Yellowcake Summer

by Guy Salvidge

  He didn’t much enjoy looking over the city like this, but it was part of his morning routine. He had to remind himself that no matter how grim things seemed for him here, it was better than East Hills. In a minute, once he’d reconciled himself to another day of the grind, he’d grab his soap and towel and head for the shower. But he had to find a reason to reconcile himself first.

  “I’m still alive,” he said aloud, but it wasn’t enough. There had to be more to life than just living.

  “I have my health.” Debatable.

  “I could get a promotion.” From Orderly to Senior Orderly at Regal Perth Hospital: that was his career path. At least then he wouldn’t have to burn bodies in the hospital crematoria any more, he supposed.

  “I’m a free man,” he said. “I can come and go as I please.”

  Somebody thumped the wall from the other side. “Fucking SHUT UP,” the person said.

  Rion got his soap and towel.

  He liked to use the showers on the 33rd floor because they weren’t normally as busy as those on his own. It was mostly junkies up here and they didn’t like to shower. But the water was always cold when you wanted it warm and warm when you wanted it cold. He recognised a few less than friendly faces as he took his place in the queue. Someone farted. He shuffled along the threadbare carpet. The line at the women’s showers down the dimly-lit hall was far longer than the men’s.

  The shower warden stamped his ticket when Rion reached the front of the queue. He saw naked, pasty flesh and brown, dirty water swirling between grimy toes. He pulled off his itchy vest and dropped it into the laundry chute and his underpants followed. Then he was under the intermittent spray, scrubbing furiously at his skin with soap and a bristly brush. In a matter of seconds his allocation of water had been used and another man made to occupy the space under the showerhead.

  He towelled himself dry as best he could and dressed in a fresh pair of underpants and a vest from the pile. Back in his room, he put on his hospital coveralls before locking the room and making his way down the staircase. Only someone with a death-wish or lacking a sense of smell would risk the lift. There were chemheads on the stairs near the 23rd landing, passed out in their own filth. Management would evict them come 06:00 when the office opened. It was busy at ground level. The lights were brighter; the air, if not cleaner, then certainly better circulated.

  He took his place in the canteen queue, picking up a tray and shuffling forward until he came to the canteen window. Here he was given two slightly stale bread rolls, a ladle’s worth of powdered tomato soup from a great cauldron, and a cup of the vilest coffee he’d ever had the misfortune to ingest. An obese man with oily hair was in his regular place, so he sat down somewhere else. Someone had left half a roll on a tray, so he snatched it up and wolfed it down before anyone could protest.

  His belly full, he finally remembered what gave him the strength to keep doing this: the grind.

  “Because I get fed,” he said to no one, and no one replied. He forced the black, bitter liquid down.

  06:15 and it was time to leave for work. If you didn’t sign in between 06:50 and 06:59, they’d dock you a whole hour and he couldn’t afford that. His regular bus, the 55, passed Prince Towers at 06:21 if it was on time, which it often wasn’t. But it was there just often enough that you couldn’t bank on it being late. He’d have to move his bowels at the hospital after he signed in.

  “Orion Saunders?” the young woman at reception called out as he hurried past. Could it be that she actually recognised him? Dumbstruck, he stopped and peered through the grubby window at her. “Mail for Orion Saunders,” she said. She was barely out of her teens and yet her teeth were as bad as his. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Gimme your card.”

  Fumbling in his wallet, he spilled a range of cards out onto the desk. The Hub-Nexus card, the most important one, was bright green. He handed it over. The receptionist ran the card through the scanner and gave it back to him with a small, official-looking envelope with a blue star in the corner. “Thanks,” he said, stuffing his cards away.

  Clutching the envelope, he pushed his way through the crowd onto the grey, pre-dawn street. Most of the streetlights here on Stirling Road were smashed and the ones that were intact shone weakly, barely illuminating the pavement. The intersection of Stirling and Edward just up ahead was choked with cars, the reddish glow of their fuel cells providing some colour to an otherwise drab canvas. If he got that promotion to Senior Orderly, he might be able to afford a second-hand car himself, but judging by the congestion, it might not make much difference to his journey’s duration anyway. As it stood, he could barely afford the bus fare.

