The Poison People

by Alex Makepeace

  I wonder: were you just playing the fool? Playing to the crowd? Playing for all it was worth?

  And in that other wilderness, that suburban desert, three more lost souls saved each other, and thereby themselves.

  All of us were orphans—Ma, cut off from her family, her guru, everything she had held dear; Lauren, a grandmom looking for a grandchild, a chance to make good her failures as a mother, as all mothers fail; me, who didn’t even have a name yet.

  “What do you call him?”

  Ma smiled—of all the details, this was the one she hadn’t considered.

  “Matthew,” she said, after her father.

  “Matthew,” said Lauren. “The Evangelist, the first of the Apostles.” Ma’s smile became all the more fixed.

  “Come on, Matthew,” said Lauren. “How about we get you a little fresh air. You don’t mind?” she asked Ma.

  “No,” she said. “In fact, I was just about to get some light in here myself. I’ve been kinda low,” she admitted.

  “Of course!” said Lauren. “You’d be crazy to feel otherwise, honey. Just you get on with things, we’ll be right out here, won’t we, Matt?”

  Ma took a deep breath and got on with her life.

  The ‘car crash payout’ catered for our needs, although instead of visiting the bank on our monthly trips to Jacksonville to, supposedly, pick up the insurance money, Ma went to a luggage locker at the railway station, where she collected used bundles of notes and slipped them in her shoulder bag.

  If only, she used to say, she had realised how lucky she was then—this cash appearing out of nowhere—she would have maybe squirreled some away, saved it for a rainy day (and there would be many in Edgbaston and Hebdon) but instead she got into the whole wealthy widow thing. Had her hair cut, bought some new clothes, installed cable TV. True to her more conventional cover—she told Lauren she had been a social worker in Boston—she began to dress a bit less like a hippy, to mix with the other ‘moms’, drink in their experiences and echo them back in their conversations. The birth? Well, girls, they say we can’t remember pain but whoever said that must have been a man!

  One day, Lauren suggested they take a trip out to Roanoke Island, site of the earliest English settlement in the US. They drove along the high road that skirted the Cape then down into the rolling, fertile farmland that had attracted the early settlers and which still shivered with acres of tobacco plants. Ma imagined those Elizabethan men and women working the fields, battling the natives, clinging on to the edge of an unmapped continent. She thought of the black slaves who replaced them, looked out for a glimpse of their heirs among the towering shrubs.

  She glanced at Lauren who, she had proudly explained, came from an old North Carolina family that could trace its roots back to Bonny Prince Charlie. Ma thought about where Lauren’s money had come from—could it be possible to hold this old lady, the epitome of generous, God-fearing America, responsible for the deeds of her slave-driving ancestors?

  Then she thought: what about me? The daughter of Italian, German and Irish immigrants whose houses sat on lots taken from the native people; whose tax money had paid for the bombs that fell on the Iraqis. My whole nation is built on bones. All our gentleness, our so-called civilisation, springs from an act of violence somewhere along the line, is insured by our guns and bombs.

  Still, the Swami claimed the rich, unencumbered by material need, had a greater opportunity to reach enlightenment. But if our wealth is built on the blood, the suffering of others, then what kind of moral basis can our enlightenment have?

  Morality, what’s that? said the Swami in Ma’s head. What’s moral in one society can be immoral in another, Ma Renuka. Morality is invented religion, which is just another form of enslavement. Discovered religion, which is yours and yours alone, is the true faith.

  But what if in my religion, Swami, I think it’s wrong to build our peace upon war?

  Then, my child, there should be more people like you, many more!

  “Turn left here, dear,” said Lauren.

  And there, anchored in the bay, was the most beautiful riverboat “straight out of Huckleberry Finn,” said Ma. “We cruised down the river and I remember feeling so at peace, so happy to be with you and Lauren in this strange new life. This new life far from the commune, from the Swami.

