by Alex Marwood
Lucien lays a comforting hand on Luz’s shoulder. He is so kind. This loss must be exquisitely painful to him, but always, always, he is there first and foremost for his people.
‘Sometimes,’ he tells her, ‘accidents happen anyway. With all the care we take, with the best will in the world, they happen.’
The patient in the bed at the end of the room lost skin from her hand and thigh when a vat of boiling fruit slipped off its trivet as she walked past it. Jam boils at 105 degrees, and jam is sticky. It clings to the skin like glue. The burn has gone a full half-inch into the thigh, and Vita and Ursola had to spend more of the precious opium to operate and remove the dead flesh before it turned bad. She had her healing visit from Lucien a week ago. You don’t expect a second.
‘If I’d been there ...’ says Luz.
‘You couldn’t have been there,’ says Lucien. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
Farial spasms again, and her ribs snap like firecrackers. She is screaming inside, thinks Somer, and grits her teeth as the tiny hand grips her fingers so hard she is afraid her knuckles might dislocate. This is awful. It’s awful. Are we right to be keeping her here? Should we take her down to some cold, efficient, neon-lit hospital where nobody loves her?
‘They fight so hard, the young,’ Lucien says. And he looks up and meets Somer’s eyes for the first time since he arrived, and she sees no real spark of recognition. I am nothing to him, she thinks. Now I’ve had his baby, it’s as though I never existed. I’ve been paid off with a ring. And then she forces the thought away.
Vita lays a hand on Luz’s other shoulder. Somer watches them, feels their pain. There are tears on Lucien’s cheeks. It must help her, she thinks, knowing that they care so much. We’re their children, all of us. And she dismisses the flash memory of Lucien’s O-face in the firelight in his bedroom and tips a little more opium into the feeding tube.
‘You must stay with her,’ Vita tells Luz. ‘Stay with her all the time. We’ll set a chair up for you, make it comfortable.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, and the words catch in her throat. No hospitals for Farial. We take care of our own, at Plas Golau.
Lucien stays a full hour, sitting quietly by his daughter’s bedside, holding her mother’s hand. When he leaves, he doesn’t return.
Farial takes four days to die, and they bury her in the chapel graveyard. After the burial, they never speak of her again.
Among the Dead
October 2016
11 | Romy
It is very quiet.
Not really. It’s just a completely different sort of loud from the rural sounds of Plas Golau. The sound of traffic outside, the rumble of the machines downstairs. I have the windows open, for the heat is stifling on a sunny day in October. Every minute or two, the roar of aeroplane engines as they soar so close to my rooftop that I feel as though, were I standing up there by the chimney of this two-storey building, I could reach out and catch a ride on the great black wheels that hang from their bellies.
Out on the pavements, coming in and out of the Underground, voices, incessant, day and night, far more disturbing than the mechanical rumbles. A jumble of accents, but one particularly harsh and prevalent, which I take to be the local flavour. Many voices speak languages I don’t understand. But London is one of those places where the whole world comes seeking the gold on the pavements, and two hundred and fifty languages are spoken here every day. I can’t wait to get away. Find my people, and get away.
Eden. It was her birthday last month, which will mean it will have been Ilo’s too, though we didn’t mark them. She will be fifteen. A ward of the state. My period of rest is up. I must make myself leave this noisy little sanctuary and start to look for them. Ilo’s only young. He’s strong and brave, but I’ve got to find Eden and make her safe, and I know he will understand. Now I have you, now you’re growing inside me. I need to make her safe, to keep you safe. But not today. The journey here – the speed, the dizzying distance, the million unfamiliar sights – has left me exhausted, and even glancing out of the window at all those passing strangers overwhelms me. Overwhelms me with fear, and overwhelms me with sadness. All those people. All of them, unaware of what the future holds.
