by Peter Liney
“It’s not food they want.”
Delilah chuckled to herself, as if she knew that all along.
I stared at Lena, suddenly feeling that familiar old-age obsolescence—that I was out of my depth again. “Drugs?” I eventually asked.
“’Course.”
“So what do we do?”
She shook her head and sighed again, as if I had no idea what I was getting into. “Nail them to the floor,” she replied.
Couple of days later I began to see what she meant. At last the two kids started talking to us, but in such a way we could’ve well done without it. They screamed abuse, frothing at the mouth, demanding we let them go, and when we wouldn’t they went even more crazy. Throwing themselves at the wire mesh, hanging off it like frenzied animals, baring their teeth, making all sorts of vicious threats. You wouldn’t believe it. Even though they were just little kids, even though they were locked up, it still left you feeling decidedly unnerved. All you wanted was for them to stop, be quiet, act in a way that was recognizably human.
One day, when they were particularly bad and Jimmy went in to change their crap container, they grabbed him and a scuffle broke out. I had to get in there and give the older one a real clout before I could drag Jimmy away. Even then they managed to tip the entire contents of the container over him.
When Delilah saw him, smelling and stinking and looking all sorry for himself, she went crazy.
“Jesus Christ!” she ranted. “Why are we carrying on with this? We all know what’s gotta be done. Let’s do it!”
There was a long pause. I hadn’t heard Delilah lose her temper that way for a long time.
“Delilah,” Lena said soothingly, but she wouldn’t listen to anyone.
“No! We can’t keep them forever! You know we can’t!”
“We can’t just kill them,” Lena said.
“Why not? What other choice have we got?” Delilah challenged. “You gonna look after them for the rest of your life?” Jimmy turned and skulked off down to the garden to clean himself up. “Kill the little bastards!” she screamed, turning to hurry away after him.
Neither Lena nor me could find it in ourselves to speak. I mean, I knew Delilah hated them, I just hadn’t appreciated how much.
Lena lowered herself down to sit cross-legged in front of the fire. “We can’t kill them,” she repeated.
I went and squatted down behind her, wrapping my arms around her so far it was like they went around twice. I knew why it was so important to her, that there was still enough of the Camp in her to identify with those two, but I was also afraid that after this long period of happiness and harmony in the tunnels, this situation just might tear us apart.
Day after day it went on. Going down there was like entering the forbidden wing of an asylum, sometimes they started screaming at you even before you unlocked the door. Spitting through the wire mesh, throwing food at you, coming out with stuff so sick it made you think something else must be speaking through them. A couple of times, I gotta be honest with you, it even went through my head that maybe Delilah was right. Maybe putting them out of their torment and misery was the kindest thing we could do. Then one morning I went down and everything had changed. They were utterly exhausted, their fury spent, and instead of screaming at me, they started to beg for their freedom.
The little one came over to the mesh on his hands and knees, pulling himself up by the wire, pleading with me, again reminding me of a stray dog.
“Please, let us go!” he begged. “Please! Please!”
I just shook my head. “Sorry.”
“Come on!” the other one howled at the ceiling. “Let us out!”
“We can’t let you out and you know it,” I told them.
“We won’t tell anyone!”
“Honest! Honest, we won’t!” the little one confirmed.
“We won’t go to the Village again. Ever,” his sharp-faced companion added.
“Look! You’re not going anywhere, so get used to it,” I told them.
And you know something? When they realized, when they saw how adamant I was, that there was no chance of changing my mind, they both burst into tears. I tell you, I just stood there and stared at them, their behavior no more believable, no less extreme, than it’d been before. I couldn’t take any more. I walked out, leaving them to their wailing, the sound echoing all the way down the tunnel. It almost pulled at your heartstrings . . . until you remembered what it was they were really weeping for.
