by Ely, Jo;
“He’s on a list already,” Gaddys confirms. “A walking ghost. He wouldn’t even be here, amongst the living, if the general’s wife hadn’t woken up enough to sign his papers personally. I don’t know who got to her, but when I find them … Anyway, with what you’ve told me.” She smiles sweetly at Tomax’s aunt. “When I find them then I’m going to be … Cross.” She enunciates the last word crisply. “Aren’t I Jengi?” She says lightly. Eyes him. Jengi turns briefly toward her. “Yes.” He says. He turns back to his work, stacking the Sinta’s empty jars and the orange grain sacks.
Aunt looks up at Jengi on his stool, “Goodbye Dear!” Then she meets Gaddys’ eye. Clutching on to her over-full basket, makes a rush for the door. When she gets to it, slows down to pass an Egg Boy in the doorway. Stops just long enough to squint at him. “The new batch look almost human,” she says, “Don’t they?” Turning to Gaddys. She peers closely at Antek. Something she sees in his face causes her to take a sudden step back. Rattle and squeak of the shop door as she tries to jam it into its hinges behind her and fails.
BLACK FLOWERS
JENGI EXAMINES ANTEK BRIEFLY, looks away. Lifts a jar and climbs the stool to stack it. Top shelf. But just a moment later he’s teetering for a jar just out of reach. Leans far right enough that he’d take a nasty fall if he lost his footing even for a moment, especially over the meat slicer like that. It seems extraordinarily clumsy to Gaddys. But then what else can you expect from a Digger? She thinks. He’s been making mistakes lately, too many and it’s a pain that the general’s wife goes on re-certifying him as ‘tame’, three times a year and year in, year out, no matter how pollinated she gets. The damned woman never seems to forget to do that one thing.
Jengi will be easy enough to replace in the shop, Gaddys calculates. With her right foot pushes the meat slicer a little closer to Jengi, moving her foot backward so casually that it appears like an absent minded gesture. She goes back to counting her ration cards. And now she’s making small indecipherable marks on her clipboard in red ink, next to Sinta names on today’s work rota.
“Right a bit, Jengi Dear.” Smirks. Jengi, balancing on one foot only now, teeters on the edge of his small platform.
What happens next happens fast.
Antek lunges. Shoots out his right foot, secures Jengi’s stool with it. Now he holds his right arm out steadily, for just long enough for Jengi to get down safely.
The two men eye each other, wide scared eyes, the significance of Antek’s action is immediately apparent to them both. Now Antek feels rather than sees Gaddys’ curious gaze on the back of his head. He understands his mistake. He is already on Gaddys’ list. There’s no room for him to make another error like the one with the rain barrel. He’s only just gotten out of prison, and even that by the skin of his teeth.
Egg Men aren’t supposed to help out a member of any tribe but their own, and the OneFolks of course, and even then only when following orders. But apparently the Egg Boy’s right foot and right hand have decided something else without him. It’s too late now, Antek thinks. Best to brazen the thing out. “Didn’t want to see the jar smash.” Antek says in a stilted voice. “Egg Boys must protect the rations. Them jars are fine quality foodstuffs.” He says stiffly. Pauses, looking down. The smashed jar was empty. “You want to watch them foodstuffs better, Digger.”
Gaddys shrugs, eyes the row of empty jars. She looks bored. There is no reason for her to doubt Antek, after all the Egg Men were bred to be incapable of deception. The Egg Boys don’t lie.
“Yes. Of course.” Jengi’s tone is giving nothing away. “Now I’ll get out of your way, Egg Man.”
“Good.” Antek sniffs. “You do that, Digger.”
Gaddys turns away. Fixes her coils. Checks her nails and yawns again. Showing all her small white teeth. “Over there,” she says. Pointing Antek toward the Egg Boys rations. But she watches Antek closely as he crosses the room. A cold, shrewd gaze.
Antek, with his ration box under his left arm and a half rotten fish slithering out unwrapped from under his right, strides quickly toward the shop door. But when he gets to the door, something causes him to pause there. Risks a quick glance back at the room.
And then Antek is caught, eye to eye with those marbled pupil-less eyes that Gaddys wears on Tuesdays, reminding The Egg Boy of the fishes stacked in rows and piles at the front of her shop, just at the point where they’re tipping softly into rot, covered with a veil of white mucous.
