Beacons

by Gregory Norminton

  ‘No. Haven’t had one of them since … No.’ For some reason, Marcko had lost a bit of time, just standing there with the meat. ‘It’s, um … Well, this is …’ He tilted his burden to show the label. For some reason he didn’t extend his arms, keeping the whole of the business away from his son. ‘It says… well, look – ONA Approved Bovine. Saltwaste raised flesh. Is what it … I mean, there it is.’ As if the stuff had appeared by accident and was nothing to do with Marcko and he hadn’t requested it, paid for it, accepted it from a Messenger who’d looked at him with palpable disgust.

  As if I was some kind of pervert.

  Irradiation minimal.

  He didn’t read that bit aloud. Dibbs could see it and draw his own conclusions.

  The wild cow hordes were almost all confined to the coastal Saltwastes and the Residue from the flooded new-gen and old-gen power stations was bound to be an issue, but apparently it did the animals no harm and you could eat them without ill-effects.

  Chernobyl Buffalo – a slice of that would cost years of water allocation. Import tax, transport tax, killing fees, preparation fees.

  Fees only people inside the Gates have heard of.

  Only people inside the Gates would ever hold Chernobyl Buffalo and get to worry they weren’t going to cook it right.

  No. People inside the Gates don’t worry.

  They have body servants who worry.

  But Saltwaste flesh is probably much the same, really. Still a luxury item.

  I have a luxury item in my rooms.

  I have a body servant.

  My body servant is me.

  My flesh serves my flesh.

  To a degree.

  Marcko – this was very clear to him – was cradling his luxury as if he was indeed a very bad kind of pervert, as if he had accepted the compensatory post-separation sexoffer from Bellata on Twelfth Level and was now presenting, perhaps, an item of triumphantly used underwear to his only son.

  Why meat?

  I could have requested tomcod, or killifish – they’re cheaper. More poisonous, but cheaper.

  Sodsaintpauls, no. They’d have eyes.

  A bag of little fishbodies staring at me.

  I couldn’t deal with that.

  The boy – nearly a young man, to be honest, scary how tall he was – seemed mainly puzzled, rather than repulsed, ‘Flesh? In that?’ He poked the bag and Marcko felt it give in response. The movement was quite sensual.

  ‘Yeah … you know. I thought …’ Marcko found himself unwilling to describe what he’d originally thought.

  That I wanted to eat something which had once been alive. Not alive like a plant: I wanted to taste the running about and making noises and thinking sort of alive. Alive the way Mr Benihan’s Therapeutic Animal Companion is alive. (Although probably much more pleasant. Then again, Mr Benihan is not pleasant, so why should his TAC be?)

  Dibbs pressed his finger more gently into the acceptably radioactive package. It rustled softly.

  In the way that acceptable radiation might if one could hear it.

  Hello, son. In the absence of your wiser and better and more morally mature and bloody intolerable mother – we won’t mention that she didn’t even ask to take you with her when she ran off with that bastard to the Stilts – in her absence, I decided to have something killed for your benefit. Or rather to create the pressure of demand that meant some hunter person went adventuring in, I suppose, a small boat or other vehicle equipped to cope with wetland in Suffolkponds or Norfolkponds or suchlike and took along a proper and legal allowance of fuel and maybe ammunition – undoubtedly weapons – and perhaps a protective suit and then he shot or otherwise dispatched some kind-eyed creature doing him no harm – probably a number of them, a whole family – and carried their corpses back and cut them up and I’ve bought us this section – I have no idea from what part of the body – and soon I will prepare it and then we’ll put it in our mouths and chew it and swallow it down.

  It will become us.

  Something doomed and stupid will become us.

  Can’t say that.

  Better than eyes, though.

  And there was blood.

  Oh, Geefuck.

  He stood side by side with Dibbs and slowly uncovered the thing, naked and surrounded by a mild ooze of blood.

  Fuckcockit.

  Flesh.

  Can we not call it flesh? Can we call it meat? We should. Flesh is something different, is what we love. It’s what I loved.

