The Poison Garden

by Alex Marwood

  Three steps is all it takes to cross the yard and get his hand on the door handle. And then his fingers are buried to the palm in my hair and he’s pulling me out onto the concrete.

  Despite myself, I am taken by surprise. I’d forgotten, so long is it since I last had it, how vulnerable hair makes you. And I remember Jaivyn doing this to me when I was five, and I am filled with rage. My scalp shrieks with pain. He’s strong. Manual-labour strong. No dexterity to what he does, just brute force and indifference to my humanity. I buck and try to grab at the hand. He hauls me into the open, drags me backwards into the shadow of the building. I try to dig in my heels, but it’s useless against the backward impetus. And then he punches me sharply in the side of my head, and the world goes white.

  Play dead. I have two things to my advantage: that he thinks I’m unconscious and that he believes me harmless. I let my body go limp as I wait for my brain to recover, hear him grunt with the effort of dragging my dead weight. Not yet, Romy. Not yet. Not while he’s behind you.

  He drops me. Throws me onto a bed of gravel and broken things. Stands over me in his big old boots. They are covered in drips of paint and plaster. I wait. Release a noise between a groan and a whimper.

  He laughs into the darkness. He believes me. He thinks he’s won. That’s good. My right arm is half-pinned beneath my body, the hand still safely in my pocket. No power to swing it like this. Wait, Romy, wait. One chance is all you get.

  With the tip of a boot, he rolls me onto my back. I open myself up, lie with my eyes half-closed, and watch through my eyelashes. And, when he raises a leg to step over and straddle me, I strike.

  It’s not accurate, but it doesn’t need to be. The femoral artery runs close to the surface at the groin, and my blade is wide and sharp. Flat-out on the ground isn’t the best angle to hit from, so I hit with all my might, while he’s off balance. Feel my glorious blade glide through denim and flesh as though they were made of butter, feel the tip hit the bone, slide sideways. Artery, testicles: either one will stop a man stone dead.

  He screams. The sound bounces off the metal walls. I pull the knife out, quickly, before he crumples. Scoot backwards with my heels as he falls to his knees. He’s no longer looking at me. He’s gone inside, where the pain is. His eyes are shut and his hands are clamped over the deep black stain that spreads over the tops of his thighs.

  ‘You cunt!’ he screams.

  Not down yet. Not entirely out. One chance to make sure. No need to torture him, but you need to be sure. Go for the side of the throat. Don’t waste energy on the gristle of the oesophagus. Go for the artery. If you’re going for a swift kill, arteries are your friends. I flip the handle of the knife across my palm and slash.

  * * *

  * * *

  He dies quietly. I wonder, as I elbow my way backwards, if he feels proud that his last words in this world were ‘you cunt’. Maybe he has other things on his mind. Or nothing at all. Blood loss affects the brain quickly, especially if the leak is near the head.

  He spurts. Warm, salty liquid smacks my face.

  He moans. No more of that barking laughter now.

  Another spurt. It spatters my hoodie, the front of my dress, my skin. There’s disease in blood. I don’t have time to worry about that. The front of his jeans is soaked, all the way to his knees. Blood drools from the cloth, creeps across the concrete. So much blood. There’s over a gallon in the human body. I scoot back once more, and his final pump spatters harmlessly to the left of my legs.

  He crumples. To knees, to face. His hands have not left his groin.

  I blink. My eyes sting as his cooling blood slides off my brow.

  One last groan, and nothing more.

  You kick, deep inside me. The man spasms a couple of times and lies still. I pull my sleeve down over the heel of my hand and wipe my face. Roll over onto my hands and knees. There was a time when I could get to my feet from the ground without the help of my arms. Not now.

  I wait five minutes, but he doesn’t move again and the blood slowly stops spreading. Out on the road, the swish of car tyres, a brief change in the pattern on the shadows in our yard. No one comes to investigate the noise. In the bleaching light from the headlamps, the man looks silver-grey, the viscous pool that surrounds him a deep, reflective black. In the morning, when daylight comes, it will be dirty, flaking red-brown.

