by Rob Mclean
The Americans would be furious, but their government was in disarray at the moment. Their nation was weakened by their staggering national debt and riddled with the cancer of religion. As such, they were most likely heading towards another civil war, but if they managed to avoid that, then he had no doubt that their nation would soon disintegrate because of its religious disharmony and under the weight of its own purulent decadence.
“As you can see, the choice is clear,” the Captain addressed the sea of blank faces as they absently turned to face her. “The future is with us. Religion is dead. You are generously given the chance to join the rest of the sensible world. I urge you to consider it while there is still time.”
Vacant faces took in her words. Ling was pleased to see some nodding in agreement, but when she searched for the headstrong girl, she was surprised, then frustrated to see that her defiant attitude hadn’t changed.
The Captain gave the order for the prisoners to be led back to their holding cells. They were duly shuffled out in reverse order of their arrival. Their silence was broken only occasionally but the yelps and cries from prods with electrified batons.
The foolish youth didn’t feel the red dot of Captain Lau’s laser pointer on the back of her head. She looked genuinely surprised and outraged when she was singled out from her fellow worshippers.
With the successful redemption of the citizen from Henan, there was now a vacant isolation cell. Ling had little doubt as to who her Captain Lau would do with it.
Chapter 31
They had listened to the Aretha Franklin CD John had given her on the way from her place to his mother’s. It was a forty-minute drive and they had heard some classics on the way.
Angela thought it sounded a bit like some of the older Southern Baptist hymns, but she loved Aretha’s voice and the variety of things she sung about. It was refreshing to hear something different, but she was mindful that it and all non-Christian worldly media was, according to her mother, a pathway for the Devil to get inside her mind and lead her astray.
Despite the risk of moral peril, the music had lifted Angela’s dark mood. She had been worried at first about what she had said to Zeke the night before, then depressed and regretful as time went on and nobody had gone to see how she was.
The next morning, her mood had darkened as she had heard nothing from any of her ‘friends.’ She hadn’t expected to hear anything from Zeke. He would be too self-absorbed, dissecting his wounded pride, examining it from all angles and diverting the blame away from himself to call her this soon. She did however expect a call from at least one of her girlfriends but as the afternoon dragged on and her phone remained silent, it only added to her growing feelings of isolation, rejection and depression.
Angela studied John while he drove. In contrast, he looked so happy just to be alive and enjoying the beautiful sunny day. She couldn’t help but feel happier in his presence. His smiley blue eyes pierced the clouds around her heart, but would he be worth giving up her lifelong circle of church friends? She could always go to a different church. Being L.A, there was no shortage of them – yet. She then remembered she still wanted to give Eric a call and talk to him about his faith. Maybe he had met a worldly girl…
“Hey, are you listening to a word I’m saying?” John asked. He had been nattering on about his family and the neighbourhood. Something about some people he used to know and places where he used to hang out, but she hadn’t really been paying attention.
“No, sorry,” she confessed. “I was miles away.”
“Still getting over our exciting date last night?” he smiled. She knew he was probing, trying to find out where her heart was. In truth she didn’t know herself.
“The Observatory was interesting…”
“Yeah, Jarred was saying that it would have normally been a lot busier. He thinks the crowds stayed away because of the Alien. You know, our science now looks a bit lame by comparison.”
Angela was about to correct him and tell him the Alien was really the AntiChrist, but she held her tongue. She didn’t want to spoil things by having a debate. She decided instead to tell John about Zeke.
“After you dropped me home, Chelsea and I went out afterwards.”
“Late night, huh?” he said with an air of assumed casualness.
“It would have been normally. It was band practice. Zeke has a band and they’re playing tonight…”
“Did you want to go to it later, instead of a movie? This thing with my family won’t go all night.”
Angela smiled ruefully. He was trying to be so nice, but the last thing she wanted was to taking John along to meet her friends. She suddenly wondered what she would do with him at church tomorrow, assuming he still was willing to go. “Thanks, but no.”
“Uh, okay, but I have to warn you, my family won’t be as exciting.”
She made a token effort to smile at his joke, but she couldn’t stop thinking about how none of her friends had called her to see if she was okay. Surely someone must have noticed that she wasn’t there? Maybe she had been black-listed already. She could image Zeke calling a band meeting and telling them all how she had called a break, albeit from his point of view.
“You okay?” John asked. He must have sensed her distance. She was curious that he was so sensitive to her feelings. It was a nice change from Zeke, who was particularly obtuse to those sorts of things at times. Maybe because John was in that glowing, fresh new stage of the relationship where you couldn’t get enough of the other person. She remembered feeling that way about Zeke a long time ago. She wondered if he ever felt the same way about her.
“I told Zeke last night that I didn’t want to see him anymore.”
“Good,” John said. “I didn’t think you were the sort of girl who’d have two boyfriends.” He flashed a quick grin at her, and she felt a little twinge of guilt at having not told him the absolute truth about her break with Zeke. She knew she was, in effect, having two boyfriends, just not exactly at the same time.