  Not what his mother loved. Or not mine, anyway.

  Meat is food.

  Was food.

  I’m old fashioned in my words, there’s no harm in that, I’m not a Nostalgist. I simply appreciate the names made up in more killing times to tell apart the various animals that used to live and call and breathe about the place. And it’s neat and correct that we have other terms set ready to describe them when dead and cut and stripped down for eating.

  Mutton. Woodmeat. Tarp.

  Haven’t seen tarp in years. The carcasses of magpies, that was. They talked about plagues of magpies when I was a kid, you could kill them whenever you wanted.

  You’d still see them sometimes.

  And then not.

  ‘Woo.’ Dibbs made the small, happy noise he occasionally does. He was not in any way disturbed by the dark red mass and its surrounding swim of, ‘Blood … Just like us.’

  Don’t say that, kid. It’s dinner.

  ‘Yes, like us. Probably. Or maybe not blood exactly after all this time. I mean, I think they keep it – store the … to make it soft, or more digestible or something and so the blood would …’ The smell of it – wild, heated, sickening, metally and charged – did that mean it was safe, or not safe? Was it normal? ‘It would be a fluid, rather than … No, don’t.’

  But Dibbs had jabbed his finger into the fluid, or blood, or whatever.

  You get diseases from blood. And fluid.

  Dibbs jerked back and a drip fell from the end of his index finger to the floor and contaminated it with death and radiation and who knew what.

  Have to clean up the mess with water. Solvent and water. More Waste.

  Marcko lifted the final bag with its increasingly alarming contents and emptied the lot of it into their pan. There was an immediate, accusatory hiss.

  ‘Woo-ya !’ Dibbs clearly delighted by the whole proceedings. He hadn’t said woo-ya since his mother pissed off.

  So the cow murder and possible infections were worth it, then.

  The hissing settled into a sputtering complaint.

  Marcko had read up on meat cookery – you were meant to have an extravagantly hot pan ready and let that seal the outside of the muscle fibres, because their moisture should not be lost.

  Unless it was lost in transit, leaked out to be pointlessly nasty inside protective wrappings and to scare fathers who are trying to please their sons.

  And why shouldn’t moisture be lost?

  Is muscle meant to taste wet? Like sea vegetables?

  I hate sea vegetables.

  He flipped and badgered their meal. It truthfully seemed less of a meal by this point and more a ridiculous gesture, or a proof of guilt.

  It’s changing colour, is that right? Is that seared?

  Dibbs stared intently. ‘Are you burning it?’

  His son’s close attention made the hairs prickle on the backs of Marcko’s hands. Unless that was just the spatter and the vapours. Or the radiation.

  Burning 6000 Panyuan.

  They were probably both inhaling untold damages. ‘I don’t think so, loved one. I think that’s it sealed, and next we can smother the fire, and the heat from the pan will do the rest.’

  I am, once again, pretending that I know what I’m talking about. I lie to him. It’s what I’ve always done.

  It would be worse if I didn’t, if he understood how we are magpies: too-silly, too-clever, noisy, walking creatures.

  They ate the other birds, their eggs, and then they ate e
ach other. That’s what I heard.

  Marcko continued, more and more ashamed as he tried to sound more and more certain, ‘When it’s cooked it’s still meant to be … giving. Not just … I don’t think it’s meant to be too solid. And it ought to be dark brown, definitely not black.’

  ‘Well, that’s just common sense.’

  ‘Well …’

  Marcko thought it likely that Dibbs had common sense, which was good, but odd, given that neither of his parents had ever come near it. A recessive gene, maybe. A gift from the grandparents, or beyond.

  The grandparents would have remembered meat. I think … I never met them, but they’d have been around for the superfarms and the Self-Harming Nitrogen Crisis. They’d have been around for all the Self-Harm. Which isn’t the best way to put it: they harmed us far more than themselves.

  And they didn’t even pass on their common sense.

  Then again – they were the ones Self-Harming, and how commonly sensible is that?

  Did they lie? To my parents?