  I pick my knife up. Take it over to a skip that squats further back between the buildings. Fish around until my hand finds a dirty rag and wipe it off. Blood is bad for metal joints, and hard to remove; gluey, once it’s dry. I cleaned mine every night at Plas Golau, regardless of whether it had seen use. Love your weapons and they won’t let you down.

  I fold the rag up and put it in my pocket. It’s twelve miles to Hounslow from Slough. I can dispose of it on my walk, along the top of the motorway embankment, where nobody ever goes. It’s a long walk, but I should make it before morning.

  Before the End

  2011–2012

  27 | Romy

  2011

  The latrines are built into the south wall of the courtyard, where on the outside the land slopes sharply off into the woods and a path runs down to what was once a piece of useless bog by the main road. It’s far away from the house and far enough below the reservoir that it’s ideal for their discreet little bio-gas plant and slurry pit.

  Eight latrines serve the main compound: little stinky sheds that no one would dream of using to snatch a moment’s privacy. Rough wood planks suspended over blue plastic barrels in the hole beneath and tubs of water and ladles for washing off once your business is done. The barrels can be accessed via wooden doors off the path, and doing so is one of the Dung Squad’s duties.

  Collecting the barrels and taking them down the hill was once a communal duty done on rotation. It was Uri who came up with the idea of Sanitation Engineers. The fact that Squad membership can double as fatigues goes almost unremarked. The Sanitation Engineers clean out these, and the Guard House latrines, and the little septic tank behind the Great House, muck out the pigs and the cattle and the horses and the poultry in the winter, pick up after them in the meadows in the summer and, in February, dig out the digested manure and give it back to the land.

  They may be called the Sanitation Engineers in official language, But Uri quickly coined the epithet ‘Dung Squad’ and allowed it to spread through the compound like muck on a field. And now they have their own separate table at the back of the dining hall and a dedicated dormitory, for, try as they might, the stink never really washes off.

  The narrative of equality rumbles on. Everybody talks the talk, but when it comes to walking the walk it’s different. Though no one would ever call it demotion out loud, everyone knows that wrongdoers are invariably sent to duties agricultural. And, when they’re already wallowing in mud, the Dung Squad is the only way down. There is no level below Dung Squad, beyond leaving, quietly, in the night.

  Somer is their Leader. It was her choice. Stay a Farmer, or become a Leader. Go down, to go up. Leaders get to attend the Council. She may smell of shit, but she’s back, in a way, in the inner circle.

  Uri’s getting stronger. They all see it. Lucien came off his horse a couple of summers ago and spent the night unconscious on the moor before they found him, and there are people among them who wonder occasionally if he has truly recovered. He walks with a cane now, and spends more time in his quarters, and when he appears he seems mellowed, somehow: distant. Though smiling. Always smiling. And then they dismiss it straight from their heads because he’s Lucien, Leader of Leaders, and everything they are and everything they will be comes from him.

  * * *

  * * *

  Romy and Ilo train every day, slipping off together when the Pigshed lets out. Down in the woods, up on the moors, in the hive compound, in the godowns. Step and kick and step and kick. She can stand one-legged like a stork for fift
een minutes and still kick out to head height when she stops. Can pull herself up all the way to her breasts on the barn crossbar a hundred times. Shin up a tree trunk all the way to the branches on thigh power alone. Lift a cider barrel above her head. She works her knife as she harvests: the slash and the slice; the upward cut and the twisting stab. All theory, so far, but muscle memory is a wonderful thing. If I have to fight, she thinks, I will be able. My arms and legs and hands and torso will know what to do, even while my brain is catching up.

  * * *

  * * *

  She has been volunteering to help the Farmers butcher the livestock when they’re brought in for feasts and preserving for a year, now. She’s watched, quietly, through the window. Seen Fitz and Jacko and Willow dispatch animals with single, skilful, unhesitant lunges – a guard duty and privilege, to accustom them to the shock of death. She has yet to bring about the act of slaughter, but Romy knows how it feels to slice from groin to sternum, to have still-warm innards tumble out onto her slicing hand. She knows how it feels to bury her arms to the shoulder in a stag that had been strutting proud on a mountainside an hour before, to hack through the trachea to pull out the lungs. She can strip the pelt from a rabbit with two cuts and a single wrench of the wrist.