“We’re here,” John said. “That’s Jarred’s bike.” She remembered that his brother was a student, and the old motorbike was just the sort of thing a poor student would get around with.
They pulled up in the driveway and gathered up their things before walking around the back. John had brought some light beers and, on Angela’s request, some non-alcoholic white wine and some flowers for his mother.
Angela hadn’t known what to wear. It had been a long time since she had met Zeke’s parents for the first time, and she didn’t really know what these people expected. She didn’t want to be too conservative and end up looking like a nun, but on the other hand she didn’t want to look like something he had picked up at a nightclub either.
She had wanted to wear jeans and a t-shirt. She figured that was what most worldly girls wore, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it, reminding her that it had been forbidden the church that her mother had grown up in. The fact that lots of women wore jeans in the church that they currently went to didn’t matter. While she lived under their roof, her mother’s standards were law.
After much consultation with her mother, Angela had decided upon a simple denim over-the-knee skirt, a ruffled white short sleeved blouse and flat white shoes. She wore her hair loose, hanging long at the back and held by a red floral headband. Her mother’s church had always insisted that a woman cover her hair. There was scripture somewhere–Angela couldn’t quite remember where-that said a woman’s beauty was in her hair and that it should be covered. That edict had been modified and massaged down the generations, so that a simple headband would do, but Clarice rarely went anywhere outside the house without a scarf covering her grey locks.
Angela saw as they walked up the concrete driveway how plain the house was. It needed a new coat of paint and there were all sorts of toys - in various states of sun damaged disintegration-lying covered in grime, abandoned amidst dried-out, straggling weeds.
Looking around, she could see that there were lots of jobs
that were in a state of incomplete limbo. Tools lay in a similar state of rusted decay, dropped where they had been last used. She couldn’t help but compare it to Zeke’s parents’ manicured mansion. Unlike Zeke, at least John was making it in his own place.
“It ain’t pretty, is it?” John asked. Disgust and embarrassment were evident in his tone. “They aren’t exactly the happy homemaker types.”
Angela was about to ask why he didn’t help look after his parents’ place when she heard a woman’s voice coming from inside, through an open window. “Come in if you’re handsome.”
John rolled his eyes and led her through the back door. It led into a laundry and then through to a kitchen/dining room where his family sat.
Two guys sat at the kitchen table. They wore dark sunglasses and waved a lazy hand in greeting. The younger red-head kid she recognized as John’s brother. The older guy, she presumed was his step-dad.
An enormous woman waddled over from the kitchen sink where she had been preparing food and took the drinks and flowers from John. She wiped her hands on the front of her tatty t-shirt, and then wrapped her flabby arms around him. She wore a faded, thin pair of cotton tights with cigarette burn holes in them that her flesh pushed through like blisters. A tortured pair of sandals were being pressed flat under her hugeness. Her heels were cracked with deep crevices and looked like a balloon bursting in slow-motion. In contrast, her toenails were brightly painted and she wore a toe-ring.
“My boy,” she said. She peered over John’s shoulder as they hugged and winked at Angela. “My beautiful boy.”
Angela felt it weird that this woman came across like she was claiming ownership of her son; as if it were some sort of competition for his affection.
John turned towards Angela and with one arm still around his massive mother, he said, “Mom, this is Angela.”
Angela didn’t know if she was supposed to hug this woman as well. She decided to offer her hand to shake, but before she could, the woman smothered her within an all encompassing embrace. Angela could smell the acrid sweat that was smeared over the woman’s skin. It wasn’t a particularly hot day, but being as big as she was, every movement was obviously an effort for her.
Underlying the sweat, Angela could also smell the rancid, older odours of what she could only imagine were the result of rotting skin cells, accumulated within her moist rolls of fat. Floating at a distance above and distinct from the putrid smells was the discordant strains of a lavender perfume.
Angela’s head swirled. From the assault on her nostrils or the crushing hug, she couldn’t tell, but she was glad when the woman let her go.
“There’s not much of ya, is there?” she said, then to John, “You’ll have to put some meat on her bones before you jump ‘em, or else you’ll break ‘em.” Everyone laughed except John, the two men sitting at the kitchen table and Angela.
“This is my mother, Shelley,” John said, ignoring his mother’s previous comment.
John reached over and took Jarred’s sunglasses off. “What are you wearing these for?”
Jarred blinked and David took his own off. “We were just outside and…”
“Yeah, right.” He continued with the formal introductions, naming David as the thin, older man with a chequered polyester shirt and puce saggy skin.
David met her eyes only briefly, but in that moment she saw within the hollowed out depths of his soul, a ravening animal. It seemed to her that it prowled below the surface, barely restrained by great effort, restraint and vigilance.
She had met reformed prostitutes, alcoholics and drug abusers before through church. She had heard of the battles these people fought with their inner demons and seen their haunted eyes. At least they had support from the church community. She wondered where David got his strength from to battle his particular beast, but as his eyes slid away to look to his wife, she wondered if she wasn’t the source of his resolution.
