YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
No men. No pigs either. No liobams.
No bird woman.
Maybe I lost my mind, thinks Toby. Not lost. Temporarily misplaced.
It’s bath time; she’s up on the roof. She pours rainwater from her collection of smaller bowls and pans into the largest bowl, soaps herself, hands and face only: she won’t risk the vulnerability of a full bath, because who knows who may be peering? She’s in the midst of sponging off the suds when she hears the crows making a commotion, close by. Aw aw aw! This time it sounds like laughing.
Toby! Toby! Help me!
Was that my name? thinks Toby. She looks over the railing, sees nothing. But the voice comes again, right close to the building.
Is it a trap? A woman calling out to her, a man’s arm around her throat, a knife to the jugular?
Toby! It’s me! Please!
She blots herself with a towel, slides into her top-to-toe, shoulders the rifle, makes her way down the stairs. Opens the door: no one. But the voice again, so near. Oh please!
Left corner: nobody. Right corner, nobody again. She’s just outside the garden gate when a woman comes around the building. She’s hobbling, she’s thin and beat up; her long hair’s across her face, matted with dirt and dried blood. She’s wearing a spangled body suit, with damp, tattered blue feathers.
The bird woman. Some freak from a sex circus. She’s bound to be infected, a walking plague. If she touches me, thinks Toby, I’m dead.
“Keep away from me!” she shouts. She backs up against the garden fence. “Fuck off out of here!”
The woman sways on her feet. She has a gash on her leg, and her bare arms are scratched and bleeding – she must have run through brambles. All Toby can think of is the fresh blood: boiling with microbes and viruses.
“Piss off! Get away!!”
“I’m not sick,” says the woman. Tears are running down her face. But they’d all said that in their despair. They’d said it, pleading, holding up their hands for help, for comfort, and then they’d turned into pink porridge. Toby had watched them from the roof.
They’ll be drowning. Don’t let them clutch you. Don’t let yourself be that last straw, my Friends, says Adam One.
The rifle. She fumbles with the strap: it’s caught in the fabric of her top-to-toe. How to fend off this festering hotspot? Yelling’s no good without a weapon. Maybe I could bang her on the head with a stone, thinks Toby. But she doesn’t have a stone. A good kick in the solar plexus, then wash my feet.
You are an uncharitable person, says the voice of Nuala. You have scorned God’s Creatures, for are not Human beings God’s Creatures too?
From under the mat of hair the woman pleads: “Toby! It’s me!” She crumples, falls to her knees. Then Toby sees it’s Ren. Beneath all the dirt and mangled glitz, it’s only little Ren.
64
Toby hauls Ren inside the Spa building and dumps her on the floor while she locks the door behind them. Ren is still crying hysterically, in great gulping sobs.
“Never you mind,” says Toby. She takes Ren under the arms and pulls her upright, and they stumble down the hall into one of the treatment cubicles. Ren’s a dead weight, but she’s not very heavy, and Toby manages to hoist her onto a massage table. She smells of sweat and earth, and blood somewhere, and another smell: something’s decaying.
“Stay here,” says Toby unnecessarily: Ren isn’t going anywhere. She’s lying back on the pink pillow with her eyes closed. One of those eyes is black and blue. AnooYoo Soothing Aloe Eye Pads, thinks Toby. With Extra Arnica. She breaks open a packet and applies them, and adds a pink sheet, tucked in at the sides so Ren won’t fall off the table. There’s a cut on Ren’s forehead, another on her cheek: nothing too serious, she’ll deal with those later.
She goes into the kitchen, boils up some water in the Kelly kettle. Most likely Ren’s dehydrated. She pours hot water into a cup, adds a little of her cherished honey, a pinch of salt. Some dried green onions from her dwindling stash. Carries the cup into Ren’s cubicle, takes off the eye pads, sits her up.
Ren’s eyes are huge in her thin, bruised face. “I’m not sick,” she says, which is untrue: she’s burning with fever. But there’s more than one kind of sickness. Toby checks the symptoms: no blood oozing from the pores, no froth. Still, Ren could be a plague carrier, an incubator; in which case, Toby’s already infected.
“Try to drink,” says Toby.
“I can’t,” says Ren. But she does manage to get some of the water down. “Where’s Amanda? I need to get dressed.”
