by Joy Dettman
August: Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. And I’m sick of this, and I’m sick of everything. The End.
September: I don’t even know why I’m writing this, but I am anyway, because we’re not allowed to watch the television any more because it’s always bad news, Mum says and she won’t let us watch it. They watch it. It’s like they don’t want us to know what’s happening. As if we’re deaf or something. Tommy Martin knows everything they know, because he sort of creeps up and listens, and they’re always talking about it. Like how many died and like even though plague got to Australia and people are dying of it, the stupid fighting idiots in other countries are still dropping bombs and shooting people.
I turn another page, and another, and read of food once more and the Logans and the Toyota which has been out again.
November: I forgot October. Sorry October. We haven’t seen anyone for weeks. We’ve hardly been outside the rotten house, but today Dad and Mr Logan went off in the ute, just to see if there is anyone left in town. And they said there was a truck on the road before they got down to the town, and there was no driver in it. Anyway the truck was loaded with rice, and like it just stopped on the road. They loaded up the whole back of the ute with rice then went back for more. Dad says it’s probably safe because it’s sealed in plastic bags, and anyway, it has to be cooked, which would kill the virus.
Anyway, later they went right to the town and they said everyone is gone and Mr Hanson from the shop was gone too, and his shop looked as if it had been robbed. Like everything was gone. It wasn’t much of a town to start with, just Mr Hanson’s shop and the service station and the take-away place. It’s like everyone is turning into robbers, like pinching things. Like pinching that rice. I hate rice. Anyway, I had to put on one of Mum’s masks and rub Vicks around my nose and help unload the rice. We left it outside in the sun, just in case of germs, which the television used to say don’t live long unless they get into a host or something, then we all had to have a wash in disinfectant and soak our clothes in it before we came inside.
The Logans brought plenty of food with them when they moved in because Mrs Logan started storing stuff as soon as Mum and Gran did. She got a lot of tinned meat and stuff, and even baby food and baby formula.
It’s still November. Dad and Mr Logan have been out again and they found some salt at Mr Rowan’s place. They’ve gone to Melbourne. Dad asked them if they wanted to move in with us but they had two daughters in Melbourne and they wanted to be with them. I hope they’re all right, because it’s gone mad down there. Like everyone pinching trucks and robbing people, like they’ve all turned into terrorists. Nobody has come to rob us yet and that’s because no one knows we’re here, like we were twenty-eight kilometres away from the town and no one came to the town because there was nowhere to go except here after you got there. Anyway, the Rowans left us their dog because she would have hated the city. Dad said we’d look after it, and Gran said, ‘Or eat it.’ But she said it quietly. It’s a huge dog, half Rottweiler and half great Dane. It’s a good friendly dog, and big enough to scare off anyone thinking of robbing us.
The next page has been written with a blue pencil, and written well – Granny would have been pleased with Aaron’s letters and his neat joining of the letters.
It’s December, six days to Christmas and something has gone wrong with the power. No computer. No television. Every day, till it went off, the television said that Retribution wasn’t going to hit anything, that America would nuke it. We’re not getting any news, but Mr Martin said a bloke in a truck had a radio which told him they did nuke it over America but only knocked it in half or something. Dad said because America is in the northern hemisphere and we are in the south, we’re going to be all right, and that’s why everybody and their dogs have been coming to Australia like for months, and months, like maybe they knew it was going to hit up the top of the world. Before the television went off they used to say, remain calm. Do not leave your homes, and that was because Sydney and Melbourne were already stuffed full with illegal immigrants and sick people and the cops and the army were going crazy trying to sort it out.
If the worst comes to the worst, we can live on rice I suppose, until things get back to normal, except I hate rice and most of it is brown rice, which is worse than white rice and now we’ve got tons of it. Even if we don’t die of the plague or the comet, or even the nuke, then we’ll probably die of rice poison.
Me and Tommy Martin had a belly ache last night, only because we stuffed ourselves with plums and stuff while we were picking them. Mum and Mrs Martin are bottling everything. Dallas smart-arse Logan said me and Tommy had bloat, because we are animals, and it’s lucky her father is an animal doctor.
The weather is getting crazy and that’s because the wind from the northern hemisphere is mixing with the wind from the southern or something. That’s what Mr Logan says. And anyway, Mum sat us all down last night and she said that this is a disaster and that we have to all work together and not fight, because fighting started the whole mess. And she said three families pooling their talents will do a lot better than one family by itself. And she said we won’t be able to use the bathrooms because we have to keep the tank water to drink, not flush. Which is why Mr Martin has been digging a hole near the back verandah, to make an outdoor loo like in the old days. Stuff just disappears into the dirt, like mulch, and doesn’t need water to flush it.
We’ve been cutting hay for weeks, and storing it in the garage. Dad and Mr Martin are going to bring some of his pigs up here. Not many, because they’ll have to live in the barn too, because Mr Logan said it’s going to get a bit like living in Russia, like keeping the stock inside in the winter. They do that in Russia because of the long winters, and if there is a nuke winter, which happens after a holocaust, Mr Logan said it might last for a long time. And guess what? Tommy Martin started singing ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas’ and I started laughing and no one else did. Dallas Logan started howling.