Janet’s milk is good; the tomatoes are bland and textureless; the bread is woolly. I long for a proper tomato again, warm from the sun through the greenhouse walls, sweeter and more perfumed than a plum. I play with the television for a bit, and eventually find my favourite, a man called Jeremy, who shouts at fat people on channel 27. It was always playing in the rec room at the Halfway. Spencer said that it soothed them, seeing that people like us could get on the TV. It seems as good a place as any to find out about the dystopia I am still learning to inhabit.
I have food for three days, if I eke it out, and then I must go out and brave the world. I never thought of myself as an anxious individual before, but I’ve found since I came out of the hospital that all sorts of things have become challenges to me. Melanie said that it wasn’t surprising, that PTSD is a powerful condition and I must learn not to be hard on myself. All very well for her to say. I have a baby to feed and a sister and brother to find, and that will take courage.
I find myself stringing out the actions of the day, filling the time to soothe myself. Washing up each plate and mug as I use it, making small snacks – a sliced tomato, a hard-boiled egg, a piece of toast made under the grill – one after the other rather than a meal. I unpack Janet’s box, arrange the soap-shampoo-conditioner I find in it on the shelf by the bathroom sink, put Melanie’s crockery away, string my spare sheet across the bedroom window to stop the people in the flats opposite looking in.
And then I allow myself to open my box. I’ve been looking at it sideways for a couple of hours, saving it, savouring the prospect. I have a strange feeling that once I lift the lid all the contents will simply vanish into thin air, like the dust of an Egyptian mummy.
I remember everything that’s in here. Of course. If your belongings are pared down to everything that can fit in a wooden box twenty inches long by a foot wide by ten inches deep, you don’t forget what you own. But oh, to feel them again. These little souvenirs of home. I take them out, one by one, and weigh them in my hands. Small things, vast memories.
A soap that smells of lavender.
Photographs. One of my mother as a teenager, maybe Eden’s age, face covered in thick make-up, black lipstick, black lines around her eyes like an Egyptian goddess. One of my mother and her family: an awkward photo, standing on a doorstep, parents behind, children in front. Mum maybe twelve, so I guess her sister Sarah, my aunt, is five.
A tiny strip of three photos of my mother and me. She said they came in a strip of four and she had them done in a photo booth. Cut one off and posted it to my grandparents. She’s seventeen or eighteen there. Thin and scared-looking, holding baby-me as though she’s afraid I’ll break, staring at the lens with wounded eyes. Gone is the make-up, the backcombed hair of the earlier photo. Now she looks like a small albino mouse.
It’s one of only two photos I have of myself. Somer gave them to me because she said that she had the memories and I didn’t, that I should have something of my infancy. We didn’t do photos. Or mirrors, beyond necessary medical or firestarting purposes. Narcissism, Father said.
The other photo: me and my friends Kiran and Eilidh, ready for our first solstice. The one exception to the no-photography rule was that they recorded us as we reached legal adulthood. It was like branding us as Real People, people with a place at last in history, worth recording for the descendants. We kept them as souvenirs of this rite of passage, like our puberty flowers, to be handed down to those who come after. Ursola had a clunky machine that whirred and spat out a piece of white card that gradually, as you waved it in the air, took on colours and shapes and turned into a photograph. She took three, one for each of us. We look so young. Eilidh and me with our crowns of flowers, me
still watchful, Eilidh with her big open grin, Kiran standing between us looking straight at the lens, his half-smile that preceded his laugh. Three young people, ready for a party. I miss them. So much it physically hurts.
I look at the pictures for a long while, touch the faces with a fingertip. Want to howl at the sky, for I will never see them again. I don’t know what they’ve done with my mother’s body. No one asked if I wanted to claim it – and what would I do with it if I did? – and I don’t suppose any of the family that didn’t want her when she was alive have done so. I don’t know what they do with bodies like that. Just burn them up and never speak of them again, I guess.
I lay the photos aside and go on.
A wreath of flowers, dried and pressed and stored between two sheets of cardboard to keep it from falling apart. A souvenir of the day I reached womanhood, worn over my hair as I walked to have it shorn.