  06:20 and no sign of the bus crawling along Stirling Road as yet. A street vendor in a tiny, fluorescent orange booth that was hitched up to the back of a motorbike hawked his wares to the waiting commuters: “I’ve got drinks. I’ve got meds. I’ve got something to pick you up and put you down safely again. I’ve got mags. I’ve got apps. I’ve got some kinda special goggles that lets you see the stars through all the goop up there.”

  Rion coughed up some foul phlegm and spat it out. His lungs were itching like a bitch and the street vendor’s voice was like the screech of an axle grinder. 06:23. He turned to the vendor. “Just quieten down, would you? Maybe then I’ll buy something.”

  The creases in the vendor’s face were caked with grime. “You look as if you could use a pick-me-up,” he declared.

  “I’ve got hayfever. It might be conjunctivitis.”

  “Hospital boy, yeah?” the vendor said, indicating to Rion’s coveralls. “I’m sure they’ve got some cream for things like that in there.”

  “Yeah, but it costs plenty,” Rion said. “More than I can afford.”

  “I hear you, brother. Let’s see.” The vendor rummaged around in a plastic tub. “No creams, no ointments, no nothing,” he concluded. “Looks like it’s gonna have to be a temporary fix. A booster’ll take your mind off it for a coupla hours. Set you back two hundred.”

  “Two hundred?” Rion laughed. “You’re going to have to lower your prices if you expect to sell anything in this neighbourhood. I can pay fifty.”

  “Fifty,” the vendor spat. “I can’t sell you a Band-Aid for that. Looks like you’re gonna have to grin and bear it. Wait here, I got a better idea. You’re right; people aren’t buying any of this shit any more. You could branch out into a little side business yourself, if you catch my drift, hospital boy.”

  “Sure,” Rion said. “I’ll sleep on it. No, wait, I’ll be sleeping in the street if I did that.”

  “Nah, I’m serious,” the vendor insisted, lowering his voice. “Swipe me some meds. Pills, antibiotics, whatever you can lay your hands on. Smart young guy like you. All the trolley boys are doing it.”

  “I catch the 55 six days a week,” Rion said. “How come I’ve never seen you before? This smells like a sting.”

  “I used to be over on Main Street but some hoods drove me out. This here’s my new patch.”

  “Better suck on a booster yourself then. There’s my bus.” 06:25.

  “Wait up,” the vendor said. “Here, take a booster. It’s on the house.”

  Rion held out his hand and accepted the narrow tube. “You’re not a cop?”

  “If I was a cop, I’d wanna hope I had something more important to do than busting the lowlife trash spilling out of Prince Towers. They don’t have a jail big enough.”

  “Prince Towers is our jail. Thanks for the tube,” Rion said. He clambered onto the bus.

  Things seemed to be rolling his way for once; he even scored a seat in the back corner. All right, so someone had vomited on the floor there.

  “What you got there, mate?” a heavy-set man in a hard hat said, turning around to look at Rion.

  “It’s just a booster. Want to buy it?”

  “Not that,” the man said. “The letter. Go on, open it.”

  “I’m not ready yet,�
�� Rion replied. “Maybe I’ll take the booster first.” He looked at the envelope and the blue star on it. He knew then that it was something bad.

  The man’s eyebrows were black and bushy. His face was unshaven and swarthy. “How about I guess what it says, and if I’m right you give me the booster.”

  “What’s my incentive?” Rion asked. The bus was moving again, but the street ahead was filled with klaxons and flashing lights. 06:32.

  “If I’m wrong, I’ll give you my hard hat!”

  Rion laughed. “Your hard hat. I guess I could sell it back to you.”

  “That’s the spirit,” the man said. Bored, the other commuters looked on with moderate interest. “Ready?”