Couple of days later they both started to run a fever; doubled-up with stomach cramps, vomiting, sweating so much that they left watery imprints on everything they touched. I had to keep taking them water. Gallons and gallons of it. Then they started hallucinating. Seeing all sorts of stuff. Calling you the names of people you didn’t know, shouting at things and folk that weren’t there, pulling demons out of their heads like pieces of glass from an accident victim.
Sure as hell it wasn’t what we intended, but we didn’t have a choice. Somehow we had to help them purge the crap from their systems. Thank the Lord, Lena knows something about it. Apparently De Grew mostly gives them “bubbles” and “flames.” I mean, shit, I don’t know what that means to you, but it didn’t mean a helluva lot to me. But that’s what they were full of when they went up to the Village, when they did their killing and stuff, which, as far as I’m concerned, makes it a transfusion straight out of the devil’s veins.
Day after day it went on. Every time you unlocked that door, you never knew what you’d find. Sometimes they were so spent they were almost comatose, lying on their sacks, staring out into some far dark corner of the universe. Other times they couldn’t sit still for a moment, leaping all over the place, shouting at the top of their lungs.
The older one had a habit of head-butting the walls. It was nothing for me to walk in there and find blood pouring from his forehead, a line of impact points around the room. Both of them got into such a state racking body and mind that it even went through my head to go out and try to get them a little of what they so craved. The stuff their bodies had been deceived by—the drugs that they would willingly administer to themselves till it destroyed them.
Eventually, just when I thought everyone—and that included Lena—was starting to despair, to wonder if we’d bitten off more than we could chew, their madness began to be interspersed with something else. Something more familiar. And at last there came the odd moment when you could see the slow rising of the human face.
I went down there one night to pick up their dishes and stuff and as I turned to leave the little kid spoke to me, normally, like I was a human being or something.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Before I could answer the other one turned and sneered, “Big Guy!” probably cuz he heard Jimmy say it a few times.
“It ain’t exactly my name,” I said, feeling a bit of a fake, like a champ who lost his crown years ago. Still, it was the first bit of normal conversation we had and I was eager to build on it. “And you?”
“Arturo,” the little one told me, and when his companion refused to say anything, filled in for him. “He’s Gordie.”
“Hi, Arturo. Hi, Gordie,” I said, but the latter wasn’t having any of it.
“Shut it!” he said to Arturo. “We ain’t talking to no old people.”
I went silent for a moment, not quite knowing where to go from there, but fortunately Arturo was his own little man.
“How old are you?” he asked; for the first time his big brown eyes reflected rather than absorbed the candlelight.
I hesitated for a moment, then decided to come straight out with it. “Sixty-three.”
I tell you, they practically wet themselves. You’d have thought I just told them the funniest joke ever known to the human race. They simply couldn’t believe anyone could live that long.
“Sixty-three!” Arturo cried, throwing himself around the cell, shrieking at the top of his voice, falling helplessly to the floor and rolling
over and over. Gordie was more restrained, laughing partly at me and partly at the antics of Arturo.
I just stood there, not saying a word, waiting for them to calm down. When they did, you could tell it wasn’t going to be for long.
“You smell,” Arturo informed me.
“I smell?” I said, immediately opting to meet him on his own level. “Ever smelled yourself? A skunk wouldn’t keep you company.”
“I don’t smell!” he replied, surprisingly indignant.
“Matter of opinion.”
“I don’t!”
“How old are the others?” Gordie asked, more aware of where the real serious mocking lay here.
“Ask them.”
“That little old guy must be a hundred,” he sneered.
“Two hundred!” Arturo cried.
I stood there for a while, listening to their rekindled shrieking, Arturo upping and upping Jimmy’s age and squealing louder each time. They might’ve calmed down a bit, but they still seemed crazy to me. I wanted to try to relate to them somehow. To prove we weren’t so very different. But maybe that was my first mistake.
Despite the difficulties, the friction the kids were creating, Delilah still occasionally threatening to take a machete and go down there and “solve the problem,” life in the tunnels gradually settled into a new routine. In fact, it wasn’t so very different from the old one, just a few extra duties.