  Or did they not understand? Were they very stupid?

  Did they look at the absence of birds, but not let themselves see?

  Or did they just hit that age when they saw that death would come and save them from their consequences and personal dying was more of focus than anything else?

  I think I’m at that age.

  I think I don’t give a toss really. Past it.

  The meat is shrinking. As Marcko watches, it seems to stiffen and crouch towards the back of the pan.

  Too late now. For both of us.

  Poor meat.

  There’s fat, too – the spit and sting of fat that once hid under skin, under fur of a specific length and colour. Marcko guessed the fur would be fawn. ‘Imagine, dear one.’ He regretted the guess at once – made him feel sickish. ‘There were big hordes of these raging about the landmass once, outside the drycities …’ Fawn and with forgiving eyes. ‘…and eating personfood and turning it into less personfood and shitting everywhere.’

  When Dibbs was still a young stub, he’d giggle about shitting – the inevitable, shared humiliation of producing it, weighing it, removing it. Since his Education had started he’d got more sober in every way. ‘Yes, they told us. And about the concentrated hordes and the pestilences and the soil saturation. That was for last year’s testing. I told you. This year, we’re on to the Love Revolution.’

  Kids always went for dinosaurs first – those first great, tragic extinctions: innocent and beneficial, more room for us thereafter – and then it was the Love Revolution: so much hope and the whole, sweet, terrible story behind Loveday. After that they were grown and working and didn’t have much time for mindhobbies and were common sensible enough to realize the Love Revolution was no longer quite as it was when it started and no longer likely to tolerate complaints.

  Marcko didn’t want to picture his son in workers’ blues and wearing down the hours and wondering how long he’d last at it and then maybe not caring. The grandparents would have lived to over sixty, Marcko was sure he’d read that. Nobody seemed to any more, except perhaps inside the Gates. They probably took baths and lived forever inside the Gates.

  Pretty magpies inside the Gates.

  I do recollect them as being pretty. Handsome. They had a swagger.

  ‘They didn’t have panyuan back then. No money at all. It must have been great, eh dad?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Marcko fidgeted the meat again – it felt ungiving. ‘After Finance collapsed they didn’t have anything for a while, only like an idea of money.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Dibbs newest favourite phrase.

  You know, you know.

  You don’t, you don’t.

  ‘I know, I know. So that we wouldn’t get hooked up with Self-Seeking Desire – so we’d only do things for each other because we wanted to and other people would do them back.’

  It must have been beautiful.

  When he was Dibbs’s age Marcko had learned the old measures of the Lovetime, the calculations of goods and services. They were designed to instil an appropriate loathing of Reckless Finance and its wrongs: a hundred tears makes one hurt, a hundred hurts makes one misery, one misery keeps three people for one day: father, mother, child in all their comforts: bread, heat, water, light, and fellowship. And each should have enough and no more than enough. In this way the wrongs of Profitinterest had been memorialized and the Sacrifices were remembered – the spilling of blood – and whatever was left in the not ideal world was shared.

  ‘And they stopped people drowning in Elsewhere, or dying of thirst and it’s OK now. And that means that we can have panyuan these days because we’re sensible. All in the same lifeboat.’

  Of course, no one Marcko knew had been to Elsewhere and no one ever seemed to come from there any more. And the Punishment Tornadoes persisted and the Long Heats grew and the Punishment Freezes lengthened the Winters and the Free Occupationists’ Assembly had become the National Occupationist Authority, because that was more businesslike. And inside the Gates, people were in a different lifeboat altogether.

  With us outside and looking at them – living and calling and breathing about the place.

  ‘Is it done?’ His boy expecting an authoritative answer.

  ‘I think so. I think.’

  Dibbs scurrying as if it was Loveday, slicing the bread ration.

  Marcko’s mouth had started to feel odd, wracked by a sudden and excessive appetite. ‘No need for anything on the bread, loved one. We can dip it in the juices.’ He felt animal, yet also cheerful.

  Perhaps the art of everything is to be animal and cheerful, to keep on and never mind.