  Ilo has a natural talent, although he’s only eight. Old enough to learn. An hour each day, the two of them, dancing their dance of secret violence, hitting with all their might and rarely making contact. She’d like to train Eden too, but Eden’s not interested. She’s ten and knows her status. She’s done her carpentry apprenticeship, but no one has asked her to hammer a ploughshare or stoop down in the fields. Eden will go straight into Leadership training when she’s grown. But she’s never seen the poison in their garden, as Romy has. Never seen the secret graveyard. Doesn’t know how unlikely it looks that she will ever be grown at all, unless her siblings form her bodyguard.

  They practise stalking, in the woods. Take turns to be pursuer and prey, practising camouflage and silent movement. Sometimes they follow a Guard on patrol, track them all the way from the gate to the dam, or wait with frozen limbs to catch a squirrel, tickle a fat brown trout out of the water and watch it gape for water on the bank.

  They’re returning to the compound over the wall by the privies when Ilo touches her arm and presses his finger to his lips. She stops, listens. Someone is down there, talking, and their mother’s voice, low and submissive, replies. Romy signals her brother to work his way along the bank and climb the old Scots pine twenty feet along so they can see.

  It’s Willow. Stern and stiff-backed as she’s become over the two years since she left the Pigshed. She watches as Somer empties cupboard No. 5. The barrel is brimming and Somer is hurried and self-conscious as a girl nearly half her age supervises her. As she thumps the metal lid into place, its liquid interior splashes out around the seal, coats the cupboard wall, sends a fine spray of droplets onto her right cheek. She doesn’t flinch.

  Willow stands there with her crossbow and pulls a face of pure disgust. ‘You’re going to have to clean that up,’ she says.

  ‘I know that, yes,’ says Somer patiently.

  ‘No need to be insolent,’ she says.

  ‘No,’ says Somer.

  ‘You shouldn’t let them get that full,’ says Willow.

  ‘I know,’ says Somer. ‘But you can’t predict how people are going to use them. A couple of the others were almost empty.’

  Willow tucks her thumbs into her toolbelt. Uri does that, Romy’s noticed. They’re all starting to mirror his gestures. ‘Are you trying to blame other people?’ she asks.

  ‘No, Willow,’ says Somer, ‘I’m just stating facts ...’

  ‘Well, don’t, 142,’ she snaps. Somer starts, and gazes at Willow with big, hurt eyes. Then her shoulders slump and she turns away. She may be a Leader, but she knows who’s boss. She edges the barrel out of its cupboard and leaves it on the path, fills a bucket from the pump and crawls inside with her scrubbing brush.

  Romy swells with shame and rage in equal measure. How can Somer be so humble? How can Willow have turned into such a monster?

  Willow opens cupboard No. 1. All clean inside, the blue tub in place, scrubbed and only slightly soiled. She checks the three others, looking for fault, finds none. When she emerges from cupboard No. 4, Somer is standing on the path, picking at her rubber glove. She gets it off and dips the hand into the bucket, splashes the water onto her face.

  ‘Not much point in doing that,’ says Willow.

  A flash of defiance. ‘I don’t need your permission to wash my face,’ she replies.

  Willow raises a hand, and slaps her. Not a lady slap: the full whack, hand cupped to catch the ear. Somer goes down without a sound. Crumples to the soiled earth and clamps a hand over the ear, her face white where the blood has rushed away.

  ‘Don’t ever, ever speak back to me like that, 142,’ snaps Willow. ‘Once more and it’s Purgatory.’

  Somer doesn’t move.

  ‘Do you understand?’

  Still no movement on the ground.

  ‘Do you understand?’

  Somer nods. From their perch in the tree it looks as though even nodding hurts.