  “And I felt this sudden flush of joy because I realised, and I can still hear the water wheel as we glided down that river, the summer sun against my face, that all my longing for knowledge, enlightenment was a way of trying to fill a hole inside of me, a hole I had had for years, since I was a kid, maybe. A longing for someone, for something that I hadn’t gotten then. My pop, maybe, who’d left us when I was a kid. Sounds pathetic, doesn’t it, but that Freudian slip—you, Matthew—maybe said it all.

  “Anyway, this came to me instantaneously as Lauren chatted away and you gurgled and it was like a great weight lifted off me, a great weight I realised I’d been carrying for maybe the past ten years, longer, even. Sure—the hole remained, I could feel it still there inside me, but the need to fill it had disappeared. I accepted myself for who I was, hole and all. And then you started to cry and I forgot all about it until later.”

  “Tell me about Crow Town.”

  “Croatoan.”

  “Crow Town!”

  “We got off the boat at some kind of nature reserve. Lauren explained that it was the site of the very first English settlement in the United States. It even pre-dated Jamestown. Do you know who was at Jamestown?”

  “James?”

  “No! John Smith. And do you know who John Smith was dating?”

  “James?”

  “No! Pocahontas, the princess in the cartoon. Anyway, it was the first English colony. They built their camp and planted some seeds, but then things started to go wrong and some of them needed to return to England for supplies. The captain of the ship said—if you have to leave the settlement, carve your destination into a tree and I will come and find you.

  “So, the captain heads to England, but there are dreadful problems with the weather and then, when he does get home, he has all sorts of difficulties that mean he doesn’t actually return to the colony for three long years . . . ”

  “What sort of difficulties?”

  “All sorts.”

  “What sorts?”

  “Do you want me to tell you the story, Matthew?”

  “Yes . . . ”

  “Well, then. So, he gets his ships together again and they make the treacherous crossing. But when they arrive at the colony they find no one there! Everyone has disappeared . . . ”

  “Disappeared . . . ?”

  “The fields are grown over, the houses half knocked-down. There is a big fence around the empty settlement, though, which suggests that the colonists wanted to keep someone out.”

  “Pocahontas!”

  “No one knows. But there on a tree nearby to the settlement was carved the mysterious word: CROATOAN.”

  “Crow Town!”

  “CRO-AT-OAN. To this day no one knows for sure what the word means. There were over two hundred settlers in the new colony but not a trace of any of them was ever found again. Some say Croatoan was the place they were headed, but the captain and his men searched all over and asked the local Indians and no one could find any trace. Others say Croatoan was a great god of the forest who had taken those first settlers as sacrifice. Gobbled them up!”

  “No!”

  “No, my darling, because only Ma knows the truth . . . ”

  “Tell the truth, Ma!”

  “Croatoan is of the forest, yes, but it’s no monster. Croatoan is the forest, Matthew. It’s the forest’s secret name for itself, it’s where you go when you want to hide. Croatoan is in the dark spaces between the trees, the shadow of the mulberry bush, the terwitawoooooo . . . ”

  “Terwitawooooo!”

  “Of the owls on the branches. It’s the snug, secret place—the heart of the forest known only to the special people. To p
eople like me. And people like . . . you.”

  “Me too?”

  “You too. It’s where we go to hide, to keep ourselves safe. So when you hear that word . . . ”

  “What word?”

  “Croatoan. Crow Town.”

  “Crow Town . . . ”

  “That’s when you head for the heart of the forest, Matthew. That’s when you run and hide . . . ”

  28

  The jeep is parked crossways between two lampposts in the pedestrianised shopping centre, luminous yellow tape blocking the path ahead. I smelled the smoke—a bitter mix of tar, wood and plastic—some way off, and had begun to feel the crunch of broken glass underfoot, but this is first proof that something really bad has gone down. This isn’t your usual trouble between youths—with its swirling sandy yellow and chocolate brown camouflage, that’s an army jeep.

  I begin to head off in the opposite direction when I see a squad of them coming the other way. Like the jeep, they’re still in their desert cammies. Their skin baked Arabian brown, their rifles at the ready.