Jimmy went back to playing with his power supply, running a lead all the way down to his workshop. I think he had it in mind to go through all those computer bits he brought back and see if he could build one working unit. Which sounded like a pretty tall order to me, but according to him he was one of the last great computer prodigies. He could hack in anywhere. At the age of thirteen he was headhunted by the government after leaving messages with every major head of state in the world announcing his birthday. There ain’t nothing he don’t know about those things. Or so he says. And these days, I’m more of a mind to believe him.
As for me, well, if Lena don’t need me, if there’s no fetching or carrying or shoring up of tunnels to be done, I divide my time between lifting weights, running, and going down to see those kids. Don’t ask me why. They don’t exactly make me feel welcome. Some days it’s just plain uncomfortable, what with them either refusing to speak or making stupid personal comments that end up with them shrieking and giggling and falling all over the place.
Couple of times Arturo has tried to get a more normal conversation going, but Gordie just tells him to shut up. He’s a real mean little sonofabitch. Everything’s confrontation; all language is war. Trying to have a conversation with him’s like blowing up balloons for a knife thrower.
Nevertheless, I still sit there, hour after hour, hoping that somehow I’ll win Arturo over a little and maybe Gordie’ll follow. Not that I’d put money on it. Not on either count. I mean, they couldn’t be more blunt and barefaced about how they feel about old people—how they deserve to die and should’ve been exterminated long ago. And if it’s not that, if it’s not the irrational hate, the blind prejudice, then, as I say, it’s the endless teasing and laughter.
One afternoon Lena walked in and caught them at it and decided to intervene.
“What did you say?” she asked Arturo, hearing the tail end of yet another bout of merciless mocking.
He hesitated for a moment, a little taken aback by her obvious anger. “He smells. Can’t you smell him? I think he might be dying.”
“More like he’s dead,” Gordie chipped in. “Starting to rot.”
The two of them squealed with laughter, jostling each other from side to side, but they were in for a real shock. For a few moments Lena stood there silently, as if letting the irritation build up inside her, then she erupted. “If anyone smells ’round here, it’s you two! You’re damn near stinking out the whole place!”
There was a momentary pause. They both stared at each other, then back at her, as if one of their own had committed an act of treachery.
“You reek of the dump,” she continued. “And you know what? It’s time we did something about it.” She turned to me. “Clancy, go and get Jimmy, will you?”
I paused for a moment, as curious as the kids to know what she had in mind, then went off to fetch the little guy.
’Course, he wasn’t happy about it. I had to practically drag him away from that barricade of boards and chips he’d built up around him. On the other hand, maybe he just had a premonition about what we were letting ourselves in for.
As soon as we got back to the storeroom Lena unlocked the cell. “Come on,” she said. The kids immediately backed away.
With Jimmy and me on escort duty, both of them were marched up to the garden, forcibly stripped of their clothing and made to take a bath in one of the water barrels.
I tell you, I been in a few wrestling matches in my time, but never anything like that. Little Arturo cursed and swore and wriggled like some hydrophobic cat, spreading his limbs out, gripping onto the sides of the barrel, arching his back and refusing to be pushed into the water. But that was as nothing compared with Gordie. He saw the whole process as a direct attack on his manhood and went crazy, taking a couple of swings at me, almost wrenching off Jimmy’s ponytail, only ending up inside the barrel when we enlisted Delilah’s help. Her and Jimmy holding his legs, me his arms, and Lena just washing whatever she could.
It was the first time Delilah had seen either of them since the day they broke in, and no matter how aggressive Gordie was, how much he cursed us, she was his equal.
“Shut your foul little mouth!” she told him. “I ain’t taking that from you.”
“You old bitch!” he shouted. “I’ll kill you!”
“Yeah, well, if it was left to me, that’s what we would’ve done with you long ago,” she replied.