A small wooden horse, whittled painstakingly by Kiran over the course of a long, dark winter when he was twelve. It’s clumsy, energetic, mane and tail flying out as it heads into the wind, and he gave it to me because ... because I don’t know. I never even questioned it.
And then I am crying, for there will be no more Kiran, no more Ursola or Somer or Vita, no more any of them. I don’t cry. I never cry. But there has been so much loss, so much.
And, when I’ve finished crying, I put the horse on the little mantelpiece for decoration and I hang my crown on an old picture hook and this dreary flat feels suddenly more like home.
I go back and find something else that makes the tears come. Wrapped in a piece of cloth lies my mother’s ring. They threw it away when she got pregnant with Ilo, as though it were tainted, and I sneaked out and retrieved it from our tiny landfill in the medieval quarry from whose stones the house was built – not such a hard task, as we produced barely any rubbish – and slipped it into my box. I’m not sure why. I had a feeling, just a feeling, that it might have a function later. I guess it does, now. I slip it onto my own finger, left hand, third from the right, and look at it. It fits as though it had been made for me. And I stare at it and let the tears fall.
* * *
* * *
When I’m calmer, I change the channel on the TV and watch a programme about people who are unable to stop collecting things – rubbish, clothes, bits of wood, old newspapers – and whose houses are so cluttered that they have to climb through tunnels of trash. A woman has been collecting cats, out of control, shit everywhere, and the house-clearer has just moved a pile of books to find a batch of tiny kittens, dead and mummified, behind them, and the floorboards rotted by urine.
And I half-watch and wonder about the billions and billions of us and the millions of the Dead who must be living like this, and I feel around for the marram-grass tab at the bottom of my empty box. My finger grasps it and I lift. The false bottom comes away, and there they are, my last treasures, nestled in their niches and quietly gleaming. The police and the social worker would never have let me have the box if they’d known they were there, but I feel instantly safer when I see that they still are. Wrapped in tissue paper, two items from the modern world: a bank card, and a tiny flat shard of metal and plastic the size of my pinkie nail. A SIM card, to put in a phone and make it one’s own.
And, beneath those, my comfort. My protection. My knife.
Before the End
2003
12 | Romy
March 2003
The month before each solstice, the tension grows among the women. They eye each other, assess their own chances, assess those of others. Romy is a long way from understanding this burning urge to reproduce, to fill themselves with baby, but it pours off them like body odour as the nights lengthen and shorten.
A six-month window. It’s likely all you’ll ever get here. There are more women than men in the Ark, and the chances are that if you fail in your first conception window it will be too late by the time your turn comes round again. Lucien, standing on the Great House steps, watching, playing God. He doesn’t like his mothers over thirty, his fathers under. And all the women, even the older ones with their fading wombs, pray, as he passes them by: me, me, this time let it be me. Let his eye light upon me, let him see me strong and young and healthy. If not for himself, let him choose a mate for me.
Lucien knows best. Who’s fittest, who’s ripest, who will make the best babies. Their future depends on his choices, for they can’t afford to carry weaklings. The Ark will need strength, intelligence, endurance, to carry them through the Great Disaster, and Lucien can tell, by eye alone.
Sometimes, when the choice has been made, when Lucien has announced the names of the lucky pairings at the choosing ceremony, Romy sees the unchosen women turn and walk away, bury their faces in their hands and weep.
* * *
* * *
A change has come over her mother, she’s noticed it. She’s gone quiet, turned inward; flinches if someone touches her unexpectedly, crosses the yard whenever one of Uri’s new squad of swaggering, bumptious Guards appears. Walks with her eyes downcast and sometimes, weirdly, wrings her hands. On the morning after solstice, her eyes were red when she came with the other women to let the children out of their overnight confinement in the Pigshed. And later, in the washroom, with the other women turned away, Romy noticed bruises on her shoulders, her thighs. A fall, said Somer. It’s nothing. Silly me. I tripped on a stone and went for a burton. That’ll teach me, eh? No more cider for mamma. And she was seven and careless, so she laughed at the thought that she should have come from such a clown. Then Farial died, and everyone in the Pigshed was sad, for never speaking of someone is not the same as never thinking, and she just assumed that Somer, who was there when it happened, was sad as well. And then she thought no more of it.