Gaddys examines the Egg Boy’s face. And then staring down at his right foot. Nodding softly. It’s a clear warning.
Jengi glances briefly at Antek then looks away. He goes back to his shelves.
Antek steps over the door jamb. Softly turns to go. The Sinta girl Zorry is entering the shop as Antek leaves it, this seems like no coincidence to Antek and he gives no indication of having seen her before. He pushes past Zorry abruptly, and then he’s gone. Zorry hears the whole door frame clatter and stick fast in the frame, so that the ancient bell on the top of the door goes on tinkling and ringing after Antek. Jengi takes the broom handle. Deals with the bell roughly.
“Those clumsy Egg Boys.” Gaddys says. “But the general’s wife has a liking for that one, for some reason. Certified him all the way out of a cell. No idea why the general puts up with such sentimental nonsense. It’s not as though they’re human, no need to get attached to the servants. Is there Jengi?”
“No, ma’am.”
“No, that’s right, isn’t it, Jengi?” And then, in a further unpleasant aside, “The Egg Boy will be better after he gets his staining.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Jengi replies, more tonelessly than Zorry has ever heard Jengi speak. He turns and stacks the shelves faster.
Gaddys turns to face Zorry now.
“Yes, Dear. What can we do for you? Don’t be shy now.”
Zorry is nervous, coming here. It can be tricky for a Sinta to collect their rations. They don’t always leave here the way they came in and Zorry knows it. She has heard the stories. Eyes flick toward the exit. The smoke from the furnace outside, just visible through the mottled upper window of the back door.
Zorry silently places her ration cards on the counter. She moves so quickly that she scratches the palm of her hand on the edge of one of the brass angel wings which decorate Gaddys’ counter-pulpit. She curls her hand closed behind her back, pressing her fingers down on the hurt.
Gaddys has her back turned toward Zorry just now, giving Zorry a chance to examine unseen the small pale lumpen head with its sheen of soft white down, like feathers, which is Gaddys’ current look for Tuesdays, when she is washing her coils.
“Fetch me that jar, Girl.” Gaddys says. Without turning.
“Which one?”
“Top shelf.” Gaddys manages to pour as much contempt into those two words as she can.
Zorry walks around the room with an air of outraged silence. Pokes a cabbage, on the way to collect the jar. Runs a single finger over the rows of skin coloured chalks and the coiled hair pieces, the potatoes with the white roots, the softly mouldering bread. Gaddys’ back is still turned.
Zorry hurts her neck looking up at the huge shelves, row upon row, tilting up as far as the eye can see. The ceiling of the shop is like an aircraft hangar. Impossibly high.
Most of what sits on the shelves are items in jars and tins, rations for the domestic workers and slaves who work in the OneFolks’ village, the Sinta and the edge farm miners. The rest of the shelves are stocked with differently coloured grain sacks, meant for the edge farmers, those who still have their pass cards to the OneFolks’ village. The furnace outside is for meat, which is only for the OneFolks’ and those whom Gaddys considers to be useful to her.
And then there’s the black shiny store shed.
Nobody knows what’s in there. No-one but Gaddys and Jengi, of course.
Zorry takes in as much as she can. Tries to note any changes. Jengi watches Zorry. Cold hard knot at the base of his throat. The girl
is collecting information under Gaddys’ nose. Jengi’s not sure if she’s being naive or simply reckless. Possibly both. Mamma Zeina didn’t have enough time, in the end, to train Zorry. The girl is doing fine work under the circumstances, it’s just that … It takes all of a hundred years of Sinta knowledge, passed down mouth to ear, to know how to deal with the village shopkeeper. And there’s no room for mistakes, not even one small one. He squeezes his eyes shut. Blinks and opens them again. Hard stare at the patch of white wall at the back of the shelf. Places an empty jar there. Takes two careful steps down from his ladder. Notices Gaddys watching the girl with her powder compact.
Taking a few extra seconds between the order and the following of the order, Well. Jengi thinks, watching Zorry’s slow movements. That’s about the only time of day a Sinta gets to call her own. The time between the order and the following of the order, Jengi thinks, the only form of protest left. To fall down at the work, let things rust and seize up slow in the bomb factories, sew the edge farm children’s uniforms full of breathing holes and with a little slack at the throat. Be the spoke in the wheel of Bavarnica’s many interconnecting systems. Weaponised slowness.