  “Okay.”

  “What you’ve got there in your hot little hands is a draft notice. You’ve been drafted into the Civilian Police Force. Cop that.”

  His clammy fingers fumbled with the envelope. It wasn’t often you saw a letter on actual paper. There was his name, and yes, he had been drafted. He handed over the tube and stared at the text, the meaning dissolving into a long sequence of unintelligible symbols.

  “Cheer up, buddy,” the man said. “Look, that was a dirty trick. See?”

  Rion looked up; the man held up an identical letter, except for the name and address. “That’s your name, Marcel?”

  “Yep. We even get to go to the same recruitment meeting. Here, take your booster back. I’m sorry I tricked you.” Marcel came and sat down next to Rion. He looked down at the vomit at Rion’s feet. “Whoa, did you do that?”

  “No, but I could now.”

  “Tube’ll make you feel better. Mind if I do half?”

  “Take the whole thing.”

  Marcel opened the valve and sucked down some of the odourless gas. “Mmm, yeah. Your turn, Orion.”

  “Rion.” But he took the proffered tube and, after imbibing what remained of the booster, he felt a little better.

  3. The First Domino

  Paranoia need not concern Sylvia any longer: now she knew they were watching her from inside her skull. But they could not penetrate her mind, her soul: that was her sanctum. These thoughts were all she truly owned. A prisoner in her own body, each movement betraying the thought that generated said movement, she tried to keep still. She tried to keep her eyes closed and to avoid reaching out to touch the things around her. She thought she could feel the SCA there, at the core of her being: an enemy within. How she longed to pick at it as she would a scab, to lance it like a boil, to excise it like a tumour.

  An itch on her left leg, below the knee. The need to swallow back the saliva that accreted in her throat. Her bladder not full, not empty. The gurgling in her stomach. Each of these things and more, possibly much more: the sensations she wasn’t consciously aware of. Her respiration, her blood pressure, her heartbeat. Each of these things was recorded and transmitted to some studio in an anonymous government building in an anonymous government town, where anonymous government employees sat enraptured, or indifferent, or contemptuous, or laughing with their colleagues, at the nexus of her digitised being. She could not know them as they knew her. She had been staked out, colonised. She was their property, their territory. And now they intended to use her to reach out to neighbouring territories, to conquer and assimilate until such a point that all things were known and all places had been brought under their dominion. Sylvia was the first domino. Now they would position her in such a way that the others could be made to fall.

  Then she was en route from point A to point B, then B to C, before C to D. There were no words of encouragement, but nor were there warnings or threats. It was no longer necessary to police her; they thought her entirely rehabilitated. She was propelled along cool corridors, was made to sit in frigid rooms and was conveyed in the comfort of an empty prison coach with darkened windows. The external world only imposed itself on her for brief moments, in the few steps between the reception and the waiting coach, and again between the coach and the airport terminal. The ferocity of the sun surprised her. But now she had arrived at point E, the terminal, into air-conditioned cool once again.

  The crowd surprised her. Here was something she’d forgotten, what it was like to be one of many, to be no one in particular and for others not to know her name or to care where she went. The prison officials whisked her over to a quiet area where she could be processed, shielding her from the necessity of standing in line with the other commuters. Off went her luggage on a conveyor belt. The body imager didn’t intimidate her the way it once had. She had no privacy, nor any expectation of privacy, and thus had lost her sense of modesty.

  In the departure lounge, the guards asked her to sit down.

  “Toilet break first,” she declared.

  The female guard, the one she thought of as the surly one, shook her head. “You can go on the plane.”

  Something snapped. What could they do to her now, aside from what they were already doing? “Ever seen a thirty-five year old piss herself?” Sylvia said. “Are you going to mop it up?” Now people were looking at her.

  “All right, calm down,” the male guard said. Sylvia got her way and was led over to the toilets by the female guard.