* * *
* * *
By the spring equinox, one of the current breeders is already confirmed – has adopted the waddle and back-pressing of late pregnancy though she can’t be more than a few months gone – and glowing with pride. The other’s eyes are ringed with dark circles from her sleepless nights, and her chosen mate walks as though he’s carried the good news from Aix to Ghent.
Three days after the equinox, the bell in the chapel tower begins to ring to call a Pooling – the summoning ring, long slow tolls – and the compound drops its tasks and hurries to the courtyard. They know they’re not in danger – a double ring, repeated around two-second gaps – and that the End has not begun – fast tolling, constant until everyone is safe – but that something momentous has happened. A betrayal or a triumph, a water leak in one of the food godowns. They eye each other silently. Will someone be disgraced today? Is it you? Is it you?
Busy planting beans below the trellises surrounding the Pigshed wall, Romy jumps to her feet and runs inside to scoop up Eden. She’s barely beyond the goo-ga stage – but everyone has to come to a Pooling. She is heavy, though, and wriggles, and Romy’s progress is slow. When she realises that they are the last ones left in the orchard, she ignores the squawks of protest and jogs the rest of the way. She weaves a lengthy path around the flowerbeds to get to a place where she will be able to see.
They count off, so everyone knows who’s here, and there’s a gap after 141, before Romy calls out her own number, and her vague sense of unease, the one everyone shares when these gatherings are called, gets a whole lot worse. She and Somer arrived on the same day, so of course they have consecutive numbers. She calls out Eden’s number for her, but she can barely make herself heard, her mouth is so dry.
And then the Great House door opens and the compound sees that the sinner is indeed Somer. A murmur runs through the crowd.
Somer. It’s Somer. Eden Blake’s mother, for God’s sake. How are the mighty fallen.
Downcast eyes with shadows beneath, the skin on her face red-raw from crying, she emerges from the gloom behind Lucien and Uri, Ursola to her left and Vita to her right
, four grim Guards in a row behind as though they expect her to make a break for it. Romy doesn’t recognise half the Guards these days. The original corps was made up of people she remembers from the Pigshed, but Uri has brought several in from the Outside, recruited from among his old colleagues in the army of the Dead, some strangers from the Cairngorm compound. Loyalty, he says. The first thing I need from my Guards is loyalty.
Somer’s head is bald as an egg. Someone’s cut her hair off and shaved her right down to the skin. Vita, probably, because it is usually Vita who carries out this harshest of all penalties.
Minutes pass. Lucien’s eyes rake the crowd, search for signs of prurience. His most recent handmaid, a woman so honoured that she bore his child, brought so low that he cannot even look at her. But the Ark see. Oh, yes, they see, now that they’re looking. She carries so little flesh – they all do – that it’s hard to hide the signs of pregnancy once someone is looking: the swollen breasts, the filling belly. A three-month gestation is impossible to hide. Somer looks as though her uniform has shrunk. Yet she herself is also diminished.
Romy is scandalised. Burns with shame. People nearby have edged away from where she and Eden stand, leaving them in a little pool of space as though her mother’s disgrace might be infectious. How could you? she thinks, and her memory floods with images of mating pigs, of the squalls of the semi-feral cats who live around the godowns. How could you? Can you not stop yourself? Do you have no willpower? She’s filled once again with the ignominy of her own conception. She’s like a rutting animal, she thinks, always on heat, always waiting for her chance to mate. Only a couple of children in the compound have brothers and sisters, but they were all conceived when their parents were still Dead. Nobody has two. Nobody. She will be marked forever, a freak. They all will, all three of them. Even blessed Eden.