  I’m slowing down, thinking on my decreasing options, when I’m gestured over.

  I calculate my chances. I could leg it, but you just have to look in their eyes to know these guys are no beginners. I wouldn’t make it down the street.

  So I lift my head up, walk towards them, pull out my ID.

  “Alright.” I grin.

  “Alreet,” says one of them. He’s from Sunderland.

  “Man, you’ve come a long way,” I say, playing up my Macam accent.

  “Aye, too fucking right, mate. We thought we were on our way home, but we got re-routed. Turns out the same fucking shit is going down here! What you doing in these parts?” He takes my ID.

  “Been to see me lass, haven’t I,” I say. “She lives out in the suburbs. All kicked off here, then?”

  “Kicked off fucking everywhere, mate,” he says. “Fucking Mozzies. Where you from then?”

  I risk it. “Hebdon,” I say.

  “Fucking Hebber!” He grins, handing me back the ID without a glance. The others laugh. “Man, you’re better off back there. This here’s injun territory.”

  “Nasty then?”

  The soldiers chuckle. “Not compared to over there. The Mozzies here have got a bit of catching up to do, if you know what I mean. We showed them though, eh? Taught them how to walk like an Eeegyptshian . . . ”

  The squaddies chorus, “Walk like an Eeegyptshian!”

  “Are the railways still running?” I ask. “I was planning to get home from there.”

  “Yeah, we’ve secured the central station. But best avoid Charwood, Belgrave and Clarendon Park; we’re still mopping up.”

  As I walk along the station road I begin to see increasing signs of disorder. Broken grass, fencing and bricks strewn across the road. Scorch marks and dirty rags. A bloody trainer. Baton rounds, gas canisters lying along the gutter. And there, piled in a shiny golden pyramid by a garden wall—cartridge cases.

  A group of white folks are watching some firefighters douse flames still licking the gaping roof of a post office. “Disgrace,” one of them greets her friend. “Too right, Mary,” her friend agrees. “Wicked, I said. Wicked.”

  There’s more army around the station, backed up by heavy-looking armoured cars I can remember seeing on a documentary about Northern Ireland. Only these ones are sandy rather than dirty green. I keep my hood down, act as pleased to see them as all the other white folks milling about.

  I say a loud “Alreet,” and flash my ID at a squaddie, who waves me through, and then I’m on the station concourse where it’s business as usual but without any ethnic minorities.

  Ma was right: it’s so easy to forget the violence that underwrites our lives on this wealthy, quiet corner of a continental plate. The violence that’s always there, even if we can’t see it—that’s being acted out in a foreign country, a subterranean lab for our—for your—benefit. Bloody horror that becomes collateral damage, sanitised by the time it reaches our living rooms, our laptops. Until the natives get restless, that is, then WALLOP and everything changes. The State reveals itself like a waking giant.

  Suddenly, the troops are on the streets.

  And I understand too that that’s the source of my dread, what my bug has evolved to understand. It’s not fooled by our civilised cities, our synthetic skins, our good manners.

  It knows the naked, violent nature of man. And is naked, violent in its turn.

  Crow Town, our word carved into the wood.

  It means: scram, boy, head for the heart of the forest. It means: go back home, Vereesh. Not to Hebdon. Home to Edgbaston.

  Our unshared home, our wee nest, just Ma and me. Between the flight from Hyderabad and the endless hurry, the hassle of moving from one freezing apartment to another and the letter that dropped on the mat one morning from Samat saying about Hebdon, there was Edgbaston.

  My happy childhood, with my own room and Ma to myself, who seemed happier too. Maybe it was because I was attending school by now and she could get out a bit, take that part-time job in the library. Maybe because this time, for whatever reason, we appeared to be staying put.

  Edgbaston—home. Crow Town.

  We would rendezvous at the tower.