  “Are you going to stand outside the cubicle or do you want to come in and watch?” Sylvia said to Surly, who scowled in response. Sylvia shut the cubicle door. She realised then that the guards didn’t know about the SCA. It made sense; they were just low-level functionaries. They just treated her the same way they would any prisoner.

  Washing her hands, Sylvia looked straight into the mirror and said: “Did you get some good information out of that?” Surly, not understanding that the question wasn’t directed at her, grabbed Sylvia’s arm and forced her out. The tap was still running.

  “Let go of me,” Sylvia said.

  Surly sat her down, but Sylvia knew she’d won this minor battle. “Where’s my reader?” she said.

  Sylvia managed to finish The Lady in the Lake by the halfway point of the flight. Not wanting to start another novel, she closed the reader and looked around for something to occupy her attention for the remaining hour. The other guard, whom she’d dubbed Placid, blocked her view of the window. Surly sat between Sylvia and the aisle, so she was pretty much trapped.

  “Hey, mind if I go to the bathroom?” she asked.

  “Again?” Surly replied. “You went at the airport.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to go, I’m just asking if you mind. I guess you do.”

  Surly didn’t appreciate that, but it seemed there was nothing she could do to punish her here, so she pursed her lips.

  “Come on, tell me your life story,” Sylvia said. “Aren’t you bored?”

  “I’m not supposed to talk to you and I don’t want to anyway.”

  “The feeling’s mutual. What about you, Placid?”

  “Placid?” the male guard said, turning to her. “That’s what you think of me as?”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to talk to me.”

  “We’re not. But no one will know, right?”

  “Right.” Sylvia shut her mouth. Poor old Placid; she was probably getting him into trouble.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You’re shy now?”

  “No, I’m... not at liberty to say.”

  “I’ll get back to my cloud-watching then.”

  Sylvia had vowed to herself that she wouldn’t be paranoid, but now she was struck by another possibility: how did she know that the SCA was real? Did such things even exist? Couldn’t the whole thing have been a ruse, a cost-cutting measure to have her police herself? But Lyncoln Rose had wanted her to contact Misanthropos, hadn’t she? Why would she want that if the SCA wasn’t real?

  She tried to think back to the operation. Had they shown her the SCA before they put it in? She didn’t think so, but then there was no particular reason why they would. All she remembered was the anaesthetic and the headache she’d had when she woke. So her memories were inconclusive. She’d need a way o
f testing it somehow.

  The reader.

  Opening it again, she unfolded the keyboard and typed: HOW DO I KNOW THAT THE SCA IS REAL? I NEED A SIGN. Then she held her gaze on the words for several seconds so that any observer would have plenty of time to read the message.

  “Give me that,” Surly said. “What are you doing?”

  Sylvia handed over the reader.

  “Scar has an ‘r’ in it,” she said, handing it back.

  Sylvia kept her thoughts to herself after that. The plane landed safely and they were the last passengers off. “Where do we say our goodbyes?” she asked as Surly and Placid marched her across the hot tarmac to Arrivals.

  “Someone will be here to pick you up,” Placid said. “Then you’re free to go.” They entered the terminal.

  After Canberra, Perth Airport had a distinctly Chinese feel. Every sign in English was repeated in Mandarin, and there were Chinese businessmen and women everywhere. It was like arriving in an Asian city. Even the vending machines had Chinese characters emblazoned across them. She couldn’t recall whether it’d been quite so pronounced last time she’d been here, back in ‘58. She’d had other things on her mind at the time, like the prospect of a life in prison.

  “Sylvia Baron?” a woman in a pant suit said. “I’m Alannah Furey from Golden West News. I wonder whether I could have a moment of your time?”

  “Ms Baron has no comment to make,” Surly said, putting her hand in Sylvia’s back.

  There were other journalists further along; they swarmed around, clamouring for attention.

  “Ms Baron, just a few questions.”

  “How do you feel to be back in WA?”

  “Will you try to return to Yellowcake Springs?”

  “How do you feel about your husband’s sentence? Are you angry that his co-accused have been sentenced to just six years each?”