  ‘Did they used to do that, Dad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I have no idea.

  ‘Yes, they did.’

  Marcko sets the meat on a plate and lets it rest for exactly five minutes. They both stare at it during this period, as if it will indicate when it is ready and relaxed. It does not.

  At least it can’t stare back, though. No eyes.

  ‘Here we go, then …’ Finally, Marcko picks up their best knife. He’s sure that Dibbs would like to cut the meat, but if everything about their meal turns out to be terrible he wants the boy to be not involved, for nothing to be his fault.

  Marcko feels only a kind of unwillingness under the blade and then the flesh is in two pieces – the bigger one for his son. The sliced wound releases a defeated moisture.

  So I did preserve it.

  But now it’s going.

  They wipe their bread round the pan and mop at the plate. Then father and son make sandwiches, which is an old, old traditional dish.

  To Marcko the meat is leathery and tastes of grease and wrongness. The bread seems rancid. Nevertheless, he eats keenly. He is aware that Dibbs, sitting opposite, is doing exactly the same. They don’t speak.

  Things haven’t turned out well.

  In a while they will tidy up and listen to the radio broadcast and then Marcko will go out to work while Dibbs gets to sleep.

  Things haven’t turned out well at all.

  Sad to think so and sadder to know that it wasn’t their fault.

  So best to be animal, to keep on and never mind.

  ‌The Great Consumer

  ‌Adam Marek

  INT. BEDROOM. NIGHT.

  The décor is 1950s. A lamp on the bedside table is lit. There is someone asleep in the bed. A man: VICTOR. His legs are crossed at the ankles. His bare feet poke out from beneath a tartan blanket. On the bed beside him a pair of spectacles rests on a yellow legal notepad. Several pages have been filled and flipped over so that we can see his black handwriting in reverse. The facing page contains two paragraphs. The extravagant length of the ascenders and descenders, and the slope of the writing suggest that it was written at speed and with great excitement.

  From behind, we hear a noise. A creaking floorboard. There is a brown leather sofa in the room and hiding behind it is a young man, maybe sevente
en years old: MARTY. He looks panicked. He is sweating, maybe because it’s hot and he’s wearing so many layers: an orange bodywarmer over a denim jacket over a blue checked shirt over a maroon T-shirt. He shifts his position and stumbles. When his hand goes down to stop himself from toppling over, the chunky silver revolver he is carrying knocks loudly on the floorboards.

  Someone says ‘Sssssssh!’

  Marty leaps up, full of panic, for a second standing fully upright. He hides the gun behind his back. His cheeks are flushed and his breath is wildly out of control. He looks about to see who has made the sound. The man in the bed is still asleep. It takes him some seconds to notice that behind the sofa with him is a man no more than four feet tall: RANDALL.

  Randall is older than the teenager, maybe in his thirties. He is wearing a leather flying helmet and an almost medieval-looking jacket-and-trouser ensemble in red cloth. Over the top of this are slung leather utility belts, one crossing each shoulder and one around his waist. He has a monocle pinched into one eye and is holding a tattered map which is predominantly dark blue.

  RANDALL (Softer this time, wafting the map to suggest that the boy squats down):

  Ssssssh.

  Marty crouches. He keeps the gun behind his back.

  RANDALL:

  Don’t worry, Marty. I’m here to help.

  MARTY (Whispering):

  Who the hell are you?

  RANDALL:

  I’m like you. You know. Not from around here.

  MARTY:

  What are you doing here?

  RANDALL:

  I’m not here to get in your way. You just get on with what you’ve got to do, and then I’ll take care of the evidence for you.

  Marty peeks up over the top of the sofa to check that the man is still asleep.

  MARTY:

  Did the Doc send you?

  RANDALL:

  No no no. I’m just a humble collector, and that gun you’ve got behind your back is about to become very valuable to me, and very dangerous to you, so in the spirit of friendship, you know, one traveller to another, I will relieve you of it and then we can be on our way.

  MARTY (Pointing to the man in the bed):