“It’s okay,” says Toby. “Amanda’s nearby. Now try to sleep.” She eases Ren back down. So Amanda’s in this story somewhere, she thinks. That girl was always trouble.
“I can’t see,” says Ren. She’s trembling all over.
Back in the kitchen, Toby pours the rest of the boiled water into a bowl: she needs to clean away those bedraggled feathers and sequins. She carries the bowl and a pair of scissors and a bar of soap and a stack of pink washcloths into Ren’s cubicle, folds back the sheet, and cuts away the grubby outfit. It isn’t cloth, it’s some other substance, underneath the feathers. Stretchy. Almost like skin. She soaks the patches where it’s stuck on so she can peel them off more easily. The crotch has been torn away. Cripes, thinks Toby, what a mess. Later she’ll make a poultice.
There are abrasions around the neck – rope burns, no doubt. The gash on the left leg is what’s festering. Toby’s as gentle as she can be, but Ren winces and yelps. “That fucking hurts!” she says. Then she throws up the salt-and-sugar water.
After she’s wiped away the filth, Toby starts washing the leg wound. “How did you get this?” she asks.
“I don’t know.” Ren is whispering. “I fell down.”
Toby cleans out the gash and puts some honey on it. Antibiotics in it, Pilar used to say. There ought to be a first-aid kit, somewhere in the Spa. “Hold still. You don’t want gangrene,” she says to Ren.
Ren giggles. “Knock, knock,” she says, “Gang grene.”
The dirty covering’s all stripped away, and Ren has been sponged. “I’ll give you some Willow and Chamomile,” Toby says. And Poppy, she thinks. “You need to sleep.” Ren will be safer on the floor than on the table: she makes a nest of pink towels, eases her down onto it, adds extra padding because Ren can’t make it to the bathroom, she’s too weak. She’s hot as an ember.
Toby brings the Willow mixture in a small glass. Ren swallows, her throat moving like a bird’s. Nothing comes up.
There’s no use trying the maggots yet. Ren needs to be coherent for that, able to obey instructions: no scratching, for instance. The first thing is to get the temperature down.
While Ren sleeps, Toby sorts through her store of dried mushrooms. She chooses the immune-system boosters: reishi, maitake, shitake, birch polypore, zhu ling, lion’s mane, coryceps, ice man. She puts them in boiled water to soak. Then in the afternoon she prepares a mushroom elixir – the simmering, the straining, the cooling – and gives Ren thirty drops of it.
The cubicle stinks. Toby lifts Ren up, rolls her to the side, pulls out the soiled towels, wipes Ren off. She’s put on rubber gloves for the purpose: if dysentery’s going around she has no wish to catch it. She smoothes down clean towels, rolls Ren back. Her arms flop, her head wilts; she’s muttering.
This is going to be a lot of work, thinks Toby. And when Ren recovers – if she recovers – there will be two people eating instead of one. So the food stash will be gone twice as quickly. What’s left of it. Which isn’t much.
Maybe the fever will get the better of Ren. Maybe she’ll die in her sleep.
Toby considers the powdered Death Angels. It wouldn’t take much. Just a little, in Ren’s weakened condition. Put her out of her misery. Help her to fly away on white, white wings. Maybe it would be kinder. A blessing.
I am an unworthy person, Toby thinks. Merely to have such an idea. You’ve known this girl since she was a child, she’s come
to you for help, she has every right to trust you. Adam One would say that Ren is a precious gift that has been given to Toby so that Toby may demonstrate unselfishness and sharing and those higher qualities the Gardeners had been so eager to bring out in her. Toby can’t quite see it that way, not at the moment. But she’ll have to keep trying.
Ren sighs and groans and flails. She’s having a bad dream.
When it’s dark, Toby lights a candle and sits beside her, listening to her breathe. In out, in out. Pause. In. Then out. Raggedy. At intervals she feels Ren’s forehead. Cooler? There must be a thermometer in the building; in the morning she’ll look for it. She takes her pulse: rapid, irregular.
Then she nods off in her chair, and the next thing she knows she wakes up in the dark with a smell of singeing. She winds up her flashlight: the candle has fallen over, and a corner of Ren’s pink sheet is smouldering. Luckily it’s damp.
