them about themselves. Like I told you before. Have you even asked her a single thing about herself yet?’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I see. She’s always asking us questions. I didn’t realise that was what it was about.’

  ‘Yes. And then the other thing you do, you listen carefully to the answer, and you ask more questions based on that, to show you’re listening.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says.

  ‘And you praise her,’ I say. ‘Tell her how great she is. Tell her when she says something smart or wise, let her feel appreciated.’

  ‘Wow,’ he says.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘They love that shit.’

  Before the End

  2014

  40 | Romy

  She’s nearly nineteen when Vita comes to her in the physic garden, where the foxgloves are going over and she’s harvesting the seeds by tying paper bags over the flower heads.

  ‘You lucky girl,’ she says.

  Romy nearly wipes her forehead with her glove, remembers in time and strips it off. She was cutting hemlock yesterday and the outer layer will still be soaked in sap. ‘What?’ she asks.

  ‘He wants to see you.’ Vita’s a bit grim about the mouth, not her usual self.

  ‘Who?’ she starts to ask, and then she realises what she’s saying and she’s speechless. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. I thought he was done with all that, but it seems you’ve caught his eye.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Romy. She feels slightly sick. Lucien is her Father. It has never occurred to her to expect anything else.

  ‘It’s a great honour,’ says Vita, but her expression doesn’t match her words.

  ‘Yes,’ says Romy. ‘Of course. I am honoured. I just … I wasn’t expecting … ’

  ‘I can imagine,’ says Vita. ‘Well, there you are. Looks like you’ve drawn the long straw. But don’t be boasting or telling people.’

  ‘No,’ says Romy.

  There’s a spiteful edge to her next words. ‘And don’t think this makes you special.’

  Romy’s face flushes. ‘No,’ she lies. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Your mother thought it made her special,’ says Vita, ‘and look what that did for her.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘You’re a vessel,’ says Vita. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Romy.

  ‘Right. Tomorrow, after lunch.’

  She nods, her mouth dry. Not me, she thinks. I don’t deserve this. I don’t want it. But how do you refuse?

  But there’s an itch of excitement beneath her skin. Maybe I can save our family. Maybe if he’s pleased with me, my mother will be forgiven. Maybe I will mother the One, and that is why I’m here. Why I’ve always been here.

  ‘I’ll be waiting by the door once the Cooks have finished clearing,’ says Vita. ‘Come clean, and bring your solstice dress.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and returns to her toxic harvest.

  41 | Romy

  Romy’s life is less monitored than that of the average Drone. But still, she spends the next twenty-four hours feeling as though she has a flashing beacon attached to her back and everyone is staring. But the day goes on and nobody looks and nobody comments, and she goes through the motions without anyone spotting that something is different in her world. And, inside, little grains of fear and anticipation. Because, whatever Vita says, having Lucien’s eye light upon you will change your life forever.

  She takes her time in the Bath House in the middle of the morning, when there’s not much competition. Washes twice with the lavender soap from her box, rinses and rinses her naked scalp, trims her fingernails and toenails, and goes to find her solstice dress. It lies, ironed and neatly folded by the Launderers, beneath her spare uniform. It’s not hard to slip it into her backpack that’s usually full of tools and take it with her without anyone noticing.

  *

  In the Great House, Vita waits for her where the sweeping staircase meets the first-floor landing, and leads her briskly, in silence, past the series of knocked-through bedrooms that constitute the Infirmary and its pharmacy, to the door that leads to the private quarters. The number of people who have gone past this door can be counted on one’s fingers and toes, and they never speak of what they’ve seen.

  I’m one of those, now, thinks Romy. Me, who has always been an outsider here.

  Vita fetches a key from her pocket. Turns and looks Romy up and down. Then she shakes her head slightly, as though the sight of her leaves her mystified, and opens up.

  They step onto a staircase. Soft moss wool carpet, white walls. The carpet is so thick that their footsteps are muffled as they walk. Vita stops at the first door in the corridor at the top, pushes it open. ‘You can get changed in here,’ she says. ‘I’ll wait outside. There’s an en suite. You might want to wash, I suppose.’

  She goes in. It’s a bedroom, the sort she’s read about in books. High ceilings, high windows, a four-poster, a chaise longue, a full-length cheval glass in one corner, a linen press, a dressing table. She’s surprised to realise that she knows all the words, although she has never seen such furniture in the flesh before. That extra year in the Pigshed, reading, when she was fourteen. The room is spotless. Not a mote of dust in the shaft of sunlight that falls through the curtains, the bedclothes folded neatly on top of the bed, awaiting an occupant.

  She puts her rucksack on the chaise.

  Who cleans this? she wonders. It’s not just sitting here. Someone comes in and cleans. A Launderer, I suppose, sworn to secrecy.

  She goes through the door to the right, and gasps. There’s a bath. A whole bath, for one bedroom. And a basin that sits atop a cupboard and what she can only assume is a flush toilet. That can’t work, surely? All this way up in the top of the house? How does the water get here?

  She turns a tap on the sink and hot water gushes out. They have plumbing downstairs, of course, but the water comes in a trickle, to preserve resources. She puts her hand on the handle that sticks out of the porcelain cistern above the toilet, pushes it down and laughs in astonishment as water thunders into the pan. She’s heard of these, but never seen one. It’s like magic.

  She washes her face perfunctorily, sniffs her armpits, but despite her nervousness she can still smell a faint whiff of lavender. On the sink lies a whole bar of the same soap, still wrapped in
its greasproof paper. She makes a note to bring her old bar and swap it for that one, if she’s invited back. And allow time for a bath all to herself. If she’s invited back.

  Of course I will be, she thinks. He won’t find me wanting.

  She changes into her dress and studies herself in the mirror. Long and thin and strong and tanned, eyes big and green and frightened. I look vulnerable, she thinks. He’ll like that. I can kill a sheep with my bare hands – have killed a sheep with my bare hands – but I know what he’ll want today is an innocent to teach. I can give him that. I shall give him anything he wants, because the world depends on it.

  She lets herself out.

  ‘Rules,’ says Vita.

  ‘Yes,’ says Romy.

  ‘You never speak to anyone about anything here.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you do what he asks and you never question him.’

  ‘Of course,’ says Romy. ‘I always have.’

  ‘And you leave when he tells you to.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you must please him, or you won’t be asked back.’

  ‘I want to please him,’ she says. ‘I want nothing more. But I’m afraid I won’t know how.’

  Vita looks suddenly softer. ‘Don’t be afraid, Romy. Everyone’s a bit afraid, their first time. Just be grateful that it’s Lucien. You’ll get used to it. Just remember that he wants the best for all of us.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘Oh, I know.’

  ‘Right,’ says Vita, and knocks on the door to Lucien’s quarters.

  There’s a strange smell. Oily, chemical and yet not. As if he’s been burning something. Lucien stands in the doorway, blocks her view of the rest of the room, and leans a forearm on the jamb. He’s wearing loose cotton drawstring trousers and a billowy shirt in some feather-light, soft material that she’s not encountered before. Silk? Cotton? She’s not sure. Its buttons are undone halfway to the bottom, and she sees a medallion on a leather cord like the one his children wear, and a sea of curly white chest hair.