  A rustle of leaves. Ilo has tensed. Romy keeps her eyes on the scene below, puts a hand out to hold his arm. No. They don’t know we’re here. Better that way. His small, hard bicep flexes, relaxes.

  Somer sits on, staring at the trodden earth, as Willow walks away. She lays the flat of a hand to her cheek, but her eyes are dry. Romy and Ilo slip down from their hiding place and go to her. She looks up as they approach, and mortification fills her face.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t seen that,’ she says.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asks Ilo.

  ‘Yes.’ She drops her hand from her face and they see the imprint of Willow’s hand. Nothing half-hearted about that slap. They’re getting bolder, thinks Romy. Not even waiting for Lucien and the elders to judge infractions. Summary punishments, and no one’s discussing it.

  The Dung Squad is not Uri’s only innovation. He’s turned the crypt beneath the chapel – too damp for food storage, too airless for even one of their cramped dormitories – into a sort of jail. They call it Purgatory, and no one who’s spent a night or two there wishes to return. Punishments have got harder, and are handed out more frequently as well: short rations and extra work, night shifts added in until rule-breakers are stumbling with exhaustion, obedient zombies. There’s not a day passes when someone isn’t in Coventry, shunned and eating alone on the Great House steps.

  Ruaridh, Leader of the Blacksmiths, fifty-five, former owner of nightclubs across Glasgow and Stirling and recruited from a rehab where Vita was working as a locum, lost his temper when Uri announced in the Council Chamber one evening that there would be spot inspections. Leapt to his feet and roared in Uri’s face: Nobody’s made you Leader yet, bhoy! You’re not the boss o’ me! Five days later he disappeared, taking his box and his leather boots, and they never spoke of him again.

  Romy knows where he went, though. Oh, she knows.

  * * *

  * * *

  Romy holds out her hand and helps her mother to her feet. A smear of privy mud runs up her body from knee to elbow. Yesterday was laundry day. She will have to wear her uniform like that until Saturday now, or rinse it out and wear it damp in the autumn chill. Ilo picks up her knitted hat, brushes it down and holds it out.

  Somer pulls it over her vulnerable skull and looks at them with injured eyes. ‘Don’t ...’ she says.

  I will, thinks Romy. Just a bit. Just enough to make her sick. She’s on my list now.

  But she says nothing.

  Somer turns away and levers her tub of effluent onto her trolley. Plods down the path towards the slurry pit without another word.

  They stand and watch her go. She looks smaller, thinks Romy. But I suppose that’s because I
’m bigger. A bit of wolfsbane in Willow’s boots, that’s what I’ll do. They all leave their footwear on a rack outside the Guard House door at night. I’ll slip some in and it will work through her socks and into her skin. Just enough to lay her low. Not enough to stop her heart.

  ‘She won’t survive without us,’ she says to her brother, and he knows who she means.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘So do you still want to be a Guard?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ says Ilo, and glances in the direction Willow has taken. ‘Absolutely.’

  Among the Dead

  November 2016

  28 | Romy

  So that’s how it feels to kill a human being. I didn’t know. In many ways, it was more upsetting to kill a pig.

  I follow the road back to the motorway roundabout. It’s not as far as I’d thought. Time and distance expand in times of stress. It felt as though we were driving for ten minutes after he turned off the motorway, but it turns out that it’s only maybe a quarter-mile.

  It’s nearly midnight. At this time of year I have the cover of darkness for another seven hours, before I will need to be in the sanctuary of my flat, no one looking at my rainbow face and wondering. Though maybe, if they do, they’ll just think I’m a Hallowe’en stop-out dressed as a vagrant or a deranged serial killer. My nose feels strange, as though it’s been popped out of alignment, one of my eyes is already beginning to close, and I can feel my split lip swelling. Only a mile and three-quarters to cover every hour. It should be easy.

  * * *

  * * *

  I killed a man tonight. Not exactly in cold blood. I should feel something, but I don’t. Perhaps what Uri’s asking of me won’t be so hard after all. Especially if I start with Jaivyn. Jaivyn will be more like practice, the way the man was practice.