That was terminally stupid, Toby tells herself. No more candles unless I’m fully awake.
65
TOBY. SAINT MAHATMA GANDHI DAY
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
In the morning Ren feels cooler. Her pulse is stronger, and she can even hold the cup of warm water in her own two trembling hands. Toby’s put mint in it this morning, as well as the honey and salt.
Once Ren has gone to sleep again, Toby hauls the dirty sheets and towels up to the roof to wash them. She’s brought her binoculars, and while the sheets and towels are soaking she scans the Spa grounds.
Pigs far away, over in the southwest corner of the meadow. Two Mo’Hairs, a blue one and a silver one, grazing quietly together. No liobams. Dogs barking somewhere. Vultures flapping around the pig funeral site.
“Get away from there, you archeologists,” says Toby. She’s feeling light-headed, almost giddy – in the mood to tell herself jokes. Three huge pink butterflies circle her head, alight on the damp sheets. Maybe they think they’ve found the biggest pink butterfly of all. Maybe it’s a love affair. Now they have their thin tongues unrolled, licking. Not love, then: salt.
Some will tell you Love is merely chemical, my Friends, said Adam One. Of course it is chemical: where would any of us be without chemistry? But Science is merely one way of describing the world. Another way of describing it would be to say: where would any of us be without Love?
Dear Adam One, thinks Toby. He must be dead. And Zeb – dead also, despite wishful thinking. Though maybe not; because if I’m alive – more to the point, if Ren’s alive – then anyone at all could be alive too.
She stopped listening on her wind-up radio months ago because the silence was so discouraging. But just because she’s heard no one doesn’t mean no one’s there. Which had been among Adam One’s hypothetical proofs for the existence of God.
Toby washes Ren’s infected leg, applies more honey. Ren eats a little, drinks a little. More mushroom elixir, more Willow. After much rummaging, Toby locates a Spa first-aid kit; there’s a tube of antibiotic cream, but it’s stale-dated. No thermometer. Who ordered this crap? she thinks. Oh yes. I did.
Anyway maggots are better.
In the afternoon she lifts the maggots from the plastic snap-top, rinses them in tepid water. Then she transfers them to a sheet of gauze from the first-aid kit, applies another sheet over the top, and tapes the maggot-filled envelope over the wound. It won’t take long for the maggots to eat through the gauze: they know what they like.
“This will tickle,” she tells Ren. “But they’ll make you better. Try not to move your leg.”
“What are they?” says Ren.
“They’re your friends,” says Toby. “But you don’t need to look.”
Her homicidal impulse of the night before is gone: she will not drag dead Ren out into the meadow for the pigs and vultures. Now she’d like to cure her, cherish her, for isn’t it miraculous that Ren is here? That she’s come through the Waterless Flood with only minor damage? Or fairly minor. Just to have a second person on the premises – even a feeble person, even a sick person who sleeps most of the time – just this makes the Spa seem like a cozy domestic dwelling rather than a haunted house.
I’ve been the ghost, thinks Toby.
66
TOBY. SAINT HENRI FABRE, SAINT ANNA ATKINS, SAINT TIM FLANNERY, SAINT ICHIDA-SAN, SAINT DAVID SUZUKI, SAINT PETER MATTHIESSEN
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
It takes the maggots three days to clean the wound. Toby watches them carefully: if they run out of dead tissue, they’ll start in on living flesh.
By the second morning Ren’s fever has gone, though Toby continues the mushroom drops just to make sure. Ren’s eating more now. Toby helps her up the stairs to the roof and sits her down on the imitationwood bench, in the early morning light. The maggots are photophobic: light drives them into the deepest corners of the wound, which is where they need to be.
No movement out there in the meadow. No sounds from the forest.
Toby tries asking Ren where she’s been ever since the Flood hit, and how she escaped it, and how she got here, why she’d been dressed in those blue feathers; but she only tries once because Ren starts crying. All she’ll say is, “I’ve lost Amanda!”
“Never mind,” says Toby. “We’ll find her.”
On the fourth morning Toby removes the maggot plaster: the wound is clean, and healing. “Now to get your muscles back in shape,” she tells Ren.