Jengi remembers that ‘God Speed’, is the soft, ironic Sinta goodbye. When two neighbours meet in the street. But Gaddys is not some factory guard, or an untrained Egg Boy. There is a reason the general trusts her to decipher who’s ‘tame’ and who’s not. Jengi scratches his head. What Zorry needs right now is a distraction.
Gaddys strokes her balding head. With the sproutings of white feathers in her wrinkled skin cap she looks like a too-soon-hatched chick, Zorry thinks. Gaddys pulls a silver wig out of her pocket, pulls it on slowly. Stares at the girl. Silence.
This can’t end well.
Zorry puts Gaddys’ jar down on the counter. Soft clink.
“What is your purpose here, Girl? What are you for?”
“I’ve come … I’m here to collect funeral flowers, for Mamma Zeina’s grave,” Zorry says. And then lifting her chin slightly. Meeting Gaddys’ eye. It is a long and dangerous moment.
“I have the ration cards.” Zorry says. She speaks quietly, but there’s a steeliness in the girl, Gaddys thinks. She’s not afraid. Gaddys taps her tooth. Jengi takes another small step down his ladder. Plucks an empty jar. Now he finds himself gazing at the second empty jar behind it. He’s listening. Holding his breath.
“That’s quite a collection of ration cards.” Gaddys examines the Sinta family names on the cards. Writes them down.
“A funeral has been approved.” Zorry says, objecting as much as she dares to. Her voice is just a little more shrill than she intended.
“Has it now? And who exactly was it who approved a Sinta funeral? I can guess, Child, but I would like to hear you say it.”
“The general’s wife.”
Jengi freezes. Collects himself and then, dipping his head, takes a jar from the shelf beneath his elbow. He takes the opportunity to glance at Gaddys’ face. To see how she takes this.
Gaddys snatches up the ration cards again. Examines them with a sullen expression. She’s trying to find something wrong.
Feels like only seconds later, Zorry is leaning against the cool sweating wall in the alleyway beside the shop. Listening to the sound of Gaddys shrieking, making phone calls, hitting Jengi with the brush end of his own broom.
There’s a sting in the sun today. Zorry has no flowers. No ration cards. And she’s put a clutch of Sinta names, via their ration cards, into Gaddys’ hands. This whole thing was a mistake from beginning to end. What’s worse, Gaddys has noticed Zorry now. Zorry listens for a little while longer to the sound of Jengi taking a beating on her behalf. Guilt seems to take Zorry by the throat and press down. It’s paralysing. She can’t go home or go back.
A side window opens behind her. And then Jengi’s arm, his thick bony wrist. He’s clutching a black flower in his fist. “This is for you.” He says, grimly. “For Zeina.” Jengi hands her the flower. Zorry notices the bruising on Jengi’s face, that his mouth and right ear are bloodied. He rocks one loose tooth softly side to side with his tongue. Grins wryly.
“We’re alright, Zorry. It’s not your fault. She’s been wanting to do that for a while, damned savage. Now, go have Zeina’s funeral.” And turning toward a sound behind him, hisses, “Scurvets. Now, Scram!”
Zorry doesn’t need to be told twice.
Levers herself over the glass topped wall at the end of the alley. One seamless, flowing motion, Zorry hurdles the fence. Not a single petal falls.
This time she knows how to avoid the glass shards.
Zorry just keeps going. Sound of her heart in her ears.
RATIONS
EGG MEN ARE TURNING over the house. Zorry notices Zettie hiding out behind the chair in the corner. The child is sucking her thumb and her eyes are closed tight. She’s buried her ears under her hat, with her hair stuffed around it. Zorry throws the black flower into the sink, covers it with the dish cloth just in time. Ezray eyes the sink, small nod at Zorry, and then turns quickly away.
The Egg Men find it all. All the family’s food stores, including the fresh eggs from under Mamma Ezray’s hat, and the new hatched chicks in the box behind the oven, peppered with breathing holes, the red peppers under the sink, the root vegetables sunk down with stones at the bottom of the rain barrel. The perfectly formed mushrooms in the hidden pouch of Father’s jacket.