I glance at the next page, made on a printing machine, though not the same machine. For a moment I think it is not Aaron’s writings but another’s. But he is back and I am pleased to read him. I do not wish to leave these people.
G’day again. Mr Martin knocked off the emergency generator from Mr Hanson’s shop, and also pinched the diesel that runs the generator, and anyway Dad and Mr Logan were busy getting the outside loo finished so Mum and me and Tommy went out with Mr Martin and we wore masks like robbers and just knocked off diesel and anything for fuel and poured it into drums Mr Martin got from the dump. It felt weird, like we went into most of the houses in town, only after Mr Martin checked there were no dead bodies. Then we just helped ourselves to everything, like blankets and stuff. Anyway we drove for miles, and brought back the loads and Mum was all dirty, like I’ve never seen her look as if she needs a wash, but she didn’t bother washing it off just unloaded it onto the verandah and got back in the truck and said, let’s go.
The only person we saw was old Mr Graham who’s got a garden and a bit of a hut in the valley. He’s about ninety and he said he preferred to die on his own land. Mum tried to make him come with us to our house, but he wouldn’t come. He gave us a ton of pumpkins and some other vegetables to take with us, and he said, Good luck, good health, and God bless you.
By the time we got back, Dad and Mr Logan had put the generator on the back verandah and connected it up. It started first pop and, as Gran said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. She went and got her sewing machine out and sat it on the kitchen table and went back to making her aprons for the Red Cross. Anyway, Mrs Logan said I could use her old word processor, which isn’t as good as our computer, except the computer has gone, like it’s lost its brain. Like Mr Martin has lost his because he found some bottles and since they got back with his pigs he’s been sitting on the back verandah looking at the sky, singing and wiping his brain out with what’s in his bottles and Dad is getting cranky with him. That’s because already he can’t stand liv
ing with Mr and Mrs Martin who are arguing now. I can’t standing living with Mr smart-arse Logan either, but I’m not allowed to be cranky. Anyway, the weather is getting worse. It’s scary, like I’m watching a scary movie or reading a Steven King and it won’t end. That’s why I keep writing this stupid thing because I want to get to the end and go back to school. Got to go. Mr Logan is yelling. He wants to turn the light off and save the juice.
Dad dragged us out of bed this morning, even if it didn’t look like morning, and we were stacking hay in the loft because the Martins are going to move their beds down to the garage so there is room to move in the house and we can stop tripping over each other and they can yell in peace. Me and Tommy were up the top of the barn and the others were tossing hay up and we all heard screaming, and Mum thinks Mrs Logan is having her baby and she runs over to the house and it’s dark and she nearly trips over this dead bloke.
Mrs Logan shot him because he had a gun on the girls and he was trying to drag off Dallas, to probably – you know what. She’s not even twelve yet. Anyway, Sarah told me that her mother was in the laundry where Mr Martin put his rifle that wasn’t supposed to have any bullets in it. Lucky it did have bullets in it, because she just comes out with it and lines the bloke up in the rifle sights and fires. Like, POW, he’s dead. She’s cool-hand Luke. Her and Sarah are cool. Anyway we didn’t stack any more hay. Dad and Mr Martin dragged the dead bloke down to the orchard and dug a hole and just threw him in and covered him over and they didn’t even ring the cops, because we can’t ring anyone. One good thing about it is the bloke left his truck near the fence and it’s full of food and even jewellery and all sorts of stuff he’s been robbing and it’s got a tank full of diesel and even some cans of diesel.
Tonight Mrs Logan cooked rice [as usual] but with the dog sitting on her feet and the rifle on the bench. She wasn’t looking worried or scared about killing that robber, just kept saying all the time, ‘I’m glad the gun was loaded. It was him or Dallas, and I’m glad I did it. And I’ll do it again too. I’ll do whatever I have to do to survive this thing.’
I am glad she did what she had to do. I like Mrs Logan very well. I wish she had written some words for me to read, and told of the baby she carried. I think I would like to read the words of another who has carried a foetus within them.
There is a strangeness in reading of those who walked these rooms in that time before. I look at the cellar as a different place now, for I know Mr Rowan and his son dug it deep beneath the house. I sit in the kitchen and feel the warmth of the stove and know that Gran sits there, stitching aprons with red crosses. Sometimes I think that I am as the weaver at my loom, slowly interlacing the frayed threads of every used-up yesterday and joining them to the threads of today, thus creating from them a fine fabric of time.
The old Bible and the Book of Moni live side by side on the kitchen table, and each morning I read first from one then from the other. If I am to learn of all the world, the old and the new, then I must begin at the beginning, and read my way to the end. There is much in these books I find tedious, but much also I find satisfying, so I persevere. I have read all I can find of birth in Granny’s doctoring book. Grown heavy too fast, my waist is thick, my belly awkward, and truthfully, as with Mrs Logan, I am beginning to fear this being’s entrance into life. She had other females to help her when it was time for it to emerge. Who will help me? Will my body give it up easily or will it have to be cut from me as the Caesarean births Granny’s doctoring book tells of? And who will cut me, except the grey men? Damn them! Damn their cordial. Damn the grey men’s filthy world and the thing that came from the sky and got nuked – which is a word I can not find in the dictionary, which now lives in Aaron’s room beside his journal.