Ren starts walking, up and down the stairs, along the corridors. She’s gained a little weight: Toby’s been feeding her the last few jars of AnooYoo Lemon Meringue Facial, which has a lot of sugar in it and nothing toxic that Toby can think of. She leads Ren through some exercises from Zeb’s old Urban Bloodshed Limitation classes – the satsuma, the unagi. Centred like a Fruit, sinuous like an Eel. She needs the refresher herself; she’s out of practice.
After a few days Ren tells her story, or a little of her story. It comes out in short clumps of words punctuated by long periods of staring into space. She tells about being locked in at Scales, and how Amanda came all the way from the Wisconsin desert and figured out the door code. Then Shackie and Croze and Oates appeared from nowhere, just like magic, and she was so happy – they’d been saved by being in Painball when the plague broke out. But then three horrible men from the Painball Gold Team came to Scales, and she and Amanda and the boys ran away. She’d said they should come to AnooYoo because Toby might be there, and they’d almost made it – they were walking along through the trees, and then blackout. She can’t get any farther than that.
“What did they look like?” says Toby. “Did they have any …” She wants to say “distinguishing marks,” but Ren shakes her head, meaning that that subject is closed. “I have to find Amanda,” she says, wiping away tears. “I really have to. They’ll kill her.”
“Here, blow your nose,” says Toby, handing her a pink washcloth. “Amanda’s very clever.” It’s best to talk as if Amanda is still alive. “She’s very resourceful. She’ll be all right.” She’s about to say that women are in short supply and therefore Amanda will surely be preserved and rationed, but she thinks better of it.
“You don’t understand,” says Ren, crying harder. “There’s three of them, they’re Painball – they’re not really human. I have to find her.”
“We’ll look,” Toby says, to be soothing. “But we don’t know where they – where she’s gone.”
“Where would you go?” says Ren. “If you were them?”
“Maybe east,” says Toby. “To the sea. Where they could fish.”
“We can go there.”
“When you’re strong enough,” says Toby. They have to move somewhere else anyway: the food supply’s shrinking fast.
“I’m strong enough now,” says Ren.
Toby scours the garden, unearths one more lone onion. She digs up three burdocks from the near edge of the meadow, and some Queen Anne’s lace – the spindly white proto-carrot roots. “Do you think you could eat a rabbit?” she asks Ren. “If I cut it up very small and make it into s
oup?”
“I guess so,” said Ren. “I’ll try.”
Toby’s almost ready for the switch to full-blown carnivore herself. There’s the sound of the rifle shot to worry about, but if there are still Painballers lurking in the forest they already know she has a gun. No harm in reminding them.
There are often green rabbits near the swimming pool. Toby shoots at one of them from the rooftop, but she can’t seem to hit it. Is conscience twisting her aim? Maybe she needs a bigger target, a deer or a dog. She hasn’t seen the pigs lately, or any of the sheep. Just as she was getting all set to eat them, they’re gone.
She locates the packsacks on a laundry-room shelf. She hasn’t been down there since the pumps stopped working, and the air’s thick with mildew. Luckily the packsacks aren’t cotton but impenetrable synthetic. She takes them up to the roof, sponges them off, leaves them in the hot sun to dry.
She lays out her available supplies on the kitchen counter. Don’t carry so much weight that you burn more calories than you can eat, says the voice of Zeb. Tools are more important than food. Your best tool is your brain.
The rifle, of course. Ammunition. Trowel, for digging roots. Matches. Barbecue lighter, which won’t last long but it might as well be used up. Pocket knife with scissors and tweezers. Rope. Two sheets of plastic, handy in rain. Windup flashlight. Gauze bandages. Duct tape. Plastic snap-top containers. Cloth bags for wild edibles. Cooking pot. The Kelly kettle. Toilet paper – a luxury item, but she can’t resist. Two medium-sized Zizzy Froots from a Spa minibar, raspberry flavour: junk food, but food, since it has calories in it. The bottles can be used later, for water.
Spoons, metal, two; cups, plastic, two. The remaining sunblock. The last SuperD bug spray. Binoculars: heavy but necessary. The mop handle. Sugar. Salt. The last of the honey. The last Joltbars. The last soybits.
The syrup of Poppy. The dried mushrooms. The Death Angels.
The MaddAddam Trilogy Page 63