Jarred, who was similarly thin, but with that intense orange hair, had bright, sharp eyes that sparkled with interest. She hoped it wasn’t the sort of attention she was all too familiar with. It would mark him as normal for a worldly male, but at least he smiled nicely and had the decency to keep his eyes above her shoulders. He briefly nodded in response to meeting her in unison with David.
John then turned to his mother. “Where’s Maddie?”
“Probably watchin’ TV in her room,” David said.
“Madison Anne, get yourself out here and see your favourite brother and his new girly-friend,” Shelley bellowed suddenly, making Angela jump.
“Hey, don’t worry,” Jarred said, “She said the same thing when I got here.”
“Except the bit about the girlfriend,” David added, getting a frown from Jarred.
“They’re all my favourites, but in different ways and at different times.” Shelley said, then raising her voice again to a concrete piercing screech. “Even Madison Anne who should have gotten her scrawny butt out here by now.”
“I’ll go get her,” David volunteered. Shirley nodded her consent.
“She’s retarded, you know,” Shelley began.
“Not this story again,” Jarred spun around and walked away.
“Yeah, not a good time, Mom,” John added.
Angela’s curiosity was stirred, and although she found this matriarch intimidating, she felt perversely interested. She was glad when Shelley ignored her son’s pleas.
“She’s retarded on account of being damaged while she was growing inside me.”
“That’s terrible,” Angela said. She saw John’s jaw tighten and he was glaring at his mother.
“You can’t prove any of this,” Jarred said. They had both obviously heard this story many times and clearly didn’t want to hear it again.
Shelley continued, oblivious to her sons’ discomfort. “When I told Johnny I was pregnant and that he was going to have another brother or a little sister, he got angry.”
“I was just a kid,” John protested.
“David and I had just told the boys that I was pregnant. I was about four months along and you know, Johnny got so mad, for some reason, I’ll never know, he went and kicked me, right in the guts.”
Angela’s eyes widened in horror.
“Oh my goodness. That’s terrible,” she said, looking at John. He scowled and shook his head. She began to worry that John might have a darker side that he had kept hidden up until now. She certainly didn’t want any unresolved psychotic issues to come out if she were to be carrying his baby.
“He loves her to bits now though,” Shelley said.
“I was thirteen and I was angry,” he said. Angela waited for more of an explanation, but all he added was, “David wasn’t our favourite person back then.”
“Still not,” Jarred said, earning a warning glare from his mother. He risked the big woman’s ire by explaining, “With him and Mom having a baby, it meant that he wasn’t going away anytime soon.”
Angela saw David as a smaller than average man, and if it weren’t for the haunted look in his eyes, she would have found it hard to believe that he would have caused such a reaction from his step-sons.
“Davie’s all better now,” Shirley said with such an emphatic finality that Angela knew that particular topic was now finished. They probably didn’t want to talk about it with David around and likely to return at any moment. She could tell by the tension that there was more to that story, and she decided she would ask John more about it later.
John took his mother’s cue and changed the topic by asking what was for lunch. Small talk followed with discussion about food likes and dislikes. Angela wondered where David had gone and what was taking him so long.
John helped himself to a beer and asked the others what they wanted. Angela just took water, and when he offered a beer to Jarred, it was declined.
“What’s up, bro’?” John asked, clearly surprised by his brother’s self-restraint. “Not feeling well?”
“Nah, I’m being good.”
He stole a glance at his mother, “I have to drive later.”
“Good for you,” John nodded his approval.
“Now, lunch is just about ready, but what is that man doing?” Shelley asked, verbalizing Angela’s thoughts.
“I’ll go see,” John volunteered and made to leave. Angela felt suddenly uncomfortable at the thought of being left alone with these strange people, but, much to her relief, John reached back and took Angela’s hand for her to come with him.
They went down a dim hallway. The thin, brown carpet was so worn and stained that she couldn’t make out if there was a pattern underneath. Along the walls, the dark grime of human grease smeared the walls. Now that they were out of the kitchen and the cooking smells, the rest of the place smelt of stale smoke and sleepy body odours. Cobwebs hung in the corners, outlining the reach of those who passed along the hallway.
From the end of the passageway, she could hear David’s soft murmurings. He was talking gently to Madison, who to Angela looked about nine years old. They way she had her arms and legs flopped at awkward angles and the way her head tilted forward and to the side with her mouth open told Angela that Maddie was no ordinary girl. David stroked her arm as he tried to coax her out of her bedroom.
John put his head into her room. “Hello, Maddie.”
Madison looked up and squealed with delight and surprise. She launched herself at John and clung to his neck. Her sounds of joy stopped when looked over John’s shoulder and saw Angela.
“Hello there,” Angela said. She patted Madison’s hand that clung over John’s back. “I’m Angela.”
Madison said nothing. She just stared at Angela from behind John’s shoulder with big, watchful, watery eyes that peeked out from under a tangled mess of hair.
“Aren’t you going to say hello?” John asked as he jiggled Madison and turned around with her to face Angela. Madison squirmed to keep herself away from Angela without taking her eyes off her.