They went at it hammer and tongs the whole time. I never heard such talk, and I wouldn’t want to say who came out on top. And yet, I’ll tell you something, when it was all over, when Gordie stopped fighting, when he was sitting there in that water barrel, shivering from the cold, for all his toughness, for all he knew and had done, he was just a child and Delilah saw that as clearly as anyone.
Why that one forced act of familiarity, bathing those kids, seeing them naked, should start to change things, I don’t know, but it did. ’Cuz I gotta tell you, from that day on, the strangest thing happened. Gradually, what we saw as a terrible intrusion, as a threat to our lives, has begun to seem more like one of its attractions. I’ve been going down there more and more. So has Lena. Sitting on the floor, coaxing and calling to them, doing our best to get some kind of conversation going. Even Delilah’s softened a little. I mean, she don’t visit them or nothing, but she did stop talking about killing them, or getting all aggressive every time they’re mentioned. Which, I gotta tell you, these days is pretty often.
I still think Lena’s the only one they feel comfortable with. Probably cuz of her age, cuz they can identify with her background. Mind you, she did take one helluva dive in their opinion when they figured out her and me were a couple. They went on about it for days. Describing me to her at great length, saying how saggy and wrinkled my face was, how gray and thin my hair, in the belief that it could only be cuz she couldn’t see me that she was participating in such a sick arrangement.
Tell the truth, a couple of times I got a bit upset about it. But she always answered them in exactly the same manner, by telling them that none of that mattered, not in the least, not when she loved me as much as she did. Which might make you feel a degree queasy, but I tell you, it made me feel a whole lot better. As if, no matter what they threw at me, she’d always be there to make sure it didn’t hit.
How long it would’ve gone on like that, one day better, two days worse, and vice versa, I don’t know. But eventually I had a real breakthrough with them. And the irony was, it was through the thing they most despised me for: my age. I was down there one day— I don’t even remember how it got started, I thin
k I mentioned Mr. Meltoni—and the fact that his name had come up a couple of times before prompted Arturo to ask me who he was. I mean, I think they’d figured out he was my boss, but they just assumed in a factory or a shop or something. When they realized the nature of the business I was involved in, they suddenly got a whole lot more interested.
“Were you a gangster?” Arturo asked, a little wide-eyed.
I shrugged. “If that’s what you want to call it.”
“Yah!” Gordie sneered dismissively, though not with complete conviction.
“Tell us about it,” Arturo said.
“What’s to tell? I worked for a guy called Mr. Meltoni. Don’t mean a lot to you, I guess, but on the Mainland it’d probably still get a reaction. Even now.”
“Bet you never killed anyone,” Gordie said, in a way I didn’t altogether care for.
I hesitated for a moment. It was the last question I wanted to answer, but the first I knew would be asked. “Unfortunately, I did.”
“How many?” he asked, as if we were in competition.
“I don’t know. Never kept score. Not exactly proud of it. But then . . . I guess I didn’t know any better.”
They went quiet for a moment, like they were digesting that, like they weren’t sure how they felt about it.
“Did you have a gun?” Arturo asked.
“Yeah. Didn’t use it very often though. Mr. Meltoni didn’t like violence any more than I did. Only to show we meant business. To put someone in their place.”
“Who?” Arturo asked. “Who did you put in their place?”
I really didn’t want to dwell on the violence, but I knew they would, that I had to get it out of the way. Mind you, once I did exhaust the subject, once I’d gone through every last detail, at least it would make it easier to go on to other things.
I spent the whole afternoon down there. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Jimmy being sent down to remind me it was dinnertime I’d probably still be there. I told them all sorts of tales of the Mainland—or the Mainland as it used to be. The various larger-than-life characters, the different nationalities that dominated the neighborhoods. What we did, what we stood for and believed in. I even explained about old people being the victims of circumstance, of propaganda, and not the cause of everything that had gone wrong. Though, to tell the truth, they didn’t seem that interested. Maybe they don’t know the story. Or maybe they’ve just inherited their attitudes from others and never bothered to question them. All I do know is that, by some means or other, I managed to connect with those kids.