  Built way back, Perott’s Folly dominates the area. Seven storeys high, it served no apparent purpose, so we filled it with our stories and dreams. Ma used to say a princess lived at the top and it was from here she had to trail down her hair for the dashing prince to clamber up. Look, she would say as we passed on the bus, look, there she is, but I never managed to catch a glimpse. Then when I got into the Rings, I learned Tolkien may have actually drawn upon it for inspiration. So every time I would trail past I would gawp upwards, imagining Dark Lord Saruman standing atop, waving his white staff and ordering the Orc armies into battle.

  It was here, I would think, here it all happened—on this ground the hobbits of the Shire stood firm against the forces of evil; here once walked elves, dwarfs and wizards. Perhaps they still did.

  I would walk on, imagining Frodo Baggins opening a garden gate and beckoning me into his cosy cottage, inviting me to take part in a fresh quest. I would say—but what about school? And he would reply—oh, young Matthew, you don’t need to worry about that now.

  It was a magical place. So when she asked, I chose the tower for our Croatoan, our Crow Town.

  “At twelve,” she said. “At twelve midday and twelve midnight, I shall wait for you and you shall wait for me until we are together again. Got that?”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “Twelve,” she would say. “Always on the twelve.”

  “Yes, Ma.” I would stifle a yawn and wonder what was on the telly. Because although I played along, I played her game, although I still feared the flare of anger in her eyes, I was no longer a true believer. For all her pointing, I’d never caught a glimpse. Not a glimpse.

  It’s coming on for ten by the time I arrive at New Street station. The train’s packed because of delays and I’ve had to stand pressed most of the time against the window to keep away from the folk squeezed in beside me, the condensation from my bug breath collecting against the window. But when it comes time to alight, then I make sure I’m thick in among them. Hood still down, head back, mind you—I don’t want to look too evasive, or like I have anything to hide.

  A posse of ticket inspectors are waiting at the barriers and beyond them a cop with a bomb dog and a couple of bored-looking squaddies. I neither look at them nor away, just pass by with the rest of the crowd, and I’m through—into the hustle, the bustle of late night shoppers. The Selfridges building looms above us like a bloated blue whale. Busy, busy Birmingham, in a huge bubble, it feels, all of its own.

  I check the headlines—MID EAST COMES TO MIDLANDS screams one. The pub screens are tuned to the news. Images of tracer fire over Arab cities, riots in the UK. A gang of masked youths hurl petrol bombs. An army jeep bursts into flames, blazing squaddies tumble
into a terraced street.

  I wait. Wait for the chaos to clear and for it to flick to a pic of me—England’s Most Wanted—but no, instead it’s the cricket: England’s losing again.

  Croatoan, Crow Town. But what good can you do me, Ma? Do you really have any idea what you’re getting yourself into? Wouldn’t it be better to leave you be? Wouldn’t it be kinder?

  But this has nothing to do with what’s best for you, Ma, I realise as I head towards Edgbaston, it’s all about me. It always was.

  29

  There are signs to the tower now and gentrification has taken hold. Audis and BMWs sit in driveways. The Poundsaver has become an organic health food store.

  It’s half-past eleven and I’m making my way along the quiet streets, keeping to the shadows.

  I don’t doubt that Ma will be at the tower, even though it must be weeks since she wove the message into her chat with Jane. It’s what she does, it’s what she is.

  These tidy suburban streets lined by bushes. The semi-detached houses with the curtains drawn, or else mum and dad slumped on the sofa in the blue TV screen light. The pub on the corner begins to turn out. A ripple of laughter, then quiet again.

  Just like anywhere.

  Crow Town, Middle Earth.

  A monster making its way along the street.

  I can see the shadow of the tower up ahead. I stop, step sideways into the shadow myself. Watch out for the Orcs, I tell myself, clad in their beetle-black body armour. I can sense it, you see, that Orc whiff, a faint trace of the same stuff I detected at the demo. There’s badness around here, a touch of brimstone.

  My bug begins to uncoil. Runs through my body like a shiver. My senses prickle. I immerse myself in the fabric of the moment.

  It’s not safe. Vereesh, stay put—there’s badness here, there’s danger lurking. It’s not worth the risk.