Today everyone looks white and scared. They’re not talking, just looking outside and it’s like everyone wants to be in the same room and close. I’m up here because I thought I’d better write this down. Mrs Logan had her baby last night. It’s a boy and it came out early, due to the shock of shooting the bloke, Mrs Martin reckons. It’s not very big, but it can yell. Dallas has gone sick in the head since that bloke with the gun. She’s crying all the time and not eating and saying about how she doesn’t want to die. She’s scaring Emma and Sarah and even brat Carrie.
It’s dark, and cold, and it feels like the whole world is shaking and breaking and blowing away and we’re all prisoners in this house, and like the house is going to break up in the wind. I wish we were with the rest of the people in the city, but Dad says that it would be even worse there because we’ve got plenty of food and plenty of water in the underground tanks and if we run out we’ve got the spring up at the cave. And he said our house is strong. I hope it’s strong.
Gran has stopped sewing. Now she’s praying and saying that God sent the comet to wipe the sinful from his earth. I hope we weren’t too sinful and I wish she’d start sewing her aprons again and shut up. No one is going outside. They’re just moving stuff down to the cellar, like bedding and a rubbish tin we can use for a loo. No one thought about a loo for down there, or a tap for water, but we’ve got a hose from the tank.
It’s about eleven o’clock in the morning, but it’s like it’s night-time. Sometimes I think after everything, after all of Dad’s talk and stuff, that it’s like Dallas says. We’re all going to die. Got to go, diary. Mr Smart-Arse is yelling that it’s time to go down in the cellar. I don’t want to die. I want to live to be a hundred, and I want to come back up here when this is over and keep on writing this thing. It might turn into a Steven King, like with about a thousand pages, if I can find some more paper and if the house doesn’t blow away. I hope Mum bought plenty of paper, because I’m going to get to the end of this story one day and I’ll say, and they all lived happily ever after. So there. Goodbye, diary.
There are no more pages. I check the first, the last. I check his numbers one by one. I look at the rear of all the pages, wanting more. But it is done, and Lord, how I feel the loss of it. I think to take up his pencil, to tell him he did not die of rice poisoning, and that his house did not blow away, for I know of old Aaron Morgan.
He was the grandfather of Granny’s grandfather.
(Excerpt from the New World Bible)
In the first year of the great gathering of the feral groups, twenty-three females were brought into the city. And their death rate was acceptable.
And in the first breeding season the creche was filled, for many births were multiples of three and the ferals of a size to bear them.
And some infants were born and they were not of the city blood, but of feral males. And the infant males of these were housed separately to the sons of the Chosen, for they were robust and when of the crawling year, they were walking. And they were thick of limb and neither of high birth nor of low, thus they were placed with the Arms Masters to be taught the trade of armament.
But there were amongst the feral females those who carried disease unknown to the scientists and it was transmitted to the Chosen who lay with them.
And there were amongst the feral females those who had the desires of the male and they ravished those who lay with them, and also the labouring youths who came to clean their quarters and tend their garden.
And there were those amongst them who would eat of meat, though the eating of meat was long banned in the city. And it was found that these females were feasting on what meat they found.
And when their blood-greed could not be controlled, they were named abominations and sent to the labourers’ recreation halls as sport.
THE V CUBES
Information is as the grey men’s cordial; a little of it raises a desire for more – and I find more of it on Lenny’s V cube.
For some time I have been looking to the needs of Pa. I tidy his room and straighten the tumble of his bedding, and each week clean it in the air-tub, and because I do these small things for him, it does me no harm to also see to Lenny’s needs. This morning when I go to his room I find he has left a
V cube on the floor.
There is not much to see on it, and I wonder why he smiles. I sit on his bed and try to smile at the sketched figures that prance and dance and sing the praises of Seelong.
The cubes are small enough for my hand to hold and have different prancers on five sides. They are colourful, as is the map on the sixth side. I do not understand it, but as I brush the tips of my fingers across the surface of it, one prancer disappears and from behind him, first comes black, then from within the black a living male appears. He speaks to me, speaks news of the city, then he leaves and the cube face shows a garden and many flowers. I watch it to its end, seeking the face of Nate amongst the many white overall clad workers who measure out water to the plants, certain I will know his face if I see it, though I have no mental image of him.
It is a wonderful garden, but how they waste water. It runs down plasti-walls, beads on plasti-ceiling. I can not find the one I seek; the workers’ faces are too small for detail, and soon the speaker is done with his talking, the black comes down and the sketched prancer figure returns.
I try another face and laugh aloud as I activate a large-breasted female, divested of all clothing. Perhaps it is not a true female, only one of the modified bed-males. As I watch him, many come, then on couch and floor they play entwining games with each other and with other males who have the male parts. I believe I have discovered why Lenny does not want to share these cubes with me and Pa, and why it is that he sits long on the verandah smiling at these foolish things.