Zorry’s father seems to take it worse than Mamma Ezray.
Zorry’s father was left with nothing this evening but a handful of dried beans because no one thought to check in the palm of his hand. Too obvious. He curls his hand around the beans until the Egg Mens’ search is over.
Antek’s father, the chief Egg Man for this sector, tucked a food ration card in the top left pocket of Father’s jacket as he left. “Gaddys will replace it all. Don’t look so sour, Sinta. Present your ration card at the shop. You are lucky we left you anything at all.” Zorry rolls silence around on her tongue, the way Mamma Zeina taught her. Zorry’s father looks down at the ration card.
A few dots on a ticket and his children to spend their lives begging back the half rotten leftovers of all that he raised or grew. He bangs his hand against the side of his head, once, twice. As though he’s trying to remember something that won’t come back.
Zorry tries to protect her father as much as she can, understanding without ever being told that he’s not as strong as her mother, Mamma Ezray. And that several years of taking the government medicine has ruined what was once a fine mind. Now she tells him it’s alright. What else? She tells him that Gaddys is nice and not to forget to take his medication. Pats his shoulder, sensing that what he’s lost is too great for him to contemplate. If there was a time for him to confront all that he was and is now, then that time was long ago. He slowly pulls on his overalls, ready for his work in the sewers. But once they’re on, he looks down at them. As though he sees them for the first time in his life. He doesn’t make a move toward the door. He doesn’t move at all, for one long moment.
“It will be alright, won’t it?” Father gazes at Zorry opaquely.
“Yes.” She lies.
Mamma Ezray grows herbs and strong spices to cover the taste of soft rot in the rationed shop food.
Their father regularly complains that Mamma Ezray’s chilli burns his tongue.
“You, Woman. You woman with your bitter cooking. Trying to kill me, you are.” He said last night, the way he does every night. Medicated as he is, Zorry thinks that deep down he knows.
There have been small signs. That day when he threw the cooking pot at the kitchen counter. The day he slid down the wall and then sat there. Three straight hours. His eyes blank, unreadable. He didn’t get up until the bell rang, once, twice, to call the Sinta men for their work.
Zorry’s father will clear the drains that run underneath and alongside the OneFolks’ village. Then he’ll come home and sleep through the day. Return at nightfall for his next shift.
>
He was a teacher in The Before. A professor of botany before the last Reckoning Era, before the mountain deaths and the Diggers’ revolution. Zorry doesn’t know anything about that time. It was before she was born. All she knows is that her father has been getting more distant every year since she was born. Since she was a small girl she has believed that some day he would just get up and vanish like smoke. Even his voice sounds farther away every year. As though he’s leaving his family in slow pieces and parts.
“Reckon we need another Reckoning of you all. Another purge of the Sinta.” Gaddys stands at the cottage door, eyes her manicure. Pats her coil of hair. And then, unfathomably, she smiles at Zorry. Just as though she’s pleased to see her. Bright corporate smile, the way the shopkeepers were trained to in the long ago. As if her face betrays her, Zorry finds she smiles nervously too.
Zettie slides out from behind her chair, slipping up to her sister Zorry. Holding on to Zorry’s leg and then slips in front of her. Leans. And then without taking her eyes off Gaddys, slowly lifting her small hand in the air, tiny thumb pointed upward. Puts the thumb in her mouth. Zettie gazes solemnly at Gaddys. Fails entirely to read the situation, as far as Zorry’s concerned.
Gaddys takes a package from the Egg Man standing beside her, unrolls it. The rotting fish slaps on to the kitchen table. “Present,” she says. “For my best slaves.” Zettie looks up sharply when she hears the word. Now Gaddys is eyeing Zettie. Soft, knowing smile spreading out over her features. Zettie repeats the word, “Slaves.” A gentle uptilt at the end of the word like she asks it as a question.
And then the infant turning to gaze at Mamma Ezray, quick checking gesture.
Mamma Ezray seems to slip inside herself.
Zettie eyes her mother.
Something seems to get into the child.
Zettie reaches out her small hand, prods the fish with her right index finger. It oozes a clear liquid tinged with yellow. Now she steps back. The liquid pools on the floor, around her feet. Now she gazes up at Gaddys.